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Fasten your Seatbelts
as we Prepare for our Nude Descending

Rites of Passage: s / he

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Figure 30

Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917

Figure 31

Constantin Brancusi, Princess X, 1916

Further elaborating the domain of the "phallesse"--of such formidably phallic she-males as "La Broyeuse de chocolat" and "Le Pendu Femelle" / "La Guêpe" (femelle)--Duchamp's Fountain (1917) (Fig. 30) analogously redesignates and, in the process, exactly reverses what would very much appear to be "un pissoir" (or, otherwise, "un urinoir"), instead, as "une fontaine". Indeed, Kermit Champa asks, "Phallic? Vaginal? It was a man-made female object for exclusive male functions. Yet, who could characterize it precisely?"⁽⁴³⁾ Nevertheless Fountain can perhaps be characterized as a "female object" in the same sense that Duchamp might have described the similarly organic lines of Brancusi's phallic totem, of only the prior year, Princess X (1916) (Fig. 31). For Beatrice Wood, indeed, Fountain was not only the "Madonna of the Bathroom",⁽⁴⁴⁾ but also comparable to "a Brancusi, with curved lines of genuine sensitivity",⁽⁴⁵⁾ a formal logic perhaps informed by the fact that Fountain and a version of Princess X were both slated to appear at the 1917 New York Independents exhibition.⁽⁴⁶⁾ But Fountain is also a "female object" according to another of Duchamp's randy quips: "On n'a que: pour femelle la pissotière et on en vit" (DDS 37; cf. WMD 23). For those who easily recall the days of disco, the gist is fairly clear--"I've got what you want; you've got what I need":

on n'a que = on a queue: we've got dicks et on en vit = et on envie: and we want [what they've got]

(Or, "where there's pussy there's prick" ["où il y a Chaliapine"],⁽⁴⁷⁾ as Duchamp elsewhere declares.) Lost in between what "we've got" and what "we want", however, "pour femelle / la pissotière" plays by an entirely different set of rules. Although I might as well be quoting Freud's infamous remarks in his lecture on "Femininity",⁽⁴⁸⁾ yet here too the problem--as in "Le Pendu Femelle" / "La Guêpe" (femelle)--is "femelle". Like its closest English translation--which is not really the "female" gender, but rather the zoological "bitch"--"femelle" frankly varies from catwalk to dogshow, for exactly which reason Flaubert counsels its use "only in speaking of animals".⁽⁴⁹⁾ No less problematical, however, is the second and likewise "femelle" term: "la pissotière". Even so, "We've got dicks, but all we've got for broads are open holes, and we want them"--taking both "femelle" and "la pissotière" as crudely reductive of male desire to the desire for any available opening--doesn't quite work.

For, behind the obviously problematic view of feminine sexuality inherent in "pour femelle / la pissotière", the more fundamental problem is Duchamp's intent to assimilate the meaningfulness of gender in its psycho-sexual sense to its meaninglessness--or only circumscribed, even binary meaningfulness--in any linguistic sense.⁽⁵⁰⁾ By which I mean, why are farmers, pirates and poets all in the conventionally feminine form in Latin, although grammatically they are masculine, and in Rome they were paradigmatically men? This is the typically aesthetic question to which Duchamp likewise reduces gender, most obviously, when he explains to Cabanne, "If it isn't a literary movement, it's a woman; it's the same thing".⁽⁵¹⁾ At this grammatical-as-ontological level, by simultaneously reversing both the flow and the gender of "un pissoir", instead, as "une fontaine", Duchamp similarly alienates it from its expressly male identification by the simple and--like the rose of Shakespeare and Stein--entirely arbitrary process of renaming it. So, too, in "Le Pendu Femelle" ["the female of the species which is male and hangs"], "La Guêpe" (femelle) and its phallic stinger, as well as the Chocolate Grinderess and its phallic cabriole "legs", even this process of renaming is, itself, self-consciously marked and, in this sense, not unlike the use of "she" as the indefinite personal pronoun, yet definitely to raise the issue of why "he" is otherwise assumed. Duchamp's early experience with the failure of English, by contrast, to gender its articles might even explain the artist's otherwise inexplicable preoccupation with no sooner arriving in New York than replacing each occurrence of a gender indefinite "the" with an even more indefinite "*" in his title text of 1915: The.

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Figure 32

Marcel Duchamp, Nine Malic Molds, 1914-15

Circles are straight. They are a straight line. -- "Joey" ⁽⁵³⁾

Becoming Full Circle: From PiRr to πR²

Like the "circularity" of the Bicycle Wheel, Coffee Mill and Chocolate Grinder -- or the tautological "I" they posit, whose final determinant is only the "not-I" to which their onanism opposes itself -- clad not only in the black leather of a Fresh Widow, but also in "pi", the very figure of the circle, Rrose Sélavy embodies an alternative (meta)physical trajectory. As Duchamp describes her:

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Figure 33

Marcel Duchamp, An Original Revolutionary Faucet: Mirrorical Return, 1964

Yet what is "original revolutionary", as the engravings boldly declare, either describes a faucet caught in the pleonastic grip of advertising or one caught, instead, in a "revolutionary"--in the sense of rotational--process, which is itself "original": a sort of sexual spin-cycle, according to which his sex goes in, her sex comes out; so too faucets go in, urinals come out. Thus, rather than return Fountain to where it began--as he does the "handle" of the Coffee Mill, completing its circuit of (de)tumescence--Duchamp brings Fountain to where it never was, yet in some parallel sense always is. He rotates it through the "fourth dimension", which exactly accounts for its sexual involution, with what was an insertive / effluent faucet "mirrorically returned" as a receptive / influent urinal.⁽⁵⁷⁾ Indeed, that the faucet doesn't actually appear in Mirrorical Return is precisely Duchamp's (fourth-dimensional) point. For urinal and faucet, in this sense, are not analogous objects, but rather are alternate manifestations of the self-same object. At any given time and place, only one aspect of its essentially dyadic nature is in esse--the other aspect, by contrast, is always in potentia, and awaits the object's rotation through the fourth dimension. For this reason, Duchamp elsewhere compares the process of "mirrorical return" to the effect achieved by so-called "Wilson-Lincoln" diagrams (DDS 93; WMD 65). Seen from the left, these accordion-pleated diagrams appear to be Wilson; only at another time and place--a few seconds later, say, now seen from the right--do they appear to be Lincoln. In this way, the object has no absolute priority of identity--whether Wilson or Lincoln, faucet or urinal--but only a relative identity, a pure sexual (ex)change value, whose coordinates need include not only a place (our three dimensions) but also a time (the fourth dimension, according to popular understanding). Although the "Wilson-Lincoln" diagram is destined to remain among the Large Glass' definitively unfinished elements, yet the only difference between it, a faucet "mirrorically returned" as a urinal, and Duchamp's related researches into the fourth-dimensional field of sexual involution--his 1950s erotic casts which we might never more accurately describe as "invaginated"⁽⁵⁸⁾--is one of medium: e.g. Feuille de vigne femelle (1950) (Fig. 34), in which her trough returns as a peak, if not strictly speaking his peak; Coin de chasteté (1954) (Fig. 35), in which a positive form and its negative are indissolubly elided; even Objet-Dard (1951) (Fig. 36), in which Eve's rib, from Etant Donnés, instead returns as Adam's (d)art.⁽⁵⁹⁾ No differently than Duchamp reversibly genders sexual identity along the axes of "le" / "la", "mâle" / "femelle", he thus "engenders" the figure-ground problem: as a question not only of three-dimensional versus invaginated / fourth-dimensional space, but also of real versus virtual space, to which I myself now turn. >>Next

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Figure 34	Figure 35	Figure 36
Marcel Duchamp, Feuille de vigne femelle [Female Fig Leaf], 1950/61	Marcel Duchamp, Coin de chasteté [Wedge of Chastity], 1954/63	Marcel Duchamp, Objet-Dard [Dart-Object], 1951/1962

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