Seems Pollock tried to do it—paint on glass. It was in a movie. There was an admission of failure. That wasn't the way to proceed. It's not a question of doing again what Duchamp already did. We must nowadays nevertheless be able to look through to what's beyond—as though we were in it looking out. What's more boring than Marcel Duchamp? I ask you. (I've books about his work but never bother to read them.) Busy as bees with nothing to do.
He requires that we know that being an artist isn't child's play: equivalent in difficulty—surely—to playing chess. Furthermore a work of our art is not ours alone but belongs also to the opponent who's there to the end.
Anarchy?
He simply found that object, gave it his name. What then did he do? He found that object, gave it his name. Identification. What then shall we do? Shall we call it by his name or by its name? It's not a question of names.
- John Cage
A sampling of Duchamp's avant-garde film collaborations
Witch's Cradle (1943), unfinished work by Maya Deren with Marcel Duchamp.
Dreams that Money can Buy (1947), a film by Hans Richter, music by John Cage.
Dadascope (1961), directed by Hans Richter, contains two poems by Marcel Duchamp. "Carte Postale" and "Puns".
(posted August 2007)
Beyond Shock, the Fountain Still Stands
by Brad Bunkers
Pubic hairs imbedded in soap bars, revolting inhumane acts caught on film, garish reproductions of Michael Jackson and puppies...
Contemporary artists working within the realm of shock are often linked back to Marcel Duchamp. On the surface, these lesser-skilled boobs give the impression of working in the Duchampian paradigm by exploiting the vernacular, capitalizing on all things kitsch, and testing our comfort zones in an effort to challenge our notions about art. If you look deeper into the relationship, the so-called shock artists of the past 20 years come off as cheap imitations backed by shallow logic.
Recently, I visited MoMA to take a stroll through works from their permanent collection. Halfway through, I turned the corner and I was face to face with Duchamp's Fountain, actually a replica of the original urinal Duchamp entered in the 1917 Independents exhibition. It has been ninety years since the urinal had been rejected by the Society of Independent Artists, ninety years since Duchamp dropped a bombshell on the New York art world. At the time, the word "urinal" was considered profanity, not to be printed or spoken. Causing quite a brouhaha, the urinal was intended to question worn-out conventions and to challenge fundamental notions of art. Yes, it was shocking in 1917 to see a bathroom fixture on a gallery wall, but that wasn't Duchamp's primary intention.
Duchamp's critics instantly dismissed the urinal as artistic mischief, but Duchamp was disputing the entire idea of art and the role of the artist. According to Calvin Tompkins, "The artist's choice gives birth to new ways of seeing and thinking. This was Duchamp's philosophy of art, reduced to its most basic level and expressed by the readymade." After ninety years, the Fountain still epitomizes this sense of artist as author. To this day, Duchamp's inanimate object prompts us to re-imagine basic visual principles we often take for granted.
Shortly after the urinal was rejected from the Independents show, "The Richard Mutt Case" was published in Duchamp's magazine The Blind Man. The author of the clever editorial was never revealed, but the witticisms point directly to Duchamp:
The Richard Mutt Case
They say any artist who pays six dollars may exhibit.
Mr. Richard Mutt sent in a fountain. Without discussion, this object disappeared and was never exhibited. What were the grounds for refusing Mr. Mutt's fountain:--
1. Some contended it was immoral, vulgar.
2. Others that is was plagiarism, a plain piece of plumbing.
Now Mr. Mutt's fountain is not immoral, that is absurd, no more than a bathtub is absurd, no more than a bathtub is immoral. It is a fixture which you see every day in plumbers' show windows.
Whether Mr. Mutt made the fountain with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an article of life, placed it so its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view--created a new thought for that object.
As for plumbing, that is absurd. The only works of art America has produced are her plumbing and her bridges.
(posted April 2007)
Achieving Optical Results Millimeter by Millimeter
"The movies especially amused me because of their optical side. Instead of making a machine which would turn, as I had done in New York, I said to myself, "Why not turn the film?" That would be a lot simpler. I wasn't interested in making movies as such; it was simply a more practical way of achieving my optical results. When people say that I've made movies, I answer that, no, I haven't, that it was a convenient method--I'm particularly sure of that now--of arriving at what I wanted. Furthermore, the movies were fun. The work went millimeter by millimeter, because there weren't any highly perfected machines. There was a little circle, with millimeters marked off; we filmed image by image. It took two weeks. The equipment wasn't able to take the scene at any specific speed--it was a mess--and since it was filming rather quickly, it created a curious optical effect. So we were therefore obliged to abandon mechanical means, and make everything ourselves. A return to the hand, so to speak." — Marcel Ducham Excerpted from an interview with French art critic Pierre Cabanne, circa 1967.
(posted January 2007) L.H.O.O.Q.: Avant-garde Iconoclasm or Kitsch
“If we think of kitsch as a ‘style’ of bad taste, we arrive at another paradox, much deeper and more puzzling that the one just pointed out, namely the earlier mentioned possibility of consciously using bad taste (i.e., kitsch) in order to subvert the conventions of a ‘good taste’ that eventually leads to the sclerosis of academicism. Baudelaire, who is rightfully regarded as a precursor of aesthetic avant-gardism, had such a possibility in mind when he wrote in Fusées about the intoxicating effect of bad taste, derived from ‘the aristocratic pleasure of displeasing.’ Avant-garde movements have often indulged in such kinds of pleasure, satisfying their anti-artistic urge by outrageously using kitsch mannerisms both in literature and in the arts. Even if we accept Clement Greenberg’s view that avant-gardism is radically opposed to kitsch, we have to realize that these two extremes are strongly attracted to one another, and what separates them is sometimes much less striking than what unites them. This is so for two reasons, which have been indicated before in two contexts: (1) the avant-garde is interested in kitsch for aesthetically subversive and ironical purposes, and (2) kitsch may use avant-garde procedures (which are easily transformed into stereotypes) for its aesthetically conformist purposes. The later situation is another illustration of the old story of the ‘system’ (read kitscg) co-opting its challengers (the avant-garde). The relationship between kitsch and the avant-garde may in a sense be taken as a caricature of the central principle of modernity: Octavio Paz’e ‘tradition against itself.’ A good example in point is Marcel Duchamp’s treatment of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, the masterpiece that has probably been the most overworked by kitsch. Everybody knows that some time between 1919, while in New York, Duchamp took a reproduction of the Mona Lisa and, after drawing on mustaches and a goatee, entitled it enigmatically ‘L.H.O.O.Q.’ (which spelled out loud in French gives the obscentity: ‘Elle a chaud au cul’) ‘L.H.O.O.Q. is an example of what Duchamp used to call a ‘ready-made assisted,’ as distinct from a straight ‘ready-made’ like the famous urinal that he entered in the 1917 New York art exhibition under the poetic title Fountain. Many critics see the artist’s aggressive treatment of the Renaissance masterpiece as a humorous case of avant-garde iconoclasm. What Duchamp had in mind, however, was different. The Gioconda he abused was not the masterpiece but a reproduction, an instance of the modern falsification of tradition. Duchamp would have probably agreed with Adorno’s view that, in the modern world, tradition has become false, and that there is virtually no tradition that has not become falsified. So Duchamp insulted merely a kitsch object, meant to satisfy a typical form of cultural Bovarysme—one of those countless images of the Mona Lisa with which we have been flooded for decades. And I add that it is not at all certain weather in proceeding as he did, the artist was attacking da Vinci’s original painting or whether, on the contrary, he did not try secretly, as I personally believe, to vindicate it. One thing is clear, however; namely that Duchamp resorted to kitsch not only to reject certain crass aesthetic misconceptions and jaded conventions but also to advocate the avant-garde drive toward the abandonment of an aesthetics based on appearances, which, in our time, are so easily falsified. But in spite of its efforts, the avant-garde was unable to go beyond appearances and, ironically, certain more advanced representatives of kitsch were not long in realizing that they could profitably use the successful unconventionalities of older avant-garde movements. Duchamp himself was largely kitschified by Andy Warhol.” Text from Matei Calinescu, “Five Faces of Modernity” 1987 Duke University Press
(posted October 2006) Delirium of Imagination: Raymond Roussel and the Large Glass
by Brad Bunkers Just prior to moving to Munich in 1912, Marcel Duchamp accompanied Gaby Picabia and Apollinaire to a performance of Raymond Roussel’s play Impressions of Africa in Paris. Roussel, the obscure French author and playwright heavily influenced by Jules Verne’s fanciful machines and dream-like voyages, adapted his novel and funded the elaborate production. Although unpopular with the upper-bourgeoisie and panned by critics of the time, Roussel remained in vogue with the avant-garde, including the Surrealists, Oulipo (Ouvoir de Litterature Potentielle - Workshop of Potential Literature founded in Paris in 1960) and the authors of the nouveau roman.
One of Roussel’s biggest admirers, Duchamp credited Roussel for his Large Glass, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelours, Even. Duchamp admitted, “it was fundamentally Roussel who was responsible for my glass. Referencing Impressions of Africa, Duchamp stated, “I got the general approach… Roussel showed me the way.” Although Roussel and Duchamp never met in person, Duchamp commended Roussel’s “delirium of imagination.” The two men were both inquisitive about technology and the imposition of the machine age on the human spirit.
Interest in mechanics and science was popular among the European avant-garde at the time Roussel produced Impressions of Africa. Besides the illogical journeys and outlandish inventions, such as a machine that produced paintings, Roussel was most noted for his elaborate word play. Based on hypnotic puns, he devised a unique compositional method. In his posthumously published book , How I Wrote Certain of My Books, Roussel stated, “I chose two similar words. For example billiards and pilliards (looter). Then I added to it words similar but taken in two different directions, and I obtained two almost identical sentences thus. The two sentences found, it was a question of writing a tale which can start with the first and finish by the second. Amplifying the process then, I sought new words reporting itself to the word billiards, always to take them in a different direction than that which was presented first of all, and that provided me each time a creation moreover. The process evolved/moved and I was led to take an unspecified sentence, of which I drew from the images by dislocating it, a little as if it had been a question of extracting some from the drawings of rebus."
Michel Leris had this to say about Roussel’s work, “Roussel...discovered one of the most ancient and widely used patterns of the human mind: the formation of myths starting from words. That is (as though he had decided to illustrate Max Müller's theory that myths were born out of a sort of 'disease of language'), transposition of what was at first a simple fact of language into a dramatic action."
Unfortunately for Roussel and his ambitions for immortality as a writer, he is most often remembered for his absurdly shocking theatre productions such as Impressions of Africa and not for his poetic zeal.
To learn more about Raymond Roussel pick up a copy of Raymond Roussel by Francois Caradec or Mark Ford's Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams. And if you want to delve deeper into Roussel, search out Michel Foucault’s Death and the Labyrinth.
(posted July 2006) The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors,
Even (The Large Glass), 1915-192
The Large Glass has been called a love machine, but it is actually a machine of suffering. Its upper and lower realms are separated from each other forever by a horizon designated as the "bride's clothes". The bride is hanging, perhaps from a rope, in an isolated cage, or crucified. The bachelors remain below, left only with the possibility of churning, agonized masturbation. Duchamp invents the working parts of these two sexual machines, which are as arbitrary and absurd as the machinery of Roussel which inspired them. Their mechanisms are so complicated that they are usually accompanied by a diagram, which leaves the viewer feeling a little helpless. In an artistic essay without punctuation, someone named "davidantin" quite rightly wrote, "now duchamp takes fragments of science his relation to science is that of a scavenger you reach in and you say 'what a nice set of wires' and you pull them out and if you survive you say 'now doesn't that look great' ... duchamp takes all sorts of physical laws they are physical laws in the sense that they are phrased like such laws this does this in such a way the feeble cylinders actuate the desire motor love gasoline you really don't know what he's talking about..." Still, it is useful here to give a rough summary of their "functioning". Some additional ideas for the machinery were never carried out and exist only potentially in the notes
The bride is made of several parts that supposedly work together like the parts of a motor. The motor runs on self-secreted love gasoline, inspired by Roussel's glass-caged worm, which created music with its metallic secretions. Despite her mechanization, the bride is also called the "arbor-type", recalling the young girl under the trees in Duchamp's painting, Young Man and Girl in Spring of 1911. The hanging figure, or "Pendu femelle", derives from the Munich Bride painting. It has a "halo", which blossoms out into stripped flesh, coral-colored with a tinge of green. It corresponds to the comet's tail of the "headlight" child from Duchamp's 1912 car trip through the Jura mountains, namely his interpretation of the functioning headlight as a comet with, unusually, its tail in front. Here, the veil-like halo appears to protrude roughly from the bride's forehead. The headlight child was male; Duchamp compared him with Jesus, as the divine blossoming of his mother, with whom he was to be united, as well as with God. Since the notes refer to the bride's stripping as a cinematic blossoming, a halo and a milky way, it is clear that ideas are mixing here, as are the sexes of the bride and the headlight child. The flesh-colored protruding veil takes on explicit male qualities. The three wafting squares that so resemble the flat surface of the snow shovel in his Advance of the Broken Arm were derived from square sections of net curtain - one meter by one meter - that Duchamp had hung above a radiator and photographed as models. Although they have become soft like a veil, he called them "draft pistons", which also have male connotations in their mechanical functioning.
It is hard to say what the bride is doing, besides hanging and potentially lusting to the degree her "feeble cylinders" (notes) will allow. She does, however, have the potential of communication through inscriptions. Once again, the readymades come to mind. A so-called letter box of the alphabet provides the "hinge" between the vertical and horizontal parts of the bride. There letters could be found to form an inscription moving across the pistons towards the only sign of the bachelors within the bride's realm, namely the shots drilled through the empty right side of the pane.
The realm of the bachelors is even more complicated. There are nine of them crowded together to the left behind a strange framework. They look like hanging articles of clothing; only one bachelor has a tiny, wheel-like head tilted back in perspective. Duchamp calls them "malic molds" ("malic" for "male"), assigns professions to them in then- "cemetery of uniforms and liveries" and says they are to be filled with illuminating gas. They are connected to the rest of the machine by their ejaculations that travel in gas form from their head-regions along "capillary lines". These lines have been adopted from the Network of Stoppages, changed slightly so that they might be shown in perspective. Within the "capillary lines", the gas changes into a solid that breaks into short needles, which, in turn, ascend through the cone-shaped "sieves". These sieves are colored by the dust that collected on their glass surface while lying on the floor of Duchamp's studio for several months; a famous photograph by Man Ray documents the "dust breeding". Duchamp fixed the dust with varnish. During their passage through the sieves, the ejaculate "spangles" become liquid and spiral down into a great splash, the orgasm. At the same time, the strange framework signified as a "chariot", "glider", "sleigh" and "slide" is gliding back and forth on its runners, powered by an invisible waterfall turning the paddle-wheel. The right side of the framework is affixed with scissor-like bars that open and close with the movement of the "chariot". The chocolate grinder, resting on a round table with curving legs ("Louis XV chassis"), is connected to the threatening scissors at their joint. There doesn't seem to be any passage of energy here. As Duchamp suggested in his notes, the bachelor has to grind his chocolate himself. The "oculist witnesses" to the extreme right of the bachelors' domain personify the viewer.
Many questions remain open, not the least of which is why the bride has so many bachelors and not a single husband. The passage of time is also unclear, now after the shots that have pierced the bride's realm have rung out. Although the machinery of the bride and her bachelors has the potential for movement, nothing visible is happening anymore. Duchamp called the work a "delay in glass", which suits the atmosphere of waiting and stillness. All of the energy and juices of the proposed activities remain hypothetical or mythic. The full title is also puzzling. In French, the title ends with "méme", which is always translated as the adverb "even". Of course, as has often been noticed, phonetically it could also mean "m'aime", that the bride "loves me". (This interpretation has supported an incest theory coupling Duchamp with his sister Suzanne.) It appears Duchamp added the "méme" to the title after his arrival in the United States in 1915, when he was experiencing the disjointedness of the French language from the point of view of someone trying to teach it to Americans. If "méme" were understood as an adjective (Duchamp himself said it was an adverb), it could mean "the same", such as 'Vest la méme chose' (that's the same thing), 'Vest moi-mémé' (it's me), or 'quand plusieurs verbes ont un méme sujet' (when several verbs have the same subject). In any case, it does seem possible that Duchamp hints the bride and the bachelors could be diverging facets of the single person who invented them.
No one is in the position of deciding what events determined Duchamp's psychological makeup. For the art historian, the most decisive aspect of his concentration on sexuality was its communicative potential as a universal human experience. Sexuality was for Duchamp a primary, a core element - that existential legitimacy all progressive artists were looking for at the beginning of the twentieth century. Lawrence Steefel, the art historian with whom Duchamp was perhaps most frank, was once told by the artist, "I want to grasp things with the mind the way the penis is grasped by the vagina." Steefel has written: "Seeking to distance himself from his own fantasies, Duchamp sought a means of converting pathos into pleasure and emotion into thought. His mechanism of conversion was a strange one, but essentially it consisted of inventing a 'displacement game' that would project conflicts and distill excitements into surrogate objects and constructs without which his mental equilibrium might not have been sustained." And Duchamp once said to Steefel, "I did not really love the machine. It was better to do it to machines than to people, or doing it to me." Steefel then adds, "By letting machines and mechanisms suffer outrageously, Duchamp could muster his energies for survival and the pursuit of poetry." Duchamp's poetry remains unspoken as an atmosphere "between the lines", it is always in the process of recreating itself through the mixing and overlapping of forms, ideas and emotions. Text from Janis Mink, "Marcel Duchamp, 1887-1968: Art as Anti-Art"
(posted April 2006) Dada Hammer: Laughing after all these years.
by Brad Bunkers
In 1917, Marcel Duchamp's Fountain, a factory-made urinal, was rejected as being unoriginal and outlandish. After almost ninety years, Duchamp is still shocking the globe—from the National Gallery of Art's Dada exhibition in Washington, D.C. to Pierre Pinoncelli's hammer episode at the Pompidou Centre in Paris—Duchamp and the Dadaists are receiving plenty of ink these days.
Let's start with Pinoncelli, the 77-year-old French performance artist. Yes, it's true he smuggled a small hammer into the Pompidou earlier this year with intentions to "vandalize" a work of art, Duchamp's Fountain. Although the urinal was one of eight replicas signed by Duchamp in 1964, Pinoncelli was taken into custody and fined $262,000 for degrading the knock-off urinal. In his defense, Pinoncelli stated, "I am not the cheap vandal that some would have me to be. A vandal does not sign his work. It was a wink to Dadaism. I wanted to pay homage to the spirit of Dadaism... which is disrespect."
Is Pinoncelli an old man looking for a little notoriety, or could he be a true disciple of Dada? Manifested in the midst of World War I, Dada rejected notions of normalcy in protest of the horrific war. Dada represented the opposite of common cultural values, reflecting the absurdities of chaos and destruction in a modern world consumed by war. More than anything, Duchamp and the Dadaists reinvented our ideas of art and broke open the gates to many the last century’s art movements. Pinoncelli's Pompidou stint can be considered a Dadaist act in that he challenged our perceptions by his actions. Defacing a urinal in the middle of the Pompidou is no rational endeavor, nor is it at all acceptable. Pinoncelli was fixated on the act and it is this raw intention void of circumstance that signifies a Dadaist work.
Duchamp gave art up for the more refined pursuit of chess, so I doubt he would be concerned with any of this hammer business, if he were alive. I'm sure he would laugh the whole ordeal off as he often employed humor in his work. And although the Pompidou may not be laughing at its chipped porcelain urinal, Marcel is no doubt chuckling in between chess games wherever he may be resting. As he said once, "It's true, of course, humor is very important in my life, as you know. That's the only reason for living, in fact."
