Duchamp: Love and Death, even

292 Pages·021.553 MB·English

by  Juan Antonio Ramirez

DUCHAMP
LOVE AND DEATH, EVEN
Juan Antonio Ramirez
TRANSLATED BY
ALEXANDER R. TULLOCH
J. Bata UJ***
Thomas
TRENT UNIVERSITY
PETERBOROUGH, O
REAKTION BOOKS
DUCHAMP
LOVE AND DEATH, EVEN
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Published by Reaktion Books Ltd
n Rathbone Place, London wip ide, uk
First published in English 1998
Originally published in Spain by Ediciones Siruela,
under the title Duchamp, el amor y la muerte, incluso
©JuanAntonio Ramirez, 1993
English-language translation © Reaktion Books, 1998
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,
without the prior permission of the publishers
Printed and bound in Italy by Giunti Industrie Grafiche, Florence
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data:
Ramirez, Juan Antonio
Duchamp: love and death, even
1. Duchamp, Marcel, 1887—1968 2. Art, French
[.Title
709.2
ISBN I 86189 O27 3
Contents
Also 9
Preface to the English Edition 17
1. DEVISING THE READY-MADES 19
The Rupture 21
The Meaning of the Ready-mades 26
The Bicycle Wheel 31
Tinned Chance 35
The Bottle Rack and the Snow Shovel 37
The Comb and Things about Hair 39
Apolinere Enameled (1916—17) 41
Pliant . . . de voyage and Trebuchet 43
The ‘Suspended’ Ready-mades 44
' L.H.O.O.Q. 46
» Belle Haleine 51
The Fountain Affair 52
11 Why Not Sneeze . . . ? 59
'Turn’ 62
2. ‘precision painting . .
(the mechanisms of bachelors) 67
The Large Glass: Preliminary Questions 69
A‘Futurist’Contraption 75
The ‘Solipsistic Machine’ and the ‘Conjunctive Apparatus’ 78
The Glider and the Waterfall Wheel 82
The Chocolate Grinder 87
The Scissors and Buridan’s Donkey 91
The Malic Moulds 93
The Capillary Tubes ioi
The Sieves 102
The Butter Churn and the Fan 107
The Helter-Skelter and Other Chemico-Mechanical Devices 108
Optical Transformation 112
The Boxing Match 117
3. ‘...AND THE BEAUTY OF INDIFFERENCE’
(THE BRIDE STRIPPED BARE) 121
The Artificial Woman 123
The Splash’s Shadow and the Gravity Regulator 126
The Cannon Shots 130
The Milky Way and the Draught Pistons 131
The Standard Shaft 134
The Wasp (Sex-Cylinder) 136
Evolution of the Female Pendant 138
The Pulse-Needle and the Weather-Vane 139
The Bride, Feminine Insect 141
The Large Glass as the Graveyard of Ideas 144
Towards a Psychoanalysis of the Machine 145
A Boiler, a Motor, Agricultural Machinery 147
Chemical Apparatus 150
Electricity and the Telegraph 151
Optical Metaphors 156
v Love and the Fourth Dimension 157
Anatomical Dissection and X-Rays 159
Musical Machine 161
Post-Cubist, Dadaist and Surrealist Stages of the Large Glass 162
The Breaking and Repairing of the Large Glass 166
The Surrealist Moment (Objective Chance) 170
4. IN THE ORBIT OF ETANT DONNES 173
Works with Optical Gadgets 175
Windows and Doors 181
The Boxes 185
1 Rrose Selavy 191
« The Infrafine and Virtuality 192
Existential Minimalism (Living on Credit) 195
y 5. ‘given, in the darkness . . (love and death) 197
The Three Spheres of Etant donnes 199
The Door and the Brick Wall 202
The Landscape and the Table 206
The Sacrificial Dummy 208
Electrical Installation and ‘Objects’ for the Assembly 210
The Gas-Lamp and Pharmacie 211
Three Bas-Reliefs 213
Selected Fragments 214
4 Nudes in a Landscape 216
Anatomical Theatre 217
Nineteenth-Century Examples 218
Precedents of the Avant-Garde 220
About the Optical Device 224
More Considerations about the Door, the Landscape,
the Waterfall ... 228
... and about the Mutilated Woman 234
The Cunt ... 238
... Shaven 240
Love, the Signature and Posterity 245
Instant Repose and an Invitation to the ‘Creative Act’ 247
6. appendix: early duchamp
IN 9 REPRESENTATIVE WORKS 249
Select Bibliography (69 Books) 261
References 265
Index of Works by Duchamp 287
Index of Proper Names 289
Photographic Acknowledgements 293

p
Also
Marcel Duchamp, by profession ‘imprimeur en taille douce’ (a wood-
engraver), had fair eyebrows, grey eyes, a medium-sized nose, a round
chin and an oval face and was 1.68 metres tall.1 He asked for nothing,2
lived on a limited budget, had few possessions (real estate, cars, etc.) and
did not even possess his own library.3 He never had a family in the strict
sense ol the word. When, in 1954, he married Alexina Sattler, the former
wife of Pierre Matisse, it was too late (at least, this is what he said) to ‘pro¬
duce’ any biological descendants. He travelled a great deal, always with a
minimum of luggage, and at times in nothing more than the clothes he
stood up in.4 His whole existence was governed by the need for econ¬
omy, although this should not be understood in the bourgeois sense of
planned accumulation. To consume and produce the minimum possible
was for him an elegant way of preserving one’s liberty. Duchamp did not
allow himself to be captivated, either by a particular woman or by an
artistic or literary movement.5 Nobody knows for certain what he lived
on; not even Duchamp himself was able to come up with a satisfactory
answer to that question. It is obvious that economic matters held little
interest for him: ‘. . . money always passes right over over my head,’ he
confessed to Cabanne.6 Between 1915 and 1923,he spent the greater part
of his time in New York, working on the Large Glass', this was the era of
Beatrice Wood’s biting assessment of him: ‘Marcel, at the age of 26, had
all the charm of an angel who spoke slang!7 His personality was also
recalled, many years later, by Henri-Pierre Roche, the other element in
this triangle of friends, in an unfinished biographical novel:
Victor [Duchamp] has neither needs nor ambitions, he lives lor the day. He
belongs to nobody . . . He says that he takes a deep breath and looks at the
world without wishing to exert any influence on other people.That is all. He
says that the only people who should have children are those who have a
vocation for doing so, and that the more possessions one has in this world, the
less free one is.
9
And further on: ‘[Victor] has to be alone, he is a loner, meditative
and pensive. He is, in his own way, a preacher. He is working for a new
morality.’8
This biographical sketch needs to be completed by the addition of
some of Duchamp’s intellectual characteristics. ‘The word yes’, wrote
William Copley of Duchamp,‘was virtually the whole of his vocabulary.
Yes can be said without any emotional expenditure. Saying no brings a
flush to the face.’9This testimony coincides with that of other friends and
the artist’s closest relatives. Paul Matisse (the son of Alexina and editor of
the posthumous Notes) said that his stepfather‘saw no difference between
one conviction and its opposite; from his point of view each of them was
nothing more than the reverse of its opposite .. .To assent was his way of
preserving his liberty.’10 It is easy to see how this approach could make
discourse difficult and ruin the chances ol developing any argument.
But this is a rather simple way of interpreting Duchamp. The reality is
not that he agreed foolishly or cynically with any affirmation, but that he
placed himselt beyond it, in an intellectual territory where many argu¬
ments lack sense. I think that he had something important to say to us
regarding the well-known principle of contradiction.11 When the scandal
exploded in New York over the urinal which he displayed at the
Exhibition of Independent Artists (illus. 40), it revolved around the same
doubts which had arisen previously about Nude Descending a Staircase
(illus. 290): ‘Is this something serious, or is he joking?’ Louise Norton’s
answer seems to me to be very revealing: ‘Perhaps both at the same time!
Or is that not possible?’12 There was no assent, then, in the face of anti¬
thetical positions. Nor was there a dialectical superseding of them, but
rather what we might characterize as ‘integration through juxtaposition’.
It was as if one were to apply the metaphor of transparent images to
propositions. One idea is added to another (placed above it), and in this
way neither is destroyed; this does not prevent us from recognizing or
isolating the initial constituent formulations (forms) in a new configura¬
tion, should we wish to, and thus certifying that configuration’s apparent
incompatibility. This is not a binary logic which results in exclusion in
the sense of‘heads or tails’, even though the monetary metaphor would,
in Duchamp’s case, permit both sides to be visible all the tnne.This, then,
is a transparency of arguments, not the foolish acceptance of all of them
through their separateness. Heads and tails.
This epistemological consideration is important for an understanding
of our subject. In a letter to Andre Breton (4 October 1954), Duchamp
attempted to address a few of the points raised by Carrouges’ book Les
10
machines celibataires, writing, among other things: ‘For me, there is some¬
thing more than the yes, the no and the indifferent, and an example of this
would be an absence of this kind of investigationd3 In writing this, he not
only pulled the rug out from underneath the spiritualist interpretations
of the Large Glass, but affirmed his right to remain silent in the face of
many such questions and problems. Duchamp did not wish to reply to all
of the questions concerning human existence, nor to touch on all of
those themes which are of interest to the historian of contemporary art.
It might be good to remember this now, when there are so many fervent
devotees who saw Duchamp as a prophet capable of bringing comfort to
the troubled consciences of the modern world and as the founding father
of countless artistic movements. In Duchamp, the ‘absence of question¬
ing’ (silence) did not stand in opposition to other statements or fixed
propositions, but to the discoveries of a new logic. Symbolic adverbs:
moreover, also, including; that is to say, meme.
This, then, is how one should approach the crucial matter of meaning.
There is no need to deny Duchamp’s insistence that we are, as viewers,
the ones who complete the work by participating actively in the creative
process,14 since by also being independent from it the artist was able to
have one or several intentions. And he [the artist] may have hinted at a
familiarity with such things by bequeathing to us (together with the
works themselves) his notes, statements, drawings, interviews, letters, etc.
The art historian does not deny the right to re-mvent or recall the past
from the inevitably confrontational and biased trenches of the present, but
he or she must take into account the evidence provided by these objec¬
tive documents. Duchamp left us a great deal of very explicit material,
and it is incredible that, even when we have seen it all, his works should
still invite so many outrageous interpretations.This book is an attempt to
place those works in context. All historic, artistic narrative has to be plau¬
sible, and I have tried to make my view of Duchamp agree with what is
said in the texts and works at our disposal, at the same time (also) associ¬
ating it with the concerns of the present day. This is the only way I can
understand the meaning of scientific truth. ‘I like the word “believe,”’
Duchamp said to Sweeney. ‘Generally speaking, when somebody says “I
know”, it is not that he knows, but [that he] believes.’15
I believe, then (again), that the works of this artist possess a signifi¬
cance which is not attributed to him in an arbitrary manner by the
viewer. It is normal for several apparently opposite meanings to be
mounted one on top of the other in the same work. Duchamp was con¬
scious of this fact, and his friend Louise Norton, in the famous article on
ii