Our next speaker is Dr. David Hopkins, professor
of art history at the University of Glasgow.
David has made many wonderful contributions
to the body of literature about and around
Marcel Duchamp over the last number of years,
a number of which I have been very privileged
to use as text in various courses that I have
taught and have read over the years quite
eagerly.
Today he's going to look at a photograph.
We've seen an example of it already on the
screen and I think it's one that we all know
quite well, under the label of “Dust Breeding.”
The photograph, however, when published in
the October 1922 issue of “Littérature”
was accompanied by a most interesting title,
“The Domain of Rrose Sélavy.”
In his paper entitled “The Domain of Rrose
Sélavy: Duchamp's Dust Breeding as a Portrait,”
David considers the way in which the image
can be construed as a portrait of Marcel Duchamp,
another way of inventing a look at Duchamp.
David Hopkins.
How do I get my presentation up?
Do you mind?
This little button will advance your slides.
This one?
Yeah, and if you want it, that’s a laser
pointer.
OK, here we go…
Oh, does it have animation?
Sorry…
Thanks.
Okay well thanks very much.
Thank Sam, yes, but yeah thanks again to Anne
and to Jim for inviting me to come here to
speak in this examination of sort of Duchamp
portraiture.
My focus in this presentation will be an image
which does not appear to be a portrait of
any kind or at least not a conventional one.
“Dust Breeding” is a photograph, normally
ascribed to Duchamp and Man Ray [Emmanuel
Radnitzky] in collaboration which on first
viewing appears to picture some form of extraterrestrial
landscape.
In what follows, we’ll discover that what
appears to one thing is in fact another.
Scale will change, viewpoint alter, meaning
shift.
By the end of this paper, I hope to show that
“Dust Breeding” is in fact a form of portrait
of Duchamp, or rather a double portrait of
Duchamp and his other half, Rrose Sélavy.
But even the concept of a portrait will need
to alter to embrace the idea of the figuring
of absence or presence withheld.
Like water in the desert, identity will prove
to be a mirage.
The photograph of “Dust Breeding” was
first published in the October 1922 edition
to the Paris Dada group’s journal “Littérature”
in Paris.
It was an image of the buildup of dust on
the surface of Marcel Duchamp’s “Large
Glass” as the work rested on trestle tables
in the artist’s New York studio in mid-1920.
The photograph seems to arisen out of a meeting
between Man Ray and Duchamp concerning the
latter’s rotary discs of the period.
The two men apparently went out for lunch
leaving the camera to take a long exposure
of the surface of the glass in artificial
light.
In the photograph we see an angled and relatively
close up view of the dust lying on the bottom
half or ‘bachelor’s domain’ of the work.
As is widely known, the dust would eventually
provide the coloration for the so-called sieves
or drainage slopes in the bachelor's domain.
Having let it settle for some six months,
Duchamp wiped away that which he didn't need
and stuck it down with varnish.
The relation of this photograph to ideas about
the passage of time, chance, and photographic
indexicality which have been explored by the
likes Rosalind Krauss and David Campany will
not concern me here.
And I will return to the thematic of dust
shortly.
But first I want to concentrate on the caption
which was appended to the photograph when
it was reproduced for the first time by the
Paris Dada group and say a little about their
relation to Duchamp.
As reproduced in “Littérature,” the photograph
carried the following caption in translation:
“view from an airplane” on the right and
“here is the domain of Rrose Sélavy, how
airy it is, how fertile, how joyous, how sad”
on the left.
The first part of the caption relates rather
fairly directly to an account that Man Ray
would later give of the genesis of the image.
His is “view from an airplane.”
He talked to the dust on the work resembling
some strange landscape seen from bird's eye
view, adding “there was dust on the work
and bits of cotton wadding that had been used
to clean up the finished parts.”
But we should remember that the image was
actually produced in 1920 and the captioning
for the Paris-based Dadaists, all of them
fervent admirers and interpreters of the enigmatic
Duchamp, came two years later.
Man Ray's account of the photograph as a bird's
eye view which came in his autobiography of
1963 may be a retrospective formulation of
ideas that had developed… that had been
developed as much by the Paris Dadaists as
Duchamp himself…
Duchamp and himself.
In what follows, I have to make the assumption
that Duchamp and Man Ray, gazing into the
photograph they had produced on the glass,
saw an immediate connection with aerial photography
or actually set up the image in this way.
But there's no clear evidence for this.
However, if we look at the photograph from
which the image in “Littérature” was
cropped, which has only recently come to light,
we get a greater sense of the degree manipulation
carried out by Duchamp and Man Ray in the
photograph as published.
In the original image, the templates which
were presumably used to establish the shape
of the sieves in the bachelor’s domain remain
in place to provide a record of studio activity.
In the final image, all of this paraphernalia
is eliminated and the white wall beyond the
edge of the table is made to function as an
implacable sky above the landscape ending
abruptly at an impossibly straight horizon.
The second part of the caption, “This is
the domain of Rrose Sélavy” and so forth,
is clearly even more art-loaded and sparks
off a complex account of the way the image
was understood by the Dada group in France.
Rrose Sélavy was the alter ego Duchamp had
invented himself in a series of photographs
and ready-made gestures from about mid 1920s
onwards.
In other words from around the time “Dust
Breeding” reading was created.
We all know Rrose by now.
The Paris Dada group had heard of this mysterious
creation of the New York-based Duchamp by
1922, not least from Duchamp himself who had
been in Paris in the latter part of 1921.
They may well have pondered how her name,
which as well as suggesting upon… suggesting
love is life, Rrose Sélavy, also suggest
water or sprinkle of life, “arroser la vie”,
resonated with Duchamp’s reputation for
being a dry type.
Hence one way to read the caption is to see
Rrose’s fertility in counterpoint to the
dryness or dustiness perhaps of her other
half, Marcel Duchamp.
It's hardly surprising in fact that in his
first essay on Duchamp produced around the
time of the “Dust Breeding” photograph,
André Breton should talk of Duchamp as quote
“an oasis for those who are still searching,”
deliberately playing no doubt on these notions
of deserts and watering holes.
It seems as though the French poets understood
the dry Duchamp to have made way for his fertile
other half, to have killed off his former
self.
And this may well be the way Duchamp encouraged
them to think.
And I’ll return to Rrose again shortly.
Now I think we should pursue the deathly inflection
I’ve just mentioned slightly differently.
Given that the dust breeding image was captioned
“view from an airplane,” what further
emerges from contemplation of the mournful
or elegiac tone of the caption is that there
may well be an allusion here to aerial photographs
of battlefields.
There has been much research in recent years
on the extent to which the Dadaist registered
the physical or mental effects of the First
World War.
And I would draw attention Amelia Jones on
New York, Bridget [inaudible] on Berlin and
Amy [Lyford?] on Paris.
But nothing's been made of the striking links
between May Ray’s photographs and the reconnaissance
photographs of battlefields which were such
a key aspect of the imagery thrown up by the
war.
In Man Ray's previously cited description
of the photograph, he talks about the bits
of cotton wadding that had been used to clean
up the finished parts of the glass and comparing
the photograph of the battlefield, the photograph
taken by an American unit headed by Edward
Steichen.
It’s hard to resist the impression the cotton
wads double as plumes drifting smoke.
Remarkable jump from close up to aerial view
takes place such that the bachelor zone in
the large glass becomes transformed into a
scaled-down war zone.
The trope of miniaturization seems relevant
here.
The American literary theorist Susan Stewart
talks of a miniaturized war game envisaged
by the writer H.G. Wells was a counter propositions
to the war games indulged in by the British
Army.
Wells wrote: “my game is just as good as
their game and saying it by virtue of its
size, war is a game at all proportion.”
In this context, Duchamp and Man Ray assume
the personae of boys playing at warfare.
It is important here to know the aerial view
and its implications was already established
as a minor genre within avant-garde art production.
The marriage of airplane and camera implied
in the aerial photograph the meeting of two
technological nodes which was pioneered by
Italian pilots in 1911, inaugurated a new
mechanized mode of visualizing warfare which
we find exploitive for example in Max Ernst’s
photo montage “Massacre of the Innocents.”
published around the time… the same time
as “Dust Breeding.”
Sorry, produced around same time as “Dust
Breeding.”
A nightmarish form of military attrition,
aerial bombardment, which had also been perfected
by the Italians in the bombing of Tripoli
in 1911 which [Filippo Tommaso] Marinetti
lauded in his futurist poem, “La Bataille
de Tripoli,” now haunted the imagination
of artists.
Even the visual presentation of Marinetti’s
“Words-In-Freedom” as exemplified in “Zang
Tumb Tuum” produced in Adrianople in 1912,
borrowed its impetus from an aerial viewpoint.
It's worth pausing to assess the enormous
psychological… sorry, the enormous psychological
repercussions emanating from this annexation
of photography to the imaging of the landscape
of modern warfare and a fascinating discussion…
has dwelt on the altered modes of perception
inaugurated by the alliance of airplane and
camera.
He notes that quote “the aerial photographs
up front demonstrate pointedly the new perception
and expression of a landscape hitherto unknown;
a landscape of complete destruction and high
artificiality in terms of its systems of dugouts,
trenches, communication lines, supply routes,
and so forth.”
Expanding on the new alienating aesthetic
order brought into being, he notes “the
morphology of the landscape of destruction
photographed from a plane was transformed
into the visual order an abstract pattern.”
This is obviously suggestive in relation to
the choice made by Man Ray and Duchamp to
incorporate the angled vision of the bachelor's
apparatus from the large glass with its enigmatic
network of lines into the “Dust Breeding”
image.
There’s some comment about a new mode of
perceptual disorientation being made here.
To offset this, it should be asserted that
rather than expressing the dizzying effects
of aerial perception in a grand artistic statement
in a manner avant-gardists from Marinetti
through to [Kazimir] Malevich and [Alexander]
Rodchenko, Man Ray and Duchamp deliberately
conjure their battlefield scenario out of
odds and ends material and from a chance perception,
a momentary shift of viewpoint.
They avoid any pretense of profundity.
They assume, as I've argued elsewhere, the
attitude of the amateur “bricoleur” rather
that of the professional modernist artist.
And their collaboration is more closely informed
by the spirit of boyish camaraderie than by
shared experimental zeal.
More precisely, their approach is born out
of play rather than moral indignation or esthetic
ambition and there is in any case a considerable
degree of ambiguity in the visual conceit
they come up with.
In the past, “Dust Breeding” has often
been thought to evoke not so much a battlefield
as some kind of ancient earthwork or site.
It parallels with the geoglyphs drawn onto
the surface of the Nazca Desert in Peru around
300 to 800 AD, and significantly only fully
apprehendable from the air, are worth considering.
This element of ambiguity in the image the
way it appears to oscillate between picturing
a modern landscape destruction an ancient
site of ritual significance also chimes in
with [inaudible]’s thoughts on the character
of aerial wartime photography, pursuing his
sense of the disparity in aerial… in images
of battlefields between the purely aesthetic
effects of the image – images sorry – and
the horrendous sufferings of flesh and blood
soldiers that are effectively rendered invisible
in them.
[Inaudible] notes that we are returned to
modes of cognition characteristic of primitive
art.
Hence he writes “there too knowledge is
required for the deciphering of shapes and
colors associated with events, demons, totems,
or tribes, and their actions in the tribal
warfare,” adding “visual representations
of the model of that battlefield in aerial
photography is another example of the frequently
observed return of archaic structures in the
world of modern technology.”
If Man Ray and Duchamp mobilize a kind of
entropic metaphor in their photograph, a slippage
from the modern to the archaic, this also
reinforces a sense of regressive strategy
in their conception of themselves as artists,
a reversion to boyishness.
And here the male thematic of that play becomes
even more poignant.
Dust, the material which coats their miniaturized
landscape, is itself evocative of the boy’s
bedroom or later perhaps the bachelor's habitat.
It seems hardly coincidental that the “Dust
Breeding” photograph actually isolates the
chocolate grinder from the large glass, the
part of the work which most closely figures
masturbation.
Talking about visiting Duchamp’s New York
studio at approximately the time he was working
on this section of the bachelor's domain pictured
in photograph, the American painter Georgia
O'Keeffe recalled “it was a few flights
up in a dismal drafty building.
The room looked like it had never been swept,
not even when he first moved in.
The dust everywhere was so thick it was hard
to believe.
I was so upset over this dusty place that
the next day I wanted to go over and clean
it up.”
Whatever this might say about stereotypical
male and female roles, it is evident the dust
was something that Duchamp cultivated just
as surely as he cultivated his bachelor status.
We’re reminded here of course about the
way the captioning a photograph in “Littérature”
plays on this dry Duchamp.
In respect to this cultivation of dust, one
should mention the title of the dust photograph
clearly derives from a phrase in Duchamp’s
special notes for his large glass, the so-called
“Green Box” which reads “élèvé de
la poussière.”
Strictly speaking the word “élèvé”
here means to raise, although the added connotation
of rearing – breeding – was supplied when
the photograph became “élèvage de la poussiere”
which translates more exactly as “Dust Breeding.”
The implication, then, is that dust has been
coaxed forth made into an active principle
in some way.
We must also of course reconcile this with
the fact that dust evokes mourning, ashes
to ashes, dust to dust.
Elaborating on dust’s deathly connotations,
the historian Carolyn Steedman in a fascinating
discussion of dust’s role in the phenomenology
of archive fever, dwells on the French nineteenth
century historian [Jules] Michelet perusing
the musty manuscripts at the Archives Nationales
in Paris and perceiving himself to be literally
breathing in via the dust from the documents
the spirits of those who are now, as he said,
smothered in the past.
As Steedman notes, Michelet…
