… the opportunity for something new to begin.
And it is perhaps no coincidence that his
identification with the Dada began to take
hold at just about the time that Duchamp began
to allow, perhaps encourage, belief in his
inactivity to become commonplace.
As with his association with Dada, we might
see Duchamp’s cultivation of the appearance
of inactivity as a means of summing up another
sort of blank force; a camouflage of apparent
creative inertia by which he could pursue
his interests undisturbed.
“Étant donnés” was to be initiated in
secret in 1946 under the twin signs of this
protective blankness.
We still have a little while without images
but since Duchamp is anti [retinal?]
I hope that's alright with all of you, rather
than having an image that’s unnecessary
on the screen.
For all that it may have provided him with
a new way to get free, Duchamp’s identification
with the Dada was more complex than that.
Blank force was not quite what it seemed.
Duchamp’s comments to [James Johnson] Sweeney
had continued.
The blank force Dada is very salutary.
It told you: don't forget you are not quite
so blank as you think you are.
Usually a painter confesses he has his landmarks.
He goes from landmark to landmark.
Actually he is a slave to landmarks, even
contemporary ones.
In Duchamp’s view, Dada's primal blankness
paradoxically set artists free by telling
them only that they themselves were not blank.
Not to the originary points of creativity
modern art encouraged them to believe.
Dada sweeps the past away but only to reveal
how implacably connected one is.
The typical painter Duchamp describes goes
from landmark to landmark, yet his comments
imply an alternative to this enslavement.
Landmarks maybe distinctive parts of a landscape
but they can also be made.
In us, they can also be altered, moved, or
demolished.
Landmarks may be unavoidable but the artist’s
freedom lies in the capacity to create his
or her own landmarks by appropriating ones
that already exist if necessary.
Which is exactly what Duchamp did when he
reached for Dada to define himself in New
York during the 1940s.
The mutability of landmarks means that they
can become temporal as well as topographical
points of reference, helping artists see where
they are by showing them where others – including
themselves – have already been.
Identity becomes contingent, dependent on
one's relation not only to tenuously sided
objects but to actions across time as well
as space.
Dada’s blank force and the landmarks it
mercilessly exposes provided Duchamp with
a way of relating not only to the past, to
history, and to his contemporaries, but to
his very identity.
For most of the individuals we associate with
Dada, the question of identity was a central
concern.
Indeed, the Dada self was an entity in flux
and plays of identity were commonplace among
its participants.
For example, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag
Loringhoven.
Although he made a number of self-portraits
during his long life, Duchamp’s Dada-era
forays into self-fashioning are distinctive
as a group.
In Buenos Aires in 1919, as James McManus
has traced in his catalogue essay, Duchamp
made physical changes to his appearance by
assuming an tonsure.
Perhaps initially the result of an unusual
treatment for an infection or for thinning
hair, it was soon to become emphatic, identifying
Duchamp as a [célibat?] with its attendant
associations of withdrawal from the world
and rebirth.
Duchamp, with the assistance of Man Ray, documented
his appearance in disguise in photographs
over the next two years, during which time
Duchamp also presented the world with perhaps
his best-known alter-ego, Rrose Sélavy.
The tonsure Duchamp and Rrose were to be followed
in 1923 by this wanted poster showing Duchamp
to have a number of aliases.
And the following year brought Duchamp shaving
cream portraits with Man Ray and the “Monte
Carlo Bond.”
In short, Duchamp’s self-fashionings during
the post-war Dada years were the most physically
transformative of his life thus far.
Given this association of Dada with self-fashioning,
what insights into his identity might be gained
from Duchamp’s embrace of Dada in the 1940s?
In the 1930s when he was first at work on
the “Box in a Valise,” Duchamp developed
the concept of the infra-thin as a way of
thinking of the liminal distinctions between
seemingly identical objects, or the almost
imperceptible relation between two states…
designing the cover, contributing the note
on tobacco smoke and the infra-thin, and providing
additional images, including this photograph:
a projected portrait of himself at age 85,
an inversion of Duchamp’s actual age of
58.
With its strong lighting emphasizing the wrinkles,
veins, and furrows of his face, the image
is but an intensification of Duchamp’s contemporary
identity as it was already understood in New
York: an elder, withdrawn from the creation
of art, perhaps blind to [inaudible] [retinal?]
appeal, but possessing still the inward sight
of the wisdom that comes with age and experience.
In view, this self-portrait was juxtaposed
with a portrait of the young Duchamp.
An imagined gulf of half a century separates
them, yet they're the same person.
Or are they?
During the last quarter century or so of his
life, there was so to speak not one Duchamp
but two, separated by the merest of existential
intra-thins.
One was the Duchamp slowly being recognized
as one of the most important artists of the
20th century; an artist who had capped his
extraordinary accomplishments by apparently
giving up art in 1923; and who was to become
by the 1960s the focus of a multitude of museum
and gallery exhibitions and popular and scholarly
articles.
The other Duchamp was Duchamp the elder, who,
when not spending his time just breathing,
would generously lend his time and assistance
to those curious about his younger counterpart.
This dual persona of youth and old age gave
Duchamp an imagined temporal space from which
to negotiate his past.
But it also gave him a new way to conceive
a new relation to time itself.
Time had been an important element in Duchamp’s
previous work.
He conceived “The Large Glass” as a delay
in glass, on one occasion allowing dust to
settle on its surface over some months as
documented by Man Ray in “Dust Breeding.”
But Duchamp was also concerned about time's
passage and its corrosive effects on works
of art.
For “The Large Glass” he decided to sandwich
his materials between sheets of glass in hopes
of preventing the yellowing and fading that
is the usual result of age in oil paintings
on canvas.
And when works from the Arensberg collection
went on display, Duchamp wrote to a friend,
“did I tell you how struck I was by how
fresh most of my canvases look and in what
good condition, technical, seen under strong
museum lighting?”
Duchamp’s interest in how his paintings
aged points to another concern that began
to [voice?] starting just about the time that
more of his works began to go on public view
at the end of the 1940s.
The possibility that a work of art, like its
creator, could die; leaving, as Duchamp put
it, museums to serve as mausoleums.
In 1963 on the 50th anniversary of the Armory
Show, he remarked, “I think that emanation
from a work of art doesn't last more than
twenty or thirty years and the work dies.
Especially in painting.
The time is difficult to estimate.
Twenty years, thirty years, more or less.
I mean for example my “Nude” is dead,
completely dead.
The noise around it has nothing to do with
esthetic emanation.”
The blank force of encroaching mortality was
not the only way to negotiate the passing
of time however.
To consider another way of thinking about
time's passage, we might turn to Duchamp’s
treatment of “Bottle Rack” for the “Box
in a Valise.”
Sometimes considered the first ready-made,
the “Bottle Rack” had originally been
kept by Duchamp in his Paris studio before
the First World War and it was lost shortly
after his departure for New York in 1915.
Two decades later, Duchamp and Man Ray purchased
a new bottle rack in order to provide the
journal Cahier d’Art with a photograph.
Shortly thereafter, Duchamp used the halftone
printing block from the Cahier d’Art illustration
to create the image used in the “Box in
a Valise.”
By the time this photograph was made, the
“Bottle Rack” and Duchamp’s other ready-mades
had been embraced by the surrealists as the
forerunners of their own erotically charged
objects.
Accordingly, the “Bottle Rack” sympathetically
transmuted itself.
Man Ray's photograph heightens its mysteriously
anthropomorphic character.
And Duchamp’s subsequent manipulations would
further emphasize this quality.
However, the photograph of the “Bottle Rack”
is also a meditation on past time albeit a
subversive one.
Its enigmatic expressiveness was heightened
by an almost painterly mottling of the “Bottle
Rack’s” surface.
Mary Ray and Duchamp deliberately prepared
the photograph so that the “Bottle Rack”
they purchased, despite the new sheen of its
zinc plating, appears to have gained a patina
in the intervening time since its first inception
by Duchamp some 22 years earlier.
Taking time into their own hands, they mimicked
the corrosive processes associated with its
passage to generate a work that would itself
be the eventual victim of these same forces.
Their trickery yielded a backhanded celebration
of the bottle rack’s conceptual durability
but qualified it as well.
Its manufactured patina suggests another way
that objects age: by the slow accumulation,
layer upon layer, of ideas, associations,
and interpretations generated by a succession
of viewers over days, weeks, months, and years.
Meanings accrue over time and so can identities.
During the 1940s, Duchamp learned to make
casts from the human body, a process he used
for the central figure of “Étant donnés.”
Around 1945, Ettore Salvatore, his instructor
in this process, made a life mask of Duchamp.
And Michael Taylor has I think convincingly
argued that the portrait of Duchamp at the
age of 85, and here's a variation without
the glasses, was probably made immediately
after the cast was made as fine particles
of what appears to be plaster can be seen
on Duchamp’s skin and hair.
These particles are also a sort of patina,
“Dust Breeding” as time passes.
But unlike the surface of the “Large Glass”
or the “Bottle Rack” or for that matter
the subject of a life mask, Duchamp was rarely
a passive participant in these processes.
In the 1940s, Duchamp’s work took on a newly
visceral physicality, the most obvious result
being the explicit carnality of “Étant
donnés.”
But Duchamp also embodied the shift in himself.
In 1946, the year he began “Étant donnés,”
he made “Wayward Landscape,” the unique
piece for a deluxe “Box in a Valise” that
would go to Maria Martins, the woman he loved
and who inspired the creation of “Étant
donnés.”
The drawing medium is semen, presumably Duchamp’s
own, thus making this work a sort of self-portrait.
But even in this abrupt spurt are intimations
of time’s passage.
Duchamp’s gesture harks back to the bachelor's
ordeal in the “Large Glass” of some thirty
years earlier.
But it was also a deeply private gift to an
ultimately unattainable woman some two decades
younger than himself.
Time also figures in “Tiffs,” the unique
piece made also in 1946 for the box of [Roberto?]
Matta, the youngest among the surrealists.
“Tiffs” presents a portrait in terms of
strategically taped hair clippings and a few
lightly penciled marks.
We can't really say whose hair or portrait
it is but we could think of it as a sort of
counterpart of Duchamp’s Dada-era pictures
of himself with [“Tonsure”?].
Like dust, hair clippings are usually just
swept away as refuse.
But a lock of hair is also often kept as a
memento of those who are no longer with us.
Near the end of his life, Duchamp was asked
whether he thought Dada had really been understood
in the United States.
He answered yes but then he added: “except
having been there.
There's always a deformation, a distortion
of this in souvenirs and even, you know, when
you tell a story about that you, in spite
of yourself, change the story as you saw it
because you have not an exact memory or you
want to twist it anyway for the fun of it.
So the history of these things become so distorted
in the end that it's very difficult to get
a real picture.
It becomes more important in the memory of
it, the remembrance of it, than it actually
was at the time, as usual.”
Duchamp achieved an understanding of the past,
his past, through pictures.
Pictures that in their deformations and distortions
tell us as much about memory as they do about
what might really have been.
Confronting and dealing with the past and
the passing of time means coming to terms
not only with its effects on our experience
and understanding of works of art but also
on our ever-changing, aging bodies.
As he had in the Dada years, in the nineteen
forties Duchamp again subjected himself to
transformations in his identity.
Transformations largely related to the effects
of time's passage on and through his body.
We might say this process started via a surrogate:
Duchamp’s “Compensation Portrait” for
the first papers of surrealism.
Duchamp appropriated the image from Ben Shahn’s
photograph of a farmer's wife, a victim of
the Great Depression hardships.
David Hopkins has discussed this as a sort
of reincarnation of Rrose Sélvay, but there
is another important aspect of her identity
in addition to her gender.
Her lined and drawn face.
This is a woman whose hard life appears to
have prematurely aged her.
An experience in which time has been compressed
to a painful degree and whose effects are
visible in her face just as Duchamp’s aged
and vulnerable visage in the “Portrait at
85” presents a still more dramatic telescoping
of time.
Duchamp would not quite live to the age conjured
in this photograph, but in the years to come
he would use the processes of art, history,
and even celebrity to interrogate the nature
of identity through time.
Such images by and of Duchamp remind us that
aging is not death, although there may be
the merest of infra-thin intervals between
them.
Duchamp grew old before our eyes but rather
than estranging us from his past, his continued
use of explorations of identity into his old
age and the pictures of them that resulted,
bring us into immediate and continuing contact
with what had come before and how it has changed
through-time.
Thank you.
[Applause] I… do we?
I don’t know if we have…
I think I went long.
Do we have time for questions?
Yes, gladly.
Hello Michael.
Hi.
I just had quick couple of thoughts on that
really interesting paper.
You mentioned the Matta “Boîte,” and
one thing I can add to that is that the [Denise?]
brown hair, when she took the photographs
of Duchamp’s studio after his death found
some envelopes filled with pubic hair, head
hair, and underarm hair that she felt were
of the same color.
Ah, OK.
Of course, we have to take them to the same
a FBI laboratory that discovers this, if such
a place exists, you know.
The problem is we need DNA testing now.
I think that was not available when they were
taken the first time.
But the evidence, a brunette and a red head,
it's pretty compelling when you see the work.
I think it's Duchamp and Maria.
I think the date of 1946 is also interesting
because it would have been exactly at that
time when they're doing the body casting and
they have to shave.
Ah, yes.
But my real point was really about Dada.
I think that Dada was a loaded term in the
early’ 50s.
I think that one of the things that struck
me was, you know, you can make an opposition
between Dada an abstract expressionism but
you should always remember the Harold Rosenberg
in his action paintings had invoked [Richard]
Huelsenbeck’s “En Avant Dada” and I
think that that must have been a great affront
to Duchamp, you know.
This idea that the arena to act comes out
Huelsenbeck.
Huelsenbeck says you’ve got to make up with
the gun in your hand.
He leaves that out.
But this idea of art as action being taken
from Huelsenbeck, turned around, and then
recast for someone like [Willem] de Kooning
and [Jackson] Pollock is pretty amazing.
Well, and I think that something very similar
happens with Robert Motherwell's work on the
Dada anthology which Duchamp did help him
extensively with but….
Around 1948 through when the book was published,
actually published in ’51, Motherwell also
starts sort of recasting certain aspects of
Dada to fit what he saw as the sort of creative
needs of himself and his fellow artists.
So he talks about….
There are a couple of talks like the school
New York where he talks about how an artist’s
most difficult decisions are in what they
reject and refuse to do.
And he refers to Duchamp and [Mondrian?] as
having made these very difficult choices.
I'm sure that's also not what Duchamp had
in mind when he started working.
Thank you.
Thank you, Michael.
Yes Cathy's fabulous paper is so thought-provoking.
Thank you.
I just I wanted to add here, I think you're
comment about this identity of Duchamp as
a resource for historians of modern art is
such a relevant one because….
So for the [Pablo] Picasso forty years of
his art show, Alfred Barr is quizzing Duchamp
about Picasso and did Picasso really know
about Einstein.
And Duchamp is trying so hard to make clear
more realistically about what that situation
was.
And it had to be terribly frustrating for
him because he was the one who was engaged
with science.
It wasn't Picasso.
And Reyner Banham also, in the machine ascendant
as seen in the end of the mechanical age [“Theory
and Design in the First Machine Age”], uses
Duchamp as a resource.
So this notion of taking on that, being willing
to take on the Dada identity is such an interesting
one.
And in this interview – and [inaudible]
is sitting here so he was there watching this
happen – but what's so striking in that
interview is how he's determined to resist
the term if it's going to mean Zürich Dada.
But if it's the eternal Dada spirit, then
that's okay.
If it’s [inaudible] etcetera then he’ll
accept the term.
And so this… and that’s probably not clear,
then, in the public's mind.
No, or even in most of the sort of what you
could say is the smaller art world’s mind
also.
But I see that…
I see that as sort of a general tendency in
some of Duchamp’s interviews where he was….
Because many of these interviews were conducted
with people who are also friends.
Duchamp I think was perfectly capable of using
a term like Dada or Futurist or Revolutionary
in a pretty casual way in conversation.
But then when it gets turned into a formal
interview situation, he immediately backs
off and says no no no it doesn't mean anything.
I think he doesn't want to get pinned down
in that specific way.
And this looming, this image of Picasso, and
you really sense that frustration because
Picasso is the modern artist at that point.
He’s getting all the attention, and he’s
not.
And you can see how there is strength in numbers.
Even though he’s not a joiner of groups,
there's an advantage at that point to taking
that on.
Absolutely.
Anyway, just a wonderful, wonderful talk.
Oh thank you very much.
Thanks again to Ann and Jim inviting me.
Please.
Sorry, I just want to go back to on the connection
with abstract expressionism for just a moment
in the late ‘40s, and this idea that Motherwell
is sort of turning Dada into something that
he and his colleagues can use.
But I think it's ’49, it’s included in
the anthology, Huelsenbeck writes a new Dada
manifesto in 1949…
