…some investigation on this for the piece
that I wrote for the catalog and for a longer
piece on which I am currently working for
Brian.
So I guess as kind of a student I'm looking
forward to this lecture today from Brian to
see what I can learn from it that I don't
know or what I can correct that I think I
know about it.
As we will quickly see, Brian in 1966, in
April of 1966, asked Marcel Duchamp to submit
to an electrocardiogram.
And its printed readouts would then serve
as the basis for what would become his sixteen-part
portrait of Marcel Duchamp done over the rest
of 1966 into 1967.
In his brief statement, Brian tantalizes us,
dangling the carrot that his motives behind
this work were not so innocent.
I look forward to learning about those motives.
[Applause] Thank you Jim, thank you.
We happy few survivors [laughter] we will
try and end with some good humor and enjoyment.
As Jim said I took a medical degree in Dublin
in 1952, that’s a little while ago.
But long before I lived in New York I was
in search of Duchamp and in 1959, I came down
from Boston to hunt him down.
When I came to Aspen, my first American city
in 1959, not too many people were interested
in Duchamp at that point apart from gentle
John Cage and through Cage, [Robert] Rauschenberg
and [Jasper] Johns.
And the meeting was not a great success.
He resolutely cancelled every move I made
in my young naiveté.
He said ‘words don't do anything’ he said
in that very appealing voice.
‘We can explain nothing.
When I say chair and you say chair, we both
mean different things.’
He was patient, though and he finally said
to finally shut me up, he said ‘you know
we're in the bath trying to explain the bath
water.’
And that developed into an interesting phrase
in which he said ‘we can't tell ourselves
from the bath water.’
And I took that to be the same order of [William
Butler] Yeats’ how can we tell the dancer
from the dance?
But not of course as elegant.
We became friends and at that age of his life
he was 79.
He was charming, wry, amusing, ironic, funded
with artist egotists, he repeatedly said.
And he frequently quoted the “je suis respirateur.”
My conceptual colleagues at that time which
included Sol LeWitt, Mel Bochner, the wonderful
Eva Hesse and Peter Hutchinson, they were
not too interested in him at all.
I found his ideas had changed the game and
I wrote then that he would own the second
half of the century as Picasso had owned first
half.
We did not by the way talk about art at all,
which we both found rather boring.
When he did say something about art, he would
say something about when you put art on the
wall of a museum it begins to die.
And we've heard about the emanation that depreciates
by half-lives once the art is enclosed in
the museum which becomes and acropolis, a
last columbarium.
And that idea was not unpleasant.
The museum is a place where art goes to die.
Not a new idea, even so temperate ideas as
a gentleman as [Camille?]
Pissarro wanted to burn down the Louvre, if
you remember.
And my adage to the gallery and museum was
the mild occupational resentment of the artist.
As we became more friendly, I didn't quite
warm to his idea that the art I was making
was prematurely dead.
I began to think how could I refute Duchamp’s
idea that art on museum walls rapidly diminish
into nothing, into artifacts?
Well getting the art it into the museum is
another story, isn’t it?
And not a pretty story of influence-peddling,
manipulation, greed, power, infected by that
virus – money.
How do Duchamp’s artifacts fare in the museum?
Were they dead to begin with?
Were they then doubly dead?
I was very clear headed that to be influenced
by Duchamp was to lose your queen.
You would be sucked into his orbit and circulate
around him helplessly becoming what I call
a Duchamp pet.
Duchamp’s zone of influence is radioactive
still and dangerous.
For this reason I have not allowed until now
through the eloquence of the curators my Duchamp
portrait to appear in the vicinity of Duchamp
exhibitions.
I was thinking a lot about body parts in those
early sixties.
Let's see if I picked the right one.
Yes I did.
Yes.
I remembered as you'll do Jericho's charnel
house of parts, of severed parts.
In those days I'd immersed myself in symbolist
poetry and prose.
I called one of my sculptures [unknown].
You remember [unknown]’s New Eve.
And medicine at that time also was transplanting
organs.
And in 1967, Christiaan Barnard did the unthinkable.
He transferred a heart from one man to another.
And I wrote about this in Art International
under the title you see there.
It dealt with the subtraction and addition
of parts, the polar nightmares of the Gothic
charnel house, and the science fiction figure
shining with artificial prostheses.
And of course, with matters of identity, the
location of sentience.
What is consciousness anyway?
Is it a place?
If it is, where is it?
Is it something that secretes language or
is it secreted by language?
And there was Duchamp, when you think these
things, smiling.
I started thinking of Marcel's heart beating
away there out of sight and very much in mind.
So I asked him casually if I could do his
portrait and with his usual equanimity he
said yes.
He was cool beyond cool.
Why his heart?
Surely his head would have been more appropriate.
Roland Barthes wrote beautifully on Einstein's
brain.
But I knew the heart as relic, fetish, and
venerated metaphor.
I remembered a song from Shakespeare's Merchant
of Venice: ‘where is fancy bread, in the
heart or in the head, how begot, how nourishèd?’
Reply, reply.
Well, my reply was the heart for reasons that
will become clear.
An electroencephalogram issues squiggly, vaguely
parallel lines on a sheet of paper.
Anyway Robert Morris had already done that
as a self-portrait.
Framing Duchamp’s encephalogram on wall
wouldn’t mean much at least to me.
I never heard of a witty encephalogram.
Brain is cool.
Heart is hot.
And Duchamp was warm, in my experience, warm.
By the way I've heard talk about the chair,
the famous chair that once belonged to Max
Ernst.
Well you’d go there and I remember at dinner
he would sit in his chair.
He had a little Cornell box that he would
light and then he’d light that up and eventually
he would smoke a cigar and he would look supremely
happy.
And I think a great deal of his time… life
at that time was being happy.
He was a very happy man in my experience.
Well, the heart is a metaphorical crossroads.
Has been for centuries, at least since Philip
Sidney.
A portrait based on Duchamp’s heart derived
from mapping the electrical potentials of
his body through his extremities arms and
legs with the heart at the center; that would
have possibilities.
I should add that in modern medicine the body
on the table is surrounded by such a battery
of instrumental readings that the body itself
seems almost irrelevant, almost transparent,
its own ghost as the readings become more
real, which is carried out.
All of you go to doctors.
They pay little attention to you, who you
are.
They pay a lot of attention to what the laboratory
sends back about you.
One of the corruptions of modern medicine
which the speed of seeing patients and the
pressures on doctors now produce this unfortunate
result.
Well, Barbara Novak my wife invited Teeny
and Marcel Duchamp to dinner with some other
guests.
And in honor of Duchamp, she took out her
Julia Child and she cooked a volaille, lots
of cream with a trifle for dessert.
Duchamp looked at this high cholesterol extravaganza
and demurred.
He must have thought it was an attempt on
his life.
He ate everything as did the voluptuous and
delightful Teeny.
Well after dinner, we stayed up etcetera and
I said would you come into the bedroom?
And he did, he just walked into the bedroom
and stood there beside the bed.
And I said would you take off your shirt please?
And he did.
And I said if you would sit down and take
off your shoes and stockings and would you
roll up your pants a little bit and would
you lie back.
No questions whatever.
[Laughter] Very cool.
Very cool.
You want to watch out with this man.
I had rented an electrocardiograph machine.
I applied the gel to his wrists and ankles
as you did in those days, strapped on the
metal leads, and he lay still, unperturbed.
And if I had said I was going to take out
his heart, I believe he would have been mildly
curious as to how I was going to go about
doing it.
The machine unfurled its long ribbon.
Is this a pointer?
This thing?
It doesn’t matter too much.
Oh, thank you.
The needle was steady, the heartbeat regular,
and Duchamp stood up and said – I was wondering
what he's going to say – he said how am
I?
[Laughter] I hadn't given much thought to
potential pathology but if I had, and if I
had been… if I had remembered my stuff from
the profession I had abandoned many years
before in consultation… with the cardiologist,
one of Jim’s family last night, here is
the evidence, there at the… that’s a PQR,
the QR area and that, lead two and an AVF
down here, indicates cardiac problems, that
he already had injury to the lower part, the
inferior part of his heart.
Interesting.
So he finally took the fact that I was an
incompetent doctor and said thank you from
the bottom of my heart.
[Laughter] And I said thank you for letting
you take your portrait.
He knew I’d been a doctor and suggested
– this man is wicked – he suggested that
I sign the portrait Brian O'Doherty M.D.
That would have been a subtle act of possession
on his part.
I wasn't going to allow him co-authorship
of his own portrait.
His heart had done its work.
I had a set of electrical potentials describing
the functions of his heart, beat by beat,
intrinsic to his living, breathing, beating
substance more accurate and unchanging than
any representation of the lineaments changed
by age of his wonderful face which looks like
the shadow.
Did you ever see the shadow?
Duchamp looks like the shadow.
So I studied the heartbeat and I really did
that heartbeat upside down.
I drew it very carefully, the first lead which
you see there with its big T bump, and I wanted
to become intimately acquainted with this,
as intimately as I could.
So I drew carefully in until I isolated and
experienced fully that PQRST, PQRS and the
big T at the end.
The record involuntarily made by Duchamp that
had been snatched at a virtually infinite
continuum.
The record of each beat was the same but each
beat was an original.
So repetition through redundancy began to
indicate a kind of stasis, an interruption
in time which through its perfectly repeated
cycle induced a fiction of paralysis, a suspended
immortality.
[Søren] Kierkegaard’s ‘the true repetition
is eternity.’
It wasn't quite the eternity I was after.
Eternity is the true repetition seems better
to me.
Maybe they’re the same thing.
You could tell them by the heart but the heart
itself could not tell time.
By the way the transplanted heart beats like
an unalterable metronome.
Its beat never changes because, no matter
how much adrenaline is secreted by its new
owner, it is not connected to the sympathetic
nervous system and therefore beats at its
own inevitable, regular, clockwork metronome.
So I studied the heartbeat upside down in
several drawings to clarify my thoughts.
I made various drawings and paintings of boxes
that would take the first three leads and
animate them.
That was the plan.
Somewhere I was going to make an oscilloscope.
I was going to make him live.
So I got in there in the center you can see
a spirit level which seems relevant.
Then I did drawing after drawing of the heartbeat
itself.
I interrupted the heartbeat to do it in separated
increments.
It's hard for you to see this.
I did registers of drawings in which each
heartbeat is broken down to its own fragment.
You see it a little better over there.
That's a continuous one, a mounting heartbeat.
And you see the little smooth curve of the
P, the dip then down of the Q, the apex R,
then down to the bottom…
QRS and then the round T at the end.
Anyway, I broke down as I say the first lead
in a series of cumulative increments until
the beat completed itself as the next beat
is imminent.
The beat remembering as it were its own origin
and the sinovericular [sic] node which is
where the origin of the impulse to make the
heart beat comes from which William Harvey,
the discoverer of the circulation of the blood
compared to the firing of a pistol, the firing
the hearts contraction [note: the speaker
combines two nodes here - correct nodes are
sinoatrial and atrioventricular].
And then the drawing of the increments each
one alone in its fragment of time, unconscious
of before and after, a kind of atomic conception
of a heartbeat if you will on this side.
Showing again the profile of a part of a heartbeat
isolated from its smooth continuum.
And since language haloed almost everything
I was doing just then, I had made the hearts
grand morpheme utter phonemic blurts and stammers.
Well, within the crisis of the heartbeat,
if the heartbeat is a crisis perhaps, a banal
crisis, I had mapped or felt I had its firm
architecture and at the same time I’m beginning
to subvert it.
Within the paralysis of repetition, the cold
paradoxes of time, I had or felt I had divided
time into fractions that in their isolation,
I had succeeded in infusing some sense of
risk perhaps into the heart’s beat.
That fragment might not appear as someday
it would not.
I wanted as far as a drawing could a sense
of time engaged, mapped, cancelled, continued
through the usual paradoxes which include
the time taken while we were studying a stalled
heartbeat during which study of course our
own heart keeps quietly beating.
Because to ignore the echo of your own heartbeat
would be too clinical.
You the perpetrator and observer are in this
too.
Yes, I had a static record.
But to fulfill my refutation of Duchamp I
needed not a record of his heartbeat – that
was the beginning – but the heartbeat itself
actually beating.
This…
