Category Archives: commonplace

similarity

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“One stone is like another and a corkscrew is like another corkscrew. The resemblance between stones is natural and involuntary; between manufactured objects it is artificial and deliberate. The fact that all corkscrews are the same is a consequence of their significance: they are objects that have been manufactured for the purpose of drawing corks; the similarity between stones has no inherent significance. At least this is the modern attitude to nature. It hasn’t always been the case. Roger Callois points out that certain Chinese artists selected stones because they found them fascinating and turned them into works of art by the simple act of engraving or painting their name on them. The Japanese also collected stones and, as they were more ascetic, preferred them not to be too beautiful, strange, or unusual; they chose ordinary round stones. To look for stones for their difference and to look for them for their similarity are not separate acts; they both affirm that nature is the creator. To select one stone among a thousand is equivalent to giving it a name. Guided by the principle of analogy, man gives names to nature; each name is a metaphor: Rocky Mountains, Red Sea, Hells Canyon, Eagles Rest. The name – or the signature of the artist – causes the place – or the stone – to enter the world of names, or, in other words, into the sphere of meanings. The act of Duchamp uproots the object from its meaning and makes an empty skin of the name: a bottlerack without bottles. The Chinese artist affirms his identity with nature; Duchamp, his irreducible separation from it. The act of the former is one of elevation or praise; that of the latter, a criticism. For the Chinese, the Greeks, the Mayans, or the Egyptians nature was a living totality, a creative being. For this reason art, according to Aristotle, is imitation; the poet imitates the creative gesture of nature. The Chinese artist follows this idea to its ultimate conclusion: he selects a stone and signs it. He inscribes his name on a piece of creation and his signature is an act of recognition – Duchamp selects a manufactured object; he inscribes his name as an act of negation and his gesture is a challenge.”

(Octavio Paz, Marcel Duchamp: Appearance Stripped Bare, trans. Donald Gardner, pp. 25–26)

the golden age of the blurb

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From the dust jacket copy of Edwin Denby’s Mrs. W’s Last Sandwich (1972; reissued as Scream in a Cave):

Ron Padgett says: “Edwin Denby’s Mrs. W’s Last Sandwich is as charming and pleasurable for me to read as an adult as The Hardy Boys series was when I was a boy. He is one of the best writers in America.”

Anne Waldman says: “Mrs. W’s Last Sandwich is a pure, authentic 30’s novel – suspense, humor, melodrama, adventure, what you will. It will make you drag your own cookies. I can’t put it down.”

The only thing better than this is W. H. Auden’s blurb for John Ashbery & James Schuyler’s A Nest of Ninnies (1975):

My! What a pleasant surprise to read a novel in which there is not a single bedroom scene . . . there are, to be sure, some scenes of violence, but the violence is meteorological: the characters can hardly go anywhere without encountering torrential rains. More extraordinary still, though many of them live in suburbia, they all seem, believe it or not, to be happy, and, though sometimes bitchy, actually to like each other .  .  . A NEST OF NINNIES is a pastoral .  .  . it took Messrs. Ashbery and Schuyler several years to write. Their patience and artistry have been well rewarded. I am convinced their book is destined to become a minor classic.

stein/duchamp

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“I was always perfectly able to understand the enthusiasm that Marcel Duchamp aroused in New York when he went there in the early years of the war. His brother had just died from the effect of his wounds, his other brother was still at the front and he himself was inapt for military service. He was very depressed and he went to America. Everybody loved him. So much so that it was a joke in Paris that when any american arrived in Paris the first thing he said was, and how is Marcel. Once Gertrude Stein went to see Braque, just after the war, and going into the studio in which there happened just then to be three young americans, she said to Braque, and how is Marcelle. The three young americans came up to her breathlessly and said, have you seen Marcel. She laughed, and having become accustomed to the inevitableness of the american belief that there was only one Marcel, she explained that Braque’s wife was named Marcelle and it was Marcelle Braque about whom she was enquiring.”

(Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, p. 795)

duchamp/stein

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“CABANNE: So it’s your moral position, more than your work, which was irritating?

DUCHAMP: There again, I had no position. I’ve been a little like Gertrude Stein. To a certain group, she was considered an interesting writer, with very original things . . .

CABANNE It’s a form of comparison between people of that period. By that, I mean that there are people in every period who aren’t ‘in.’ No one’s bothered by it. Whether I had been in or not, it would have been all the same. It’s only now, forty years later, that we discover things had happened forty years before that might have bothered some people – but they couldn’t have cared less then!”

(Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, trans. Ron Padgett, p. 17)

dali, not sounding like dali

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“In Paris, in the early days, there were 17 people who understood the “readymades” – the very rare readymades by Marcel Duchamp. Nowadays there are 17 million who understand them, and that one day, when all objects that exist are considered readymades, there will be no readymades at all. Then Originality will become the artistic Work, produced convulsively by the artist by hand.”

(Salvador Dali, “L’Échecs, c’est moi”, preface to Pierre Cabanne’s Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, trans. Ron Padgett.)

hélène

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“Hélène had her opinions, she did not for instance like Matisse. She said a frenchman should not stay unexpectedly to a meal particularly if he asked the servant beforehand what there was for dinner. She said foreigners had a perfect right to do these things but not a frenchman and Matisse had once done it. So when Miss Stein said to her, Monsieur Matisse is staying for dinner this evening, she would say, in that case I will not make an omelette but fry the eggs. It takes the same number of eggs and the same amount of butter but it shows less respect, and he will understand.”

(Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, p. 665)

(fernande)

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“Our only other conversation was the description and names of the dogs that were then fashionable. This was my subject and after I had described she always hesitated, ah yes, she would say illuminated, you wish to describe a little belgian dog whose name is griffon.”

(Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, p. 684)

henry-pierre roché

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“He had done a great many things, he had gone to the austrian mountains with the austrians, he had gone to Germany with the germans and he had gone to Hungary with hungarians and he had gone to England with the english. He had not gone to Russia although he had been in Paris with russians. As Picasso always said of him, Roché is very nice but he is only a translation.

Later he was often at 27 rue de Fleurus with various nationalities and Gertrude Stein rather liked him. She always said of him he is so faithful, perhaps one need never see him again but one knows that somewhere Roché is faithful. He did give her one delightful sensation in the very early days of their acquaintance. Three Lives, Gertrude Stein’s first book was just then being written and Roché who could read english was very impressed by it. One day Gertrude Stein was saying something about herself and Roché said good good excellent that is very important for your biography. She was terribly touched, it was the first time that she really realized that some time she would have a biography. It is quite true that although she has not seen him for years somewhere Roché is probably perfectly faithful.”

(Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, pp. 704 in the Library of America edition of Writings 1903–1932)

34q.

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34Q. Coins. Three 5-øre pieces, two of them aluminium and one copper; three 25-øre pieces (some kind of alloy); four 10-øre pieces; one Danish crown; three German 10-pfennig pieces and one 5-pfennig piece; one French 50-franc piece, and a 50-something piece (the inscription is in Hebrew).a

a. Note by ALAIN JOUFFROY: “This box and its contents remind me of the ‘Can of Involuntary Secret Noise’ that SPOERRI presented to me in January 1961 with a dedication on the label signed with orthographic variants of his name: DANIEL SPÖRRI — SPOERRI — SPOERRI-FEINSTEIN — SPÖRRI-FEINSTEIN — SPÖRRI-FAINSTEIN — SPOERRI-FAINSTAIN. [See also 28a, a] On shaking the aluminium can, which contained among other things a key, an empty spook of ACKERMANN’s black thread, one slightly yellowish die, a large safety pin, a tube of paste, an old franc and a compass glued to a pen, one could really hear an incomprehensible noise, similar to that made by those toy puzzles with which one can play for hours trying to return tiny ball bearings to their pockets. This ‘Can of Involuntary Secret Noise,’ which I hung up on my wall between a bronze Benin mask and a MANINA picture, given to me on my last birthday and consisting of pieces of lead glued to brown wood, may have been presented to me by SPOERRI to thank me for the article I wrote about him for his first exhibition (Mostra Personale, Galleria SCHWARZ, Milan, March 16–30, 1961). My introductory text, entitled ‘The Snare-Pictures of DANIEL SPOERRI’ [see 15, b], ends with the words: ‘The idea of reality is to reinvent, as everybody knows.’ But I’m not certain. Maybe he gave it to me, without knowing it, for the symbolical meanings of the objects which it contained, and in particular the key, the compass glued to the pen, the empty spool of black thread and the yellowing die. Key-compass-pen-spool-die constitute, to my eyes, an ensemble of meanings, well tied together, that summarise, like the images of a poem, the half-conscious, half-unconscious impulses that have compelled me since the age of seventeen. I would be interested in knowing if the snare-pictures and objects SPOERRI has given to others correspond as well, and as subtly, to their personalities and sensibilities. (New fact: In trying to find out what there was deep down in the can, which still contains many small objects impossible to identify – among which, no doubt, is the perpetrator of the ‘involuntary noise’ – I uncoupled the pen and the compass. Thus I am certain that the source of the source of the secret noise ought not to be probed.)”b (DANIEL SPOERRI, 1966)

b. What is the secret that JOUFFROY thinks he ought not to probe, and why is the hidden noise involuntary? This dilemma calls to mind immediately the 1916 semi Readymade of MARCEL DUCHAMP, “With hidden noise” (à bruit secret), called by ULF LINDE “one of the most puzzling things DUCHAMP has ever done.”c In the catalogue accompanying the recent DUCHAMP show at Galleria SCHWARZ, LINDE describes it as “a ball of twine mounted between two metal plates, the latter with strange texts engraved on them. There is an object hidden inside the ball of twin – an object put there by WALTER C. ARENSBERG. And the object gives out a sound when in contact with the plates (the voice of the bride?).”

The inscription on the plates – a telegraphic compound of French and English words with periods replacing missing letters – has no special significance, according to DUCHAMP:

P.G   .ECIDES   DEBARRASSE.

LE.   D.SERT.   F.URNIS.ENT

AS    HOW.V.R   COR.ESPONDS

and on the lower plate:

.IR.    CAR.E   LONDSEA

F.INE,   HEA.,   .O.SQUE

TE.U    S.ARP   BAR.AIN

No special significance. The system, at least, is obvious.

There is no intentional mystification in the SPOERRI object, and he inscription, too, bears the mark of the artist’s straightforwardness. He confided to me recently that after he finished gluing the object he discovered that he hadn’t glued it as well as he had intended; and that when he shook it and head a noise, he called it exactly what it was: “involuntary” because it was unintentional and “secret” because he didn’t know the source. As long as JOUFFROY refuses to get to the bottom of the matter – of the can – SPOERRI’s “secret” will remain hidden. (EMMETT WILLIAMS, 1966)

c. Why is there anything ‘most puzzling’ on (or under or by or in or around) DUCHAMP’s thing? If one looks aside (or keeps away) from the superlative here and then simply says (or asks): “What constitutes the puzzling?” I could at once come and say (or reply): “The puzzling is something that does something to me, and I cannot stop it because I don’t know where it is located and don’t know who it is that is doing it (or is it), and furthermore I know that I do not (or will never) know who it is (or who does it) bcause it is located at the edge of the (or my) world (the two worlds are in any case the same), and it is there at the edge of my world so that I cannot (or can never) reach it and stop it, regardless of whether at the edge of the inner or at the edge of the outer world, because it does not jut (or poke) far enough into my world, however large I keep trying to make (or extend or inflate) the latter, for me to grab it.” And if one surmises what I might then be about to say, and says: “Right,” I would then come a step closer and say: “That thing there from DUCHAMP, I can grasp it with my hands (which is one way of reaching it), and I can stop that thing inasmuch as it is doing something (to wit making a noise). I can stop the noise inasmuch as I can put it down. Why should one shake it? I can reach it, I can stop it, and so I cannot call it puzzling – let alone most puzzling, or am I wrong?” (DIETER ROTH, 1968)

(Daniel Spoerri et al., An Anecdoted Topography of Chance (Atlas Press edition, 1995, pp. 121–122)

the book to come

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“But excuses have no place in art, and intentions count for nothing: at every moment the artist has to listen to his instinct, and it is this that makes art the most real of all things, the most austere school of life, the true last judgment. This book, more laborious to decipher than any other, is also the only one which has been dictated to us by reality, the only one of which the ‘impression’ has been printed in us by reality itself. When an idea – an idea of any kind – is left in us by life, its material pattern, the outline of the impression that it made upon us, remains behind as the token of its necessary truth. The ideas formed by the pure intelligence have no more than a logical, a possible truth, they are arbitrarily chosen. The book whose hieroglyphs are patterns not traced by us is the only book that really belongs to us.”

(Proust, Time Regained, trans. Andreas Mayor & Terence Kilmartin, p. 914)