“With the signing of the agreement concluded between the Arensbergs and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, on 28 December 1950, Duchamp’s work, almost in its entirety, reached the care of a public collection without ever coming into contact with the art market. Duchamp’s comment: ‘I never had such a feeling of complete satisfaction.’ ”
(Ecke Bonk, Marcel Duchamp: The Portable Museum, p. 19.)
Marcel Duchamp and I are collaborating on a giant wall painting. Duchamp’s part in this work consists of a talking portrait of himself – a profile which appears at the center of a brightly colored rectangle on the white wall. Using a long stick to push the colors around, I demonstrate the niceties of the composition to a large audience standing in a semicircle. “You see,” I say, “we (Duchamp and I) are much the same – but mostly at the edges!” Now the righthand edge of the rectangle explodes in a flashing white light which then “bleeds” into a field of dazzling pellucid orange. The room during this phase of the work has been almost totally in the dark – the only light source being the painting itself – its colors illumined from the inside. Now the room lights up and I am painting the four walls, running back and forth like crazy with my stick. In one corner I draw a huge black gorilla figure and pivoting to face the next long wall, I trace a black line punctuated with a thick gob of paint which sticks out like a fist. I pause, sensing this work is “a great success.”
(Bill Berkson, in Serenade.)
“WHEN
THE TOBACCO SMOKE
ALSO SMELLS
OF THE MOUTH
WHICH EXHALES IT
THE TWO ODORS
ARE MARRIED BY
INFRA-SLIM”
(Marcel Duchamp, View, 5, no. 1, March 1945. Trans. Elmer Peterson.)
“Marcel Duchamp was quick to recognize that the artist moves from the margins of society to the centre. He always resisted becoming ‘bëte comme un peintre’ – ‘stupid like a painter’ – and understood art as an attempt to school his intellect. For Duchamp, the artist is highly integrated into society, so that, after his or her emancipation from the commission and the patron, he or she is positively obliged to pursue the education and expansion of his intellect. Quite rightly, Duchamp insisted on being more than just a chatterer and a thief in an artist’s smock, because he saw himself confronted with a society that pursued the exploitative logic of capitalism and therefore dwelled in intellectual homelessness.”
(Florian Waldvogel, from “Each One Teach One”, p. 22 in Dexter Sinister’s Notes for an Art School.)
“The impulse that made him travel to another city and lead a completely isolated existence, free of family ties or distractions of any kind, also seems to have made him want to preserve that experience, intact and inviolate, for himself alone. He hinted at this in a late filmed interview with the French documentary filmmaker Jean-Marie Drot. ‘In 1912 it was a decision for being alone and not knowing where I was going,’ Duchamp said. ‘The artist should be alone . . . Everyone for himself, as in a shipwreck.’ ”
(Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp, p. 93.)
“In most cases the impossibility becomes apparent after viewing the figure for a few seconds however the initial impression of a 3D object remains even after it has been contradicted. There are also more subtle examples of impossible objects where the the impossibility does not become apparent spontaneously and it is necessary to consciously examine the geometry of the implied object to determine that it is impossible.” The bed in the advertisement is an impossible object, a theme perhaps not discussed in topology or other sciences until later. The very words “impossible object” are suggestive of meanings which might be illuminatingly applied in the description of an artist, as Apollinaire himself was rather an impossible object, at least after some meanings are unpacked (Picasso drew him masturbating among friends). Any work of art, as an aesthetic illusion, is an impossible object in a separate sense. So Duchamp calls attention to an impossible object, while Penrose opens themes Duchamp might well be credited with appreciating, albeit tacitly. The spelling of Apolinère in relation to Apollinaire is like Guilliame in relation to my name, William, otherwise Bill Wilson. So think about the same name differently spelled. Your themes now include art, visual perception, platonic ideal beds, and reach Escher and undecidability, as if Duchamp had said, “I am a liar,” and pointed toward the pictured bed, itself a visual lie… If a work of art is true to itself, it is false to the materials which convey it. Were Duchamp to have said, “I am a liar,” his statement would be true if it were false, but false if it were true: thus an impossible object. Jasper Johns did write “I am a liar” in some works of art which elaborate on Duchampian undecidable verbal and visual statements.”
(William S. Wilson, from a posting here on Apolinère Enameled).
” ‘Include Marcel Duchamp in your book.
Just like you, Marcel Duchamp had few ideas. Once, in Paris, the artist Naum Gabo asked him directly why he had stopped painting. “Mais que voulez-vous?” Duchamp replied, spreading wide his arms, “je n’ai plus d’idées” (What do you expect? I’ve no more ideas).
In time he would provide other, more sophisticated explanations, but this one was probably closest to the truth. After The Large Glass, Duchamp had run out of ideas, so instead of repeating himself he simply stopped creating.
Duchamp’s life was his finest work of art. He abandoned painting very early on and embarked on a daring adventure in which art was conceived, first and foremst, as a cosa mentale, in the spirit of Leonardo da Vinci. He wanted always to place art at the service of the mind and it was precisely this desire – driven by his particular use of language, by chance, optics, films and, above all, by his famous “readymades” – which stealthily undermined 500 years of Western art and transformed it completely.
Duchamp abandoned painting for over fifty years because he preferred to play chess. Isn’t that wonderful?
I imagine you are perfectly aware who Duchamp was, but let me remind you of his activities as a writer; let me relate how Duchamp helped Katherine Dreier form her own personal museum of modern art called the Sociéteé Anonyme, Inc., advising her what art works to collect. When plans were made to donate the collection to Yale University in the forties, Duchamp wrote thirty-three one-page biographical and critical notices on artists from Archipenko to Jacques Villon.
Roger Shattuck has written in the New York Review of Books that had Marcel Duchamp decided, not uncharacteristically, to include a notice on himself as one of Dreier’s artists, he would probably have produced an astute blend of truth and fable, like the others he wrote. Roger Shattuck suggest that he might have written something along these lines:
“A tournament chess player and intermittent artist, Marcel Duchamp was born in France in 1887 and died a United States citizen in 1968. He was at home in both countries and divided his time between them. At the New York Armory Show of 1913, his Nude Descending a Staircase delighted and offended the press, provoked a scandal that made him famous in absentia at the age of twenty-six, and drew him to the United States in 1915. After four exciting years in New York City, he departed and devoted most of his time to chess until about 1954. A number of young artists and curators in several countries then rediscovered Duchamp and his work. He had returned to New York in 1942 and during his last decade there, between 1958 and 1968, he once again became famous and influential.”
Include Marcel Duchamp in your book about Bartleby’s shadow. Duchamp knew that shadow personally, he made it with his own hands. In a book of interviews, Pierre Cabanne asks him at one point if he undertook any artistic activity during those twenty summers he spent at Cadaqués. Duchamp answers that he did, since every year he had to repair an awning that sheltered him on his terrace. I admire him greatly and, what’s more, he’s a man who brings luck – include him in your treatise on the No. What I most admire about him is that he was a first-rate trickster.’ “
(Enrique Vila-Matas, Bartleby & Co., trans. Jonathan Dunne, pp. 56–58.)
“And the problem, suddenly, was that I’d been trying to be eau et gaz for all my life, that was the kind of game I was trying to play, that was the way I read the lesson I learned from Duchamp, it was a way of liberating yourself from just about everything, and it’s a very dangerous lesson to learn, the idea was to be always and totally available, even more than schizophrenic. The idea of living in a state where the mind has just simply exploded, scattered itself everywhere, and the psyche, the animus, the capacity for feeling is exploded and vaporized too, the idea of belonging to everybody, the idea then too of needing a container. I found myself deciding that I’d had enough of that and that I didn’t want to be eau et gaz any more because being a fluid in a container is a very difficult state to live in. All somebody has to do is to punch a little hole in it, and here I was suddenly full of holes. It suddenly became clear that I had to transform my whole way of being. It seemed that I couldn’t any longer be pure eroticism always at the disposal of others, just as my work couldn’t continue to be, well, so open, so open to investigation. There’s a secretiveness in Agricola Cornelia too. There’s a point where everything you’re dependent on can turn against you, and being eau et gaz is like being an irritated mucous membrane, it involves a sensibility where you can be very easily hurt by even the very slightest slight, and I decided that I’d had enough of that and that in addition to being eau et gaz, that instead of being eau et gaz I had to be something else.”
(Gianfranco Baruchello & Henry Martin, How to Imagine: a narrative on art and agriculture, pp. 52–53)
(Man Ray. Photograph of Mary Reynolds and Marcel Duchamp. Gelatin silver print; 15 x 14.9 cm. The Art Institute of Chicago)