All posts by robert

‘Infusion Ball’ or ‘Holy Ampule’?

click to enlarge

Figure 1
Sir Roger’s Infusion Apparatus,
A Catalogue of Surgical
Instruments and Medical
Appliances,Allen &
Hanburys Ltd., London, 1938, p. 186

To the Editor:

Stimulated by the article “Paris Air” or “Holy Ampule” by Girst and Shearer in the December 1999 issue ofTout-fait, I conducted some research about the history of infusion medicine. The “Paris Air” ampule used by Duchamp for his artwork combines three main functions of an infusion apparatus. First it can be used as a closed vessel to keep sterilized fluids. Second it can be used as an infusion apparatus. (One simply has to break the far glass ends, connect a tube infusion system to the lower one and gravity draws the fluid into the patient’s vein.) Third it is the most convenient apparatus to hang over the patient’s bed because of its glass hook. Most strikingly, the “Paris Air” ampule combines all three functions in one piece made of the same uniform material.

By using a medical infusion ampule for his artwork Duchamp cites, likely without knowing, from a very interesting part of the history of medicine. Blood letting as a medical treatment has been known since ancient times, but its contrary “infusion” was not tried until Harvey discovered the system of blood circulation in the mid 17th century. In 1656 Sir Christopher Wren wrote the first report about experiments of injections into dogs‘ veins. Although he was a successful medical scientist of his time he changed his profession in 1665 to architecture and built fifty churches in London including the famous St. Paul’s Cathedral. (Remember that the ancient Egyptian god of medicine, Imhotep, used to be a physician and architect as well.) The first report of venous injections into humans was published by Johann Sigismund Elsholtz in Berlin in 1665. ⁽¹⁾ Lacking proper materials like small needles and microbiological knowledge like methods of sterilization, the next reports suggesting infusions as a standard medical treatment were not published before the late 19th century. Most of these reports describe different infusion equipment as well as methods of sterilization. Again, it took nearly two to three decades until infusions became a well-established treatment in World War I and World War II.

click to enlarge

Figure 2
Closed Sterile Ampoule,
de l’Asepsie dans la Pratique
Chirurgicale Procedes de Sterilisation,
de Robert & Leseurre, 1930, 141

Closed ampules as a container of pharmaceutical products were first described by Harnack in 1883 ⁽²⁾. Three years later they were brought into mass production by Limousin in Paris ⁽³⁾.

Most of the first infusion vessels were open systems like the example of Sir Roger’s infusion apparatus (figure 1)⁽⁴⁾. It resembles the shape of the “Paris Air” ampule, but the top end is open and bears a metal hook. Also some closed sterile ampules existed like the one described by de Robert & Leseurre in 1903 (figure 2), which combined a sterile container and infusion apparatus ⁽⁵⁾.

The one report about an infusion apparatus which resembles the “Paris Air” ampule best was published by Maurice Boureau in Paris in 1898 (figure 3) ⁽⁶⁾. Boureau describes a method of sterilization and the use of what he calls an “Infusion Ball” for infusing “Serum Artificial.” In medical terms “Serum Artificial” is synonymous to “Serum Physiologique” which is also printed on the “Paris Air” ampule and describes a 0.7% – 0.9% Sodium Chloride solution.

click to enlarge

Figure 3
Infusion Apparatus, published
by Maurice Boureau in Paris,
1930, seen from
Zur Entwicklung der Infusion
slösungen in der ersten Hälfte
des 20. Jahrhunderts,
Karin Bischof, Diss. Basel,
1995, p. 307

Some questions still remain unanswered. 1. If Boureau’s report is from 1898 but Duchamp didn’t buy his ampule till 1919, could he have bought an actual “Infusion Ball?” 2. What size is an “Infusion Ball”? Trying to answer the first question one has to bear two conditions in mind: Pharmacists have always been very traditional, therefore using old pharmaceutical/medical instruments for decoration of their pharmacies. Moreover, early in the 20th century the production of pharmaceutical products was individual rather than mass production. The first condition leaves the possibility that Duchamp bought an old instrument. However, because of the second condition, it is still possible that Duchamp bought a new ampule because infusion systems and ampules varied a lot in shape and design. The latter may also be the answer to the second question. If the ampule used by Duchamp was an “Infusion Ball” there is no need to argue about the size. Like most medical/pharmaceutical instruments infusion systems were and are available in a great variety of sizes for different medical indications.

In summary, especially with the knowledge of the Boureau report, it becomes more likely that Duchamp bought an infusion ampule made after Boureau’s description for his “Paris Air” artwork rather than having had one produced by a skilled pharmacist. Why would a pharmacist produce a unique “Paris Air” ampule resembling the “Holy Ampule” when there already existed a pharmaceutical/medical apparatus like Boureau’s “Infusion Ball” which resembled the shape of the “Paris Air” ampule even better?

Yours,

Cand. Med. Tobias Else, Innsbruck, Austria

Notes

1. Elsholtz, Johann Sigismund. Neue Clystier Kunst wodurch eine Arzney durch eine eroffnete Ader beyzubringen. Berlin 1665

2. Harnack, Erich. Lehrbuch der Azneimittellehre und Arzneiverordnungslehre. Auf Grund der dritten Auflage des Lehrbuchs der Arzneimittellehre von R. Buchheim und der Pharmacopoea Germanica. ed. II. Hamburg/Leipzig 1883.

3. Limousin, S. “Ampules hypodermiques, nouveau mode de preparation des solutions pour les injections hypodermiques” in Archives de Pharmacie I, 1886.

4. Figure taken from Allen & Hanburys Ltd. A Catalogue of Surgical Instruments and Medical Appliances. London 1938.

5. de Robert & Leseurre. “de l’Asepsie dans la Pratique Chirurgicale Procedes de Sterilisation.”

6. Boureau, Maurice. “La technique des injections de serum artificial,” Diss. Med. Paris 1898. Figure taken from Bischof , Karin. “Zur Entwicklung der Infusionslösungen in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts,” Diss. Basel 1995

Rhonda Roland Shearer responds:

click to enlarge

Figure A
Marcel Duchamp,
Fountain, 1917

Figure B
Marcel Duchamp, Trébuche
t (Trap), 1917

Figure C
Marcel Duchamp,
Hat Rack, 1917

We truly appreciate the effort that you made to research the historical context for Duchamp’s alleged “Paris Air Medical Ampule.”

Despite Duchamp’s contention that his objects were mass-produced readymades, the fact remains that no exact duplicate exists for any of his productions in the historical record. No scholar has ever found — in any museum catalogue or collection, or dealers’ storerooms — any exact object (urinal, coatrack, hatrack, etc.) that, according to Duchamp’s claims, was mass produced, store bought and readymade. Is this not strange? If an object is mass produced, by definition and logic, the attempt to find a duplicate design should not be analogous to searching for a needle in a haystack or scraping the bottom of a barrel, as has been the case.

So little evidence exists for the art historical othodoxy’s assumption — namely, that readymades are mass produced, and were therefore readily found in stores. Therefore, a reversal of the typical question of evidence about the status of Duchamp’s objects must be proposed. We should be persuaded by, and judge only by, direct evidence any claim that Duchamp objects are, in fact, readymade.

Using three illustrations of infusion devises, your letter lists three criteria met by Duchamp’s ampule in your judgement.

1. A closed vessel for sterilization
2.It can be used as an infusion system (with a bottom to break for connection to a tube)
3.”Convenient apparatus to hang over the patient’s bed because of the glass hook”

Yet when I look at your three illustrations, I fail to follow your conclusion that the Paris Air ampule “combines all three functions in one piece made of the same uniform material.”

Figure 1 does not have a glass hook and, like Figure 2, is safely and securely held by a metal clasp. Therefore the hook and the ampule are separate, not uniform materials as in Duchamp’s ampules. Indeed, Figure 3 is very suggestive — but unlike Figure 1 and 2, which appear to be accurate technical drawings from medical catalogues, Figure 3 with its inclusion of a hanging curtain and rough, hand-drawn quality is unclear. Considering Figure 3’s earlier 19th century date, this device was replaced by more practical and safe designs shown in Figure 1 and 2. The cylinder form of Figure 2 shares, with the mass-produced ampules developed in France during the first years of the 20th century, a shape that can be safely packed into boxed rows (see my illustration A of an early 20th century ampule mass-production factory).

click to enlarge

Illustration A
Photograph showing a factory
mass-producing ampules,
France, early 20th century

I have handled many European and American ampules and have “opened” them (see video). It would have been very tricky to attach a hose to the jagged end of an ampule. If indeed a glass hook was ever incorporated (as Figuer 3 is unclear), the motion of a patient’s arm would have led to stress on a glass hook that would likely cause it to break or become dislodged. Logic and practicality would lead to the further development of a metal, not a glass hook — as shown by the historical chronology held within your illustrations, beginning with Figure 3, then Figure 1, and 2 as the most historically recent in the series.

But let’s say that you are correct and that Figure 3 was among the early experiments in hand-made infusion devises that Duchamp saw hanging in a pharmacy as an “old pharmaceutical/medical instrument for decoration” (as you write). Is this one-of-a kind and obsolete hand-made infusion ampule to be accepted by us as evidence of Duchamp’s use of a mass produced, easily found, store-bought readymade object?

As to size, I believe that the facts about sizes of infusion balls actually used and made would be extremely important to know. For example, what if infusion ampules — even early custom-made ones — were only more than 125 cc in volume? This fact would further indicate that Duchamp had his own ampule made. Or on the contrary, if you discovered that infusion ball ampules were only made in 35 cc and 125 cc in volume, this would suggest that Duchamp exploited the two standard sizes for his original 1919 and 1941 Boite en Valiseversions, etc. Furthermore, we have testimony by experts that a pharmacist would not have needed unusual skills to convert a mass-produced ampule into a custom-made version similar to Duchamp’s larger 1919 and smaller 1941 Paris Air objects. In fact, Duchamp tells us that he had his 1941 ampules version custom made.

Click image for video (QT 2.6MB)
Click image for video (QT 2.6MB)
Click image for video (QT 2.0MB)

Demonstration of the
breaking of two antique
ampules at the Art Science
Research Laboratory, NY
More contemporary
ampule(with thicker glass)
Display of various
antique ampules at ASRL, NY

I believe that the question of Duchamp’s readymade ampule is very much aided by your research, but must still continue! I would love to find out more about infusion devices. If, in fact, infusion balls were “available in a great variety of sizes for different medical indications,” evidence and images of mass-produced infusion balls matching Duchamp’s Paris Air (1919) should readily be found, and should now be in the historical record in a duplicate form, not just as resemblances. A duplicate of Paris Air (1919) (alas, for people who want to believe in readymades) has not yet been found. We may be facing another Loch Ness monster or Big Foot. People will believe that Duchamp’s Paris Air (1919) ampule was a mass-produced readymade even in the face of little or no evidence.

Figs. A, B and C
© 2005 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris. All rights reserved.

Voyage à travers le Grand Verre: Avec le premier cinéma-vidéo du Grand Verre sur le web

Cliquez pour agrandir

La brochure. Voyage à travers le Grand Verre
par Jean Suquet,Centre Georges Pompidou, 24 octobre 1995 – 12
février 1996.
Cliquez ici pour le Grand Verre, un film de Dominique Lambert

Une diapositive du Grand Verre est projetée sur le mur blanc d’une chambre sous les toits. A droite, un porte se devine. Fermée. Le narrateur entre dans le cône de projection et, devenu la proie des ombres portées, il leur transfuse son souffle. Duchamp a laissé le Grand Verre aux trois quarts transparent pour qu’en filigrane de la machinerie extravagante qui bat la parade au premier plan on puisse lire un poëme. Sans les mots, pas de moteur. Crépite avec le titre le premier allumage : La Mariée mis à nu par ses célibataires, même. Au ciel, la Mariée. A terre, les célibataires. Entre eux, la ligne d’horizon. Elle est, dit Duchamp, le vêtement de la Mariée. Malheureux célibataires qui rêvent de mise à nu! Ils portent dans leur propre regard le voile qu’ils brûlent de dégrafer.

La ligne d’horizon est une limite imaginaire qui recule à mesure qu’on avance vers elle. Fatale dérobade dont les célibataires vont devoir se désensorceler. Rejoignons les neuf bonshommes rouges qui nous ressemblent comme des frères. Ficelés dans des uniformes étriqués, cloués au sol par leurs semelles de plomb, ils n’en sont pas moins mis en émoi par une échappée de gaz d’éclairage qui, en 1912, était le sang des lumières de la ville. Cet esprit s’élance dans un voyage qui le fait passer par tous les états de la matière. Solidifié, liquéfié en une flaque, il erre jusqu’à ce qu’un poids tombé on ne sait d’où le fasse rejaillir en éclaboussures. Il explose. Il déclare sa flamme. Il s’éblouit de sa propre lumière qu’un jeu de miroirs projette vers le ciel. Au ciel, la Mariée est nue dans tous les sens du mot. Elle-même dénoue son vêtement qui tombe à ses pieds et s’arrondit autour du monde. Elle échappe à tout contour, récuse toute représentation. Sur le Grand Verre on ne voit d’elle qu’un hiéroglyphe difficile à déchiffrer tant qu’on n’y reconnaît pas la chrysalide déchiquetée d’une reine des abeilles que le vol nuptial a évaporée dans les nuages.

Cette reine est vivante. Son pouls bat. De beaux temps en tempêtes elle s’épanouit en une voie lactée chair. Et la chair se fait verbe. Des lettres emportées par le vent portent aux célibataires ordres et autorisations. Et oui! dans le Grand Verre, c’est la feme qui dicte la loi. Comment fait-elle descendre jusqu’à terre son bon vouloir? Grâce à un deus ex machina qui noue le lien entre le haut et le bas. Duchamp l’a personnifié par un guéridon. Le dieu frappe à la porte sous les haillons du vagabond. La déesse s’habille en putain et en fait croustiller à lèvres chaudes le vocabulaire. Ce dernier invité à la noce se nomme : Le Soigneur de gravité. Médecin dissipé dans la transparence non seulement il s’active pour que la pesante heure soit délivrée de la pesanteur mais il donne à qui sait l’entendre son remède: guéris donc! Et si tu es gai, ris donc! Guérir la gravité, c’est rire. Voilà, résumé à grandes enjambées, le conte de fée des temps modernes qui raconte comment le voyage de gaz d’éclairage se termine dans l’éblouissement. Comment l’envolée de la Mariée la conduit à l’épanouissement. Avec pour moteur, la jouissance.

Au cœur de ces trois mots, à condition de n’avoir pas perdu l’innocence de chercher l’or dans l’oreille, il y a le mot de la fin: OUI. Le narrateur retraverse les ombres portées, pousse la porte, et sort. C’est à dire qu’il ENTRE dans le Grand Verre. Dans le rectangle noir où DANSE le Soigneur de gravité, à hauteur de l’horizon, un bras nu de femme brandit un bec Auer. Allumé.

The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even…more

This is an animation based on the artwork created by Marcel Duchamp titled The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. I have recreated it as a 3D model and animated its motion loosely-based on his “book” the Green Box, which explained how the piece “works.” Furthermore, I have explained why and how the glass came to be cracked.

This animation was created using 3D StudioMAX and Sound Forge and Acid Music.

Entire Length: 2:00 minutes

Comments by Francis M. Naumann:

In a masterful and amusing animation, Dennis Summers has made one of the key monuments of twentieth-century art — Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (better known by its abbreviated title: the Large Glass) — come alive. In a careful analysis of Duchamp’s notes for this elaborate mechanical construction, it is clear that he designed every detail to “function,” that is so that each part would move in tandem and sequentially, like an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine. Summer’s animation makes the heretofore only imagined visible, as we watch the desires of nine sexually-aroused Bachelors progress through a hazardous and circuitous route as they strive to attain union with their ever elusive and unattainable Bride.

[VHS tapes are available by contacting dennis@quantumdanceworks.com]

Voyage through the Large Glass: With the Very First Computer Animation of the Large Glass

click to enlarge

Brochure for Jean Suquet,
Voyage through the Large
Glass,Centre Georges
Pompidou, 24 October,
1995-12 February, 1996

A note on the translation:
Some French words from the original have been included in this translation to show the wordplay that takes place in Jean Suquet’s text which cannot be translated exactly into English. Also, in the original, several words were italicized for emphasis. Those words have been underlined in the translation since the added French has been set off in italics, as is customary. These minor adjustments have been made in order for the reader to appreciate as much of the intentioned subtlety as possible.

Click images for Jean Suquet’s animation of the Large Glass

A slide of the Large Glass is projected onto the white wall of a room in a garret. On the right, a door, it’s obvious. Closed. The narrator enters into the projection cone and, having become prey to the cast shadows he transfuses his breath into them. Duchamp left three-fourths of the Large Glass transparent so that in the filigree of the extravagant machinery parading in the foreground we could read a poem. Without words [mots], with no motor [moteur].

The initial lighting crackles with the title: The Bride stripped bare by her bachelors, even. In the sky, the Bride. On the ground, the bachelors. Between them, the horizon line. This line, Duchamp says, is the Bride’s clothing. Poor bachelors dreaming of stripping her bare! They carry before them in their own gaze the veil they can’t wait to unfasten. The horizon line is an imaginary boundary that recedes as one moves towards it. An inevitable escape from which the bachelors will have to disenchant themselves. Let’s join the nine red fellows who look like our brothers. Dressed in tight uniforms, nailed to the ground by their lead soles, they’re nevertheless in a flutter by a leak of illuminating gas, which in 1912 was the blood of the city lights. This spirit rushes into a journey through which must pass all states of matter. Solidified and liquefied into a puddle, it wanders around until some weight, falling down from who knows where, makes it splash out. It explodes. It declares its flame. It is dazzled by its own light that is projected into the sky by a playful configuration of mirrors. In the sky, the Bride is nude in every sense of the word. She unfastens her clothing, which falls to her feet and covers the world around. She escapes all outline, denies all representation. On the Large Glass we can only make out a hieroglyph too difficult to decode until we recognize, within it, the jagged chrysalis of a queen bee that the nuptial flight has dissolved into the clouds.
This queen is alive. Her pulse beats. From fair weather to tempests, she blossoms into a milky way flesh color. And the flesh is made word. Some letters, carried by the wind, bring orders and authorizations to the bachelors. Oh yes! In the Large Glass, the woman dictates law. How does she have her will come down to the ground? Thanks to a deus ex machina which links the top and the bottom. Duchamp personified it with a pedestal table. The god knocks at the door dressed up like a vagabond. The goddess dresses up like a whore and cracks the vocabulary with her hot lips. This last guest to the wedding is announced: the Tender of Gravity. A doctor, undisciplined in the transparency, not only takes action so that the weighty time [le pesante heure] gets rid of gravity [la pesanteur], but he also gives his remedy to anyone who cares to hear it: so heal! [guéris donc!] And if you’re cheerful, then laugh! [Et si tu es gai, ris donc!] To heal gravity is to laugh. And so, resumed in long strides, is the fairy tale of modern times, which tells us how the journey of the illuminating gas ends in l’éblouissement [the dazzling]. How the flight of the Bride drives it towards l’épanouissement [the blossoming]. Powered by la jouissance [sensual pleasure].

At the heart of these three words, if one hasn’t lost the innocence of looking for “or” [gold] in “oreille” [ear], here is the word at the end: OUI [YES]. The narrator walks back through the cast shadows, pushes the door, leaves. In other words, he ENTERS the Large Glass. In the black rectangle where the Tender of Gravity DANCES, at the height of the horizon, a naked female arm brandishes a gaslamp. Lit up.

From Blues to Haikus: An interview with Charles Henri Ford

click to enlarge

Charles Henri Ford in
his New York apartment,
age 87 (2 May 2000)

In addition to writing surrealist literature, being a photographer and creating art objects, Charles Henri Ford (b. 1913 in Mississippi) edited such avant-garde magazines as Blues and View. As Alan Jones wrote in Arts Magazine, “Ford opened the pages of his ‘newspaper for poets’ to the swarm of European surrealists (Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy, André Breton, Marcel Duchamp) and the returning native sons and daughters all fleeing Europe for New York. Bridging the worlds of literature and art, View rapidly grew into an art magazine the likes of which the United States had never seen.”

Charles Henri Ford, together with Parker Tyler, authored the omnisexual novel The Young and the Evil, published in Paris in 1933 and banned in the United States and England for fifty years. His ambitions as a writer and editor brought him in contact with authors like William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Jean Cocteau and especially Djuna Barnes, for whom he typed up Nightwood in Morocco while visiting Paul and Jane Bowles. Ford became an early supporter of Pop Art and a crucial influence on Andy Warhol and his circle. Active as ever, he has recently shown his poster designs at the Ubu Gallery, New York and is preparing a publication of his latest collection of haikus.

On May 2, 2000, we met with a lively Ford, and his close friend, performance artist Penny Arcade, in Ford’s New York apartment to discuss, among other topics, a 1945 issue of View magazine devoted to Marcel Duchamp, which contained Ford’s poem about the artist, “Flag of Ecstasy.” We brought our copies of View to ask him about several curiosities.

click to enlarge
1922 – STIEGLITZ – 1972

Marcel Duchamp At
The Age Of 35

Marcel Duchamp At The
Age Of 85

View, Marcel Duchamp Number, vol. 5, no. 1 (March 1945), p. 54 (detail)
© 2000 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS/N.Y., ADAGP/Paris

Rhonda Roland Shearer: Do you know who took the photograph Duchamp at the Age of 85 that was published in the back of View’s Duchamp issue of March 1945?

Charles Henri Ford: You see that was an oversight, one never knew. The one to its left, showing Duchamp in 1922 is Stieglitz, isn’t it?

R.S. Yes that’s what it says but it doesn’t say who took the other one.

C.H.F. That’s right.

R.S. Some people said that this was a double, somebody that looked like Duchamp. But I think it’s Duchamp, and you know it is.

C.H.F. Oh yeah, of course it is. Otherwise it wouldn’t be, it wouldn’t …

R.S. …mean anything?

C.H.F. … it wouldn’t work. Duchamp was heavily made up to look old.

R.S. But you don’t remember who took the photograph?

C.H.F. Maybe I never even knew.

click to enlarge

Charles Henri Ford, “Flag of Ecstasy,”
published in:View, vol. 5,
no. 1 (March 1945), p. 4
© 2000 Succession Marcel Duchamp,
ARS/N.Y., ADAGP/Paris

R.S. Page four of View magazine reproduces your poem “Flag of Ecstasy,” an homage to Duchamp, superimposed on a detail of Man Ray’s “Dust Breeding”, showing the lower part of the Large Glass. How did this come about, “Dust Breeding” with your poem on it?

C.H.F. Well, it’s something that the printer superimposed.

R.S. Did you pick it out for your poem or did Parker Tyler who did the typography of your Poets for Painters, published in the same year and also reproducing “Flag of Ecstasy”?

C.H.F. I don’t remember … so much water under the bridge, I can’t remember.

R.S. It’s a fabulous poem.

Thomas Girst: Your poem on Duchamp is a great one.

C.H.F. You like it?

T.G. Yes, I do.

R.S. Could you read it for us? Do you read your poetry still?

Click here for video (QT 3.5MB)

Charles Henri Ford reading
“Flag of Ecstasy”

C.H.F. Why, yes.

Over the towers of autoerotic honey
Over the dungeons of homicidal drives

Over the pleasure of invading sleep
Over the sorrows of invading a woman

Over the voix celeste
Over vomito negro

Over the unendurable sensation of madness
Over the insatiable sense of sin

Over the spirit of uprisings
Over the bodies of tragediennes

Over tarantism: “melancholy stupor and an uncontrollable
desire to dance” Over all

Over ambivalent virginity
Over unfathomable succubi

Over the tormentors of Negresses
Over openhearted sans-culottes

click to enlarge

Charles Henri Ford,Poems for Painters,
New York: View Editions, 1945 (cover)

Over a stactometer for the tears of France
Over unmanageable hermaphrodites

Over the rattlesnake sexlessness of art-lovers
Over the shithouse enigmas of art-haters

Over the son’s lascivious serum
Over the sewage of the moon

Over the saints of debauchery
Over criminals made of gold

Over the princes of delirium
Over the paupers of peace

Over signs foretelling the end of the world
Over signs foretelling the beginning of a world

Like one of those tender strips of flesh
On either side of the vertebral column

Marcel, wave!

Penny Arcade: Marvelous.

R.S. Great, wonderful, beautiful. Thank you

C.H.F. I’m out of practice, I don’t read. People ask me
to read and I don’t usually read. But you win.

click to enlarge

Frederick J. Kiesler and Marcel Duchamp,
center fold-out tryptich for View,
vol. 5, no. 1 (March 1945)
© 2000 Succession Marcel Duchamp,
ARS/N.Y., ADAGP/Paris

R.S. I thank you, we love your work. Tell us about the Frederick J. Kiesler fold out in View’s Duchamp number. You said that was very expensive to do. It’s beautiful. Do you like it?

C.H.F. Yes, sure. It cost a lot of money. I think it broke our budget.

R.S. So what do you remember in terms of Duchamp and Kiesler doing this? Were they pushing you to, saying it had to be done?

C.H.F. No, they just turned it in.

R.S. Yup, and you just liked it and had to do it.

C.H.F. Yeah, I thought that I would risk all.

R.S. Yeah, that’s what art is about, isn’t it? Who is Peter Lindamood that wrote the “I Cover the Cover.” as an introduction to the View magazine of March 1945? Is that just a pseudonym?

C.H.F. No. Peter Lindamood was from Mississippi, he was a corporal in the military and so on.

P.A. Was he a friend of yours from Mississippi?

C.H.F. Yes he was, yes. He edited a special Italian number, didn’t he?

P.A. I don’t know.

click to enlarge

Marcel Duchamp,front cover
for View magazine,
vol. 5, no. 1 (March 1945),
© 2000 Succession Marcel
Duchamp, ARS/N.Y., ADAGP/Paris

Marcel Duchamp,back cover
for View magazine,
vol. 5, no. 1 (March 1945),
© 2000 Succession Marcel Duchamp,
ARS/N.Y., ADAGP/Paris

R.S. And so he apparently worked very hard on this issue, the Duchamp issue, it says. What this talks about is that he heard that Duchamp went through a lot of trouble to make this special effect for the cover and apparently there’s all sorts of levels of trick photography in making this cover. Do you recall?

C.H.F. No.

R.S. But it’s beautiful.

C.H.F. Yes it is.

click to enlarge

Marcel Duchamp,
cover for André Breton’s
Young Cherry Trees Secured
Against Hares, New York, 1946,
© 2000 Succession Marcel
Duchamp, ARS/N.Y., ADAGP/Paris

R.S. Another of Duchamp’s covers for View Editions, “Young Cherry Trees Secured Against Hares,” André Breton’s collected poems, shows the Surrealist’s face through a cut-out, thus posing as the Statue of Liberty. Did you ask Duchamp to make this cover?

C.H.F. Yes. Duchamp always liked to be surprising and Breton of course was noted for not cherishing homosexuals. That’s why André Breton was put in drag.

T.G. Breton supposedly liked the cover.

C.H.F. He liked any attention that was paid to him. I mean nobody was publishing his poetry in America.

T.G. That was the only translated volume of poetry resulting from his time in New York.

click to enlarge

Charles Henri Ford
flipping through his current
sketchbook (2 May 2000)

C.H.F. And then he came out with another edition too and they didn’t use his cover somehow. But its all water under the bridge…what I’ve been doing for the past few years is taking up where Matisse left off, doing cut outs and things but it was limited to the female sex so I’ve been making up for his neglect. I’ll show you an example.

R.S. Originally you’re from Mississippi?

C.H.F. Born in Mississippi, raised in Tennessee, if you don’t like my peaches, don’t you shake my tree.

T.G. From Columbus, Mississippi you started Blues in 1929, the short-lived poetry magazine which Gertrude Stein once praised as “the youngest and freshest of all the little magazines which have died to make verse free.” You were only 16 when its first issue came out.

C.H.F. Now I’m 87, about the same as Balthus and Cartier-Bresson.

T.G. And Balthus is still doing as well as you are.

P.A. Did you know Balthus?

C.H.F. I met him, once.

T.G. He’s very reclusive, Balthus. He lives in a tiny village in Switzerland, Rossinière, in a little chateau, with a beautiful wife maybe 40 years his minor.

P.A. Fascinating … we should send a message to Balthus, “Charles Henri Ford says ‘Hi.’ Still alive…”

T.G. “…we’re still standing, alive and kicking.”

R.S. Did you know the librarian at the Morgan library,
her name was Belle Greene? Did you know her?

C.H.F. No.

R.S. She was the woman that put the library together for Morgan. And she knew a lot of the artists, she posed nude for a lot of the artists and actually wrote an article in 291 and was hanging out with Stieglitz. I don’t know if you ran into her.

C.H.F. No. If she ran into me, I didn’t feel it. (An air of flirtation ensues.) Penny looks always surprised when she’s not at all surprised.

P.A. Not at all surprised. It’s your latent bisexuality.

C.H.F. Not only latent, it was executed.

R.S. Really?

P.A. Oh, yes. You can join the ranks of women like Frida Kahlo.

R.S. So does this mean that I have a chance?

C.H.F. Huh?

P.A. He doesn’t want to understand you.

R.S. He pretends he doesn’t. Does this mean I have a chance?

C.H.F. Oh. Yeah.

T.G.Your entry for the Dictionary of Literary Biography mentions your submission of a poetic prose piece to Readies for Bob Brown’s Machine. Your contribution of 1931 was intended for a Reading Machine that allowed readers to speed the words past their eyes via reels and a crank. The streamlined sentences should be as far away from conventional books as sound motion pictures were from the stage. You simply eliminated all punctuation and capital letters.

C.H.F. e.e. cummings did that too

P.A. One of the things that’s unusual about Charles is that he actually acknowledges other artists. Once I said to Charles, “One of the things that I really love about you is that you promote other artists.” And you said, “I don’t promote other artists,” and I said, “But you published other writers, you promoted other writers,” and you said, “I wasn’t promoting other artists, I was exercising my taste.”

click to enlarge

Charles Henri Ford
reading a haiku

T.G. And you still write poetry, right? You write haikus.

C.H.F. Only haiku… I have a thousand page book I think of haiku and a friend of mine is going to make a typescript for that book.

T.G. Do you write them daily, haikus?

C.H.F. Yeah, I guess so, but I don’t make a point of it. If they come to me, I have to write them down quick, otherwise they fly out of my head.

R.S. Would you read a couple?

C.H.F. Good with the bad
Charles is ready when you are
Good with the bad, what does that mean?

Unbelievable! Somebody’s going to type up all of those for a big book.

Let the other people be homosexual,
As for him,
He’s not that queer

R.S. How about this one?

C.H.F. To my unexpected
Nude niece: “Get out of here,
You look like a bum!”

T.G. In 1924 Duchamp published something more longingly on the themes of nieces: “My knees are cold because my niece is cold.”

C.H.F. Oh yeah.

T.G. I actually have another question about him for you.

C.H.F. Well, let’s see if I know the answer.

T.G. In recent years, Duchamp scholars like Amelia Jones and Jerold Seigel have discussed Duchamp’s possible bi- or latent homosexuality, a claim that seems solely supported by Duchamp in drag as Rrose Sélavy and other androgynous themes running through his oeuvre. Bisexual? Marcel?

T.G. Mm-hm.

C.H.F. Yeah, he’s really a real actor.

Picture Gallery: Charles Henri Ford

click images to enlarge

Charles Henri Ford,
“Irving Rosenthal as l’Epoux Abandonné, Poem Poster Series, 1964/65 courtesy of Ubu Gallery,
New York
Charles Henri Ford,
“Fallen Womane”, Poem Poster Series, 1964/65 courtesy of Ubu Gallery,

New York
Charles Henri Ford,
“Jane as Jane” (Violet/Blue), Poem Poster Series, 1964/65 courtesy of Ubu Gallery,
New York
Charles Henri Ford,
“One of the World’s Giant Queens,”, Poem Poster Series, 1964/65 courtesy of Ubu Gallery,
New York

Four more haikus by Charles Henri Ford

Weeping and wailing
And grinding of teeth … you don’t
Have to go below

I don’t know if I’ve
Settled down or not but I’m
Not moving for now

You haven’t changed she
Said I thought I looked a
Little better I said

If it’s worth reading
Once it’s worth reading twice so
You know where to start

We are grateful to Penny Arcade and Indra Tamang, Ford’s longtime personal assistant and frequent collaborator, for making this interview possible. For more information on View, we recommend Charles Henri Ford (ed.), View: Parade of the Avant-Garde, 1940-1947 (with a preface by Paul Bowles), New York: Thunder Mouth, 1991

The interview was conducted at Charles Henri Ford’s New York apartment on May 2, 2000. It is preserved in part as a digital videotape (filmed by Martin Samsel) and available in full on audiocassette. © ASRL, 2000.

Shooting Bullets at the Barn

click to enlarge

Left subtitle
Marcel Duchamp, Cover for the First
Papers of Surrealism, New York, 1942 (verso)
© 2000 Succession Marcel Duchamp ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris
Right subtitle
Marcel Duchamp, Cover for the First Papers
of Surrealism, New York, 1942 (recto)
© 2000 Succession Marcel Duchamp ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris

click to enlarge

Kurt Selingmann’s farmhouse
in Sugar Loaf, NY, 26 April 2000

In 1942 Marcel Duchamp is said to have fired five shots at the base of artist-friend Kurt Seligmann’s barn in Sugar Loaf, New York. Shortly thereafter, for the 1942 New York exhibition, First Papers of Surrealism, organized by the exiled Surrealist leader André Breton, the cover of the catalogue was perforated where Duchamp’s bullets hit the nineteenth century stone wall. Other holes on the cover look similar but remain without cut-through circles.

click to enlarge

Marcel Duchamp,The Bride
Stripped Bare by her Bachelors,
Even, (a typographic
version by Richard Hamilton,
Percy Lund, Humphries: London, 1960),
n.p.

It has been suggested that by firing the bullets, Duchamp was referring to the Nine Shots of the Bachelors in the Bride’s Domain of his Large Glass, whose location,according to one of his notes (written between 1911-15) published in the Green Box (1934), was to be achieved by randomly firing matches dipped in fresh paint from a toy cannon. ⁽¹⁾

On close examination almost sixty years later, the exact location of the barn’s detail depicted on the cover of First Papers of Surrealism can no longer be made out on the surface of the crumbling and weather-beaten wall. As for the cheese on the back of the cover, the debate still continues. It is definitely Swiss cheese ⁽²⁾, from Seligmann’s native country, but is it a refined “gruyère” as Francis M. Naumann and Arturo Schwarz maintain or just “emmentaler,” as Stephan E. Hauser ⁽³⁾claims? One final incidental: According to Charles Shaughnessy, a longtime family friend and neighbor, the .22 rifle Duchamp used is considered the same one that killed Seligmann twenty years later.

click image for video (0.8 MB)

close-up video of
Kurt Seligmann’s barn in
Sugar Loaf, NY, 26 April 2000
video of Kurt Seligmann’s
farmhouse and barn in Sugar
Loaf, NY, 26 April 2000

On Wednesday, April 26th, 2000, Bonnie Garner,Lester Lockwood and the author drove to the Seligmann homestead, 26 Oak Drive, Sugar Loaf, New York (Telephone: 914-469-3849), to examine the barn. We’d like to thank Ms. Patricia Gilchrest, Executive Director of the Orange County Citizens Foundation, and Mr. Charles “Chuck” Shaughnessy for their hospitality. We’d also like to thank Stephan E. Hauser for establishing the contact.

Notes :

1. Francis M. Naumann. The Art of Making Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. (Ghent, Amsterdam: Ludion Press, 1999), pp. 151. (See also: pp. 150, 153.)

2. Martica Sawin. Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York School. (Cambridge: MIT, 1995), pp. 224-226.

3. Stephan E. Hauser. Kurt Seligmann (1900-1962): Leben und Werk.(Basel: Schwabe, 1997), pp. 221-222.

An Open Letter to Donald Kuspit

All quotations in the following letter were taken from a taped recording of the “Jewis Holocaust in Art” session (24 February 2000; 9:30 AM – Noon) at the 88th Annual Conference of the College Art Association held at the Hilton Hotel in New York City, 23 – 26 February 2000. The recording was made by the CAA.

Dear Donald:

In regard to an exchange of words we had at the College Art Association Conference 2000 during the panel “Jewish Holocaust in Art” (February 24, 2000), I would like to add the following.

click to enlarge

Rudolf Herz, Zugzwang,
1995 (Room installation at the
Kunstverein Ruhr e.V.,
Essen, Germany)
© photo:
Werner J. Hannappel

You were on the dais with several co-presenters in easy reach of a microphone and I was sitting in the audience attempting to voice my puzzlement on a specific work of art being presented by Norman Kleeblatt of the Jewish Museum. The work in question was a wall-like installation by the contemporary German artist and photo-historian Rudolf Herz, depicting reproductions of photographs of Marcel Duchamp and Adolf Hitler. The work was completed in the late 1980s and, according to Kleeblatt, the images were “probing [a] new aesthetic discourse on Nazi representation.” The work’s raison d’être was the apparent discovery that photographer Heinrich Hoffmann photographed Duchamp when he was in Munich in 1912, and later became Hitler’s official photographer. Both subjects appear to be dressed in a dark coat and tie.

I was puzzled about the work and asked for clarification. In my short discourse I said I thought that the juxtaposition of Duchamp with Hitler was bizarre, and I suggested (tongue in cheek) that it might have been appropriate to also include a photograph of Lee Miller since Man Ray (who had become the (un)official photographer of Duchamp) also photographed Miller. Plus, Lee Miller, who reportedly bathed in Hitler’s tub, was one of the subjects of a presentation by Carol Zemel of the State University of New York, Buffalo. In her discussion of the so-called liberation photographs by Margaret Bourke-White and Miller, Zemel suggested that the two women’s photographs tended to “anesthetize and aestheticize” the Holocaust. I could not agree more and I indeed feel that Herz’s Zugzwang “anesthetizes and aestheticizes” Hitler.

Kleeblatt was confused by my question — indeed he had a right to be — but you, Donald, asked for the microphone and said, “I don’t think it’s so bizarre at all. Duchamp was a terrorist, wasn’t he? [Microphone disturbances] I just wanted to say that I don’t think it’s so bizarre at all. Duchamp was a terrorist and so was Hitler, and Duchamp was a fetish object, as Hitler is. And a lot of art historians, there are a whole group of art historians who click their intellectual heels and make the Duchamp salute these days. They are both fairly disruptive figures. I think Duchamp was an extremely disruptive influence on art, despite the rationalization of it as, quote,conceptual and so forth. So I think it is a wonderful and actually rather insightful connection to put Hitler and Duchamp together.”

click to enlarge

Photograph of Marcel
Duchamp by Hans Hoffmann,
Munich, 1912

At this point I said,”The fact that Duchamp skipped out of France in World War I might make him a draft-dodger or a coward … but to call … a coward a terrorist is ridiculous.” Your response was: “Cowards can be terrorists — the art world is a place were artists can be terrorists.” This drew some laughter from the audience as I protested and gestured trying to show you that there was no proportion to your statement.

The discussion moved on to other statements and questions but toward the end of the session you took hold of the microphone again and said, “Incidentally, I’d like to say one last thing to defend myself about what looks like mockery —artists as cowards — you know, the art world as cowards. There is a famous incident … there was a Dadaist happening in Germany and … I believe there was one of the events where one of the Dadaists went and took all the money and invited people to a lecture and didn’t give the lecture — took the money and made some mockery. They were brought into court — this is documented, okay. They were brought into court — some famous Dadaist,and they were trembling, trembling — brought into court and the judge said to them, ‘How do you explain the fact that you stole all the people’s money?’ Then he looked at them trembling and said, ‘Oh, you’re artists,you were artists. Oh, okay. Case dismissed.'”

If the case existed (neither I nor those I’ve consulted have found any evidence of it), its German judge was the Weimar equivalent of the New York Supreme Court Judge “turn ‘em loose Bruce” Wright of the 1970s. And who was the “famous” Dada artist or artists? The Jew Tristan Tzara, the Communist George Grosz or the diminutive Helmut Herzfelde, a.k.a. John Heartfield — who in utter disgust for the Kaiser’s militarism anglicized his name after WWI and who depicted the Nazis, Hitler, Göhring, et al, in unflattering situations?cowards, you say. Yes, I suppose in the end they were cowards because they did choose to flee (an instinct we share with other species when they or we feel threatened).

I suppose that cowards can be terrorists, but we more often associate terrorists with martyrs.Can one call Hitler a terrorist? I believe that one can call Hitler any bad name possible. I prefer mass-genocidal murderer, myself. Does Duchamp fit those descriptions? No!

As for the “fetish object” association you assigned to both Duchamp and Hitler, were you referring to Rrose Sélavy of the Man Ray photographs or Duchamp portraying the fig-leafed Adam on stage, his playing chess with a nude woman, or smoking a cigar? Dare I say that skinheads surround themselves with Nazi images, and not with those of Duchamp? Were you being cynical when you said that “they are both fairly disruptive figures”? But lastly, I can’t help but put together rather horrible images and thoughts about Nazis when in two short sentences you use “fetish,” “clicking … heels” and “salute” to describe Duchampian art historians. Who would that include? Arturo Schwarz? Francis Naumann? Rosalind Krauss? Calvin Tomkins? Rhonda Shearer? Arthur Danto? Who? Wha?

Sincerely,

Elliott Barowitz

A Life in Pictures Revisited

Marcel Duchamp: A Life in Picturesby Jennifer Gough-Cooper & Jacques Caumont,Translated by Antony Melville,Illustrations by André Raffray,Atlas Press, 1999. (UK 5.99 USA $8.95) 26 pages

See Marcel. See Marcel pun. See Marcel’s toys: Why Not Sneeze Rose Sélavy is Lego. The Box-in-a-Valise is a Matchbox dinky car suitcase. Given is a Bar bie StrippedBare By Her Kens, Even. I was hoping that Jennifer Gough-Cooper and Jacques Caumont’s new kid-focused biography, Marcel Duchamp: A Life in Pictures, would really exploit the silly, outrageous possibilities of M.D.’s work. Just as the Box-in-a-Valise enchantingly opens, then unfolds and even slides into place, I was looking for a little bit of innovation here: pop-up features, scratch-n-sniff illustrations, interactive text, maybe even one or two pull-out posters. But this compact biography, the first English translation of the 1977 work La Vie illustrée de Marcel Duchamp, though indeed elegant and informative, seems more geared for the art world set than for the sandbox crowd. It makes Duchamp, and his work, appear quite adult-serious, even.

What the biography does well is cover eighty-one years of a fairly event-filled life. In less than thirty, compact pages we follow M.D. from his early days in Blainville, to his rebuff at the hands of the jury of the Salon des Indépendants, to his revelatory viewing of Roussel’s Impressions d’Afrique and finally to his lionization in New York. The writing, though occasionally a touch technical, is never condescending: “Far from being oppressed by the event he found that fate had arranged things quite well, and the symmetry of the cracks looked rather intentional; instead of being disfigured the work was actually embellished.” And the book’s general shape may appeal to some young readers as it physically resembles the classic Golden nursery book: small and colorful with glossy pages and a hardcover. André Raffray’s vivid illustrations, however, so replete with Duchampian allusions (note the brides, bachelors and fresh widows hinted at in his chocolate grinder picture) seem, again, more adult than kiddy-ready.

The idea of a Duchamp-bio for children is very cool and it may be just the infinitely amusing potential of such an idea that renders A Life in Pictures merely satisfactory. I imagine – if only for Raffray’s intriguing pictures – that most Duchampions will want to check out this little volume but I can’t see too many others, especially the juniors, squealing about either the text or the art. So for now, I suppose, it’s back to the Playstations, the Furbys, and the Easy Bake ovens.See Marcel. See him frown.

Leonardo’s Optics Through the Eyes of Duchamp: A Note on the Small Glass

click to enlarge

Marcel Duchamp,To Be
Looked at (from the Other Side
of the Glass) with One Eye,
Close to, for Almost an Hour, 1918
© 2000 Succession Marcel
Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris

The following example of Marcel Duchamp’s overlooked encounter with the mind of Leonardo da Vinci is excerpted from a longer essay. The edition of Leonardo’s Treatise on Painting referred to is Josephin Peladan’s 1910 French translation Leonard de Vinci, Traite de la Peinture. This publication aroused gr eat interest among the Duchamp brothers and their Cubist friends at Puteaux.

To Be Looked At, With One Eye, Close To, For Almost An Hour (in French: A regarder d’un oeil, de près, pendant presqu’une heure) is a cruel set of commands. Nobody would want to look at anything following this prescription. Duchamp wrote the phrase in small capital letters across the face of a glass painting,
and insisted that his directive, issued in the infinitive, serve as its title. But the owner of this work, Katherine Dreier, hated the title, and referred to it instead as Disturbed Balance.

Duchamp, however, was being uncharacteristically descriptive with To Be Looked At… because the image on glass is based upon optics and experiments with the functioning of the eyes. It follows Leonardo da Vinci’s study of vision.In fact, the idea, the image and the phrase itself all come from this short illustrated passage in the Treatise on Painting ⁽¹⁾:

Objects in relief, viewed close up with one eye [vues de près avec un seul oeil], seem like a perfect painting. If the eyes A and B look at Point C, C will appear at

click images to enlarge

D F. But if you look at it with one eye, M, it will seem to be at G.Painting only presents this second form of vision.

click to enlarge

Marcel Duchamp, Note, 1919
© 1993 Pontus Holten, ed.
Marcel Duchamp: Work and Life,
The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.

Paintings are flat surfaces.Spacial illusions in paintings are derived from monocular, not binocular,vision. Leonardo was fascinated by the transformation from physiological optics to the artifice of painting, so he studied the behavior of a pair of human eyes. When an object to be looked at is placed close to the face, the paths of vision of the two eyes cross. Duchamp took Leonardo’s X-shaped diagram of cross-eyed vision, along with the wording of his title, directly from this passage in the Treatise. In a posthumously-published sketch for To Be Looked At… he even used Leonardo’s letters “A” and “B” to identify the eyes, or viewing points, represented by circles at the extremities of the cross. But he then placed the configuration on a receding plane, in perspective, and turned it into a pair of giant scissors, a device soon to appear in The Large Glass. Now the cross-eyed observer, it would seem, could cut his way through the visual field by flexing his eyeballs together and apart to make the scissors work. In the small glass To Be Looked At… most of this peculiar tool lies outside the rectangle of the picture, so only its tips can be seen.

The squat, transparent pyramid hovering above the scissors would appear to transport the setting of this one-act farce for eyeballs to ancient Egypt. But it does not.Instead we are right back in the arena of the optics of Leonardo, who wrote frequently and vehemently about the “pyramid of vision.” According to Leonardo:

The body of the atmosphere is full of infinite pyramids composed of radiating straight lines (or rays of light), which are produced from the bodies of light and shade, existing in the air; and the further they are from the object which produces them the more acute they become, and although in their distribution they intersect and cross they never mingle together, but pass through all the surrounding air, independently diverging, spreading, and diffused.⁽²⁾
If you look into a mirror and close one eye, you will have formed a visual pyramid pointing at your open eye, whose base is the shape of your face. Leonardo displays remarkable insight into the mechanism of light as it reflects off our surroundings. The receiving human eye always forms the apex of a complex geometric solid, whose base is delineated by the outline of an object in view, and whose sides are formed by the rays of light racing towards the viewpoint from its edges. Leonardo’s use of the word “pyramid,” however, is confusing, because in common usage a pyramid sits on the earth, on a perfectly square base, its axis pointing up to the sky. Duchamp’s Egyptian pyramid in To Be Looked At… is a deliberate and mocking distortion of Leonardo’s idea as it occurs, in the Treatise on Painting, at the center of his theory of optics.

In 1918, from the isolation of Buenos Aires, where he made To Be Looked At…, Duchamp had good reason to poke fun at the visual pyramid. He was probably sick to death of it. His brother, the painter Jacques Villon, was, in contrast, obsessed. Villon believed that Leonardo’s pyramid could provide the unifying theory in his enterprise to make Cubism more than just a passing fad, to transform it into an enduring, classical art form. In 1915, the last time the two were able to meet until after the Great War, Villon would talk of nothing else. All this had started in 1911, when the brothers and their Cubist friends became fascinated by Leonardo’s optical formulations: “Every body in light and shade fills the surrounding air with infinite images of itself; and these, by infinite pyramids diffused in the air, represent the body throughout space and on every side.”⁽³⁾

Was Leonardo da Vinci a Cubist himself? He was, it is true, presenting a vision of the space around objects filled with latent images. The eye at any given location could only perceive one image at a time. Visual pyramids “intersect and cross [but] they never mingle together…” But could a painter, a Cubist painter, overcome the laws of light and vision? Could his imagination and intuition capture these half-formed, transparent images, as evoked by Leonardo, before they are condensed into a point, as they overlap, interpenetrate, and jostle for predominance? Jacques Villon struggled to embed this concept of latent visual pyramids into his paintings for the rest of his life.

Marcel Duchamp discussed these ideas with his brother in the early days of Cubism. Then he chose a different path, a directly-perceptual method of creating transparency and overlapping planes in the visual field. He preferred the method that children use. He crossed his eyes.

click to enlarge

Marcel Duchamp,Portrait of
Chess Players, December 1911
© 2000 Succession Marcel
Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris

Only one painting, supported by a group of studies, was produced using the cross-eyed method: the Portrait of Chess Players.

click to enlarge

Marcel Duchamp,Portrait
of Chess Players, December 1911
© 2000 Succession Marcel
Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris

Marcel Duchamp,For a
Game of Chess, October 1911
© 2000 Succession Marcel
Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris

Duchamp asked his two brothers, Jacques and the sculptor Raymond Duchamp-Villon, to sit in front of a chess table, in the midst of a game, and face each other nose-to-nose. Marcel then stationed himself within a foot of his motif, and, in an experiment with scissored configurations of his binocular vision, observed his brothers’
profiles merging and multiplying, engulfing the armies of chessmen behind them. Next, to sort things out, he studied Jacques, on his right, “with one eye, close to, for nearly an hour.” He followed this procedure with Raymond, this time with his left eye, all the while intending the physical proximity of the three artist-brothers (one behind and two in front of the canvas), clustered around their favorite game, to reflect their intellectual and emotional closeness. It is a rare glimpse into a private world.

Duchamp left a clear record of the steps leading up to his finished painting. Five preparatory drawings survive. One is in the format of a triptych, with a central square drawing flanked by two smaller contiguous squares. At first glance it looks as if all three squares are filled with Cubist studies of a man’s head. A closer look reveals Raymond’s, then Jacques’s, physiognomies,delineated separately on either side, on the flanking panels. These two monocular visions are repeated, combined and merged in the central panel, which became the prototype for the final painting, the Portrait of Chess Players. Duchamp had put Leonardo’s visual scissors, as depicted a few years later in the small glass painting of 1918, into practice, in the service of Cubism. He never repeated this experiment.

Notes

1. Josephin Peladan, translator and editor, Leonard de Vinci, Traite de la Peinture (Paris: Librairie Delagrave, 1910), 113. English translations in A. Phillip McMahon, translator, Treatise on Painting by Leonardo da Vinci (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956), 177, and Edward
MacCurdy, translator and editor, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (New York: George Braziller, 1954), 241.

2. Peladan, Leonardo de Vinci, 89. English translation in Jean Paul Richter, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, Volume I (New York: Dover Publications, 1970), 39.

3. Richter, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, Volume I, 39.

Duchamp as Trickster

click to enlarge

Photograph of Duchamp
sitting in front of a chess set
designed by Max Ernst, 1968 © 2000
Succession Marcel Duchamp ARS,
N.Y./ADAGP, Paris.

click to enlarge

The white square needs
to be in the lower right-hand
corner. Seen in James Eade,
Chess for Dummies, 1996, p. 11

Cover for the “Chess for
Dummies,” by James Eade,
IDG Books Worldwide, Inc., 1996

In the accompanying photograph of Duchamp sitting in front of a Max Ernst designed chess set, the master chess player Duchamp has the board set up with a dark square in the lower right corner! (The proper setup is to always have a light square in that corner.) Following the theme of the articles in the first issue of this journal, Duchamp seems to always both 1) deceive, yet 2) leave clues of his deception. (Of course, a deception a without a clue would be hard to uncover.)

As a personal note, most of my previous scholarly work has been on Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mathematics. I have just begun an investigation of the confluences between Duchamp’s readymades and Wittgenstein’s conception of ordinary language. For the moment, I have a title — “Still Life with Wittgenstein and Duchamp” — and some hints. Consider the following sample from remark 129 of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations:

“The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something — because it is always before one’s eyes.)[…] we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful.”

Chess should play an illuminating and complicat
ing role, as in this passage from Wittgenstein’s Blue Book (p. 65): “I want to play chess, and a man gives the white king a paper crown, leaving the use of the pieces unaltered, but telling me that the crown has a meaning to him in the game, which he can’t express by rules. I say: ‘as long as it doesn’t alter the use of the piece, it hasn’t what I call a meaning’.'”

I hope to report further in a future issue of Tout-Fait. Fellow investigators are welcome to contact me at Steven.B.Gerrard@williams.edu.
[José Antônio Fabiano Mendes Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, informs Tout-Fait’s readers that 39 chess games played by Marcel Duchamp can be retrieved at http://www.chesslab.com/positionsearch.htmlDate range: select Historical archive(1485-1990)].