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Left
Marcel Duchamp,Exterior view of Etant donnés: 1° la
chute d’eau / 2° le gaz d’éclairage(Given: 1. The Waterfall /
2. The Illuminating Gas), 1946-1966 © 2000 Succession Marcel
Duchamp ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris.
Right
Marcel Duchamp, Interior view of Etant donnés: 1° la
chute d’eau / 2° le gaz d’éclairage (Given: 1. The Waterfall /
2. The Illuminating Gas),1946-1966 © 2000 Succession Marcel Duchamp
ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris.

In the spring of 1961,Euripides’s The Women of Troy opened at the Récamier Theater in Paris. The first night was attended by many of the intellectual elite: André Pierye de Mandiargue, Alain Jouffroy, Robbe-Grillet and Octavio Paz; our party was made up of Noma and Bill Copley, Marcel Duchamp and myself. The Women of Troy, being both anti-war and anti-misogynist, has been produced more times than any other Greek play so that Marcel might have seen it before, though he did not say so. The play was given an extravagant production in New York in 1964, so he might have seen it again at the very time he was changing the name of the foundation that was to donate his yet secret work [Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas] to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

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Attributed to the Brygos
Painter Vase,
ca. 480
B.C. – 475 B.C.
© Museé du Louvre

Euripides opens his play with Cassandra, possessed with prophecy, coming on stage with a flaming torch in each hand. One she places in a sconce on the statue of Hymen, God of Marriage, and the other she holds high in her right hand singing the marriage song, prophesying her betrothal to Agamemnon; this despite the fact that even Apollo had respected her virginity.

“Hecabe,”says Hephaestus. “In our weddings you are the torch-bearer; but this torch-bearing is a hideous mockery.”

At dinner after the play the four of us discussed the predicament in which Cassandra had put Apollo. Apollo appeared to her and promised to teach her the art of prophecy if she would lie with him. After accepting his instruction, Cassandra went back on the bargain. A successful teacher communicates the facility of achieving certain significant results which become intuitive once acquired by the student. So it was with Cassandra, and she saw no reason to lose her virginity for something that was already hers. (This is heuristic education and can at times be disconcerting.) Apollo, accepting the fact that what he taught her was irretrievably hers, begged her to give him just one kiss. A sentimental compliance to what seemed to be an innocent reward was her demise. As she gave Apollo his kiss, he spat into her mouth thus ensuring that none would ever believe what she prophesied.What he did in spite was not instruction but a God-given gift.

Not long after this I made a sculpture called The Torch of Cassandra which was bought by Barnet Hodes, one of the directors, along with Marcel Duchamp and Noma and William Copley, of the William and Noma Copley Foundation. Some years later, Hodes told me that because of my sculpture he had investigated the story of Cassandra, so that when Marcel presented the motion to change the name of the foundation to the Cassandra Foundation, he (Hodes) said, he was the only one to know her story.

Bill Copley recounted an incident that happened in his sixty-ninth street apartment in New York.Noma did not, naturally enough, see why the Noma and William Copley Foundation should be changed to the Cassandra Foundation. Marcel was waiting in the living room while Bill was in the bedroom, which was just off the living room, trying to convince Noma to change the name of the Foundation. After quite a time, Bill blew a cloud of white cigarette smoke out the door of the bedroom to let Marcel know that he had been successful.

I see a relation between Marcel Mauss’s “Essai sur le don,” “Étant donnés,” “don de la Fondation Cassandra,” the gift of Cassandra (which Marcel seemed to think was among his gifts as well) and all that potlatch entails. Marcel spent the war in the German-speaking part of Switzerland and had lived in Germany and so was able to add a common Teutonic word to his arsenal of puns, “Gift”: die Gift, gift, das Gift, poison.

(In a telephone conversation, March 1, 2000, Noma Copley would not comment on Mr. Metcalf’s remarks. However she assured us that “his statements are all fine.”)

Un Chapeau

Robert Lebel (5 janvier 1901–28 février 1986), écrivain, expert d’art (à partir de 1935) et expert en tableaux anciens près les tribunaux et les cours d’appels (à partir de 1953), est né et mort à Paris.

C’est à New York, à la galerie d’Alfred Stieglitz, An American Place, en juillet 1936 selon toute vraisemblance, qu’il a rencontré Marcel Duchamp, alors aux États-Unis afin de réparer le Grand Verre.

C’est encore à New York, à l’occasion de la Deuxième Guerre, durant l’exil forcé, qu’il a écrit “L’inventeur du temps gratuit”, vers 1943-1944, “à une époque où je voyais Duchamp presque tous les jours. Le titre Ingénieur du temps perdu date de beaucoup plus tard et je crois que Duchamp s’est inspiré de mon titre plutôt que moi du sien. Je lui avais montré mon texte peu après l’avoir écrit”.^(A) Ce “conte féérique et sacrilège en pleine civilisation du gratte-ciel et du métro aérien”(rabat de la couverture, édition de 1977) sera publié une quinzaine d’années plus tard en revue: Le surréalisme, même, Paris, nº 2, printemps 1957, avec trois photos de l’Elevated, justement ^(B), puis sept années plus tard en livre: La double vue suivi de L’inventeur de temps gratuit, avec un diptyque gravé à l’eau-forte par Alberto Giacometti et un pliage (La pendule de profil, 1964) de Marcel Duchamp, Paris, Le Soleil noir, 1964; ce livre a reçu le prix du Fantastique en 1965.

Enfin, c’est vers 1949 que Robert Lebel a le projet de consacrer un livre — biographie et catalogue — à Marcel Duchamp, livre auquel il travaille de façon élaborée du printemps 1953 à l’automne 1957 et qu’il complète et corrige en 1958, au moment de sa traduction en anglais. Ce livre, qui sera le premier livre, aura été précédé et suivi d’une vingtaine d’articles (sur Duchamp, mais aussi sur Picabia et Duchamp, de Chirico et Duchamp, Breton et Duchamp, Man Ray et Duchamp, etc.) parus à partir de 1949, justement, et qui n’ont pas tous été repris dans l’édition entièrement recomposée de 1985:

• Sur Marcel Duchamp, Paris, Trianon Press, 1959; traduit en anglais par George Heard Hamilton, New York, Grove Press, 1959; traduit en allemand par Serge Stauffer, Cologne, DuMont Schauberg, 1962;

• 2e édition, américaine augmentée, New York, Paragraphic Books, 1967; 2e édition allemande revue et augmentée, Cologne, DuMont Schauberg, 1972;

• Marcel Duchamp, 2e édition française revue et augmentée, bien qu’élaguée de son catalogue, de ses illustrations et de sa mise en page, Paris, Belfond, coll. “Les dossiers”, [septembre] 1985;

• réimpression en fac-similé de l’édition courante de 1959, augmentée sur feuilles volantes de 4 lettres de Marcel Duchamp à Robert Lebel, Paris et Milan, Mozzotta, et Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou, 1996.

Avec Francis Picabia (à partir de 1911), peintre et poète, Man Ray (de 1915), peintre et photographe, et Henri-Pierre Roché (de 1916), collectionneur et diariste, Robert Lebel aura sans doute été le dernier complice de Marcel Duchamp. “Tout en étant très amis, nous étions restés sur une certaine réserve” ainsi résumera-t-il, à la fin de sa vie, cette complicité.

André Gervais
9 avril 2000

A. Robert Lebel, lettre à André Gervais, Paris, 21 mai 1979. Ingénieur du temps perdu est le titre de la réédition, en 1977, des Entretiens avec Marcel Duchamp (1967) de Pierre Cabanne.

B. Dans un article sur Robert Lebel et Marcel Duchamp (Critique, Paris, nº 149, octobre 1959), Patrick Waldberg précise que “le brillant et curieux texte de Robert Lebel, L’inventeur du temps gratuit, véritable spéculation, au sens où l’entendait Jarry”, aurait pu paraître dans le Da Costa encyclopédique, preparé à partir de 1946. Et il ajoute: “On reconnaît sans peine, dans l'”inventeur” en question, sinon Marcel Duchamp en personne, tout au moins l’un de ses frères en esprit.”

L’inventeur du temps gratuit

par Robert Lebel

Tous les photos reproduit ici étaient publiée avec l’article original.
(Le surréalisme, même, Paris, nº 2, printemps 1957.)

Dès qu’il laissait derrière soi, vers la pointe de l’île, la silhouette mutilée déjà du terminus, l’Elevated pénétrait dans des rues étroites dont il frôlait les façades aux escaliers de fer. Front street, Pearl street qu’il recouvrait et calfeutrait comme de longs tunnels, ne menaient au-dessous de lui, dans l’intervalle de ses ébranlements, qu’une existence illusoire et silencieuse d’ancien décor. Scellées de volets imprenables ou aveuglées de crasse, les fenêtres avaient cessé l’une après l’autre de s’ouvrir. C’était, entre les docks de l’East River et les gratte-ciel de Wall street, l’étrange ville morte où tout ce que New York recelait de menaçant venait se terrer et attendre.

Ce quartier m’attirait et j’ai souhaité d’y vivre mais les maisons y étaient à ce point inhabitées qu’un locataire éventuel y faisait aussitôt figure de suspect. Personne ne voulait croire que l’on songeât sérieusement à s’établir dans ces bâtisses délabrées, à l’écart de tout ce que le zèle urbaniste proposait de dignité et de confort. En vain avançais-je l’excuse que je me donne volontiers d’être artiste. Cet argument qui est accueilli souvent avec indulgence ne provoquait ici qu’un surcroît de méfiance et d’hostilité.

Je n’en poursuivais pas moins mes démarches de porte en porte. La déception que j’éprouvais à me heurter inévitablement à de nouveaux échecs se trouvait amplement compensée par mes découvertes à l’intérieur des maisons que je visitais de fond en comble. J’y errais parfois deux ou trois heures sans rencontrer un être vivant. C’est au cours de l’exploration d’un immeuble qui me parut totalement abandonné que je lus à une porte l’inscription suivante, en français:

A. Loride, L’Inventeur du Temps Gratuit – Cela était écrit à la plume, négligemment, sur une feuille de papier fixée par deux clous.

J’avais déjà pu parcourir, aux autres étages, les bureaux d’une compagnie de navigation, l’atelier d’une imprimerie et un établissement de bains, tous également déserts. J’entrai donc sans hésiter. Il était trois heures de l’après-midi d’un jour ouvrable.

Au centre d’une sorte de vaste entrepôt extraordinairement encombré, un homme entièrement nu exécutait des mouvements de culture physique. Il se retourna et je constatai qu’il devait avoir dépassé cinquante ans, bien que son corps fût toujours assez svelte. Il était glabre et son apparence de méticuleuse propreté dans un tel milieu surprenait. Pourtant je fus surtout frappé par son absence d’embarras. Sans penser à se couvrir, à marquer son étonnement ou à justifier sa tenue, il me considérait avec calme et attendait mes explications.

Je ne trouvai d’abord, plutôt sottement que: “Etes-vous Français?”, ajoutant après un silence: “Je viens pour votre invention”.

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D’un signe, il me permit de m’asseoir mais, sauf un lit où était couchée une très jeune femme, on n’apercevait aucun siège et je m’appuyai contre une caisse, poliment. “Je vous écoute”, dit-il. “A ce moment, l’Elevated surgit au ras des fenêtres et tout se mit autour de nous à vaciller.”

“Monsieur,” lui répondis-je enfin, dès que l’on put s’entendre, “je ne vous cacherai pas que je m’intéresse prodigieusement à vos découvertes et c’est parce qu’il me tarde d’en discuter avec vous que j’ai omis de prendre, avant d’entrer ici, les précautions d’usage.”

˜Je ne reçois que sur rendez-vous,” répliqua-t-il brièvement. “Inscrivez votre nom et votre adresse (il me désigna un mur couvert de notes et de chiffres), je vous convoquerai” et, me tournant le dos, il se remit à sa gymnastique.

Sa lettre ne me parvint que trois semaines plus tard. Elle était rédigée sur une feuille à en-tête de A. Loride and Company. “Je vous préviens, écrivait-il, que je ne suis ni fou, ni mystique, ni philosophe, ni inspiré, ni poète. Je me livre à des recherches positives et mon activité correspond, dans une large mesure, au titre peut-être un peu trop affirmatif que je me suis décerné. Engagé dans une entreprise réelle, la nécessité pratique m’obligeait à lui donner une raison sociale. D’autres s’intitulent bien roi du pétrole ou pharmacien de l ère classe. Quoi qu’il en soit, nos rapports éventuels, permettez-moi de le stipuler, ne pourront être que strictement commerciaux. Je ne désire pas de nouveaux amis, mon excentricité ne regarde que moi et ce n’est pas sans intention précise que j’ai choisi, pour m’y retirer, un lieu où seules votre curiosité et votre extrême indiscrétion devaient vous emmener à me découvrir.” Et il m’assignait un entretien pour un jour suivant.

Je fis le chemin mas l’Elevated. A plusieurs reprises déjà, depuis notre première entrevue, j’avais tenté l’expérience de passer devant ses fenêtres, espérant le surprendre en quelque posture significative mais, du compartiment, s’il eût suffi de se pencher à peine pour frapper à sa vitre, on ne distinguait rien qui permit de soupçonner sa présence.

Il me reçut avec l’impassibilité que j’avais observée précédemment. Il n’était ni réticent, ni chaleureux. C’est armé d’une bonne grâce un peu lointaine qu’il se présentait à ce tête-à-tête dont, visiblement, il n’attendait mais aussi ne redoutait rien. Vêtu non sans recherche, il me guida courtoisement à travers un remarquable désordre de machines, d’établis, de poutres, d’horloges, de coffres-forts, jusqu’au lit qui n’était pas occupé.

“Vous avez beaucoup de matériel,” lui dis je pour amorcer la conversation. “Tout ce que vous voyez dans cette pièce, ou mieux dans ce magasin, y a été laissé par de précédents locataires,” répondit-il. “Vous n’y verrez donc pas grande chose qui m’appartienne, mais je préfère ces instruments de hasard. La diversité de leur nature m’interdit de me borner à un seul mode de réflexions et, dans ce laboratoire dont j’inventorie systématiquement et, bien entendu, à contresens les ressources, mon imagination s’expose moins à marquer le pas.”

“Mais le temps?” demandai-je.

“J’y venais puisque j’ai mis au point ma théorie grâce à la réunion toute providentielle devant moi de ces trois horloges dont une fonctionne avec exactitude, une autre irrégulièrement et la dernière pas du tout. De même, cette bascule m’a conduit à réviser mes vues sur le isotopes et je dois à cette essoreuse électrique des révélations inattendues sur la suspension pyrrhonienne.” Mais, rencontrant mon regard, il ajouta vivement: “Surtout ne me prenez pas pour une espèce de penseur. Je ne vise qu’à relier des notions éparses, je ramasse les miettes des grandes idées. Je hais les abstractions. Toutes ces machines, pour la plupart déficientes, me ramènent sans cesse aux détails, aux vérifications fragmentaires et m’astreignent à un bricolage mental d’une heureuse incohérence. Elles imposent à mon interrogation sa forme concrète tandis que leur caractère éminemment fictif me retient de céder, comme le font les physiciens et comme l’ont fait, malheureusement, tant d’alchimistes, au souci mortel du résultat. J’apprends ici à tirer inutilement parti du tout. Ainsi, le passage inéluctable de l’Elevated assume pour moi une fonction aussi fondamentale que le cycle des marées. Il exprime avec autant de perfection le piétinement humain mais, en outre, il a l’immense avantage de maintenir l’organisme dans un état d’exaspération latente. Le flux et le reflux ne nous incitent jamais qu’à nous résigner, alors que l’Elevated nous pousse directement à la révolte contre ce qu’on persiste à nous présenter comme notre condition.”

“Mais le temps?” insistai-je.

“Nous y sommes. Chacun de nous aspire à l’intensité d’une vie de chien, à ces journées bien remplies qui préludent traditionnellement à un repos bien gagné. Notre époque a beau jumeler en un culte dérisoire la liberté et le loisir, les êtres les plus satisfaits sont toujours les plus affairés, donc les plus asservis. Or il est clair qu’aucun progrès n’est à notre portée si nous ne surmontons d’abord la compulsion de l’activité utile. C’est cependant elle, et elle seule, qui continue à régir notre concept du temps. Tenez, fit-il en saisissant un bâton pour désigner les horloges, chacun de ces cadrans figure le temps sous un de ses trois aspects. Pour la quasi totalité des hommes, il n’en existe qu’un. Les individus dits évolués en pressentent peut-être deux, mais je suis un des rares à en définir explicitement le troisième, si bien que je puis, sans trop d’imposture, m’en présumer l’inventeur. Mon but, d’ailleurs, est moins de le formuler théoriquement que de lui donner une consistance. J’ai l’ambition d’en faire une véritable denrée, un simple objet de consommation et d’échange, au même titre que ces remèdes dont les chimistes sont seuls à connaître la composition, mais qui se vendent à tous les comptoirs. C’est pourquoi je me flatte d’être un commerçant et non un philosophe.”

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Il se tut, alla s’installer devant une machine qui se trouvait à proximité des horloges et, du pied, mit une pédale en marche. Bientôt, de minces baguettes de bois commencèrent à jaillir d’un orifice d’échappement. “Excusez-moi,” dit-il, “je dois satisfaire à une commande pressée.”

“Seraient-ce là vos comprimés de temps?” m’écriai-je. Je les eusse plutôt imaginés cristallins et sous les dehors de quelque pastille.

“Peu importe le symbole,” fit-il, tout en continuant à pédaler. “Il se trouve que, sans y être pour rien, j’ai à ma disposition cet appareil qui débite des rondins dont les quincailliers du voisinage, mes clients, se sont révélés avides. Un sculpteur surréaliste en ferait même, me dit-on, courant usage. Toujours est-il que cette industrie exige à peine de moi la somme d’attention dont je suis capable à l’égard de ce qui me fait vivre. Je puis m’y livrer sans quitter des yeux cette première horloge et, aussi aisément que, de cette même place, je vois venir, passer et disparaître l’Elevated, je vois, sur ce cadran, venir, passer et disparaître le temps qui ne s’interrompt jamais, le temps qui possède une valeur vénale. Ces aiguilles déjà vétustes tournent avec une régularité qui ne peut tenir que du prodige. Il semble que ce soit leur destin de tourner, quoi qu’il arrive. Leur bonheur consiste à n’être ni en avance, ni en retard, ni surtout arrêtées. On discerne dans leur mouvement net, résolu, sûr de soi, la satisfaction cocardière dont resplendit le visage de l’honnête serviteur, de la ménagère diligente, de l’ouvrier consciencieux, du fonctionnaire méthodique, de l’homme d’affaires entreprenant, de tous ces gens que je vois se bousculer le matin dans l’Elevated pour se rendre à leur travail, et s’y écraser de nouveau le soir pour regagner leur domicile. Or ce temps se déroule devant moi comme un film. Je sais, je sens que j’y suis étranger. Littéralement j’y échapper, mais serait-ce en vertu de mon horaire que l’on peut estimer fantaisiste? Je ne le crois pas. Comparez les physionomies que je vous ai décrites avec celles qui les remplacent aux heures que l’on nomme si justement creuses, lorsque les compartiments presque vides sont devenus à peu près confortables. Les privilégiés qui, pour des raisons généralement très douteuses, ont bénéficié d’une levée d’écrou, loin de se montrer ravis, paraissent, au contraire, pour la plupart, inquiets et tourmentés. Ils parcourent distraitement leur journal, ils se crispent nerveusement sur leur banquette, la lenteur des trains les irrite. En bref, leurs symptômes sont ceux d’une rumination morbide.”

S’interrompant soudain, il repoussa du pied les baguettes qui s’étaient accumulées devant l’orifice et il reprit sa manœuvre. “Rassurez-vous,” continua-t-il, “mes voyageurs des heures creuses ne sont aucunement dévorés de remords. Au surplus, la réaction du privilégié devant l’esclavage des autres se traduit plutôt par un cynique contentement. Non, l’explication est ailleurs. Si vous passiez comme moi plusieurs heures par jour à braquer vos lorgnettes sur l’Elevated du haut de cette chaire de prédicateur anglican (ce qui me permet de tout voir sans risquer d’être aperçu), vous pourriez constater que ces voyageurs se subdivisent en deux catégories bien distinctes. Simple problème d’interprétation que j’ai dû résoudre à la façon de l’ethnographe ou de l’anthropologue par une exhaustive confrontation des caractères individuels. Certains voyageurs que l’on surprend, aux heures creuses, à sourire, voire à se détendre, sont en réalité des membres provisoirement détachés de la grande fourmilière. Selon le langage des bureaux, ils sont en course ou, comme disent plus noblement les militaires, en service commandé. Leur sérénité, leur désinvolture, qui les différencient aussitôt de leurs voisins immédiats, n’ont pas d’autre origine. Pour eux, l’heure ne saurait être creuse puisque la société qui ne les perd pas de vue en consacre la densité. Le temps où l’usage a frappé une monnaie reste le lien même qui les rive à leur agitation.”

Tandis qu’il dégageait de nouveau les issues de son appareil, je me permis d’objecter: “Cependant, pour les autres voyageurs des heures creuses, ceux qu’à plus ample examen vous classez toujours parmi les oisifs véritables, comment expliquer leur mélancolie si vous écartez l’hypothèse de scrupule? Aurons-nous recours à l’exploitation banale de l’angoisse dont nos voyageurs sont supposés être saisis devant la perspective de leur disponibilité?”

˜Nullement,” répliqua-t-il avec un peu d’humeur. “Ce serait rendre à l’argument spécieux par excellence, celui dont on se sert communément pour justifier les inégalités sociales et démontrer le bien-fondé de la servitude en exagérant à la fois les responsabilités de l’oisif et les dangers que courrait un homme libre. Si les individus qui parviennent à une relative indépendance sont, de fait, les plus désemparés et les plus ombrageux, c’est que, physiquement affranchis, ils demeurent mentalement des esclaves. Ils ne rectifient pas leur conception du temps alors que celui-ci modifie pour eux son rythme. Dès lors s’introduit dans leur existence le déséquilibre que ces secondes aiguilles miment adéquatement. Elles ne sont plus animées que d’un mouvement erratique, fiévreux en quelque sorte et rompu par de longs moments d’immobilité pesante. Sans cesse, elles sont en avance ou bien en retard mais sur quoi, pourrait-on demander, puisque précisément c’est en dehors du circuit de la ponctualité qu’elles se situent? D’où vient cette inconséquence si ce n’est de la conscience très vive qu’elles conservent encore du temps social? En définitive, leur regret d’en être exclues l’emporte sur leur soulagement d’en être dispensées. Une horloge déréglée, donc libre, n’oublie pas l’horloge exacte qu’elle fut. L’heure qu’elle marque n’est jamais absolument délivrée de l’autre dont un timbre antérieur s’obstine à sonner le souvenir.”

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Sans quitter sa machine, il se prit à rire silencieusement.”Voyez-vous,” enchaîna-t-il, “je n’accepterais le titre de penseur que suivi de l’épithète comique, mais au sens non douloureux du terme et comme Stendhal envisageait de devenir “the comic bard”. Contrairement à Molière et à sa misérable suite de vaudevillistes, je ris moins de l’homme lui-même que des abstractions dont il est pénétré. Le comique de la pensée est beaucoup plus irrésistible que celui des caractères. Il est grand temps d’en finir avec la comédie classique et son arsenal de types à jamais flétris pour lui substituer une comédie de la connaissance qui se terminerait par un beau massacre d’idées, au lieu de conclure systématiquement par l’écrasement du “drôle”. Je vois fort bien, par exemple, une comédie sur la notion du temps, vielle coquette aux minauderies sordides, qui compte et recompte inlassablement son or à mesure qu’il lui glisse des doigts. Ce serait elle qu’il s’agirait de confondre et de rosser en lui laissant, comme il sied, sa configuration idéographique. J’aime souvent à croire que les formes surprenantes dont l’art moderne a été prodigue sont des idées qui ont pris corps et s’apprêtent pour la scène future où elles seront rouées de coups. Ce sont les personnages de notre nouvelle comédie et leur aspect, parfois repoussant à première vue, ne fait que confirmer leur signification mythique et annonce le sacrifice bouffon auquel ils sont destinés.”

Les piles de rondins avaient atteint une hauteurs considérable et, jugeant sans doute suffisant le résultat de son effort, mon hôte cessa de pédaler, se leva, désigna de nouveau la seconde horloge et reprit: “Ce temps qui a cessé d’être social et qui n’a pas encore commencé d’être individuel, ce temps amorphe, incolore, insipide, constitue un intolérable poids mort pour ce qu’on est convenu d’appeler l’évolution humaine. Ou bien celle-ci n’est qu’imaginaire et, parmi des masses éternellement primitives, nous ne représentons qu’une écume négligeable de dissidence, ou bien, dès son départ, cette évolution s’est engagée dans une impasse où elle butte à un obstacle qui la fait irrévocablement refluer. Mais qu’on y prenne garde, le désir même de liberté ne résistera pas indéfiniment au démenti terrible que lui infligent les faits. Entre les paroles que nous énonçons et notre comportement notoire, la brèche scandaleuse s’élargit chaque jour. Autour de nous, les défaillances se précipitent et les plus rebelles font parfois penser à ces femmes émancipées qui souhaitent secrètement un homme à poigne. Il ne leur manque jamais qu’une cause pour s’y consacrer “de toute leur âme”. Reconnaissons-le, ce temps social sait entretenir chez ceux qui, momentanément, s’en étaient écartés, une nostalgie particulièrement écoeurante. Les uns sont à la merci de la première équivoque venue, les autres, orgueilleux de leur fermeté, rédigent avec un raffinement morose les codes de leurs nouvelles contraintes. Ceux-là mêmes, si peu nombreux, qui s’accommodent d’être seuls, paient leur tribut sous forme de gémissements. Ils s’ennuient, ils désespèrent ou, plus ridiculement encore, ils travaillent. Chaque bribe de ce temps, qu’ils ont si péniblement conscience de soustraire à la société, acquiert à leurs yeux une valeur extravagante. Ils s’en instituent personnellement les usuriers et, pour mieux faire fructifier leurs tristes épargnes, ils calculent, ils inventent, ils bâtissent, ils peignent, ils écrivent avec une ardeur désolée. Sans doute se livrent-ils à une sorte de transfert: ils convertissent leur temps papier en temps or, ils le consolident et l’on utilise d’instinct pour cette opération mentale un langage de finance. Il n’est question que d’un placement pour les cieux jours ou, suprême ambition de banquier philanthrope, spéculateur à long terme, d’un moyen de se perpétuer.”

“Voyez-vous,” remarqua-t-il en souriant, “je me laisse à mon tour emporter par la satire. Je stigmatise l’homme moderne, l’homme libre, celui qui, semblable aux anciens duellistes, se tient pour comblé dès qu’on lui accorde le choix des armes qui le tueront. Suivez son manège lorsqu’il hésite triomphalement entre les journaux, entre les professions, entre les églises. Entendez-le s’exprimer à son aise dans des langues qui confondent le temps et la cadence, comme l’anglais time ou l’italien tempo. Regardez-le s’éloigner avec assurance, persuadé qu’il pourrait, à son gré, ne plus revenir, alors qu’il porte en lui, plus contraignant qu’un philtre d’amour, le gage de sa soumission. Dans la forêt même où parfois il s’aventure, les fées, les sorcières, les voix anonymes sont autant d’horloges métaphoriques dont la fonction est de lui rappeler l’heure. Sous son regard, chaque surface est un cadran lisible, chaque ombre, une montre embusquée. L’agonie des minutes brame à tous les échos et, jusque dans l’emportement de son vertige, le voyageur s’écoute vieillir car c’est le temps qui bat son pouls, inexorable chef d’orchestre intérieur. Rebrousser chemin, retrouver le “temps perdu”, quelle tentation pour qui, ayant cru fuir, lui aussi, la vielle terre, reprend à son compte l’exclamation désenchantée d’un auteur connu: “Ce n’est rien, j’y suis, j’y suis toujours”.

Depuis quelques instants, mes yeux s’étaient fixés sur le troisième cadran dont l’aspect immuable commençait à me fasciner. “Que cette inertie ne vous inspire pas des images faciles de néant ou d’éternité,” me dit mon hôte d’un ton sardonique. “Dans cette horloge arrêtée, imaginez au contraire un mécanisme plus sensible que les autres, trop parfait pour enregistrer les vibrations grossières du temps social. Ailleurs, en quelque partie soigneusement occultée de ses rouages, d’imperceptibles oscillations révéleraient le passage presque impalpable du temps gratuit. Certes, la façade figée et comme morte de ce cadran est bien faite pour éloigner ceux qui reculent naturellement devant une mutation possible. Tout annonce un passage à franchir, une rupture à réaliser. Entre ce monde et l’autre, aucune transition légendaire, aucune communication discursive. On ne nous offre pas la clé d’un autre nirvana puisqu’il semble même que là où nous allons, l’extase n’ait plus de raison d’être. Nous ne renouons avec rien et peut être aurons-nous enfin brisé avec tout. Ni cérémonial, ni incantations, ni rites, mais atteindre ai point de lucidité où la notion du temps devient un fruit que l’on pèle”, et il fit avec ses doigts de petits mouvements déliés.

Je brûlais de poser une question mais, me devançant, il ajouta: “Ai-je besoin de spécifier qu’en nous retranchant du temps utile, nous entendons en aucun cas nous restreindre à la quiétude neutre du spectateur, à cette transcendance sceptique ou contemplative qui, pour ma part, me répugne absolument? Le domaine du temps gratuit est celui du risque extrême, de l’exaltation soutenue car il est à la fois le seul où l’on perde sciemment son temps, donc sa vie et le seul où tout effet dramatique, toute emphase soient inadmissibles. Le jeu lui-même s’y dépouille des compensations verbales ou passionnelles que lui avait léguées le temps social où nul acte ne se justifie sans dividende. Les anciens aristocrates prenaient la précaution de réunir tous leurs invités avant de jeter leur argenterie au fond de l’eau et les mises à mort, dans la littérature moderne, ont souvent conservé ce style tapageur. Pour nous, le gaspillage est obligatoirement non ostensible et nous chercherons surtout à donner le change. Nous ne serons ni mages, ni héros, ni justiciers, ni prophètes, mais nous aurons soin de jouer des rôles quelconques avec un faux sérieux qui pourra faire illusion. C’est à l’intérieur même du temps social et non à l’écart, ce qui déjà serait édifiant, que nous créerons, sans nécessairement le laisser entendre, des zones de refus et de légèreté.”

A cet instant, une jeune femme entra. Ce n’était pas celle que j’avais déjà vue. Elle se contenta d’incliner la tête et vint s’asseoir sur le lit sans prononcer un mot. Je me disposais à poursuivre l’entretien lorsque je m’aperçus que, manifestement, les pensées de mon interlocuteur avaient pris un autre cours.

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“Puis-je vous prier de ne plus revenir?” me dit-il après quelques minutes de silence. “Epargnez-moi la disgrâce de reprendre ces démonstrations orales qui ne trahissent jamais que nos propres tergiversations. Un bruit de paroles qui prétendent convaincre et il n’en faut pas davantage au temps social, momentanément conjuré, pour retrouver son arrogance.” Et me poussant aimablement vers la porte, il conclut: “La gratuité ne se sépare jamais d’un certain mutisme. Sans doute en ai-je déjà trop dit.”

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Marcel Duchamp, Etant
donnés: 1º la chute d’eau / 2º le gas d’éclairage, 1946-66

First you have to get far enough back from everything. How ridiculous to let any taboos linger. Having smashed the king of all taboos we looked around to see if anyone else had smashed through as well. Not exactly. Not yet. But had our old friend also sought to defy death? Had he constructed an architectural surround to return to? If “after all death is always only for others,” should not the ironic artist, first off, busy himself with a tomb for himself?!? Revitalizing tombs are Mallarmé’s specialty. His ” Tomb of Baudelaire” serves as point of departure, framing context, and signaling scaffolding for Marcel Duchamp’s heroic but limited, for being local and self-contained, effort to fit himself a tomb. His “Etant Donnés, involving, it would now appear, a returning to this world, might better bear the title ” Encore Etant Donnés” or “To Return To.*”

*Title of a critical essay on Etant Donne by Madeline Gins and Arakawa

*Title of a critical essay on Etant Donne by Madeline Gins and Arakawa

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Click here for video (QT 0.7MB)

Madeline Gins

Etant Pris

D. drinks M. drinking B.–drinks-toasts.

Muddy ruby-filled brew.

Pubis, liquid, illuminating gas.

Eternal afternoons—— of cities without night.

Symbols that gaze back at . . . . . . .

Forests of gazing-back symbols–

Dried foliage–

The bec Auer and its predecessor the bec papillon–
or the butterfly or bat’s wing burner

The wick’s desire . . . to be put . . . inserted.

M. Gins

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Click here for video
(QT 0.7MB)

Madeline Gins

Marcel Duchamp, Marcel
Duchamp as Rrose Sélavy, 1921

Being Taken—Having Taken It To Be
by S. Mallarmé or R. Sélavy

Nature is a temple
Whose living pillars
Release confused words
Perfumes, colors, sounds
Are everywhere let loose
All over the place

Humans pass there
Traversing forests of symbols
Which observe them with
A gaze akin to a familiar regard

M. Gins

[Note: Italized words that come up from the last stanza
of Baudelaire’s poem, Correspondances, to invade its first stanza plus all those that exceed the usual bounds of translation.]

Click here for video (QT 0.5MB)

Madeline Gins

“The Tomb of Charles Baudelaire”

The buried temple divulges from its sepulchral mouth
Sewerage: mud and rubies
Abominably an Anubis
The whole of its muzzle aflame with wild ferocious baying

Or that [as] the [most] recent gas twists the squinty wick,
A sweeper away, one knows, of infamies undergone,
It ignites a haggard immortal pubis
Whose flight moves up and off according to movements
Within and off out from the gas street lamp.

What dried-out foliage in “les cités sans soir”*
Votive, could bless like her, she, in her settling down again
Vainly against the marble vainly of Baudelaire

In the veil that wraps her around, absent with shivers,
Always to breathe
This, she, his Shade
Even if it be a tutelary poison
from which…of which…we perish.

by Stéphane Mallarmé
first translated by Roger Fry
adjusted and retranslated by Madeline Gins

Etant Pris

D. drinks M. drinking B.–drinks-toasts.

Muddy ruby-filled brew.

Pubis, liquid, illuminating gas.

Eternal afternoons—— of cities without night.

Symbols that gaze back at . . . . . . .

Forests of gazing-back symbols–

Dried foliage–

The bec Auer and its predecessor the bec papillon–
or the butterfly or bat’s wing burner

The wick’s desire . . . to be put . . . inserted.

M. Gins

Telescopic/Paralll Malic Moulds
by Rrose Sélavy

Charles Baudelaire 1821-1867
Arthur Rimbaud 1854-1891
Henri Poincaré 1854-1912
Stéphane Mallarmé 1871-1898
Marcel Duchamp 1887-1968

M.Gins

Poincaré’s Infra-thin

A.

Because

we cannot

a curve

without width

and must a straight line

under the form of

a rectilinear band

having breadth.

But well know these lines have no width.

Have them be narrower and narrower

thus to approach the limit;

so we do in a certain measure,

but we shall never attain this limit.

Always picture these two narrow bands,

one straight, one curved,

in a position such that

they encroach slightly one upon the other

without crossing.

A hand made of paper

and a hand made of gentle breeze

were made to shake hands

so that zeroing in on

the as-always oversized

triggering-zero might keep narrow. . . .

B. [tangent at infra-thin]

A high-tension non-wire

The tension needed to hold the image of a line.

The width of this line shall not exceed the posited non-width.

The tension needed to hold the thought-the breaking into thinking–
of a line.

The-tension-needed-to-hold-the-image-of-a-line’s width, non-width,
or near-non-width.

The-tension-needed-to-hold-the-thought-of-a-line.

T-T-T . . . te te te te te

A cross-sectional slice, a shaving, a would-shaving of
…tentativeness….

 

M.Gins

Figs. 1, 4 © 2000 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris. All rights reserved.

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Dove Bradshaw,
Praying For Irreverence, 1984

My involvement with Marcel Duchamp started early. Growing up in Manhattan, I first went to the Museum of Modern Art when I was eleven or twelve. I was understandably attracted to the machine imagery of theBicycle Wheel in their permanent collection. The subversive nature of the work left a strong imprint. My first artbook was Arturo Schwarz’s original Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp. By 1969 I was in art school, and it was there that I stumbled into my future work with Indeterminacy in a piece that came from life. It was titled Plain Air.

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Dove Bradshaw,
Plain Air, 1969-91
PS1 Institute of Comtemporary Art

Cycling home from school, I came across a discarded bicycle wheel. I hung it horizontally in my studio as a perch for a pair of doves. At the time I let them fly free. The birds picked up pieces of wire and string from the studio to make a nest. Then I placed a Zen archery target below the wheel on the floor. This piece has been recreated three times since: at Sandra Gering and PS 1 Institute of Contemporary Art in New York and at The Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh.

In 1977 my partner William Anastasi was offered three evenings at the Clocktower in which to perform versions of You Are, a piece from 1967. He wanted a writer, a painter and a composer each to serve as narrators. The narrators described ad libitum the viewers. This was taken down by a court reporter and transcribed by a typist; the pages were then pinned to the wall. Because of my involvement with the philosophy of chance, (and remembering that Bill had met John Cage in the 1960s) I suggested Cage as the composer. Cage agreed; a friendship developed and through him we met Teeny Duchamp.

We were invited for dinner with Teeny at Cage’s house in 1982. John, as he often did, had asked us to arrive at five for a round robin of chess. Chance placed me across from Teeny. We had not met before and had barely said a few words before beginning.

It was an intense game. Chess has the capacity to be more revealing than small talk. The play went on for about two hours and I had the sense that neither of us wanted the other to lose, although perhaps neither wanted to throw the game. Teeny, the stronger player, won. This was the beginning of our friendship; we kept a correspondence until her death.

Bill and I often traveled to Europe for our work. On a number of occasions, we stayed with Teeny for a couple of weeks at her home in Villiers-sous-Grez. In 1984, on such a visit, Teeny had driven us to Paris where she had things to do. She put us up in the apartment/studio in Neuilly that she had shared with Duchamp. She returned for us the next day. It was a marvelous unplanned experience.

The Neuilly studio was the place where Duchamp died. Although fifteen years had passed, it looked as if he had just left. The books and folios on the shelves gave the impression of constant use. The room seemed filled with a beautiful spirit.

Among many of the readymades were the Bottle Dryer, Fresh Widow and Fountain. The next morning I asked Bill to photograph me Praying for Irreverence.

That night, we took off for Cadaquès, Spain, where Teeny and Marcel had summered. Our host was Richard Hamilton who was responsible for the typographic version of the Green Box notes. Hamilton’s house (formerly the Governor’s) is a medieval building made of local flint stone. Richard had gathered a rare mix of Antonio Gaudí and seventeenth century furniture. We arrived in January during the month of the Mistral (a cold violent wind which whips off the Mediterranean). Its incessant howling rang through Richard’s vaulted stone corridors. And each house we entered made a different sound. It was known to have set a native’s mind mad. We left this place after a week. I was grateful to quietly reclaim my thoughts. To this day, I associate the wail of the Mistral with that land of Duchamp, Dalí, and Buñuel.

Click here for images of Duchamp’s studio/apartment in Neuilly.

Click here for information on Dove Bradshaw’s recent exhibitions.

For articles on Dove Bradshaw’s “Firehose” (1976-2000),
see The Columbus Dispatch and The New York Magazine.

Click here to see Dove Bradshaw’s recent work: Water of Life.

Introductory Remarks

Robert Lebel, who was born in Paris on 5 January 1901 and who died in Paris on 28 February 1986, was an art expert (1935- ), an authority on ancient paintings with the courts of justice and the courts of appeals (1953- ), and a writer all of his life.

It was in New York, at “An American Place,” the Alfred Stieglitz Gallery, in July 1936 according to all accounts, that he met Marcel Duchamp, then in the United States to repair the Large Glass.

It was again in New York, during the Second World War, when in forced exile, that he wrote “The Inventor of Gratuitous Time,” around 1943-44, “during a period when I was seeing Duchamp nearly every day. The title Ingénieur du temps perdu [Engineer of Lost Time] dates from a lot later and I believe that Duchamp was inspired by my title rather than me by his. I had shown him my text a little after having written it.”^(A) This “enchanting and sacrilegious tale in the fullness of a civilization of skyscrapers and elevated railways” (from the back cover flap of the 1977 edition) would be published fifteen years later in the journal,Le surréalisme, même (Paris, 2, Spring 1957), with three photos of the Elevated, exactly, ^(B)then seven years later in the book, La double vue [suivi de] L’Inventeur du temps gratuit, with an etched diptych by Alberto Giacometti and a folding (The Clock in Profile, 1964) by Marcel Duchamp (Paris: Le Soleil Noir, 1964); this book received “Le Prix du Fantastique” in 1965.

Lastly, it was around 1949 that Robert Lebel came up with the plan of devoting a book – both biography and catalogue – to Marcel Duchamp, a book that Lebel would work on in elaborate fashion from the spring of 1953 to the autumn of 1957 and that he would complete and correct in 1958, just as it was translated into English. This book, which would be the first book, was preceded and followed by about twenty articles (on Duchamp, but also on Picabia and Duchamp, de Chirico and Duchamp, Breton and Duchamp, Man Ray and Duchamp, etc.) appearing from 1949, exactly, but only some of these articles would be picked for inclusion in the completely redesigned edition of 1985:

– Sur Marcel Duchamp, Paris: Trianon Press, 1959; translated into English by George Heard Hamilton, New York: Grove Press, 1959; translated into German by Serge Stauffer, Cologne: DuMont Schauberg, 1962.

– Second American edition, expanded, New York: Paragraphic Books, 1967; second German edition, revised and expanded, Cologne: Du Mont Schauberg, 1972.

– Marcel Duchamp, second French edition, revised and expanded but trimmed of its catalogue, illustrations, and layout. Paris: Belfond, collection “Les Dossiers,” [September] 1985.

– Facsimile edition of the 1959 regular edition, expanded with four letters from Marcel Duchamp to Robert Lebel on loose sheets. Paris and Milan, Mazzotta, and Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1996.

With Francis Picabia (from 1911), painter and poet; Man Ray (from 1915), painter and photographer; and Henri-Pierre Roché (from 1916), collector and diarist; Robert Lebel would have been, without doubt, the last accomplice of Marcel Duchamp. “All for being very good friends, we remained to a certain extant on our guard,” thus did he summarize, at the end of his life, this complicity.

André Gervais
9 April 2000

A. Robert lebel, letter to André Gervais, Paris, 21 May 1979. “Ingénieur du temps perdu” is the title of the new edition, in 1977, of Entretiens avec Marcel Duchamp [Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp] (1967) by Pierre Cabanne.

B. In an article on Robert Lebel and Marcel Duchamp (Critique, Paris, 149, October 1959), Patrick Waldberg specifies that “the brilliant and curious text by Robert Lebel The Inventor of Gratuitous Time, a veritable speculation, in the sense that Jarry heard it,” would have been able to be published in the De Costa encyclopédique, which had begun being produced in 1946. And he adds, “We easily recognize, in the “inventor” in question, if not Marcel Duchamp in person, at least one of his brothers in spirit.”

The Inventor of Gratuitous Time

by Robert Lebel

translated by Sarah Skinner Kilborne (with Julia Koteliansky)

As soon as it was beyond the already mutilated silhouette of the terminus, near the tip of the island, the Elevated penetrated the rail-narrow streets, skimming their iron staircase facades. Front Street…Pearl Street…were covered by it, shut in like long tunnels, and managed beneath, when not shaken from its passing, only the illusive and silent existence of ancient scenery. Boarded up with impregnable shutters or blinded with filth, windows, one after the other, ceased to be openings. Here it was, between the docks of the East River and the skyscrapers of Wall Street, the strange, dead village where everything menacing that came to New York had buried itself, waiting.

I was attracted to this neighborhood and wanted to live there, but the houses were at that point so inhabited that any imaginable tenant would immediately appear suspicious. Nobody would believe that someone could seriously think about living in these dilapidated buildings, far from the dignity and comfort that is so proffered by urbanite zeal. In vain, I proposed the excuse that I wanted an artistic existence. This argument, which is often accepted and indulged, only provoked additional mistrust and hostility.

Nevertheless, I pursued going door to door. My disappointment of having to deal with some unavoidable failures was amply compensated by discoveries I made inside of the houses that I visited from top to bottom. Sometimes I would walk around for two to three hours without encountering a single human being. It was in the process of exploring one of these buildings that seemed totally abandoned when I came upon the following inscription, in French, on a door:

A. Loride, Inventeur du Temps Gratuit [“A. Loride, Inventor of Gratuitous Time”] – This was carelessly written in pen on a sheet of paper attached by two nails.

I had already gone through, on other floors, the office of a navigation company, a print shop and a bath shop, all equally deserted. Thus, I entered without hesitation. It was three o’clock in the afternoon of a weekday.

In the middle of some sort of vast, extraordinarily cluttered warehouse, a totally naked man was executing movements of physical exercise. He turned around and I thought he had to be over fifty, even though his body was still quite svelte. He didn’t have any hair and his meticulously clean appearance was surprising in such surroundings. But I was especially struck by his lack of embarrassment. With no thought of covering himself up, or being astonished, or justifying his attire, he considered me calmly and waited for an explanation.

At first, I found nothing to say except for the silly “Are you French?” adding after a pause, “I’m here about your invention.”

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He made a sign, permitting me to sit down, but, except for a bed where a very young woman was lying down, there was no place to sit, and so I politely leaned against a crate. “I’m listening,” he said. At that moment, the El appeared suddenly level with the windows and everything around us started to shake.

“Sir,” I finally answered, as soon as we could hear each other. “I won’t try to hide the fact that I’m prodigiously interested in your discoveries, and it’s because I couldn’t wait to talk to you that I lost my manners and just came in.”

“I receive only by appointment,” he briefly replied. “Write down your name and address (he pointed to a wall covered with notes and numbers). You’ll be invited,” and turning his back to me he resumed his exercise.

I received his letter just three weeks later. It was written on a sheet of paper with “A. Loride and Company” in the letterhead. “I warn you,” he wrote, “that I’m not a madman, not a mystic, not a philosopher, not a seer, not a poet. I devote myself to positive research and my actions correspond, to a large extent, to the title perhaps a bit too complementary that I have given myself. Engaged in a real enterprise, the practical necessity obliged me to have a professional name. Others call themselves oil kings or first-rate pharmacists. In any case, let me stipulate that our eventual relations can only be strictly commercial. I don’t desire any new friends, my eccentricity is my personal matter and I didn’t unintentionally choose this place to retreat to, where only your curiosity and extreme indiscretion could have enabled you to discover me.” And he assigned me an interview for a following day.

I made my way there on the El. Many times already, since our first meeting, I had passed by his windows, trying to experience what it would be like to catch him in the act of some telling pose, but, from the compartment of the train, even though it was enough to just barely lean out in order to tap at his glass, I distinguished nothing that permitted any suspicion of his presence.

He greeted me with the same impassivity that I noticed before. He was neither reticent nor warm. Armed with a graciousness that was somewhat distant, he presented himself at this tête-à-tête, from which he was obviously neither expecting nor fearing anything. Elegantly dressed, he courteously guided me through a remarkable disarray of machines, benches, beams, clocks, safes, all the way to the bed which was no longer occupied.

“You’ve got a lot of equipment,” I said, to start a conversation. “Everything you see in this place, or rather in this store, was left here by the previous tenants,” he replied. “So, you won’t see much belonging to me here, but I prefer these instruments of chance. The diversity of their nature doesn’t allow me to limit myself to just one way of thinking, and in this laboratory – where I inventory the resources systematically and, of course, in the wrong way – my imagination exposes itself less to marking time.”

“What about time?” I asked.

“I came round to the idea since I adjusted a theory of mine, thanks to the altogether providential gathering in front of me of these three clocks, of which one functions precisely, another irregularly, and another not at all. In the same way, this see-saw made me revise my views on isotopes and I owe this electric drying machine some unexpected revelations on the pyrrhonian suspension.” Then, meeting my gaze, he added sharply, “Most importantly, don’t take me for some sort of a thinker. I only try to connect some scattered notions, I pick up the crumbs of great ideas. I hate abstractions. All these machines, deficient for the most part, constantly bring me back to details, to fragmentary verifications, and make me carry out a mental patchwork of happy inconsistency. They impress upon my questioning a concrete form while their eminently fictitious character keeps me from giving up, just like it does for physicians and like it has done, unfortunately, for so many alchemists, to the detriment of the result. Here, I learn to uselessly take advantage of everything. Thus, for me the ineluctable passage of the El assumes a function as fundamental as the cycle of the tides. It expresses with as much perfection the stamp of humanity, but in addition has the immense advantage of keeping the organism in a state of latent exasperation. The ebb and flow merely encourage us to resign ourselves endlessly, while the El directly drives us to revolt against what is presented to us again and again as being our condition.”

“What about time?” I insisted.

“We’re getting there. Each of us works like a dog, in the hope that our thoroughly full days will eventually lead up to a well-deserved rest. Our era can’t help but twin freedom and leisure into a derisive kind of cult, even though the beings who are most satisfied are the most busy, and consequently the most enslaved. Now, it’s clear that no progress is within our reach unless we first overcome our compulsion to be actively productive. However, this compulsion, and only this compulsion, continues to dominate our concept of time. Look,” he said, grabbing a stick to point at the clocks, “each of these dials shows time in one of its three aspects. For the quasi totality of men, there’s only one aspect. The so-called enlightened individuals might conceive of two, but I’m one of the rare ones to explicitly define the third, to the point where I can, without too much posturing, presume to be its inventor. Moreover, my goal lies less in formulating it theoretically than in giving it a lasting quality. My ambition is to turn it into a real commodity, a simple object to buy and sell, just like those pharmaceuticals whose properties are known only to chemists, but which are nevertheless sold at every counter. That’s why I flatter myself being a tradesman rather than a philosopher.”

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He stopped talking, sat down at a machine situated in proximity to the clocks and set the machine in motion, with one foot on a pedal. Soon, some thin wooden sticks began coming out of an open escapement. “Excuse me,” he said. “I have to work on a pressing order.”

“Would those be your time compressions?” I cried out. I rather imagined that they were crystalline and their appearance, some kind of tablet.

“The symbol is of no importance,” he said, continuing to pedal. “I’ve found that, without having anything to do with it, I’ve got this device at my disposal which cuts up the kind of logs that my clients, local hardware dealers, are very greedy to have. I was even told that a surrealist sculptor has been using them quite often. But the fact remains that this work hardly requires the amount of attention I’m capable of giving to something I do for a living. I can devote myself to it without taking my eyes off the first clock and, as easily as I can, from this spot here, watch the El come, pass by and disappear, I can, by that dial, watch Time come, pass by and disappear, Time which is everlasting and venal. The clock’s hands, already worn out, turn with a regularity that is nothing but miraculous. It seems as if it is their destiny to turn, no matter what happens. Their good fortune consists in being neither ahead nor behind and, above all, not stopped. We can discern in their clear, resolute, and confident movements, the chauvinistic satisfaction that emanates from the face of an honest servant, a diligent housewife, a conscientious worker, a methodical official, an enterprising businessman, all the people that I see every morning on their way to work, jostling each other in the El, and similarly pushing each other every evening on their way home. Meanwhile, time progresses in front of me like a movie. Sure, I feel like a stranger here. I literally escape here, but is it because of my work schedule which can be considered whimsical? I don’t think so. Compare the faces of those I described to you with those who replace them during off-peak hours, when the train is almost empty and just about comfortable. These privileged few who, for generally very questionable reasons, have gotten to be released, far from showing delight, seem, on the contrary and for the most part, anxious and tormented. They carelessly glance through their newspapers, sit upright in their seats, and get irritated by the slowness of the train. In brief, their symptoms are the ones of a morbid rumination.”

Interrupting himself suddenly, he pushed the sticks which had been accumulating in front of the escapement out of his way, and then resumed his small operation. “Don’t worry,” he continued. “My off-peak travelers aren’t in any way eaten up by remorse. What’s more, the reaction of a privileged person to the enslavement of others is contemptuously expressed by a cynical contentment. No, the explanation is elsewhere. If, like me, you spent several hours each day aiming your binoculars at the El from the height of this Anglican minister’s pulpit (it allows me to look at everything without risking detection), you would notice that these passengers are divided into two quite distinct categories. It was a simple problem of interpretation that I solved with the skill of an ethnographer or anthropologist, using an exhaustive comparison of individual characteristics. Those that you espy, in the off-peak hours, smiling, even relaxing, are in reality temporarily removed ants from the big anthill. As they’d say in the office, ‘they’re running an errand’ or as they’d say in the military, with more dignity, ‘they’re on official assignment.’ The serenity, the casualness, which distinguishes them from their immediate neighbors, could have no other explanation. For them, an empty hour is nearly impossible, since society is devoted to filling up time, andthey can’t escape that. Time, in which currency is measured by practice, remains the very glue which binds them to their agitation.”

While he was once again clearing away output from his machine, I permitted myself to disagree. “Nevertheless, for those other off-peak commuters, those that you’d still classify after further examination as true people of leisure, what’s the explanation of their melancholy if you discard the hypothesis of scruples? Should we resort to the well-worn exploitation of anguish with which our travelers are supposed to be seized before the prospect of being at somebody else’s disposal?”

“Not at all,” he answered in a bit of a temper. “That would be giving in to the most spectacularly specious argument, the one commonly used to justify social inequalities and prove the validity of servitude by exaggerating both the responsibilities of an idle person and the risks that run a free man. If individuals who achieve a relative independence end up being, in fact, the most helpless and skittish, it’s because, while being physically emancipated, they remain mentally enslaved. They don’t adjust their notion of time, although time modifies its rhythm for them. Thus, their existence is marked by an imbalance that is aptly mimicked by this second set of hands. These hands are animated solely by an erratic, sort of feverish movement, interrupted by long moments of heavy stillness. The hands are constantly ahead or behind, but of what, we might ask, since they’re set, precisely, outside of the revolutions of punctuality. Where does this inconsistency come from, if not from the very lively consciousness of social time that they manage to keep? When all is said and done, their regret about being deprived of punctuality prevails over their relief from not having to deal with it. A clock that is ‘off,’ and thence liberated, doesn’t forget that it was once an accurate clock. No matter the hour, it will never be totally free of the other whose earlier bell persists stubbornly in ringing and calling up memories.”

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Without stopping the machine, he started to laugh quietly. “You see,” he went on, “I will only accept the title ‘thinker’ if it’s used with the word ‘comic,’ not in the sad sense, but in the way Stendhal envisioned becoming ‘the comic bard.’ Unlike Molière and his miserable suite of vaudevillian writers, I laugh less about man himself than about the abstractions he’s highly conscious of. The comedy of thought is a lot more irresistible than that of character. It’s high time we finished with the classic form of comedy and its arsenal of forever withered ideal types, and replace it with a comedy of knowledge that would end with a beautiful butchery of ideas, instead of a routine conclusion which smothers what’s ‘funny.’ For example, I can clearly imagine a comedy based on the notion of time, that old flirt with her sordid minauderies, tirelessly counting and recounting her gold as it slides through her fingers. She would be the one to astound and trash and leave, as is fitting, with her ideographic configuration. I often like to think that the amazing forms which modern art has been lavished with are ideas which have taken shape and been dressed up for the future where they will be shot down. These are the characters in our new comedy and their appearance, sometimes repulsive at first, only confirms their mythical significance and announces the farcical sacrifice they are destined to make.”

The stacks of logs had reached a considerable height, and probably judging the results of his effort to be sufficient, my host stopped pedaling, stood up, pointed at the second clock again and continued. “This time, which has ceased being social and hasn’t yet started to be individual, this amorphous, colorless, insipid time represents an intolerable dead weight which we’ve agreed to call human evolution. Either it is only fantasy, and among the eternally primitive masses, we represent only a negligible dreg of dissent, or, from the very beginning, this evolution reached a deadlock, meeting with a challenge that irrefutably pushes it back. But we should be careful, because the very desire for freedom won’t endlessly resist the terrible denial imposed by the facts. The scandalous gap between the words we put forth and our notorious behavior grows bigger every day. Around us, failures begin to happen all at once and the most rebellious sometimes resemble those emancipated women who secretly wish for a tough-minded man. The one thing that’s always missing is a cause for dedicating themselves “with all their soul.” We have to admit that this social time knows how to keep those who are momentarily outside of it feeling disgustingly nostalgic. Some are at the mercy of the first ambiguous welcome; others, proud of their firmness, write down with a morose refinement the codes of their new constraints. Even the few who put up with being alone pay tribute by way of moaning. They are bored, they despair or, what’s more ridiculous, they work. Every bribe of this time, which they are so painfully aware takes away from society, acquires in their eyes an extravagant value. They personally establish themselves as usurers and, to make their sad savings more fruitful, they calculate, they invent, they build, they paint, they write with a sorry fervor. Without a doubt, they give themselves over to a sort of transference; they convert their paper-time into gold-time, they consolidate, and it’s pure instinct to use the language of finance for this mental operation. The matter is only a question of investing for old age or, like the ultimate ambition of a philanthropist, the long-term investor, for a way to survive.

“You see,” he said smiling. “I sometimes let satire get the best of me. I stigmatize the modern man, the free man, the one who, like ancient duelists, feels spoiled when accorded the choice of how he’d like to be killed. Follow him in his game as he vacillates triumphantly between newspapers, between professions, between churches. Hear him expressing himself at ease in languages which mix-up rhythm with time, such as the English ‘time’ or the Italian ‘tempo.’ Watch him confidently walk away, persuaded that he could stay away if he wants, while he carries within him, more restricting than a love potion, the proof of his submission. Even in the forest where he sometimes ventures, the fairies, the witches, the anonymous voices are just like metaphorical clocks whose function is to remind him of the time. Under his gaze, each surface is a readable dial, each shadow, a watch that awaits in ambush. The agony of the minutes bellows in every echo and the traveler listens to himself grow old, to the point where he is dizzy with anger, because it is time, the inexorable maestro of the interior orchestra, that beats his pulse. To retrace his steps, to search for ‘lost time,’ what temptation for someone who, having believed he avoided old ground, resumes on his own account the disenchanted exclamation of a famous author: ‘It is nothing, I am here, I am still here.'”

For several moments, my eyes had been fixed on the third dial whose unchanging face had begun to fascinate me. “Don’t let this inertia inspire facile images of nothingness or eternity,” my host told me in a sardonic tone. “On the contrary, imagine within this stopped clock a more sensible mechanism than the others, too ‘perfect’ for registering the coarse vibrations of social time. Somewhere, in some carefully hidden part of its gears, imperceptible oscillations will reveal the almost impalpable passage of gratuitous time. Of course, the face on this dial, fixed and death-like, is well-made for turning away those who naturally step back from any possible mutation. Everything announces a passage to go through, a rupture to realize. Between this world and the other, there’s no legendary transition, no discursive communication. No one offers us the key to some different nirvana because it seems as if, where we’re going, ecstacy has no reason to exist. We reunite with nothing and perhaps will have broken with everything. No ceremonial, no incantations, no rites, but reaching the point of lucidity where the notion of time becomes a fruit one can peal,” and with his fingers he made these little, nimble movements.

I was burning to ask a question but, getting ahead of me, he added, “Do I need to specify that in removing ourselves from useful time, we don’t in any way intend to restrict ourselves to the neutral calm of a spectator, to a skeptical or contemplative transcendence which, as far as I’m concerned, is absolutely repulsive? The domain of gratuitous time is the domain of extreme risk, of sustainable exaltation, for it is, at once, the only one where we consciously lose time and therefore life, and the only one where every dramatic effect, every emphasis is unacceptable. The game itself is stripped of the verbal or passionate compensations bequeathed by social time where no act is justifiable without a dividend. Ancient aristocrats would take the precaution of gathering all their guests before tossing their silverware to the bottom of the water, and various ways to execute, in modern literature, have kept this showy style. For us, waste is strictly mandated to be not ostensible, and we will try above all to stay above suspicion. We’re not magi or heros, dispensers of justice or prophets, but we’ll take care to play any roles with a false seriousness in order to create an illusion. It’s exactly within social time – not outside of it, which will itself be enlightening – that we’ll create, without necessarily meaning to, zones of refusal and lightness.”

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At this point, a young woman entered. She wasn’t the one I’d seen before. She just nodded her head and sat down on the bed without saying a word. I was prepared to continue the conversation when I realized that, without a doubt, the thoughts of my colleague had taken a turn.

“May I request something, that you never come back again?” he asked after some minutes of silence. “Spare me the disgrace of resuming these oral demonstrations which only betray our own shilly-shallying. The noise of words claiming they can persuade is enough for the momentarily averted social time to regain its arrogance.” And kindly pushing me towards the door, he concluded, “Freedom is never separate from a certain silence. Yes indeed, I have already said too much.”

[An earlier version of this article was first published in German as “Duchamp Werden,” in: CROSSINGS: Kunst zum Hören und Sehen, Vienna: Kunsthalle, 1998 (exh. cat.), p 55-61]

“They did not speak. They did not sing, they remained,
all of them, silent, almost determinedly silent; but from
the empty air they conjured music. Everything was music…”

Franz Kafka, Investigations of a Dog

John Cage first met Marcel Duchamp in the 1940s. Duchamp asked Cage to write music for his part in Hans Richter’s film “Dreams that Money Can Buy” (1946). But it took twenty more years before the two actually became close. Cage didn’t want to bother Duchamp with his friendship until he realized that Duchamp’s health was failing. Then he decided to actively seek his company. He knew that Duchamp was taking chess very seriously, and it was easy for Cage to use this pretext, so he simply asked him to teach him the game. And for the last three years of Duchamp’s life the two men and Teeny Duchamp, the bachelor’s bride, met at least once a week and played chess. ⁽¹⁾

It was widely believed at the time that Duchamp had stopped working. Visitors reported that his studio was empty. And it was. The studio was precisely made for that – for not making art. Duchamp had another space next door no one knew about, where he did his work. (He was putting together Étant Donnés, his last project).

Coming from Duchamp nothing was too unbelievable. Even Cage gave him credit for what he didn’t understand – for making Étant Donnés this voyeuristic show, for instance, after having renounced retinal art. Maybe he meant to contradict himself. The truth is, no one could tell for sure. Even when Cage learned that Duchamp may have taken his subject matter from Alfred Jarry, he recovered quickly from the shock. His friend must have had his reasons.

Every year Duchamp would pay a visit for a week to Salvador Dalí in Cadaquès, Spain, with Teeny and Cage in tow. Cage was mystified by the reverence Duchamp kept showing Dalí whom he himself disliked intensely like so many others. Everybody loved Duchamp, of course. The self-proclaimed genius and the self-effacing sage. The bulimic and the anorexic. Ubu Roi and Gregor Samsa. But maybe they were just two sides of the same coin. Both were busy deflating the piety of Capital – Dalí with his bloated cynicism (Breton came up with the anagram Avida Dollars to describe him best) and Duchamp with his imperceptible humor (Rrose Sélavy). The visionary paranoiac and the conceptual schizophrenic. Their delirium was paradigmatic of the age.

At bottom, Duchamp was Duchamp, an enigma to himself as to everyone else. Only he was capable of scrambling codes and genders with a strange, impersonal elegance. “Mince,” thin, slim, was Duchamp’s favorite word as “petit” or “menu” was Deleuze’s (as when he declared: “I am not sick, I simply have a petite health”). Duchamp found “infra-mince” even better as a concept. He was convinced that it took us to another space, from the second to the third dimension. Duchamp, the thin man, the hunger artist, el ombre invisible. His best performances were disappearing acts. And yet he always left traces of a sort – a signature on Fountain.

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Figure 1
Marcel Duchamp,
Fountain, 1917

Duchamp didn’t especially like listening to music, but its evanescence fascinated him. He kept dreaming of even more elusive sounds, sounds like the faint rustle of corduroy pants in a dance (he was always precise). Sounds for the birds. No wonder Cage got trapped.

“Duchamp placed chess above everything, and Cage was his partner.” This is what flashed in my mind when one day, out of the blue, Cage called me for a game. “You’re French,” he said, “so you must play chess.” Duchamp and me. That was in 1975, a few weeks after Cage and I first met. I cowered for a few more weeks, imagining Duchamp’s ghost breathing down my neck as I leaned over a chessboard. But Cage nudged me again and I surrendered to my destiny. We met, and played. I could hear music coming from the empty space. He narrowly won our first game.

As it turned out, he wasn’t such a formidable adversary. He was no adversary at all. It was then that he told me the Chess Master had found him a real disappointment. “Don’t you ever play to win?” Duchamp had kept asking, exasperated. Cage was a Zen Buddhist to the core: why should anyone have to win? He had already won what he wanted: spending time with Duchamp.

Cage got somewhat better at playing chess after that, trying his hand, I guess, on vague Duchamp surrogates like myself. And then there was Teeny, of course.

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Figure 2
Duchamp, Teeny, and Cage playing
chess in a performance, Sightssoundsystems,
a festival of art and
technology in Toronto, 1968

Actually, Cage hadn’t lost every single match with Duchamp. There was one that he definitely won, after a fashion. It happened in Toronto, in 1968. Cage had invited Duchamp and Teeny to be with him on the stage. All they had to do was play chess as usual, but the chessboard was wired and each move activated or cut off the sound coming live from several musicians (David Tudor was one of them). They played until the room emptied. Without a word said, Cage had managed to turn the chess game (Duchamp’s ostensive refusal to work) into a working performance. And the performance was a musical piece. In pataphysical terms, Cage had provided an imaginary solution to a nonexistent problem: whether life was superior to art. Playing chess that night extended life into art – or vice versa. All it took was plugging in their brains to a set of instruments, converting nerve signals into sounds. Eyes became ears, moves music. Reunion was the name of the piece. It happened to be their endgame.

Well, not quite. Less than a year later Duchamp was gone, but for Cage the game wasn’t over; it was rather like jumping into the middle of Duchamp’s disappearance act. Duchamp’s studio didn’t remain empty for long. Cage, so to speak, quickly moved in. Discreet, but focused and industrious, he gave Duchamp a piece of his own mind. From then on, it would be work as usual. There were countless traces to be picked up in Duchamp’s trail – slim cues, silent music. Cerebral circuits had to be delicately hooked on to other machines, imaginary solutions invented. Example of nonexistent problems: “What belongs to Duchamp and what belongs to me?” The problem wasn’t just crossing over – what’s identity anyway? – but making the two separate spaces work together.

In a sense Duchamp was as much alive in his death as he had been in his life. Didn’t he always want to “go underground” anyway? The imaginary solution already was at hand, and it would affect the living as well as the dead. “The effect for me of Duchamp’s work,” Cage wrote, “was to so change my way of seeing that I became in my way a Duchamp unto myself.” ⁽²⁾

Cage had to see things for himself in such a way that Duchamp’s work would be kept alive through his own. The only way to celebrate Duchamp was to “recerebrate” him – a Duchampian pun Cage invented – which meant to plug Duchamp’s mind into one’s own, the way the chessboard had been plugged to the sound system. And the music would be both theirs.

This uncanny collage – this ménage à deux, moins Duchamp – remains exemplary of the kind of creative crossings that can be achieved between the various arts, but also between art and life, and art and death. Becoming someone else (Jarry-Duchamp-Cage) is a way of becoming oneself, which became the condition for Cage’s own poetics of chance and politization of aesthetics. His creative anarchism.

Very early on, in 1913, the year Cage was born, Duchamp composed a music piece en famille, Erratum Musical,

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Figure 3
Marcel Duchamp,
Erratum Musical, 1913

by using chance operations. The procedure was far too simple for Cage’s taste – he favored more complex operations leaving no room for intention – but it was precisely that kind of simplicity that Duchamp liked, drawing jumbled notes at random from a hat. Duchamp composed Erratum Musical with his sisters Yvonne and Magdeleine, seventy-five notes picked by chance to accompany as many syllables of the randomly chosen dictionary entry for imprimer. ⁽³⁾“How is it that you used chance operations when I was just being born?” Cage asked Duchamp. This was a straight-faced question, but I don’t doubt that Cage saw in this synchronicity the start of their collaboration. He always experienced the past in the future tense – as a futur anterieur – and reclaimed this experience as his own, like everything else that concerned Duchamp. He would occasionally use chance the way Duchamp did (pulling slips of paper out of a hat) whenever he happened to be some place without his own I Ching simulation program. He always kept his “IC” in a black suitcase reminiscent of the famous “valise” in which Duchamp, ever the salt salesman (marchand du sel), kept small replicas of his art. Becoming Duchamp in the most “detailed” way.
Cage always considered music far more “detailed” than painting or visual work. In 1978, though, he was invited to make etchings at Crown Point Press. Not being an artist himself, and quite incapable of drawing, he decided to treat etchings like music – his own music – and draw into the plate with his eyes closed. But after spending two weeks every year, for fourteen years, making etchings and watercolors, they became so complex, he said, that he considered them “probably the most musical…the most detailed work, with very subtle changes in the colors and shapes.”

Duchamp didn’t especially like listening to music, and yet he made forays of his own into the world of sounds. In his writings (The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even: Erratum Musical, 1913),

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Figure 4
Marcel Duchamp,
The Bride Stripped Bare
by Her Bachelors, Even:
Erratum Musical,1913

he conceived what Cage called after him “Duchamp’s Train,” in which each freight car would carry a different octave on the piano, so that each of the “cars” would have its own notes. Cage eventually used this idea for one of his own violin pieces. (Unlike the piano, the violin allowed him to chose sustained intervals.) For this, he had to disregard the fact that Duchamp’s train was meant for a pianist to go through the eighty-five notes of the keyboard (the standard range for a piano of that time), which the violin doesn’t have. Crossings don’t just happen between the ear and the eye, they also occur within the same medium. Actually, they always happen between the two ears – in the empty studio of the brain. As far as he was concerned, Cage always kept an eye on the eye, starting with the intricate layouts for his Mesostic texts, these acrostic-like compositions with the key letters running down the middle of the text. But the poems would also lead him onto another track. The source material would become the starting point for other experiments involving source material he didn’t even know, like German or Japanese – we could call this endo-crossing – or he would let the repetition of sounds bring him back to the world of music – exo-crossing. Innovations between the arts, therefore, are not just a matter of crossing a barrier, even the frontier between sound and form, or synthesizing the two. It is essentially rhizomatic and can proliferate in every direction. Once Cage showed me a scrap of paper that he got from Duchamp in the late 1960s.⁽⁴⁾ Duchamp’s scribble read as follows: Sculpture Musical.

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Figure 5
Marcel Duchamp,
Note from the
Green Box, 1934

Sons durant et partant de différent points et formant une sculpture sonore qui dure. (“Musical Sculpture. Sounds lasting and leaving from different places and forming a sounding sculpture that lasts.”) Until then Cage had been thinking of himself as a “percussion composer,” someone who could strike anything – traffic sound, ambient noise, sounds that weren’t musical – investigating each sound for itself. But these sounds didn’t give him a feeling of space. You couldn’t walk around them as you would if they were emitted from three sources, instead of one or two. They didn’t provide a sculptural experience; they were two-dimensional. And Duchamp, just by pointing out the virtual volume of sounds, made it possible to take them to the third dimension.
As a visual piece, Étant Donnés remains a puzzle. But the extreme attention Duchamp paid to the details of its installation are even more intriguing. He specially wrote a “Manual of Instructions” spelling out the disassembling and reassembling of his work, from his 10th Street studio in Manhattan to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Étant Donnés’s final resting place. Why? Could it be that there was more there than could meet the eye? Duchamp left so little behind – his work was so slim – that any scrap or relic was worth treasuring and nurturing with the greatest care until it assumed its proper dimension. “Anything he did,” Cage wrote, “was of the utmost importance.” If Duchamp envisaged to take Étant Donnés down and putting it back, Cage went on, riffing around the idea and making it its own, it had to produce a sound. Therefore it was a musical work, the most musical of his works. Besides, Cage declared, closing the circle, “the whole structure of Étant Donnés is done with something that corresponds to a chessboard, in principle at least…It’s the most fantastic artifact.”

In 1988, four years before he died, Cage conceived of an opera that would be called “Nohopera,” which he subtitled – this was only partly in jest – “the Complete Musical Works of Marcel Duchamp.” It would be produced in Tokyo and would encompass both the Orient and the Occident. All of Duchamp’s “musical works” would be carefully staged, performed and choreographed in order to bring out what was lying latent in Duchamp: his “total work.” It would be the Grande Oeuvre of this fin-de-siècle – actually the “petite” oeuvre – and the culmination of Cage’s life efforts. Something like “Duchamp on the Beach.

Erratum Musical would be there, the songs Duchamp had fished in a hat and sang with his sisters (Music Hall). Also the toy train of The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even: Erratum Musical, loaded with excerpts from Nohdrama and European Opera (Theater). Then the Sculpture Musicale, executed by David Tudor, Takehisa and Cage himself (Music). And last but not least: Infra-Mince, choreographed by Merce Cunningham (Ballet).A “Manual of Instructions” would begin “Nohopera” with a reconstruction/reassemblage of Étant Donnés, after the original art piece, across the entire stage, accompanied by other “musicals” by Marcel. (Rrose Sélavy). As for Cage, he would be “the composer of the entire work, but almost nothing, or very little would be by me.” A slim project, by any account. A minor Gesamtkunstswerk. What is for certain is that by the time this Noh-opera (pointedly, Cage added a dash at the right place to register his hope that his project would eventually take shape) was about to leave the draft-board, the effect on Duchamp of Cage’s way of seeing was such that Duchamp himself had become in his way a Cage unto himself.

---

Notes

1. Cf. “John Cage on Marcel Duchamp: An Interview, ” by Moira Roth and William Roth, Art in America (November-December, 1973), p. 151 – 161.

2. John Cage, X: Writings ‘79-’82. (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1983), p. 53.

3. Many passages of this article are indebted to the rich diet of interviews between Joan Retallack and John Cage in Cage’s and Retallack’s Musicage: Cage Muses on Words Art Music. (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1996). See especially pages 153, 178, 229, 341.

4. This note now is at the Music Library of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.

Figure 1~5 © 2000 Succession Marcel Duchamp ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris. All rights reserved.

Introduction

“You know, I like signing all those things – it devalues them,” Duchamp confided to Richard Hamilton at the Pasadena Art Museum. (Tomkins 1965, p. 68.) A retrospective of his work had just opened (1963) and without reluctance Duchamp spent the morning signing papers, posters and other objects. His fame in America was greater than ever, and as Duchamp recalled himself he would sign anything in those days. (cf. Judovitz 1995, p. 162.) Many more shows were put together in the years to follow. Vogue interviewed Duchamp, museums organized round table discussions where Duchamp himself would frequently show up, and slowly a body of literature emerged that vainly tried to pin down the meaning of his work.

A little over a year after Pasadena, the same ritual took place: a show opened at the Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery in New York and an unknown man entered.⁽¹⁾ Philippe Bruno, more of a groupie than an art collector, had cut out all newspaper reviews of the show and pasted them in his copy of the show’s catalogue. If Duchamp could sign this please, maybe on the blank check that was attached with a paperclip to the page where the Tzanck Check was reproduced (facing L.H.O.O.Q.)…

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Figure 1
Marcel Duchamp,
Cheque Bruno, 1965
© 2000 Succession Marcel
Duchamp ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris.

With the “Cheque Bruno a quartet of financial readymades had been completed. Duchamp created the first of them in 1919 (Figure 2)

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Figure 2
Marcel Duchamp,
Tzanck Check, 1919
© 2000 Succession Marcel Duchamp
ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris.

for his dentist Tzanck, followed five years later by a bond issued to finance a roulette project. (Figure
3) In the same year that he signed Philippe Bruno’s check (1965), Duchamp had also converted a Czech membership card into a readymade by wittily naming it “Czech Check.” Duchamp’s four financial readymades have hardly received attention.⁽²⁾

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Figure 3
Marcel Duchamp, Monte
Carlo Bond, 1924
© 2000 Succession Marcel
Duchamp ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris.

The status of the Czech Check and the Cheque Bruno is particularly ambiguous, as if Duchamp’s interpreters have understood his lesson all too well (or not at all). The checks have never been institutionalized as proper works by Duchamp.⁽³⁾ At the same time, they have been noticed too often to live in oblivion altogether.

Duchamp’s financial documents both specify and generalize his overall artistic enterprise. Rather than addressing all institutions of the art world, they nail art down at one specific institution: the art market. Rather than questioning artistic worth, they address the general question of how value comes into being. As epitomes of the readymade, Duchamp’s financial documents defy general interpretations. They may be fingerprints of a charlatan, but it is impossible to deny their critical potential as readymades. Conversely their refined critique of the art market’s perversity can only be seen by ignoring Duchamp’s biography; it recounts how Duchamp was highly implicated in the market mechanisms the financial documents allegedly critique.

Four financial documents

Drawn on “The Teeth’s Loan and Trust Company, Consolidated, 2 Wall Street” in the amount of $115, Duchamp created the Tzanck Check in 1919 to pay for the services of a Parisian dentist, Daniel Tzanck. Apart from its larger size, the check resembles the design of standard checks accurately. Duchamp minutely drew the whole check by hand and had a stamp manufactured for the background print which reads “theteeth’sloanandtrustcompanyconsolidated,” repeated over and over.⁽⁴⁾ Whereas his other readymades questioned the value of artistic craftsmanship in a capitalist society, the Tzanck Check traveled the opposite direction by importing this value in the world of finance.

The Monte Carlo Bonds (Obligations pour la Roulette Monte Carlo) were issued five years later to raise funds for a gambling project. In an interview Duchamp recalled that he created the bonds “to make capital to break the Monte Carlo bank” (Lebel 1959, p. 137): roulette would be converted into a game of chess by removing luck from the table and relying on mathematical calculations instead. Like the Tzanck Check, the Monte Carlo Bond is a look-a-like of the actual financial document.⁽⁵⁾ On top of the bond is a photograph by Man Ray of Duchamp’s face covered in shaving foam, while the background reads “moustiques domestiques demistock” (“domestic mosquitoes half-stock”). The document is signed by Rrose Sélavy, president, and Marcel Duchamp, one of Sélavy’s administrators.⁽⁶⁾ Of the thirty bonds that were created, about twelve would eventually be sold for 500 francs each. All owners of the bonds were entitled to an annual dividend of 20%.⁽⁷⁾

After the Monte Carlo Bonds, it would take a long time before Duchamp resumed making art.⁽⁸⁾ Indeed, the other two checks came into being towards the end of Duchamp’s life.  With the Czech Check (Figure 4)

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Figure 4
Marcel Duchamp, Czech
Check, 1965
© 2000 Succession Marcel Duchamp
ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris.

, Duchamp supported his friend John Cage who was organizing a fund-raising action for the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts. Instead of a real check, the document is Cage’s membership card at the Czech Mycological Society which Duchamp merely signed. The check was sold for $500 at the fund-raising event. Finally the Cheque Bruno came into being when Duchamp complied with Philippe Bruno’s request to sign the check he had included in his catalogue from the Cordier & Ekstrom show. Duchamp wrote the check in an unlimited amount to the “Banque Mona Lisa.”

Expositions of value

When Jane Heap, editor of the American Little Review, received a copy of the Monte Carlo Bond from Duchamp she advertised it as follows: “If anyone is in the business of buying art curiosities as an investment, here is a chance to invest in a perfect masterpiece. Marcel’s signature alone is worth much more than the 500 francs asked for the share. Marcel has given up painting entirely and has devoted most of his time to chess in the last few years. He will go to Monte Carlo early in January to begin the operation of his new company.” (Lebel 1959, p. 185.) It is unclear if Heap intended to be ironic or if she was simply unable to read underneath the economic surface of the bonds, but just like the other readymades Duchamp’s financial documents obviously criticize an art world where the signature certifies both artistic and economic value, where the authority of the artist and the authenticity of the work are seemingly all that counts. And if Duchamp had to face the fact that people ended up ascribing aesthetic value to his readymades whereas his choices were informed by aesthetic indifference, the financial documents were an effective remedy.⁽⁹⁾ Thus Duchamp’s readymades express the intent “to eliminate art as an institution,” as avant-garde’s advocate Peter Bürger puts it:

When Duchamp signs mass-produced objects…and sends them to art exhibits, he negates the category of individual creation. The signature, whose very purpose it is to mark what is individual in the work, that it owes its existence to this particular artist, is inscribed on an arbitrarily chosen mass product, because all claims to individual creativity are to be mocked. Duchamp’s provocation not only unmasks the art market where the signature means more than the quality of the work; it radically questions the very principle of art in bourgeois society according to which the individual is considered the creator of the work of art. (Bürger 1974, p. 51-52.)

The financial documents take Duchamp’s general critique of value one step further by not only questioning the distinction between art and non-art, but also exposing the congruency between the art world and the economy. The financial documents made artworks equivalent to monetary tokens, conflating the categories of culture and finance in one object. To be sure, Duchamp was highly critical of art’s marriage to commerce in the modern art world. When asked why he had stopped painting, Duchamp answered, “I don’t want to copy myself, like all the others. Do you think they enjoy painting the same thing fifty or a hundred times? Not at all, they no longer make pictures; they make checks.” (Naumann 1984, p. 192.) And to one of his American patrons, Katherine Dreier, he complained that economic success corrupted artists, while art lovers would only be able to value a work once it had a high price.⁽¹⁰⁾ (Tomkins 1996, p. 285.)

The Tzanck Check, with the word “original” printed on it, more specifically questions the value of originality and addresses issues of forgery, common to the worlds of both finance and art. (Read 1989, p. 99.) Likewise the Cheque Bruno addresses the art historical canon, and the way it is safeguarded by the museum (the Louvre being the most likely candidate for the “Banque Mona Lisa,” with Mona Lisa’s pricelessness as an analogy to the unlimited sum of the check), while the Monte Carlo bonds point at the speculative nature of both gambling and the art world: success is based on luck rather than merit. As Duchamp argued in a letter to Jean Crotti: “Artists throughout history are like gamblers in Monte Carlo and in the blind lottery some are picked out while others are ruined… It all happens according to random chance. Artists who during their lifetime manage to get their stuff noticed are excellent traveling salesmen, but that does not guarantee a thing as far as the immortality of their work is concerned.” (Judovitz 1995, p. 182.)

Economic implications

Given his condemnation of the art market, it is hardly surprising that rather than getting involved in commercial transactions, Duchamp gave away the major part of his oeuvre. Collectors are said to have rarely left his studio without a gift. When the art collector and couturier Jean Doucet financed the production costs of Duchamp’s second optical machine, the Rotary Demisphere (Figure 5)

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Figure 5
Marcel Duchamp,Rotary Demisphere, 1925
© 2000 Succession Marcel
Duchamp ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris.

, the artist gave him the machine in return. He insisted that the transaction was “an exchange and not a payment.” (Tomkins 1996, p. 255.) Furthermore, Duchamp seemingly avoided involvement in the art world, urged his main patron Walter Arensberg not to lend his works to others, and frequently denied requests to have his art exhibited. “All expositions make me ill,” he wrote to Doucet. Duchamp disapproved of commercial transactions in art in particular and wrote in a letter to Alfred Stieglitz that “[t]he feeling of the market here is so disgusting. Painters and Paintings go up and down like Wall Street Stock.” (Tomkins 1996, p. 285)

At the same time however, Duchamp was highly implicated in the mechanisms and institutions he critiqued in word and object. To begin with, he was extremely well connected in the art world. During the course of his life, Duchamp became friends with bourgeois art collectors like Jean Doucet, Katherine Dreier, and Walter and Lydia Arensberg; with (would-be) art dealers like Sidney Janis, Julien Levy and Arturo Schwarz; and with museum officials like Alfred Barr, Walter Hopps (Pasadena Museum of Art) and Fiske Kimball (Philadelphia Museum of Art). More than once he used this network to do favors for befriended artists. Furthermore Duchamp functioned as executor of the estates of Dreier and of Mary Reynolds, frequently gave assistance to galleries ⁽¹¹⁾ and was active organizing exhibitions and spotting new talents as co-founder of the Société Anonyme, a short-lived museum for contemporary art in New York. At the 1917 show of the Society of Independent Artists (where R. Mutt submitted his urinal) he played a double role, being an artist as well as president of the hanging committee. (De Duve 1990, p. 63.) Duchamp was very keen on keeping his work together in the collections of Dreier and Arensberg, and seemed to be extremely pleased with the abundance of attention he got in the United States towards the end of his life. (cf. Jones 1994.)

From the mid 1920s to the 1940s, Duchamp made a partial living from trading art. In 1926 he helped out his friend Francis Picabia by buying eighty of his works directly from the artist. After framing them and making a catalogue (with an entry by Rrose Sélavy) Duchamp sold the works at one of Hotel Drouot’s auctions in Paris. Afterwards Duchamp and one of his best friends Henri-Pierre Roché bought twenty-nine sculptures by Brancusi from the estate of John Quinn, a rich American collector of modern art and early buyer of Brancusi’s work. They were encouraged to do so by Brancusi himself who was afraid that the sculptures would not be able to maintain their value if dumped on the market in such a large quantity. After this transaction, Duchamp organized a Brancusi exhibition at the Brummer gallery in New York, where some of the works were sold. Over the fifteen years to follow, he sold the rest of his share piece by piece.

The anticlimax of these commercial transactions was Duchamp’s cooperation with the writer and art dealer Arturo Schwarz, who reproduced thirteen of his readymades in 1964, including Fountain, Bottle Rack and Bicycle Wheel. According to Schwarz it was Duchamp who came up with this idea because he regretted the fact that many of the readymades had been lost, and it was impossible to see the surviving ones together. Duchamp was highly involved in establishing the price of the edition, its size, production process and presentation (Camfield 1989, p. 91-92); Schwarz sold the edition in his gallery on a commercial basis.

Duchamp’s compromise

Probably the main motivation for Duchamp to partake in these commercial activities was simply to make a small profit. Since he had given most of his works away, his reputation had not been translated into economic terms. Apart from commercial reasons, the replicas had artistic repercussions which Duchamp did not eschew. The American painter Douglas Gorsline, for instance, who asked Duchamp to sign his bottle-dryer, got the following reply in the mail: “In Milan I have just made a contract with Schwarz, authorizing him to make an edition (8 replicas) of all my few readymades, including the porte bouteille [bottle-dryer]. I have therefore pledged myself not to sign anymore readymades to protect this edition. But signature or no signature, your find has the same ‘metaphysical’ value as any other ready-made, [it] even has the advantage to have no commercial value.” (Naumann 1999, p. 245.)

Thus Duchamp suggested that his signature decreased rather than increased the value of his readymades, since the commercial value that the signature generated was a vice rather than a virtue. Likewise his friend Max Ernst, who first thought that “the value of the gesture which established the great beauty of the readymade seemed compromised,” started wondering later on if the transaction was not merely “a new attempt to throw public opinion, to confuse minds, to deceive admirers, to encourage his imitators by his bad example, etc.” (Naumann 1999, p. 25.) When Ernst asked Duchamp, the latter laughingly agreed.

Duchamp’s commercial excursions were condemned nevertheless, for they seemed to turn the readymade’s original critique into a celebration of exchange value. Robert Lebel, one of the first experts on Duchamp, refused to include any of these replicas in an exhibition. (Naumann 1999, p. 22.)

Daniel Buren maintained that “Duchamp totally betrayed himself…when he allowed Schwarz to make replicas.” John Cage wondered why he permitted the creation of these replicas that looked more like business than art ⁽¹²⁾ and many other people could not understand why their model of artistic integrity no longer resisted the temptations of the market. Critics of Duchamp saw their doubts confirmed.

If the readymades deconstructed “modernist notions” of originality, the replicas deconstructed this very critical potential. Because of his commercial joint venture of the 1960s, Duchamp became “a factory foreman…O.K.ing a product” rather than an “originary genius authenticating a creative work through his signature.” (Jones 1995, p.140.) Thus Duchamp exactly enacted what Peter Bürger warned the neo avant-garde about: that the means by which art could be sublated, would be burdened with the status of an artwork, fully institutionalized and incorporated into the market.⁽¹³⁾ (Bürger 1974, p. 57-58.)

Anti-market perspective

So here we are at a dead end. Duchamp’s own defense with respect to Schwarz’s reproduction of the readymades, that all great painters have made copies of their work, that hardly any sculpture in the history of art is unique, that “it is rarity which gives the artistic certificate.” (Camfield 1989, p. 94.) Obviously these defenses only add insult to injury. We are stuck with a body of work whose critical impact is unmistakable, but a biography which seems to be entirely affirmative of Institution Art.

But let’s return one more time to the first of Duchamp’s financial documents, the Tzanck Check, and take a close look at its economic biography. Since Duchamp made the Tzanck Check (just before he created L.H.O.O.Q) to pay for the services of a dentist, the origin of the work is in economics, not art; only later would the document move back into the art world. Tzanck, who was an established Parisian art collector, accepted the check wholeheartedly. The Tzanck Check – Thank Check? – thus constituted an ambiguous transaction, a mixture of ordinary market exchange, barter trade, and gift-giving based on reciprocity. Duchamp probably knew the dentist via his brother-in-law Jean Crotti, Suzanne Duchamp’s husband; many artists and poets went to see him because of his willingness to accept art work as a means of payment. (Tomkins 1996, p. 220.) Of course the check had no direct monetary value, and contrary to the other works Tzanck accepted the aesthetic value of this piece was negligible as well, but by “buying” Tzanck a place in the art world the check definitely had sumptuary value. (cf. Foster 1996, p. 108.)

The work remained in Tzanck’s collection for more than two decades. In 1940 Duchamp was busy putting together the first edition of the Boîte-en-valise. The war had started but he was still able to find the materials he needed to create the boxes. Furthermore, he found his patron Arensberg willing to finance the project. As a counter-gesture, Duchamp created the opportunity for Arensberg to buy the Tzanck Check for $50 from Tzanck and L.H.O.O.Q., which Duchamp still owned himself, for another $100. (Tomkins 1996, p. 319.) For unknown reasons, Arensberg declined the offer.

Eventually Duchamp would buy the check himself for 1000 francs, somewhat more than the stated value of $115. In an interview with Cabanne, Duchamp vaguely recalls giving the check away later to the painter Roberto Matta (Cabanne 1967, p. 59), but in fact Matta’s wife Patricia, future daughter-in-law of Henri Matisse and admirer of Duchamp, bought the work from him together with the original L.H.O.O.Q. and Network of Stoppages (Tomkins 1996, p. 391).

In 1965 the work would be shown at the Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery in New York after which it ended up in the Mary Sisler Collection, together with a number of other works like the Rotary Demisphere, a large number of early works by Duchamp, and a set of Schwarz’s edition of readymades.⁽¹⁴⁾ Probably this transaction did not get much approval by Duchamp: in the eyes of Duchamp and gallery owner Ekstrom, Mary Sisler turned out to be less of an art lover than they had assumed. They expected her to donate the whole collection to a museum, but instead she sold parts of it off. Ekstrom: “She had no real interest in or feeling for the work.” (Tomkins 1996, p. 436.) The Tzanck Check was later sold by Sisler to Arturo Schwarz, who recently donated the work to the Israel Museum (Jerusalem).

The social/cultural subtext of exchange

Defying the “anti-market” perspective prevalent in the humanities, the economic biography of the Tzanck Check points at the highly personalized nature of economic transactions in art. Indeed, almost all of Duchamp’s artworks have been owned by persons he had known for a long time, and the majority of them ended up with two collectors, Walter Arensberg and Katherine Dreier who were patrons of Duchamp for almost all of his life (they donated their collections to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Yale Art Gallery respectively). Copies of the Monte Carlo Bond were owned by his friends André Breton, Jacques Doucet, the painter Marie Laurencin (an ex-lover of Apollinaire, who had been represented along with Duchamp and seven other artists in Apollinaire’s The Cubist Painters), Daniel Tzanck and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which had received a copy from Duchamp as a gift in 1939. (Lebel 1959, p. 171.)

Analogous to Greek or Medieval societies, where commercial exchange was largely the domain of strangers rather than citizens proper, or to contemporary society, where commercial transactions are avoided as much as possible in intimate relationships, Duchamp seemed to have discriminated deliberately between the transactions he got involved in. Whereas he made a partial living from buying and selling works that were more remote from his own studio, he avoided commercial transactions in the works he created himself by giving them away.⁽¹⁵⁾ The impersonal financial systems signified by the Tzanck Check, theCheque Bruno and the Czech Check not withstanding, these checks were in fact subjects of gift relationships.

The economic biography of the Tzanck Check also defies the anti-market mentality that is still so common in the humanities by qualifying the concept of commodification: artworks, like other goods, merely go through “commodity phases.” (cf. Appadurai 1986.) The evaluational history they adopt in their non-commodified status – from admirers talking informally about the work in a private setting to highly specialized and institutionalized scholarly analysis – is inevitably taken into the economic realm every time an artwork enters a commodity phase.

Interrogated by Cabanne about the opportunities he continuously created for Arensberg to acquire his works, Duchamp answered, “I had a certain love for what I was making, and this love was translated into that form.” (Cabanne 1967, p. 74.) Valuation in the domain of art in other words spills over into the domain of the market, and thus both domains are blurred. “Value is created through exchange, through the display, circulation, and consumption of the work, in a game where worth has no meaning in and of itself.” (Judovitz 1995, p. 163.)

Seen in this light, the financial documents take Duchamp’s “ordinary” readymades one step further: whereas the readymades had defied Marxian notions of value by indicating that objects can have value without “embodying” labor, they obscured the source of this value in the signature and institutional setting of the work. The financial documents indicate by contrast, that exchange, both inside and outside of the economic realm, may be closer to the source of value and of our desire to own a good. Desire, in other words, is at the same time satisfied and generated by exchange.

Rather than signifying the commensurability of art on the market (commensurate, for instance, to the services of a dentist), they highlight the social and cultural subtexts of exchange. The financial documents emphasize the fact that both money and art work are dependent on trust, while both need a social setting in order to function. Just as the paper money and checks we use in everyday transactions are fiduciary and do not embody any value themselves, Duchamp’s checks destroy any illusions we may still have had about the intrinsic value of art. Instead, its value is based on a discursive context which initiates the production of belief. (cf. Bourdieu 1993.) As one interpreter concludes:

And Duchamp? Yes, both making a living and making art could surely be done simultaneously, “without one destroying the other,” and no, not too much attention should be paid to his activities as an arts marketer. Admittedly, “I bought back one of my paintings…Then I sold it, a year or two later, to a fellow from Canada. This was amusing. It didn’t require much work from me.” (Cabanne 1967, p. 74.) Or, in other words, “it is not that important.”

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Notes

1. Not Seen and/or Less Seen of/by Marcel Duchamp/Rrose Sélavy, 1904-1964.

2. For exceptions, see De Duve (1990), Judovitz (1995), Joselit (1998) and Read (1989).

3. By contrast, the Tzanck Check was published under the title Dessin Dada in Francis Picabia’s short-lived magazine Cannibale in 1920. Duchamp included the Check in the Boîte-en-valise (Box-in-a-suitcase), which he started working on in the late 1930s (Tomkins 1996, p. 317), and it was part of a number of main collections. Furthermore Alfred Barr included André Breton’s copy of the Monte Carlo Bonds in his 1936 exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, whereas the Tzanck Check was exhibited in 1945 at Yale in a show of Duchamp and his two brothers, Jacques Villon and Raymond Duchamp-Villon. (Tomkins 1996, p. 346.)

4. In an interview he stressed the labor of making it: “I took a long time doing the little letters, to do something which would look printed – it wasn’t a small check.” (Cabanne 1967, p. 63.)

5. Arturo Schwarz has coined pseudo-readymades like the Tzanck Check and Monte Carlo Bonds “rectified readymades.” (Schwarz 1997, p. 45.)

6. As Amelia Jones (1994) notices, Rrose Sélavy thus became an authority over her author Marcel Duchamp.

7. Duchamp did try out his system but unsurprisingly the profits were not large enough to make more than a fraction of the dividends payable. (cf. Lebel 1959, p. 137.) The only person known to have received any dividends is the Parisian couturier and art collector Jean Doucet.

8. Instead, he concentrated on playing chess. However, with the Monte Carlo Bonds in mind Duchamp wrote playfully to Picabia: “You see, I haven’t quit being a painter, now I am drawing on chance.” (Lebel 1959, p. 187.)

9. In a letter to Hans Richter Duchamp had complained that “in Neo-Dada they have taken my ready-mades and found aesthetic beauty in them. I threw the bottle-rack and the urinal into their faces as a challenge and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty.” (Camfield 1989, p. 96.)

10. This complaint echoes the American economist and social critic Thorstein Veblen. Value, Veblen argued in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), is informed by “pecuniary canons of taste”: for an object to appeal to our sense of beauty, it must have aesthetic qualities as well as the looks of expensiveness. And if beauty and expensiveness are related, this is because we tend to value an object “in proportion as they are costly.” (Veblen 1899, p. 108.) Because of its high price art is an exemplary tool for what Veblen calls “invidious distinction” or, in other words for being a marker of status.

11. Sidney Janis, for instance, recalls Duchamp’s help in putting together the Dada show at his gallery in 1953: “A most difficult show to do since collectors were hesitant to risk invaluable loans, but Marcel’s frequent intercession smoothly resolved these problems.” (Janis in D’Harnoncourt and McShine 1973, p. 202.)

12. When Buren asked Duchamp why he did that, Duchamp supposedly answered that “[t]he notion of original extends to eight…today.” (De Duve 1991, p. 309.) Ironically, Cage induced Duchamp to make a reproduction of the Czech Check, desiring to own Marcel’s signature on his membership card himself. When Cage coincidentally received a new membership card on the day the old one was sold at the fund-raising action, Duchamp did not mind signing the new card as well.

13. As a review of a recent exhibition of Marcel Duchamp’s works in a New York gallery noted: “While Duchamp often blurred such distinctions, they become important in defining his market. A good signature and the artist’s touch still means something in terms of prices.” (Art and Auction Magazine, October 1999.)

14. Sisler acquired most of the works before they were exhibited at Cordier & Ekstrom in 1965, mainly from Henri-Pierre Roché, who had died in 1959, and Gustave Candel. (Naumann 1984, p. 17.) It is unclear however how she acquired the Tzanck Check and sold it afterwards.

15. As Foster argues, the gift is one of the ways to challenge capitalist exchange and its presupposition of equivalence symbolically. (Foster 1996, p. 115.) Likewise Lewis Hyde has noted that gift-giving acknowledges similarities between the persons involved in the transaction: “an academic scientist who ventures outside of the community to consult for industry expects to be paid a fee (…) The inverse might be the old institution of ‘professional courtesy’ in which professionals discount their services to each other. The custom is the opposite of a ‘fee for service’ in that it changes what would normally be a market transaction into a gift transaction (removing the profit) as a recognition of the fact that the ‘buyer and seller’ are members of the same community and it is therefore inappropriate to benefit from each other’s knowledge.” (Hyde 1983, p. 78.)

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Bibilography

Appadurai, Arjun, ed. The Social Life of Things. Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production. Essays on Art and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.

Bürger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Translated by M. Shaw. 1974. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

Cabanne, Pierre. Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp. Translated by R. Padgett. 1967. New York: Da Capo Press, 1971.

Camfield, William A. Marcel Duchamp. Fountain. Houston: Houston Fine Art Press, 1989.

Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery. NOT SEEN and/or LESS SEEN of/by MARCEL DUCHAMP/RROSE SELAVY 1904-64. Exhibition Catalogue, New York, 1965.

Sanouillet, M. and E. Peterson, eds. Salt Seller: The Writings of Marcel Duchamp. 1959. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.

De Duve, Thierry. “Marcel Duchamp, or The Phynancier of Modern Life,” October 52 (1990), 60-75.

De Duve, Thierry, ed. The Definitively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991.

Foster, Hal. Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century. Cambridge: MIT Press 1996.

D’Harnoncourt, Anne and Kynaston McShine, eds. Marcel Duchamp. 1973. Munich: Prestel, 1989.

Hyde, Lewis. The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. New York: Random House, 1989.

James, Carol P. “An Original Revolutionary Messagerie Rrose, or What Became of Readymades,” in Thierry De Duve, ed., The Definitively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991.

Jones, Amelia. Postmodernism and the En-gendering of Marcel Duchamp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Joselit, David. Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp, 1910-1941. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998.

Judovitz, Dalia. Unpacking Duchamp: Art in Transit. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

Lebel, Robert. Marcel Duchamp. Translated by G.H. Hamilton. New York: Trianon Press, 1959.

Naumann, Francis M. The Mary and William Sisler Collection. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1984.

Naumann, Francis M. Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Making Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Ghent: Ludion Press, 1999.

Paz, Octavio. Marcel Duchamp. Appearance Stripped Bare. Translated by R. Philips and D. Gardner. New York: Viking Press, 1978.

Read, Peter. “The Tzanck Check and Related Works by Marcel Duchamp,” in R. Kuenzli and F. Nauman, eds., Artist of the Century, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989.

Schwarz, Arturo. The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp. 3rd ed. New York: Delano Greenidge, 1997.

Tomkins, Calvin. The Bride & The Bachelors. The Heretical Courtship in Modern Art. 1962. New York: Viking Press, 1965.

Tomkins, Calvin. Duchamp. A Biography. New York: Henry Holt, 1996.

Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class. 1899. New York: Dover, 1996.

click to enlarge

“Send Me a Kiss by Wireless”,
QST, May 1922, p. 54 (photo: Underwood & Underwood) This
picture was reproduced in many newspapers across the country during
the radio boom. The male radio amateurs reacted with new proposals
for captations, like “See the Shaft – on the Variometer”

Everything that we call electronic mass media today begins with the sending and receiving of signals without any material connection, with the miracle of “wireless” that started shortly before 1900. From 1920 on, this transmission technique of then primarily strategic military use develops into radio broadcasting. As a result, material things disappear from mass distribution and the media turn into something “immaterial”. The uniformity of all products for all people caused by industrialization – as is expressed by the lexical term “ready made” – is only a preliminary stage towards a globally synchronized perception of a “radio-made” experience world. With the Greenwich time signal, which has been broadcast by radio transmission from the tip of the Eiffel Tower since 1910, this immaterial synchronization reaches all of Europe. And only a year after that a time signal is transmitted around the world through a chain of wireless stations.

Radio is not a word but a prefix. It denotes something that emits radially: from one point to many, carried by electromagnetic waves. According to the intentions of its inventors, radio transmission ought to deliver a signal from a transmitter to one single receiver. But despite all efforts they cannot mold the Hertz waves to fit into the concept of cable connections: the signal would always reach more receivers than it was supposed to. Thus, the military becomes concerned with the secrecy of their radio messages. At the same time, this circumstance delights the radio amateurs who devotedly listen to everything their homemade apparati allow them to receive way before actual radio programs emerge. These craftsmen and amateurs form the basis of the unexpectedly developing radio boom starting in 1920, which creates a medium nobody had planned. The same happens again in the 1980s when hackers, being the first private users of the global computer and telecommunications network, represent the forerunners of the Internet boom of the 1990s.

Indeed, radio – and therefore the beginning of all electronic mass media – is invented by receivers, not by broadcasters. One might modify Duchamp’s famous quote that the onlookers make the pictures: “Ce sont les récepteurs, qui font les médias.” And even though today it seems as if the broadcasters alone possessed all power over the mass media, there is an almost anarchical criterion, on which all is based and in which the power of the receivers has been preserved: In TV ratings are everything.

click to enlarge

“Radio Girl”, QST,June 1922, p. 68. Sketch of an
amateur from Poduch, NJ, reacting to the photograph
“Send Me a Kiss by Wireless,” including a reader’s letter (excerpt)
: “This radio game is getting too much punk lately.
Why, pick up any newspaper and take a look at some of the radio
pictures they are printing. Swell janes talking into sets that have
no tubes in the sockets.” Signed: “Your brass pounder. Amplifier
Ambrose.”

How could the power of the receivers be great enough to turn the entire media machine upside down and change it from a strategic into a distributive system? What fascination initiated all that constitutes our present-day electronicized worldview? For one thing, there is the “bricolage” or fiddling with ominous elements such as wire, lacquer, magnets, crystals and so on. Under one’s own hands an apparatus comes into being that brings forth strange signals from the nothingness of the air. The enigma lies in how something develops out of nothing and how this something is interconnected with the rest of the world. For there are signals telling of news from far away, of temperatures, stock market rates, other radio amateurs and sometimes even of sensations like the SOS signal of a distressed ship. The power of the receivers lies in the invention of listening – first there were the listeners, next broadcasting stations emerged addressing this unknown and scattered community, then a radio boom arose, which was very much comparable to today’s internet boom. During the first years of radio, listeners would experience and describe receiving as global raptures of listening to boundless spaces. ”

“…to feel at home in the surge, in the motion, in the fleeting and infinite. Not to be at home and yet to feel at home anywhere; to see the world, to be in its center and to be concealed from it.” These words may serve to describe the listening experience that would fascinate so many from the time of the amateurs to the beginning of radio. Yet they come from Charles Baudelaire and relate a flaneur’s experience in the anonymous mass of a modern metropolis, “from this universal communion he gains a unique sort of inebriation.”⁽¹⁾

click to enlarge

The first
radio lecture being delivered by radio from Tufts University, 1922.
Initially, radio is being promoted as a great instrument of education
for the masses. In the USA it is announced that the “University
of the Air” will have more students than all universities of the
country combined. At the first radio lecture at Tufts University
in 1922 it looks as if Freud himself speaks into the apparatus of
the soul – should it be viewed as a premonition of the libido’s
might, which would ultimately eliminate all educational value from
mass media? (see: Susan J. Douglas, Inventing American Broadcasting
1899-1922, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987, esp.
pp. 292-314)

The poet is a particularly sensitive receiver who by creating poetry becomes a sender himself. He bridges the centuries in the same way as it is depicted by Baudelaire’s marine metaphor of “Lighthouses” signifying intellectual authorities that send each other signals through the ages. What if the “universal communion” turned into a universal communication?

Many a time Baudelaire meets Baudrillard back to back on the shelves of a well-arranged private library. But beyond all alphabetical alliterations, premonition and abgesang of the sender’s power meet when Baudrillard writes in his “Requiem for the media”: “In the symbolic exchange relation, there is a simultaneous response. There is not transmitter or receiver on both sides of a message: nor, for that matter, is there any longer any ‘message’. […] Thus, the receiver (who in fact ceased to be one) intervenes here at the most essential level” by a “subversive reading” of the transmitter.⁽²⁾

It is exactly one such subversion of the broadcaster’s power through the receiver that 20 years before Baudrillard had been undertaken by John Cage’s “Imaginary Landscape No.4”: 24 performers convert 12 radios from reception to production devices. Something quite similar had already been done with record players in the 1939 piece “Imaginary Landscape No.1.” The transformation of a receiving device into a source of continuous original production has become an everyday aspect of mass entertainment in the era of the Techno-DJs. “Do you remember your thinking at the time?” Cage is asked. “Yes, my thinking was that I didn’t like the radio and that I would be able to like it if I used it in my work. That’s the same kind of thinking that we ascribe to the cave dwellers in their drawings of frightening animals on the walls – that through making the pictures of them that they would come to terms with them.”⁽³⁾

It seems as if media and machines have replaced wild beasts in the way they are depicted in art and literature of the 19th and 20th century: dangerous and fascinating, they cannot be conquered by the individual but are at the same time indispensable for the nutrition of the whole of the entire human society. The hoard of those, who are avantgarde fighters in the field of media and machines, is as purely male by definition as any prehistorical group of animal hunters.

One of the most famous wild beasts is Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick”. Here, the danger lurks in the deep – of the soul and of the sea – and both confront each other in such a dramatic way that the book becomes a world success. The metaphor of wild nature is replaced by technology in Melville’s almost unknown fantastic narration “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” of 1852. It describes a bizarre world that comprises nine bachelors and a large machine, which is operated by lonely, freezing virgins and produces some sort of spermatozoid liquid from old clothes. Jean Suquet pointed out that the narration constitutes a counterpart to the “Bachelor Machine” of the Large Glass. Both agree even in details such as names and numbers, even though it is certain that Duchamp had never read Melville.⁽⁴⁾

It may seem almost natural that all radio amateurs and computer hackers of the 20th century are true bachelors. They are “amateurs”, i.e. lovers in the proper sense, who already get confused by the fact that with the opening up of their domain to a mass audience women might now be present on the air and on the Internet, respectively. This way, the previously celibatic purity of technology is sacrificed, making space for a playground of media-erotomaniac identity games that are based on the technical ambivalence of distance and proximity.

But in the depth of language the secret goal of all hackers is buried: The “matrix” is the net of all nets and at the same time it is the mother’s womb. The painful rebirth of Neo alias Keanu Reeves into the real world as shown in the movie “The Matrix” (1999) offers the best visualization of this double meaning. Perhaps, the ultimate goal of all those hackers, amateurs and lovers in regard to their media could be compared to Paik’s “Danger Music”⁽⁵⁾for Dick Higgins: to crawl into the vagina of a live female whale in order to become one with what separates them from the world – thereby, without being explicitly sexual, reinstating the prenatal experience of absolute seclusion in a man-made natural environment. But alas, there is no escape: ultrasound will detect the embryo in a mother’s womb as well as the whale in the depths of the sea. Technology advances into realms that previously were considered unknowable and therefore remained in the unconscious mind.

click to enlarge

Marcel Duchamp,The Bride Stripped
Bare by her Bachelors, even (The Large Glass),
1915-23© 2000 Succession Marcel
Duchamp ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris

In the Large Glass the bachelors and the bride stand divided by a translucent horizon, yet they are connected through “wireless”.⁽⁶⁾Media technology surpasses the horizon between the two irreconcilable worlds – just like in Grandville’s enigmatic woodcarving from 1844, which shows a letter shooting up from the depths of the sea on a spiraling cable. Here, reference is made to the first submarine telegraph cable.⁽⁷⁾

click to enlarge

Jean-Jacques Grandville, “Une fusée élastique,
” in: Un Autre Monde, Paris:
H. Fournier, 1844

Is it coincidence that during the last years of the 19th century two disciplines that – due to their lack of physical substance – the ordinary mind found unimaginable are investigated almost synchronous: wireless transmission technology and psychoanalysis? Both of these are the last great gifts of the 19th to the 20th century where they would have enormous effects. Both have lead to a new form of non-dialogic one-way speech that clearly assigns the sender and the receiver their respective separate sides of couch and microphone. And both turn the flow of natural language into a new form of “automatic” speech. The surrealists utilized this phenomenon in their “écriture automatique”, which, in turn, is based on the futurist’s “wireless imagination”, a language lacking any regard to syntax and punctuation. The difference between the approaches of the surrealists and the futurists is that the latter refer to the electric, wireless medium while the former employ the psychological or even para-psychological meaning of “medium” as a model. In the libidinous and immaterial wireless connection between the bachelors and the bride of theLarge Glass technology and psychology are put to work together.

Like submarine commanders in the sea of the unconscious, bachelors of all ages and media send out signals through their machines, without even knowing that by doing so they are but trying to reach prospective brides. Though, strategically they seem just as helpless as the submarine Cage’s father, an inventor, had constructed. Cage compares his father without hesitation to Duchamp in that they were both “bricoleurs”.⁽⁸⁾ The submarine, however, was never put to service in WW I, because it could be detected too easily due to the bubbles that would rise from it. This is why “… and bubbles on surface” is frequently heard from Cage in his readings and writings.

Thus is the state of the subconscious that it is nothing but a sunken cultural asset lurking deep down on the bottom of common sense where we can detect it through bubbles on the surface of the media.⁽⁹⁾

Today, the last adventures in an overly well-known world await the surfer in the depths of the Internet. He dives deep into the waves of the information tide, as did the radio amateurs who would lose themselves in the global waves of the ether. Only rarely he surfaces to obtain the bare necessities for survival from the world of “ready-made” goods.⁽¹⁰⁾

The ever-identical object from the world of mass-produced goods becomes obvious only through the attachment of a pseudo-indivduality to a single “ready-made” object. In the same manner, the world of “radio-made” information becomes distinguishable from static only through the random selection of a single one out of many signals. Since the appearance of “ready-mades”, producing and presenting as the basic principles of mass production have become as dubious as sending and receiving have for media technology since Cage’s “Imaginary Landscape No.4”. George Brecht follows Cage’s path with his “Candle piece for radios” and the concept of “listener as virtuoso”.⁽¹¹⁾

But aren’t even the songs of whale recorded, as if they were messages encoded for us humans? Whenever a signal is sent man thinks it happened on his behalf.⁽¹²⁾

Certainly, the spiritualistic medium of occultism has – in part – been inspired by “wireless” technology. Yet it remains a pre-technological model, even if the shortcut between sender and receiver in a psycho-technology of make-beliefs may be comparable to the collaps of the sender-receiver model in the mass media according to Baudrillard.⁽¹³⁾ But it is the privilege of artists to transcend the division of sender and receiver without losing their credibility. Thus, claims Duchamp, artists play a “mediumistic” role allowing the worth of a work of art to remain “completely divorced from the rationalized explanations of the artist. […] All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.”⁽¹⁴⁾ The work of art reaches the viewer like the signal reaches the listener, like the sonar reaches the whale.

click images to enlarge

• 
• 

• “Cage-type emitting antenna,
  from: Henri Poincaré and Frederick Vreeland,
  Maxwell’s Theory and Wireless Telegraphy,
  New York, 1904, p. 142” (image from:
  Henderson, cf. note 6, ill. no. 103)
• Suzanne Duchamp, Radiationde Deux Seuls
  Éloignés (Radiation of Two Lone Ones at a Distance),
  1916-18-20. The combination of wireless technology
  and erotic desire becomes more explicit in this work
  by Suzanne than in her brother’s Large Glass.
  According to Linda Dalrymple Henderson “The upper form
  resembles a cage-type emitting antenna [see adjacent image]
  and the lower gridded one implies a surface on which the
  ‘radiations’ are to be recorded. […] the theme seems to
  echo that of the Large Glass: here an antennalike
  ‘Bride’ (Suzanne herself?) projects her message.”
  (Henderson, cf. note 6, p. 112). The metaphor of an
  electric or magnetic attraction between lovers has its
  roots way back in the age of romanticism: In 1827,
  Goethe told Eckermann “between lovers the magnetic
  force is especially strong.” Around the same time,
  the possibility of telegraphy via the “loving
  needles” of two distant compasses synchronized by myserious
  forces was seriously discussed.

---

Notes

1. Charles Baudelaire, quoted after Wolfgang Kraus (ed.), Symbole und Signale: Frühe Dokumente der literarischen Avantgarde, Bremen 1961, pp. 46 – 47 (see also: Charles Baudelaire’s “The Painter of Modern Life,” in:The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, London: Phaidon, 1964, pp. 1-40; Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen, New York: Norton, 1988, transl. by Louise Varese)

2. Jean Baudrillard, “Requiem for the Media” (1972), in: For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign(Charles Levin, transl.), St. Louis, Mo.: Telos Press, 1981, pp. 164-84

3. Richard Kostelanetz and John Cage, “A Conversation about Radio in Twelve Parts,” (1984) in: John Cage at Seventy-Five (Bucknell Review, v. 32, no. 2), Cranbury, NJ: Associated UP, p. 278 (pp. 270-302).

4. Jean Suquet, Miroir de la Mariée, Paris 1973, S. 228 – 231. The term “bachelor machine” stems from the “Green Box” of 1934, Duchamp’s collected notes for his “Large Glass”. Numerous authors pick up on the term, applying it to a wide variety of phenomena, e.g. in: Michel Carrouges, Les Machines Célibatiares (1954), Paris 1975 and Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipe, Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1972

5. Nam June Paik, Niederschriften eines Kulturnomaden, Edith Decker (ed.), Köln 1992, p. 16

6. cf. Linda Dalrymple Henderson, Duchamp in Context: Science and Technology in the Large Glass and Related Works, Princeton 1998, see esp. pp. 103-115: “Wireless Telegraphy, Telepathy, and Radio Control in the Large Glass”

7. Jean-Jacques Grandville, “Une fusée élastique”, in: Un autre Monde, Paris 1848/49

8. Conversation of the author with John Cage, Cologne, 1987

9. So to speak the “subconscious” (German: unterbewusst) is a Freudian misconstruction based on a misunderstanding of Sigmund Freud’s “unconscious” (German: unbewusst). For the notion of the unconscious topologically located “underneath” the conscious, to be found somewhere ‘down there’, like some kind of primeval sludge rising that resurfaces every now and then, is not in any way related to Freud’s concept of the unconscious. In fact, his writings call for a very different model of the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious, with the conscious arising from the unconscious, being enclosed by it while both are subjected to their mutual state of continuous correlation.(from an e-mail correspondence with Sigrid Schade).

10. E-mail correspondence with Sigrid Schade

11. Both net-pop culture and art offer comparable experiments by which one’s entire lifestyle, from food to furniture to sex partners are organized via the internet; cf. Dirk Lehmann, “Überleben mit dem Internet”, in:Konr@d, December/January 1998 – 99, pp. 22 – 28 and Christian Jankowski, Let’s get physical/digital, Galerie Klosterfelde, Berlin June/August 1998; also: www.artnode.se/physical/digital

12. George Brecht, Notebooks I – III, 1958 – 1959, Facsimile Editon, Dieter Daniels (ed.) with collaboration of Hermann Braun, Köln 1991, vol.. III, p. 111 and footnotes

13. cf. Wolfgang Hagen, “Der Okkultismus der Avantgarde um 1900”, in: Sigrid Schade, Georg Christoph Tholen (eds.): Konfigurationen zwischen Kunst und Medien, with CD-ROM by Heiko Idensen (ed.), Paderborn 1999

14. Marcel Duchamp, English translation from the French quoted after: Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (eds.), The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, New York 1989, pp. 139f

The following animations are based on Marcel Duchamp’s paintings Chocolate Grinder, No. 1, 1913 and Chocolate Grinder, No. 2, 1914, both at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Duchamp based these images on a machine he saw in a confectionary shop (Gamelin’s) in Rouen. These images are significant to Duchamp’s oeuvre because they prefigure the Large Glass (his most renowned work) through clarity of drawing, observance of perspective and the incorporation of mechanism and rotation

Click image for video (QT 0.5MB)

• 
• 

• 1^st Animation – Copyright 1999 Stuart Smith/Mark Jones
• 2^nd Animation – Copyright 1999 Julian Baum/Mark Jones]

I have been analyzing Duchamp’s manipulation of perspective as a research topic for an MPhil/PHD at Manchester Metropolitan University. This research has involved visiting chocolate manufacturers to see similar machines working and correspondence with a number of eminent Duchamp scholars. My aim is to clarify whether Duchamp has, as he claimed, reinvented perspective in the 20th century.

The research involves practical creative work, producing measured perspectives, 3D models and computer animations in conjunction with Ian Marland at British Aerospace, Chadderton, UK.

The animation in red and white checker board is one of six produced by Stuart Smith that is speculating on the motion of the grinder. The other animation, created by Julian Baum, is a simulation of the grinder based on Duchamp’s notes in the Green book.

• The team involved includes
• Mark Jones – Research and model making
• Frazer Gregory – Multimedia
• Stuart Smith – Animations
• Julian Baum – Animations
• Anneliese Cheadle – PR
• Ian Marland – AutoCAD

The following essay is appearing for the first time in English. An Italian version appeared in the Catalogue for the 1993 Venice Biennale. The three-part fragmented format was due to my underestimating or misconstruing the publisher’s desires regarding length.

A little way into Part II of Goethe’s Faust, a short, cacophonous scene transpires in which various poets – poets of nature, court poets, love poets – are so intent on being heard that not a word can be understood by the audience. One poet, the Satirical Poet, does manage at last to get a decipherable word in above the din – it’s his only line in the play: “Do you know what would really delight me as a poet? To write and recite what no one wants to hear.”

With this one line, Goethe telegraphed with marvelous accuracy one of the most conspicuous features of the twentieth century avant-garde. I am thinking particularly of the work of three related giants: James Joyce, Marcel Duchamp and John Cage.

Never before has a work of literature been so universally known by name yet so little read as Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Similarly, there is no precedent for a body of artwork so widely disseminated yet so little understood as Duchamp’s oeuvre from 1913 on. And in John Cage we have a composer who, even before his death, was being cited as the most influential composer of the twentieth century. Yet how many music lovers rush home from the record store to put on the latest Cage CD? It then comes as no surprise that Joyce was Cage’s favorite contemporary writer, Finnegans Wake his favorite work of twentieth century literature, and Duchamp his favorite artist.

Goethe’s Faust was admired and gleefully plundered by the eccentric French poet and playwright, Alfred Jarry. His extended take-off, Faustroll, contains stream of consciousness passages, which look forward to Joyce’s Ulysses, and numerous invented words, which help prepare us for Finnegans Wake.⁽¹⁾
Faustroll is, on the whole, a work of such complexity that Jarry added these words to the completed manuscript: “This book will not be published integrally until the author has acquired sufficient experience to savor all its beauties in full.” In fact, Faustroll, was not published until 1911, four years after Jarry’s death at the pitiable age of thirty-four.

As Jarry was informed by Goethe’s sentiments, Joyce, Duchamp and Cage were informed by Jarry’s (Joyce and Duchamp, I believe, directly; Cage, according to my thesis, more by his love of Joyce and Duchamp). John Cage did not enjoy what he knew of Jarry. When I broached the subject, Cage said the following:

I have an allergy, you might call it, against the kind of expression that was Jarry’s, but it’s clear that Duchamp did not. But I agree with the view that everyone was influenced by Jarry. I myself think that Duchamp and Joyce having used Jarry is far more interesting than anything Jarry himself did.⁽²⁾

I never learned exactly how much of Jarry John Cage had read, but he admitted that he had read some. In 1989, at his suggestion, I loaned him my copy of the English translation of The Supermale.⁽³⁾

I had noted on the blank pages numerous passages which correspond with parts of Duchamp’s notes and with sections of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. After a few days Cage returned the book, sayingthat it was a novel and he couldn’t read novels. A short time after thishe volunteered that my interest in the subject had brought him back to Jarry. Cage gave no titles and never indicated that his “allergy” had left him. I believe that if he had read more of Jarry, Faustroll in particular, his feelings might have changed. After all, in addition to his love for Joyce and Duchamp, who he agreed were influenced by Jarry,he repeatedly commented that he followed Antonin Artaud’s philosophy of theater. Artaud was, in fact, such a disciple of the writer that he named his theater “The Alfred Jarry.”

Ironically, John Cage had more similarities with Jarry than did either Joyce or Duchamp. His sexual orientation was much closer to Jarry’s than to that of the other two, although he was as soft-spoken on the subject as Jarry was blaring. And Cage, like Jarry, was an avowed anarchist. Here, too, the difference was more in the manner of expression and emphasis than in the bottom line commitment. But perhaps the most significant parallel between the two reveals itself when we look at their respective interest in Chance. We know that Cage studied with the Zen teacher, Daisetz Suzuki, and that as a result he started to use chance operations in his compositions around 1950.

Jarry was equally involved with Chance. His Pataphysics, an alternate hypothesis for the workings of the universe, assigns an important role to l’accident. The same holds true when he writes of matters à l’amour: “Men and women think they choose each other…as though the Earth should boast of revolving on purpose! It is in this passive inevitability, as of a falling stone, which men and women call love.” This “falling stone” remark may well have planted a seed in Duchamp which
resulted in the Standard Stoppages, by which he hoped to create “a new image of the unit of length.” The Jarry line which follows the “falling stone” reference runs: “The god and goddess are about to unite…in order to meet, they need a length of time which, according to human measurements,
varies between a second and two hours.” While this touches on the measurement of time, elsewhere (in How to Build a Time Machine) Jarry states bluntly that “space and time are commensurate.” He goes on to share his reasoning: “To explore the universe by seeking knowledge of points in Space can be accomplished only through Time: and in order to measure Time quantitatively we refer to Space intervals on the dial of a chronometer.”

Tapping another Jarry source, I have written:⁽⁴⁾

click to enlarge


Marcel Duchamp,3 Standard
Stoppages, 1913-14
© 2000 Succession Marcel Duchamp
ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris.

Jarry’s Doctor Faustroll has an almost obsessional fascination with standards of measure. He carries in his pocket a “centimeter, an authentic copy in brass of the traditional standard,”
and he also possesses a tuning fork, its period “carefully determined…in terms of mean seconds.” These habits are a parody of traditional Western science, which Jarry anarchically undermined. Discussing science, he remarked, “Universal assent is…a quite miraculous and incomprehensible prejudice.” Duchamp shared this attitude. The 3 Standard Stoppages, for example, in which the artist believed he had “trapped the mainstream of [his] future,” reflects his mock-scientific intention “to create a new image of the unit of length,” and to obtain a specimen of “canned chance.” The very method of their making – “a thread one meter long [falling] straight from a height of one meter on to a horizontal plane twisting as it pleases” – recalls a line in Jarry: “When a piece of copper is dropped…it will float down slowly as though a viscous liquid occupied the space.”⁽⁵⁾

There are many passages in each of his major works in which Jarry reveals strong feelings about chance. One description in The Supermale is particularly apt. The Supermale (Marcueil) wants to get into his disguise for the 82 ravishments of Ellen Elson within 24 hours.”It was ten o’clock, and André Marcueil was looking for an excuse to slip off to make way for the Indian. Chance – or perhaps some previously determined assistance brought about by chance – supplied him with one.” In Duchamp’s notes pertaining to his making of the 3 Standard Stoppages, he almost literally describes a previously determined assistance brought about by chance.

André Breton maintained that “beginning with Jarry…the differentiation long considered necessary between art and life has been challenged to wind up annihilated as a principle.” Duchamp presented manufactured products from life as art, a gesture surely in tune with this stance of
Jarry’s. And Cage’s composition 4’33”,
in which the natural sounds occurring during that length of time constitute the piece, likewise demolishes this distinction. Cage often said that 4’33” was his favorite of his own works, and that he believed that the most beautiful music was the natural sounds around us.⁽⁶⁾

click images to enlarge

• 
  
• 
  

• John Cage,
  4’33”, 1960
  Reproduced with permission of
  Henmor Press, Inc. New York
• John Cage,
  4’33”, 1960
  Reproduced with permission of
  Henmor Press, Inc. New York

click images to enlarge

• 
  
• 
  

• John Cage,4’33”, 1960
  Reproduced with permission of
  Henmor Press, Inc. New York
• John Cage,4’33”, 1960
  Reproduced with permission of
  Henmor Press, Inc. New York

The characters in Jarry’s Faustroll parody and, at times, ridicule Jarry’s great model, Goethe’s Faust. Duchamp’s improvised mustache performs a similar service for Leonardo’s La Gioconda. And so it is also with the vocalists in Cage’s Europeras 1,2,3,4 & 5, who are instructed to perform arias of their own choosing simultaneously with chance chosen excerpts, both orchestral and vocal, from existing masterworks. For a lover of Mozart or Monteverdi to hear a beloved aria overlaid with the sounds of a frothy bit of pastry from a popular operetta, the experience can readily be compared to that of an aficionado of Da Vinci’s works first encountering Duchamp’s desecrated icon,

click to enlarge


Marcel Duchamp,>L.H.O.O.Q., 1919
© 2000 Succession Marcel Duchamp ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris.

L.H.O.O.Q.

There is a passage in Faustroll in which Jarry pokes such delicious fun at painters that I believe its publication in 1911 may have helped Duchamp decide to call it a day at the easel. In it, Jarry likens painting to masturbation, an urge so strong and irrepressible that there will be painting even after the end of the living world. Once again, Chance plays an important part in his fantasy:

“…Meanwhile, after there was no one left in the world,the painting machine, animated inside by a system of weightless springs, revolved…like a spinning top…dashed itself against the pillars, swayed and veered in infinitely varied directions, and followed its own whim in [ejaculating] onto the walls’ canvas the succession of primary colors ranged according to the tubes of its stomach…this modern deluge…”

When Jarry attacks the scientific rationale, he concludes by putting forth “purely accidental phenomena” as the more realistic explanation: “the laws which it is believed have been discovered in the traditional universe [are but] correlations of exceptions…of purely accidental phenomena.”And l’accident occurs as a pivotal idea in his definition of Pataphysics, given here in a shortened version:

Pataphysics…is the science of that which is superinduced upon metaphysics, either within, or outside of, the confines of the latter, extending as far beyond metaphysics as metaphysics extends beyond physics. E.g., the epiphenomenon [that which is superinduced upon phenomenon] often being the accident, Pataphysics will be above the science of the particular, even though it is said that the only science is that of the general. It will study the laws governing exceptions and will explain the universe supplementary to this one…”

In the early 1980s, at a festival of new music in Venice, I attended numerous concerts with John Cage, sometimes several in a single day. I made the observation that when I was listening to anyone else’s music I could pick up echoes of Berg, Stravinsky, Webern, Bartok, Schoenberg, or whomever. But then something of his would be played and I was on my own. No traces of ideas from earlier composers could be heard. His music was full of ever-new sound and structure, guaranteed no doubt by his use
of chance. For all I knew, his music could have come from another world.His polite smile of agreement reminded me that his way of listening could not be further from mine; his whole approach was ahistorical.

Robert Rauschenberg has remarked that he likes to operate in the ever-narrowing gap between life and art. John Cage has responded that he’d rather collapse them both together. If we think of the radical freshness of the Europeras, in effect built from the bits and pieces of the old – its debris you might say – Jarry’s introduction to Ubu Enchained, with which he greeted the last century in 1900, seems to be at least indicated, if not vindicated:

Pa Ubu: “Hornstrumpet! We shall not have succeeded in demolishing everything unless we demolish the ruins as well. But the only way I can see of doing that is to use them to put up a lot of fine, well-designed buildings.”⁽⁷⁾

© 1993, 2000 William Anastasi

*******************

April 24, 1993

A short time after John Cage learned that I was researching correspondences between Jarry’s writings and Duchamp’s notes and art works, he asked, “What have you found?” I listed some of the pieces by Duchamp, which seemed most clearly connected to certain passages or images in Jarry.
This list included:

The Large Glass, Étant Donnés, Bicycle Wheel, Bottle Dryer, In Advance of the Broken Arm, Tu m’, To Be Looked At With One Eye…, Monte Carlo Bond, L.H.O.O.Q., Why Not Sneeze Rrose Sélavy?, Comb, With Hidden Noise, Apolinère Enameled, Traveler’s Folding Item, Fountain and With My Tongue In My Cheek.

When I paused, trying to remember additional items, he asked whether I had found anything in Jarry, which might have pointed toward Duchamp’s “musical sculpture” paragraph, which is in the Green Box notes. [“Muscial sculpture. Sounds lasting and leaving from different places and forming a sounding sculpture which lasts.”] I answered that I had found a possible link in The Supermale, which was perhaps a less literal and certainly a more complex connection than the links I had been finding for many of the art works.

The images which make up this connection appear in a section of the novel in which suddenly a wide variety of sounds are being described for us at every turn. In some cases, sounds emanating from different places at different times are described as arriving intermingled at one place. Repeatedly we are given descriptions of three-dimensional objects giving off sounds – “sound sculptures,” if you will. The sound images include “the clicking of heels,” “a burst of laughter,” “a crystalline chatter…like parakeets, deliciously out of tune, like the sound of love instruments tuning up,” “a rustling sound,” “a light and rapid step [is heard],” “the beating of [one girl’s] little fists” as she “drums” on an ironbound door,a voluminous quarter-hourly clock-chime, while “downstairs…violins weretuning up,” etc. Making reference to the clock-chimes which punctuate the entire section, or rather the space of silence between them, he writes, “It was one o’clock, it was any time, then it was eleven o’clock in the evening, and the distant music struck through the silence as confusedly as nervous fingers straining after the eye of a needle.” Since a church’s spire with quarter-hourly chimes pouring forth could very aptly be described as a “sounding sculpture,” the following passage seems relevant: “…at
irregular intervals the highest notes of the top strings rose like spires piercing through the fog.” These high notes, we are told, are interspersed with the deafening chimes and other sounds, helping the reader to imagine a veritable concerto performed by three-dimensional objects: “…its booming filled the long room, the chandelier vibrated, the picture frames trembled, and near the ceiling, a pane of glass vibrated.” Jarry, who Breton tells us annihilated the difference between life and art, often describes natural sounds in pointedly musical terms. For example, in a passage already partially quoted, Jarry describes the sound of seven harlots gossiping as “crystallinechatter, deliciously out of tune, like the sound of love instruments tuning up, one might imagine.” Jarry is not only comparing their “chatter” to the sounds of musical instruments – he is also telling us that as prostitutes, they themselves are “love instruments” to be played, obviously, by their customers. In Faustroll he describes “stones [which] are as cold as the cry of trumpets,” contrasting them with others which have “the precipitated heat of the surface of kettledrums.”

I paused after having given John Cage a precis of the above, thinking there might be a response. When none came, I went on to describe a more direct connection between another passage in Jarry and a Duchamp note. It was not about a piece of Duchamp’s, but rather about one of many component parts of a piece (The Large Glass). When Jarry first describes Doctor Faustroll’s raiment, he pictures for us “tiny little gray boots, with even layers of dust carefully preserved on them, at great expense, for many months past…” Duchamp, in the Green Box notes, wrote, “For the sieves in the glass – allow dust to fall on this part a dust of 3 or 4 months…” I pointed out that the idea of “sieves” itself may well have come from the same book of Jarry’s. Chapter six of Faustroll is titled Concerning the Doctor’s Boat, Which is a Sieve. The Doctor describes in minute and obsessive detail the magnificent seagoing properties of this bark, then ends by informing the reader that “we shall not be navigating on water but on dry land.” By coincidence or otherwise, Man Ray’s photograph of Duchamp’s Dust Raising

click to enlarge


Dust Raising
by Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp, 1920
© 1960 Marcel Duchamp, George Heard Hamilton, Richard Hamilton

, reproduced on the page facing the Duchamp note in Richard Hamilton’s typographic version of the Green Box notes, which John Cage had by now opened in front of us, resembles, more than anything else, an aerial view of some extremely flat dry land.

I was emboldened to say that these connections, and a hundred others like them, left me with the impression that Duchamp, perhaps consciously, had been playing a game in which he used hints from Jarry’s writings in every major piece as well as in most of the lesser ones. Duchamp unfailingly left clues about the Jarry connection in the title, in the appearance, or in the accompanying notes of his work. At the same time, Duchamp unfailingly diverted attention elsewhere whenever an interview or conversation seemed headed in that direction.⁽⁸⁾

Again there was no response for some time. Then John Cage said, “Well, he was a wonderful man and I was extremely fond of him, but he did love secrets.”

Thinking of this remark, it has occurred to me that John Cage’s well-known openness is 180 degrees away from the stance of his friend. Cage, in addenda to his compositions, to his etchings or drawings, and even to many of his written works, took great pains to lovingly describe his methods in whatever detail necessary to attain the greatest clarity. Duchamp’s notes, by comparison, seem a maze of intentional obfuscation. I am aware of only one instance in which the artist left a document solely meant to illuminate. I am referring to the Manual of Instructions for the fabrication of Étant Donnés, revealed to the world after his death. And this manual was left for the excellent reason that without it there would have been no earthly way of assembling the intricately designed tableaux in the manner intended by the artist.

I once discussed this issue of artistic disclosure with John Cage. It was not in regard to Duchamp per se, but rather in regard to an admirer of both Cage and Duchamp, – Jasper Johns, who at that time, according to certain remarks attributed to him, seemed to share Duchamp’s fondness for mystery. John Cage made light of the issue. “Oh, I think it’s just a question of personality,” he said.

*************

I asked Dorothea Tanning if she would read a new and unpublished essay I had written titled Who Broke the Glass, which presents evidence to support the argument that The Large Glass was not broken accidentally, as the world has been told, but intentionally by, or at
the behest of, the artist.⁽⁹⁾

Ms. Tanning, who with her late husband Max Ernst, knew Duchamp well, has been generous with her help and encouragement. Both she and Max Ernst were great lovers of Alfred Jarry, and since she and I also share a fondness for Joyce, we are never at a loss for conversation. When she had handed my essay back she said it had convinced her, and she showed me something she had written in the margin of the last page. It referred to Duchamp, and she said that I could use it in future writings with attribution, or without. It reads, “All is formulaic and calculated. This meticulous planning leaves nothing to chance, that force so often claimed by the artist.” (Emphasis Dorothea Tanning’s.)

Reading this I found myself thinking once again about the parallels and differences between Marcel Duchamp and his friend John Cage. They both claimed Chance as an assistant. But in Duchamp’s case, at least according to Ms. Tanning’s view, nothing could be further from the truth.
⁽¹⁰⁾
Years ago, wanting to test Duchamp’s commitment to chance I had tried his thread-dropping experiment for the 3 Standard Stoppages – canned chance, as he called it. Tirelessly, with a wide variety of thread materials and thickness, I followed his “instructions” as they appear in the Green Box notes. Not once did the results come close to those three gentle and elegant arcs that he permanentized as the stoppages. John Cage, honoring Duchamp, tried this same experiment in making some of his earliest etchings. His results were as far from Duchamp’s as mine were, and not surprisingly, just about identical to my results. We talked this over a number of times, wondering what could account for the difference.

I have by now come to the conclusion that when a man as intelligent as Duchamp, as elegantly articulate, civilized and gracious says, “Every word I tell you is stupid and false”, and, “All in all I’m a pseudo, that’s my characteristic” – when he gives us one self-portrait titled With My Tongue In My Cheek, another as a wanted felon, a third as an old whore, and a fourth as the very devil – the net effect on most observers is to cause them to believe his every word, perhaps more than they might have had he never brought up the subject. It seems as though Duchamp managed to hide very well behind these statements and shady personas. Maybe most of us have difficulty believing that a man
of such genius and elegance would be capable of doing something so expected, so unimaginative, as to be telling the truth when he calls himself a liar. It is easier to believe that the disclaimers themselves were part of a game, a put-on, an act – that the real Duchamp was as straightforward as his famous profile.

John Cage and Marcel Duchamp can be seen then as being equally guilty of saying what they mean and meaning what they say. Duchamp, again and again, in a spectacular assortment of gestures, warned us not to take him too seriously. John Cage was fond of saying that a thing is what it is and his favorite of his own works accepts whatever sounds occur. In his life as in his art, Cage had not the slightest use for secrets, a fact which characteristically did not in the least prevent him from loving
and admiring the very artist who, above all others, thrived on them.

© 1993, 2000 William Anastasi

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Notes

1. According to my reading of Finnegans Wake, Joyce refers to Alfred Jarry as “me innerman monophone” and “me altar’s ego in miniature,” and retells or recalls various scenes from the life, as well as from every novel and theater piece, of the French author. In addition, one of the book’s four main characters, Shem (a.k.a. Jerry), is based in the largest part on Jarry himself.

2. Speaking of Duchamp and himself, Cage said, “I think the difference between our attitudes towards chance probably came from the fact that he was involved with ideas through seeing, and I was involved through hearing.” Similarly, Jarry’s “…one has only to look” sets off Cage’s “One has only to listen.”

3. Translated from the French by Ralph Gladstone and Barbara Wright, New Directions Pub., NY, 1977.

4. From William Anastasi, “Duchamp on the Jarry Road”, Artforum (September, 1991).

5. John Cage, referring to the 3 Standard Stoppages, made the observation to Duchamp that when he, Cage, was two years old, the artist was already using chance. And on a number of occasions Cage said that this was his favorite of Duchamp’s entire oeuvre.

6. In 1975, Cage said, “All of my music since [4’33”] I try to think of as something which doesn’t fundamentally interrupt that piece.”

7. Pére Ubu: Cornegidouille! Nous n’aurons point tout démoli si nous ne démolissons même les ruines! Or je n’y vois d’autre moyen que d’en équilibrer de beaux edifices bien ordonnés.

8.I have since come across a half dozen or so instances in which Duchamp either brought up Jarry for praise or, in response to questions about Dada, praised “his spirit” – once going so far as to call him “a great man.” I have yet to learn of a case in which someone else brings up the subject and Duchamp chimes in.

9. A recent expanded version of this article has since been published in this journal under the title Alfred Jarry and l’accident of Duchamp, December 1999.

10. I have discovered at least one instance in which Duchamp seems clearly to have been guided by chance. In the early nineties I visited Duchamp’s friend and sometime collaborator the painter Enrico Donati. It was he who had been commissioned by Duchamp to execute a roomful of “pink foam-rubber breasts” (a readymade taken from a set of “falsies” which Duchamp had designed for the cover of the catalogue to the Paris exhibition Le Surréalisme en 1947). Donati told of having covered his studio floor with these delights for Duchamp’s first viewing. Duchamp entered the room and for a spell no one spoke. Finally, to end the silence, Donati said, “Please touch.” Without missing a beat, Duchamp turned to him with pointing finger and said, “That’s the title.” Perhaps Arturo Schwarz was unaware of this exchange. Regarding “Please touch” he writes, “Whether this request arises from the Bride’s desire or the bachelor’s wishful thinking, the result is the same.” (The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, 1997 p. 228) It would seem that it rose, in fact, from Donati’s off-handed icebreaker and Duchamp’s relaxed suggestibility.