click to enlarge

Figure 1

Figure 2

Duchamp’s most fervent biographers, Jacques Caumont and Jennifer Gough-Cooper, tell us that Duchamp was in New York City on 22 December 1944 and that, on this day, he met up with Frederick Kiesler in the afternoon for a discussion about a forthcoming issue of View magazine. This issue was going to be dedicated exclusively to Duchamp. After meeting with Kiesler, Duchamp cabled Walter Arensberg in Hollywood to inquire about the address of a photographer who had taken some pictures of Duchamp’s work before World War II. Duchamp wanted to contact him again in connection with View.⁽¹⁾ The cable said, “PLEASE WIRE ADDRESS OF MR LITTLE WHO PHOTOGRAPHED MY PICTURES SOME YEARS AGO STOP VIEW MAGAZINE PREPARDING [sic] DUCHAMP NUMBER WRITING= MARCEL DUCHAMP.”

Not noted by his biographers but also on that same day, Duchamp ran a very important errand. ⁽²⁾He asked Ms. Elsie Jenriche to confirm the authenticity of his rectified readymade L.H.O.O.Q.(Figure 1), made twenty-five years earlier in 1919. We know this from an inscription on the reverse side of the readymade. It reads, in ink: This is to certify / that this is the original / “ready made” LHOOQ / (Figure 2) Paris 1919 / Marcel Duchamp. Beneath this, also in ink,is a testimony: Witnesseth: / This 22nd day of / December, 1944 / Elsie Jenriche.

A rubber stamp to the right of Ms. Jenriche’s name declares that she was a notary public (Figure 3): NOTARY PUBLIC, New York Co. / N. Y. Co. Clk. No. 63, Reg. No.
82J-3 / Commission expires March 30, 1945. But can we be sure of this?

The 1943 A to L volume of Notaries Public N.Y. County Term Expires 1943 (archive #0394442), begins to eliminate doubt. Ms. Jenriche is listed, along with her profession (public stenographer) and signature. Then, in the 1945 A to K volume of the Notaries Public N.Y. County Term Expires 1945 (archive #0394442), Elsie Jenriche is listed again, this time as a public stenographer at the Hotel St. Regis (Figure 4,5). The entry is dated 17 March 1943 with an expiration of 30 March 1945 (Figure 6). This is precisely in accordance with the stamp on the back of L.H.O.O.Q.

Fast forward some fifty years. On Thursday, 29 April 1999, Mr. Jonathan van Nostren, archivist of the Division of Old Records at New York County’s Surrogate Court Hall of Records, declared that Elsie Jenriche’s signature on verso L.H.O.O.Q. is “authentic,” adding that “there’s no doubt that the work was properly notarized.”

click images to enlarge

• Figure 3
• Figure 4,5
• Figure 6

Notes:

1. Marcel Duchamp, Pontus Hulten, ed., 1993. Why is Marcel Duchamp´s Bicycle Wheel Shaking on Its Stool?

2. I am grateful to Francis M. Naumann for pointing out that fours years prior to this ‘errand,’ Duchamp intended to sell L.H.O.O.Q. to Louise and Walter Arensberg. In a letter dated 16 July 1940, Duchamp writes from Arcachon, France: Une autre chose dans la même genre est l’original de la Joconde aux moustaches (1919) / Pensez-vous que $100 soit trop pour la dite Joconde (Something else in the same category is the original of the Mona Lisa with a mustache (1919) / Do you think that $100 would be too much for the so-called Mona Lisa ). The Arensbergs are not known to have acquired the work. Arturo Schwarz in his The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, vol. 2 (New York: Delano, 1997) lists the Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery in New York and the collector Mary Sisler as previous owners of L.H.O.O.Q. As for its current status, it is now in a private collection in Paris. As yet unaccounted for is the Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York, which on a label on the work’s verso is credited (as Matisse Gal.) for loaning the work to the Museum of Modern Art’s traveling exhibition The Art of Assemblage which was on display in New York from 10 October – 12 November 1961.

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left:Duchamp as the Black
King in Hans Richter’s 8×8, 1957
right: Duchamp in 1957, wearing
a crown made for his 70th
birthday (photographyby Denise Hare)

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left:Figure 1.
Salvador Dalí, Apotheosis
of the Dollar, 1965
right: Figure 2.
First known image
of Clovis I and the miracle of
the ‘Holy Ampule,’ ca. 9th Century

In January 1968, Salvador Dalí wrote the preface for the English translation of Pierre Cabanne’s Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, stating that “Marcel Duchamp could have been a king if, instead of making the Chocolate Grinder, he made the Holy Ampulla, the unique, divine readymade, to anoint himself as king. Duchamp then could have been crowned at Rheims.” ⁽¹⁾ Duchamp and Dalí, “treat[ing] each other with great respect,” ⁽²⁾had spent several summers together since the late 1950s, in the small fishing village and surrealist haven of Cadaqués, on the northern tip of Spain’s Mediterranean coast.

Dalí had likened Duchamp to a king once before, in a painting of 1965 with the rather gargantuan title Salvador Dalí in the Act of Painting Gala in the Apotheosis of the Dollar, in which One may also Perceive to the Left Marcel Duchamp Disguised as Louis XIV, behind a Curtain in the Style of Vermeer, which is but the Invisible Monument Face of the Hermes of Praxiteles. ⁽³⁾(Figure 1).

While the painting establishes Duchamp as France’s sun king and grand monarch, Dalí, with his introductory remarks for the publication of Dialogues, had yet another ruler in mind: Clovis I, pagan founder of the Frankish kingdom in the early Middle Ages who converted to Christianity only after the combined efforts of his wife and the bishop inspired him to do so. He was finally baptized at Rheims around 500 A.D. with ‘le Sainte Ampoule’ or ‘Holy Ampule’ ⁽⁴⁾ (Figure 2).

Ever since Clovis, a ‘holy ampulla’ has been used to consecrate the kings of France. Usually in the shape of a small vial with a large paunch and an elongated neck, its form became diversified in the 16th century. ⁽⁵⁾ The Museum of Antiquities in Rouen, Duchamp’s birthplace, holds two such ampules designated for holy water, possibly from the middle of the 18th century (Figure 3). ⁽⁶⁾ It should not come as a surprise that these bulging flasks more closely resemble Duchamp’s Air de Paris of 1919 (Figure 4) than any pharmaceutical instruments of the early 20th century (Figure 5). In fact, experts testify that the shape presented by Duchamp as a readymade ampule looks nothing like a standard medical ampule of his time. (Listen to a message left on ASRL‘s answering machine by Professor Gregory Higby, School of Pharmacy, University of Wisconsin, Summer 1998.) The apparent oddity of a medical ampule containing a hook within its design adds to the argument that Duchamp’s ampule stems from an earlier period. ⁽⁷⁾

click images to enlarge

• Figure 3.
  Two Holy Ampules, ca. 1750s,
  height: 35 mm (photograph by Yohann
  Deslandes, Musees Departementaux
  de la Seine-Maritime
• Figure 4.
  Marcel Duchamp, Air de Paris,
  1919 (Philadelphia Museum of Art)
• Figure 5.
  Late 19th and 20th century
  pharmaceutical glass ampules
  (Collection Rhonda Roland Shearer,
  New York)

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Figure 6.
Marcel Duchamp, Comb,
1916 (Philadelphia Museum of Art)

Figure 7.
Set of Surrealist
Postcards, Paris, 1937

Figure 8.
Marcel Duchamp, Letter to Henri
Pierre Roché, 9 May 1949
(Carlton Lake Collection,
The University of Texas at Austin)

The ampule is not his only readymade linked to coronation ceremonies. In Duchamp’s inscribed Comb of 1916 (Figure 6), we note another object commonly used for this grand occasion. Those combs were often made of “precious metals, carved and adorned with Scriptural and other subjects.” ⁽⁸⁾

Paris Air was brought to New York by Duchamp as a present from Paris for Louise and Walter Arensberg. ⁽⁹⁾ Duchamp claimed that he bought the ampule from a Parisian pharmacist. Presumably containing “Sérum Physiologique,” the pharmacist was asked to empty the glass bottle, let it fill up with air and then reseal it. Paris Air, first published as a postcard in 1937, was titled ampoule contenant 50 cc d’air de Paris (Ampule Containing 50 cc air of Paris) (Figure 7). ⁽¹⁰⁾ While visiting the Arensbergs in Hollywood during the spring of 1949, he discovered that his present to them had beeen broken. (It was later restored).

He immediately wrote to his close friend Henri Pierre Roché, asking him to find a similar one in Paris. In a letter dated 9 May 1949, Duchamp explained: May I ask you for the following service: / Walter Arensberg broke his ampule / ‘Air de Paris’ – I’ve promised him to / replace it – / Could you go to that pharmacy on the corner of rue Blomet and rue / de Vaugirard (if it’s still there) and buy / [this is where I have bought the first ampule /] an ampule like this: 125 cc and of the same / dimensions as the drawing; ask the pharmacist / to empty it and reseal the / glass with a lamp – wrap it and / send it to me here – if not on rue Blomet / than elsewhere / but as much as possible the same form thank you (Figure 8). ⁽¹¹⁾

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Figure 9.
Marcel Duchamp, 50 cc Air
de Paris, 1949 (Philadelphia Museum
of Art)

About three weeks later, in a letter written 29 May 1949, Duchamp tells his friend (Roché seems to have suggested to present the Arensbergs with a miniature version of the ampule from the Boîte instead) “that the ampule must be the size I gave you, because that’s the size of the (broken) original.Those in the valises are scaled down, like all reproductions (generally speaking). ⁽¹²⁾This second version for the ‘life-size’ ampule (titled and signed on a label: 50cc air de Paris réplique type / 1949 R.S.), now in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, is generally assumed to be a selected readymade by Henri-Pierre Roché. It seems odd that after an apparently unsuccessful search for the “real thing,” Duchamp’s friend “found” – almost twenty years after Duchamp’s initial Paris Air – an object closely resembling but strangely different from the version of 1919. (Figure 9)

Most likely, Roché was aware that the small-scale replicas of the ampule which had been made in the 1940’s (for Duchamp’s Boîte) had been created by the firm of Obled, laboratory glass blowers, located close to Duchamp’s studio in Paris at that time. ⁽¹³⁾ Furthermore, glass experts tell us that pharmacists would have easily had the ability to alter or make glass objects. ⁽¹⁴⁾ We suggest that the probable scenario was that Roché eventually asked a pharmacist to duplicate the odd shape of Paris Air – just as Duchamp had done when he conceived of the work in 1919.

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Figure 10.
Marcel Duchamp, 50 cc Air
de Paris (small-scale version for
the Boíte-en-Valise), 1940

Measuring the Schwarz-version of
Air de Paris, 1964, at the
Art Science Research Laboratory,
Inc., New York

In an interview of 1959, Duchamp confirms George Heard Hamilton’s suggestion that the 1919 version of Paris Air was the last of his actual readymades. ⁽¹⁵⁾ Let us consider four versions of Duchamp’s ampule, including the 1964 Schwarz edition. All of these versions are obviously four different sizes. Puzzled by Duchamp’s consistent ’50 cc’ title, we measured the volumes of the 1964 Schwarz edition and the Boîte miniature version. The Schwarz version measures approximately 123 cc; the original and the Roché versions appear to be slightly larger in volume and would therefore measure more. Even the 300 miniatures of the Boîte failed to match their shared name of 50 cc of Paris Air, for their volume measures approx. 35 cc

But why then do we trust the original ampule to be a readymade when it holds more than double the amount stated by Duchamp, when its second full-size version is signed on a label with the initials of Duchamp’s pseudonym Rrose Sélavy (resembling the lettering of the Rouen ampules)? Moreover, the ‘Sérum Physiologique’ on the label of the first version of Air de Paris is preceded by a small star (*), an asterisk, commonly used to distinguish words of obscure character or wrong usage. ⁽¹⁶⁾ Where is the 50 cc of Paris Air?

Notes

1. “L’Échecs, C’est Moi,” in Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, (New York: Da Capo, 1967)13-14. Dalí had published two articles on Duchamp before — “The King and Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes,” Art News 58 (April 1959): 22-25 and “Why They Attack the ‘Mona Lisa,'” Art News 62 (March 1963): 36, 63-64.

2. Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp. A Biography (New York: Henry Holt, 1996), 402.

3. For further information on Duchamp’s and Dalí’s years in Cadaqués and a brief discussion of the painting, see Tout-Fait‘s interview with Timothy Phillips.

4. The first recorded mention of an ampule with holy attributes was in connection to Clovis I. In 869, the archbishop of Reims held up a small bottle of holy water at the coronation of Charles le Chauve and declared that “Glorious Clovis, King of France, was consecrated with a holy water which came down from the sky and which we still possess.” According to legend, le Saint Ampoule or “Holy Ampule” which was filled with this holy water had been brought to the sanctuary of Saint Remi by a dove and then used in the sacred ceremony which crowned Clovis as King. The story follows the story of Christ: the spirit of God descended from the sky in the form of a dove. As a result, beginning with Clovis, the kings of France were crowned in a fashion which implied that they had been “chosen” and that God’s will would be done. (The Holy Ampule can still be found in Saint Remi, at Reims.) See Patrick Demouy, “Du Baptême du Sacre,” Connaissance des Arts 92 (1996): 7-9.

5. See Jacqueline Bellanger, Verre. D’Usage et de Prestige. France 1500-1800, (Paris: Éditions de l’Amateur, 1988); Etienne Michon, “La Collection d’Ampoules à Eulogies du Musée du Louvre,” Mélang. Archeol. Hist. 12 (Rome, 1892): 183-201. We are grateful to Virginia Wright and Rosalind S. Young of the Corning Museum of Glass, New York, for drawing these sources to our attention.

6. Laurence Flavigny, conservator of the Musée des Antiquités, Rouen, could not confirm how long the ampules have been in the museum’s collection.

7. For the first discussion and questioning of the status of Duchamp’s glass ampule (with a hook) as a readymade, see Rhonda Roland Shearer’s “Marcel Duchamp’s Impossible Bed and Other ‘Not’ Readymade Objects: A Possible Route of Influence From Art to Science”, Part 1, Art & Academe 10, no. 1 (Fall 1997): 26-62. Shearer argues that historical evidence and analysis of their forms reveal the readymades were not unaltered, mass-produced objects as Duchamp claimed. Monika Wagner, professor of Art History at the University of Hamburg, Germany, also discusses the impossibility of Duchamp’s ampule in her forthcoming book “Das Material der Kunst” (Munich: Beck, 2000).

8. Henry John Frasey, “The Use of the Comb in Church Ceremonies,” The Antiquary XXXII (January/December 1896): 312-316.

9. “I thought of it as a present for Arensberg, who had everything money could buy. So I brought him an ampule of Paris Air.” –Marcel Duchamp in Arturo Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, vol. II, (New York: Delano, 1997), 676. The quote in Schwarz’ book is taken from Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 1965), 99.

10. See Ecke Bonk, The Box in a Valise (New York: Rizzoli, 1989) 201-202.

11. Translation by Julia Koteliansky; letter reproduced in William Camfield, Marcel Duchamp: Fountain(Houston: Houston Fine Arts Press, 1989) 76.

12. Bonk, The Box in a Valise, 202.

13. Ibid., 202.

14. In a fax of 27 April 1998, Virginia Wright of the Corning Museum of Glass, New York, writes:

 

“Pharmacists in the early 20th century had training in chemistry, and one of the first things taught in chemistry classes is lamp working (a.k.a. glass-blowing)”; also see: W.A. Shenstone, The Methods of Glass Blowing and of Working Silica in the Oxy-Gas Flame, London: Longman’s, 1916; p. 7 describes a burner useful in small laboratories (similar books were widely available in France at the time).

15. The interview was conducted by Richard Hamilton and George Heard Hamilton for BBC around October 1959. It was published as an audiocassette by Audio Arts Magazine 2, no. 4 (1976). According to Dieter Daniels this “last, actual readymade” was actually the first one to be commented upon in print. See Daniels, Duchamp und die Anderen, (Köln: DuMont, 1992), 188-189, 330. See also Henry McBride, “The Walter Arensbergs,” The Dial (July 1920).

16. In his postumously published notes (Paul Matisse, ed., Marcel Duchamp Notes, Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1980), Duchamp twice refers to ‘asstricks’ (notes 217 and 235), a possible play on the word “asterisk.” [In this context it is worth mentioning that the verso of note 32 – an important note on the infrathin – reads 50 cent. cubes d’air de Paris (not reproduced).] In an e-mail of 6 December 1999, André Gervais wrote:

Yes, of course, “asstricks” and “asterisks” is a play on words, almost
a pun (because they do not sound exactly alike). You will find in my book
(La Raie Alitée d’Effects. Apropos of Marcel Duchamp, Québec: Hurtubise, 1984, p. 242) the following: “asstricks: tours du cul, arse et attrapes, trucs cul(s) lent(s), etc.”

I translate to help you:
* “tours du cul” = asstricks, and “tours” is the anagram of “trous” = holes (so “trou du cul” = asshole);
* “arse et attrapes”, almost a pun (with French and English words): arse = cul, and “farces et attrapes” = tricks and jokes;
* “trucs” = tricks or contraptions, “cul(s) lent(s)” = slow ass(es), a pun on “truculent” = realistic, tough.

For the asterisks, also see his manuscript page The of 1915 [Schwarz, 1997, cat. no. 334, p. 638]. And do not forget that “asstricks” is a word (probably invented by MD) with a “tr” in it: as you probably know, Duchamp said to Cabanne that in the title Jeune homme triste dans un train [Sad Young Man on a Train, (1911), see: Schwarz, 1997, cat. no. 238, p. 559], the young man is “triste” (a word with a “tr”) because – ! – he is in a train (another word with a “tr”): the “tr”, here, he said too, is very (“tr”ès, in French) impo”rt”ant.

Fig. 4, 6, 9, 10 © 1999 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, NY/ADAGP, Paris.

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Figure 1.

Marcel Duchamp’s masterpiece is The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), 1915-1923 (Figure 1). With his notes, which the artist stated were part of the piece, it stands as the most influential artwork of our century. Duchamp said that the two plate-glass panels which hold the work were accidentally broken, then carefully repaired.

The greater our familiarity with the sources for this work, the stronger the sense that this must have been the most fortuitous accident in the history of art; or not an accident at all. In any case, The Large Glass, visualized in its unbroken state, does not make nearly the poetic sense that it does in its broken state. Duchamp’s own response to interviewers is not at odds with this evaluation. This article will talk generally of the Jarry/Duchamp connection and present evidence suggesting a conscious breaking of the glass.

* * *

Marcel Duchamp once said, “Rabelais and Jarry are my gods, evidently”.⁽¹⁾Barely any of Rabelais’ imagery can be found with any specificity or consistency in Duchamp’s work and notes, but ideas and imagery adapted from Alfred Jarry’s writings crop up regularly in many of his most characteristic concoctions. Sometimes we see the material straight up, thinly disguised, sometimes in the form of either ingenious or obvious inversions. An example of inversion occurs in a Duchamp note treating an image from a pivotal scene in Jarry’s science fiction novel, The Supermale. A five-man bicycle team of inconceivable potency is engaged in a cosmic race, sometimes exceeding the speed of light, with a train on a ten-thousand-mile elliptical course. When they reach the apogee, which represents the fourth dimension, Jarry describes a tower, “shaped like a truncated cone.” In Duchamp’s writings for the large glass, with their “heaps of notes on the fourth dimension,”⁽²⁾he makes reference instead to a “conical trunk.” Vis à vis breakage, the Jarry scene ends with the symbolic penetration of the fourth dimension’s barrier, pictured as the shattering of a large barrel which has magically appeared as the racers complete their turn. “The cowcatcher of the locomotive hit [the barrel] like a football, spattering the rails and the track with a little water and sheaves of roses.” Roses owe their presence to the Supermale’s virgin inamorata Ellen Elson, the sole female passenger on the train. Her entire car had earlier been mysteriously covered by “red roses; enormous, full-blown, and as fresh as if they had just been picked. Their perfume spread through the stillness of the air…”⁽³⁾

The English title for The Large Glass is The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even. In Jarry’s first novel, the autobiographical Days and Nights, a licentious young artist’s model named Huppe is itching to entertain five lovers in the studio where she poses. One of the chosen, introduced as “the Jewish eunuch Severus Altmensch,” is understandably hesitant. Sengle, the Jarryesque hero of the novel, dreams up a ruse to permit all present to see the naked body of Severus. His objective is to discover “whether he lacked so much as to be a eunuch or merely enough to prove him a Jew.” He proposes a game “to decide who would pose nude on the dais.” Then, “without cheating, although Sengle might have predicted the result, the lot fell upon Severus Altmensch. Who refused to comply. Sengle held him by the shoulders — with his fingertips –and Huppe stripped (him)…”⁽⁴⁾ The inversion here is that a male (“bachelor”) is being stripped by a female (“bride”). In a number of Jarry’s novels hyper-sexual females who are not brides are referred to as such. Another figurative foretaste of Duchamp, here sans inversion, is the central presence of one “bride” and multiple “bachelors,” with copulation their sole raison d’être. And we meet in the person of the Jewish eunuch — the stripping reveals as much — a viable forerunner to Duchamp’s alter ego Rrose Sélavy, who was born when the artist had himself photographed as a female. Castration is naturally implied when a male becomes female. Recall, too, that Duchamp’s first idea for Rrose involved turning himself into a Jew.

This orgy scene takes place in a “studio below the oasis of a great lamp.”⁽⁵⁾The short chapter ends with the naked troupers scampering: “And the six disappeared in the smoke of the great lamp, whose glass was cracked … they rushed to their clothes, barefoot across the cracks.” Appearing in 1897, this is the first of three crucial scenes in separate Jarry novels describing “stripped” participants in a whirl of sexual jouncing, accompanied by images of cracked or shattered glass. The second occurs in Messalina, 1900, the third in The Supermale, 1902.

In Chapter One of Messalina, the heroine, wife of Emperor Claudius Caesar, takes on all comers in a lowly brothel from nightfall to sun-up, then “[closes] her cell-door last of all, later even than her servant, still consumed with desire.”⁽⁶⁾Duchamp’s “Bride”, according to his notes, is “basically a motor” and “in perpetual motion.”

Chapter Two begins with Claudius rising at dawn, “when Messalina slept at last,” then entering “the quadrangular, glass-paned study which rose above the roofs of the palace…” On the next page we learn that most of the Emperor’s courtiers are also his wife’s lovers. In the same chapter, Jarry describes a cameo of the Empress “that was copied and preserved by Rubens.” We read that “according to this cameo … [she is] not beautiful, in fact; but then the fire in her eyes has been put out in the unliving stone! And surely beauty is only a convention.(7) Or perhaps a form that is called beautiful is but a vase for passion, and one preferably unblemished, uncracked even, as it is itself of the purest transparency.” Though Jarry here equates beauty with an uncracked and transparent vase, in the next scene his promiscuous heroine, soon to be a “bride,” is associated with an image of shattering glass. She contemplates the magnificent landscape outside her window “as though admiring herself in a mirror…Suddenly she burst into sobs, and in her room it was as though the great mirror of Sidon glass had shattered across the mosaic floor –a sparkling arena of powdered specular stone! –or as though the pearls of the portrait were unstrung and the beauty of Messalina flooded over the ground in a thousand fragments.”

Chapter Three, Book II, of Messalina is titled THE ADULTEROUS NUPTIALS. It describes a “marriage” in which the Empress (who, of course, is already married) is to be the “bride.” This chapter, with its central figure the unquenchable Messalina, certainly relates to the drama Duchamp described in his notes to the glass, with an axial bride surrounded by her bachelors.

Relevant to Duchamp’s “Stripped Bare,” Jarry’s heroine, “altogether naked” for most of her appearances, declares at one critical point, “But I have given you my whole life! I love you, Silius! My body, which you do not reject. . . will you also peel off my skin…?” The bride of the adulterous nuptials is offering herself to be stripped bare indeed by one of her “bachelors.”

In The Supermale, the American Ellen Elson, as eager in her clean-cut way as the notorious Roman Empress, says towards the end of a non-stop around the clock sexual marathon, “I’m not naked enough. Couldn’t I take this thing off my face?” She makes reference to her sole bit of apparel, a pink plush driver’s mask meant to hide her identity from the peeping scientist busy keeping score for the bettors. In the chapter titled AND MORE, she has just helped Marcueil, the Supermale, achieve an imposing record of eighty-two consummations in twenty-four hours. Marcueil leaves the room briefly, pleased with having accomplished his goal.⁽⁸⁾But the instant he returns,

“a supple body, still warm from his embrace, wrapped itself about him and pushed him onto the bed of fur. And the young woman’s breath murmured, in a kiss that made his ears buzz: ‘At last we’re through with the betting to please… Now let’s think of ourselves. We haven’t yet made love. . . for pleasure.’⁽⁹⁾ She had double-bolted the door. Suddenly, near the ceiling, a windowpane shattered, and the glass showered down on the rug.”

Thus ends the chapter.

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Figure 2.

Before delving further into broken glass, we’ll detour to a glass-free passage from Jarry which depicts a sexually amenable machine-bride.⁽¹⁰⁾In 1902, the same year as The Supermale, Jarry’s article for La Revue Blanche titled Wife-beaters tells of a “matrimonial agent who was at the same time a large rubber manufacturer” who made “spouses of elastic rubber available for two-thousand francs per specimen, three thousand with made-to-order head.”⁽¹¹⁾We learn that “honeymooning in their company is incomparable” and that “one enters into communication with them by means of a valve.” Duchamp’s bride seems to share this handy feature with Jarry’s honeymooning spouse. Under the heading Compression in Duchamp’s posthumously published notes for the glass we find, with the artist’s idiosyncratic punctuation: “cones in elastic metal (resembling udders) passing drop by drop the erotic liquid which descends toward the hot chamber, onto the planes of slow flow. to impregnate it with oxygen required for the explosion. the dew of Eros.”⁽¹²⁾ An additional possible connection suggests itself here. Duchamp’s perfume bottle festooned with Rrose Sélavy’s face is titled BELLE HALEINE, EAU DE VOILETTE 1921. (Figure 2) One of the English translations for belle is ‘rubber’ as in “rubber game” or “winning game.” French/English puns were a specialty with the artist, as were games. Jarry’s honeymooning bride is made of rubber, and his Supermale’s sexual marathon was a winning game.

Jarry and Duchamp circle around the same exotic terrain obsessively. They share a marvelously specific stereotype of woman as sexually insatiable. In Jarry’s case she is sometimes flesh and blood, sometimes a machine; in Duchamp’s case, always a machine.

* * *

The Large Glass, with its notes, features a distinctive pattern of sexual motifs combining the ideas of virginity, sexuality and machinery. There are machines that resemble the living, a bride who “reveals herself as nude,” who, although he calls her “basically a motor,” “becomes a sort of apotheosis of virginity,” or “must appear” as same. A little later she is simply “this virgin” with an “intense desire for the orgasm,” whose “reservoir will end at the bottom with a liquid layer.” His bachelor machine section includes a description of “the bottles: Great density and in perpetual movement…(oscillating density). It is by this oscillating density that the choice is made between the three crashes. It is truly this oscillating density that expresses the liberty of indifference”⁽¹³⁾“…after the 3 crashes = Splash.”

Jarry, in a passage from Days and Nights (1897), shows a similar collision of motifs. These include the idea of “virgins,” nakedness, love-making, “glass wall,” a “liquid sea,” “machines [which] resemble the living” and “which move, oscillating in the waves…” Two pages earlier, Jarry introduced the subject of “a glass shopfront.” Here are two passages without the intervening text:

Sengle,…thought first of looking for a ditch or a glass shopfront for the temporarily blind men to topple into…

I have been unable to bring Micromegas back to life or join the quotinoctial circling of virgins around the enclosure.

There is an inscription upon the wall stating that whoever passionately kisses his Double through the glass, for them the glass comes to life at one point and becomes a sex, and person and image make love through the wall, whether by the will of the immortal gods or the artifice of some skillful man who has constructed machines to resemble the living, and which move, oscillating in the waves and to the island’s libation, on the other side of the glass.

Compare this with Duchamp’s ‘shop window’ soliloquy dated 1913, published in A l’Infinitif:

The question of shop windows

To undergo the interrogation of shop windows.

The exigency of the shop window

The shop window proof of the existence of the outside world

When one undergoes the examination of the shop window, one also pronounces one’s own sentence. In fact, one’s choice is “round trip.” From the demands of the shop windows, from the inevitable response to shop windows, my choice is determined. No obstinacy, ad absurdum, of hiding the coition through the glass pane with one or many objects of the shop window. The penalty consists in cutting through the glass pane and in feeling regret as soon as possession is consumated. Q.E.D.

Of all the images common to both passages, the critical parallel is between the idea of “coition through the glass pane,” as Duchamp puts it, and Jarry’s “person and image make love through the [glass] wall.”

There are, as well, numerous subsidiary affinities: Jarry has, “a glass shopfront for the temporarily blind men to topple into…” Duchamp has, “The shop window proof of the existence of the outside world.” And the title of his 1917 magazine was The Blind Man,⁽¹⁴⁾with its celebratory Blindman’s Ball. Jarry pictures for us “the…circling of virgins,” Duchamp’s notes describe the Bride as “a sort of apotheosis of virginity,” and her “Sex Cylinder” features “Heat produced by rotation.” Jarry: “I stand naked against the glass wall…standing in the liquid sea.” Duchamp: “The Bride reveals herself as naked,” and “The reservoir will end at the bottom with a liquid layer… This liquid layer will be contained in the oscillating bathtub (hygiene of the Bride.)” Jarry’s “…by the will of the immortal gods or the artifice of some skillful man who has constructed machines to resemble the living…” sounds like a precise prediction, twenty years before the fact, of the notes for The Large Glass and the skillful man who wrote them.⁽¹⁵⁾Jarry tells us that the machines made by this man “move, oscillating in the waves … on the other side of the glass,” a harbinger of Duchamp’s Bride in her “oscillating bathtub” and his bachelor machine, with its “oscillating density.”

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Figure 3.

From Duchamp’s ‘shop window’ soliloquy we learn that “one’s choice is “round trip.” This almost certainly relates to his known interest in the androgyne, a male-female creature.⁽¹⁶⁾ His L.H.O.O.Q., from 1919, (Figure 3), is a reproduction of the Mona Lisa to which he has added a mustache and beard. The title, when the letters are pronounced in French, becomes “She has a hot ass,” which readily reminds us of Jarry’s famous homosexual bravado and occasional cross-dressing. Two years later, in harmony with Jarry’s line, “I…gaze at my image glued close to me…” Duchamp himself cross-dressed and began his habit of hiding behind his female double, Rrose Sélavy, signing many of his important works with her name.⁽¹⁷⁾ It is quite easy to view The Large Glass, in addition to its other significations, as a picture of Duchamp “kissing” his Double through the glass.

To the cast of characters cited thus far as likely models for Duchamp’s bride and bachelors, add Adele from The Supermale. She is first among “the seven prettiest harlots in Paris” who have been hired by Marcueil to assist him in attaining a new record for virility. Prior to being locked out and preempted by the amateur Miss Elson, we find the prostitutes arguing among themselves over who would “go” first. Virginie informs the others that she was told “we’ll be ‘put through’ in alphabetical order.” A few lines later we read, “Let’s congratulate the first ‘bride,’ said all six, making deep curtsies to Adele.” As in Messalina, a lady with an accommodating sexuality is referred to as a bride. Unlike the scene in the earlier novel, this arrangement is the reverse of the configuration in The Large Glass. The prostitutes were hired to be many “brides” for one bachelor.

In the same novel, the five-man bicycle team racing the speeding locomotive enlightens us regarding “the machine with 5 hearts” in Duchamp’s notes for The Large Glass.

“Perpetual Motion Food” energizes Jarry’s cyclists, whose interminable race symbolizes and prefigures the sexual marathon to follow; “Love Gasoline” energizes Duchamp’s bride and he describes the Bachelor Machine’s “bottles” as “in perpetual movement.”

Jarry speaks of the gears of the cycle, Duchamp of the “desire gears” and “lubricious gearing.”

Early in the novel, we read of Marcueil’s physical attack on an imposing “female” machine, literally shattering it to pieces as he utters, “Come, Madame.” Duchamp’s 1912 machine-like painting Bride is called to mind, as well as a Green Box note from that period describing “this nude bride before the orgasm which may (might) bring about her fall.” Also, this orgasm/fall idea can be tied to Marcueil’s firm belief, later in the story, that he has killed Ellen with his frenzied lovemaking, as well as to Messalina’s execution for indiscriminate bed-hopping. The Love Machine, title of the final chapter of The Supermale, again calls to mind Duchamp’s concept of a mechanical bride and bachelors and their “love gasoline.” Messalina and Ellen could be called, in common parlance, sex-machines; Duchamp’s Bride is literally that. Yet notwithstanding unremitting desire and sexual athleticism, his Bride, like Jarry’s heroines, is described a virgin.

* * *

Jarry’s biographers are in agreement that each of his heroines can be easily identified as symbolizing his mother, with whom he was obsessed. Jarry’s ultimate “dramatic situation” is “to perceive that one’s mother is a virgin.” The reason for his repeated association of sexual intercourse with the breaking of glass is plainly related to a fantasy he shared with his readers in which his mother is a virgin whom he would break in. In his novel L’Amour Absolu (Absolute Love) written in 1899, a young man resembling the author makes love to his “virgin” mother, then kills her. Duchamp’s alter ego, Rrose Sélavy, gives us that basic plot in a few words: “…an incesticide must sleep with his mother before killing her…” (…un incesticide doit coucher avec sa mère avant de la tuer…) . Both the Jarry story and Duchamp’s encapsulation remind us of Duchamp’s “virgin” bride, whose orgasm might bring about her fall. Any doubt that Jarry means his “bride” vanishes when we read in this novel, “I am the Son, I am your Son, I am the spirit, I am your husband, in all eternity, your husband and your son, oh pure Jocasta,” connecting his mother to Oedipus’ mother/wife. Oedipus was blinded as punishment for making his mother his bride; Jarry describes “a glass shopfront for the temporarily blind men to topple into…” His imagery of making love through a glass wall may well signify the breaking of his mother’s hymen. Duchamp’s soliloquy ends, “The penalty consists in cutting the pane and in feeling regret as soon as possession is consummated. Q.E.D.” The “regret” and the “penalty” seem to both connect with Rrose’s mention of “an incesticide.” The pun possibilities, which include ‘incest’, ‘insect’, ‘insecticide’ and ‘suicide’, work equally well in French and English. Q.E.D., abbreviation for which was to be demonstrated, in all likelihood points to the immanent construction of The Large Glass.

* * *

Considering Jarry’s persistent association of frenetic coupling with cracked or shattering glass, and Duchamp’s words from 1913, “The penalty consists in cutting the pane…,” the suspicion arises, though obviously only a theory, that the two thick glass plates of The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even were not broken accidentally, as advertised.

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Figure 4.

Remember that Tu m’, 1918, (Figure 4), Duchamp’s last painting as such, features a zigzagging trompe l’oeil rent cutting the plane of the picture, as well as a brush handle, a bolt, and three safety pins physically puncturing the canvas surface — an unprecidented violation of the heretofore sacred face of a painting. This could be an indication that Duchamp’s intentions, conscious, or half-conscious, were already preparing for a later, more ambitious breaking of a two-dimensional work’s plane. By 1918, the year of the painting, he was well into work on The Large Glass.

The story given to the world regarding this famous breakage is devoid of details and has sufficient time and space for the act to have been done surreptitiously. We’re told that more than four years passed before the breakage was discovered by the Glass’s owner, another two months before the artist was let in on the secret. A 1956 television interview of Duchamp has the interviewer, J.J. Sweeney, opening with : “So here you are, Marcel, looking at your Large Glass.” Duchamp responds, “Yes, and the more I look at it the more I like it. I like the cracks, the way they fall. You remember how it happened, in 1926, in Brooklyn?”

Duchamp errs slightly here regarding the year. The Glass was not packed up until January of 1927 after its premiere showing at The Brooklyn Museum. Also, since by all accounts it wasn’t discovered broken until 1931 in Connecticut, “it happened…in Brooklyn” can be an assumption at best. If it occurred in transit between Brooklyn and Connecticut, with the truckers unaware, or at the least uncommunicative, why assume Brooklyn? Possibly to divert attention from Connecticut. To further muddy things, Duchamp’s handwritten caption on the back of the Glass states that it was broken in 1931, even though he repeatedly told interviewers that it broke on its way to Connecticut years before. Is it possible that his caption on the artwork is more reliable than his words? If so, then Connecticut would have been the scene of the breakage.

Continuing Duchamp’s reply: “They put the two panes on top of one another on a flat truck, not knowing what they were carrying, and bounced for sixty miles into Connecticut, and that’s the result! But the more I look at it the more I like the cracks: they are not like shattered glass. They have a shape. There is a symmetry in the cracking, the two crackings are symmetrically arranged and there is more, almost an intention there, an extra — a curious intention that I am not responsible for, a ready-made intention, in other words, that I respect and love.”

On the same subject, Duchamp gave this account to Pierre Cabanne in 1966: “While I was gone, it was shown in an international exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. The people who sent it back to Katherine Dreier weren’t professionals; they were careless. They put the two glasses one on top of the other, in a truck, flat in a box, but more or less well packed, without knowing if there was glass or marmalade inside. And after forty miles, it was marmalade. The only curious thing was that the two pieces were one on top of the other, and the cracks on each were in the same places.’

Cabanne: The cracks follow the direction of The Network of Stoppages, it’s astonishing all the same.

Duchamp: Exactly, and in the same sense. It constitutes a symmetry which seems voluntary, but that wasn’t the case at all.

Cabanne: When one sees The Large Glass one doesn’t imagine it intact at all.

Duchamp: No. It’s a lot better with the breaks, a hundred times better. It’s the destiny of things.

Cabanne: The intervention of chance that you count on so often.

Duchamp: I respect it; I have ended up loving it.

Jarry, no less than Duchamp, seemed to love Chance, l’accident. He had invented a new physics, for which he coined the word ‘Pataphysics,’ containing nothing less than an alternate hypothesis for the workings of the universe. These workings depended ultimately on “purely accidental phenomena.” Duchamp identified to a startling degree with this concept and coinage in his notes and attitudes. For example, he describes his 3 Standard Stoppages, of 1913, as “casting a pataphysical doubt on the concept of a straight line as being the shortest route from one point to another.”⁽¹⁸⁾ And once, for a friend, he signed a photograph of himself, “Yours Pataphysically (Bien pataphysic a vous), Marcel Duchamp.”

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Figure 5.

The fervor of Duchamp’s remarks about the breakage is unprecedented. We never hear him raving about any piece or aspect of his work the way he does about this. One explanation might be that he felt free to be so openly enthusiastic about this because it was not his doing. But it may be instead that given what the world was told, he felt free to rave about the one part of the idea that he personally liked most. When we consider that earlier, two other important pieces on thick plate glass were also reported to have been accidentally shattered (The 9 Malic Moulds, 1914-1915, and To Be Looked At With One Eye, Close To, For Almost An hour, 1918 — Figure 5) — both, according to my thesis, influenced to a substantial degree by Jarry — the case for a discreet intentional breaking becomes stronger. Duchamp’s account of how The 9 Malic Moulds was broken may shed light on the “astonishing” symmetry that Cabanne and others have commented upon: “[The glass] was cracked when I brought it here to America in 1915. I showed it to somebody⁽¹⁹⁾ and it was leaning against a rocking chair which rolled back, so the splinters were not scattered at all, the floor was carpeted, it stayed in shape, as it is today. All I had to do was to pick it up very carefully between two other glasses, so that it would not change shape, and would keep like that, which it has for the last forty years.”

A chess master, and self-described “very meticulous man,” would seem an unlikely victim of such an accident, let alone three of them. His description of this accident raises questions. To break a thick plate glass panel on a carpeted floor, one would have to be particularly unlucky or clumsy. Yes, if you were careless enough to leave the piece under the runner of a rocking chair, a person sitting and inattentively rocking backward or forward over it might break it, carpeted floor notwithstanding. But what Duchamp describes is different. Rolling an empty chair back, causing the glass to fall from its leaning position to a flat position on a carpeted surface, would seem insufficient to cause such thick glass to shatter.⁽²⁰⁾ A look at the configuration of cracks on the piece only reinforces this skepticism.

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Figure 6.

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Figure 7
Wanted, 1923.

The stories offered are of accidents. My questioning Duchamp’s veracity will be seen as decidedly late-in-the-day when we consider his own famous all-purpose disclaimers, such as, “Every word I tell you is stupid and false,” and “All in all I’m a pseudo, that’s my characteristic.” We also have the famous self-portrait titled With My Tongue In My Cheek, 1959, (Figure 6), a second self-portrait as a “Wanted” felon, 1923,(Figure 7), and a third as the very devil.⁽²¹⁾In the Cabanne interview, given two years before Duchamp’s death, we find him blatantly ignoring the truth. When the interviewer, harking back to the twenties, brings up his decision to stop painting, Duchamp reminds him that the Glass “was far from the traditional idea of the painter, with his brush, his palette, his turpentine, an idea which had already disappeared from my life.”

Cabanne: Did this break ever bother you?

Duchamp: No, never.

Cabanne: And you never had a longing to paint since then?

Duchamp: No,… Never… All that disgusted me.

Cabanne: You never touched a brush or pencil?

Duchamp: No. It had no interest for me. It was a lack of attraction, a lack of interest.

Duchamp is leaving out the palette and all the brushes and turpentine that he used in executing the meticulously painted backdrop for the Etant Donnés, knowledge of which was kept from the world while he lived. Later in the interview, Duchamp goes out of his way to close any conceivable loophole to the truth.

Cabanne: You’re the first in art history to have rejected the idea of painting…

Duchamp: Yes. Not only easel painting, but any kind of painting.

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Figure 8.

It is noteworthy that the cracks in The Large Glass are the part that Duchamp seems to be most proud of. When having it photographed for reproduction in The Box in a Valise, 1935-41, (Figure 8), Duchamp tells Dreier to make sure that the photographer shoots the piece so that every crack in the glass is visible. He wrote, “I hope you won’t have too much trouble with Mr. Coates about photographing the glass. It seems important to me to have the black background as well as the white one… The black is to help outlining the cracks in the glass, the white outline is to help outline each group painted on the glass (chocolate grinder etc…….) …Each item (including cracks) on the glass shall be printed from half-tone cuts cut out and leaving the cellophane perfectly transparent.”⁽²²⁾ This means that in the concise 16″ x 10″ reproduction in the Box, Duchamp, with the help of hundreds of tiny stencils, will reproduce every tiny shard of broken glass that state-of-the-art photography could reveal. If the cracks were not part of the original thinking, he has certainly welcomed them into the family with all the rights and privileges accorded the children of his own brain. And it may be significant that he treated the cracks on the other two broken works in similar ways reproducing them for the Box. For The 9 Malic Moulds: “A labor-intensive detail that is almost invisible…is the pattern of “original” cracks in the glass, reproduced by scratching with an etching needle.”⁽²³⁾ For To Be Looked at With One Eye…..: “…the lines of the cracks in the glass have been strengthened in ink.”⁽²⁴⁾

Duchamp to Arturo Schwarz: “I never finished The Large Glass, because after working on it for eight years I probably got interested in something else; also I was tired.”⁽²⁵⁾ To Cabanne on this subject: “…it became monotonous, it was a transcription, and toward the end there was no invention. So it just fizzled out.”⁽²⁶⁾But though he may have stopped the work in 1923 because he was bored by it, he seems, in 1965, only a few years before the end, to have been still very enthusiastic about its cracks. In fact, nothing in the hundred page Cabanne interview elicits equal exuberance. Furthermore, his fondness for broken glass can be traced back to the era of the Arensberg salon when he was still at work on the piece. It was there that he declared that “a stained glass window that has fallen out and lay more or less together on the ground is of far greater interest than the thing conventionally composed in situ.”⁽²⁷⁾

One last sign that may point away from l’accident is that in his early notes, composed either before or roughly concurrent with the three shatterings, Duchamp makes reference to “the 3 falls,” and repeatedly to “the 3 crashes.” Coincidentally, of the seven pieces which he made with or on panes of glass, three were “accidentally broken.” Coincidentally, in three Jarry novels, highly sexual activity is accompanied by cracking or shattering glass. Eventually the sheer number of coincidents seems to make a statement.

Duchamp never names a second person witness to any of the accidents. In the case of The 9 Malic Moulds, as mentioned, he was showing it to “somebody.” Regarding To Be Looked At With One Eye…, I have come across no description of the circumstances surrounding its breaking. And The Large Glass itself, we’re told, was discovered broken years after it was delivered to Katherine Dreier. Neither she nor anyone else is named as having been aware of the breakage when it occurred. Was the shattered glass of the two large panels mute as the heavy packing crate was carried from the truck and set down in Dreier’s storage space? Was she in attendance for the event? Was anyone there besides the truckers? Was an insurance company of the truckers or of Dreier or of the Museum ever notified?

Dreier is the one person identified by Duchamp in connection with any of the breaks. She was a “formidable woman who considered herself an artist,” and who was known for her “organizational skills.” She was to all appearances obsessed with Duchamp. She followed him to Buenos Aires in 1918 even though it is clear that they were never romantically involved.⁽²⁸⁾Duchamp made the laborious repairs over a period of two months in her home in West Redding, Connecticut. Dreier has been described as a “demanding presence” for Duchamp during the entire thirty years of their acquaintance.⁽²⁹⁾ Nor was the connection left to die with her — she had named him executor to her will.

Perhaps Duchamp looked to Jarry’s works for ‘instructions,’ even to the point of breaking three thick plate glass pieces. Telling the world that The Large Glass and the others were broken accidentally would then be just another of his famous hoaxes. True, in all of art history we have never heard of an artist who secretly destroys major works, telling the public a story of accidents, all with the intention of laboriously repairing them. But then, we have never before had an artist who works on a major work for twenty years in total secrecy — the intricate Etant Donnés, with its moving parts, its artificial lighting, and its fifty page construction manual — while claiming publicly that he had completely stopped making art, leaving his survivors to deal with the complications of its posthumous debut. This was a man who thrived on secrets and who was obviously more interested in posterity’s decision than in the instant gratification most artists hunger for. “Wait for posterity,” was one of his mantras. Another was, “I found it amusing.” Conceivably the artist capable of the drawn out ruse of the Etant Donnés, with its awesome logistics, might have been just the artist capable of three sudden gestures — three falls — kept equally secret.⁽³⁰⁾In the one case, it takes twenty years to construct one hidden piece; in the other, it takes seconds to destroy three public ones. It would be a neat inversion indeed.

* * *

AFTERWORD

In 1959 Duchamp agreed to be “a satrap” in the College of Pataphysics, the “Parisian band of zealots devoted to perpetuating (and often distorting) Jarry’s philosophical pranks.”⁽³¹⁾But, in spite of his having identified Jarry as one of his two “Gods,” by 1965 he had been fairly quiet about a Jarry connection for about forty-five years. In 1965, possibly inspired by mixed signals which the artist himself had periodically put on the record about Jarry, the Swiss art historian Serge Stauffer sent the question, “Was Alfred Jarry an influence?” Duchamp answered, “Not directly, only in an encouragement found in Jarry’s general attitude toward what passed for Literature in 1911.” Actually, Jarry had already been in his grave four years by 1911. That year may have come to Duchamp’s mind because it was the year in which Jarry’s influential Exploits and Opinions of Doctor Faustroll, Pataphysician was published posthumously. This was hailed by Apollinaire as “the publishing event of the year.” It is clear that back in 1914 Duchamp did not mind confiding to his notes, and to whomever might read them, his intense interest in Jarry. In his art-defining formula of that year, consisting of just four words, the most revealing word is Jarry’s coinage merdre, by then famous in the art world and beyond as marking the end of one era in the arts, and the beginning of another. It is the only one of the four words not found in the French dictionary, or in any other. The equation reads,

Arrhe est à art que merdre est à merde. In English it would be something like ‘Deposit is to art as shitte is to shit.’⁽³²⁾

Even by 1918, he is still relaxed about the possibility of someone connecting the writer to himself. Tu m’ of that year is essentially an abstracted illustration of the pivotal scene in The Supermale where the racing five-man bicycle team reaches the fourth dimension, the turning point of the race. There is a Jarry sentence there that would work well as a caption for Tu m’, Duchamp’s last painting for a wall: “It was revolving on its own axis, corkscrewing through the air just above the ground in front of us, while a furious wind was sucking us toward its funnel.”⁽³³⁾

Duchamp obviously came to reverse this openhandedness about Jarry. He may have decided that the connection was too good to broadcast. Or it may have been that admitting as an influence the same writer who was being increasingly lionized by the likes of Picasso, Dali, Ernst, Miró, Magritte (as well as by virtually all of the Futurists, Surrealists and Dadaists) would have been out of character for the secretive and independent person he was becoming. This reading is consistent with Robert Lebel’s recollection of a remark made by his friend, Marcel Duchamp: “In a shipwreck, it’s every man for himself.”

* * *

HE HAS NICE TEETH, HE PROBABLY ONLY CHEWS BROKEN GLASS AS A RULE…

…THE CHANDELIER SWAYED, THE PICTURE FRAMES TREMBLED, AND NEAR THE CEILING, A PANE OF GLASS VIBRATED.

…A FIST, CUIRASSED WITH RINGS BUT WHICH BLED NEVERTHELESS, SMASHED IN THE PANE.

SUDDENLY, NEAR THE CEILING, A WINDOW-PANE SHATTERED, AND THE GLASS SHOWERED DOWN ON THE RUG.

The Supermale

…THE GREAT MIRROR OF SIDON GLASS HAS SHATTERED ACROSS THE MOSAIC FLOOR…

Messalina

…THE SIX DISAPPEARED IN THE SMOKE OF THE GREAT LAMP, WHOSE GLASS WAS CRACKED. AND SCANDALIZED…THEY RUSHED TO THEIR CLOTHES, BAREFOOT ACROSS THE CRACKS.

Days and Nights

Notes

1. Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp (New York: Henry Holt and Co.), 73.

2. Duchamp in 1966 to Pierre Cabanne: Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp (New York: Viking Press, 1971).

3. Jarry’s “…a little water and sheaves of roses,” whose “perfume spreadthrough the stillness of the air,” would seem to connect with Duchamp’sperfume bottle labeled with a photograph of the artist as Rrose Sélavy[BELLE HALEINE, EAU DE VOILETTE — Beautiful Breath, Veil Water]of 1921. The title’s second word could remind us that the Supermaledreams of Ellen transformed into Helen of Troy (Hellene is French forGreek) during a post coitum animal triste. (P. 72). Haleine canalso be used in the phrase “Tenir en Haleine” (“to keepin working order” or “in a working mood”). Ellenneeded to stay in the mood and in super working order for 82 consummationsin 24 hours. Rrose, who Duchamp once described as an old whore, withher calling card advertising herself as a specialist in “precision assand glass work” fits well with this good “working order” sense and alsowith the Greek part of the thesis, since anal intercourse is known as”the Greek way” in both English and French slang. A second meaning forvoilette is fall, so that EAU DE VOILETTE ties to water-fall,as in Duchamp’s title Given: 1. The Waterfall; 2. The IlluminatingGas, which in turn ties to the falling water on the Supermale’sestate. It is the power generated by this water, at the novel’s end,that supplies the voltage that electrocutes him as punishment for having”loved” Ellen.

4. Chapter Three, Book I.

5. Coincidentally, in Duchamp’s posthumously unveiled Etant Donnés,a nude woman, with her legs spread, holds high, almost dead center,a glass lamp. The lush painted backdrop could be either a paradise oran overly idyllic oasis.

6. Jarry introduces the novel with a quote from Juvenile’s Satires,writing of the historical Messalina, which may point to Jarry’s knowninterest in androgeny: “…she stayed till the end, always the lastto go, then trailed away sadly, still with a burning hard-on, retiringexhausted, yet still far from satisfied.”

7. Duchamp: “Taste is habit.” Cabanne, Dialogues With Marcel Duchamp.

8. His intent was to prove the viablity of his opening line, also the first words of the novel: “The Act of love is of no importance, since it can be performed indefinitely.” Again we think of Duchamp’s bride, “basically a motor,” “in perpetual motion.”

9. Duchamp’s notes tell of the Bride’s “intense desire for the orgasm.”

10. A more comprehensive account of this connection was published in an earlier essay. See William Anastasi, “Jarry in Duchamp,” New Art Examiner (October 1997).

11. Note that by implication the cheaper model is a ready-made item as well as a machine-wife.

12.Paul Matisse, Marcel Duchamp, Notes (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1980).

13. Jarry too seems to have had a soft spot for indifference. Here is an exchange between his characters Fear and Love:

Fear: Your clock has three hands. Why is that?

Love: Nothing could be more natural, nothing simpler. The first marks the hour, the second urges on the minutes, and the third, forever motionless, points to the eternity of my indifference.

From “Visits of Love,” Chapter VIII, Fear Visits Love (London: Atlas Press, 1993).

14. Published with Henri-Pierre Roche and Beatrice Wood.

15. Nobel laureate Octavio Paz connected Jarry’s later posthumously published novel to Duchamp with these remarks: “The best commentary on the Large Glass is Ethernites, the last book of the Gestes et opinions du Docteur Faustoll. A doubly penetrating commentatery because it was written before the work was even conceived.”

16. Duchamp’s relief Etant Donnés: la Chute d’Eau et le Gaz d’Eclairage , 1948-49, shows a nude figure with one leg lifted. The opening between the legs resembles a notch made by an axe rather more than it does an anatomically faithful vagina. The upper torso has an unquestionably female left breast, but a right one more to a male’s proportions.

17. Jarry’s sparse ouevre of paintings includes at least one that he signed “Ubu,” the name he gave to his best known invented character who served also as his notorious alter ego.

18. Anne d’Harnoncourt and Kynaston McShine, eds., Marcel Duchamp(Philadelphia: TheMuseum of Modern Art and Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1973).

19. As with the other famous breakages, we are given no named witness.

20. Consciously or otherwise, imagery from Jarry may have contributed to Duchamp’s story. At the climax of The Supermale, following the moment when Ellen asks for MORE after having withstood 82 rapid-fire consummations, the chapter ends with: “Suddenly, near the ceiling, a windowpane shattered, and the glass showered down on the rug.”

21.Corroboration can be found as well in the remarks of his friends. H.P. Roche: “I watch Normans like Duchamp carefully … I know that I can be had by him.” John Cage: “…he was a wonderful man, and I was very fond of him. But he did love secrets.” William Anastasi, Jarry, Joyce, Duchamp and Cage (Catalogue to the Vienna Biennale, 1973).

22. Ecke Bonk, Marcel Duchamp, The Box in the Valise (New York: Rizzoli Press, 1989), 200.

23. Ibid., 206.

24. Ibid., 247.

25. Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp (London: Thames & Hudson, 1997), 146.

26. Cabanne, Dialogues With Marcel Duchamp, 65.

27. Dickran Tashjian, Henry Adams and Marcel Duchamp: Liminal Views of the Dynamo and the Virgin (speech at The Whitney Museum of American Art, 26 April 1976), 22.

28. Tomkins, Duchamp, 209.

29. Tomkins, Duchamp, 180.

30. In Duchamp’s notes for The Large Glass, there are mysterious allusions to an “instantaneous state of rest,” an “extra-rapid State
of Rest” and a “twinkle of the eye.”

31. Michel Sanouillet, “Marcel Duchamp and the French Intellectual Tradition,” in Marcel Duchamp (Philadelphia: The Museum of Modern Art and Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1973).

32. At the age of 72, looking back on his long career, Duchamp said, “Eroticism is a subject very dear to me…in fact, I thought the only excuse for doing anything was to introduce eroticism into life. Eroticism is close to life, closer to life than philosophy or anything like it; it’s an animal thing that has many facets and is pleasing to use, as you would use a tube of paint.” Given this outlook one can easily guess that his use of the word “arrhe” points more to the sexual than to any other place on the compass. From a primitive male point of view, a deposit of semen is the goal of each act of sexual intercourse. This could not have been overlooked by Duchamp, the punster responsible for “Have you already put the hilt of the foil in the quilt of the goil?” Therefore, one interpretation of his formula must be: “my way of saying fucking corresponds to everyone else’s way of saying art as Jarry’s way of saying shit corresponds to everyone else’s way of saying shit.” – or more succinctly: “My fucking is to your art as Jarry’s shit is to your shit.” See William Anastasi, “Jarry in Duchamp,” New Art Examiner (October 1997).

33.The Supermale, p 32. An analysis of this connection appears in William Anastasi, “Duchamp on the Jarry Road,” Artforum (September, 1991).

Fig.1~8 © 1999 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris.

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Green Box with 94 Items
© 1999 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS,
N.Y./ADAGP, Paris.
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Museum of Modern Art Lab.
In 1934, Marcel Duchamp announced the publication of his Green Box (edition of 320 copies) in a subscription bulletin — an enormous undertaking since each box contains 94 individual items mostly supposed “facsimiles” (Duchamp’s word) of notes first written between 1911 and 1915, each printed and torn upon templates to match the borders of the scribbled originals for a total of 30,080 scraps and pages.⁽¹⁾

(See illustrations 1A & 1B for The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even in deluxe and regular editions; illustration 1C for the Subscription Bulletin advertising the Green Box in 1934; and illustration 1D for Duchamp’s master work a.k.a. The Large Glass (1915-23) of the same title as the Green Box.) Spectators, according to Duchamp, needed to study this “Sears Roebuck-like catalogue” of notes in order to understand his major life’s work, The Large Glass (also known by the same title as the Green Box: The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even).

Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp’s biographer, in 1996 writes:

Duchamp had always maintained that his Glass was not just something to be looked at but “an accumulation of ideas,” in which verbal elements were at least as important as visual ones, perhaps even more so. […] As Duchamp would say in a 1959 interview, he had “tried in that big Glass to find a completely personal and new means of expression; the final product was to be a wedding of mental and visual reactions; in other words, the ideas in the Glass were more important than the actual visual realization.” Since the ideas were contained (more or less) in
the notes, their long-delayed publication would become a new chapter in the continuing saga of his unfinished, shattered, but far from defunct masterpiece.⁽²⁾

Duchamp famously boasted — and the claim has been repeated, mantra-like, in nearly all commentary and scholarship upon Duchamp — that he had exerted enormous, almost maniacal, effort to reproduce the notes exactly, down to details of paper and ink.⁽³⁾He told Michel Sanouillet in 1954, for example:

I wanted to reproduce them as accurately as possible. So I had all of these thoughts lithographed in the same ink which had been used for the originals. To find paper that was exactly the same, I had to ransack the most unlikely nooks and crannies of Paris.Then we cut out three hundred copies of each lithograph with the help of zinc patterns that I had cut out on the outlines of the original papers.⁽⁴⁾

Scholars have accepted Duchamp’s claims at face value, uncritically adopting Duchamp’s given words as a premise in their own “analysis.” For example, Calvin Tomkins refers to Duchamp’s “absolute fidelity to the physical appearance” of his Green Box Notes as “puzzling” since they were based upon abstract ideas.⁽⁵⁾ Elizabeth Cowling writes in 1997; “Duchamp adopted the most time consuming and meticulous methods,scouring the specialist suppliers in Paris for papers that were exactly like those on which he had originally made his notes, and for lithographic inks of exactly the same color as the inks,etc. he had used.”⁽⁶⁾ And David Joselit writes in 1998: “Duchamp took extraordinary pains to mass-produce what is generally assumed to be unique or original — the artist’s cognitive process. It was not enough to publish transcripts of his texts. Rather he sought to reproduce as precisely as possible each torn piece of paper, each different ink, so that every one of the proposed three hundred editions of the Green Box would appear to share the spontaneity, the immediacy of the original process — as though he had undertaken to mass-produce his own subjectivity discovered readymade.”⁽⁷⁾

Let us leave aside for now (and for later and more extensive commentary) the deliciously ironic issue of why conventional scholarship on a man so celebrated for tweaking and mocking conventionality should be so willing to accept the subject’s own statements about his intentions and procedures as a kind of holy writ — and not suspect that Duchamp might also have played games by preying upon their gullibility and hagiographical tendencies as well. In any case, we merely wish to point out here that Duchamp, manifestly and purposefully, did not proceed as advertised in compiling the Green Box — and that scholars have not thought to check his claims, even though the material for so doing (comparison of the original and reproduced notes) has always been available.

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Illustration 2A
© 1999 Succession Marcel
Duchamp, ARS,N.Y./ADAGP, Paris

Illustration 2B
© 1999 Succession Marcel
Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris



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Illustration 3A
© 1999 Succession Marcel
Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris .

Illustration 3B
© 1999 Succession Marcel
Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris.
Most of the original notes remained with Duchamp and were not accessible to scholars during his life. But they then passed to his estate, and thence to the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), where they are now freely available for scholarly study. Moreover, and more importantly,a substantial group of these notes have always been potentially available to researchers — and comparisons between the originals and the Green Box so-called facsimiles could always have been made, although none ever were. Duchamp produced a special edition of 20 deluxe boxes (out of the total edition of 320), each containing one original note, along with 93 reproductions.

Several owners of the 20 Deluxe Green Boxes sold the original notes (contained within them) separately, and Shearer was able to procure one of the original notes.⁽⁸⁾Shearer’s note discusses a long, complex and important statement about the malic molds and sieves in the bachelor half of The Large Glass. (See illustrations 2A & 2B, Shearer’s original note and the Green Box reproduction.) She noticed immediately that neither the ink nor the paper of the original note matched the reproductions in two copies of the Green Box. The original is written in black ink, but the Green Box versions use blue ink in the lithographic reproduction. (see illustrations 3A & 3B which compare the original note’s textured paper and the reproduction’s paper) The original paper is thin, textured and warm in tone. The Green Box reproduction’s paper is much thicker, bluish in tone and smooth.If Duchamp “wanted to reproduce [the notes] as exactly as possible,” why would he replicate other Green Box notes with paper similar in texture to Shearer’s original note, but then not use this same paper in reproducing Shearer’s note? (See illustration 3C showing example of Green Box note with texture.)

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Illustration 3C
© 1999 Succession Marcel
Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris.
Shearer and Gould then consulted Margaret Holben Ellis at the New York University Institute of Fine Arts, and Christopher McGlinchey and Erika Mosier at the Museum of Modern Art Conservation to learn if the difference in ink color could have resulted from a natural change through time from Duchamp’s original. Christopher McGlinchey, from his chemical analysis, identified the ink in the original note as lamp black and in the reproduction as Prussian blue. McGilnchey assures us that the lampblack ink in the original note was not ever blue (as used in the reproduction), and that the inks are truly different.⁽⁹⁾ See illustrations 3A & 3B showing detail of Prussian blue ink in the Green Box copy and lamp black ink in the original note.) Moreover, the wove paper used by Duchamp in the Green Box could not represent the closest likeness available after scouring all the stores of Paris, because machine-laid paper much more similar (if not identical) to Duchamp’s original can still be easily obtained and was surely available when Duchamp made the Green Box.⁽¹⁰⁾(After all, he used machine-laid paper in other Green Box note reproductions.)Clearly, Duchamp intentionally altered both ink and paper to depart from the originals in his “facsimile” copies despite his claims, beginning in 1934, for faithful reproduction.

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Illustration 5A
© 1999 Succession Marcel Duchamp,
ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris

Illustration 5B
© 1999 Succession Marcel
Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris.

We then checked further to discover whether these alterations are systematic throughout the Green Box, or merely incidental in a few notes. Shearer and Gould examined 22 original notes at the Pompidou Center and we now wish to present this preliminary report.We feel confident in stating, at this early stage of our investigation,that the differences are pervasive and systematic. Every one of the 22 notes we examined shows substantial difference between the original and the Green Box “copies.” On every note, Duchamp uses complex combinations of different papers and different inks in making the Green Boxversions.⁽¹¹⁾Moreover, lest one think that Duchamp may simply have done the best he could with materials available, and that the differences represent “sins of omission” rather than “sins of commission” we can report conclusively that at least some of the changes were done with clear intent – for Duchamp’s own instructions remain in the original notes to prove the point. On the back of several one-sided notes, he wrote an instruction for the printer: tel recto seul – that is, “same size, right side only.” But two notes of the 22 we examined bear the “smoking gun” inscription: Ag 1/4 recto seul — that is, “enlarge by 1.25, right side only.” (See illustrations 5A & 5B, two of the notes which Duchamp selected to enlarge in reproductions.) The Green Box versions of these two notes are, indeed, 1.25 times larger than the originals.

Among further typical alterations in the 22 notes we find: the original note “laws, principles, phenomena” is written in blue ink but the Green Box version is printed in black ink, a reverse combination when compared to Duchamp’s alterations of Shearer’s original note — in black ink but “duplicated” in blue ink. In another case, he reproduced the “1912” note on graph paper with a square pattern whereas the original was on graph paper with a rectangular pattern. However, in the “chute d’éau” note, the original is not on graph paper, yet the Green Box version is printed on square patterned graph paper.⁽¹²⁾

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Illustration 6A
© 1999 Succession
Marcel Duchamp, ARS,
N.Y./ADAGP, Pari

Illustration 6B
© 1999 Succession
Marcel Duchamp, ARS,
N.Y./ADAGP, Paris

We strongly suspect that the differences between originals and Green Box versions are systematic rather than capricious — they are surely pervasive in any case — and we shall be studying all the available notes in an attempt to understand the system. But, for now and in closing, we wish to report one other remarkable fact.⁽¹³⁾

Duchamp’s wry and false claims that he worked so hard in scouring Paris for the right inks and papers covers up an enormously greater (and genuine) expenditure of time that he completely failed to stress!We first learned about this remarkable feature of Duchamp’s production when Margaret Ellis noted a pin prick through a period in both Green Box versions that we used for this study– but no pinprick in the original.(See illustrations 6A & 6B, showing original note without pin prick and reproduction with pin prick.) This led us to suspect that the pinprick probably anchored a stencil that Duchamp had used to produce part of the Green Box version.

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Illustration 6C
© 1999 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS,
N.Y./ADAGP, Paris.

Indeed, our study of several notes reveals that, although Duchamp always reproduced the background text by lithography when he added the words and phrases in red or blue highlight (often as they appear on the originals) he used pochoir stencils (a method he openly discussed and employed for promoting both his Boîte en Valise1934-41)and his< Eau et Gaz Box (1958)even featuring his inclusion of the actual pochoir stencils in his grand deluxe versions). (See illustration 6C for Duchamp’s Boîte; see illustration 7A for Duchamp posing with Lebel holding “pochoir stencils” sold with the grand deluxe Eau et Gaz and illustration 7B for pochoir stencil included in the grand deluxe version of Eau et Gaz.) Moreover, and more remarkably, he used two or more stencils for one color on some of the notes (to secure overlayerings as occurs in handwriting), even though the entire text of one color could have been reproduced with a single stencil. (See llustrations 8A & 8B comparing his use of two stencils for red showing overlap — similar to the results of handwriting — versus his use of one stencil for red.See also illustrations 8C & 8D which show the irregular texture of collotype lithography in one of Duchamp’s Green Box notes versus the smooth surface from a stencil that often shows varied pooling along edges upon close inspection.) ⁽¹⁴⁾

Just consider the immense amount of work required to reproduce 320 copies of most of the 94 items in varied combinations of inks and papers that depart from the originals, often one at a time using multiple stencils. For example, Ellis and Mosier have assured us that Duchamp, as a printer with two years of professional training, would have known that he could have achieved far greater exactness in reproduction, and saved a great deal of money and even more time in what can only be regarded as meticulous and uninspiring work, by reproducing the red and blue highlights lithographically. Did he use this laborious method of stenciling to introduce inevitable and slight differences among the 320 boxes — differences that a careful observer could use to spot his methods, and to discover the inconsistencies between his actions and his explanations? Or does the hand stenciling create enough small, perceivable differences between each copy (and its original document) to force us to ask whether we encounter here a new category and strategy of reproduction — not a true “facsimile” (“to make similar”) but now a “facvarious” (“to make different”). This man never ceases to surprise us — and to instruct us about our foibles and assumptions.

Notes

1. The following text is from the 1934 Subscription Bulletin: 300 exemplaries numérotés et signés d’un recueil de feuillets manuscrits,dessins et peintures (années 1911 à 1915) ayant servi à la composition du LA MARIÉE MISE A NU PAR SES CÉLIBATAIRES, MÊME par Marcel Duchamp Les notes manuscrites, en fac-simile rehaussé de crayon rouge et bleu, les dessins et peintures reproduits en phototypie (une planche en couleurs)sont imprimés sur papiers divers et réunis dans un emboîtage de 33 cm x 28cm. prix de l’exemplaire franco de port: France 120 francs / Étranger 150 francs Edition Rrose Sélavy 18 rue de la Paix Paris Il a été tiré 20 exemplaires (dont 10 hors commerce), signés et numérotés, sur papiers de luxe; chacune des boîtes contient, outre la reproduction en couleurs, des photographies originales et une page de manuscrit. prix de l’exemplaire franco de port: 750 francs. – Bulletin de Souscription Veuillez m’adresser ………………….. exemplaires de la boîte contenant les fac-simile et reproductions en couleurs de notes manuscrites, dessins, peintures ayant servi à la composition de LA MARIÉE MISE A NU PAR SES CÉLIBATAIRES, MÊME par Marcel Duchamp

2.Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp (New York: Henry Holt, 1996), 296.

3.In Marcel Duchamp’s 1st Catalogue Raisonné designed by Duchamp himself in 1959 — Henri Pierre Roché, Duchamp’s close friend and sometime partner and collaborator writes about the Green Box notes: “These are exact replicas of each document with the original colors of the inks and pencils that he used. The textures and shapes of paper are identical with the originals even in the case of scraps and torn pieces where metal masks were used.” Robert Lebel, Marcel Duchamp (New York: Grove Press, 1959). 81.

4. Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp, 296.

5.Ibid.

6.Elizabeth Cowling in the exhibition catalogue Surrealism and After:The Gabrielle Keiller Collection (Edinburg, 1997), 161.

7. David Joselit, Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp 1910-1941 (Cambridge:MIT Press, 1998), 85.

8. This particular note is recognized by experts as an authentic Green Box note original.

9.This particular note is recognized by experts as an authentic Green Box note original.

10.Ellis, Mosier, and McGilnchey identified the papers as wove and machine-laid.

11.For an English translation of the Green Box Notes, see Hamilton and Hamilton, The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelor, Even (New York: Percy Lund, Humphries and Co. Ltd,1960).

12.This particular note is recognized by experts as an authentic Green Box note original.

13.See Hamilton for Green Box Notes.

14.Duchamp was known for his formal interest in chance systems. For example,Duchamp and his two sisters created a musical score (also included in the Green Box) with a system of randomly selected notes.

Jean Suquet, born in Cahors (Lot, in the South of France) on 22 June

Introductory Remarks

Jean Suquet, born in Cahors (Lot, in the South of France) on 22 June 1928, has been close to the Surrealist group since 1948.

One day during the spring of 1949, André Breton invited Suquet to show him some of his writings. Suspecting a relationship between Suquet’s work and Duchamp’s The Large Glass, Breton, who had been commissioned to write a book on Duchamp, suggested that Suquet do the book instead. Breton introduced him to Mary Reynolds and Jacques Villon.

In his first letter to Duchamp (Paris, 15 July 1949), Suquet wrote: Si je dois écrire sur vous et votre oeuvre ce ne sera pas en critique mais en poète. [If I have to write about you and your work, I will do so as a poet, rather than as a critic.] Duchamp answered (New York, 9 August): Suis tout à fait d’accord pour votre projet. Et comme vous le dites, ‘en poète’ est la seule façon de dire quelque chose. [Am in complete agreement with your idea. And like you say, ‘as a poet’ is the only way to say anything.]

In conjunction with a letter dated 12 December, Suquet sent him some forty or so pages of writing. Duchamp responded immediately (25 December).His answer ended with nothing less than the following: Après tout, je vous dois la fière chandelle d’avoir mis à nu ma mise à nu. [After all, I really owe it to you to have stripped bare my stripping bare.]

However, Suquet’s first Duchampian works (1949-1956) wouldn’t be published at that time, except for “Le Signe du Cancer” [“The Sign of Cancer”] by La Nef, Paris, in the special issue of March-April 1950 (Almanach Surréaliste du demi-siècle).

The two men – 63 and 22 years old – met in Paris on 26 October 1950 at the home of Mary Reynolds who had just died.

From the first exchanged letters, one can tell, the tone was set. A conviviality was there and it remained for fifty years.

Suquet has published seven books, long and short ones, on Duchamp’s work.

*Miroir de la Mariée.
[The Bride’s Mirror]. Paris: Flammarion, coll. “Textes,” 1974.(267 p.)

*Le guéridon et la virgule
[The pedestal table and the comma]. Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1976.(128 p.)
*Le Grand Verre rêvé
[The Large Glass of dreams]. Paris: Aubier, 1991. (169 p.)

*Le Grand Verre: Visite guidée
[The Large Glass: A Guided Tour]. Caen and Paris: l=Échoppe,1992. (25 p.)

*Regarder l’heure. Sur le ciel de Marcel Duchamp
[To look at the hour. Against the sky of Marcel Duchamp]. Caen and Paris:l’Échoppe, 1992. (24 p.)

*In vivo, in vitro.
Paris: l’Échoppe, 1994. (119 p.)

*Marcel Duchamp ou L’éblouissement de l’éclaboussure.
[Marcel Duchamp or the dazzling of the splash]. Paris: Éd. l’Harmattan,coll. “L’art en bref,” 1998. (124 p.)

Far beyond Breton’s and Duchamp’s deaths (in 1966 and 1968 respectively),
Jean Suquet “delays as a poet.” He is currently 71 years old.

Even though Duchamp wrote to Suquet on 25 December 1949: Vous savez sans doute que vous êtes le seul au monde à avoir reconstitué la gestation du verre dans ses détails, avec même les nombreuses
intentions jamais exécutées [You know without a doubt that you’re the only one in the world to have reconstituted the gestation of the glass in its details, including even the numerous intentions which were never materialized], it would be some decades and many essays before the understanding would become clear, in the path of this succinct “guided tour,” that all the elements of the glass – The Large Glass – are in place.

André Gervais

16 November 1999

translated by Julia Koteliansky with Sarah S. Kilborne

Marcel Duchamp’s Scheme for The Large Glass

1 – Chocolate grinder. 2 – Slide. 2A -Driving hook and chain of revolution 2B -Underground pedal. 2C -Water mill. 3 – Large scissors. 4 – Bachelors. 5 – Capillary tubes. 6 – Horizon — Bride’s clothing. 7 – Bride, head or eyes. 7A -Suspension ring of the “Hanged” female. 7B -Wasp. 7C -Weather vane. 8 – Milky way flesh color. 8A -Meteorological extension. 8B -Roundtrip of the top inscription letters. 9 – Sieves. 10 -Planes of flow. 10A-Mobile of splash. 10B-Crashes — splashes. 11 -Cannon (?) 11A and 11B-Rams of the boxing match. 12 -Oculist charts. 13 -Shots. 14A-“Tripod” of the juggler-handler-tender of gravity. 14B-Spring of the juggler-handler-tender of gravity. 14C-Platform and black ball of the tender of gravity.

Being the one who punctuated the Mona Lisa with a mustache, who exhibited a urinal in a salon, Marcel Duchamp dashed off salubrious mockeries from time to time, to amuse the “gallery” of artviewers, as if to put them on a false scent. Meanwhile, every day, almost entirely in secret, he was working on his “grand oeuvre,” which is today at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The Large Glass, as much a window opening up a perspective as far as the eye can see, is formed by two vertical glass plates, one on top of the other, in a frame that is 1.76m wide x 2.72m high. On these glass plates, without offending the main part of their transparency, Marcel Duchamp outlined, using lead wire, austere echanical figures that are meanly stopped or, one could say, imprisoned in ice. He sketched them, erfected them, arranged them in schemes; he suggested their possible movements in notes, by pen, by encil; he scribbled them on pieces of paper in Paris between 1912 and 1915. He patiently and obsessively crystallized them in New York from 1915 until 1923, before he abandoned the piece in a definitively unfinished state. (The italics are Marcel Duchamp’s.) In 1933 he was told that the “oeuvre” on which he had spent thousands of hours of work had been accidentally broken into a thousand pieces. As if words themselves would escape from the lips of those breaks, he immediately undertook to publish his first and formative rough drafts of The Large Glass before even considering mending the disaster, which he would finally address in 1936. With the fervor of a water diviner and the carefulness of a monk copying a sacred text, he made a facsimile of each manuscript (he used the same paper, he tore outlines in the same way) and then gathered the jumbled up notes which made up ninety-three loose sheets in a luxurious box of green velvet, producing three hundred copies of this box in the autumn of 1934. A flight of leaps from the very first moment. On the cover of this marvelous Green Box is a constellation of dots in capital letters for us to decode into a sentence locked to its own equivocation: LA MARIÉE MISE À NU PAR SES CÉLIBATAIRES MÊME [The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors Even]. No need for the author’s name. Its sonority sparkles in the title:
MARiée, CÉLibataires. It’s similar to looking for or in oreille.⁽¹⁾ Marcel Duchamp delivered his notes in the sumptuous disorder of a puzzle, as if he had wanted everyone to start the game over and to braid his own path through the nerve tissue of the breaks. He wished pure reign for the legend – provided that one would read it through the grid of The Large Glass – without giving away in silence any of its given data. In order to begin, the reader should better add a swig of fun to the mechanical scheme described in these pages. With the same playfulness, he will have to make thousands of words sing which echo; he will have to find the sources of this “oeuvre” in the most vivacious, the most breathtaking,the most insatiable desire which haunts every mortal; and in every articulation of this meager trace he will have to follow the thread of this or that imaginary escape – for example, of the elusive fourth dimension – time – which a painter can only make sense of by revealing the imprints of its passing. That is why none of the rouages [cogs], none of the roueries [cunning] should be left in the shadows. The gears speak if they can be matched with precision, according to the number of their teeth. And their forbidding machinery, their jubilant machinations, start up as soon as mots [words] provide them with a moteur [motor].

In the bottomhalf, in the very middle, the chocolate grinder (1) is turning;turning as it has been and as it will continue to do, in a circle, inorder to come back under the mere whip of repetition of the adageof spontaneity: the bachelor grinds his chocolate himself. We won’tdwell on its dubious color or its essence of childhood. This triplemillstone propelled by a proverb, in spite of its size, in spite ofits central positioning, is useless except for the fact that it putsone on guard against the razzle-dazzle of the appearances. Next to it,a slide (2) goes back and forth over repeating litanies.

It jerks and rattles and opens and closes, oh, barely half way throughthe large scissors (3) which do not cut but whose large X, ontop of the bachelor’s world, sharpens the poignant question of an unknown.A bit further back from the infernal train of these grating scraps ofmockery, nine red fellows stand frozen at attention. They are the bachelors(4). They do not move, but the name that they wear slips and slides.This masquerade of uniforms, as hollow as if strictly dressed up, wasbaptized by Duchamp in the beginning as eros matrix and then,at the end, cemetery. Matrix and cemetery in one and the sameplace! A great gap must be overcome to be able to link at once the entranceand the exit. A subtle mobility, a quasi-spiritual fluidity must fillthese moulds of males reduced to their clothes. As a matter of fact,the bachelors are full of spirit – inflated with illuminating gas.”Gas” comes from the Germanic “geist” meaning “spirit.”Moreover, in 1912, gas wasn’t yet reduced to its culinary usage. Itblew life into lamps, but before it met its match, “l’hydrogène clarteux” [glimmering hydrogen] remained invisible. The painter can onlyshow the demijohns which contain it, the pipes and tubes (5)which canalize it, or he can perceive out of its flow only the plumbingnailed to the walls. Meanwhile inside, spirit flows, time flies, gasleaks…

Let us, then, flow along together. This brother in wandering, let’s accompany him on his voyage – in spite of the fact that he does not spare guiding traces. He does not say anything about the direction of the route [path], he hardly indicates the movement of the roue [wheel]. Thus, relying a lot on chance, dressed in personal rags, heavy with our own past, motivated by the very improbable prospect of enjoying the end of an instantaneous rest, let’s enter the impersonal duration of The Large Glass. But before stepping over the threshold, let’s pause while standing in front of it. At eye level (at least in the original frame) the fracture between the bottom and the top follows naturally the horizon line (6). Below, on the ground, the bachelors. On top, the Bride (7). What?! This skeletal puppet balancing at the zenith of the cemetery is actually the promised female? Could it be the spectre of Jocasta, the hanging mother of blinded Oedipus? Could death and love have crossed their blades for the sake of the large scissors of the unknown? What does this formless form mean? Is it a fossil? Is it a trace of an inspiration, like the impression of a bird’s talons on snow or sand? Can we imagine it from here below? Duchamp has only half-opened the keyhole of the vanishing point: he has designated the horizon as the Bride’s clothing. An admirably just allegory! We know the duplicity of this imaginary line which is, after all, only an infirmity of the eye. Where sight is lost, there we see it being drawn. When we go towards it,it moves away accordingly. And the bachelors, who are rushing pleins gaz [flat out] to strip the Bride bare, keep before them in their own regard [gaze] the veil which they are rousing and agitating and which they are dying to unfasten. However, before they can actually unfasten the folds of perspective which blind them…

The Bride has undone her clothing which falls down onto the horizon and covers the world around. She is nue [nude], nuages [clouds], nébuleuse [nebula]. Milky way flesh color (8) writes Duchamp with one stroke of the pen, one flap of the wing.

C’est la vie! The Bride has a life–center. Her heart beats. The throbbing jerk of her pulse, palpitating like the convulsive abdomen of a wasp (a winged hymen), generates an air draft, a blow, a wind which sends out, to fray at the four points of the quadrant, an oriflamme [banner] of entrails and brains. On fire with infinity, the Bride escapes from her intimacies, she evaporates from appearance into transparency, she breaks out of the limits of her skin, escapes all outline, challenges all representation. Nubile, the maiden pours her heart out like a nebula. Nue [nude], she wants to be une [one] with the universe. She lets herself be captivated by the meteorological extension (8A), ripped out by the tempests, embellished by fair weathers (time takes the colors of weather), which merge her smoothly into the weave of the sky as une flamme consistante [a solid flame]. A langue de feu [tongue of fire], sublimated into what is fatal about it: le langage [language]. The current of air going up through the Bride’s porous flesh is charged with lettres [letters]. The blowing, rising her up, is her vivid voice. The flesh is made word. Even though, in her first outburst, the blossoming of the Bride was going to turn the top of The

Large Glass into a vitrail [stained-glass window] of entrails sparkling with fine copper, platinum and golden dust, the rise of pleasure transmuted gold into words, the dew of the lips into volatile ink. Blossoming: to make an Inscription of it (8B). The writing, which drags its ink, crackles. It blazes, it self-erases, it rises again, it flows back, it ploughs the Milky way flesh color from one end to the other. Breathtaking, always on the alert, letters deliver the commandments, orders, authorizations of the Bride to the bachelors. Times have really changed. Instead of a hefty fellow spitting out thunder, a woman reigns in the sky. She dictates law.

On the bottom, the gas is still far from the end of its hardships. From pipes into funnels, from sieves (9) into churns, from obscurity into narrowness, being compressed, stretched out, cut, re-cut, frozen, and finally liquefied as a floorcloth, spirit goes through all the states of matter. La pesanteur [gravity] humiliates it, and la pesante heure [weighty time] overwhelms it with even worse hitches. But that’s in vain. Gas never gives up its determination to rise. Its most twisted avatar, the least conclusive of its laborious progress, fails to even slightly alter the dream which is going to emancipate it from gravity. And when on the bottom of the planes of flow (10) the blood-bursting gas drips its miserable puddle on the ground, it is always capable of exploding desire. Three or four of its drops regale the breech of the cannon (11) pointed towards the vanishing point. The artist/artillery man spits out a bille de combat [combat marble]. The bachelors, with Gallic pride, support the sky above their heads with the help of two béliers [battering rams](11A, 11B) standing straight, risen to the surface of the horizon and flirting with its alluring underclothing. The bille [marble] releases the béliers [battering rams]. The sky falls. At least it intends to fall. For, with each shot, at the same time as the gas breaks up the supporters, whose parts are iron but whose joints are fragile, it infuses them with its dearest childhood memories: a resurgence of ascensional magnetization. The fallen rams raise their heads. And all starts over. It wasn’t exactly what I wanted, concluded Duchamp. Thus, after five years of obstinate,ysterious work, distillations, incantations, decantations, backwardsreturns, fresh advances – of knights, bishops, queens and kings – thereverse of The Large Glass is silvered. In this mirror,using a scalpel on line after line to the point of scratching out theeyes, no second chances possible, he engraves three ready-made oculistcharts (12) which had been borrowed from an optician’s shop windowand placed in perspective. By the end of its apprenticeships, the gasunderstands what destiny its name implies. Being illuminating, it mustilluminate – starting with making itself clear. Under the shock of onelast fall, of a shattering weight (10A) thrown into the puddle by theintervention of the scissors, it leaps out in éclaboussures [splashes](10B) – whose sublimation maintains only éclat [brilliance].The gas sets its own body on fire. It declares its flame. On the springboardof the oculist mirrors, which peel off its last dregs and correct thearrow of its ultimate rise, it spouts into the sky in a burst of rays.The soaring is described by Duchamp in a flight of alliterations: éblouissementde l’éclaboussure [dazzling of the splash]. The late illuminatinggas fades into the core of its own light. It discovers there the originof its own interior lighting. And it metamorphoses for the lasttime. Even though they are ablaze, these are not the drops themselves>which pass over the horizon and find their opening towards the infinite in the constellation of the nine shots (13); but their image does. Which is the exact physiological definition of the gaze. When a ray of grains of light riddles the retina, the light doesn’t go beyond and find its way through the gray matter thickness; but its image at the nerve level does, as a bunch of electrical impulses, of chemistries and chimeras.

So, the energies at work in The Large Glass tend to unite. On the top, a flood of words. On the bottom, a flux of light. At the end of the voyage, the gas is transmuted into a dazzling gaze, the Bride, into effervescent writing. And the stripping bare, according to Duchamp’s wish, can therefore be read as a poem. Which rhymes the épanouissement [blossoming] of the Bride with the éblouissement [dazzling] of the bachelors. We’ll turn this already rich rhyme into gold by extracting from it this last word: OUI [yes].

click to enlarge

“You don’t say!” burst out laughing the supporters of NON [no]. Between the horizon and the Milky way there’s a transparent immensity, in which Duchamp had not drawn any signs, neither a cloud nor the cast shadow of a dash. There are only solitudes. It’s having never looked at the sky on a beautiful night. The Milky way marries the roundness of the vault of night and bows until it touches the horizon. No need for a giant to give shape to this pure effect of perspective. It’s enough to have a being whose forms have no longer in relation to their destination a mensurability, for example the letters of the alphabet, upper and lower cases, which forward and deliver the same message. In fact, a troubadour enters into the scene and will reveal himself as the Bride’s letter-weight, the lady’s spokesman: the juggler of the center of gravity (14). He DANCES on the horizon line. He flexes, he straightens himself up, from one foot to the other, at the mercy of the cannon shots, according to the wish of the splashes. His body, sharpened into a spring, twists like an endless screw between the bottom and the top. At his head, he erects a round platform in which a black ball rolls. That’s the clot of darkness he juggles with. He dances, he translates the jerks of the machine through twirling the ball which concentrates the waves of unbalance of the bachelors’ commotion. The ball vacillates,zigzags, dangerously brushes against the edges, but it does not fall. For the Bride sends it orders of new balance by licking it with a flame tongue, by flicking it with touching letters which contrecarrent [thwart] its écarts [swerves]. Five times, in drawings and model, Duchamp represented this deus ex machina in the shape of a guéridon [pedestal table], of a table tournante [swivel table]. A streamer on its three legs (sometimes four, or two), it is the Oracle of the married-divinity. One knock, two knocks, three knocks – like all gods, it doesn’t exist. The Large Glass cleared it away into transparency. The fundamental dodge making diabolic the empty space, the miraculous blank around which the puzzle has been reconstituted. So that,
for all the onlookers who had not read, or misread, the directions for use, it does not work, it cannot work. These infidels don’t hear the screeching of the grain of salt crunched by the gears, > they forget to deduce the god from these signs, from these marks. In the title, for example, he curves a comma’s tail, sliding it in between the plural célibataires [bachelors] and the singular même [even], virgule [comma], there is no dead language except Latin which admits its real name: virga. Oh yes! He’s the one in the salons today whom everybody calls Mister Phallus.
The one who shines in his own absence, who acts all the better since he is not there. To the sounds of the stripping bare, this dancer changes his name as if it were a mask. With one last stroke of the pen,Duchamp instituted the appellation: Tender of gravity. The doctor of the law de la chute des graves [of the collapse of the graves] who unites the One in the sky with us on the ground. The volatile physician who heals the grave horizontal cut, who turns into a song the cry, indicated by Duchamp in the first draft of his preface: Given that, if I suppose I’m suffering a lot. And what kind of remedy, what drug or alcohol is carried by the guéridon that is the Bride’s bed-side table? It’s enough to address it sharply and to enjoy one of the puns Duchamp had been so fond of: guéris donc! [so heal!]. And si tu es gai, ris donc! [if you’re cheerful, then laugh!]. To heal gravity is to laugh. With the dot on the “i” shaped like a black ball. By spelling the letters of the Bride, the trismegistus juggler-handler-tender of gravity undresses this well-balanced virtue labeled by Duchamp: irony of affirmation. He personalizes OUI from top to toe. A OUI, whose letters anybody can make dance to their liking:

Notes

1. Tr. “or” is French for “gold”; “oreille” is “ear”

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Marcel Duchamp, 3 Standard
Stoppages, 1913-14
© 1999 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris

Marcel Duchamp’s first box, the Box of 1914, included the seminal note that led to one of the artist’s most important works — the 3 Stoppages Étalon(or 3 Standard Stoppages): ⁽¹⁾

The Idea of the Fabrication
horizontal
–If a threadone meter longfalls
straight
from a height of one meter on to a horizontal plane
twisting as it pleases and creates
a new image of the unit of
length —
— 3 examples obtained more or less
similar conditions
:considered in their relation to one another
they are an approximate reconstitution of
the unit of length
The 3 standard stoppages are
the meter diminished

(See illustrations 1A & 1B, showing the 1914 Box and the 3 Standard Stoppages note.) The Green Box of 1934 includes the first paragraph of this statement and also the additional key note: “3 Standard Stops=canned chance.” (See illustrations 2A & 2B,showing The Green Box and its reproduction of the earlier note for 3 Standard Stoppages).⁽²⁾

click images to enlarge

• 
  Illustration 1A
  © 1999 Succession Marcel Duchamp,
  ARS, N.Y./ADAGP,Paris
• 
  Illustration 1B
  © 1999 Succession Marcel Duchamp,
  ARS, N.Y./ADAGP,Paris
• 
  Illustration 2A
  © 1999 Succession Marcel Duchamp,
  ARS, N.Y./ADAGP,Paris
• 
  Illustration 2B
  © 1999 Succession Marcel Duchamp,
  ARS, N.Y./ADAGP,Paris

Duchamp then made the object, listing the date as “1913-14” and insisting that he had followed the protocol of his note. He claimed that he had dropped three pieces of string, each exactly one meter long, each from a height of exactly one meter, and each only once, onto a canvas. He then glued each string to the canvas in the exact position of its chance fall. Photographs of the three canvas strips appear in the Box of 1914.
When working on his painting Tu m’ in 1918,Duchamp made wooden templates in the shape of each string’s pathway. (See illustrations 3A, 3B & 3C for Tu m’ and details of the Stoppages.)


Illustration 3A
© 1999 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS,
N.Y./ADAGP, Paris


Illustration 3B
© 1999 Succession Marcel Duchamp,
ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris


Illustration 3C
© 1999 Succession Marcel Duchamp,
ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris

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Illustration 4
© 1999 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS,
N.Y./ADAGP, Paris
In the summer of 1936, as he was working on the restoration of The Large Glass, Duchamp cut each of the canvases down to its current width and glued each to a glass plate. A comparison of the 1914 photos with the current strips on glass — which are now at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York — reveals no differences in the length or form of any of the strings. We may therefore assume that MOMA’s object represents Duchamp’s original construction.(See illustration 4 for the 3 Standard Stoppages in situ at the Museum of Modern Art.)
Calvin Tomkins describes the central importance of the 3 Standard Stoppages in Duchamp’s work and career:

Duchamp would come to look upon the stoppages as one of the key works in his development as an artist. “In itself it was not an important work of art,” he [Duchamp] said, “but for me it opened the way — the way to escape from those traditional methods of expression long associated with art. I didn’t realize at the time what I had stumbled on. When you tap something, you don’t always recognize the sound. That’s apt to come later. For me the Three Standard Stoppages was a first gesture liberating me from the past.”

(However one chooses to interpret this work and its meaning, one can only appreciate the deep and delicious irony,the provocation of thought, and the tweaking of the most literal of all conventions — for the meter was defined by the French revolutionary government in 1791 as a new and liberating device, based on the size of the earth itself [defined as 1/10,000,000 of the quadrant of the earth’s circumference measured from the North Pole through Paris to the Equator], and therefore constant, unvarying, and capable of serving all people as an absolute standard. [In fact, The International Bureau of Weights and Measures long kept, at rigidly constant temperatures to prevent change by expansion and contraction, an actual standard meter,defined as the distance between two lines etched into a bar of 90 percent platinum and 10 percent iridium]. [See illustration 5, showing the standard meter.] How lovely, in an early 20th century age that was introducing concepts of chance and higher dimensionality into the previous exactness of Newtonian physics, to tweak this rigidity by defining a new meter based on three separate infusions of chance imposed upon an object one meter long!)

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Illustration 5

Standard scholarship on the Standard Stoppages simply repeats Duchamp’s descriptions of his modus operandi — arguing about meanings and intentions at great length and with great erudition,but never questioning the actual mode of manufacture, or carefully examining the original object to verify Duchamp’s claims. Nonetheless, a current of doubt has crept into the literature, and into the talk of Duchamp scholars and aficionados, for a definite and interesting reason: each of Duchamp’s three strings (see figures) follows a smooth and gentle curve, with broad and limited undulations and no large “wiggles,” crossover loops or other sharp irregularities. The three pathways are, in fact, quite regular and appealing in their gradual and limited meandering.

Many people — perhaps, for the fun of it, or to feel some affinity with Duchamp, rather than from any suspicion about the master’s standard protocol — have tried dropping strings of the same apparent composition following Duchamp’s method: regular tailor’s thread, one meter long, dropped from a height of one meter. And, to put the matter succinctly, no one (at least anecdotally) has presented evidence that they have been able to replicate any of Duchamp’s gentle patterns,even once. Light string just will not fall into such a regular pattern when dropped from such a height. Try as many times as one may, the actual results always produce a pathway far more jerky and wiggly than anything obtained by Duchamp in any of his three stated attempts.

For example, a well known and oft repeated story states that Duchamp’s friends, composer John Cage, and artist William Anastasi each tried to drop string numerous times following Duchamp’s protocol, and never could match any of his patterns closely because the actual drops always exceeded the pathways of the stoppages in degrees of irregular wiggling. We do know that when Walter Hopps and Arturo Schwarz both asked Duchamp how they should make the pathways of the strings for their reproductions of the stoppages (they were having trouble replicating the pathways even by trying to lay out the string in the “right” patterns by hand because the string always jumped and wriggled in other parts as they tried to lay out one part in Duchamp’s gentle arrangement) — Duchamp advised them simply to lay out the string along and against the path of the wooden templates (residing in MOMA).⁽³⁾

Yet Duchamp continued to insist, vehemently and even when questioned closely (and perhaps in the light of such suspicions),that he had followed the stated protocol of dropping each string — “exactly” one meter in length — just once, and gluing it where it had landed “à son gré” (by its own will). For example,in an interview with the young Carroll Janis (who has told us that he pressed the point because he had developed similar doubts and puzzlement): ⁽⁴⁾

Marcel: It could be done only once. Also I like that it could only be done once and no more. That’s like an experiment or something. I liked it very much …

Carroll: I wanted to ask you about the lines.Were they dropped according to the laws of chance, and the first position they fell, they were? In other words, it was strictly that one drop and it wasn’t any drop until you felt you had achieved this sort of effect?

Marcel: No, there were three drops.

Carroll: Yes, I know there were three separate drops, but each was one drop?

Marcel: Absolutely. Also, that’s the point…

Carroll: Marcel, did you drop each one just once, or did you keep on dropping them?

Marcel: Just once, just once. Don’t recall there was any mishap.

We have also tried to replicate Duchamp’s smooth and gentle patterns by hundreds of frustrating drops, using all kinds of threads, including some (of much greater weight or thickness, or covered with various stiff surfaces) that one might consider more apt than Duchamp’s threads to fall in such regular patterns — different materials of cotton, silk and wool; different weights, different waxed and unwaxed surfaces; including forms of “regular tailor’s thread” (Duchamp’s words and claim) that would have been available in France, during 1913. We also never came close to replicating the smooth patterns of the stoppages. Our drops were often dramatically affected by the variety of slight differences in initial conditions. Sudden whipping air currents or the uneven timing of the opening our two thumbs (holding the thread at each end in-between the two forefingers before releasing each thread) created even more extreme wiggle patterns. The elastic construction of the thread itself (in actuality, a bundle of smaller gauge threads) creates differences in overall length (due to increases or decreases of pulling and releasing tension, which results from stretching each thread into its horizontal position in preparation for each one meter drop).⁽⁵⁾
Trying to establish stability and precision in the act of holding and dropping threads was maddening (and therefore hilarious) and impossible.⁽⁶⁾

We then asked conservators at MOMA, Erika Mosier,Pat Houlihan, and Christopher McGlinchey, to examine the original object,and they solved the old problem, with almost embarrassing simplicity, in a simple and direct way that any even casually suspicious scholar could have discovered at any time. Duchamp, in fact, followed a procedure quite contrary (both in actual action and implied significance with respect to the role of chance) to his stated protocol to make the original object now on display. If one turns over each of the canvases and studies the back through the glass mounts, the solution emerges clearly — and one can only laugh and say something like: “oh, so that’s what he did to get such smooth patterns.” Each of the strings begins on this obverse side, extends through a needle hole to the recto side of the display,meanders for a meter along the recto (making the path of the stoppage itself), and then goes through another needle hole back to the obverse,where it extends further for a few additional centimeters (making a much longer total thread length than Duchamp’s claim of an “exact” one meter!).(See video and illustrations 6A, 6B, 6C & 6D for recto and verso views. Also see, illustration 6E for visualization of a needle’s path through the canvas.>

click images to enlarge

• 
  Illustration 6A
  © 1999 Succession Marcel Duchamp,
  ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris
• 
  Illustration 6B
  © 1999 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS,
  N.Y./ADAGP, Paris
• 
  Illustration 6C
  © 1999 Succession Marcel Duchamp,
  ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris
• 
  Illustration 6D
  © 1999 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS,
  N.Y./ADAGP, Paris

Illustration 6E

Obviously Duchamp made the pathways purposefully by sewing– that is, he sewed through the obverse, left a meter of string on the recto side, and then sewed back through to the obverse. He could then put tension on the string by holding both of the obverse ends and (along with the potential counter weight of needles)produce any pattern of his own choice on the recto side.

In his characteristic, instructive and playfully challenging way, Duchamp did not make his actual protocol (so contrary to his stated procedure) obvious, but he didn’t hide his workings very strictly either — as if he intended to challenge us by saying: “I have hidden this in plain sight. I have given you deliberate hints. Why don’t you be critical and look carefully, and not just believe what creative people or authoritative scholars (and docents giving public tours at MOMA) tell you.” To wit:

1. He could have mounted the canvases on an opaque surface, — wood, cardboard — thus making the holes for sewing through, and the extensions of string on the verso sides, invisible.But he glued the canvases on glass, so that one could see his procedures through a glass, and rather clearly.

2. Once one has the right hypothesis,the whole “experiment” becomes even funnier, and emerges more as a test of the chance occurrence of critical powers and human discovery than a test of the blank rules of chance within objective nature. Once one realizes what Duchamp actually did, several features of the work, previously unnoticed,point to the true procedure. For example, one can now actually see (in the visible relief impression — pressing up from the back into the rectoside) that the pathways of the extensions of the strings on the versoside (see again illustrations 6A, 6B, 6C, 6D) have been right there, and fully visible, all along, not only in the work on display at MOMA but also in Duchamp’s 300 copies of the Boîte en Valise where a miniature version of the 3 threads, their six ends (on the recto side, see illustration 7) and their faint but visible extensions (pushing up from the verso side) lie at the bottom of the box ready to be seen.⁽⁷⁾

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Illustration 7
© 1999 Succession Marcel Duchamp,
ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris
Also, importantly, Duchamp’s threads are decidedly more than a meter in length, a fact that he also leaves right before us — to be seen in both recto and verso. Moreover, one can finally understand why the string “ends” do not fray at all on the rectoside (as ordinary string always does at a cut end). These are not string ends at all, but places where a continuing string passes through a hole to the other side (see again illustrations 6A, 6B, 6C, 6D).

Finally, another delicious irony in closing:perhaps we can now understand the real reason behind Duchamp’s naming this piece a “stoppage,” literally an “invisible mending.” Scholars like Camfield have assumed that he meant to designate his “amending” of the meter. But what then is invisible about the effort — given the object
itself and Duchamp’s published protocol? The object, we now understand,truly, and absolutely literally, represents a genuine “invisible mending”– a pathway done by sewing, but hidden in plain sight.

Notes

1.From the Box of 1914 at The Art Institute of Chicago; in Arturo Schwarz’ Duchamp Catalogue Raissoné (Revised edition, New York: Delano Greenidge Editions, 1997) this note is listed as Note 96.

2.Richard Hamilton, The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even(New York: Percy Lund, Humphries and Co. Ltd, 1960).

3.We are grateful to Pat Houlihan, Associate Conservator of Sculpture at MOMA,for pointing out the visit to MOMA by Hopps and others re: their construction of 3 Standard Stoppages reproductions.

4.From a private conversation with Carroll Janis and Rhonda Roland Shearer,1998.

5.We used thread from varying size spools (large and small) including waxed thread loosely wrapped around 12″ flat cardboard.

6.Box Notes (1934) but specifically ddressed the technical aspect of “early chaos theory” first developed by Henri Poincaré (who died in 1912). Poincaré stated that chance systems sensitive to small, initial conditions, like the weather or roulette, are affected by 1) air currents 2) muscle control (as in no two spins of a roulette wheel can ever be exactly controlled to be alike) and 3) gravity.(Henri Poincaré, The Foundations of Science, New York: The Science Press, 1921. See chapter,”Chance.” In the Green Box Notes, Duchamp refers to the same three initial conditions that Poincaré mentions as his examples. For his three
experiments in chance Duchamp writes:

Wind — for the draft pistons

Skill — for the holes

Weight — for the standard-stops

to be developed —

In a second note, Duchamp correlates the “weather” with his Bride in The Large Glass as sensitive to initial “differences” — just as Poincaré correlates the “weather” as “sensitive to small differences.” (See Poincaré,The Foundations of Science). Duchamp would have likely learned about Poincaré’s insight into chance systems from Poincaré’s popular writings.The artist Cleve Gray, translator of Duchamp’s White Box Notes, was told “many times” by Duchamp that “Poincaré was at the bottom of everything he [Duchamp] was doing” (Private conversation 1997 Rhonda Roland Shearer and Cleve Gray.)

(For above two notes, see Richard Hamilton, The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelor, Even, New York: Edition Hansjörg Mayer, 1976.)

7.An important topic for Duchamp, he, in fact, titled an exhibition,NOT SEEN and/or LESS SEEN of/by MARCEL DUCHAMP/RROSE SÉLAVY 1904-1964,Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery, 1965.

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Salvador Dalí with Timothy
Phillips (left),
early 1960’s

We first learned of Timothy Phillips (b. 1929) when he wrote a letter to the editor of Canada’s National Post in response to Sarah Boxer’s article “A Self-Made Man. The Art World is Upset by Evidence that Marcel Duchamp Manufactured the Readymades he Claimed to have Found” (15 March 1999, reprinted in the Post with permission of The New York Times). The letter was forwarded to us by one of the paper’s editors. From this initial writing, a correspondence with Phillips began and it soon became apparent that he was highly interested in one of Duchamp’s fascinations: mathematics. We also became aware that he had worked as an assistant for Salvador Dalí, executing “minor details of lesser pictures.” The assistantship came about in 1949 when Phillips’ mother had her portrait painted by Dalí (Illustration 1) and Phillips went along, bringing his copy of 50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship for an autograph.

Perhaps intrigued by the young man’s looks and interest in mathematics, Dalí invited Phillips to his house in Port Lligat, Cadaqués, and Phillips started to spend his summers working with Dalí (who wrote later that an angel had sent Phillips across his path). In the art world of Cadaqués at that time, the young Canadian met, among others, Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp.

An active painter, Phillips maintains the Toronto-based Tappa Gallery as well as the Timothy Phillips Art Foundation. Now deeply religious, he attends services twice a week. In the correspondence that ensued after his letter to the editor, he happily shared memories of his very different lifestyle of the 1950s and 60s:

Emboldened by the example of the renowned master [Dalí], I proceeded to act in ever stranger ways. In the beginning Dalí said (in “Dalínese”): “You is not enough crazy.” When I parted company from him, he declared: “You is too much crazy!” In the interval, my apparent insanity had progressed more than his command of English. Eventually, my wealthy step-father purchased for me and my newly married – and disastrously so – wife, a mountaintop former monastery. There I took mescalin and vast quantities of alcohol (not to mention sex!), confirming to the letter Dalí’s shrewd estimate of my then mental state.

We had to meet him!

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Timothy Phillips, Toronto, June 1999

Thomas Girst: You seem to have had a pretty wild time while living in Cadaqués during the 1950s and 60s.

Timothy Phillips: That’s unfortunately true.

T.G. But you lived in a monastery.

T.P. First of all, I started in a fisherman’s hut which I rented and then I fell in love with a local girl. She was the daughter of an English expatriate. Staying in the monastery meant very primitive living but we stayed there for a couple of summers. Then she ran off with Jonathan Guinness who secretly turned out to have a second wife that he kept in the countryside. Well, she went where the money was and I fell in one of my down periods. That’s when I became religious. I was working for Dalí before I was married, doing mathematical calculations. I also did very minor parts of lesser pictures and he complimented my sense of tone. It is very difficult to explain to anybody who doesn’t paint what tone is. Generally, tone is what you see in a painting when you take a black and white photograph. If it’s all pale and you can’t distinguish things, if it all depends on color it is not in tone. If it is in tone, it’ll be 50% mid-tone, 25% light tone and 25% dark. And it will have a pattern of masses of tone. Apparently, tone is becoming lost. It used to be taught in schools. So Dalí said to me that I had the total sense of a Velazquez, a big exaggeration, but I’ve tried to live up to it and in a lot of pictures I haven’t./p>

T.G. Did you know Puignau, the contractor and mayor? He was important to Duchamp.

T.P. Puignau! Yes, I certainly know him. He is a great guy!

T.G.He arranged the wooden door for Duchamp’s Given to be shipped to New York. He also got the bricks for Duchamp’s last major work and helped him find a summer home, later installing a big chimney designed by Duchamp.

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Illustration 2.© 1999 Succession
Marcel Duchamp, ARS, NY/ADAGP,
Paris Marcel Duchamp, The
Mayor of Cadaqués, 1968

T.G. Duchamp even did a portrait of him in the 60s.
A little drawing (figure 2)
.

T.P. Oh, I have to see it.

T.G. Was he friends with Dalí as well?

T.P. Oh yeah, was he ever! He was a very intelligent man. No one could be friends with Dalí without having either talent or intelligence or both.

T.G. It is said that when Dalí was with Duchamp, Dalí wasn’t the exhibitionist he used to be.

T.P.Dalí was never an exhibitionist, that was for the public. Dalí was the humblest man I’ve ever known in my life. Only interested in what he could learn, what he could absorb. A remarkable man! Duchamp was a very humble man too and so sharp and intelligent. He was a chess player, he didn’t advertise his moves. I don’t think that Dalí appreciated Duchamp until he began to deeply study mathematics and metaphysics. First of all, Dalí had this concept of Freudian analysis but then he outgrew it and became aware of not only geometrical format in painting, but the dynamic of mathematics and geometry which underpinned everything. So a little talk with Duchamp would show Dalí just where the real truth of things laid and he could then abandon these Freudian concepts and go to something far deeper, which he did. His paintings became progressively more mathematical and dynamic.

T.G. He also showed a big interest in DNA.

T.P. Yes, he was a “scientist manqué” fascinated with contemporary science and all its branches, particularly biology and physics.

T.G. As a young man, Duchamp read up on mathematical treatises, especially at the time he was working at the library Saint-Genevieve in Paris.

T.P. He did, he saturated himself in that, and I also noticed that he knew Apollinaire who was unbelievably intelligent.

T.G. He even tried to outdo de Sade by writing a more pornographic book than the old prisoner could have had imagined.

T.P.I do not know one major creative mind that did not have a pornographic streak, not one!

T.G. Can you elaborate upon when you first met Duchamp? He and Man Ray had come up to your monastery?

T.P.My wife invited them. She had a remarkable ability to meet people and socialize and she was incredibly pretty. So it was no difficulty for her to have this famous pair invited. I knew that Duchamp had a fantastic grasp of perspective and a razor sharp intellect, but I thought he was the supreme joker of modern art.

T.G. When did that change for you?

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Illustration 3 Timothy Phillips,
Nude after Velazquez (Untitled),
late 1950’s

T.P. Well, I spoke to him while I was working on a study of a nude and he complimented me on the foreshortening (Illustration 3).He said how difficult foreshortenings were and I knew this was a very serious person. Just his general conversation showed a very high intelligence and I became aware that he was no joker. He said to me: “My idea is to destroy easel painting” and I thought “But this is what I am doing, why do you want to destroy it?” I believe what he wanted was to destroy the banality and the mechanicalness of what passes for painting and to introduce the beauty of “grey matter,” add a bit of intelligence into painting.

T.G. I thought the term “grey matter” did not come up with Duchamp until later in his life. Did he mention “grey matter” to you in Cadaqués?

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Salvador Dalí (center)
with Gala and Timothy
Phillips (left), early 1960’s

T.G. Do you have any memory of how Man Ray and Duchamp were together?

T.P. Well yeah, they were terrific. Man Ray, I think it was a joke, said to me, “I intend to paint a picture of such a nature that everyone of the spectators will drop dead,” and I said to him: “Mr. Ray, have you paid up your insurance premiums?”

T.G. You must have also met Teeny, Duchamp’s wife?

T.P. Yes, she was lovely!

T.G. Teeny and Gala [Dalí’s wife] didn’t get along…

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Timothy Phillips,
Toronto, June 1999

T.P. No, I am afraid not, they wouldn’t. Gala had a commercial streak. I am sure that came as a result of her childhood in Russia and her life as an ex-patriot in Paris. She became, well, not only an entrepreneur but a total opportunist. Regretfully, it spoiled the character of an otherwise wonderfully civilized woman, that’s too bad. And also of course, she was a nymphomaniac and Dalí alone couldn’t satisfy her sexually, so that boatmen or young actors or anything else would do. Eventually, Dalí got fed up and he slugged her in the Hotel Meurice. They broke up and that was the end for Dalí because she did all the business.

T.G. How did they spend their summers together?

T.P. Well, he would paint from early morning until nightfall, then after supper he’d turn on the lights and painted by artificial light. Occasionally, he’d go out on a little excursion in a yellow fishing boat with Gala and I would often come along. We’d go to those islands off Cap Creus.

T.G. Where you can see those rock formations sometimes found in Dalí’s paintings?

T.P. Yes, wonderful rock formations!

T.G. And Gala would read to him while he was painting?

T.P. Yes, she would read to him the most pornographic works that she could find: Marquis de Sade and also Rabelais.

T.G. Do you know that someone once did the L.H.O.O.Q. with Gala for a surrealist
exhibition in the 60s — the “L.H.O.O.Q., Comme D’Habitude” (Illustration 4)?

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Illustration 4.L.H.O.O.Q.,
Comme d’Habitude, 1961

T.P.This is a supreme piece of irony to put the moustache on Gala. Incidentally, there was a lot of tension between Gala and Dalí. He knew that she was a nympho and that she betrayed him sexually every time she could. Dalí and Gala were a very unhappy union at the time, projecting to the public something they weren’t. But she had an amazing eye!

T.G. For his art or for young men?

T.P.Both! (laughs) Regarding Duchamp and Dalí, she didn’t like Dalí giving too much credit to anyone. Her idea was that Dalí should be some kind of a demigod, a Renaissance man who simply absorbed everything osmotically and gave it back in his own way. The fact that he would then commune with Duchamp I think disturbed her a little bit. The idea that anyone could influence Dalí was alien to her.

T.G. So when you met him was he still practicing his paranoic-critical method?

T.P. Paranoic-critical method was with him from the time he discovered it until his death. It was his basic method of creation. And it was really his way to liberate the right hemisphere of the brain because what hinders the sane person is the critique of the left hemisphere. It is critical and linear, but if you can liberate the right side of the brain you can have these wonderful insights, which are free of limiting logic. They have their own logics. There are so many different logics — irrational or non-rational and hyper-rational logics. They’re all in mathematics, so that is Dalí’s method of contacting the super-rational.

T.G. And delving into the subconscious at the same time.

T.P. But I think Duchamp showed him there was a mathematical basis for all this. It clearly fascinated Dalí to see that Duchamp could handle these things. He understood the whole field of advanced mathematics.

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Salvador Dalí (lower center) and
Marcel Duchamp (upper left)
attending a bullfight held in
Dalí’s honor, August 1961

T.G. Hence their mutual respect.

T.P. Yes, mutual respect. A lot of mutual admiration between two geniuses. They were two minds on a single wavelength.

T.G. And in one of Dalí’s paintings, Dalí hands the crown to Duchamp, turning him into a king.

Yes, it is Salvador Dalí in the Act of Painting Gala in the Apotheosis of the Dollar, in which One may also Perceive to the Left Marcel Duchamp Disguised as Louis XIV, behind a Curtain in the Style of Vermeer, which is but the Invisible Monument Face of the Hermes of Praxiteles(figure 5) which he did three years after I broke off contact in 1962. There are so many references in the title alone. To begin with, you have the helix and its reflection.

T.G. In the background you also find allusions to Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase
of 1912.

Figure 5


Salvador Dalí, Salvador Dalí
in the Act of Painting Gala
in the Apotheosis of the
Dollar, in which One may also
Perceive to the Left Marcel Duchamp
Disguised as Louis XIV, behind a
Curtain in the Style of Vermeer,
which is but the Invisible Monument
Face of the Hermes of Praxiteles, 1965.

Timothy Phillips and Thomas Girst
outside the Tappa Gallery
Toronto, 1999

T.P. An incredibly complex painting with the Velazquez door and the Vermeer curtain. I believe that Dalí acknowledged Duchamp as the major mind force in modern art. For me, everything else is an effervescence of superior talent, but without real significance. Besides Klee, Dalí and Duchamp, I can’t really think of many of the others as anything except being exceptional talents. Klee was a man who I think understood the insane, children and the symbolism of these minds which might in certain ways be far superior to normal minds. There might in fact be no such thing as insanity, because you can’t define sanity; and Klee’s exploration of the insane I think went deeper than Dalí’s. At the time, I thought the value of Dalí was in his superb technique. Now I think that his technique was cumbersome although he achieved miracles.

T.G. But Dalí as a person must have been much more insane than Klee!

T.P. Klee was Swiss! What do you expect of a Swiss?

T.G. Not too much of what Dalí was, with his staring eyes…

T.P. That was something he just put on. Dalí wasn’t insane at all, one of the sanest men I’ve ever met in my life. My god was he sane (laughs)!

The interview was conducted at Timothy Phillips’ Tappa Gallery in downtown Toronto,June 20, 1999. It is preserved in full on a digital videotape (filmed by Friederike N. Gauss), © ASRL, 1999.

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Timothy Phillips – Picture Gallery

Un Chapeau

Jean Suquet, né à Cahors (Lot, dans le midi de la France) le 22 juin 1928, fréquente à Paris le groupe surréaliste depuis 1948.

Un jour du printemps 1949, il est invité par André Breton à lui faire lire quelques pages de ses écrits. Soupçonnant une parenté entre ceux-ci et Le Grand Verre de Duchamp, Breton, à qui on a demandé un livre sure Duchamp, lui suggère d’écrire ce livre à sa place. Il lui fait rencontrer Mary Reynolds et Jacques Villon.

Dans sa première lettre à Duchamp (Paris, 15 juillet 1949), Suquet écrit: “Si je dois écrire sur vous et votre oeuvre ce ne sera pas en critique mais en poète.” Duchamp lui répond (New York, 9 août): “Suis tout à fait d’accord pour votre projet. / Et comme vous le dites, ‘en poète’ est la seule façon de dire quelque chose.”

Parallèlement à une lettre du 12 décembre, Suquet lui envoie quelque quarante pages. Duchamp répond tout de suite (25 décembre). Cela se termine sur rien de moins que: “Après tout, je vous dois la fière chandelle d’avoir mis à nu ma mise à nu.”

Les premiers travaux duchampiens de Suquet (1949-1956) ne seront cependant pas publiés à l’époque, sauf “Le Signe du Cancer,” dans La Nef, Paris, no. spécial (Almanach Surréaliste du demi-siècle), mars 1950.

Les deux hommes – 63 ans et 22 ans – se rencontrent à Paris, chez Mary Reynolds qui vient de mourir, le 26 octobre 1950.

Dès les premières lettres échangées, on le voit, le ton est donné. Et la connivance est là – est toujours là, cinquante ans plus tard. Bien au delà de la mort de Breton (en 1966) et de Duchamp (en 1968), Jean Suquet “retarde en poète.” Il a 71 ans.

Il a publié sept livres, longs et brefs, sur l’oeuvre duchampienne:

*Miroir de la Mariée. Paris: Flammarion, coll. “Textes,” 1974. (267 p.)

*Le guéridon et la virgule. Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1976. (128 p.)

*Le Grand Verre rêvé. Paris: Aubier, 1991. (169 p.)

*Le Grand Verre: Visite guidée. Caen and Paris: l’Échoppe, 1992. (25 p.)

*Regarder L’heure. Sur le ciel de Marcel Duchamp. Caen and Paris: l’Échoppe, 1992. (24 p.)

*In vivo, in vitro. Paris: l’Échoppe, 1994. (119 p.)

*Marcel Duchamp ou L’éblouissement de l’éclaboussure. Paris: Éd. L’Harmattan, coll. “L’art en bref,” 1998. (124 p.)

Bien que Duchamp lui ait écrit (25 décembre 1949): “Vous savez sans doute que vous êtes le suel au monde à avoir reconstitué la gestation du verre dans ses détails, avec même les nombreuses intentions jamais exécutées,” il faudra attendre quelques dizaines d’années et plusieurs essais pour qu’il soit clair, dans le trajet de cette “visite guidée” succincte, que tous les éléments du verre – Le Grand Verre – sont bien en place.

André Gervais

16 novembre 1999

LE GRAND VERRE: Visite Guidée

Par Jean Suquet

Schéma du Grand Verre de Marcel Duchamp

1 – Broyeuse de chocolat.
2 – Glissière.
2A -Agrafe motrice et chaîne de révolution.
2B -Pédale en sous-sol.
2C -Moulin à eau.
3 – Grands ciseaux.
4 – Célibataires.
5 – Tubes capillaires.
6 – Horizon — vêtements de la Mariée.
7 – Mariée, tête ou yeux.
7A -Anneau de suspension du Pendu femelle.
7B -Guêpe.
7C -Girouelle.
8 – Voie lactée chair.
8A -Allongement météorologique.
8B -Aller-retour des lettres de l’Inscription.
9 – Tamis.
10 -Pentes d’écoulement.
10A-Mobile de l’éclaboussure.
10B-Fracas — éclaboussures.
11 -Canon (?)
11A et
11B-Béliers du combat de boxe.
12 -Tableaux d’oculiste.
13 -Tirés.
14A-“Trépied” du jongleur-manieur-soigneur de gravité.
14B-Ressort du jongleur-manieur-soigneur de gravité.
14C-Plateau et boule noire du soigneur de gravité.

Celui qui a virgulé des moustaches à la Joconde, qui a exposé une pissotière dans un salon, Marcel Duchamp, s’est acquitté à la va-vite de ces salubres moqueries, de loin en loin, pour amuser la galerie, et comme pour donner le change. Car dans le même temps, chaque jour, presqu’en secret, il travaillait à un “grand oeuvre,” aujourd’hui au musée de Philadelphie. Le Grand Verre, telle une fenêtre ouvrant une perspective à perte de vue, est constitué par deux plaques de verre verticales dressées l’une au dessus de l’autre dans un cadre de 1,76 m de large sur 2,72 m de haut. Sur ces vitres, sans offusquer l’essentiel de leur transparence, Marcel Duchamp a dessiné, au moyen de fil de plomb, de sèches figures mécaniques méchamment arrêtées, on dirait prises dans les glaces. Il les a esquissées, précisées, mises en place sur des plans, il en a suggéré les possibles mouvements par des notes, à la plume, au crayon, sur des bouts de papier griffonnés à Paris de 1912 à 1915. Il les a cristallisées patiemment, obsessionnellement, à New York entre 1915 et 1923, date à laquelle il a abandonné son chantier définitivement inachevé. (Le caractère italique souligne les citations de Marcel Duchamp.) En 1933 on lui apprit que l’oeuvre à laquelle il avait consacré des milliers d’heures de travail était brisée en mille morceaux. Aussitôt, avant même de songer à cicatriser le désastre, ce qu’il fit en 1936, comme si les mots s’échappaient d’entre les lèvres des cassures, il entreprit de publier ses brouillons fondateurs. Avec la ferveur d’un sourcier de soi-même et la minutie d’un moine recopiant un texte sacré il reproduisit chaque manuscrit en fac-similé, il le fit imprimer sur un pareil papier, il en déchira le contour à l’identique et il recueillit en vrac dans un luxueux coffret de velours vert édité à trois cents exemplaires à l’automne 1934 un jeu de quatre vingt treize feuilles volantes. Envolées de leur jaillissement au tout premier moment. Le couvercle de cette merveilleuse Boîte Verte est constellé par un pointillé de lettres majuscules qui donnent à déchiffrer une phrase articulée sur sa propre dérobade: LA MARIÉE MISE À NU PAR SES CÉLIBATAIRES MÊME. Nul besoin du nom de l’auteur. Sa sonorité scintille dans le titre: MARiée, CÉLibataires. Ainsi qu’une invite à chercher l’or dans l’oreille. Marcel Duchamp a livré ses notes dans un somptueux désordre de puzzle comme s’il avait voulu que chacun reprenne le jeu à son compte et brode à travers le tissu nerveux des brisures son propre chemin. Il a souhaité libre cours à la légende, pourvu qu’on la lise grâce à la grille du Grand Verre; et sans passer sous silence aucune des données. Pour commencer le lecteur fera bien d’ajouter une lampée d’huile de rigolade au schéma mécanique que ces pages détaillent. Il devra avec le même enjouement faire chanter les mille échos du vocabulaire; retrouver les sources de l’oeuvre dans le plus vif, le plus haletant, le plus irrassasiable désir qui hante le commun des mortels; et à chaque articulation de ce trop maigre tracé prendre le fil de telle ou telle échappée imaginaire, celle par exemple de l’insaisissable quatrième dimension, le temps, que le peintre ne peut mettre à la raison qu’en relevant les empreintes de son passage. C’est pourquoi aucun des rouages, aucune des roueries ne doivent être laissés dans l’ombre. Les engrenages parlent pour peu qu’on les apparie avec exactitude selon le nombre de leurs dents. Et leur machinerie rébarbative, leurs machinations jubilatoires, marchent dès l’instant que les mots leur prêtent moteur.

En bas, au beau milieu, la broyeuse de chocolat (1) tourne; tourne comme elle a tourné et tournera en rond pour revenir au même sous le seul fouet de la répétition de l’adage de spontanéité: le célibataire broie son chocolat lui-même. Ne nous attardons pas à sa couleur douteuse, à son parfum d’enfance. Cette triple meule mue par un proverbe, en dépit de son volume, de sa place centrale, ne sert à rien. Sinon à mettre en garde contre le tape-à-l’oeil des apparences. A son côté une glissière (2) va et vient en ressassant des litanies. Ses saccades et ses hoquets ouvrent et ferment, oh à peine à moitié, de grands ciseaux (3) qui ne coupent pas mais dont le grand X affûte au dessus du monde célibataire la poignante question d’une inconnue. Un peu en retrait du train d’enfer de ces ferrailles grinçantes de railleries, neuf bonhommes rouges se tiennent figés au garde-à-vous. Ce sont les célibataires (4). Ils ne bougent pas mais le nom qu’ils portent ripe et dérape. Cette mascarade d’uniformes aussi creux que strictement ficelés, Duchamp pour commencer l’a baptisée matrice d’éros et pour finir cimetière. Matrice et cimetière confondus en un même lieu! Il faut en faire un grand écart pour joindre ainsi d’un trait l’entrée à la sortie. Une mobilité subtile, une fluidité quasi spirituelle habiter ces moules de mâles réduits à leurs habits. En effet, les célibataires sont pleins d’esprit. Gonflés au gaz d’éclairage. Gaz dérive du “geist” germanique qui signifie esprit. Et de fait en 1912 le gaz n’est pas rabougri aux utilités culinaires. Il insuffle aux lampes leur sang. Mais tant qu’il ne rencontre pas une allumette “l’hydrogène clarteux” demeure invisible. Le peintre ne peut montrer de lui que les bonbonnes qui le contiennent, les tuyaux et les tubes (5) qui le canalisent, ou ne perçoit de sa coulée que la plomberie clouée aux murs. Or dedans l’esprit court, le temps passe, le gaz fuit…

Fuyons de concert. Ce frère en errance, accompagnons le dans son voyage. Bien qu’il soit avare de traces indicatrices. Il ne dit rien du sens de la route, tout juste amorce-t-il le mouvement de la roue. Alors, en laissant la part belle au hasard, vêtus de nos loques personnelles, lourds de notre propre passé, motivés par la très improbable perspective de jouir de la fin d’un repos instantané, entrons dans la durée impersonnelle du Grand Verre. Mais avant d’en franchir le seuil, marquons un suspens debout face à lui. À hauteur d’oeil (du moins dans le cadre d’origine) la fracture entre le bas et le haut suit naturellement le trait de la ligne d’horizon (6). En bas, à terre, les célibataires. En haut, la Mariée (7). Quoi! Ce pantin squelettique se balançant au zénith du cimetière, c’est donc ça la femelle promise? Serait-ce le spectre de Jocaste, la mère pendue d’Œdipe aux yeux crevés? La mort et l’amour croiseraient-ils leurs lames au service des grands ciseaux de l’inconnue? Que signifie cette forme sans forme? Est-ce un fossile? L’empreinte d’un envol, telle la griffe d’un oiseau sur la neige ou le sable? Pouvons nous d’ici-bas l’imaginer? Car Duchamp vers elle n’a entrouvert que le trou de serrure du point de fuite: il a désigné l’horizon comme vêtement de la Mariée. Admirable justesse de l’allégorie! On connaît la duplicité de cette ligne imaginaire qui n’est après tout qu’une infirmité du regard. Où la vue touche à sa perte, là la voit-on tracée. Quand vers elle on avance, elle recule d’une égale dérobade. Et les célibataires qui s’élancent pleins gaz pour mettre à nu la Mariée portent dans leur propre regard, fomentent et agitent au devant d’eux le voile qu’ils brûlent de dégrafer. Tant qu’ils ne se seront pas eux-mêmes déshabillés du pli perspectif qui les aveugle…

La Mariée a donc dénoué son vêtement qui est tombé sur l’horizon et s’arrondit autour du monde. Elle est nue, nuages, nébuleuse. Voie lactée chair (8) écrit Duchamp d’un même trait de plume, d’un seul coup d’aile.

C’est la vie! La Mariée est dotée d’un centre-vie. Son coeur bat. Son pouls à la saccade lancinante, palpitant comme l’abdomen convulsif d’une guêpe (hymen ailé), engendre un courant d’air, un souffle, un vent qui envoie s’effilocher aux quatre points cardinaux une oriflamme de viscères et de méninges. Enfièvrée d’infini, la Mariée s’évade de ses intimités, elle s’évapore d’apparence en transparence, elle rompt les limites de sa peau, échappe à tout contour, récuse toute représentation. Nubile, la jeune fille s’est épanchée en nébuleuse. Nue, elle ne veut faire qu’une avec l’univers. Elle se laisse emporter dans un allongement météorologique (8A), déchiré de tempêtes, embelli de beaux-temps, (le temps qui passe prend les couleurs du temps qu’il fait), qui l’entre-lisse à l’étoffe du ciel telle une flamme consistante. Langue de feu qui se sublime en ce qu’elle a de fatal: le langage. Le courant d’air qui monte à travers la chair poreuse de la Mariée se charge de lettres. Le souffle qui la soulève c’est sa vive voix. La chair se fait verbe. Alors que dans son premier élan l’épanouissement de la Mariée devait transformer le haut du Grand Verre en un vitrail d’entrailles étincelant de cuivre fin, de platine et de poussière d’or, la montée du plaisir a transmuté l’or en paroles, la rosée des lèvres en encre volatile. Épanouissement: en faire une Inscription (8B). Crépite une écriture qui chasse sur son encre. Elle flamboie, elle s’efface, elle ressourd, elle reflue, elle laboure aller-retour de bout en bout la Voie lactée chair. Ses lettres haletantes, toujours sur le qui-vive, portent aux célibataires les commandements, ordres, autorisations de la Mariée. Les temps ont bien changé. Au lieu d’un malabar qui crache la foudre, au ciel règne une femme. Elle dicte la loi.

En bas, le gaz est encore loin du bout de ses peines. De tuyaux en entonnoirs, de tamis (9) en baratte, d’obscurité en étroitesses, compressé, étiré, coupé, recoupé, congelé, et pour finir liquéfié comme une serpillière, l’esprit passe par tous les états de la matière. La pesanteur l’humilie, la pesante heure l’accable des pires contre-temps. En vain. Il ne renonce jamais à son idée fixe ascensionnelle. Le plus tordu de ses avatars, le moins probant de ses ahannants progrès, n’altèrent en rien le rêve qu’il va s’emanciper de la pésanteur. Et quand au bas des pentes d’écoulement (10) le gaz suant sang et eau jute sur la terre sa flaque misérable, il est toujours capable d’exploser de désir. Trois ou quatre de ses gouttes viennent régaler la culasse d’un canon (11) pointé en direction du point de fuite. L’artiste-artilleur crache aussi sec une bille de combat. Les célibataires en fiers gaulois soutiennent le ciel au dessus de leurs têtes grâce à deux béliers (11A, 11B) dressés tout droits qui affleurent l’horizon et flirtent avec ses affriolants dessous. La bille déquille les béliers. Le ciel tombe. Du moins fait-il semblant de tomber. Car à chaque coup tiré le gaz en même temps qu’il effondre les souteneurs aux membres de fer mais aux genoux fragiles les charge du plus cher de ses souvenirs de jeunesse: une résurgence d’aimantation ascensionnelle. Les béliers chus relèvent la tête. Et tout recommence. Ce n’était pas tout à fait ce que je voulais, conclut Duchamp. Alors, après cinq années d’un travail obstiné, mystérieux, distillations, incantations, décantations, retours en arrière, nouvelles avancées des cavaliers, des fous, des reines et des rois, il fait argenter le revers du Grand Verre. Dans ce mirroir, il grace au scalpel, sans retouche possible, trait après trait, au point de s’y arracher les yeux, trois tableaux d’oculiste (12) empruntés ready-mades à la vitrine d’un opticien et mis en perspective. Au terme de ses apprentissages le gaz a compris à quoi son nom le destine. Dit d’éclairage, il doit éclairer. À commencer par sa propre lanterne. Sous le choc d’une dernière chute, celle d’un poids fracassant (10A) précipité dans la flaque par l’entremise des ciseaux, il rejaillit en éclaboussures (10B). Dont la sublimation ne garde que l’éclat. Le gaz fait feu de son propre corps. Il déclare sa flamme. Sur le tremplin des miroirs oculistes qui l’écorchent de ses dernières scories, qui corrigent la flèche de son ultime élan, il gicle vers le ciel en une gerbe de rayons. Essor que Duchamp qualifie dans une envolée d’allitérations: l’éblouissement de l’éclaboussure. Feu le gaz d’éclairage sombre au coeur de sa propre lumière. Il y découvre l’origine de son éclairage intérieur. Et il se métamorphose une dernière fois. Toutes embrasées soient-elles ce ne sont pas les gouttes mêmes qui passent l’horizon et trouvent leur trou vers l’infini dans la constellation des neuf tirés (13) mais leur image. Ce qui est l’exacte définition physiologique du regard. Quand un faisceau de grains de lumière crible la rétine, ce qui passe au delà et se fraie un chemin à travers les épaisseurs de la matière grise, ce n’est plus la lumière, c’est son image à fleur de nerf, un bouquet d’influx électriques, de chimies et de chimères.

Ainsi courent à confluence les énergies à l’oeuvre dans le Grand Verre. En haut, un flot de paroles. En bas, un flux de lumière. À la fin du voyage, le gaz se transmue en un regard ébloui. La Mariée en écriture effervescente. Et la mise à nu, selon le vœu de Duchamp, peut alors être lue comme un poëme. Qui fait rimer l’épanouissement de la Mariée avec l’éblouissement des célibataires. On fera d’or cette rime déjà riche en tirant d’elle le dernier mot: OUI.

Tu parles! vont s’esclaffer les partisans du NON. Entre l’horizon et la Voie lactée s’étend une immensité transparente où Duchamp n’a tracé aucun signe, pas un nuage, pas l’ombre portée d’un trait d’union. Il n’y a que solitudes. C’est n’avoir jamais regardé le ciel par une belle nuit.

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La Voie lactée épouse la rondeur de la voûte nocturne et s’incline jusqu’à toucher l’horizon. Nul besoin d’un géant pour donner corps à ce pur effet de perspective. Y suffit un être dont les formes n’ont plus par rapport à leur destination une mensuration, par exemple les lettres de l’alphabet qui majuscules et minuscules acheminent et délivrent le même message. Justement entre en scène un troubadour qui va se révéler le pèse-lettre de la Mariée, le porte-parole de la Dame; le jongleur de centre de gravité (14). Sur le fil de l’horizon, il DANSE. Il fléchit, il se redresse, d’un pied sur l’autre, au gré des coups de canon, selon le bon plaisir des éclaboussures. Son corps taillé dans un ressort se vrille comme une vis sans fin entre le bas et le haut. A sa tête, il arbore un plateau rond où roule une boule noire. C’est avec ce caillot de ténèbres qu’il jongle. Il danse, il traduit les secousses de la machine en virevoltes de la boule qui concentre les ondes de déséquilibre du branle-bas célibataire. La boule vacille, zigzague, frôle dangeureusement les bords, mais elle ne tombe pas. Car la Mariée lui envoie des ordres de nouvel équilibre en la léchant d’une langue de flamme, en la chiquenaudant de lettres touchantes qui contrecarrent ses écarts. A cinq reprises, en dessins comme un maquette, Duchamp a représenté ce deus ex machina sous la forme d’un guéridon, d’une table tournante. Serpentin sur ses trois pieds (parfois quatre, sinon deux) il est l’oracle de la divinité-mariée. Un coup, deux coups, trois coups, comme tous les dieux il n’existe pas. Le Grand Verre l’a dissipé en transparence. Esquive fondamentale qui endiable la case vide, la lacune miraculeuse autour de laquelle le puzzle s’est reconstitué. Si bien que pour tous les regardeurs qui n’ont pas lu, ou mal lu, le mode d’emploi, ça ne marche pas, ça ne peut pas marcher. Ces mécréants n’entendent pas crisser le grain de sel que croquent les engrenages, ils oublient de déduire le dieu de ses indices, de ses brisées. Dans le titre, par exemple, il arque la queue de la virgule qui s’est glissée entre les célibataires pluriels et le singulier même, virgule, il n’y pas de langue morte qui n’avoue son vrai nom qu’en latin: virga. Eh oui! c’est lui que dans les salons tout le monde aujourd’hui appelle Monsieur le Phallus. Celui qui brille par son absence, qui agit d’autant mieux qu’il n’est pas là. Aux soins de la mise à nu, ce danseur change de nom comme de masque. D’un dernier trait de plume Duchamp l’a institué: Soigneur de gravité. Le docteur de la loi de la chute des graves qui conjoint l’Une au ciel et nous à terre. Le médecin volatil qui cicatrise la grave coupure de l’horizon. Le guérisseur qui met en chanson le cri que Duchamp a laissé deviner dans le premier jet de sa préface: Étant donné, si je suppose que je sois souffrant beaucoup. Et quel remède, quelle drogue, quel alcool porte le guéridon qui sert de table de chevet à la Mariée? Il suffit de l’apostropher à haute voix et de savourer un de ces calembours que Duchamp aimait tant: guéris donc! Et si tu es gai, ris donc! Guérir la gravité, c’est rire. Avec le point sur le i en guise de boule noire. En épelant les lettres de la Mariée, le trismégiste jongleur-manieur-soigneur de gravité déshabille cette vertu bien balancée que Duchamp a qualifiée: ironisme d’affirmation. Il personnalise de pied en cap le OUI. Un OUI dont chacun peut à loisir faire danser les lettres: