The Duchamp Dictionary

Thomas Girst, Luke Frost

• Publisher: Thames and Hudson Ltd
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9780500771969
• Topic: Kunst
• Subtopic: Künstlermonographien

Marcel Duchamp's life and work in more than 200 alphabetical entries, using the latest scholarship and research. Marcel Duchamp (1887 - 1968) was one of the founding fathers of modern art, Dada and Surrealism: in the words of artist Thomas Hirschhorn, Duchamp was 'the most intelligent mind of his time'. Despite his popularity and provocative art, discussions often shroud his work in theory, but this book uses lively dictionary entries (from Alchemy and Anatomy to Warhol, via the Bicycle Wheel, Chess and the Fourth Dimension) to make his work and influence highly accessible and enjoyable. ''The Duchamp Dictionary' is exactly the sort of book Duchamp himself would have enjoyed reading. The entries are well researched and written, informative and entertaining. You can't ask for more - ' Francis Naumann

ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM

While Duchamp had stopped painting by 1918, he continued to follow developments within the genre closely. He appreciated Pop Art, but dismissed Abstract Expressionism, another post-war American art movement, as ‘acrobatics, just splashes on canvas’.¹ Although he championed Jackson Pollock (1912–56), in Abstract Expressionism as a whole he saw ‘academicism, the adoption of new canons, especially with the addition now of money transactions’ as well as a serious ‘danger of any new movement’.² To Duchamp, ‘the proof of good painting comes when intelligence is part of it. Abstract Expressionism was not intellectual at all for me. It is under the yoke of the retinal. I see no gray matter there .... A technique can be learned but you can’t learn to have an original imagination.’³ (grey matter). The feeling was certainly mutual. In the early 1950s, Barnett Newman (1905–70), one of the greatest proponents of Abstract Expressionism, referred to the readymades as mere ‘gadgets’ guilty of the ‘popularizing role of entertainment’ within a museum setting. In a feud with the painter Robert Motherwell (1915–91), Newman went further: ‘I want particularly to make clear that if Motherwell wishes to make Marcel Duchamp a father, Duchamp is his father and not mine nor that of any American painter that I respect.’⁴

ABSTRACTION [illustration p. 16]

Although Duchamp dismissed abstract art as mere retinal painting created to please the eye instead of engaging the mind, recent scholarship has suggested that he should nevertheless be regarded as a key player in the history of non-figurative artistic expression. By establishing the ‘artwork as idea’ with his readymades, and by producing text in his notes and boxes ‘integrally linked yet held apart’ from his work, it is Duchamp’s oeuvre more than anybody else’s that ‘makes clear that the fact of abstraction would change the terms of artistic practice for the century to come.’⁵ While in Munich in 1912, Duchamp at least partly read and annotated On the Spiritual in Art, Wassily Kandinsky’s (1866–1944) groundbreaking treatise on abstraction, which had been published earlier that year. Duchamp’s view was that perception is not a solid entity but one that perpetually changes and evolves: what is considered abstract today may no longer be seen that way fifty years hence.⁶ Whether in his readymades, optical devices or his semi-abstract film Anémic Cinéma (1926), Duchamp frequently embedded highly personal humour and eroticism in his works, but never participated in the ambitious quest for purity, emotion and transcendence of his fellow abstract artists.

ALCHEMY [illustration p. 18]

What the fourth dimension is to mathematics, alchemy is to science: a hotchpotch of ideas and ideologies for the uninitiated, an invaluable testing ground for experiments or an entire belief system for the obsessed both inside and outside the field. Alchemy as the key to understanding Duchamp’s life and work was first introduced by Arturo Schwarz (b. 1924) in the late 1960s. While the assumption that Duchamp’s work is a riddle, rebus or secret in need of monocausal decoding is a dead end, presumably finding that alchemical signs and symbols abound throughout his oeuvre does not add much of value to Duchamp scholarship either. ‘If I have practiced alchemy, it was in the only way it can be done now, that is to say without knowing it’,⁷ is how Duchamp phrased it. The warring factions that gather around the pros and cons for the claim of an alchemistic thread connecting Duchamp’s works may be reconciled by the ancient Greek myth about a certain Phrygian king. ‘The Midas touch was his’, as Richard Hamilton (1922–2011) light-heartedly wrote about the readymades, as all Duchamp needed to do was ‘simply to point a god-like finger, to bestow on any object the nearest thing to immortality we know.’⁸

AMERICAN WOMEN

When he arrived in New York in 1915, Duchamp was more widely known in the United States than almost any other European contemporary artist, which is why the media was eager to convey his thoughts on everything from Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) to Cubism and from America to the size of skyscrapers. After only three months in the city, the artist had the following to say about American women: ‘The American woman is the most intelligent woman in the world today – the only one that always knows what she wants, and therefore always gets it. Hasn’t she proved it by making her husband in his role of slave-banker look almost ridiculous in the eyes of the whole world? Not only has she intelligence but a wonderful beauty of line is hers, possessed by no other woman of any race at the present time. And this wonderful intelligence, which makes the society of her equally brilliant sisters of sufficient interest to her without necessarily insisting on the male element protruding in her life, is helping the tendency of the world today to completely equalize the sexes, and the constant battle between them in which we have wasted our best energies in the past will cease.’⁹ In subsequent decades, Duchamp got to know many American women as friends, patrons and lovers (or all three things combined). In 1954, he married Alexina Sattler (Teeny; 1906–95), the former wife of art dealer Pierre Matisse (1900–89), who was the son of the painter Henri Matisse (1869–1954).

AN-ARTIST

‘I am against the word “anti” because it’s a bit like atheist, as compared to believer. And the atheist is just as much of a religious man as the believer is, and an anti-artist is just as much of an artist as the other artist. An-artist would be much better, if I could change it, instead of anti-artist. An-artist, meaning no artist at all. That would be my conception. I don’t mind being an an-artist.’¹⁰ Duchamp certainly did not mind the homophonic resemblance between ‘an-artist’ and ‘anarchist’ either.

ANATOMY

Duchamp spoke of the ‘visceral forms’¹¹ that he depicted in his painting Bride (1912), and referred to the bride within the Large Glass (1915–23) as a ‘skeleton’.¹² His heightened interest in human anatomy came when he began juxtaposing it with mechanical operations. At that time, anatomical museums with mechanical models and wax figures with dozens of removable pieces were a major tourist attraction, entertaining both the educated visitor and the voyeur. Duchamp also explored anatomy in the painting The Passage from Virgin to Bride (1912). It is unlikely to have escaped his attention that female genitals in the ‘virginal’ as well as the ‘de-virginized state’¹³ were part of the standard repertoire of every ‘adults-only’ anatomical display since the late 19th century.

From the early 20th-century works to his erotic objects and his final major piece, Étant donnés (1946–66), Duchamp seems to have been preoccupied with the presentation of the most intimate parts of the female body. It is therefore highly unlikely that a problem with the casting process for the torso at the centre of Étant donnés, which Duchamp modelled on three women (Alexina Sattler (Teeny), Maria Martins, Mary Reynolds), ‘accounts for the anatomical inaccuracies and gender ambiguity of the mannequin’.¹⁴ Instead, it is the way Duchamp plays with the sexes (Rrose Sélavy) in much of his oeuvre as well as his interest in elaborate forms of representation far exceeding the merely visual (grey matter, fourth dimension) that make this depiction of the female body consciously transcend a precise anatomical rendering. To Duchamp, ‘distorting the object’¹⁵ or ‘systematic distortion’¹⁶ had been ‘my way since 1900 and probably before that even’.¹⁷ For the artist, this meant to ‘take any liberty with anatomy’.¹⁸

GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE

Guillaume Apollinaire’s (1880–1918) criticism of Duchamp’s works turned from bashing his ‘very ugly nudes’ in early 1910 to acknowledging his ‘interesting exhibits’¹⁹ in late 1911. From then on, Apollinaire was hooked; so was Duchamp. Seven years younger than the avant-garde poet, playwright, promoter, pornographer and patron saint of Surrealism, the artist appreciated the attention, but he also mistrusted Apollinaire’s literary wordiness – to Duchamp, painting was a language in itself that did not need to be translated into letters and syllables. Apollinaire included Duchamp as one of only ten painters in hi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• About the Author
• Dedication
• Other Titles of Interest
• Contents
• Introduction: ABC DUCHAMP
• Dictionary A-Z
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Chronology
• Acknowledgments
• Copyright