Duchamp – Review
Andy Warhol, Screen Test: Marcel Duchamp, 1966. 16mm film, black and white, silent. Courtesy NECSUS.
I remember meeting a young man over lunch under a tent, who said he spent one summer in the Midwest monitoring the pollination rate of bees — this was a paid position. He would spend all day in the fields, sitting down in a certain area and waiting until a bee circled near him. He would observe the bee and count how many times it landed, noting whether it landed on a flower, if it pollinated the flower, or if it just landed and did not pollinate the flower. I don’t remember him saying how he kept track of each landing, but I imagined he did this with tally marks in a notebook: one column for landing on a flower and pollinating and a column for just landing.
In Three Standard Stoppages, Duchamp drops a thread three times from exactly three meters off the ground and traces the line left by each of the dropped threads, then creates wooden cutouts of those lines — which are like three warped rulers.
I like to just make a list of things that interest me about Duchamp, then go about figuring out how to implement those things in something I’m writing.
I remember now that I saw one of his Fountains at the Petit Palais. They are called Fountains because if you turn the urinal on its back and imagine a man peeing into it, the pee could look like a fountain coming from the urinal — or, vice versa, a urinal peeing into a man.
There is a strange dimensional quality about time and space influencing the way we see and perceive, which Duchamp employs — or banks on — with Fountain, and seems to have discovered with Three Standard Stoppages. With both works, the viewer has to imagine something which is not there: Duchamp dropping the threads and tracing them to create the stoppages, or a man peeing into a urinal.
Talking about the exhibition First Papers of Surrealism, which he designed at the Whitelaw Reid Mansion in midtown Manhattan — asked to do so by the exhibition organizer, André Breton — Duchamp ‘designed’ the show by wrapping a long string of twine all over the exhibition hall. Of the installation he said: “You can always see through a window, through a curtain, thick or not thick, you can see always through if you want to, same thing there.”¹
In Three Standard Stoppages, Duchamp drops a thread three times from exactly three meters off the ground and traces the line left by each of the dropped threads, then creates wooden cutouts of those lines — which are like three warped rulers.
I like to just make a list of things that interest me about Duchamp, then go about figuring out how to implement those things in something I’m writing.
I remember now that I saw one of his Fountains at the Petit Palais. They are called Fountains because if you turn the urinal on its back and imagine a man peeing into it, the pee could look like a fountain coming from the urinal — or, vice versa, a urinal peeing into a man.
There is a strange dimensional quality about time and space influencing the way we see and perceive, which Duchamp employs — or banks on — with Fountain, and seems to have discovered with Three Standard Stoppages. With both works, the viewer has to imagine something which is not there: Duchamp dropping the threads and tracing them to create the stoppages, or a man peeing into a urinal.
Talking about the exhibition First Papers of Surrealism, which he designed at the Whitelaw Reid Mansion in midtown Manhattan — asked to do so by the exhibition organizer, André Breton — Duchamp ‘designed’ the show by wrapping a long string of twine all over the exhibition hall. Of the installation he said: “You can always see through a window, through a curtain, thick or not thick, you can see always through if you want to, same thing there.”¹
Twine brings to mind a couple of things: Theseus and the Minotaur, with Theseus being advised by Ariadne to leave a trail by letting the twine unravel behind him as he made his way through the maze. At the end of the ball of twine, after it has been unspooled to its logical end, the viewer is left with what could now be considered the beginning of the thread. What logically follows, at least in Duchamp’s world, is unfortunately but likely the re-ravelling of the twine.
Connections can be made between his works, and his writings can be considered clues to the riddles which are his artworks — but most people won’t care, or think it worth their time to care about these connections, which may or may not be there. Duchamp himself seems to encourage people who want to dig into those themes, and also people who are indifferent to hidden meanings or ‘signs’ which may or may not be present in his work.
The first time I saw Duchamp’s show at the MoMA, I did not know anything about Duchamp. I first learned of him by seeing a photograph of him playing chess. I also walked past the Screen Test of him by Andy Warhol when I first saw the MoMA show, because I didn’t recognize the man in the video.
Towards the end of Duchamp’s life, the two artists met on occasion, usually at Warhol’s Factory (whichever factory in the succession of factories Warhol erected from the people who lingered around him and his artmaking). In 1966, Duchamp found himself in front of Warhol’s camera in one of his Screen Tests — his three-minute film portraits. Duchamp was generous in his assessment of the younger artist: “I really like Warhol’s spirit,” he said. “He’s not some painter. He’s a filmeur (French for cameraman), and I like that very much.”²
Étant donnés (“already givens”) sounds like a different way of saying readymades, or like a description of a series. The word readymade, though a phrase Duchamp coined and wrote in English, has a construction with more of a French dialectical quality. “Ready” functions as an adjective describing “made” — something that has passed from unmade to made, or changed states from an artwork that does not exist to one that does. Duchamp creates a compound word to describe his artworks: the already “finished” or produced, in a consumerist sense, bringing to mind the French term prêt-à-porter (ready-to-wear) — which feels like an unnecessary phrase to Americans, probably, because all clothes are ready to wear, aren’t they?
Notes
Connections can be made between his works, and his writings can be considered clues to the riddles which are his artworks — but most people won’t care, or think it worth their time to care about these connections, which may or may not be there. Duchamp himself seems to encourage people who want to dig into those themes, and also people who are indifferent to hidden meanings or ‘signs’ which may or may not be present in his work.
The first time I saw Duchamp’s show at the MoMA, I did not know anything about Duchamp. I first learned of him by seeing a photograph of him playing chess. I also walked past the Screen Test of him by Andy Warhol when I first saw the MoMA show, because I didn’t recognize the man in the video.
Towards the end of Duchamp’s life, the two artists met on occasion, usually at Warhol’s Factory (whichever factory in the succession of factories Warhol erected from the people who lingered around him and his artmaking). In 1966, Duchamp found himself in front of Warhol’s camera in one of his Screen Tests — his three-minute film portraits. Duchamp was generous in his assessment of the younger artist: “I really like Warhol’s spirit,” he said. “He’s not some painter. He’s a filmeur (French for cameraman), and I like that very much.”²
Étant donnés (“already givens”) sounds like a different way of saying readymades, or like a description of a series. The word readymade, though a phrase Duchamp coined and wrote in English, has a construction with more of a French dialectical quality. “Ready” functions as an adjective describing “made” — something that has passed from unmade to made, or changed states from an artwork that does not exist to one that does. Duchamp creates a compound word to describe his artworks: the already “finished” or produced, in a consumerist sense, bringing to mind the French term prêt-à-porter (ready-to-wear) — which feels like an unnecessary phrase to Americans, probably, because all clothes are ready to wear, aren’t they?
Notes
- Mal Ahern, “The Machine That Makes Gossip: Andy Warhol’s ‘Screen Test’ of Marcel Duchamp,” NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, Spring 2022.
- Grace Ambrose, “His Twine: Marcel Duchamp and the Limits of Exhibition History,” ICA Philadelphia, October 17, 2013.
- Lewis Kachur, Displaying the Marvelous: Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dalí, and Surrealist Exhibition Installations(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001).
- Cristina Rouvalis, “Twisted Pair,” Carnegie Magazine, Summer 2010.
- Marcel Duchamp, quoted in Lewis Kachur, Displaying the Marvelous: Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dalí, and Surrealist Exhibition Installations (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 183; cited in Grace Ambrose, “His Twine: Marcel Duchamp and the Limits of Exhibition History,” ICA Philadelphia, October 17, 2013.
- Marcel Duchamp, quoted in Cristina Rouvalis, “Twisted Pair,” Carnegie Magazine, Summer 2010.