THE INAUGURAL POST

Welcome to this Blog's inaugural post. This being my first attempt at a Blog (I'm still fussing with the html for some reason), I can't say for sure what I'll be using it for. But, given what seems to suit the medium you can expect reading notes, links to things of interest, and whatever else I feel needs to be written down because it can't readily be translated into anything that would hang on a wall, take up a room, smell, travel through the air in the form of sound, be performed in public or private, or move past the eye at fps. What follows are some reading notes from the past few weeks that I have managed to give some semblance of an order over the weekend. They concern a certain Frenchman who liked to climb flagpoles and steal food. Your comments are welcome and appreciated.

THREE STANDARD STOPPAGES

I. THE LEGACY VIRUS

A certain amount of time should be spent in libraries if one really desires to get a sense for what may have animated the thought of Marcel Duchamp ("MD" from here on out). Libraries were Foucault’s heterotopias par excellance, places of slow transformations, time piling up upon itself, that invisible disorder which can be appreciated only by way of a prolonged exposure (it is an acquired taste, after all). For a time MD was employed as a librarian at the Bibliotheque Sainte-Genevieve in Paris where he would find the inspiration for his Boite-en-Valise and especially The Green Box that would, much like a catalogue, accompany The Large Glass. If one were to visit a library now, perhaps in pursuit of certain volumes which might contain pieces of the extant knowledge production surrounding MD, they would surely find no shortage of authors – with some exceptions, Marjorie Perloff being one of them - participating in his ‘Canonization’ who readily hand his life and work over to the Dadaist movement. (As if he belonged there, as if he were so obviously one of them). Yet this fact is key, since MD himself was not a Dadaist, and there is an ever-apparent shortage/lack/absence of historical and critical accounts of his ‘legacy’ that would view the fact of his Dadaist nomination as a systemic problem.

One of the more interesting refutations of ‘MD the Dadaist’ that I am aware of happens to have come from a former professor of mine, Steven Michael Vroom. Slide lectures on art of the early twentieth century were always an appropriate time to assure his students – no doubt quick to passively accept the endless stream of Dadaist accounts - that “retroactively assigning a man to a movement that didn’t happen yet is a historical fallacy” (that’s verbatim I might add). Certainly this statement applies across the board, although it is most effective when thought in the context of those who would place MD, Dada, and his 1913 Bicycle Wheel all within the same space. It should be noted that Dada itself, as a word and movement, was not even invented until the events of 1916 surrounding the Cabaret Voltaire. Regardless of Dada as a ‘spirit’ or quality whose atemporal nature one can find examples of in societies throughout history (which MD himself explains here), some of what characterized the Dadaist’s work and activities, their anti-art stance and opposition to the bourgeoisie, while shared by MD, are not enough to qualify him as a Dadaist. Par example: he ‘refused’ when asked to contribute to the Dada Salon of 1920, instead sending a telegram where “Peau de balle” was spelled “Pode bal” (roughly, “Balls to you”) and saying later: “Well, what in the world could I send them? I didn’t have anything especially interesting to send, I didn’t even know what Dada was.” (Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, 65)

Taken to its humorous extreme, MD’s involvement/non-involvement with the Dadaists could perhaps benefit from an invocation of Alain Badiou’s idiosyncratic use of set theory: of all the artists, poets, etc., surrounding that historical, inconsistent multiplicity that we can collected under the name “Dada”, the life and work of MD would be a part, but not a member. “Proto-Dadaist” might be better, but is still lacking, and Uberdada might also work if that title did not already belong to Johannes Baader. As endless as the documents that refer to MD as a Dadaist seem to be, likewise are the reasons that works such as Fountain, The Large Glass, With Hidden Noise, L.H.O.O.Q., Tzank Check…etc., should be seen as events whose only proper name is Duchamp. MD, the non-dadaist non-artist, ‘author’ of the readymade, the assisted readymade, the reciprocal readymade, and by far my personal favorite, more humorous than the idea of using a Rembrandt as an ironing board, was the “unhappy readymade”: a geometry book replete with all of its mathematical certainties sent to Jean Crotti along with instructions to hang it by strings on the balcony of his apartment in the rue Condamine. The book was, much as the map that covered the territory in Borges’ “Of Exactitude in Science”, abandoned “to the rigors of sun and rain.” MD’s singular genius as subtracted from the Dadaist movement was probably best described by the artist Willem de Kooning, who it is doubtful MD could have ever found it in himself to even like:

And then there is that one-man movement, Marcel Duchamp - for me a truly modern movement because it implies that each artist can do what he thinks he ought to - a movement for each person and open for everybody.

- "What Abstract Art Means to Me," Museum of Modern Art Bulletin, vol. 18, nr. 3 (June 1951), p. 7

II. A CURIOUS ABSENCE

Why is it that the writings of Gilles Deleuze never appropriated that elusive artistic figure that is MD? John Cage, who surely would not have been able to create work in the way that he did without the artworld ‘presence-absence’ of MD, is mentioned several times in the pages of A Thousand Plateaus. This is almost enough of an oddity in itself. That no attention was paid to MD, rather than representing some sort of ignorance on the part of Deleuze, may have had more to do with Deleuze’s definite fixation on the affective or “sensuous” in art, which is something that MD’s most significant output was calculatingly opposed to. On this point there is a scribbling in MD’s notes that surely would have irritated Deleuze: “The ultimate for/a collector/is to take/Aspirin/for his Henri Matisses”. Better still is the possibility that MD’s chess obsession (he was just shy of being awarded the title “International Grand Master”) led Deleuze to leave him alone. Chess was a game more suited for MD’s Cartesian mind, the endgame strategies of which he would deterritorialize into art - whereas Deleuze was more fond of the game Go for its “smooth” spaces as opposed to the “striated” of chess.

Chess is a game of State, or of the court: the emperor of China played it. Chess pieces are coded […]Go pieces, in contrast, are pellets, disks, simple arithmetic units, and have only an anonymous, collective, or third-person
function: “It” makes a move. (ATP, p. 352-353)

Chess is indeed a war, but an institutionalized, regulated, coded war, with a front, a rear, battles. But what is proper to Go is war without battle lines, with neither confrontation nor retreat, without battles even: pure strategy, whereas chess is a semiology.
(ibid. , p. 353)

However, if one were to rattle off a list of those ideas and literary figures important to MD, it could almost be confused with the same type of list compiled for Deleuze: movement, time, history, chance (and not just chance, but a pure chance), nonsense (or “anti-sense” rather), humor, desire; authors such as Roussell, Jarry, and Mallarme; the brain… Then of course there is the case of MD’s Bartleby-like refusal to be an artist (his non-activity or “attitude of the mind”), a refusal to even participate - in the sense that this could be associated with say, the cubist painters or the Dadaists - in any sort of ‘artistic community’. Upon close inspection, one also gets the sense from both Deleuze and MD that, very often, what they wanted more than anything was simply to disappear.

Ever since they were first translated by Richard Hamilton, MD’s notes have become famous for their surplus of puns, wordplay, Wittgensteinian propositions, descriptions of obscure machines, and examples of his “Playful Physics” (read: Pataphysics). All with the air of the subversive “prankster” that artists today such as SuttonBeresCuller, Maurizio Cattellan, and Martin Creed owe so much too. Even more interesting is MD’s idea of the Infrathin – a ‘distance between the mold and the real’. Some of his examples:

- the warmth of a seat (which hasjust/been left) is Infrathin
- when the tobacco smoke smells also of the/mouth which exhales it, the two odors/marry by Infrathin

- 2 forms cast in/the same mold differ from each other by an Infrathin separative amount.

- All “identicals” as/identical as they may be, (and/the more indentical they are)/move toward this/infra thin seperative/ difference

Aren’t Deleuze’s descriptions of events as ‘incorporeal entities’ in The Logic of Sense also very similar? For Deleuze, an event takes place at the surface of things, at the surface of states of affairs, bodies and their mixtures - the Stoic discovery that was also Valery’s profound idea: “Deeper than any other ground is the surface of the skin.” (The Logic of Sense, p. 141). The Infrathin is an “infinitesimal thickness” that has all the properties of Deleuze’s virtual -

The question is less that of attaining the immediate than of determining the site where the immediate is “immediately” as not-to-be-attained(comme non-a-atteindre): the surface where the void and every event alon with it are
made […] non-thought, shooting which becomes non-shooting, to speak without speaking[...] (ibid., p. 137)

...

Another curiosity involves just how readily MD’s early mechanistic paintings, as well as his notes and elements of The Large Glass, lend themselves not only to D&G’s concept of desiring machines, but also to the theories of Bergson. So far, Sarat Maharaj is the only ‘art researcher’ to my knowledge who has – correctly I believe – spoken about Henri Bergson’s influence on MD. If MD were to have actually been reading Bergson (and there is enough evidence to support this), it would have made possible something which has been contested ground: that the formal innovations of his Nude Descending a Staircase were invented without his ever having seen the work of the Italian Futurists, who had also been reading the aforementioned “vitalist philosopher”. I have often wondered whether the conical diagram on p. 152 of Matter and Memory (1911) was the source for the “dancing cones” embedded in The Large Glass. Maharaj explains MD’s relation to Bergson:

For Bergson, ‘readymade’ signaled the mechanical, repetitive, all-too-known – as opposed to dimensions of unpredictable possibility, the virtual. In a
flip-over, Duchamp floated the idea of the ‘readymade’ as a vehicle for raiding
the unknown – ‘the mechanical’ itself becomes a medium for breaking out of auto-pilot artistic experience into ‘other’ conceptual spaces. Duchamp interacts with Bergson – not as academic commentary but researcher-practitioner – turning
his ideas and terms upside down, fleshing them out as concrete images.

- Sarat Maharaj, “Unfinishable Sketch of ‘An Unknown Object in 4 D’: Scenes of Artistic Research”, L&B, vol. 18, p. 46

III. “THE MISSIONARY OF INSOLENCE”: AGAMBEN’S READING

“It’s completely in one’s gray matter”
- MD

With all of the subtleties that accompany the movements of Giorgio Agamben’s text The Man Without Content, there is for this reader a nagging feeling that he is attempting to restore to art and artistic subjectivity a status whose vulgarity has not been seen since ‘Abstract Expressionism’ – not to mention the irritating proliferation of untranslated Greek. The “secret nihilism” governing the history of Western art, the “self-annihilating nothing”, the split and the split of the split…all of that is better suited for another post, and one I won’t be likely to write. That said, what I want to concentrate on instead are Agamben’s accounts of the readymades’ significance. The gist of his reading is not at all dissimilar to the conclusions Peter Burger had reached in his 1974 Theory of the Avant-Garde, where the readymades ‘authenticity’ dissolves in the mass produced object and individual creation is negated (though posterity has consequently returned them to the ‘authentic’). Were one not playing the role of careful reader, they might even miss that although Agamben’s prose is indeed a long, slow, drawn out dance, he does actually manage to address even what MD himself considered to be significant about those timed interventions that were his readymades.

Agamben sets out an analysis of the readymades as objects that escape both aesthetic enjoyment and the consumption of the reproducible technical object, since they have an inherent inability to attain presence and become suspended between an oscillating double status of productive activity . This is set against the “loss” of arts original dimension since “[…]the privileged status of art in the aesthetic sphere is artificially interpreted as the survival of a condition in which manual and intellectual labor are not yet divided and in which, therefore, the productive act maintains all its integrity and uniqueness; by contrast, technical production, which takes place starting from a condition of extreme division of labor, remains essentially fungible and reproducible.” (The Man Without Content, p. 61-62). It was MD’s readymades which first attempted to flatten this opposition between a product that has a perpetual potentiality or reproducibility and the work of art as always a being-at-work, a scheme that would “actualize at least for an instant a suspension of these two statuses” (ibid, p. 67)

This is all fine, but also, and most importantly, not what MD was truly interested in; that is, a removal of art from the established parameters of a sensuous encounter. Since, regardless of what the readymades accomplished through a suspension of status where they could occupy neither the position of authenticity nor that of reproducibility, the success of the work is ultimately predicated on it’s failure – a failure to achieve the status of non-art as its goal or truth and instead revealing a truth of an entirely different nature. MD’s flip-flop made sure that not only was his “attitude of the mind” a creative act at the same time as being a form of indifferent ‘art research’, but that the spectator’s involvement as ‘research-interpreter’ via ID check (ibid., p. 50), was itself a creative act. But what else could it possibly be? If these objects were not art, were never intended as art, and the ‘artist’ MD “relinquished all responsibility”, then the only way for them to register as works of art was by way of the viewer’s intervention. The readymades’ status as art had to be created. The addition of value to their reproducibility was not dependent upon MD’s placing them in the context of an art exhibition, but instead on the viewer’s mind – on their own “gray matter”. The foregrounding of discourse and a criticality of the readymades themselves by way of their rare selction had turned them into a kind of fun-house mirror before the spectator.

MD’s inversion of the scheme was to present non-art which then had art as its shadow - no other “work” from this time period shows more forcefully that ‘cadaverous’ nature of an art object and the fact that there is nothing inherent in the work of art that could make it be in itself a work of art. Rather, MD made visible and demonstrated the dimension of art’s construction as “work” or object with aesthetic value as a process originating within the community. Though Duchamp would have claimed no responsibility for the outcome of his interventions, they were in every sense of the word collaborations – his reversal laid bare this truth, revealing the mechanisms at work…and Agamben eventually locates the future of art somewhere outside of the object, in a more original time and rhythm, so that when one engages with a work of art, the “[…] artists and spectators recover their essential solidarity and their common ground.” (ibid., p.102)

To avoid a misunderstanding, we must remember that this 'art coefficient' is a personal expression of art a' l'e 'tat brut, that is, still in a raw state, which must be 'refined' as pure sugar from molasses by the spectator; the digit of this coefficient has no bearing whatsoever on his verdict. The creative act takes another aspect when the spectator experiences the phenomenon of transmutation: through the change from inert matter into a work of art, an actual transubstantiation has taken place, and the role of the spectator is to determine the weight of the work on the esthetic scale.

All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualification and thus adds his contrubution to the creative act. This becomes even more obvious when posterity gives a final verdict and sometimes rehabilitates forgotten artists.

(MD, From Session on the Creative Act, Convention of the American Federation of Arts, Houston, Texas, April 1957)