Gitel Gilgur (1917-2002), 2015, oil on canvas, 21×19 cm |
THE BEGINNING OF DUCHAMP’S SPIRITUAL ARTGlyn Thompson; Metaphysics: Occult Munich (Part 1) Glyn Thompson; Metaphysics: Occult Munich (Part 4)That Steiner's semiotics is predicated on a non-arbitrary indexicality, each sign having a direct and specific equivalent in another language, was clearly explained by him in a series of lectures he gave in1907, in Stuttgart.[157] Steiner's semiotics, enacted in the flesh on a Munich stage in the summer of 1912, can then be seen as a final confirmation of Duchamp's way out of Symbolism, whose semiotics are summarized by Shearer West, as follows, Stirner's, and Duchamp's, semiotics run counter to this conception. In lecture 1, The Creative Cosmic Tone, we learn the following; Lecture 3 deals with the symbolism of numbers; And so on, via seven, the number of perfection, until Steiner brings his audience full-circle, because; In each case, the meaning of the number is linked to comprehensive theosophical evolutionary cosmology, the subject occupying most of lecture two. But in his return to the divine nature of the number one, Steiner plants an idea which perhaps comes to fruition later for Duchamp as a result of his Munich visit, for next he advocates the following; 'A world in yellow', le monde en jaune, is precisely the term Katherine Dreier used, in French, to describe the spiritual condition accessible via Duchamp's Large Glass, in her monograph of 1944; it is also the subject of a note from Duchamp's Box of 1914. In slang, le monde en jaune means the world of a not necessarily homosexual sodomy. But since jaune also translates as egg yolk, the phrase can also mean the world contained in the alchemical egg, from which is born the Philosopher's Stone. And in this third lecture, Steiner links semiotics to the esoteric concepts of evolution and involution, the two 'sides' of Duchamp's expression fabricating his Trois Stoppages Étalon of 1913. His fourth lecture, entitled Man, the Most Significant Symbol, analyses a series of images from seven seals hung in the Festival hall during the Munich Congress, which showed the evolution of men in connection with the world to which they belong. Their style subscribes to standard allegorical conventions of representation still used in Rosicrucian, Theosophical and Masonic pictorial emblematic, and to which Duchamp turns after Munich. Details of a selection will suffice to give the sense of how their symbolism functioned indexically. The sixth seal shows us that the human being, when he had achieved the highest spirituality, takes on the form of St Michael fettering the evil in the world, symbolized by the dragon. The seventh seal has a border containing the letters J.C.M.P.S.S.R.E.D.N. A rainbow occupies the top half of circle within it. The following symbols are arranged along a central vertical axis. At the top, a dove with outstretched wings appears to hover within a double spiral of three turns, emanating from the mouths of two snakes below; these close above the dove in a form resembling a fish-tail. The bodies of the two opposed snakes form a circle occupying the bottom half of the seal. Tendrils emanating from them point at and into a transparent cube sited between them; they roughly form a kind of four petal led clover-leaf form. According to Steiner; There follows an attempt, symptomatic of Steiner's understanding of science, to point out how anomalies in modern astronomy are rectified by the concept of the world spiral, a form with which, one day, men will identify themselves. And one can understand from what follows why, on the death of Katherine Dreier, in the early 1950's, Duchamp destroyed her portrait of him, of 1918, which was about to enter a public collection, at Yale. Steiner was one of Dreier's favorite authors. Into this portrait Duchamp had personally painted his own etheric, astral portrait. But one cannot imagine Duchamp's burgeoning post-war identity as the ancestor of a new kind of modernism being assisted greatly by the knowledge that for the previous four decades he had been patronized by adherents of a doctrine which advocated that in the future, in replacing the penis, the larynx would become the Holy Grail. As Steiner now said; This passage appears to confirm the commonality of belief between variants of the occult doctrines, since Steiner here appears to be paraphrasing Remy de Gourmont paraphrasing Diderot paraphrasing Galen. Drawing on Galen, which says something about occult 'science', de Gounnont,[159] presents the view, paraphrased by Clair in respect of the essentially alchemical character of Duchamp's corpus, that all parts of man are to be found in woman, and vice versa, with one difference; women's (reproductive) parts are exterior, and men's, interior; they part from the perineal region. This would appear to account for Duchamp's preoccupation with the perineum, clearly his embodiment of the inframince acting as an interface between the hermaphroditic/gynandrous androgyne - his Feuille de Vigne Femelle, for example, that crease of the perineum that he pressed in Man Ray's hand as he boarded an Atlantic steamer; Man Ray / main raie. Discussing sexual dimorphism, physical as well as psychical, de Gourmont advocates the following. A veritable objet dard de reprise perdu, no less; but before this last sentence, we find a direct quotation from the source de Gourmont had already used, the missing link - the passage [psychic as much as physical, we recall] which Diderot has transposed and put au courant with science in his Rêve d'Alembert. Dr Bordeau, responding to MIle d'Espinasse's suggestion that perhaps man is merely an freakish woman, and vice versa, proposes that the only difference is that between a pouch hanging outside or a pouch reversed to go inside the body; thus a female fetus is indistinguishable from the male fetus: Here he is describing the part whose name Laforgue was reputedly the first to use in French poetry, the clitoris. And in the interchange which follows, Diderot gives us an insight into the character of language. Bordeau has been talking what d'Alembert, waking from his dream, calls smut. The doctor responds that the scientific language essential to the discussion of such matters makes it acceptable, to which d'Alembert agrees, since that way words "lose the string of associated ideas which might make them objectionable." Steiner now continues; Steiner now informs the faithful of their use; But whilst providing an insight into the social functioning of such emblems, Steiner sounds a warning. These seals are not to be profaned, and some people will not be affected by them. Worse still, they cause illness if hung in rooms where no spiritual matters are discussed. Indeed, they even destroy the digestion. Now we are in the realm of Max Jacob's talismans. In his section titled The Mystery Dramas and Materialism, Creese examines the practical application of Steiner's linguistic theory, as it comes to fruition in his concept of Eurhythmy. It quickly becomes apparent that Steiner's linguistics rest on a foundation as scientifically solid as that of Brisset's. It is predicated on the belief that since vowels and consonants emerged from different sources, they could be used in different ways to describe different characters. Vowels, which arise from the astral body deep inside the inner being, and which flow into the ether body, are the revealers of soul states. Consonants, flowing the other way, have a more direct interaction with the senses, and are more closely tied to objects. Different sounds have different spiritual impacts; four categories of each. The "blown sounds", in German, the letters h, ch, i, s ch, s, f and w, allow the audience to hear the intoning of the sound. "Impact sounds", d, t, h, p, q, k, m and n, allow the audience to see the sound. The one "vibrating" sound, r, is felt in the arms and hands, whereas the "wave sound", w, is felt in the legs and feet. Eurhythmy is, then, a movement form that expresses tones and words; each sound a specific movement, the system encompasses tones, rhythms, colors, movements, patterns and moods: it is not dance or mime. Since movements can be coded to specific organs of the body, it can be used therapeutically. It is a system of correspondences. By 1923 the basic tenets and conventions of eurhythmy were well established, having received their first public outing in The Guardian of the Threshold in 1912. Originating in a request from an adherent, in 1911, for a gymnastics or dance course in tune with the ideas of occult science, Steiner began with movements based on formed speech, beginning with stepping to verses with alliteration; because alliteration developed in the windy North, each step was a battle with a victory over the storm. By 1912 the system was sufficiently advanced for the representation of the thought forms of Lucifer and Ahriman to appear on stage in the form of their Beings. By the September, Steiner had developed the first vowel sound movements, the first three, of 'Dionysian' Eurhythmy, being a, i and o. Eurhythmy forms can be described, but Steiner warned that they could not be understood intellectually. They must be experienced inwardly. Their nature is cosmic, and the feeling one gets in a performance is that for the speeches spoken, no other movements are possible. They are in no way arbitrary. Each sound brings to the spirit a specific inner feeling. With a theoretical grounding worthy of Brisset, for Steiner, no matter what language one speaks, allowing for slight variations of sound, from language to language, sounds always mean the same things, because the materialistic expression of language is only the veneer that distracts us from the soul states we are capable of perceiving, since the vowel expresses inner feelings and the consonants are imitations of the outside world. Since eurhythmy is visible speech, each sound is represented by a specific movement; each one seeks to express physically what the sound expresses audibly. The German sounds are summarized thus: Steiner meant the meaning of these sounds to be taken literally, believing they were true meanings, confounding critics who reminded him that various languages had different words for things with a response worthy of the cryptographer of Dante, Arensberg; the Germans use the word kopf for head because the sound expresses the object's roundness, whereas the Italian testa expresses the idea that the head sits atop the shoulders and speaks: if the spirit behind Italian culture had wished to express the roundness of the head, they would have used kopf. Problematic as the theoretical grounding of this linguistics seems to be, nonetheless for Steiner it expressed a semiotic rationale, in a manner akin to Roussel's method, in which words have immediate and specific equivalents in things. For example, by combining the meanings of sounds, one discovers the true meanings of words. In the German for putty, Leim, for example, the L represents the overcoming of matter by form, the ei is the sound expressing clinging and affection, and m speaks of imitation. Whole scenarios could thus be constructed, and deciphered. Steiner described in one lecture the derivation of the word raschien, to rustle, thus. The moving around (r) of a mouse hidden in the foliage makes us uneasy and astonished (a), especially once it runs out of cover and scampers away (sch). But this we have confronted (e). The little mouse must cling to its surroundings by adapting to high and low places and hollow spaces (i). When it emerges and we understand what the whole thing was about, we react (n). Thus is speech as the plastic form of words; apparently. The indexicality characterizing Steiner's semiotics is duplicated in the theory and practice of another Munich occultist bewitching Dreier, Kandinsky. Both Concerning the Spiritual in Art and the volume that she was never to translate and publish, Point and Line to Plane, make it clear that the relation between a symbol and its meaning is anything but arbitrary. For him, the authentic avant-garde artist prophet, creating out of "inner necessity", is the tip of a progressing triangle inexorably penetrating tomorrow. For him, eccentric yellow tends to warm, not the cold that concentric blue tends towards, terrestrial yellow's aggressive violence is not the calm of celestial blue, and so on. And in the chords of the chromatic cosmic piano, the peaceful circle is the soul, not the larynx metamorphosing into a penis. Such matters as these are examined in two essays in Tuchman's The Spiritual in Art. According to Ringbom, on Page 132, in theosophical aesthetics the work of art is in its own way a thought form, shaped by the artist's thought vibrations, and itself transmitting those vibrations to the beholder, as Katherine Dreier attests, in 1944, apropos the Large Glass. As with Lucifer's 'danced' thoughts, such a definition would embrace Steiner's stage props, the Strader machines, since they represent prototypes of the 'wonder-wares' derided by Hilary's factory manager; and, it follows, Duchamp's post-Munich fabrications. Ringbom continues, on the next Page, with a discussion of Parallel Representation, an idea from occultism, familiar to us thanks to Steiner, readily translated into pictorial forms. This posits that actions and thoughts on the physical plane are paralleled on the higher spiritual plane, a parallel representation via 'parallel action' suspiciously close to Moffitt's characterization of Duchamp's concept of 'elementary parallelism' apropos his Sad Young Man in a Train of 1911. In Parallel Representation, discussed by Leadbetter, counterparts of material objects and actions constitute the hidden side of things. Echoing Steiner, in addition to physical bodies, higher bodies manifest themselves as unnatural colours and forms unlike the physical body, as in X-ray photography and radioactivity. According to Besant, Leadbetter and Steiner, this occurs in the higher levels of the spiritual atmosphere, where colour formations thrown off by higher bodies exist, as in Duchamp's portrait of Dr Dumouchel. According to Kandinsky, in this spiritual atmosphere, not only actions can be observed, and feeling can find external expression, but so can perfectly secret actions that no-one knows about - unuttered thoughts and unexpressed feelings - the actions that take place within people. That this concept clearly influenced Kandinsky is shown by two drawings in a sketchbook of 1910, Study and Klange, illustrating the vacillations of a two-part technique, in which either theatrical props, or pure patches of color, function as a means of evoking action. According to Ringbom's analysis, forms in Study are given a pre-figural pretext - tree, hill, cloud, rainbow - still connected to the human protagonists in the image. But in Klange, similar encounters are accompanied by colored clouds; an Art Nouveau derived aesthetic has been replaced by images of the everyday world as it appears to the higher spiritual vision of the clairvoyant. In Kandinsky's latter street scene, people mingle with their multicolored emanations representing feelings, etc, and in Lady in Moscow, of 1912, the protagonist is accompanied by a malignant black spot which becomes the fully-fledged, non-objective, Black Spot of this same year. So whilst the post-Munich Duchamp, who never embraced abstraction, would appear to part company with the non-objective Kandinsky at this point, one cannot help but wonder whether the former's later rotary optical devices were designed to induce such after-images which, in hovering on the threshold between the concentric circle and the spiral, might convince the consumer of their own clairvoyance. For Kandinsky, a pictorial artist, 'parallel representation' was one way to escape the impasse of visual reality. But Duchamp's other way, eschewing pictorial art, nonetheless would seem to be informed by 'parallel representation' too. This would seem to make sense of Duchamp's admitted enthusiasm for Hodler, and Wagner, since Kandinsky's move is parallel to the composer's shift of characterization from stage prop to musical leitmotif. We recall here that Duchamp was instrumental in securing Kandinsky's transfer to Neuilly in the late '30's; he and Dreier had previously visited Kandinsky at the Bauhaus. Now we can perhaps understand the strange Ephemerides entry on Duchamp's Aeroplane, of the 19th of August 1912. Recalling the burden of Kaspar Hotspur and Strader's warnings, apropos the danger to the spirit of misapplied technology, now makes a little more sense of the setting into an entry addressing Duchamp's Munich drawing of Gaby-Buffet Picabia's comment that, at the time, the Machine was considered anti-artistic, and an enemy of the mind, the coincidence of the date of Audemar's triumph notwithstanding: The answer lies in standard definitions of the word Mind, by turns the commemoration of a departed soul, the seat of consciousness, thoughts, volition and feelings, the incorporeal subject of the psychic faculties, the soul as distinct from the body, mental or psychic being, and intellectual powers as distinct from the will and emotions, because Duchamp's drawing looks like nothing less than a blueprint for a piece of spirit-science apparatus, just like the Large Glass. The Rousselian analysis of the word 'aeroplane' accompanying this text demonstrates how whilst the drawing looks nothing like an avion, its title evokes the cognate of aviation, viator, or traveller, which conflates a flying machine of the aviator with the departure of the soul, since its cognate, viaticum, the Latin for provision for a journey, also means the Eucharist when administered to and received by one close to death, a risk noted in the Ephemerides entry. [Glyn Thompson; Metaphysics: Occult Munich. (Unwinding Duchamp: Mots et Paroles à Tous les Étages. Volume 1. Text., pp. 141-150.) Dissertation. The University of Leeds School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies. September 2008.] References and Sources: [157] Published as Occult Signs and Symbols, by the Anthroposophical Press, in 1972, they had been translated from German shorthand reports un-revised by the lecturer (Vol. 101 in the Bibliographical Survey, 1961) by Sarah Kurland with emendations by Gilbert Church, Ph. D.
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