Marcel Duchamp: Research as Practice
sitemap
drawings
paintings 1 2 3 4 4 5 a b c -
- A B . . . . . . . new
installations
projects
reviews
Clara Bachini (1941-2008)
|
Clara Bachini (1941-2008) |
Marcel Duchamp: Research as Practice
Glyn Thompson
Epistemology: Research as Practice*
Epistemology: The theory or science of the method or grounds of knowledge.
My practice articulates the semantic consequences arising from the shift in epistemological grounding of Duchamp's own practice in 1912, when he abdicated avant-garde self-authentication in favour of an institutional validation predicated on the deferral of epistemological authority to a higher power. The subject that his new production elucidated, for a private mode of consumption, by a specifically esoteric clientele, was expressed through bespoke items whose understanding no longer necessitated deference to avant-garde art aesthetics.
It is then predicated on the premise that the discrete circumstances of the production and consumption of any particular artefact is inevitably informed by fundamental human mental processes and social and cultural context, from the broad macro-socio-economic ideological framework of a 'class consciousness' to the micromonomanias of such co-conspirators as Braque and Picasso, or the membership of any private club or secret society.
This in turn is predicated on the premise that systematic and coherent bodies of ideas shared by cultures, sub-cultures or unique partnerships idiosyncratically inform unique behaviours and cases, a premise which underlies, for example, Lynda Henderson's assumption that the state of the understanding of contemporary science can, and did, influence the character of art produced in Paris in the first decade or so of the last century.[1]
Therefore, as a result of the bespoke character of Duchamp's own post-1912 production, the specific values of the individual consumer come into play. (We cannot, for example, hope to understand Duchamp's production in either Paris between 1913 and 1915, or New York between 1915 and 1918, in ignorance of the expectations, values and requirements of the major consumers of his contemporaneous production during those dates, in the latter period, Katherine Dreier, a committed Theosophist, and Walter Conrad Arensberg, an amateur cryptographer, enthusiast for Rosicrucianism, and collector of pre-Columbian artefacts. That the objects Duchamp made for these patrons retained an aura derived from their origins must then inform our understanding that their identity cannot be accommodated outside the personal relationship which fine-tuned the over-arching elite socioeconomic 'system' these protagonists inhabited.)
The precise nature of Duchamp's relationship to Arensberg, which is revealed in the letters he wrote from Argentina during 1918 and 1919, (in the company of Dreier) removes any suspicion that theirs was a simple client/retainer-patron relationship. The same is true in the case of Dreier. Take, for example, the painting Tu m’, produced under Duchamp’s direction, in a setting to which a small group of highly privileged collaborators had access (Duchamp's studio attached to the Arensberg apartment) but never publicly exhibited until a year after her death. This work was designed to dovetail simultaneously into both the unique form of her bookcase and the ideology inscribed in its literary contents, and nowhere else.
Constantin Brancusi, Marcel Duchamp and Mary Reynolds at Villefranche, France in 1929.
Or take the 'portrait' of Fania Marinof entitled Fania(Profil) that Duchamp produced on New Year's Eve 1915, provoked by the gift of a typewriter from Walter Arensberg; this, on the eve of his removal from 34 Beekmann Place to the Lincoln Centre Arcade. The work disappeared into Duchamp's patron-friend's private world, never to be seen until rediscovered in his estate after he died.
Or take the luggage labels Duchamp gave Ettie Strettheimer on the occasion of her birthday.
In all these cases, and more, the intimate dialogue these objects conducted occurred ultimately within a private discourse, in the manner of an encoded love-letter, or the Zimmermann telegram, both fabricated on an assumption which circumscribed their production and transmission - that their contents were to remain privileged.
Therefore, Duchamp's works did not so much offer insights into the producer's psyche as into his efficacy, functioning as therapeutic tools, by alluding to the commissioner, who projected shared values into them sui generis, transferred as to a talisman or fetish, which makes only a localised, unique sense. As such, their aesthetics acted within the discrete horizon of a highly particularised reception environment, the receiver completing the work by bringing themselves to it within a previously determined and agreed discourse. The producer was then negotiator of alignments, and manager of conjunctions, of the ideological spatio-temporal coordinates within which fabrication comes into being and functions; the results, not commodities proper, such as works of art produced for promiscuous submission to the indignities of the market place. It is by such complicit subscription to a hermetic ideological discourse that any ultra-personal or quasi-mystical identification between the mind of another person, or attitude or period, can be effected. So functions the Masonic catechism, via exegesis of the allegorical symbols of the apron or tracing-board, both models of the Masonic lodge itself, which inscribe a pre-existing field of knowledge, the doctrine of Esoteric Tradition, thus providing a pretext for erudite discourse. Whilst the particular disposition of such signs within the emblematic field might be negotiable, within certain rhetorical limitations, their form and meaning is not. (For example, the image of a unicorn, which can be quartered anywhere on a blazon, or act as a supporter, cannot inscribe the meaning of a lion; nor can one tincture inscribe the meaning of another, despite any viewer's individual hermeneutic inclinations. In the same way, the tiled floor of a Masonic lodge does not inscribe the meaning of a tiled roof, nor does the direction East inscribe the meaning of West.)
So whilst hermeneutics might argue that although one cannot perfectly recreate the attitudes and original intentions or conditions of reception of the meaning of cultural artefacts in general, due to social, cultural and intellectual differences, if practiced self-consciously, forensic archaeology appears to work, and the encrypted meaning of a telegram can be decrypted only via the application of the code by means of which its meaning was originally encrypted.
Until 1912, Duchamp's aesthetic had subscribed to the post-Symbolist 'Orphic' conception of the artist formulated by his close friend Apollinaire, advanced in his preface to the catalogue of the IIIme Expo du Cercle de l'Art Modern, Ie Havre, June 1908, entitled Les Trois Virtues Plastiques. According to Adrian Hicken[2] here the poet develops the central assumption of his modem neo-platonic aesthetic, now in regard to painting. This assumed that it is the poet alone who can identify a unique personal rationality, assuming superiority over natural phenomena, only then after purification; and further, that personal insight developed from internal experience effects a transformation of the visible world which thus appears anew. The artist is now absolute creator possessing that which had been latent and instinctive. As he puts it;
To esteem purity is to baptize one's instincts, humanize art, and exalt the personality. The root, the stem, and the flower of the lily show the progression of purity up to its symbolic blossoming. But the painter must above all be aware of his own divinity, and the paintings he offers up to the admiration of others will confer on them the glory of experiencing also, for a moment, their own divinity. To do that one must take a single glance to the past, the present and the future.[3]
Apollinaire's essay on Duchamp in his Les Peintres Cubistes of 1912[4] makes it quite clear that he considered his subject to fall into this category, but Duchamp's abandonment of a painting" offered up for the admiration of others", noted by Apollinaire on May 19th, 1914,[5] effectively immunised the consciously inscribed content of his work against interpretations predicated on his friend's aesthetic.
Thus an ever-widening disparity developed between Duchamp's expressed intentions and the interpretation of their results, rooted in different epistemological groundings. This, my practice seeks to restore; that its form might rhetorically inscribe this epistemological antinomy therefore requires the recognition, in its execution, of the implications emanating from the circumscription of two practices within two rather different extra- personal institutionalised philosophies. These were manifested, for Duchamp, in the catechistic praxis characterising exegesis of the Philosophia Perennis of the Hermetic Tradition, but for myself, in the protocols of scholarship. But these, through a formal coincidence, bear a superficial resemblance to one another. So whilst the authenticity of the latter, unlike the former, cannot be grounded in the types of resemblance inscribed in the Theory of Signatures,[6] none-the- less, the institutionalised fabric clothing their respective ideological configurations is identical, since progress through both esoteric institutions is attained, via initiation, on a gamut of ascending degrees closing full in Enlightenment.
So for myself, unaware of my own divinity as, one suspects, was Duchamp, if not his partisans, the prosecution of my practice requires something more than the baptising of my own instincts in the exaltation of my personality. That being so, the analysis offered in Research through Practice; Positioning the Practitioner as Researcher, by Douglas, Skopa and Gray[7] provides a rationale for the articulation of my practice within the framework of Fine Art rather than exclusively through that practice from which its subject emerges, the academic discipline of Art History whose formal research process and product it nevertheless automatically assumes. That is, the prosecution of my practice through the investment of a personal enquiry within academic protocols replicates, and thus embodies rhetorically, the shift in the epistemological grounding of Duchamp's own practice as presented by his abdication of an avant-garde field of consumption whose causes my practice then takes as its subject. This in turn rhetorically inscribes the antinomy at the heart of Duchamp's new practice, the epistemological status of the occult, discussed below.
(A consideration of whether the abdication of avant-garde values was at the time understood as an ironic avant-garde strategy per se, and whether this informed Duchamp's decision, must await a further occasion.)
So whilst the research methodology of my own practice adheres to the protocols of art historical enquiry, the issue of whether or not Duchamp's practice continued to subscribe to the protocols of avant-garde art can only be rhetorically inscribed within a practice exemplifying that same antinomy; hence the hybrid discursive character of this text which, in passing from premises to conclusions whilst simultaneously digressively ranging over many subjects, emulates that of its model, Duchamp's own enunciative form, as derived from Roussel's.
Contemporary Fine Art practice, and a concomitant symbiotic hermeneutic emerging alongside it, has largely developed in relation to a perceived Duchampian model. That being so, the retort "No Marcel, therefore no Damien", represents a self-fulfilling prophesy incestuously confirming its tautological self. But the subsequent misconstruction of the epistemological implications of the radical change to Duchamp's practice characterising contemporary hermeneutics carries powerful consequences for any critical practice whose authenticity is predicated thereon.
Since it is not so much this matter which is the primary subject of the enquiry but the nature of the change which provoked it, its identity must be established first. Thus, my practice, in which content, as with Duchamp, is presented both through the practice itself and the conventions of exhibition and publication (etc), located within the practice, of necessity takes the rhetorical form of Research as Critical Practice. This is demonstrated, at the time of writing, in the exhibition, at the City of Leeds Art Gallery, entitled Jemanden ein armutszeugnis ausstellen, a phrase which, if spelled correctly, means, inter alia, to exhibit evidence of one's own incompetence, to make a poor showing, or to make an exhibition of oneself. Here an example is presented of the mediation arising from such an investment of the protocols of one practice within another, for errata (such as the misspelling of the first substantive, jemandem;[8]) promiscuously mark the glossing text (entitled Jemanden ein R Mutt's zeugnis austellen, Monsieur Goldfinch).[9] These breaches of Etikett rhetorically inscribing incompetence, are further confirmed in the lack of the decorum, or etiquette, displayed by the erratic label, an Etikette or etiquette, barely attached to the text.
Thus the formal research which forms the methodological foundation of my enquiry is subsumed into an overarching Research as Critical Practice, and presented by it in the form of structured and evidenced argument. This formal research then informs the practice of Fine Art as research as critical practice by proving transparency and accountability in the research process, for the following reason. A research praxis (the imbrication of theory in practice) in an academic context generic to all academic disciplines, and recognised as a language across discourses, develops a reliable and shared body of knowledge within a discipline.[10] This institutionalised syncretism then inscribes that of the Esoteric Tradition, upon whose protocols Duchamp drew for his subject.
Further, the process of formal research authenticates its results in that they can be communicated and defended to others, much in the way that Duchamp's subject matter, the assumed authenticity of which datum was beyond question to its partisans - étant donnés, so to speak - also became the basis for the evaluation of the mode of its formal expression. In both cases, emblematic form then becomes a means of embodying knowledge more appropriately than through text alone, as in a calligram by Apollinaire.[11]
The institutional re-inscription of Duchamp's practice within the milieu of the esoteric is then mirrored in the re-inscription of my practice within scholarship, both of whose formal research methodologies address ways in which new practitioners are trained, confirm the role of practice within a culture, and perpetuate values by progressing a discipline. Thus my teaching of the module ARTF 3157: Duchamp and After, constitutes practice, since it too assumes a degree of validation, authenticates knowledge in its mode of transmission, and is predicated on the acquisition of recognisable and relevant skills as a means of making a contribution to shared knowledge through a recognisable and generic process - as does a Viva Voce, and the text it takes as its pretext.
But in both cases, a useful contribution to knowledge cannot necessarily be assumed as automatic, since the definition of aims and objectives, including descriptions of appropriate methodology, and their contextualisation via literature review that this comprises, does not assume any degree of original thinking on the part of catechist or catechumen in the perpetuation of the eternal wisdom it embodies, but merely a form of exegesis symptomatic of the historical moment. Thus the main motive to Fine Art Research as Practice is here assumed to be the explanation of a personally based project or product, through a discussion operating on a personal level of intention for the particular work, through anecdote, and documentation of its development, with varying degrees of rig our. Knowledge of this initially lies in the hands of the individual practitioner, not necessarily with a body of participating artists. Duchamp's practice after 1912, having abdicated his earlier avant-garde position, should then be considered in this light. To constrain my practice within these limits would however merely perpetuate the misconception of the nature of Duchamp's new practice, since the tracing of the import of the results of the process described here is limited to the individuals involved, and consumption of the knowledge embodied within the work relies on the complicity of the research community, (usually critics, theorists and historians,) in the process of its inscription, since the creation and import of any new knowledge is limited within this route or milieu. This is the nub of the antinomy identified above, in that this condition is as true of the esoteric field of consumption into which Duchamp translocated his practice as it is of the avant-garde field of production he simultaneously abdicated.
Notwithstanding the coincidence of belief shared by the post-Symbolist avantgarde and the esoteric community, their respective epistemologies divided them. Whilst both held that the cultivation of individual intuition was the key to enlightenment, the esoteric construction of the artist as a mediumistic being facilitating unmediated access to the eternal truths of an ancient wisdom, manifest in an emblematic universe written by some form of numinous power, runs absolutely counter to Apollinaire's conception of the divinity of the artist as the grounding of all knowledge. That these constructions conflate in the template against which Duchamp's patron Katherine Dreier judged the paradigmatic Kandinsky and Mondrian demonstrates that artefacts generated both within and without an avantgarde field of production could happily co-exist within an esoteric field of consumption, as Sheeler's photographs of Arensberg's apartment, and the advertisements for de Zayas' Modem Gallery, on the last page of Blindman 2, make plain; or, in the mistaking of a urinal for a work of art.
The issue of how Duchamp's new products might be identified as avant-garde art, as they were in the New York milieus surrounding the 'one or two people' he had been looking for in early 1915, Walter Arensberg and Katherine Dreier, is then an expression of the epistemological antinomy arising in 1912. Evidence is indirectly provided by de Zayas.[12]
In seeking to identify the origins of modern art in the "primitive mentality" of the African Negro, de Zayas provides a rationale for Duchamp's relationship to his 'patrons', through the intermediary of his work, and a soteriological conception of the function of art. According to this rationale, the concept of the readymade and the style of the Nude of 1912 are seamlessly interwoven.
This origin de Zayas identifies on page 5.
Lately European art has sought in the work of the savage new elements for the development of plastic expression, and through the discoveries made in the art of the savage we have acquired new knowledge concerning differences of representation in relation to the different mental states, and concerning the different degrees of development in the evolution of art.
Duchamp's 'painting' Chocolate Grinder No: 2 illustrates these" differences of representation in relation to the different mental states (and) concerning the different degrees of development in the evolution of art." Constructed in the period between the autumn of 1912 to the summer of 1915, partly made from lead wire, and thus distinguished from two earlier painted studies, it represents the transition from painted to constructed images which is reflected in all Duchamp's two-dimensional works from this period, including the 'rehearsals' for the Large Glass project, never exhibited at this time.
However, that one can also draw a distinction between Duchamp' s self-consciously avant-garde painting, produced before the 1912/1913 hiatus, and the different kind of work he produced after that date, is confirmed in Drier and Arensbreg's domestic hanging policies. Echoing Katherine Dreier's library during the 1930's, the walls of Arensberg's apartment were hung with avant-garde paintings, by Picabia, Duchamp, Matisse et aI, which cohabited with 'primitive' artefacts filling the rooms. But of the readymades, which were created exclusively for Arensberg, there are none. These were discretely sequestered in a private studio upstairs, just as in Duchamp's atelier on the Rue St-Hippolyte, where Suzanne found the bottle drainer, and a bicycle wheel, in 1916. The situation is less clear cut in the case of Dreier's hanging policy and practice, implying a more superficial understanding on her part confirmed by the criticism she published of the Large Glass in 1944.[13] Nonetheless, the Three Standard Stoppages, which she acquired in this period, as far as is known, remained in their box.
Duchamp's works in the Arensberg collection at this point can be assumed to illustrate de Zayas' analysis of the relationship between modem and 'primitive' art summarised above. As defined by de Zayas' understanding of the term 'primitive', the character of the fetish, to which the readymades might now subscribe, informs the aesthetic of both Katherine Dreier, who collected Brancusi, and Arensberg. De Zayas would seem to be drawing on Swedenborg's belief that ancient peoples possessed knowledge of the correspondences between the outwardly sensory and the inwardly spiritual which, for the Symbolist generation, (i.e. everyone but them, i.e. avant-garde artists,) had lost. For them, as for Swedenborg, all journeys of the spirit were changes of state, and the more changes of state, the more inward the journey.
The critical factors, for De Zayas, in the influence of Negro 'art' on modem art, may be epitomised as follows.
The statuette fetish is not the representative image of the divinities. It is only a propitiatory instrument, considered the exclusive property of the individual, of the family or of the tribe, and is only good for them. The sorcerer is the intermediator between the Negro and the fetish, which is invisible, and manifests itself but seldom to the priest, the sorcerer. But his representation of it, which is variously a tree, a mountain, a pond of water, a heap of earth, a wooden statue, is feared, and in practice confounded with the fetish itself. The sorcerer, at the same time prestidigitator, a magnetizer and a medicine man, makes the fetish speak. To the Dahomean, for example, every manifestation of a force which he cannot define, every prodigy or phenomenon which is beyond his imagination or intelligence is a fetish - a thing of God which demands a cult. The thunder, the small-pox, the sea are fetiches; the telegraph and our railroads would also be fetishes if they were not" Machines of the White People."
The statuette-fetish is made to protect its owner from all evil, and the Negro sees in it a practical use, not giving it any esthetic value. The esthetic pleasure of the Negro lies principally in decorating it, always with geometrical combinations of lines. Since we have seen that the first criterion of the Negro is the spontaneous movement in which he sees the manifestation of life, it is logical to believe that since the Negro discovers his first criterion in movement, and is an animist, it will be movement and not objects that he tries to represent primarily. The visual element on which the Negro bases the actual representation reveals the primitive sensation of the cognition of form. The expressive quality of Negro sculpture is due in great part to the manner in which the artist handles his material. The Negro is naturally identified with the plastic resources of wood. He seems to let his work be guided by the material, and instead of putting his feelings into wood, seems rather to draw them out of it. In all the flat representations of the Africa Negro, only geometrical drawings are found; they represent movement and therefore have an abstract expression. And the geometrical structure of these drawings has been maintained in the construction of the statuary. Its plastic spirit is still movement. Negro art has awakened in us the feeling for abstract form, it has brought into our art the means to express our purely sensorial feelings in regard to form, or to find new form in our ideas. Negro art has made us conscious of a subjective state, obliterated by objective education. And while in science the objective truths are the only ones that give the reality of the outer world, in art it is the subjective truths that give us the reality of ourselves.
De Zayas' analysis would then appear to provide an ideological rationale for a transition from one form of expression to another immediately preceding and following Duchamp's damascene conversion in 1912, from the Nude of that year, via the Large Glass project, to the readymades, of 1916.
Christopher Green[14] offers us evidence that de Zayas' thinking was in line with that of Apollinaire's of four years before. Green points out that by 1912 the so-called 'primitive' was commonly invoked in relation to Cubism, but more as analogy than a source or stimulus; the conceptualisation of Cubist painting was habitually aligned with the presumed conceptualisation of African and pre-Renaissance 'primitive' images by, for example, Raynal, on Giotto: and Apollinaire was describing a God of War, from Dahomey, in the Trocadero, as if it were a cubist sculpture. This particular item de Zayas must have known, since half of the 32 examples illustrated in his book were from that collection.
Green points out that this invocation echoes the current convergence in ethnology of the questions of logic and of the 'primitive', logic being a key concern of all major debates about the notion of magic in the' primitive mentality' which informed the reasoning of Levy-Bruhl. But whilst there is no evidence that either Apollinaire or Raynal were aware of the former's "Law of Participation" before 1914, none-the-Iess, by 1912, logic could be placed in opposition to the notion of 'primitive' conception. In Levy-Bruhl's major work, Les Fonctions mentales dans les Sociétés inférieures, of 1910, 'primitive mentality' contradicted logic, since if logic could be defined as founded on the "law of non-contradiction", then the exposure of contradiction in ' primitive mentality' established the operation of different laws. In magical thinking, different things in different places at different times could be causally linked, as by a spell, and anything could participate in anything else, anywhere, at any time, as in a Paracelsian or Swedenborgian theory of Resemblance.
Levy-Bruhl's critical passage, from Lilian Clare's 1966 translation, entitled How Natives Think (Washington Square Press, 1966) is quoted by Rene Berger,[15]
Objects, beings, phenomena can be, though in a way incomprehensible to us, both themselves and something other than themselves. In a fashion which is no less incomprehensible, they give forth and they receive mystic powers, virtues, qualities, influences, which make themselves felt outside, without ceasing to remain what they are. In other words, for this mentality the opposition between the one and the many, the same and another, and so forth does not impose upon this mentality the necessity of affirming one of the terms if the other be denied, or vice versa. This opposition is of secondary interest.
In the light of this, the observations cited by de Zayas, that "the telegraph and our railroads would also be fetishes if they were not Machines of the White People", and that" the Negro sees in it (the festish) a practical use, not giving it any esthetic value" would seem to establish a precondition for not only the conception of Duchamp's two-dimensional imagery, after 1912, and the form of his assemblages and the conception of the readymade as we identify it here, but also the contemporaneous assumption that these expressions constituted orthodox avant-garde art.
But this aesthetic conflation does not obscure the fact that a hermeneutic predicated on the retention of Apollinaire's Orphic construction within Duchamp's post-1912 aesthetic perpetuates a misunderstanding of the mechanism by which Duchamp could now translate ideas into objects by means of a simple, an-aesthetic rule-of-thumb method, thus allowing him to escape the aesthetic cul-de-sac into which he considered the avant-garde had blindly wandered, as the title of the magazine articulating The Richard Mutt Affair implies. But now, identification of Duchamp's products as art then renders their appearance allegorical, and masks their true aesthetic identity. But the perpetuation of the misconception that Duchamp remained an orthodox avant-garde artist by some other means, which he took no trouble to contradict, leaves the mediumistic Duchamp now ensconced rather precariously in the pantheon of contemporary hermeneuts.
The products of my practice then articulate an investigation into the epistemological dynamic generated by Duchamp's change of practice, in which intuition as the grounding of truth was replaced by various protocols of scholarship basing claims for their authenticity on the formal research disciplines employed. But the rigour of the theosophist Meade, displayed in his unimpeachable philological analysis of the Pymander,[16] for example, is not matched by the methodology displayed by the Rosicrucian Arensberg in his analyses of the cryptography of Dante, Shakespeare and Bacon, the results this obtained more symptomatic of their parabolic genre.[17] So since my practice must perforce rhetorically inscribe within its expressive form this antinomy, it must, perforce, assume the form of fine art research as practice, this being the sine qua non of the subject under enquiry, the leitmotif of the identity of Duchamp's practice as Art, or not.
Douglas, Skopa and Gray's formulation of the mode of Fine Art Research as Practice can then be seen to inform how Duchamp's post-1912 non-art practice has been susceptible to classification as Fine Art ever since, in spite of his own disclaimers. For example, the expression of the developmental research process independently of the work itself, and through professional conventions, which these authors identify in notebooks, publications, interviews and so on, then serve in Duchamp's case as a catalogue of the expressive forms his production, his various sets of Notes, for example, or his presence obliquely hinted at in his anonymous participation in public displays of material in bookshop windows, joint exhibitions, or published interviews and aphorisms. Taken to be the Essence, they are in fact the substantial Attributes and Superficies from which a hypostatic practice might now be semeiologically diagnosed.
* Glyn Thompson; Unwinding Duchamp: Mots et Paroles à Tous les Étages. Volume 1. Text. The University of Leeds School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies. September 2008, pp. 10-21.
Notes:
[1] Henderson, L Dalrymple. Duchamp in Context: Science and Technology in the" Large Glass" and Related Works. Princeton Univ. Press. 1996.
[2] Hicken, A. Apollinaire, Orphism, Cubism. Ashgate. 2002.
[3] This view of the aesthetic autonomy of the avant-garde artist was well established in the milieus Duchamp was to pass through in New York between 1915 and 1918. For example, it was expressed in print by Marius de Zayas and Paul B Haviland, in The Study of the Modern Evolution of Plastic Expression, published by '291' on March the 1st, 1913. Quoting John Marin, "It is this 'moving of me' that I try to express, so that I may recall the spell I have been under and behold the expression of the different emotions which have been called into being." the authors continue:
The true artist works first of all to satisfy a natural need of expressing himself for his own satisfaction and he has created a work of at when he has expressed himself in such a way that his conception is clearly represented for himself. If the public wishes to share the pleasure of the artist they should take the pains of trying to understand what the artist has tried to express, and they are arguing beside the point when they blame him for not having taken them into consideration in a purely personal question. That is why our personal likes and dislikes have nothing whatever to do with the achievement of the artist which should be measured solely by his success in expressing what he attempted to express. The work of art exists then irrespective of the effect it may produce on the public, as the mind of the public exists irrespective of the work of art. It is when the work of art corresponds in meaning to the feelings and emotions that the public is conscious of that it finds a response in the public. When the work of art is the product of the beliefs, feelings and emotions of a kind not known to the public, the public must first know those beliefs, feelings and emotions, be conscious of them and look for them in the work of art before it can understand the expression of the artist.
Many other things exits without being known to man. It is only when the laws of the existence of these things have been revealed to us, when experimental science has proven the fact of their existence and made us understand it that we adopt them a s a matter of course. The radium, the X-rays, wireless telegraphy, are good examples of our point.
[4] Apollinaire, G. The Cubist Painters. Trans. Peter Read. Artists. Bookwork. 2002. First published as Les Peintres Cubistes. Figuiere. Paris MCMXII.
[5] in Apollinaire on Art: Essays and Reviews 1902-1918, by Guillaume Apollinaire, Thames and Hudson, page 388. Under the heading The Engraving that will become a Collectors Item, Apollinaire notes that no paintings have been exhibited by Duchamp for the two years since he began cataloguing books at the Bibliotheque Ste-Genevieve.
[6] See Foucault, M. The Order of Things. Tavistock Publications. London. 1970. Chapter 2: The Prose of the World, and Tillyard, E. M. W .The Elizabethan World Picture. Chatto and Windus. 1943. (passim.)
[7] Douglas A, Skopa K and Gray C, Research through Practice,' positioning the practitioner as researcher, in Working Progress in Art and Design 1. University of Dundee. 2000. http://www.herts.ac.uk/artdeslresearchIpapers/wpades/vol1Idouglas.html. ISSU 1466-4917
[8] I have been obliged to resort to the only German typeface contained in the fonts of my software, Haettenschswheiler, to effect my rhetorical point here.
[9] Thompson, G. Jemanden ein R Mutt's zeugnis austellen, Monsieur Goldfinch. Wild Pansy Press. Department of Fine Art, Art History and Cultural Studies. University of Leeds. 2008-
[10] For which see Guerrini, A. Duverney's Skeletons. Isis. 2003. 94: 577-603. (passim)
[11] See Surréalisme et Art Moderne, Vente aux Enchères Publique Ie 12 Juillet, 2002. Drouot-Richelieu. 9 rue Drouot, 75008 Paris, Salle 6 à 8 heures 30.ltem 4.
[12] Zayas, M de. African Negro Art: Its Influence on Modern Art. The Modem Gallery, 500 Fifth Avenue. New York. 1916.
[13] Dreier, K and J Matta Echaurren. Duchamp's Glass: La Mariée mise à nu par ces célibataires, même. An analytical reflection. New York. Société Anonyme, 1944.
[14] Green, C. 1910-1916: The Demon of Logic, in Juan Gris. Whitechapel Art Gallery. 1992. p.34.
[15] Berger. Rene. Video and the Restructuring of Myth, in The New Television, ed. by Davis and Simmons, MIT Press, 1977, page 219.
[16] Meade, G.R.S. Commmentary on the Pymander, from Thrice Great Hermes, Vol. III. The Gnostic Society Library. www.webcom.comlgnosis/libraryllgrs-mead/grsm_pymander_commentary.html.
[17] Naumann, F. Cryptography and the Arensberg Circle. Arts Magazine. 51(9): 1997. pp.127-133.