Bernardino D’achille (1893-1974), 2023, oil on canvas, 24×23 cm
|
Bernardino D’achille (1893-1974), 2023, oil on canvas, 24×23 cm |
A Little Game Between ‘I’ and ‘me’HERBERT MOLDERINGS (Part 2)* * Herbert Molderings; Marcel Duchamp at the Age of 85: An Incunabulum of Conceptual Photography, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Konig, Köln, 2013, pp. 37-54, pp. 80-83. (Translated by John Brogden, Foreword by Dieter Bogner)
---- “A LITTLE GAME BETWEEN ‘I’ AND ‘ME’.”When Duchamp was asked by the curator Katherine Kuh in 1961 why he had such a strong need to distance himself as far as possible from the traditional forms of expression, he replied: “I was really trying to invent, instead of merely expressing myself. I was never interested in looking at myself in an aesthetic mirror. My intention was always to get away from myself, though I knew perfectly well that I was using myself. Call it a little game between ‘I’ and ‘me’.”[81] In 1911, in the painting Sad Young Man on a Train, Duchamp had for the first time made his own person the theme of his art. 1917 saw a change in medium when he visited the Broadway Photo Shop in New York to have a five-way portrait taken.[82] Such “multiphotographs,” which showed the subject simultaneously from the front, the back, and both sides and were produced with the aid of a relatively simple hinged-mirror trick, were part and parcel of the then popular genre of leisure and recreational photography.[83] Indeed, Roland Barthes recognized in the mirroring aspect of the photographic image one of its most important historical and aesthetic innovations. “Photography is the advent of myself as other, a cunning dissociation of the conscience of identity,” he writes in Camera lucida.[84] For Duchamp, this splitting of his photographic identity into five different faces marked the beginning of a whole series of artistic self-projections in the medium of photography, culminating, and also terminating, in 1945 in his self-portrait at the age of 85. While Duchamp’s masquerade portraits, mostly playful and mostly no bigger than a postcard, were indeed perceived as visual manifestations of the artist Marcel Duchamp, they were not considered as works of art. After all, their places of display were not art galleries or art museums but rather the pages of a periodical, a poster or the label of a perfume bottle.
---- One of the myths of modernism is the notion that the Large Glass and the readymades marked the beginning of the desubjectification of modern art. We may indeed consider this true as regards a work’s inherent aesthetic, but not without reservation, for even if the artist disappeared entirely from his works, leaving no trace of his hand in their making, he could not escape public attention. On the contrary, there is hardly any other artist of the twentieth century who has been the object of profane veneration to the same extent as Marcel Duchamp. Once he had reached the front pages of the U.S. national dailies with his painting Nude Descending a Staircase in 1913 and, two years later, had emigrated to New York, the media began to take a very curious interest in the thoughts and ideas of an artist who not only seemed to be completely indifferent about success but had possibly discovered a new artistic language about which his fellow artists knew nothing. Duchamp reacted to the public’s growing interest in his person by surprising it with regular changes of identity. In 1918 he painted his last oil painting (Tu m’); in 1923 he completed his work on the Large Glass; from 1920 until 1924 he devoted himself almost entirely to the design and fabrication of optical machines. So who was he? Evidently no longer a painter. So what was he then? Who was this unpredictable personality? The puzzles he set for his collectors, his friends, and a small, readily surveyable avant-garde scene were complemented by a series of photographic portraits that were just as enigmatic as his artistic actions and decisions.
---- Duchamp’s greatest fame was reaped by his self-portrayals as Rrose Sélavy, photographed by his friend Man Ray in 1921. The name of his alter ego, with which Duchamp signed his works — often in conjunction with his real name — until 1942, is a pun that says it all: Eros c'est la vie — Eros, that’s life. Duchamp was certainly familiar with Rimbaud’s famous dictum “je est un autre” [“I is someone else”], but his photographic metamorphosis Into a woman was not just an exploration of the “individual’s inner world, of the psychical structure of identity”[85] but also, and equally so, a deliberate game of confusion with his persona. From 1921 Duchamp used the medium of the photographic selfportrait to bring into circulation ever new identities of himself, each one being yet a further side to the artistic individual who went by the name of Marcel Duchamp and/or Rrose Sélavy. That the intention behind his photographic transformation into Rrose Sélavy was not to replace his male identity by a female one but rather to implement an aesthetic strategy aimed at a multiplication of identities is proved by the fact that in 1921 he not only disguised himself as a woman but also made an appearance as a “monk” amid members of the art public. The tonsure had been shaved into Duchamp’s hair by the Mexican graphic artist and caricaturist, Georges de Zayas, then living in Paris.[86] Unlike the Rrose Sélavy portrait, this self-portrayal did not take place just in front of a camera. For several weeks — Dada was having its heyday in Paris at that time — Duchamp, thus tonsured, actually appeared in person within a small circle of friends.[87] A good halt dozen photographs of this masquerade, taken by at least two different photographers, have survived.[88] The most representative among these photographs was again taken by Man Ray. Altogether contrary to Duchamp’s “image” as a hardboiled, market-oriented strategist, which is how American art critics during the Pop Art era saw him, this self-portrayal discloses Duchamp’s romantic ideal of the artist. Duchamp compared the life of an artist to that of a monk, “a lay monk, if you so wish, indeed, a very Rabelaisian one. But it is an ordination, no more and no less.”[89] The tonsure, the symbol of the individual’s subjugation to God, takes in Duchamp’s case the form of a starshaped comet, the tail of which is pointing forwards, a motif that harks back to a literary sketch of 1912 for a symbolist/ futurist painting of a car journey (Route Jura-Paris). The protagonist of this sketch is a “headlight child”, which “could, graphically, be a comet, which would have its tail in front.”[90] And to make the game even more confusing, still in 1921, Duchamp cut out a small piece from his “tonsure” portrait and stuck it on Francis Picabia’s painting L’Œil cacodylate, to which he then added the pun “en 6 qu’habilla rrose Sélavy,” thus linking the “tonsure” portrait with the figure of Rrose Sélavy.[91] And so it was that Duchamp, in 1921, had assumed two new identities with the aid of such staged photographic self-portraits. First he transformed himself into a woman and then, only a short time later, back into a man, into an “artist-monk” with an enigmatic comet tonsure.[92]
---- Three years later, Duchamp again had his portrait taken by Man Ray, this time for a Monte Carlo Bond (Obligation pour la roulette de Monte Carlo).[93] This bond entitled the purchaser to a share in the winnings to be yielded by a roulette system at Monte Carlo. Using shaving cream in lieu of pomade, Duchamp shaped his hair for the portrait into wings reminiscent of the winged helmet of Hermes, the messenger of the Greek gods, who was famous for his shady dealings and was hence also the patron god of merchants — not excluding art dealers — and thieves. Duchamp sold each of these bonds for the tidy sum of 500 Francs and promised a dividend of 20%, but he was never able to pay it, as the system never yielded any winnings. The Monte Carlo Bond was much more profitable on the art market, where in the course of time its purchasing value increased a thousandfold.
---- The two juxtaposed portraits in View — one taken in profile, the other full face — also echo, albeit distantly, Duchamp’s wanted notice of 1923.[98] Indeed, it was the “Marcel Duchamp Number,” the first monographic publication to be dedicated to his work, that did precisely what the artist himself abhorred: his person, his work, and his artistic standpoint were stamped, categorized, and shelved. In view of the large number of contributors — more than a dozen befriended artists, writers, critics, curators, and gallery owners had contributed essays to this issue — the reader ought to have expected a broad and richly facetted panorama of Duchamp’s artistic endeavors and accomplishments. Instead, however, the descriptions of Duchamp’s artistic identity in the various essays are astonishingly unanimous. The picture presented of Duchamp is that of a “has been,” a painter who gave up painting twenty years ago and since then has been unable to find a new artistic agenda. With the exception of Breton’s introduction, most of the articles are in the spirit of a “prehumous” obituary. In the eyes of Harriet and Sidney Janis, Duchamp was the embodiment of the “anti-artist,” which is quite a remarkable assertion considering the fact that in the same paragraph they state quite positively that, despite his having turned away from art, he continued to create “new works,” albeit works “so unorthodox and so far removed from (...) painting and sculpture.”[99] Adopting a strictly orthodox surrealist stance, the literature and art theorist Nicolas Calas, who like Duchamp had emigrated from Paris to New York, portrayed him as the perfect revolutionary who challenged the traditional genres, ridiculed the adoration of the masterpiece, and sold to collectors and investors masterpieces “too fragile to last.”[100]
---- The American art critic and specialist in sectarian religious movements, Robert Allerton Parker, observed in his article, “America Discovers Marcel,” that Duchamp had become “a sort of subversive guru to hundreds — possibly thousands” of people in the art scene.[101] Parker was a great admirer of Duchamp. He had already interviewed him in 1915 and had put him up in his apartment in Gracie Square during the first month following his, Duchamp’s, return to New York in 1942.[102] Parker could have easily substantiated his guru thesis simply by citing, before any of the other many Duchamp disciples, Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler, the editors of View, who, in dithyrambic eulogies, declaimed: “Marcel — mysterious as the internal changes of a star”[103] — “Duchamp: the chrysalis joyfully, maliciously, transcending the butterfly.”[104] It would be wrong, Parker stressed, to consider Duchamp primarily as an artist, for he was “an artist only incidentally,” the true key to his significance lying in his own self.[105] “His real life work has been to explore the depths of his own being, to maintain his own reality (...) he has, with subtle alchemy, transmuted the baser materials of life into the radiant myth of ‘Marcel’ — a masterpiece even more arresting than the Nude Descending a Staircase.”[106] It was precisely this “radiant myth of “‘Marcel’” that both the enigmatic autobiographical photomontage on the cover of View and the mysterious self-portrait “at the Age of 85« were meant to perpetuate.
---- While Duchamp’s self-portrait as an old man certainly echoes Stettheimer’s short story, it responds even more directly to Breton’s “Testimony 45,” the opening article to the Duchamp number of View.[112] Having maintained in this article that Duchamp’s Large Glass had the same significance for modern art that Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason had for modern philosophy, Breton ventured to assert that Duchamp was “the only one of all his contemporaries who is in no way inclined to grow older.”[113] Duchamp saw this far less euphorically and, at the end of all the homages and eulogies in View, furnished — in the form of a photograph showing how he himself would look at the age of 85 — the irrefutable proof that even he, Duchamp, was not immune to the ravages of time.
---- Three years later, Duchamp finally found himself able to come to terms with what Gottfried Benn called “ageing as a problem for artists,” no longer projecting it onto someone else but stepping in front of the mirror himself in the guise of an old man.[118] All the same, this glance into the future, into the last phase of his creative life, was altogether more optimistic than the surrogate portrait of Rrose Sélavy. There is nothing in the photograph of Marcel Duchamp at the Age of 85 that might hint at a loss of intellectual alertness and mental agility. Duchamp imagines spending the end of his life in full possession of his mental faculties. The choice of the pose — that of the introverted thinker with downcast eyes and prominent cranium — was possibly influenced by a drawing by the New York caricaturist, Marius de Zayas, which had been published in the magazine Camera Work in 1912 under the title L’accoucheur d’idées [The Midwife of Ideas].[119] Marius was the brother of the aforementioned graphic artist, Georges de Zayas, then living in Paris, who had shaved Duchamp’s comet-shaped tonsure. While the term “accoucheur d’idées” was exactly in keeping with Duchamp’s understanding of himself as an artist, his fictitious self-portrait as an old man has nothing of the inner turmoil of Marius de Zayas’s portrayal of the thinker. On the contrary, Duchamp casts himself, especially in the photograph without spectacles, wholly in the role of the inward-gazing artist-philosopher, entirely at one with himself.
---- In a letter penned at the beginning of 1946 to his clandestine lover in New York, the Brazilian sculptress Maria Martins,[120] Duchamp, who at the time was staying at the house of Mary Reynolds, his companion of the past twenty years or so, laments his mood of gloom and dwindling sexual powers: “I feel completely out of place, have not been able to make love, and feel more and more like ending it all.”[121] Biographical sources are unable to tell us whether this was just a momentary attack of depression or a more profound state of melancholia brought on by advancing age. One bizarre anecdote, written by Hélène Hoppenot, a close friend of Mary Reynolds, in her diary of 1949, may play a significant role in this present study, for it tells how Duchamp once encountered himself as an already dead artist: “Mary told me that Marcel Duchamp was invited one day by the director of a municipal museum in the United States and came across a picture postcard on the sales counter illustrating one of his works. He bought it. The caption on the back of the card gave the date of his birth ... and his death!”[122] The indicated time — “one day” — does not tell us how long before 1949 this “encounter” actually took place. If it did in fact take place before January 1945, it would be yet another addition to the already complex jigsaw puzzle of experiences, feelings, and thoughts — so difficult to piece together from surviving sources _ that inspired Duchamp to portray himself at the imaginary age of 85.
* Herbert Molderings; Marcel Duchamp at the Age of 85: An Incunabulum of Conceptual Photography, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Konig, Köln, 2013, pp. 37-54, pp. 80-83. (Translated by John Brogden, Foreword by Dieter Bogner) Notes:
[81] Katherine Kuh, “Marcel Duchamp,” in: idem, The Artist’s Voice, p. 83.
A Little Game Between ‘I’ and ‘me’ |
