Marcel Duchamp is Relevant

In the New York Times today: an editorial on conceptual art: "Has Conceptual Art Jumped the Shark Tank?" by Dennis Dutton. Excerpt:

Since the endearingly witty Marcel Duchamp invented conceptual art 90 years ago by offering his “ready-mades” — a urinal or a snow shovel, for instance — for gallery shows, the genre has degenerated. Duchamp, an authentic artistic genius, was in 1917 making sport of the art establishment and its stuffy values. By the time we get to 2009, Mr. Hirst and Mr. Koons are the establishment.

...Future generations, no longer engaged by our art “concepts” and unable to divine any special skill or emotional expression in the work, may lose interest in it as a medium for financial speculation and relegate it to the realm of historical curiosity.

In this respect, I can’t help regarding medicine cabinets, vacuum cleaners and dead sharks as reckless investments. Somewhere out there in collectorland is the unlucky guy who will be the last one holding the vacuum cleaner, and wondering why.

NOW this is probably the last of what I would like to say about Marcel Duchamp. There are hundreds or thousands of web pages and blogs dedicated to him if you want to know more. My posts in sum are:

• What did Marcel Duchamp eat?
• Marcel Duchamp Exhibit
• "Nude Descending a Staircase"
• Bachelor Machines: Duchamp or Da Vinci?
• Use a Rembrandt as an Ironing Board
• Me, Marcel Duchamp, and L.H.O.O.Q.
• Warhol and Duchamp
• Marcel Duchamp by Irving Penn
• Marcel Duchamp (why not sneeze?)
  
• Marcel Duchamp in Bloomington, IN

Marcel Duchamp's Chocolate Grinder

"Marcel took very little alcohol or food; he would simple eat what was given him. No one gave him a lot because everyone knew he didn't eat very much -- two or three peas and one bit of meat. But he did smoke cigars." (from "John Cage on Marcel Duchamp: an Interview" by Moira Roth and William Roth, 1973)

Hmm. Was this one more example of Marcel Duchamp's famous posturing? Or maybe he didn't like to eat American food, having been brought up in early 20th century France. He was indeed very skinny.

I decided to see if there was any connection between Marcel Duchamp and food, as I'm in the habit of thinking food thoughts for my food blog. So this post is more or less on both my blogs today.

The only other Marcel Duchamp-food relationship I can find is the "Chocolate Grinder," which Duchamp remade at least three times, as a readymade (an actual kitchen tool for grinding chocolate, displayed as a work of art), as a painting, and as a sketch. It appeared once on a Dada magazine cover. Duchamp described it as a bachelor machine: "The chocolate of the rollers coming from one knows not where, would deposit itself after grinding as milk chocolate... The bachelor grinds his chocolate himself..." (From The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, ed. Sanouillet and Peterson, p. 68)

Marcel Duchamp Exhibit

The Philadelphia art museum has one of the best Marcel Duchamp collections anywhere. Currently they have a special show about him (the link may be only temporary):

Marcel Duchamp: Étant donnés

Now Through November 29, 2009

Marcel Duchamp’s enigmatic assemblage Étant donnés: 1. La chute d’eau, 2. Le gaz d’éclairage (Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas) has been described by the artist Jasper Johns as “the strangest work of art in any museum.” Permanently installed at the Museum since 1969, this three-dimensional environmental tableau offers an unforgettable and untranslatable experience to those who peer through the two small holes in the solid wooden door.

Really interesting review of this exhibit in the L.A.Times: "Marcel Duchamp's Étant donnés: The revival of a masterpiece"

"Nude Descending a Staircase"

"The tiresome thing," once said Marcel Duchamp, "was that every time I met someone [in the US] they would say 'Oh! Are you the one who did that painting [Nude descending...]? ' The funniest thing is that for at least thirty or forty years the painting was known, but I wasn't. Nobody knew my name. In the continental American sense of the word, 'Duchamp' meant nothing. There was no connection between the painting and me." Pierre Cabanne, Dialogs with Marcel Duchamp, p. 45

This quote resonates! I heard of the painting "Nude Descending a Staircase" (right) long before I heard of Marcel Duchamp by name, because it was my mother's prime example of radical and strange modern art; I think she mentioned it often, with incredulity. To lots of people her generation, it was the epitome of what was bad in modern art -- not serious, not beautiful, not realistic, not comprehensible, not awesome, not Art.

Was I intrigued? Maybe. During the time I was growing up and hearing about "Nude...", I am sure that I never saw a reproduction of it -- when I finally found out what it looked like, I think I was disappointed, since it's a relatively typical cubist work, and I had seen Cezannes, Picassos, etc. before it. And I had seen nudes. I had always thought my mother was uncomfortable with some level of nudity in the painting, but it isn't really very nude at all. She had some other problem with it.

Working through this personal history with Marcel Duchamp, I begin to wonder if my mother herself knew what the picture looked like -- after all, she was familiar with Picassos and Cezannes. I suspect that she visualized it as much nuder than it was. She always thought that her own acceptance and public permissiveness of nudity in great art was mysterious, as she wouldn't have accepted nudity in any other venue. I now know that "Nude Descending a Staircase" earned its reputation at the Armory Show in 1913, when my mother was three years old, but in her view it seemed more contemporary than that. She reflected the slow pace at which it became somehow mainstream.

A few years after I was thinking about my mother's generation and Marcel Duchamp's "Nude...", my sister happened to look in an old art book that belonged to our mother. In it, she found a 1964 clipping from the St.Louis Post Dispatch reporting an interview with Marcel Duchamp. He noted the connection between his work and pop art, predicted the demise of pop art, and propagated the myth that he had not done any art work for decades. What’s important is that it demonstrates my mother’s continuing interest in him.

Bachelor Machines: Duchamp or Da Vinci?

Marcel Duchamp, among many other playful artistic endeavors, invented machines that did nothing. He called them "Bachelor Machines." These machines were not functional or practical. When he wrote about them he connected them to the technology in the modern world. One such "machine" was "The Large Glass." It's hard to comprehend exactly what it "did."

Bachelor machines seem to me to be the opposite of readymades like the snow shovel or the bicycle wheel. A readymade originated as something with a purpose, but Marcel Duchamp would select it for some other inner quality that he would intuit or notice -- this was not a physical resemblance, but something more essential. Contrariwise, a bachelor machine looks like a machine but it has no purpose.

I realize that I have a paradigm in my own mind of a bachelor machine. It's what we made as children by setting a tricycle on its seat, and turning the pedals by hand, pretending it was a machine, grinding out some invisible product or substance. My friend Marcel Duchamp would surely have played this game with us.

Leonardo da Vinci also invented machines. They relate to technology in both his world and in ours -- people interpret his never-built, and in some cases technologically fanciful, machines as visionary -- he wanted to invent flying machines centuries before even the first hot-air balloon flight, for example. I have a deep feeling that these too were bachelor machines. In the last 20 or 30 years, I've seen are heard about a number of efforts to manufacture working models: but in fact, they can only sometimes work, and often require modern high-tech materials. His flying machines were mostly unworkable, and totally impractical if made of wood or the heavy metal available in his time. His pulleys may have worked sometimes, especially if they were sketches of working equipment that he observed -- but sometimes he seems to have ignored the weight of the rope that would be needed for a very tall working pulley. Leonardo seems to have been ok at inventing weapons, but I'm not even sure about that.

A Dada moment: Leonardo's famous plan for a bicycle was way ahead of its time but had a rigid frame which thus prevented any means of steering. Many models of it have been displayed in exhibits about his technology sketches. SURPRISE: it turns out the bicycle sketch, "discovered" in 1974, was a 20th century fake. Delicious!

I wonder if people are over-interpreting Leonardo's engineering commitment and expertise. Marcel Duchamp helps me to this thought.

"Duchamp was one of the most Leonardesque of artists," says A. Richard Turner in his book Inventing Leonardo. "Both men held mathematics to be fundamentally important, and both supplemented their art by purely intellectual investigations. Both were vitally interested in process as opposed to product, and took care to record their intellectual processes in annotated form . . .. Finally both were secretive and enigmatic by temperament." (p. 146-7)

Use a Rembrandt as an Ironing Board

Long ago I bought a postcard at the Centre Pompidou Museum of Modern Art in Paris. I bought it because of an image of Mona Lisa on it. The title was "Utiliser un Rembrandt comme planche a repasser, Marcel Duchamp" by Daniel Spoerri. I wondered why it was Mona Lisa, not a Rembrandt, on the ironing board (planche a repasser) in the image.

This made me uneasy. I felt that no artist could be ignorant about who painted the Mona Lisa. Then I discovered that I was the ignorant one -- but ignorant of something much more obscure than who painted the Mona Lisa. You see, Marcel Duchamp made notes about various Dada art topics. Once he talked about using a Rembrandt for an ironing board. That obviously inspired the artist, who referred to Duchamp indirectly by the image of Mona Lisa. I applaud this Dada indirection!

Everything was interesting to Marcel Duchamp, as reflected in his readymades, so who knew what he might be thinking about an ironing board. One of my favorites among the less-well-known is his version (maybe versions) of the Parisian sign "Eau et Gaz a tous les Etages," or just "Gaz..." as shown in the photo from a Paris street.

The sign on a Paris building means that there is water and gas service on every floor. When in Paris, I found these placards mysterious, and was told they were there to inform the fire department. They date from the era when not all buildings had water and gas on every floor. Marcel Duchamp suggests that they are absurdities, like so many texts you see on the street.


Once I dreamed that Marcel Duchamp and I were walking along and he said "I am the eau et gaz." At the moment of waking up I had a clear insight: Marcel Duchamp was water! and air! Elemental.

Me, Marcel Duchamp, and L.H.O.O.Q.

Some years ago I wrote a piece called "My Friend Marcel Duchamp." I began by describing why I feel he is my friend. Mainly, he made "L.H.O.O.Q." -- that is, Mona Lisa with a mustache and goatee. I like Mona Lisa parodies and other playful uses of Art with a capital A. Appreciating and collecting Mona Lisa parodies as I do, L.H.O.O.Q. is a touchstone for my collecting activity. In fact, it may be my first collected item. Whoever makes Mona Lisa parodies is my friend.

In my first dream about Marcel Duchamp all those years ago, I had an insight into this. I was walking with Marcel Duchamp, and discussing an image of Mona Lisa with a mustache. As it happened, the work in question included a color photographic reproduction, not the usual etching that one gets on postcards of the real L.H.O.O.Q. This Mona Lisa reproduction appeared to the right of a larger scene, which I do not remember, and which I had not seen outside my dream. As we walked, Marcel Duchamp explained that he had wanted Mona Lisa to be in this work as a joke, but was afraid that Americans wouldn't recognize it, so he put the mustache on to make sure it would be funny to everyone. I answered yes, it was funny.

Do you get the pun in L.H.O.O.Q? I didn't get it until I read an explanation in a book somewhere. It's a joke on the order of CDB being read childishly as See The Bee, with a picture of a Bee. You pronounce the letters in French and make them into French words: Elle (L) A Chaud (HO) Au (O) Queue (Q), which means "She has a hot piece of tail!" The French have many jokes like this, and the Dadas loved them.

The genre of L.H.O.O.Q. — as invented by Marcel Duchamp — is "Rectified Readymade." A post card, readymade, is rectified by the addition of the beard and mustache. Or in another version published in one of the early Dada chronicles or manifestos, only a mustache. And later, L.H.O.O.Q. Rasee: the "shaved" version, which you could mistake for a simple post card from the Louvre or any tourist shop if you weren't in the know.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, much later in their careers, Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, the inventors of Dada, later re-made their earlier disposable artworks and readymades, such as L.H.O.O.Q., "In advance of the broken arm," "Why not sneeze," and the famous urinal titled "Fountain by R.Mutt." All is in service of the Dada view of the concept of a masterpiece and of Mona Lisa worship.

Warhol and Duchamp

Quote about the way that Andy Warhol sometimes (or often) had no hands-on interaction with the works of art that he signed and sold:

In this conceptual approach to making art, Warhol inherited the legacy of Marcel Duchamp, an artist he knew, admired, painted, and filmed. Like Duchamp's ready-mades, the ultimate importance of a work by Warhol is not who physically made each object, but the ideas it generates. As the son of immigrants, Warhol in his early works returned again and again to the theme of America itself. What else are the paintings of cheap advertisements for nose jobs and dance lessons concerned with if not the American dream and the price of conformity it exacts? As soon as he'd examined the American obsession with celebrity and glamour in the portraits of Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe, he was quick to show its race riots and electric chair. Unlike Duchamp's, his was a highly public art, one that criss-crossed between high art, popular culture, commerce, and daily life.

From The New York Review of Books, "What Is an Andy Warhol?" by Richard Dorment. To restate this discussion: Warhol asked not "What is art?" but "What is the difference between two things, exactly alike, one of which is art and one of which is not?" Unlike the Dada nature of similar questions in the work of Duchamp, the Warhol question is a legal question because of a lawsuit about exactly which Warhols are authentic Warhols. And the financial self-interest of the foundation that gets to say which is which and trash the losers.

Well, I guess it is Dada. Art. Money. Fun.

Marcel Duchamp by Irving Penn

Indirectly, Marcel Duchamp was also in the news this week in the obituaries of the photographer Irving Penn. Duchamp cultivated a very Dada look, which Penn famously captured.

Marcel Duchamp

I wish I could remember a dream I had a couple of nights ago about "In advance of the broken arm." That's the title of one of Marcel Duchamp's readymades. If you were literal minded, you'd say, it was not a work of art, it's a snow shovel hanging in the museum. Different museums even hang different snow shovels and hang them different ways: from the ceiling, on the wall, high or low... As a museum guard in Philadelphia, home of many Duchamp works, once said to us: "that Marcel Duchamp was a piece of work." I love Dada, brainchild of Marcel Duchamp.

On Tuesday in Bloomington, I found a small collection of Duchamp's remade readymades, which no doubt made me dream of "In advance of the broken arm." The museum also has other works such as "Why Not Sneeze -- Rrose Selavy" (shown above). This work consists of a number of sugar cubes made of marble, along with a few other things inside of a cage. The reason Marcel Duchamp so named the work may be because of the marble sugar cubes. You see, he couldn't use real sugar cubes, because art has to last. So he made them out of marble. Which is cold. And gives you a cold. So why not sneeze? There are lots of other "authoritative" versions of why and what this work is about also, which goes along with his method of creating an identity for himself and his work. Why not sneeze -- a joke no one can get -- captures the spirit of Dada. When asked about it in one case, his reason was "pour compliquer les choses."

Duchamp's early readymades dated from just before the first World War, but he remade them in the 1960s -- with the result that you can see them in many museums. In fact the most famous readymade, "Fountain by R. Mutt," was lost or destroyed after it was first submitted to a supposedly un-judged art show. If you were literal minded, you'd say it was a urinal lying on its side with "R. Mutt" written on it. Don't be literal. When challenged that a urinal displayed on its side was not a work of Art, but was only plumbing, Marcel Duchamp defended R. Mutt, noting that plumbing and bridges were the greatest art created in America. Later, he said none of his works were ever accepted at first.

At one time I did a lot of reading about Marcel Duchamp. In the next few posts, I'm going to rework some of what I wrote down at that time.

Cello

Last night we heard cellist Alisa Weilerstein and pianist Inon Barnatan play four sonatas by Beethoven, Britten, Stravinsky, and Rachmaninoff. I enjoyed the performance. We had great seats, especially because three seats in the row ahead of us were unused. The photo is blurry but gives an idea of how well we could see.

The program notes had a new twist: for each piece there was a "Snapshot of History" -- a very brief mention of events that took place in the year of the sonata. Just enough history to be intriuging: "Death of Catherine the Great, Czar of Russia," "The Berlin wall is built," "Cary Grant makes his debut as a movie actor," "US President William McKinley is shot."

African Arts in Bloomington IN

Makonde Mask

Baule Mask

Kube Embroidered Cloth

Senufo Mask

Marcel Duchamp in Bloomington, IN

International Neighbors Hiking Group

Back to the Botanical Garden on a beautiful day today. I was in this group in the past, and I think I'll stay with it again for a while. I just hope there's some good weather in store: last night was the first frost, and the arbor covered with bottle gourds and other gourds was all wilted leaves today.

Update on the mystery plant

The plant in the photo last week (Bird Hills Park: A Walk With Prue) turns out to be Jack-in-the-Pulpit in its fall incarnation. Thank you, Carol and Elaine.

Weekend Walks

Sunday: Hudson Mills Park

This weekend we went to some of our favorite walking spots. This morning, we walked around Hudson Mills park using various new devices. At right you can see our track as created by Len's iPhone. The google map of the park has every feature: the turnaround at the end of the parking lot, the bridge. I'm not sure if you can see the various channels of the Huron River that parallel the walking trail.

Besides the iPhone, we were trying out my new camera, which just replaced one that wore out from so much use I guess. It's also very small so I can carry it around and take pictures of what I eat or whatever interests me.

The fall colors will be brighter in a couple of weeks -- in town some of the maples are already red, but here they are still quite deep green with a few early changers. Anyway I've taken photos of the same trees several years in a row, so this time I did something else.

We started out at a place where the path goes over a series of bridges between islands in the river. Someone had built a wood structure in an open area near the woods. Further on, in one of the low-lying marshy areas, a whole cluster of trees had fallen down, crossing the shallow water and upending a large emmeshed root structure about 20 feet high.

Wood Structure

Fallen trees across the water

Upended tree roots

Saturday: Matthaei Botanical Gardens

The botanical gardens are another good place to walk -- and we've tested most new cameras here for years and years. We started inside the greenhouse, and continued outdoors, through the woods beside the creek. Like the river, it's rather full for this time of year as it's been raining often.

A cycad in the greenhouse

From inside a sculpture that has recently been constructed in the garden

I'm convinced that if you took refuge inside this sculpture, you would be safe from alien abduction. Better than a tin-foil hat, I think. Though from a distance I thought it was a reuse for old kettledrums.

Bird Hills Park: A Walk With Prue

Prue looking at the soft ground beside a downed tree

Prue knew the name of every plant except this one

The Climbing Tree -- world famous
(All right, it's famous to all who walk in Bird Hills Park)

Quotes from "War and Peace"

"Moscow meanwhile was empty. ... It was as deserted as a dying, queenless hive is deserted.
"In a queenless hive there is no life left. Yet at a superficial glance it seems as much alive as other hives.
"In the hot rays of the Midday sun the bees soar as gaily around the queenless hive as around other living hives; from a distance it smells of honey like the rest, and bees fly into and out of it just the same. Yet one has but to watch it a little to see that there is no life in the hive....
"So was Moscow deserted, as Napoleon, weary, uneasy and frowning paced up and down at the Kamerkolenzhsky wall..." (p. 815-817: a three page extended simile describing every aspect of the dying hive)

"A bee settling on a flower has stung a child. And the child dreads bees, and says the object of the bee is to sting people. A poet admires the bee, sipping honey from the cup of the flower, and says the object of the bee is to sip the nectar of the flower. A beekeeper, noticing that the bee gathers pollen and brings it to the hive, says that the objet of the bee is to gather honey. Another beekeeper ... says that the object of the bee is the perpetuation of its race. The botanist observes that the bee flying with the pollen fertilises the pistil, and in this he sees the object of the bee. Another, watching the hybridisation of plants, sees that the bee contributes to that end also, and he may say that the bee's object is that. But the final aim of the bee is not exhausted by one or another, or a third aim, which the human intellect is capable of discovering. The higher the human intellect rises in the discovery of such aims, the more obvious it becomes that the final aim is beyond its reach.
"All that is within the reach of man is the observation of the analogy of the life of the bee with other manifestations of life. And the same is true with the final amis of historical persons and of nations." (p. 1060-1061)

"Just as it is difficult to explain why the ants hurry back to a scattered ant-hill, some dragging away from it bits of refuse, eggs, and corpses, while others run back again, and what is their object in crowding together, overtaking one another, fighting with each other, so it would be hard to give the reasons that induced the Russians, after the departure of the French, to flock back to the place which had been known as Moscow." (p. 1034)

"To a flock of sheep the sheep who is every evening driven by the shepherd into a special pen to feed, and becomes twice as fat as the rest, must seem to be a genius. And the circumstance that every evening that sheep does not come into the common fold, but into a special pen full of oats, and that that same sheep grows fat and is killed for mutton, must present itself to the minds of the other sheep as a singular conjunction of genius with a whole series of exceptional chances." (p. 1055)

"The Frenchman is conceited from supposing himself mentally and physically to be inordinately fascinating both to men and to women. An Englishman is conceited on the ground of being a citizen of the best-constituted state in the world, and also because he as an Englishman always knows what is the correct thing to do, and knows that everything that he, as an Englishman, does do is indisputably the correct thing. An Italian is conceited from being excitable and easily forgetting himself and other people. A Russian is conceited precisely because he knows nothing and cares to know nothing, since he does not believe it possible to know anything fully. A conceited German is the worst of them all... for he imagines that he possesses the truth in a science of his own invention, which is to him absolute truth." (p. 596-597)

Saturday Morning on the Campus

A butterfly garden (full of bees today -- too chilly for butterflies) is now adjacent to the Exhibit Museum. I didn't know the museum guardians were basketball players, but it looks as if they are.

Entrances

On my walks in California, I saw many beautiful and imaginative gates and entrances. Here in the midwest, front yards and gardens tend to be more open and public, with private spaces in the back yards. In my neighborhood, there are only a few elaborate gates, like the one above.

People with gates frequently leave them more or less permanently open.

Some homes have stairways and other decorative elements to welcome visitors -- the most lavish of these in our neighborhood is above. It belongs to a house called "The Hermitage."

Most of the walks, gates, and entrances are pretty standard. The oldest style has a straight cement walk from the sidewalk to the door. Some people have replaced the cement with brick. You also see good old chain-link gates and fences. The KEEP OUT sign is the exception, not the rule!