Posted by Bill Wilson on October 29, 19102 at 07:29:50:
I posted a quotation from Le Lionnais, François in conversation with Ralph Rumney, in:
Woods, Allan, The Map is the Not the Territory, Manchester UP, 2000.
199 "What Halberstad and Duchamp perfected was the theory of the relationship between squares which have no apparent connection, Les Cases Conjugées, which was a sort of theory of the structure of the board. That is to say, because the pawns are in a certain relationship one can perceive invisible connections among empty squares on the board which are apparently unrelated.”
Here’s a poem from the Japanese:
The mole having been removed.
Her face got larger.
(R. H. Blyth Edo Satirical Verse p.119 Hokuseido Press)
The theme is adjustments of vision as attention shifts among planes, and as attention constructs planes. I am uncertain about the specific phenomenon mentioned above, the changes in the perception of an order different from the pattern of squares on the chess board, so I broaden the point with a poem about how attention changes from being fixed on one small spot, a mole, to attention spread over a broad, changing the quality of looking at her face. What we see is not what we get: what we get is an interpretation and a judgment about what is worth attending to, and just how to look at it, processes affected by other interpretations and judgments. Our attention constructs focal planes as we focus our attention on something, say a mole on a face, or squares which become a temporary unit because a pawn might be moved onto one of them. Such attention constructs a visual plane in which the squares relevant to the action become focal, a foreground of attention, while the other squares recede into a background. Nothing has moved, but the mind has constructed a focal plane and a subsidiary plane, and can itself move between them (following Michael Polanyi). Part of the meaning in an experience of the visual arts emerges from eye-efficacies---the uses of the eyes as active components of the mind. When the mind focuses a task, say moving a peon on a chess-board, the eye-mind sees less the material surfaces of objects than a focal plane, that is, an aesthetic illusion hovering just this side of the material surface. Did the word “peon,” as the French word for “pawn,” delay comprehension? Did it also shift attention to dramatic possibilities on the board when a “peon,” a flat-footed soldier, approaches La Dame? Attention needs to be paid to attention in order to comprehend art, as in this attention to Duchamp’s attention. As the play has it, “Attention must be paid to such a man.” I wish that interviewers had asked about or had noted his attention, and its effects on their perception of what he attended to; and wish that witnesses like friends, especially other artists, had noted the quality of experience with Duchamp---what, how, when and for how long he focused his attention, and that of other people, onto a plane. As I have reported, when I went to photograph him, after introductions he ignored me for an hour at least, not even glancing toward me for a moment, but then he opened the event to his being photographed, and called my attention toward photogenic objects like the Max Ernst chess-set that was on the mantle. An experience of a focal plane is not an experience of materials as such. For a period of time Duchamp kept a faucet deployed on their mantelpiece, surely a claim on the attention, since a faucet above a fireplace can be a momentary poem in the style of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissecting table. Given Duchamp’s interests in plumbing, in running water as well as in eroticisms, a faucet above a fireplace suggests concepts that so readjust vision that the faucet is seen differently (especially since a faucet resting on a mantle joins Duchamp’s faucet that is lazy hardware: “Among our articles of lazy hardware, Rrose Sélavy and I recommend the faucet which stops dripping when nobody is listening to it.” A spectator needs to decide just what the “thing” is that is being attended to, so that it can be recognized and named as an object. With works by Duchamp, one decision is likely to be followed by another decision, of course a delay for thought. Here are mentions of a work explicitly about visual attention:
Notes, TOUT-FAIT: The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal
Click to enlarge. Marcel Duchamp, To Be Looked at (from the Other Side of the Glass)
with One Eye, Close to, for Almost an Hour, 1918 © 2000 Succession Marcel ...
www.toutfait.com/issues/issue_2/Notes/shambroom.html -
Marcel Duchamp World Community
... Marcel Duchamp, 9 Malic Molds, 1914-15 © 2000 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, NY/ADAGP ... du verre) d'un oeil, de près, pendant presque une heure...
www.marcelduchamp.net/exhibition/exhibition.htm
A photograph of Duchamp that is both frontal and profile must be looked at twice, once at the front-face, once at the profile, like the visual illusions beloved of sophomore psychology where, in order to see the complex image, one looks once to see the young woman, and looks again to see the hag. Or the reverse. A delay can be felt as one shifts focal planes---as from the primal plane of the relevant squares of the chess-board, to the subsidiary plane of the squares in the background, dim because not bearing upon the next possible move. Such delays combine with Duchamp’s awareness of delays, of intervals of time, of intermissions, and his uses of long durations. The need to look twice at something, in order to experience the two views that complete its identity, has implications for the philosophy of the artist. A work of visual art that requires a second glance differs radically from a work of art that might be experienced in a moment that seems out of time. Duchamp’s delays and double-takes are parts of his non-idealist and/or anti-idealist position. Delays and slow perceptions separate him radically from the idealist aestheticism of T. S. Eliot and F. H. Bradley, and their derivatives, critics who battle on behalf of pure aesthetic moments that seem to participate in eternity. On looking again, after a delay, a wonder of art is that not only can the object still be there, but it can have become more than it was on first being seen (many implications for philosophy follow from this experience, so that Duchamp can be allied with specific verbal philosophers and dissociated from others). When, a moment later in a double-take, the object is seen differently, the aesthetic event is contrary to the idealist’s aesthetic moment. An idealist aesthetic illumination feels as though it is out of time, exempted from movement and change, a still point in a turning wheel. Such moments of idealist timelessness---epiphanies that participate in an eternal and infinite transcendental continuum---are sought as revenge against Becoming to punish it because it is not transcendental Being. Some art takes revenge against the temporal and finite to punish it for not being eternal and infinite. Frederic Nietzsche diagnosed the revenge of idealism against the world because it disappoints immortal longings. Later Martin Heidegger interpreted the “overman” as a person who does not take an idealist’s revenge on the continuum of immanences in which we find ourselves, but accepts change, mutability, even unto perishing. The artist who accepts mutability does not plaintively yearn for transport into the infinite or the eternal. Historically, one strand of Modernism consists of the artists who have taught themselves to repress their yearning for transcendences, who emancipate from the oppression of ideals that cannot be realized. To paint like Henri Matisse, a painter needs to hold beliefs the way Henri Matisse held them. To make art like any of the immanentists, a person has to believe like them, accepting that what is, is, and must be made to suffice. In this mood of acceptance of perishing, Duchamp did not work suffer the idealist nihilisms identified by Nietzsche, that is, the annihilation of experience by the idea and image of an ideal transcendental continuum as the only true reality. Faith in transcendental powers, unless held very carefully, can annihilate this world as a continuum of immanent forces, as in denials that biological life is life, followed by assertions that onlyh life in a transcendental continuum, in God, is life. Duchamp’s primal choice of time over eternity combines with the double-take that occurs in experiencing the ready-mades: now you see them as they are, now you don’t see them as they were earlier, and then you see them becoming more while you look thoughtfully at them. The effect is that you don’t continue to see them as you first saw them. I recall where I was standing in New Haven, still in the hall, when first I saw a snow-shovel hanging on a wall in a museum, academic ’53-‘54. I experienced an adjustment of my vision, that is, of my mental vision, my mind’s eye, for I saw the snow-shovel, but the white wall of the Yale University Museum of Art forced me to see the shovel in museum-light, not New Haven daylight. I had to delay my identification of what I was walking toward to read the label. I already was familiar with a verbal poem about a garden spade, so was this a visual poem? Speechless at the time, I can now say that I experienced the slow advent of the concept “art” into the rapid perceptions. I had to take time to fit the percepts of the snow-shovel into the concepts of “art,” with further worries about “beauty,” which I was entitled to expect from the concept “museum,” which also came under questioning. The snow-shovel gave percepts to the concept of art, and the concept of art gave itself to the snow-shovel, each altering the sense of the other, the two together widening and deepening experience. At first glance the snow-shovel was opaque, but it became as though transparent or weightless when the idea of art was brought to bear upon it. The shovel is a suggestive image, so that I must add that I was not in the midst of a snow-job, nor was I mucking a stable. Trying again for words, the sensory perceptual experience of the snow-shovel got inserted itself into the concept of art, filling it with a specific object that, in reciprocity, was itself filled with meaning. I had seen works in that category, but hadn’t undergone that experience of adjusting the implications of snow-shovel and of “art” so that they became mutual and reciprocal implications. As my visual perceptions accommodated to a concept, the concept itself was altered by accommodating the revised perceptions. That process also is non-idealist, for the concept “art” is as it becomes in use. The concept is not answerable to an immutable ideal that somehow dwells in a continuum of timeless forms---pure forms that existence can but aspire to imitate or to participate in, however imperfectly. Of course along came the questions such as, How can this become a work of art merely by being given a title? Note that the title did not designate the snow-shovel as an ordinary useful tool, a snow-shovel. The title built a delay between the perception and the concept, as the eye-mind needed a moment to understand that the snow-shovel itself has been delayed, its usefulness not destroyed, merely indefinitely postponed. The “toolness” became subsidiary to the “art-ness,” since the tool was taken out of use while its potential for use was preserved. That snow-shovel is an object who use has been delayed, for it is seen before its use, as it is in advance of the accident that can break an arm. Yet now that accident has been delayed in perpetuity, unless a janitor who borrows the tool to shovel snow falls on the stairs. (And on clearing away the snow, if one delays shoveling the snow, eventually it will perish.)
Examples of different focal planes, switching between practical and aesthetic uses, include details like these: a museum displayed an installation that included a bedroom in disarray, with an unmade bed. The woman who cleaned the place after the opening party made the bed. A professor at Wesleyan University thought that rugs in a display were for sale, but they had been designated parts of a work of installation art. Such a conflict between categories is not merely A Comedy of Errors. When Duchamp’s work, “Door, 11, Rue Larrey”--- the door that is open when closed and closed when open --- was exhibited in a museum, a painter who repainted the walls repainted the door. He did not see the door, retired from active duty, as a work of art. The reclassification of that specific door has perhaps happened twice; maybe someone can provide details of an event that illustrates the difference between adjustments of vision when a door is seen as a practical door by a painter, and when it is an object of aesthetic contemplation and judgment. Across the years I have caught myself admiring fire-extinguisher cases in museums until-—click!-—realizing that the useful installation was not a designated work of art. A worker in a gallery gave away a long green ladder for use elsewhere, but it was retrieved because it was a ladder by Ray Johnson, carrying his identity as a “letterman” into “ladderman.” May Wilson upon dying left some objects that might be sensitive works of art, but without their concepts, sit inert and entropic. In my house Christo once sat on a work by Alison Knowles. While I was amused that he hadn’t seen what he was sitting on, I had to ask him to wrap himself into a chair, lest the art perish. If the work had been wrapped for shipping, he may not have sat on it, since he does recognize a work of art when he sees one. Now the snow-shovel, as a tool, has its own themes of attention, for in using the snow-shovel, attention goes through a person’s arms, through the relatively transparent snow-shovel, toward its physical end as it serves its purpose. The snow-shovel in use becomes subsidiary to focus through it toward the snow, much as J.-P. Sartre described attention passing through the pen onto the paper (Being and Nothingness); and as Michael Polanyi, teacher of commitments to attention, has described piano playing and oh so much else (“Personal Knowledge”). The difference is between a tool in use, where attention passes through the tool toward its purpose, rendering the tool subsidiary to focal attention flowing beyond the tool, and attention like that of a tool-maker or a hardware salesperson. When displayed within a work of art, a tool does not subside into background attention, but becomes a focus of attention, albeit aesthetic, not practical. The themes of looking at the otherwise overlooked go back at least to 1800, and have been well chronicled.
Duchamp’s delays, as percepts and concepts realign themselves, insert an interval of time in a visual aesthetic experience, ending the 18th-century simplistic bifurcation in which music was an art of time and painting an art of space. During the delay, a spectator continues in an experience that is fully within a continuum of immanences, among natural forces within a gravitational field, with no truancy into a supernatural world. Duchamp was a master of the delay, but the delay in experience was not a neurotic symptom, it enacted a philosophy. His carefully orchestrated delays were his aesthetic elaboration of his governing meanings and values. Delays in glass, under-painting that is not over-painted, and other temporal interludes, committed a person to staying attentively within the immanences of the natural world. In the background await many parallels, like Joseph Conrad, “…the unwearied, self-forgetful attention to every phase of the living universe reflected in our consciousness may be our appointed task on this earth.” Duchamp did not encourage anyone to the forge epiphanies in which the eternal breaks into the temporal or the temporal participates in the eternal. The delay provided, and provides, time to experience changes in the processes we dwell in the midst of. That is, the delay occur among the immanent forces of the Cosmos, and keeps a person immersed in the immanences. Duchamp could have said, as his primal temporal choice, “I can wait,” and then the meanings of waiting, of attending to the passage of time and saying, “Let be!,” could be unpacked from the concept “waiting.” Now if as I say Duchamp turned away from transcendental events, he could have faced the dangers of extreme immanence. In order to live authentically, Jean Genet, if Sartre got him right, used violence against bourgeois conventions and Divine Law, even betraying friends, because such acts were demonstrations proving that his actions were his obedience of his truest self. In pure autonomy, and such purity requires violent exclusions and annihilations, he set laws to himself that contradicted the laws of a community trying to preserve itself in the eyes of God. Yet Genet was old-fashioned, for although he rejected that essences precede existence, he allowed that existence produces or concentrates itself in essences. He let existence precede essences, and so tried to suck essences out of existences. Perhaps “essences” also should have been renounced as falsifications of attention. As we have been advised after Nietzsche, a person is, yes, thrown into the world, but can respond as though thrown open into existence, while renouncing vengeance on time for not being eternity, on the finite for not being infinity, and on the immanent for not being transcendental. I see Duchamp as one of the heroes of immanences. He was, yes, slow and dilatory, which might be diagnosed as a symptom of something or other. But his delays, which mean that a spectator needs time to think about time, are a philosophic stance, a style of taking existence that, as a style, is an elaboration of a philosophy. When he said, in effect, “Consummatum est” to the breaking of “The Large Glass,” he bodied forth his acceptance of process, and of perishing, never criticizing the actual on behalf of an otherworldly perfection that depletes this actual world. Every addition to the world from transcendence subtracts intensity from the actual world. Marcel Duchamp worked to undo some of that damage. So while the perfect reconstructions of The Large Glass are educational, they blur the point. The energy spent on reconstructions is the converse of the energy Duchamp saved when he accepted his predicament as his opportunity. He arose in the midst of a field of limited energies, and constructed himself within the truth of his existence as he saw it, amid uncertainties, indeterminisms and undecidabilities. An incompleteness could have, but seems not to have, caused him anxiety. I get the feeling that his reproductions of his own art were not so much something new, as something he hadn’t gotten around to doing until he got around to doing them. Making copies went slowly, which for him was right on schedule. As I will be saying about Eva Hesse in London on November 14, 2002 (please send back-up to Tate Modern), and so say about Duchamp here-&-now, the purity of Hesse and of Duchamp is the purity of the acceptance of mutability and of perishing without nostalgia for the timeless ideal. Their legacies give us opportunities to participate in their meanings, for those two philosophic artists did not damage existence for the sake of the eternal or the infinite. They abided by their contract with existence in this self-constructing, self-organizing, autonomous universe, which is not incomplete, but is incompletable. Because all that is will perish, some artists insult and assault the Cosmos with art that aspires to the eternal and the infinite, saying No to perishing, yet with their art conveying false illusions about the limits of existence. That art tends to yield less and less, later, although other aesthetic illusions, true illusions, seemingly so vulnerable, both endure and seem to yield more, later---as is evident in this bulletin-board about Duchamp. Whether or not alone, I use the visual arts as investigations of truth, as methods and materials being used to construct trustworthy visual experiences that respect the actual conditions within which we dwell for a time. In both style and in content, Constructivist thought accepts the conditions of existence as a continuum of immanences from which there is no escape into a transcendental continuum. If there is ever to be written a history of art illuminating the last two centuries, then in order to be adequate to the art that rejoices in the immanences, it should become a history of Constructivism. Only ideas and images of constructivism can do justice to art that, although witnessing the perishing of that which we would rather have preserved, goes along with William Butler Yeats:
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress…
I will soon insert a footnote on constructivisms in mathematics, law and the arts, looking toward constructivist histories of art, suggesting that we construct historical backgrounds to our foregrounds by giving attention to the constructivisms of Marcel Duchamp.
Now in a few words: the purpose served by Duchamp’s delays is to frustrate transcendence of the immanent world. During delays, events are mutable. Hence Duchamp invites people to his demonstrations that even an ideal of art is mutable. He knew that “art” could be changed, since he paid attention to himself changing it.