Posted by Bill Wilson on November 08, 19102 at 11:36:24:
In Reply to: Re: Duchamp's attention posted by Glenn Harvey on November 03, 19102 at 08:02:50:
Glenn writes: This is very rich territory. Just who - or what - is paying attention here? I think Duchamp spent a lot of time playing with the received idea of the transcendent cogito. You touch on Sartres' 'Being and Nothingness'...but the section in this book on the voyeur - looking through the keyhole - and becoming aware of becoming subjectised(?) by the presence of the other you do not mention, Bill. Is this not also a key to understanding an aspect of'Etant Donnes', for example? In other words, we always, but falteringly, 'attend' to our own attention. (See you on the 14th November at Tate Modern).
respondeo: I can’t do justice to your response until I return from London. Perhaps you will expand on your statement: “I think Duchamp spent a lot of time playing with the received idea of the transcendent cogito.” Does he take up the pre-conditions of experience? I don’t see it. My guess is that Duchamp’s “cogito” was constructivist, an ever-emerging novelty that became as it acted in events. Because he didn’t play many explicit philosophic cards, implications have to be drawn from objects and actions, from letters written to friends, and titles given to works of art, with the hope that the implications can be woven into an image of his life-world. As I understand Duchamp’s sense of self, he was as he became by giving himself to events, as in his generosity in giving his “attendance” to Elaine Sturtevant’s recreation of Relâche. I hope that you will answer your question about the Sartrean self when it is caught looking through the keyhole. I am not aware of a place where Duchamp has someone paying attention to another person paying attention, or catches someone in an act, or makes people into rivals for the swathe of space between them. After all, Duchamp and Roché did not assume the position of rivals, and Duchamp seems characteristically to have delayed seduction of Beatrice Wood: After you, Alfonse! Roché and Wood seem to have co-operated with Duchamp’s delay in romance.
The way that two people playing chess attend to the minds of each other doesn’t feel Sartrean to me—not unless a player escaping a trap were to fall into a trap of her own making. The point I want to mark for future conversation is the gift, as in the title: étant donnés. That title is yet another gift that keeps on giving. Contrarily, Sartre’s conception of a gift is rather mean-spirited: the purpose of giving a gift is to enslave the recipient. My understanding of gifts would be bad faith for Sartre, since for him the gift smuggles purposes that are not disinterested, while I experience gifts as emancipations from oppressions that may not be felt as oppressions until the emancipation occurs.
If the world we arise in the midst of is a gift to us, then our gifts can have analogies on a spiritual plane. The Radical Theologians are proposing an understanding of the Cosmos as a gift from a transcendental God, with imperatives that we must respond to our world as a gift should be responded to (in Old English thought the world is a loan, and as something lent, it is to be returned with thanks: we are born owing a debt that we must pay).
I don’t see Duchamp worrying over transcendent powers or ideal objects. He seemed comfortable dwelling within the immanences, apparently unresponsive to transcendentals, whether God, infinity or eternity, or the Good, the Beautiful, and the True.
The point of Duchamp’s gifts is that a gift brings with it not only itself as an object, but its meaning as a gift. That meaning is not self-evident, but it can be experienced when the gift has perished, while the idea of the gift keeps on giving pleasure. Duchamp’s gifts require precise specification because of their relations with money in the market for art. Within the realm of the arts, a gift grows in significance in relation to a system that is managed for profit, like a gallery of art (many are subsidized, but the motives for subsidizing can also be economic, as a wealthy collector backing a gallery can buy and sell through that gallery). If we are alone and afraid, in a world we never made, then that world can be thought of as a gift, yet without a transcendental Giver. The themes are woven into Martin Heidegger’s obscure thoughts about existence as given, as when he chooses to say, in German, “es gibt,” where in English one might say, “there is,” or “it is.”
Evidence about gifts in the life-world of Marcel Duchamp needs to be brought together to see how the details bear upon each other: his gift of his semen as a work of art should be interpreted for the material quality of semen, its viscosity before it dries in the air. Duchamp uses his semen to produce an image he sees as a landscape, showing that he does not keep semen within a biological system that can close itself in biological reproduction (masturbation has been classified as adultery, and as with Onan, as a method of birth-control). While Duchamp eventually became acquainted with his daughter, he was never married to her mother, and neither he nor his daughter acknowledged the system of family that would have enclosed them as father and daughter. The relationship remained open; and apparently he did give her gifts.
Duchamp made gifts of his art that were evidence of his emancipations—he was not bound by money, that is, he did not bind his qualitative experiences in quantitative categories. His gifts were also emancipations of the recipient, at least for that event, since the act of giving frees both from the mercantile system of art (although after a delay some gifts were sold by recipients). If a system threatens to close down over everyone involved, it is, in Sartrean terms, a viscous system, thus giving a tactile sensory quality to an abstraction. Sartre’s experience of viscosity is sometimes a state like boredom, sometimes it is like dealing with a slimy bastard. A larger use of his image is to interpret as viscous any ideology that would become a totality, thereby closing over and perhaps suffocating a person, or gluing a person into false and falsifying relations with other people, as political-economic relations tend to do. Duchamp extracted himself from France, and never sank into the United States as into quick-sand.
Viscosity has implications for art because of the qualities of physical materials—qualities like degrees of viscosity---wetness, dryness, stickiness, slickness and elasticity. To construct a spiral stone jetty in a Great Salt Lake differs from constructing an island of broken glass in clear water. Some viscous materials like oil paint do dry, yet can preserve a suggestion of liquidity, while other liquid materials like glass are at a farther limit of viscosity, and in drying do not cling to a surface or look moist. Water has its own degree of viscosity, to be considered both when thinking with Duchamp’s image of his early paintings in oil as swimming lessons, and when drawing out the implications of Cezanne’s identification of a painting as a board for a swimmer, to hold him afloat (together with myriad other images in Cezanne’s thoughts about water). What are the implications of painting as swimming lessons? Does a person learning to swim later come out of the water? Or at least does the swimmer not sink under the water, so that the system of water does not close over the person? Duchamp may have stopped painting in oils because the viscosity of oil paints was not the quality of materials that he preferred (see Sartre on Rimbaud or other existential analyses like those of L. Binswanger). Any proof would require evidence of his preference for dryness, so I will look around for minute clues---evidence that of the wet and the dry, he preferred the dryer. His co-conscious mind could have felt the import of the name of one of his patrons, Katherine Drier (her sister was even dryer).
Glass, as in The Large Glass, is a liquid, but in our experience is as dry as Duchamp’s nonchalance and wit. Whether an artist drinks dry champagne, dry martinis or sweet vermouth is as illuminating a detail as whether he or she reads Immanuel Kant or Frederick Nietzsche. The sensory texture of the style of life chosen by an artist often combines more illuminatingly with the implications of the material in the art than abstract philosophic concepts do. Instead of starting with Kant or Sartre, I would describe Duchamp’s relations with material qualities in order to understand his idea of or his image of his self in relation to existence. How his surrounding world felt to him, how he arranged his surroundings in relation to his body, can suggest how his consciousness felt to him.
One more example of dryness, the air of Paris. Air is a liquid with a degree of viscosity. To enclose air in a glass ampule, itself a liquid, implies what? I don’t know (yet), but I sense that the work does not flatter Paris, that it encourages aesthetic autonomy from Paris, the city of impasses. That the ampule can be neither inflated nor deflated must be a meaning that will be revealed when that quality combines with other qualities in the aesthetic experiences of Duchamp.
A closed system is not only viscous, but it will run out of energy, hence Duchamp’s usefulness when he opened vents in events within the realms of art and money. He signed objects in order to reduce the market value of other objects he had signed. The history of these activities has been written by Francis Naumann in “Marcel Duchamp: the art of making art in the age of mechanical reproduction.” The book is a gift to Duchamp studies.
My hypothesis is that Duchamp used the idea and image of gift to hold open the system of art to values other than the values imposed by the market for art. The market has wanted unique signed works with an aura of spiritual unworldliness. But the market has also wanted fixed or standardized forms—vertical portraits and horizontal landscapes. While sculptors had issued a sculpture in a few different sizes, Duchamp reproduced some of his images and three-dimensional objects in editions of different sizes, in effect different forms, not suggesting one ideal form as a model. The loss of the originals might be an accident, but it served the purpose of preventing anyone from copying an original model as though that original was a pure platonic form participating in transcendental ideality. The loss of the models forced Duchamp’s “reproductions” out of reproductions into constructivism, objects made with no ideal criterion of their correct form. The bicycle-wheel in a “reconstruction” was necessarily an emergent novelty, emerging from a process of successive reproductions with varying resemblances to any original bicycle wheel, the evidence for which is a photograph open to interpretations. Many of the “copies” in Duchamp’s complete works are less copies than things that had never before existed—a miniature urinal can represent those other objects.
A philosophic position, an anti-idealism, is implicated because Duchamp followed no model in having copies made after a lost model—neither the model of an ideal form, of a preceding artist, or the model of an authentical original object like the first urinal he tried to exhibit. His reproductions are new productions, moments of constructivism. While I delay statements about constructivism, I quote Heidegger writing that construction “…first fashions what does not yet stand and exist as something at hand, something that perhaps never was at all." Duchamp had a friend who made doll-houses, but perhaps not a miniature urinal, “something that perhaps never was at all.” Heidegger has more to say about construction, which I specify as constructivism: “[construction] …does not appeal to and depend upon something given for support; it is not an assimilation but is what announced itself to us as the poetizing nature of positing a horizon within a perspective.” Please be patient.
Leaving out money and fame, what is the effect of the freedom of choice Duchamp allowed—now this bicycle wheel, now that other bicycle wheel? The great phenomenological biologist F. J. J. Buytendijk has defined life as “the freedom of form within form.” Whatever other motives Duchamp may have had, the effect of the many differing editions of his objects and boxes is to achieve a “freedom of form within form.”
Duchamp’s variations give a feeling of the processes of life—they enliven the visual by suffusing it with freedom, as in freedom to look at a urinal, an object either overlooked, or not to be looked at by women. He did not aim at a fixed immutable form. The theme of aim enters with the contrast between the urinal, which is to be aimed at, and the aimlessness of art.
Duchamp does not close down processes, he opens them, and then reopens them before they can become self-consistent systems. He thereby avoids the viscosity of an ideology that would close down in consistency and totality, incidentally destroying itself. If a system succeeds in closing over anything that might otherwise punch holes in it, its success will cause its failure for lack of novelties (A. N. Whitehead hovers in the background). Duchamp, among others, saved art from itself insofar as art can become an institution with an ideology. He prevented art from becoming self-enclosed, folded over onto itself. Institutionalized art is always in the process of becoming a product, an object. Duchamp would go around the institutionalized art and get out in front of it. Acts that prevent an active open field from becoming a closed object is what the avant-garde does. Duchamp understood and furthered the point of an avant garde, to get into a position in front where the available idea of art can’t wrap itself around the novel art and enclose it in its viscous drapery. Duchamp helped to get “art” into a position where it either closed upon itself, and therefore stultified, or stretched to open itself to try to get around the novelties. The failure of more conventional art to close out or to close around his work was his success in holding art open to constructions.
Critics attack Duchamp’s work, but they can’t get around it and close it down. The effect is that the essence of art cannot be stated, and that in fact art cannot be said to have an essence, because its existence can be changed. Duchamp ignores a Platonism in which the essence of art precedes any actual art. He sidesteps an existentialism in which the existence of art precedes an essence of art. My tentative notion is that he brackets out essences on behalf of a structure of events in which existence precedes existence, letting essences shift for themselves. If an essence of art did seem to be appearing, Duchamp got out in front of it with an object or action that reopened the subject of art. Thus for him, in his characteristic temporal mood, he perpetually delays the institutionalization of art. Let these abstract terms come down to opening a vent in an closed event. The Philadelphia Museum of Art as architecture was a closed system, the builders having realized the plans of the architect with finality. However, because of Duchamp, an actual window was constructed in the completed building. Now damned if Heidegger hasn’t got the spirit of construction: the construction of a window as a novel opening the wall of a museum “…is what announced itself to us as the poetizing nature of positing a horizon within a perspective.” That literal window suggests the metaphorical windows Duchamp opened in otherwise closed structures.
The door that is open when closed, and closed when open, conveys the unresolvable and undecidable state that Goedel has located in logic: a statement that is false if it is true, and true if it is false. “This statement is unprovable.” If that statement is proved, it is disproved. If it is disproved, it is proved. Jasper Johns’s statement, “I am a liar,” belongs with a group of statements that cannot be decided once and for all, because the decision sets in motion a contrary decision. It is intellectually an impossible object, like the set of all sets that are not members of themselves. If the set of all sets that are not members of themselves is not a member of itself, it is a member of itself. But if it is a member of itself, then it is a set that is not a member of itself. Thereby Bertrand Russell set a few brains spinning (self-reference: I illustrate Russell’s paradox in part 2 of my story, “love,” in Why I don’t write like Franz Kafka). Goedel leaves logico-mathematics as an open-ended construction, ever building a larger and stronger structure, and as it does so, building a foundation under itself. Goedel and Duchamp helped to construct their era. Each had the intellectual courage to be of his own time---a time which each had helped to make no place for intellectual or aesthetic cowards.
Sartre displayed no interest I am aware of in the institutions of art, whereas Duchamp’s work has implications for the meanings and values of galleries and museums as institutions, and for the theories of curators, critics and collectors as thoughtful people. Institutions and people are in danger of trying to close a system once they are satisfied with the structure they have achieved. Duchamp reopened systems that seemed to be closing down, often by using the functions of Cupid against cupidity. He outwitted the systems of money, fame and power by living much of his life frugally and modestly, and later emerged as an artist of heroic renunciations, a man who seemed to want to give more than he wanted to take. He stood as a conscience to artists, a man whom the systematizations of institutions and careerist art-workers had not suffocated. Not suffering from self-importance, he would go along with a joke. Sometimes seriousness seemed like a joke.
I think of Duchamp’s work as aimed against the art-lover and the damage that is done in the name of the love of art. The love of art was too often asexual. To my eye, Duchamp used erotics to reopen the art that the art-lover would lock down and seal with a kiss—the kiss of death. His gifts that consists of his semen, on Astralon backed with black satin—has dried the viscosity into an image. He titled the image, “faulty landscape,” “Paysage fautif” (the title has been translated “Sinful landscape,” restoring the rotted idealist religiosity Duchamp had worked his way out of). I am merely at the threshold of thoughts about Duchamp, the man whose name can suggest a field, that is, a landscape. Did he see himself in his landscape painted with his “male essence”---see himself as a “Paysage fautif”?
In short, in this long note, I am suggesting that we give attention to the value of the gift, at least if we are to appreciate “Etant Donnés.” What precisely is the given? Who is the giver? The themes can be investigated far from Duchamp in the work of Marilyn Strathern, The Gender of the Gift, to name only one work on a topic that seems to increase in urgency each year. A gift can have the function of frustrating the systematizations of commerce in art, history of art, and criticism of art. With a gift, what they say is true, it is the idea that counts. That is, the idea of the gift is that it is about feelings, about aesthetic values that are more than material costs, so that gifts are not reducible to calculations any more than works of art are. Even after the material gift may have withered, the idea of the gift continues to convey feelings. Because a “gift” functions as a refusal of calculated exchanges of equal quantities, the meaning and value of a gift are incalculable. Watch someone refuse a gift because it upsets a system of ratios, a rational system of equal exchanges like bartering objects, or buying a quality with a quantity of money. Of course in attending to a work of art one cannot see that it has been or that it is a gift, an object outside getting and spending, buying and selling. But we don’t attend to any work of art without having many concepts and much information---everyone learned at some first time what a painting is. Much of what we learn about art is learned among friends. Even this late in the day, any conversations about Duchamp in a friendly tone count as continuations of the values in his life and art.