Posted by William S. Wilson on July 27, 19100 at 20:25:48:
In Reply to: Re: Duchamp and chess posted by Ian Randall on June 11, 19100 at 00:04:19:
Ian Randall: thanks for twisting a few more ideas around the thread with which you link Duchamp to chess. I hope I don’t sound abrupt, merely terse, in mentioning some dangers in conversations about time and timelessness. Mention of a 4th dimension requires a context, for one needs to know if the 4th dimension is that of a mystic or a scientist. Would that we could interpret the remark Picasso quotes from Leo Stein, who on looking at his painting, said, “mais ce la cuatrieme dimention” (sic), and then Stein and Matisse laughed.
Any early reference might point toward the spiritual 4th dimension, or toward the mathematico-physical 4th dimension. A Northern mysticism, say from Reykjavic to Moscow, celebrates participations in the fourth dimension as a spiritual continuum. That fourth dimension is a fourth perpendicularity, as one might go out of oneself at an unusual angle to one’s three-dimensional self. Participation in the 4th dimension can occur by ascending from within oneself, being beside oneself in an ecstasy, or by being carried aloft in a rapture, elevated at an unfamiliar angle by a spiritual power. While in the spiritual dimensions we are weightless and frictionless impossible objects, free of gravity, in the material physical dimensions we are weighted down by gravity, yet we can work within it as very possible objects, as in descending a staircase, or sitting to play a game of chess, at the same time posing for a painter.
Confusions arise among epiphanies in the period before World War II, because aesthetic epiphanies sometimes overlap spiritual epiphanies, and sometimes displace them. Meanwhile Duchamp sought to displace both the aesthetic and the spiritual precisely because of their longing for timelessness.
The aesthetic epiphanies and the spiritual epiphanies can occur for spiritually capable initiates, self-selected or elected. An aesthetic moment in Idealism is instantaneous, a moment out of time, but Duchamp displaced that very aesthetic moment with the an-esthetic experience. Such anesthesia is time-bound. While T. S. Eliot could evoke “At the still point of the turning world,” and while you write “the experience of timelessness while playing a good game,” Duchamp’s theory of and practice of temporalities seem opposed to any religious and philosophic idealism which allows the kind of timeless moment in which the eternal participates in the temporal.
Note that Duchamp does not celebrate a still point at the center of the turning wheel. Precisely those critics who long for a still point, or a timeless instant, as a quality of an aesthetic experience, are the critics who have opposed and continue to oppose Duchamp.
I don’t see aspirations toward an idealist moment of timelessness: a snow shovel suggests that one is prepared for snow, a situation which is “before” a sequel; a bottle dryer implies allowing the bottles time to dry; a red under-painting shows a color that is prepared to wait. An accident, which can’t occur in an idealist or a spiritual dimension of timelessness, breaks a sheet of glass, designating the moments before and after. Accidents don’t occur in the timeless present of eternity, a continuum with no earlier and later. By 1917 the concept of an accident is quite complex. Jean Cocteau wrote in a notebook, quoted by Douglas Cooper, about the choreography for a theatrical production: “Leur démarche doit être comme un accident organisé qui dure."
Duchamp often turns at an angle in which one can see in two directions. That turning takes time, and those directions are temporal, like earlier and later. Much evidence suggests that Duchamp actively savored delays, that is, periods of waiting when the experience of time passing is textured and palpable. He was not in a hurry to become a lover, Beatrice Wood has written. A study of the time of chess for Duchamp, if subsuming chess in an idealist’s timelessness, is thus answerable to temporal patterns visible in other events within his world-design.
The annals of recorded time show that Duchamp rigged events with delays and postponements so that he could experience time as time, in delays, in cancellations, and in waiting. In letters edited and printed by Francis Naumann, Duchamp writes (by hand not by machine) proposing to play chess by cable, with a telegraphed code. He mentions that a code for chess might be misunderstood by censors, another possible delay and possible misreading. Many of his messages entail a delay while a turn of phrase is unfurled, the reader following its implications from before one sees the wit, until after one has grasped it. His puns require that his words be read by a reader prepared to turn back to reread.
Duchamp wrote this letter about chess in March. It was to be carried by Katherine Drier, whose departure by ship had been postponed. Since she was at that time planning to sail April 3rd, the letter wouldn’t reach its destination for weeks. In that slow letter, Duchamp describes replaying a classic chess match, a model taken from an earlier actual historic moment in chess, not from a neoplatonic continuum of timeless ideal models.
My question is how “timelessness” combines with other concepts in Duchamp’s work and life, and asks how timelessness can combine illuminatingly with his deliberate experiences of delays, postponements and waiting (as in preparing a posthumous spectacle for a slow-moving museum). When I was invited to photograph Duchamp in 1968, but asked to do so inconspicuously, only after an hour of his chatting with Alison Knowles, with casual remarks about last, or death-bed, words, did he turn toward me to speak, and then to offer to pose in the Max Ernst chair. Taking his time posing himself differs from the time of unposed snapshots. Such posing was candid and honest for Duchamp, because true to his experiences of time as he slowed it down but didn’t try to stop it. I had arrived at the apartment prepared, but after such a delay, I had become unprepared. By providing me a sample experience of waiting, he allowed me to understand something of the quality of his temporal experience by giving me a sample of it. The paintings by Henri Matisse hanging over the piano kept time with Duchamp’s world: fruits slow to ripen, flowers with long-lasting blossoms, suggestions of a life led at the pace of afternoon time, sailboat time, oasis time, and painterly time: chess time. If I may add a self-serving reference to an essay on Matisse-time, William S. Wilson, “Henri Matisse: a retrospective,” artspace (XVI #6: December 1992).
I have tried here to telegraph my understanding of the Modernists I admire as anti-Idealists, hence as opposed to the appetite for timelessness. Obviously I regard moments out of time as a problem, not a solution. I prefer to think that one of Duchamp’s great themes is the turn between “before” and “after.” However, given the complexities, I am eager to hear more about “a time outside of the seconds and minutes of common experience,” for that hypothesis may probe other evidence onto an observable plane, a place where the game can continue to be played.