Posted by Bill Wilson on March 17, 19101 at 16:56:19:
In Reply to: Re: duchamps mulitple selfportrait posted by Glenn Harvey on March 07, 19101 at 16:15:00:
: Witkacy - Russian I think - and an associate of Malinowski - took a whole series of photographic 'self-portraits' (in different guises) in the early part of the twentieth century. One of his photographs, taken in St.Petersburg during First World War is a quintuple mirror self-photo of himself dressed as a Czarist officer (formally near-identical to the famous Duchamp photo of October, 1917 you refer to.
I am questioning the concept of a photograph taken by someone else as a self-portrait. Questioning the meaning of calling such a photograph a self-portrait might bring to the surface important themes (as in wearing a costume to have oneself represented in a particular guise, yet not being the cameraman). If one is taking a photograph of oneself, one knows precisely when the shutter will be snapped. Is that true or likely when someone else, a photographer, is taking the photograph, even if under the direction of the sitter? One theme in Duchamp's life-world is the temporal pause or delay, as he allows a moment to spread. His "self-portraiture" in the case of the mirrored photograph taken by a commercial photographer might lie in the temporality of such a photograph, where the self-representation is that the photograph is an image of his way of taking time. For a viewer to look at that photograph is to participate in a Duchampian moment. The spread of the five images slows down or spreads the fractional instant into a durable moment. Such a photograph is to be looked at in successive and cumulative glances, scarcely taken in by one glance as fast as the snapping of a shutter. The one photograph,entailing five visual takes by a person viewing the photograph, is consistent with Duchamp slowing down events for himself and for other people. Thus his work can give the participant/spectator an experience of time like his own experiences. Duchamp can almost, I would say that he does, make the passing of time a component of visual events.
Approaching an inverted urinal gives one pause. I sat with him in 1968, inconspicuously taking snap-shots, for at least an hour before he turned to me, asking if I wanted to photograph him in the Max Ernst chair. Thus he revealed his feeling, his appetite for an event slowly dilating in time, rather than opening and closing in a fraction of a second, like the shutter of a camera. Note that any study of his relations with Beatrice Wood becomes a meditation on one man's delays.