Drawing on Art: Duchamp and Company

Introduction: Drawing on Art and Artists

xv Ђ Introduction Drawing on Art and Artists “You see I haven’t quit being a painter, now I’m drawing [je dessine] on chance.” t marcel duchamp, 1924 The title Drawing on Art seems at first sight a bit puzzling, given its competing literal and figurative meanings. Does it mean defacing works of art, as Marcel Duchamp did in his readymade L.H.O.O.Q. (1919) by adding a delicately drawn moustache and a goatee to a commercial reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (c. 1503–1506)? Or does the appeal to this literal gesture not preclude and indeed playfully coexist with the figurative meaning of this expression that would suggest treating art as an idea in order to draw inspiration from it?¹ The iconoclasm and Dadaist spirit of revolt implied in Duchamp’s desecration of the idea of the masterpiece appears to contradict the possibility of relying on art as a bridge toward something new. And yet, by laying claim to Leonardo’s masterpiece, Duchamp was opening up a new way of thinking about artworks, the processes of production, and the artist as producer . While Cubist artists such as Pablo Picasso and Georges Braques had incorporated, collagelike, newsprint or other nonart materials in their paintings as early as 1912 (a practice reprised by such Dadaists as Kurt Schwitters in his Merz collages after 1919), Duchamp’s daring act of appropriating objects—mass produced and commercially available— wholesale in order to eventually put them on display invited a radical reevaluation of art. Cubism and Merz expanded the component materials of painting through collage; these interventions interrogated the limits of pictorial representation, but from within the framework of the institutions of art. By the late 1920s, the Surrealists were experimenting with the appropriation of “found” objects, but they chose objects xvi / Introduction because of their visually evocative, poetic, or nostalgic character. Unlike the readymades, which were selected because of their “visual indifference ,” “found” objects were deemed worthy of appropriation because of their visual appeal, thereby reinforcing reliance on the idea of art as visual manifestation and experience.² The readymades’ aspirations to conditions of display as art despite their lack of visual interest would put to the test the idea of art: they would serve to raise the seminal question , what may or may not be art when “looks” no longer count? And in so doing, they would open up the possibility that art may hold out a conceptual future beyond its manifestations as a purely visual medium. The idea of “drawing” on art, that is, of treating art, its conventions, and its institutions as a resource in order to challenge its definition and thus the sphere of its meanings, was a groundbreaking notion in the second decade of the twentieth century, a notion whose true significance has gone unrecognized despite its continued influence. While conventional painting persisted in its attempts to draw on nature in order to provide a semblance of the physical world, avant-garde movements such as Impressionism, Fauvism, and Cubism were turning toward abstraction, experimenting with and redefining the object of painting and its modes of representation. Noting this trend toward pictorial abstraction even in such later movements as Dada and Surrealism, Duchamp questioned its necessity and reactive nature: Painter after painter, since the beginning of the century, has tended toward abstraction. First, the Impressionists simplified the landscape in terms of color, and then the Fauves simplified it again by adding distortion, which, for some reason, is a characteristic of our century. Why are all the artists so dead-set on distorting? It seems to be a reaction against photography, but I’m not sure. Since photography gives us something very accurate from a drawing point of view . . . It’s very clear with all the painters, whether they are Fauves, Cubists, and even Dadaists or Surrealists. (Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, 93–94) This impulse to distortion that drives the development of abstraction is seen by Duchamp as a reaction against photography, since Introduction / xvii photography’s accuracy attains more effectively painting’s mimetic aspirations—its “drawing point of view.” Duchamp’s rhetorical question “Why are all the artists so dead-set on distorting?” captures the thrust and potential strategy that he will adopt in his turn toward the readymades. Their emergence can be understood as a response to the legacy of the nullifying effects...