A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings

26 STATEMENTS RE DUCHAMP

Had Marcel Duchamp not lived, it would have been necessary for someone exactly like him to live, to bring about, that is, the world as we begin to know and experience it. Having this view, I felt obliged to keep a worshipful distance, though I had met him in the early 'forties, and in the late 'forties had written music for his sequence in Hans Richter's filmzyxwvutsrq Dreams that Money Can Buy. When I was in Japan in 1962 Yoshiaki Tono asked me to write a text for the September 1963 issue of Mizue, a monthly review of the fine arts, which was to include the second part of an introduction to the method of Marcel Duchamp. I gave him the following notes. Then, fortunately, during the winter holidays of '65-'66, the Duchamps and I were often invited to the same parties. At one of these I marched up to Teeny Duchamp and asked her whether she thought Marcel would consider teaching me chess. She said she thought he would. Circumstances permitting , we have been together once or twice a week ever since, except for two weeks in Cadaques when we were every day together. Remarks here and there in my second and third texts on world improvement were suggested by things he did or ideas he expressed on these occasions. 26 STATEMENTS RE DUCHAMP History The danger remains that he'll get out of the valise we put him in. So long as he remains locked up — The rest of them were artists. Duchamp collects dust. The check. The string he dropped. The Mona Lisa. The musical notes taken out of a hat. The glass. The toy shot-gun painting. The things he found. Therefore, everything seen—every object , that is, plus the process of looking at it— is a Duchamp. Duchamp Mallarme? zyxw 70 There are two versions of the ox-herding pictures . One concludes with the image of nothingness , the other with the image of a fat man, smiling, returning to the village bearing gifts. Nowadays we have only the second version. They call it neo-Dada. When I talked with M.D. two years ago he said he had been fifty years ahead of his time. Duchamp showed the usefulness of addition (mustache). Rauschenberg showed the function of subtraction (De Kooning). Well, we look forward to multiplication and division. It is safe to assume that someone will learn trigonometry. Johns Ichiyanagi Wolff We have no further use for the functional, the beautiful, or for whether or not something is true. We have only time for conversation. The Lord help us to say something in reply that doesn't simply echo what our ears took in. Of course we can go off as we do in our corners and talk to ourselves. There he is, rocking away in that chair, smoking his pipe, waiting for me to stop weeping. I still can't hear what he said then. Years later I saw him on MacDougall Street in the Village. He made a gesture I took to mean O.K. "Tools that are no good require more skill." A duchamp Seems Pollock tried to do it—paint on glass. It was in a movie. There was an admission of failure. That wasn't the way to proceed. It's not a question of doing again what Duchamp already did. We must nowadays nevertheless at least be able to look through to what's beyond — as though we were in it looking out. What's more boring than Marcel Duchamp? I ask you. (I've books about his work but never bother to read them.) Busy as bees with nothing to do. He requires that we know that being an artist isn't child's play: equivalent in difficulty — surely — to playing chess. Furthermore a work of our art is not ours alone but belongs also to the opponent who's there to the end. Anarchy? He simply found that object, gave it his name. What then did he do? He found that object, gave it his name. Identification. What then shall we do? Shall we call it by his name or by its name? It's not a question of names. zy / The air We hesitate to ask the question because we do not want to hear the answer. Going about in silence. One way to write music: study Duchamp. Say it's not...