Marcel Duchamp (review)

It is a sad truth that Marcel Duchamp is one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century and one of the least understood. The 1917 work Fountain, a urinal laid on its back, mounted on a pedestal and signed "Rmutt," demanded to know the boundaries of art, a question that has remained central to all subsequent artworks with any claim to seriousness. So far so good, except that this eighty-year-old question is increasingly redundant. Duchamp himself turned from the Fountain to the Large Glass (The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even), demonstrating that the Fountain was not the end of art but the beginning of something else. The question, as the authors of this wise and useful introduction point out, was neither the possibility of art nor the pursuit of anti-art but the necessity of not-art.

Ades, Cox and Hopkins give the Fountain serious attention as a Dadaist moment of anti-aesthetics, but they likewise move on, situating the ready-mades as a group alongside the major artworks and the more obscure art actions and prying into the positive conceptions of seriality and identity, accident, anonymity and the commodity aesthetic. Of most concern to Leonardo readers is the recognition of Duchamp as technologist. While Duchamp has been characterized, accurately enough, by other critics (such as Thierry de Duve) as a conceptualist and father of conceptualism, he was also one of the first technologically literate artists of the modern period, as witness the Large Glass itself.

The Glass, 2.75 meters tall and looking distinctively modern in its curved aluminium stand, is a cryptic, jokey, only half-visible thing. Above, the Bride, below, the Bachelors. Powered by a waterfall and illuminating gas (both of course as transparent as the glass itself), a machinery of desire creaks and gurgles into perpetually frustrated action ("A bachelor grinds his own chocolate"—geddit?). The work uses almost every kind of glass technology: mirroring, drilling, engraving, leading and of course glass-plate photography. The three loose squares that punctuate the Bride's cloudy emanation, for example, derive from three photographs of a gauze veil wafted by the wind through the open window of Duchamp's Paris apartment. Other quasi-photographic techniques abound, especially in the role of chance, through which Duchamp sought to free himself and the work of intention, just as realists had been arguing of photography for 60 years by the time Duchamp set to work. Whatever else it is—and it is many things— the Large Glass is a major work of media theory.

Like the Rotoreliefs and other optical toys that issued from his studio, the Large Glass is a technological work. After his demolition of art's pretensions to autonomy, value, permanence and the sublime, Duchamp turned to a slow, secretive technical investigation of the machinery that inhabits the human. The characters of the Large Glass are cyborgs, or more precisely mechanical organisms, just as, by submitting himself to mechanisms designed to minimize his opportunities for selfish expression, Duchamp made of himself a technology. Duchamp was rarely destructive, or rarely merely so: his Standard Stoppages become real (if pataphysical) tools for measurement and the establishment of perspective. The proliferating plaster casts and projections of the mid- and late-period works draw over and again on the importance of a world to the making of art and the importance of a spectator to its existence as meaningful.

The authors cite a saying of Duchamp's: a work of art has a life of about 40 years, after which it becomes art history. This seems sadly true of the streams of neo-Duchampian drolleries that flow from the art schools into our more fashionable collections, those same collections that so disdain technological media. It took more or less 30 years for video to become an acceptable art medium: after 40 it is still difficult to find digital artworks in national galleries. There is some Duchampian arithmetic to do here: by now, the...