-
Epilogue: the prosecution rests
- State University of New York Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
EPILOGUE 371 EPILOGUE: the prosecution rests Dieter Daniels poses two provocative questions regarding the Duchamp editorial avalanche: “Why have so many commentaries been called for regarding so few artworks?” “Why exactly has Duchamp become the object of so many—and so contradictory—theories?”1 Why, indeed? Briefly put, any body’s artwork is the sum of its essential parts: form, or visible expression, and content, the expression of intended meaning (from complicated narration to rudimentary mood). In the case of Duchamp’s meaning(s), the sheer diversity of published opinion only indicates consensus in ignorance. As for his wholly optical (“retinal”) benefits, few scribes press the perennial aesthetic issues, such irrelevancies as beauty, grandeur, elegance, vicarious pleasure, and eloquence. And please note that T. S. Eliot never wrote: “The women come and go / Speaking of Duchamp.” Why don’t we just attribute all this earnest exegetical endeavor (mine included) to misdirected energies, human folly? After all, unquestionably there are much more pressing problems presently facing the world and its harassed inhabitants; those dilemmas really do require a definitive answer—and Duchamp does not. From the postmodernist (versus orthodox modernist) perspective, probably the overriding reason for “so many, and so contradictory, commentaries” is simply this, celebrity (from the Latin celebritas, meaning “the multitudes” as much as “fame”).2 Fame generates commentary: the greater the former, the more multitudinous the latter. A “celebrity” has been identified as one who is “famous for being famous,”3 also meaning that the celebrants need not have a clue what their hero or heroine actually did, let alone thought. As a culturally superior “star” (vedette, pas étoile), Marcel Duchamp is celebrated among an intelligentsia mostly spawned by the haute bourgeoisie; their social inferiors, so designated, posthumously fancy the likes of Elvis and Princess 371 372 ALCHEMIST OF THE AVANT-GARDE Di. Overall, it appears that some thaumaturgic cultural icons function better dead than they ever did alive. Now, at the very end of my own earnest editorial labors, I may reveal a professional bias, my unique mental quirk, my vocational secret. Initially trained as a painter, even modestly exhibited as such, I have—like Duchamp— typically played with formal innovations and, especially, covertly pursued iconographic novelties, including the esoteric kind acquired by minimal bookish research. To me, therefore, these gambits are rather banal, in no way mysterious nor worthy of all that much heavy breathing. Having so often done the artful-dodger trick myself, I intuitively recognize the routines characterizing yet another ambitious practitioner. Others, who are vocationally trained as bookish scholars, perhaps do not so easily recognize the standard modernist art-school effort, even though that has been routinely performed for around a century or so. If perchance you have never often deftly wielded a paintbrush, then “making Art” (uppercase) probably seems a uniquely praiseworthy mystère, “like magic.” (Similarly, the cargo cults of Papua have a rather different understanding of the function and purposes of international commerce and geopolitics.) Vocationally endowed with an insider’s insights (like Harry Houdini), I’ve become ever more astonished by the recent, near universal adulation of The Artist—especially Duchamp—professed as much by the laity as by well-read littérateurs (chacun a son goût, même le vôtre). However, in spite of a spate of postmodernist hagiography, Duchamp was just an earthling artist (lowercase), not the otherworldly product of parthenogenesis, as was Jesus Christ (to whom he would never have likened himself), and as was the “Hermaphrodite of the Alchemists” (to whom he evidently did liken himself: fig. 20). After having read their writings, however reluctantly, you now recognize that modern Occultists live in a world of largely unchecked speculation and imagination. As we right-thinking scholars recognize, theirs is a world without a hard-headed, factual foundation. For them, however, there is no question but that they are made privy to an “unseen world,” l’au delà, a Cosmos mysteriously moved by “invisible energies.” Concerning that monde inconnu, for them an esoteric donné, the principal questions appear to be: “How far is it?” “Is there convenient parking?” “How late is it open?” Modern Occultists, on the positive side, do generally expound a strong social conscience , stress open-mindedness, and entertain strong beliefs in intuitive thinking. A typical statement (in this case, voiced by Shirley MacLaine) is: “We’re all creating our own reality.” Alas, as we also know from reading their writings, the same holds true for most modernist...