On Duchamp

MICHEL LEIRIS

Translated by Richard Sieburth

On The Bride Stripped Bare,,.

A parallelepiped box sheathed in almond green with, on one of its sides, thistitle in black and white: The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even. Inside the box,pell-mell, a series of documents relating to The Bride Stripped Bare,,,, an unfinishedpainting on glass that seems to have occupied most of its author's attention between1911 and 1923, at least to judge from the various dates at which the ninety-fourexhibits gathered into this elegant receptacle were produced. A haphazard ensembleof photographic reproductions, plans, facsimiles of manuscript notes (entire sheetsor scraps of paper, texts or snippets of phrases in black, blue, and red ink, or in blackpencil, sometimes underlined or oveiTvritten in crayon), A puzzle of sorts that onefirst has to look at and read through as a whole before proceeding to a rudimentaryclassification that might allow one to seize what it all adds up to. This then is one ofthe most recent signs that Marcel Duchamp, so habitually in the margins, has givenus of his presence. This then is the marvelous playthingat least as envisaged in itsmost circumstantial, most fortuitous guisethat he offered up to our curiosity inOctober 1934, A work such as thisa veritable Pandora's box which one manipulatesat one's own perilneeds to be approached not from the classic point of view ofform and substance, but rather, strictly speaking, from that of container dsid contained.Our critical task will therefore consist of making a rapid inventory of its contents andthen of demonstrating, should the verdict prove positive, that there is a necessaryrelationship between container and contained.

To begin with, one has to realize that Duchampinitially one of the mosttalented ofthe so-called "Cubist" paintershas, like a number of other innovators ofhis period, set himself several problems having to do with the legitimacy of representa-tion (the role of perspective, the discovery of methods that would be just asormore^valid than perspective in order to move from the three dimensions of anobject to its figuration on a surface, the role of colors, of light, etc), but that insteadof more or less academically resolving these problems, he has come up with his veryown method, an "ironism of affirmation" that is quite different from the "negative

OCTOBER 112, Spring 2005, pp. 45-50. 2005 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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ironism dependent solely on laughter" and which, by this fact alone, therefore goeswell beyond the sole mental technique to which such a method might immediatelybe related: namely, the pataphysics of Alfred Jarry, an instrument of courseprodigiously well-suited to production of a certain level of bewilderment but whosebuffoonery too often sets it off from genuine humor.

For Duchamp, even more distinctly than for Jarry, what is at issue is not thediscovery of some new method of experimentation, but rather the testing, in allseriousness, of a specific method. Everything, or almost everything, will play itselfout in the margin of uncertainty separating the sign from the signified, joined by abond that is as precise but as tenuous as possible (at times comparable to the rela-tion between monocle and cord, at times to the indentation indicating agenerational population decrease due to war casualties in the so-called "age pyra-mid" figure so dear to statisticians) thanks to the implementation of any numberofpurely conventionalprocedures of symbolization. In the course of this res-olutely asocial operation, the absurd, promoted to a sort of rational dignity,becomes the sole measure of our freedom.

Between The Bride as painting and The Bride as a series of documents there is asignificant gap, indicative of Duchamp's valorization of the-game-as-living-thing overthe-painting-as-dead-thing and expressed by the gradual passage of the subject of thepainting (which is already a machine with all its moving and interlocking parts:the "stripping bare" of the bride) into what will become the subject of the box: i.e.,the very creation of the painting itself, exhibited in all its successive stages and multi-ple ramifications, with an emphasis on its genesis and not on the dead moment of itscompletion"the apparition of an appearance," to quote one of the most revealingof the notes scattered throughout t.he documents,

Duchamp's decision to have his astonishingand at times dazzlingly lyricaldocuments reproduced on this luxurious scale (down to their most minute detail, forexample, the rips in the pieces of paper) might well suggest, despite his casual airs, acertain narcissism (which, pushed to the limit, would leave the author with no otherrecourse but to place himself on exhibit after having signed himself, thus renewingon his own person those same procedures to which he submitted manufacturedobjects). In any event, Duchamp's decision to reproduce his documents with thisexactitude addresses the necessity of presenting things (lest one kill them) in theirraw state, without dressing them up or deifying them. As Duchamp noted in his 1926preface to a sale catalogue of Picabia's paintings, "The gaiety of the titles, the collageof commonplace objects demonstrate his impulse to defrock himself, to remain anonbeliever in those divinities that are too lightly created for social needs,"

Duchamp's assessment of Picabia applies equally well to the singular value of his ownmind, which is to be located in the sovereign indifference of this non-belief 2Lnd whichleads to the gaiety with which he strips everything bare.

Whether it involves the rather special attitude adopted by Duchamp in regardto sexuality (in an article in Minotaure no, 6, "Beacon of the Bride," Andre Bretondefined the work in question as "a mechanistic, cynical interpretation of thephenomenon of love," adding: "It is as if some Martian were trying to figure out this

On Duchamp 47

sort of operation for himself); or in regard to the mechanical (for Duchamp as forRousselwho, on a somewhat different plane, was another extraordinary engineerthe machine is not just a pillar of modern decor or an index of the chimera ofhuman progress but an autonomous organism, animated in the full sense ofthe termand possessed of its own life); or whether it involves his rather cavalier approach tothe laws of physics, comparable, though with greater lucidity, to the way a childreconstructs the world with his building blocks ("By condescension, this weight isdenser in descent than on the rise"); or his rather scholastic speculations concerningthe quality of the "cuts" or "cuttage" contained in a razor blade; or the various meansto elicit the interventions of chance or those sudden flares that cast such a conster-nating glow over our world of logic (such as: "Any form is the perspective of anotheraccording to a certain vanishing point and a certain distance'' or the following apodic-tic demonstration of the tautological vanity of all language: "The search for PrimeWords, divisible only by themselves and by unity")in all these respects, Duchampdisplays the mark of his keen negativity, the obverse of a proof via the absurd, giventhat the absurd is on the contrary here rehabilitated and promoted to a kind ofrational dignity that in the end appears as the sole measure of our freedom.

In the course this research (an attempt, perhaps, at the squaring of the circle:to make a painting in which everything is perfectly gratuitous yet at the same timeblindingly self-evident, and to do this without any cheating whatsoever), Duchampwho is shrewd enough to be the very opposite of a rouedemonstrates all the honestyof a gambler who knows that the game only has meaning to the extent that onescrupulously observes the rules from the very moment they are put into place. Whatmakes the game so compelling is not its final result or how well one performs, butrather the game in and of itself, the constant shifting around of pawns, the circula-tion of cards, everything that contributes to the fact that the gameas opposed to awork of artnever stands still.

Notebook jottings fctr a projected article on "Marcel Duchamp's Arts and Crafts "

Plastic arts as a play on the principle of identity. All the pleasure derives fromsubstitution (replacing a thing or part of a thing by its conventional figuration or bya new symbol) or from the possibility of substitution (making a copy or trompe l'oeilthat could be substituted for the thing that served as model).

This involves repetition either by identity (copy, reproduction) or by pun(replacing something by its equivalentthe whole game essentially consisting inrecognition, as in repetition by the identical, but with the recognition here comingafter a hesitation, an errancy, a detour).

Out of plastic arts that normally make up a language (consisting of visualsigns, just as spoken language consists of auditory signs), one can attempt to derive amode of uniting (finding signs that will stand in the same relationship to the visualsigns alluded to above as do alphabetic signs to the words they transcribe). What isthus here involved is a symbolization raised to the second power.

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In the Bride... all kinds of procedures of symbolization are at work. The linkagebetween sign and signified as elastic and tenuous as possible. Purely conventionalprocedures, as when one decrees that a certain group of characters will express agiven phoneme.

A game of illusion on the order of LHOOQ: everything depends on the fact thatthe letters have a value in and of themselves (their sound when they are spelled outaloud) substituted for their value as alphabetical signs. A kind of short circuit is thusproduced: there is no writing, but rather letters that speak. This is what occurs inrebuses: the objects that are substituted for portions of the sentence live their ownlives, in a series that is parallel to but independent from the series of words that madeup the sentence. All of our pleasure deriving from this displacement,

A code of signs that would be to the things signified what the diagrams ofstatisticians are to the human realities they express (for example: the so-called "agepyramid" figure in which the generational population decreases due to war casualtiesare translated by a slight indentation).

At the final stage of The Bride... the "blossoming into the stripping bare bythe bachelors" is expressed by the "throbbing jerk ofthe minute hand on the elec-tric clocks" and the "blossoming as stripping bare voluntarily imagined by thebride-desiring" is expressed by the "triumphal snore" of a motorcar climbing a hillin first gear, "Throbbing jerk" and "triumphal snore" function here somewhat likereadymades.

Cubist collage = introduction into the painting of a piece of reality. Surrealistcollage = putting to work of ready-made elements, to which a symbolic signification isassigned. In both these cases, there is a gamble on contrast, on surprise, that is, onromanticism.

No romanticism in Duchamp's readymades: the chosen object is simply qualified,isolated, separated from reality, promoted into a new world, either by a slight addi-tion or by the addition of a phrase or simply of a signature. The fragment of the realis not taken up in order to be confronted with the manually generated portions ofthe work or in order to become a symbol, it is taken up in order to be taken up, andacquires its unexpected force only because it has been cut off from everything else("Discrepency is an operation"),

Example of a "graphic craft": the "craft" of the counterfeiter.

Play of mirrors: a check completely written out in elegant hand, thus a fakecheck, but genuine if it derives its value from the hand that executed this calligraphy.

Nine malic molds = liveries swollen with desire. The definitive beauty of thechess pieces (dehumanized figures).

On Duchamp 49

The world as an inextricable tangle of signs and signifieds, or symbols andsymbolizeds: "Any form is the perspective of another form according to a certain van-ishing point and a certain distance."

Whereas one always behaves as if things were amenable to cabalistic interpre-tation, what matters here is to take everything "at the letter" (as the geometricalexpression of "projection" is taken in the procedures ofthe "shots"),

The use of mechanical procedures to substitute readyrrmdes and seriality forusual painters' bags of tricks,

With his Rotoreliefs, Duchamp gives new meaning to the expression "arts ofamusement," A plaything for adults. An invention with commercial potential and, toa certain degree, "popular," A sort of paradoxical justification of ApoUinaire'sprophecy: "to reconcile Art and the People." In dialectical jargon: "negation of thenegation" or synthesis coming after the Cubist thesis and the Dadaist antithesis.

Metaphor "taken at the letter": a geometry book suspended by a thread( = "geometry in space"),

Automatic procedures of reproduction: cast shadows, shots. Max.: The "stan-dard stoppages,"

The role of inscriptions or "captions" in Duchamp's work, already noted byApoUinaire. It would seem that he wants to oppose two types of writing, both sharinga common origin, but divergent: written language in the strict sense, and plastic writ-ing (if need be in the extreme form ofthe readymnde).

To oppose the stereotyped universal to the calligraphed particular. Theineluctable, definitive, absolute character ofthe stereotype. What a printed page is toa manuscript page.

Restif de la Bretonne composing his novels "typecase by typecase,"

How the documents of The Bride. . . once reproduced, create another workwhich constitutes, this time, the true "stripping bare" of The Bride.

The acme of reproduction: to reproduce via photoengraving the facsimile ofthe sheet of paper with the letterhead of the cafe reproduced in The Bride...

A series of mirages indefinitely deducible from each other, like the box ofBensdorp cocoa (a young Dutch girl holding a box of Bensdorp cocoa decoratedwith the image of a young Dutch girl holding a box of Bensdorp cocoa).

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Romantic imagery here substituted by a sheer play of relations (relations cre-ated out of bits and pieces, by contiguity alone).

Total repudiation of such imagery: a readymade project consisting of an objectnon-recognizable by its soundshut up in an opaque box that would be hermeticallysealed.

Attack on the social screens, not by denying them (crudelyand vainlyattempting to suppress them) but the method known as "ironism of affirmation":thus replacing them with a variety of other screens, not pragmatically sanctioned butin truth just as defensible,

The role of the readymade could he compared to what ethnographers call an"autonomous document"whose entire value derives from the fact that it has notbeen made for any utilitarian purpose, that it exists in and for itself,

Humor too is an insulating factor, the white margin that brings the lines writ-ten on the page to the fore,

Elements given as premises (true readymades): "being given" the waterfall andthe lighting gas,

Literalism: the "Paris Air" ampule. Here the game involves presenting noth-ing that is not strictly true. The hoax devolving on the utter absence of hoax,

Painting reduced to its prime elements, atoms aligned: literary elements(soon reduced to rebuses, puns, spoonerisms, etc. , . ,), plastic elements (soonreduced to nothing more than issues of optics), commercial elements (soon reducedto nothing more than issues of signature).

Once painting has been disassembled like an alarm clocksprings to oneside, wheels to the othersthere is still place for "arts and crafts": amusing physicsexperiments, lavish visiting cards, novelty items from the inventors' contests run bythe Concours Lepine, "cootie-catchers" ., ,

The notion of the "infra-thin."

On Duchamp's works qua "elegant solutions,"

The work of art considered in its totality, that is, taking into account all of itsattendant social circumstances: i.e,, the mystical notion of aesthetic values andmore practicallyof the economic value that the art object represents for its owner.The art work is thus no longer regarded as an aerolith fallen from who knows whatsupernatural sky, but envisaged within its real framework and content.