The Tears of Things

Step Outside

Etant Donnés, Marcel Duchamp, 1946-1966. Exterior . . . ? . . . view.

by Jerome du Bois

Artists are the elite of the servant class.
--Jasper Johns

Can one make works which are not works of 'art'?
--Marcel Duchamp, 1912.

I don't know where I'm going, but I know it's on same train as Marcel Duchamp.
--Willem deKooning

I'm writing a short story about Marcel Duchamp, with the tentative title Schlepping The Given. As part of my research, I've had the pleasure of reading and rereading Calvin Tompkins's wise and definitive 1996 biography Duchamp --a lucid and sensible book. Here I want to extract a few quotes by both men to make the point that, in modern and contemporary times, there is something bogus at the core of art, and something phony in the hearts of artists.

Marcel Duchamp saw in 1912 a mélange of egos, money, careers, and overblown or makeshift theories. "Like a basket of crabs," was how he described the scene.

Duchamp consciously chose to step outside of it all and to go his own way. LIke the famous Fountain --which was never displayed at that exhibition-- he absented himself from the sold-out ones before they even knew it, and created a vortex in the wake of his (invisible) departure. He became not only better than an artist, his agile independence guided him around all of society's traps, and he honored his calling and mastered his life. In the meantime, without any conscious intention at all, just by example, he was the eccentric who established a new center in art.

Tompkins, page 13:

It has been argued that Duchamp's influence is almost entirely destructive. By opening the Pandora's box of his absolute iconoclasm and breaking down the barriers between art and life, his adversaries charge, Duchamp loosed the demons that have swept away every standard of esthetic quality and opened the door to unlimited self-indulgence, cynicism, and charlatanism in the visual arts. As with everything else that we tend to say about Duchamp, there is some truth in this. What could be more subversive than the readymades, which undermined every previous definition of art, the artist, and the creative process? To call Duchamp destructive, however, is to miss the point. What he was interested in above all was freedom --complete personal and intellectual and artistic freedom-- and the manner in which he achieved all three was, in the opinion of his close friends, his most impressive and enduring work of art. Heavy-duty art critics who pounce on that claim as a cop-out, a tacit admission of his failure to become a great artist, don't have a clue to the new kind of artist that Duchamp became.

That new kind of artist is rare today, when every graduating MFA wants Larry Gagosian's or Kenny Schacter's cell phone number tucked into their diploma, and each one has their one-trick pony hidden under their gown, and each has the morals of a five-sided comedian. Freedom? Integrity? Sheeit: here's what's left of my soul. Where's my collar? Where do I sign?

1912 was a deep year for twenty-five-year-old Marcel Duchamp. For several months he lived in a rented room in Munich, didn't talk to anybody, and conceived the seeds of the next twenty years of his artistic career. He painted several strong canvases, and glimpsed the first glimmers of The Large Glass. (He put his notes in a green box.)

He knew the Glass would take a long time to realize fully, and that it was too strange for him to expect support from anybody for it, including his fellow artists. (He had already experienced their rejection of his Nude #2 from a recent exhibition.) He could not expect to earn money from his art, and he would not seek out a patron. What to do?

Tompkins, pp. 113-114:

For nearly a year, ever since he had removed his offending Nude from the Indépendants exhibition, Duchamp had been moving away from the concerns of other artists. Now, in order to concentrate his energy on the large-scale work that he had conceived in Munich, he decided to withdraw from all other artistic activities and to look for a job that would supplement the modest allowance he still received from his father. What sort of job? . . .

A library job appealed to him because it meant "taking an intellectual position as opposed to the manual servitude of the artist," but he was not giving up art. As he would later explain, "There are two kinds of artists: the artist who deals with society; and the other artist, the completely freelance artist, who has nothing to do with it --no bonds."

The comparison sounds almost quaint in these grasping and heartless times, when artworks are either filthy or silly contrived gimmicks, when most students won't set foot into art school without a career --and networking-- plan already laid out, and when artists are simply whores haggling over prices and locations (or teachers with comfortable jobs), and when both "communities" are bereft of both talent and imagination. When art is not a calling, not the constant aching undertow of a deep need to help the world by revealing mystic truths.

When Duchamp asked, Can one make works which are not works of 'art'? he was simply stepping outside the confines of the conventional definition of his time, and going beyond the retinal to include the mental. As in Leonardo, where an artwork is una cosa mentale --a thing of the mind.

And the mind is an individual thing.

Picasso and Braque glued bits of paper and wood to their canvases, and impressed a lot of people. Marcel Duchamp's vision extended far beyond both of those men, and at the same time, and nobody knew for years. When they found out, after his second exposure to fame . . .

Tompkins, page 438:

Dazzled by his example, it was all too easy to fall into the seductive fallacy that anything goes. Anything does go in art, as Duchamp had demonstrated with the readymades, but only when art is approached in the way he approached it: not as self-expression or therapy or social protest or any other of the uses to which it is regularly subjected, but as the free activity of a rigorous and adventuring mind.

And that's why most art nowadays is boring or offensive therapy and self-expression and social protest and infantilistic surrealism --no rigorous or adventuring minds out there.

They're bought, and bought early. The bogus core of the art enterprise is money (and the career ladder), not quality or ideas or standards. I don't care if it was ever thus, thus it is. And the artists --the phonies-- love it that way, because they have shrivelled hearts, and eyes out only for angles, and sheaves of grant applications, and fully-charged Blackberries, and plenty of knives behind their backs. Compare this --this pecking party with the exquisite arc of Duchamp's life, guided largely by the man himself, so that most of his entire artistic output has been assembled in one place; and the uncanny achievement of his lifelong preoccupation with the classic problem, the male-female dynamic --"I want to grasp things with the mind the way the penis is grasped by the vagina"-- he revealed only after his death, and after twenty years of secret work: Etant Donnés.

These days, can you imagine any artist passing up the opportunity to reveal such an artwork? Are you kidding? They'd know which VJs to hire for the opening, even.

Instead, here was Duchamp working on Etant Donnés (page 462):

. . . There is a mysterious study that Duchamp did on transparent Plexiglas, in which he drilled small holes to outline the nude figure; probably he used it to line up the skin when he was gluing it to the maquette. Duchamp never asked for help or advice with the technical problems. He worked alone and in secret, following his own stated view that the contemporary artist's only recourse was to be underground.

He was a free man, a free artist, living by nobody's leave, following nobody's agenda but his own. As a young man, he was confronted with a choice: a stifling and predictable dance in an old historical hall, or a walk through its old worn door out into the dark unknown future, where he would be on his own.

It was an easy choice. His confidence, his backbone, and his strong ideas led him, and widened art in their wake. He made this choice more than once in his long life, refusing emotional manipulation, and monetary entrapment, and boring repetition, and the backward step.

By making his freedom --his life-- his free life-- more important than his art --that is, by only making any art strictly on his terms, in his own good time, without sacrificing his serenity and independence-- he honored both his life and his art. I say, because of the way he guided his life away from being a society artist, he will be talked about, and his work studied, long after de Kooning and Pollock and Picasso, and the whole current crew, that's for sure. As long as Leonardo, I say.

And he is an excellent exemplar for the new outsider artist --not the blind or light-struck, making so-called "art" out of soot and spit and "revelation" --no, I mean the artist who has all the tools of the 21st Century at her fingertips, and nobody in her way.

Posted by Jerome at February 3, 2006 06:20 PM | TrackBack