Learnings and thoughts about Marcel Duchamp
Why Duchamp?
When I wrote about Mark Rothko, I learned about Abstract Expressionists like Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock, who achieved great success late in their artistic careers. But they all seemed to fall into extreme depression inevitably and almost ended their lives by suicide.
Given my limited understanding of art history, I cannot accurately conclude the root causes of these tragedies, whether internal or external. However, when some art critics mention Marcel Duchamp, the iconic figure of modern art, they will say that he foresaw various modern art movements as early as half a century before these tragedies occurred.
He may have thought that for ideological reasons, these movement set artists on the pinnacle of personal fames. Also, due to ideological reasons, a rigid boundary is set for artists’ freedom of creation. Duchamp did not want to be restricted by such rigid rules, so he withdrew from the mainstream art circle and chose to live the rest of his life in detachment, in a way make sense to himself.
As for how Duchamp came to this realization, we need to start with an art exhibition in the early twentieth century.
Duchamp’s artwork
Nude Descending a Staircase
Duchamp was traditionally trained as an artist. He studied at the Académie Julian from 1904 to 1905. His early figure paintings were influenced by Matisse and Fauvism. But in 1911, his paintings began to express more personal reflections on Futurism and Cubism.
It was probably my interpretation of Cubism at that moment. There was also my ignorance of perspective and of the normal placing of figures. The repetition of the same person four or five times, nude, dressed, was primarily intended, at that time, to “detheorize” Cubism in order to give it a freer interpretation.
（p.28, A Window outo Something Else, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp）
From that period, the most well known was the Nude Descending a Staircase.
I wanted to create a static image of movement: movement is an abstraction, a deduction articulated within the painting, without our knowing if a real person is or isn’t descending an equally real stair case. Fundamentally, movement s in the eye of the spectator, who incorporates it into the painting.
(p.30, A Window outo Something Else, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp)
However, when Duchamp submitted this artwork to the exhibition committee, it was not admitted, further changes were requested before resubmission. Because it wasn’t in line with what they had predicted about how a Cubism painting would look.
Duchamp realized that the committees, Indépendants, had a very dogmatic line about an artistic interpretation that had lasted just two or three years. He found that naively foolish and did not make changes accordingly. So he withdrew and became a librarian at the Sainte-Geneviève Library in Paris.
The Coffee Grinder
Regardless if Duchamp is part of any group. He would practice art for more personal reasons. His brother had a kitchen in his house in Puteaux and wanted to decorate it with pictures by his buddies.
Duchamp made this ‘Coffee Grinder’:
The coffee is tumbling down beside it; the gear wheels are above, and the knob is seen simultaneously at several points in its circuit, with an arrow to indicate movement. Without knowing it, I had opened a window onto something else.
(p.31, A Window outo Something Else, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp)
This artwork has no symbolic significance, but according to Duchamp, the diagrammatic aspect was interesting from an aesthetic point of view.
Large Glass
Through his exploration of “The Coffee Grinder,” Duchamp thought he could avoid all contact with a traditional pictorial painting by this linear and technical method. He continued this technical approach through “the Large Glass,”
The glass interested me a lot, because of its transparency. That was already a lot. Then, color, which, when put on glass, is visible from the other side, and loses its chance to oxidize if you enclose it. The color stays pure-looking as long as physically possible. All that constituted technical matters, which had their importance. … In addition, perspective was very important. The “Large Glass” constitutes a rehabilitation of perspective, which had then been completely ignored and disparaged. For me, perspective became absolutely scientific.
(p.38, A Window outo Something Else, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp)
Duchamp’s pursuit of this scientific and mathematical perspective, rather than a realistic perspective, is “giving less importance to visuality, to the visual element, than one generally gives in painting.” He wanted to avoid being preoccupied with visual language, or precisely retinal language. He wanted to make everything conceptual so that “it depended on things other than the retina.”
Duchamp beyond artwork
By understanding Duchamp’s artistic creations in various periods, we can also gradually see his attitude toward interpersonal relationships. Although he explores art in a personal environment, and his social circle is small. However, his investment in the things and people he pays attention to is very thorough and meticulous. The coffee grinder made for his brother shows that.
When I read the Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, his interviewer, Pierre Cabanne, also praised Duchamp’s dedication and clarity of mind at the age of over 80:
Duchamp gave these interviews with a “serenity from which he never departed, and which gave his theorems an undeniable grandeur; one divined man not only detached, but ‘preserved’. Through his creative acts, Marcel Duchamp did not want to impose a new revolutionary language, but to propose an attitude of mind; this is why these interviews constitute an astonishing moral lesson … He speaks in a calm, steady, level voice; his memory is prodigious, the words that he employs are not automatic or stale, as though one is replying for the nth time to an interviewer, but carefully considered…”
(p.7, Introduction by Robert Motherwell, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp)
When Duchamp explained his process of pushing art from visual to conceptual, he also raised questions about the authority of art institutions such as established museums in defining good art. Thus, he opposed promoting and collecting art through museum exhibitions.
But during the First World War in 1917, the painter-collector Katherine Dreier, keen on collecting works of German Expressionist painters, proposed establishing the Société Anonyme with the artists Man Ray and Duchamp to collect influential modern art. So that all art collected in this way will then be stored for future museum collections.
Duchamp had no objection to this; his explanation was:
I was doing it for friendship. It wasn’t my idea. The fact that I agreed to be a member of a jury which determined what works were chosen didn’t involve my opinions at all on that question. And then, it was a good thing to help artists be see somewhere. It was more camaraderie than anything else.
(p.58, Through the “Large Glass”, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp)
From this event we can see that Duchamp’s humanitarian spirit is higher than his insistence on his principles on art.
Duchamp’s respect for people who could think original thoughts, made him willing to give others full attention and even appreciation, even if he disagreed with other artists in making art. Just as he said:
The individual, man as a man, man as a brain, if you like, interests me more than what he makes, because I’ve noticed that most artist only repeat themselves.
(p.98, I Live the Live of a Waiter, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp)
Even when three young artists worked together to create a group of oil paintings called The Tragic End of Marcel Duchamp to satirize Duchamp in his later years, because he was bereft of “the spirit of adventure, the freedom of invention, the sense of anticipation, and the power of transcending…” Duchamp responded very frankly, “These’s people want some publicity, that’s all.”
He even spoke with gusto about the last painting in the group, which depicts his funeral. His coffin bearers were Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, Martial Raysse, Andy Warhal, Restany, and Arman, and he commented humorously that:
Dressed as American Marines! I swear it was amusing to look at. It was awful as painting, but that doesn’t matter; it had to be that way for them to prove something; it was horribly painted, but it was very clear. It was a hell of a job.
(p.103, I Live the Live of a Waiter, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp)
When the interviewer asked him what he thought of the young people at that time, he said:
They’re fine, because they’re active. Even if it’s against me; that doesn’t matter. They think enormously. But nothing comes of it which isn’t old, out of the past. … That’s what’s irritating; they can’t get away from it. … it seems that today, more than at any other time in this century, there are strong ties with the past. It lacks audacity, originality…
(p.103, I Live the Live of a Waiter, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp)
Compared to Duchamp’s indifference in the face of other people’s ridicule, he cared more about contemporary people’s breakthroughs in tradition through their bold and original efforts. No matter how many or few works Duchamp produced in each period, his penetrating insights, intellectual strength, and modesty accompanied him from beginning to end.
Perhaps it was this inner strength, even though he did not belong to the gathering of the Parisian Surrealist artists who fled to New York during World War II, including André Breton, Max Ernst, and others. Whether they were anxious because of their mother country’s consecutive defeats or when inevitable conflicts arose due to getting along day and night, they always respected Duchamp very much, and his presence could always play an incomparable role in reconciling and comforting them.
Why Duchamp matters?
In the art world, Duchamp’s importance was not recognized until forty years after his active period of artistic creation. Perhaps it was when the shift in art forms from visual art to conceptual art was widespread everywhere, that people began to realize that Duchamp was the first person to broaden the definition of art. Of course, it may also be a new art movement that challenges the authority of the original tradition for ideological reasons and needs a banner figure to validate its ground. These are all debatable.
What if you are not an artist?
What if you don’t care about the art history or artistic expression? Does that mean Duchamp is irrelevant? I read Keep Going: 10 Ways to stay creative in good times and bad by Austin Kleon recently, to give me some creative juice in the midst of predictable daily rhythm.
In one of the chapters, he mentioned that children explore the world around them through play, and when they are fully engaged, play is children’s ‘work’. The best play is always full of detachment and lightness, regardless of the outcome. For example, when children are drawing, whether they use oil pastels and paper, markers and whiteboards, chalk and sofa cushions, or various media that challenge the bottom line of parents’ patience, the final result may be bad and should be thrown away like garbage. Or it doesn’t matter if it’s good enough to be hung on the wall like a piece of art. He also said that good artists can maintain this playful sense of ease. When artists focus too much on results, both art and artists suffer.
Even if we do not create works of art in the typical sense, Kleon did great to quote Rene Magritte in this book when discussing the role of art, because Magritte said that his purpose in creating art is:
to breath new life into the way we look at the ordinary things around us.
words of Rene Magritte
Kleon strongly agrees that this is what artists should do:
by paying extra attention to their world, they teach us to pay more attention to ours. The first step toward transforming your life into art is to start paying more attention to it.
(p.105, Chapter 5: The ordinary + Extra attention = the Extra Ordinary, Keep Going)
I think Kleon’s point of view also touches on Duchamp’s core understanding of life:
I would have wanted to work, but deep down I’m enormously lazy. I like living, breathing, better than working. I don’t think that the work I’ve done can have any social importance whatsoever in the future. Therefore, if you wish, my art would be that of living: each second, each breath is a work which is inscribed nowhere, which is neither visual nor cerebral. It’s a sort of constant euphoria. … best work has been the use of time.
(p.72, I Like Breathing Better than Working, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp)
Duchamp’s statement that his art had no social significance is an apt summary of his seemingly absurd works. Of course, he was very prophetic in mentioning that the best thing we can do is to live every moment of life well.
Kleon mentioned that our most precious possession is our attention, which we fight for daily in a world filled with resources competing for our attention. Good artists use their attention to help people see life with fresh perspectives and multiple possibilities. Good works of art give people the desire to continue to live. If art is ruining anyone’s life, then it’s not worth making it.
Perhaps we should appreciate Duchamp’s significance, not only for his constant redefining of the scope of art, but also for his interpretation of the meaning and value of art through the life he lived. This kind of art, art that comes from life, is possessed by everyone.
What kind of art do you want to bring to others?
