Performance From the Foot of my Bed #1: Dada Death - Song From the Heart.
By the time I became aware of Marcel Duchamp as an undergraduate art student at the University of Nevada-Reno, his bones had long disintegrated, but not his memory, which far from being forgotten and obliterated by time and disuse--had turned to gold--he had become what only the best martyrs are allowed (the 1% of martyrs, if you will)--he had achieved sainthood--but then again, perhaps not. Perhaps, as his 1959 sculptural piece "With My Tongue in my Cheek" suggests--perhaps --Duchamp didn't actually give one single shit what we came away from his work with--and maybe that was his greatest strength after--all. Marcel was Dada. All art is Dada and all artists are Dada. But then as Thierry de Duve told me--maybe I am completely missing the point (which is not only possible--but almost certainly likely.)
Whether he went by the name Marcel Duchamp, Rrose Selavy or Richard Mutt--a modernist understanding of authorship and of authorial intent is always very important to any understanding of Marcel Duchamp's oeuvre. Let us look at just a few instances where authorship is central to his work and especially where he very specifically highlights authorship by frustrating it. His character of Rrose Selavy--which features prominently in a series of images and products presents the artist in drag emblazoned with the tag Rrose Selavy (eros c'est la vie--eros is life.) And especially in Fountain, wherein Duchamp signs the--nearly one-of-a kind urinal with the name R. Mutt--are both conspicuous because of the artist's absence--in them, the artist has taken on a character--an impersonation. In Rrose--a very bad drag queen or an unconvincing woman is outrageously played by Duchamp. In the Fountain, however this is taken one giant step further and the artist is missing altogether. But what are we being told by these misperformances of identity? What does it mean when an artist signs his/her work with someone else's name? What does it mean when the artist employs varying levels of misidentification or misdirection of identity. In the Rrose pieces we know that these are Duchamp's artworks because the artist is ultimately there--even if he is in costume, in drag, misidentifying his gender and his identity. But a very interesting thing occurs. Because we see Marcel--because the misdirection is not meant to fool anyone and because it is signed--Rrose becomes an almost translation of the name Marcel Duchamp--a near translation or a badly tuned pronunciation. Almost as if Rrose Selavy is Marcel Duchamp in Russian, Spanish or more likely --as if it means the same thing in the language of art--the language of Dada.
In the Fountain, on the other hand the artist is never present. We only find out that it was made by Duchamp third hand because Duchamp comes to its rescue and then claims the urinal indirectly via a letter he writes in the Dada publication "The Blind Man." Interestingly, it is not even in the letter that Duchamp claims authorship of the sculpture and the letter itself acts as a misdirection of a misdirection. He ultimately, later uses traditionally non-artistic modes in order to claim the fountain--after the fact-- in interviews and conversations--via word of mouth.
It becomes clear that Duchamp is working with issues of authorship and here it is is also important to realize that, while Duchamp will one day lead us all to the ironic stance that will allow many artists to claim a position of non-identity--we have to remember that Duchamp was not a post-modernist, he was a very talented, forward thinking modernist--but a modern all the same. All of these instances of misdirected authorship, of misperformance of identity, whether convoluted and tricky are nonetheless, ultimately meant to lead us back to the artist--in this case, all roads lead us back to Marcel Duchamp.
Before I move on, I want to speak a bit about how authorial intent plays out for the Dadas and for Duchamp in particular in response to Duchamp's best known, masterpiece--the Large Glass (The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelor's, even)--and especially in Duchamp's definition of chance. In the large glass sculpture, Duchamp employs many examples of what he termed "Canned Chance," as he put it--“This experiment was made in 1913 to imprison and preserve forms obtained through chance, through my chance.”
"...Through my chance." This is an amazing sentence--a revelatory and very important distinction and one which is paramount to understanding what the Dada's felt about chance and authorship. The words "my chance" are odd ones because we tend to think of chance as something that occurs to us--outside of us--something over which we have absolutely no control. People often speak of bad luck, or lucky stars--even lucky people have no control over how and when their luck will run out. But for the Dadas and especially Marcel--luck was another tool of the artist--ultimately an extension of authorial intent--luck is always under the control of the artist in a way that was governed by the laws of Dada logic--which was a truly modernist undertaking and could be quite magical. The powers of the author--for the Dadas and later, even for the Surrealists was something, which to us, now, as post-post moderns must at times seem almost ludicrous, fantastical or outlandish--but which nonetheless were considered part of the general powers of an artist like Marcel Duchamp. In fact, similar attitudinal examples can even be seen in the ways that the Abstract Expressionists--especially Jackson Pollack saw themselves and the control of their environments as well. In fact it was this same supra-human authorship and "claiming" of chance that allowed Marcel Duchamp to assert that the Large Glass was finally finished when it came out of storage with a large series of cracks--that would have caused most petulant artists to break down and claim that their work had been ruined by bad luck!
In his talk at SAM, according to de Duve--the most interesting aspect of what Duchamp's work (as exemplified in the urinal) was, is that it meant that everything could be art and that anyone could be an artist. De Duve claims that this is the main idea that the artists of the sixties came away with when they were presented with his work, but I very humbly want to say that this is a misapprehension on the part of de Duve--that the dual ideas that anything can be art and anybody can be an artist were in fact, not the most interesting, most important, longest-lasting aspects of the Frenchman's work--and that this is in fact a misreading of what the work--especially Fountain even had to teach.
Over the years, Duchamp's relationship to Fountain became a complex--at times prickly one. He, himself claimed that artists of the sixties misunderstood the work--and not just Joseph Beuys as de Duve points out. He was quite concerned that his revolutionary act of "Anti-art" would be reintroduced into the realm of the "Retinal"--which he saw as a travesty. For Duchamp, himself--and I argue for the most important artists of the periods that followed him--artists like Jackson Pollock, the artists of Fluxus, all the conceptual artists of the sixties and seventies, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, John Cage and Merce Cunningham etc., what Fountain brought us was not the idea that anything could be art--but rather that art had now been forever extricated from the realm of the retinal to the realm of the conceptual. De Duve's misapprehension is mistaking the press's reaction, the popular reaction--the most visceral reaction to Fountain with what practicing artists felt was his most important revelation--and especially with what was the importance of Duchamp's impact on the history of art.
This popular view of Duchamp's oeuvre is sadly the most obvious and superficial layer of what Duchamp's work brought to the world. It is tantamount to Jackson Pollock's being called "Jack the Dripper" and Andy Warhol being called the "Campbell Soup guy." These are all true claims--but they are essentially irrelevant to any actual understanding of each artist's place in history. Duchamp's Fountain does continue to be one of the most important objects and moments in art history--and his work is seminal to all art (even the retinal) that has been made and continues to be made ever since--but the idea that this importance has anything to do with de Duve's syllogism is in itself the product of a formal/formalist and retinal reaction to an object that spoke past that directly to the conceptual--in fact giving birth to an art that exists in and of the mind and which continues to drive formalists absolutely nuts!
It is a misunderstanding of the idea of the urinal--in favor of a formalist understanding of the piece as a sculpture. It is a backward look at something that is looking and moving forward in very much the same way that Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase marked the end of Cubism--Mr. Mutt's Fountain was moving art into something completely different--and gave birth to performance art, conceptual art--any art whose basis was thinking before seeing.
What the artists of the sixties took from his urinal--what continues to be Duchamp's most generative gift--and therefor the most important, was his debasement of the retinal from its perch as the highest form of art--in favor of the conceptual. The favoring of the mind over the eye. In fact, this would prove to be far more radical--far more revolutionary than claiming all things to be art (which, in fact, in the final analysis Duchamp never claimed after all)--and in it we find the birth of everything that art is today. It is the break that de Duve is searching for. The Fountain, in the final analysis becomes nothing more than a decoy--on one hand it is something shocking enough to stick in our minds--something to shock us into a new mindset--a slap to the back of our heads, and secondly it is something used to lead us away from what Duchamp--in his guise of a Dadaist--is really attempting--something all the Dadas were working toward. That was the desire to create a space for what linguists call the breakdown in the vraissemblance of any system--it is the creation of an ideological fatigue--wherein art cannot recognize itself. Where it breaks down and something else--something new arises.
Duchamp once complained that he gave us a urinal--basically a pot to piss in and we found the Madonna--or was it the Mona Lisa--The Surrealists knew that if we came to an intersection between a skeleton and an operating table that we would bend over backwards in an effort to contrive a story that we could make sense of--and that is exactly what popular history and de Duve have attempted to do with Fountain.
Duchamp gave us the purest, most minimalist piece of Dada ever created and we contorted logic into every conceivable shape to have it make sense to us again--even searching for a formal answer to something that was only ever meant to be a completely conceptual ghost. Madness--the void--illogic and Dada are like that--they make us pine for the comforting, for the sensical, for the beautiful--it makes complete sense that Surrealism followed Dada--followed Duchamp (who never became a Surrealist--though he always was one) because the mind needs to return to succor and safety after looking too long and too hard at the opposite of art. In the end--perhaps the syllogism of the break between these two eras may actually be more like this: Marcel was Dada. All art is Dada and all artists are Dada--though not all artists are Dadaists. Magic is in the air--but not all artists are magicians (magi chiens.)
Xavier, out.
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