THE PRIVATE WORLDS OF MARCEL DUCHAMP
Desire, Liberation, and the Self in Modern Culture
A critic famously predicted that Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) would dominate the second half of 20th century art as clearly as his contemporary Pablo Picasso had the first half.
This is just what has happened, though hardly anyone would have believed it possible before the advent of Pop art, which erased the distance once thought to separate high art from low.
Duchamp was the grandfather of that deflation. Besides having abandoned painting for being "too retinal," and later pretending to renounce art altogether for chess, at which he was expert, Duchamp is known most for sporadically selecting mass-produced objects -- a snow shovel, a hat rack, a urinal -- and converting them to his "work" by titling and signing them.
The "readymades," as Duchamp called them, borrowing an English word he picked up in New York, are usually understood as critical pranks that show how arbitrary is the marriage of object and meaning or intent in traditional artworks.
In "The Private Worlds of Marcel Duchamp," Jerrold Seigel, professor of history at New York University, has a less confrontational view of Duchamp that sets the artist apart from the refractory high jinks of Dada with which he is commonly associated.
In contrast to the "noisy and self-conscious challenges" offered to art conventions by most Dada and Surrealist artists, Seigel argues, Duchamp "seemed able to do unprecedented things with a quiet and natural equanimity, making established conventions and expectations fall away without seeming to invest much energy in the act of opposing them."
Temperament was part of what made Duchamp stand out from the Dada crowd, and Seigel speculates about Duchamp's personality plausibly and at many points. He sees Duchamp as clever in a way different from what he usually gets credit for. "Issues of isolation, noncommunication, perpetuated desire and liberated fantasy" pervade Duchamp's life and work, according to Seigel. And critics are mistaken if they see in his life and work any lasting impetus to public persuasion or scandal.
In Seigel's view, Duchamp accepted public and critical reaction to his activities as useful camouflage. "Becoming the knight-errant of anti-art," Seigel notes, "masked him against recognition as the person who had given totally free (rein) to the subjectivist impulse to enclose art in the unenterable space of its maker's consciousness."
The lack of available biographical detail, especially pertaining to Duchamp's childhood and his erotic life, leaves plenty of room for conjecture. But wisely, Seigel always ties his psychological speculations to things made, written or said by the artist. Still, sensible as he is, Seigel sometimes yields to the common temptation to overinterpret Duchamp's gnomic remarks or his art. His reading of Duchamp's early paintings, for example, suffers from an overdose of critical hindsight.
But Seigel hits his stride whenever he reads Duchamp's work against its social and cultural background. For example, his account of Duchamp's inspiration by the eccentric French writer Raymond Roussel is masterly. And he argues convincingly that the American reaction to Duchamp's work -- which was a highlight of the famous 1913 Armory Show -- offered him unanticipated and decisive encouragement.
"When his American viewers professed to find in the 'Nude (Descending a Staircase)' such objects as 'Food Descending a Staircase,' 'disused golf clubs and bags,' 'half-made leather saddles,' 'an elevated railroad stairway in ruins after an earthquake' . . . or 'an explosion in a shingle factory,' " Seigel observes, "they were joining him in the project of injecting humor into art, and extending his challenge to traditional notions of what art was and was not. Had derision been the only response to Duchamp at the Armory Show, the implication of this back talk would have been to resist such transformation, but his actual reception instead signaled that in America there was an audience in its own way as ready as he to contest existing ideas about art by expanding its precincts toward objects and experiences excluded before."
A generation or two of younger artists in America and Europe now think of Duchamp as the one who made everything available as potential art stuff and so made it possible to politicize anything in the name of art and self-definition. Seigel gives this view no credence. His viewpoint may be unpopular with readers, but it accords with Duchamp's own, as he understands it.
"By separating himself . . . from the attempts to attach his career to a project of political transformation," Seigel writes, "Duchamp acknowledged that the freedom he sought belonged to the realm of pure inwardness, recognizing -- correctly, I would argue -- that any attempt to extend it to the material world must confuse a kind of freedom that can only exist within imagination with one that it makes sense to seek in the world outside the self. . . .
"It is exactly that illusion that some who see themselves as Duchamp's heirs retain, when they seek to invest his legacy in a politics of cultural disruption."