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Περιεχόμενα
Περιεχόμενα.............................................................................................................................. 4 Not a moment too soon: A Merce Cunningham Centennial Event ................................................... 5 One Rock Upon Another............................................................................................................ 8 The J. Paul Getty Museum Collection ............................................................................................ 15 Belle Haleine ............................................................................................................................ 15 Serendipity ................................................................................................................................. 17 The Surrealists ................................................................................................................................. 21 Readymades and Maintenance Labor of Marcel Duchamp ............................. 29 Helen Molesworth Work Avoidance: The Everyday Life of Marcel Duchamp's Readymades* ................................................................................................................................................. 30 Exhibition: ‘In Focus: Making A Scene’ at The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles ........................ 43 Louis Aragon and André Breton in 1924.................................................................................. 54 More about Duchamp's wordplay ........................................................................................... 55 What Does a Man Want? Reflections on “Surrealism Desire Unbound” ................................ 55 What Does a Man Want? ........................................................................................................ 56 Was Marcel Duchamp's 'Fountain' actually created by a long-forgotten pioneering feminist? ..... 57 In a new book, John Higgs looks at the story behind one of the most famous artworks of the 20th century ............................................................................................. 57 Lee Miller and Tanja Ramm, 1929 by Man Ray ....................................................................... 66 Seeing Dark Things: The Philosophy of Shadows .................................................................... 66
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Not a moment too soon: A Merce Cunningham Centennial Event
https://www.barbican.org.uk/not-a-moment-too-soon-a-merce-cunningham-centennial-event Merce Cunningham Centennial We’re thrilled to welcome Trevor Carlson to our stage. Former Executive Director of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, his solo performance offers an intimate and rare insight into the iconic choreographer’s work and personal life told through text, video, music and dance. We also warmly welcome Trevor’s collaborators and creative team from Spain. For those unable to see the performance in person, we will be live streaming Friday’s performance to coincide with #DancePassion, the BBC and One Dance UK’s celebration of the UK’s flourishing dance scene. We hope you enjoy the show. Toni Racklin, Head of Theatre and Dance It’s the winter of 2001 and, in his dressing room in Australia, Merce Cunningham looks at his reflection in the mirror and says, ‘not a moment too soon’, while capturing himself on his personal camcorder. At this point, Merce is 79 years old. For three years previously, and for nine more to come, his hands had been held by his executive director and accomplice, Trevor Carlson. Cunningham’s companion in life and most frequent collaborator was the revolutionary John Cage, who introduced him to eastern philosophies. The statement ‘not a moment too soon’ represents a
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The body 2 lifelong bond to eastern thinking that also made a mark in the tapestry of 20th-century contemporary dance. Not a moment too soon is a multidisciplinary performance piece about a shared journey through the end of Merce Cunningham’s life, in which he was gracefully accompanied by Trevor Carlson. A memory of how, year by year, Cunningham continued creating new pieces, until his final breath. A pilgrimage into a memory using unseen footage and tapes shot by Cunningham himself: audiovisual vehicles that transport us into the image and voice of Cunningham. Trevor, the guiding voice, embodies this passage and invites us into the last days of a master. Not a moment too soon premiered at the Mercat de les Flors in Barcelona October 14, 15, and 16, 2016. It is extra special for us to bring Not a moment too soon to the Barbican after such a close relationship was established in the final years of Cunningham’s life, and also of his Company. It is heart-warming to see that these relationships, first established by Merce’s great character and artistry, continue to live on through those people and institutions he touched.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=RDCMUCIQfaNRoFyBV5gXFHGwNskQ&v=p_A3hXmBvU&feature=emb_rel_end
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Stefan Banz. 6 Essays zu Marcel Duchamp, Jules Verne, Max Bill, Joseph Beuys, Fischli | Weiss und Ai Weiwei
Στα συναρπαστικά δοκίμια του, ο διάσημος εμπειρογνώμονας του Duchamp, Stefan Banz εξηγεί, μεταξύ άλλων, γιατί δεν ήταν ο Walter Hopps που διοργάνωσε την πρώτη ατομική έκθεση του Duchamp σε δημόσιο ίδρυμα, αλλά ο Max Bill, ή τι ακριβώς είχε παρεξηγήσει ο Joseph Beuys για τον Duchamp όταν ερμήνευσε το: Η σιωπή του Marcel Duchamp είναι υπερβολική, ή πώς οι Fischli & Weiss αξιοποίησαν την μη πραγματοποιημένη ιδέα του Duchamp για ένα έργο με τίτλο Équilibre, ή ότι ο Ai Weiwei αναφέρει τον Duchamp σε σχεδόν όλα τα μεγάλα έργα του και την τεράστια επιρροή που είχε ο Jules Verne στην καλλιτεχνική προσέγγιση αυτού του μεγάλου πρωτοποριακού καλλιτέχνη.
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https://vfmk.org/shop/stefan-banz-one-rock-upon-another
Μεταμόρφωση από τον Marcel Duchamp Giovanna Zapperi
Ο Marcel Duchamp είναι ο καλλιτέχνης που εξέφρασε με τον πιο ριζοσπαστικό τρόπο την κρίση που βίωσε η καλλιτεχνική δημιουργία τα χρόνια γύρω από τον Πρώτο Παγκόσμιο Πόλεμο. Εγκαταλείποντας τη ζωγραφική, η οποία δεν είχε πλέον νόημα γι 'αυτόν, ο Ντυσάμπ δεν περιορίστηκε στο να αποδεχθεί αυτήν την κατάσταση κρίσης, αλλά στρέφοντας την προσοχή του σε αντικείμενα μαζικής παραγωγής δίνει μια αποφασιστικά νέα ιδέα στην τέχνη. Μέσα από τους πολλαπλούς μετασχηματισμούς και τις μεταμφιέσεις του, ο Duchamp άρχισε επίσης να επαναπροσδιορίζει έναν τόπο τόσο παλιό όσο η ίδια η τέχνη: αυτό που σχετίζεται με τη μορφή του καλλιτέχνη ως ένα μοναδικό, καθολικό και αρσενικό άτομο. Εάν στην ιστορία της τέχνης η ανδρική συμπεριφορά του καλλιτέχνη θεωρείται δεδομένη ως παγκόσμιο γεγονός, ιστορικά η γυναίκα είχε τον ρόλο της κωδικοποίησης της δημιουργικής διαδικασίας : το αντικείμενο του βλέμματος, το έργο τέχνης, η ίδια η εικόνα. Στην παράδοση της δυτικής εκπροσώπησης, το καθήκον που ανατίθεται στο γυναικείο σώμα είναι αυτό του διανύσματος της επιθυμίας, με όλα αυτά που συνεπάγεται η σεξουαλικότητα και οι σχηματισμοί ταυτότητας, αλλά και –όπως θα δούμε– στους τομείς του εμπορίου και της κυκλοφορίας των εμπορευμάτων. 9
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Τι συμβαίνει στον καλλιτέχνη όταν, εγκαταλειφθεί το παραδοσιακό αντικείμενο της δημιουργίας, αυτό το Άλλο εξαφανίζεται, αντικαθίσταται από αντικείμενα που, τελικά, δεν είναι παρά αγαθά; Η ερώτηση αυτή σημαίνει ότι εστιάζουμε στην «αυτο-στρατηγική» που υιοθέτησε ο Duchamp όταν λείπει η διαφορετικότητα που αντιπροσωπεύεται από τη γυναίκα, προσπαθώντας να ανακαλύψει ξανά την αρρενωπότητα του καλλιτέχνη ξεκινώντας από την παρατήρηση ότι ο ρόλος του γυναικείου σώματος στην καλλιτεχνική δημιουργία δεν έχει πλέον νόημα. Η εγκατάλειψη της ζωγραφικής, η χρήση αντικειμένων βιομηχανικής παραγωγής και, τέλος, η στάση και η μεταμφίεση αντιπροσωπεύουν μερικές από τις στρατηγικές που δείχνουν, αφενός, την παραίτηση από θέση κυριαρχίας και εξουσίας και, αφετέρου , μια διαδικασία καταστροφής και ανοικοδόμησης της ταυτότητάς του ως καλλιτέχνη. Η αμφιθυμία των φύλων είναι μια σημαντική πτυχή αυτού που έχει αφαιρεθεί από το έργο του Duchamp, αν λάβουμε υπόψη το περιθώριο αυτών των θεμάτων μέσα στην τεράστια βιβλιογραφία για τον καλλιτέχνη. Ζητήματα που σχετίζονται με το φύλο και τη σεξουαλική διαφορά αναφέρονται μερικές φορές σε σχέση με τον ερωτισμό, αλλά σπάνια ως κεντρικές πτυχές της καλλιτεχνικής κληρονομιάς του Duchamp. Στον αγγλοσαξονικό κόσμο, όπου η μελέτη της ιστορίας της τέχνης ανανεώθηκε βαθιά από τις μελέτες φεμινιστικών και φύλων, το ζήτημα έχει αναδειχθεί σε όλη του τη σημασία. Από τη δεκαετία του 1990 και μετά, αρκετές μελέτες επικεντρώθηκαν στη σεξουαλικότητα και την αρρενωπότητα του Duchamp, συμπεριλαμβανομένου ιδίως του βιβλίου της Amelia Jones, το οποίο υπογράμμισε την πολυπλοκότητα της υποδοχής ενός σεξουαλικά αμφιλεγόμενου Duchamp στην Αμερική μετά το δεύτερο πόλεμος 1. Στην πραγματικότητα, ο Duchamp άνοιξε τη δυνατότητα να σκεφτεί τον καλλιτέχνη ως μια θεμελιωδώς ασταθή μορφή από την άποψη της ταυτότητας φύλου, η οποία θα είχε σημαντικές συνέπειες για την τέχνη στο δεύτερο μισό του εικοστού αιώνα. Η Αμέλια Τζόουνς έχει δείξει ότι από τη δεκαετία του 1950 και μετά ο Ντουκάμπ έχει καθιερωθεί ως παράδοξος πατέρας φιγούρας για μια ολόκληρη γενιά καλλιτεχνών σε αναζήτηση ενός εναλλακτικού μοντέλου ταυτοποίησης από αυτό που αντιπροσωπεύεται από την υπερβολική ανδρεία των ζωγράφων του αφηρημένου ιμπρεσιονισμού, υποστηριζόμενη από τα γραπτά του Κλέμεντ Γκρίνμπεργκ. Η κληρονομιά του Duchamp έπαιξε σημαντικό ρόλο και για εκείνους τους καλλιτέχνες που πραγματοποίησαν μια κριτική έρευνα γύρω από τα στερεότυπα των φύλων στην ιστορία της τέχνης και του πολιτισμού. Η χρήση της φωτογραφίας του Duchamp - το μέσο που επιλέγει να απεικονίσει την ταυτότητά του ως καλλιτέχνη ως σκηνική - μπορεί να θεωρηθεί ως βασική στιγμή στην ιστορία της χρήσης αυτού του μέσου, για να δείξει τη διαταραχή του φύλου που διασχίζει το τέχνη του 20ου αιώνα Η αποσταθεροποιητική δύναμη της επιχείρησης της Δουκάμπιας έγινε αισθητή για πρώτη φορά στην ίδια την τέχνη πριν στην ιστορία και την κριτική της τέχνης, η οποία, αντίθετα, δεν έπαψε να οδηγεί την κληρονομιά του Ντυσάμπ πίσω στους κανονικούς λόγους της πρωτοπορίας, του 10
The body 2 μοντερνισμού και ο μύθος του μεγάλου καλλιτέχνη. Αντίθετα, η αμφιθυμία μεταξύ του Marcel Duchamp και του Rrose Sélavy μας λέει ότι το έργο του δεν θα είναι ποτέ απόλυτα άνετο στον κανόνα της ιστορίας της τέχνης, αλλά ότι αντιπροσωπεύει μια ριζική συμβολή στην αναθεώρηση του ίδιου του κανόνα. Αυτή η αναθεώρηση, η οποία δεν σημαίνει μόνο καταστροφή, αλλά και εκτοπισμό και επανεφεύρεση, περνά αναγκαστικά μέσω σεξουαλικής διαφοράς: Θα προσπαθήσω εδώ για να δείξουμε ότι ακριβώς στην ανατροπή της ετερότητας που αντιπροσωπεύει η γυναίκα στην εικόνα του καλλιτέχνη, αναδύεται όλη η νεωτερικότητα του Duchamp. Όταν ο Marcel Duchamp έφτασε για πρώτη φορά στη Νέα Υόρκη τον Ιούνιο του 1915, είναι ήδη ένας πολύ γνωστός ζωγράφος λόγω του σκάνδαλου που προκλήθηκε από το Nude του που κατέβαινε από τις σκάλες, που εκτέθηκε δύο χρόνια νωρίτερα στο Armory Show. Σύμφωνα με την μαρτυρία των σύγχρονων, οι Αμερικανοί θεώρησαν ότι ο Duchamp ήταν διάσημος ζωγράφος, ακόμα κι αν στην πραγματικότητα είχε ήδη σταματήσει να ζωγραφίζει. Αν, λοιπόν, η αρχική του φήμη προήλθε από τους πίνακες, η συναρπαστική του προσωπικότητα αργότερα θα κρατούσε τους Αμερικανούς, ιδιαίτερα ευαίσθητους στην αποσπασμένη γοητεία του και στην πνευματική του αύρα. Εκείνη την εποχή ένας καλλιτέχνης όπως ο Duchamp αντιπροσώπευε μια απόλυτη καινοτομία για τις Ηνωμένες Πολιτείες, όπου η μοντέρνα τέχνη ήταν ακόμα ένα περιθωριακό γεγονός και όπου δεν υπήρχε τίποτα συγκρίσιμο με το ευρωπαϊκό avant-garde. Η Αμερική τη δεκαετία του 1910 αντιπροσώπευε την πρωτοπορία του εκσυγχρονισμού και της εκβιομηχάνισης, με την εμφάνιση μιας πολιτιστικής βιομηχανίας, μια άμεση εκπομπή αυτού του εκσυγχρονισμού, η οποία σύντομα θα επεκταθεί σε ολόκληρο τον κόσμο. Αυτό είναι ακριβώς το πλαίσιο στο οποίο το φαινόμενο της διασημότητας - με τη λατρεία του - αρχίζει να ισχυρίζεται έντονα. Στη Νέα Υόρκη, ο Duchamp φαίνεται ιδιαίτερα προσεκτικός στην εικόνα του: δεν είναι τυχαίο ότι η φωτογραφία γίνεται γρήγορα ένα σημαντικό μέσο για την ανάπτυξη της αυτοπροσώπευσης κάποιου, δίνοντας σχήμα σε αυτήν την «αυτο-λατρεία» που όχι μόνο όρισε τη γοητεία της, αλλά και πέρασε χέρι-χέρι με τον τρόπο του να σκέφτεται σαν καλλιτέχνης που με κάποια έννοια είχε σταματήσει να είναι ένας. Η ιδέα του καλλιτέχνη που παράγει ένα πρωτότυπο αντικείμενο, το αποτέλεσμα της δουλειάς του, ήταν στην πραγματικότητα σε αντίθεση με μια εποχή που χαρακτηρίζεται από εποχιακούς μετασχηματισμούς στην παραγωγή και αναπαραγωγή αντικειμένων, όταν τα μέσα μηχανικής αναπαραγωγής της εικόνας είχαν πάρει το Υπερνίκω τη δημιουργία του μοναδικού αντικειμένου Η φωτογραφία, δεδομένου ότι συνδέεται άρρηκτα με τη μαζική κουλτούρα, ήταν το καταλληλότερο μέσο για να δώσει μια εικόνα στον «αδρανές» καλλιτέχνη, καθώς ο Duchamp ενδιαφερόταν περισσότερο για τα βιομηχανικά αντικείμενα παρά τους πίνακες ζωγραφικής και που ήταν σε θέση να ανακαλύψει εκ νέου ένας τρόπος να είσαι καλλιτέχνης μετά την απώλεια του αντικειμένου της τέχνης. Η φωτογραφία επιτρέπει στον Duchamp να μετακινήσει τη φιγούρα του καλλιτέχνη στο κέντρο της εικόνας, η οποία τον οδηγεί αναπόφευκτα να την θηλυκοποιήσει: χωρίς το εικονογραφικό του έργο, ο καλλιτέχνης εκτίθεται 11
The body 2 ξαφνικά στο βλέμμα και παίρνει τη θέση που παραδοσιακά καταλαμβάνεται από τη γυναίκα, ότι εικόνα. Η απόφαση εγκατάλειψης της ζωγραφικής αναφέρεται στον τρόπο με τον οποίο ο Duchamp σκέφτηκε την ταυτότητα του καλλιτέχνη ως μια αόριστη αλλά και αμφιλεγόμενη οντότητα. Εδώ θα προσπαθήσω να εξερευνήσω τη σύλληψη αυτού του καλλιτέχνη εστιάζοντας στην άρθρωση μεταξύ της αρρενωπότητας και των μετασχηματισμών που ο Duchamp εισάγει στην εικόνα του μετά το τέλος του πίνακα. Η άρνηση του προνομιούχου ρόλου του καλλιτέχνη-ζωγράφουδημιουργού, καθώς και η υιοθέτηση μιας γυναικείας αλλαγής εγώ, δεν σημαίνει την απλή παραίτηση ενός παραδοσιακά ανδρικού ρόλου, ούτε της εξουσίας που τον συνοδεύει. Το θέμα της αρρενωπότητας του ζωγράφου που αποτυπώνει το (μεταφορικά σεξουαλικό του) σημάδι στον καμβά δεν έχει νόημα για τον Ντούκαμπ. Η παραίτηση αυτού του τύπου ταυτοποίησης ανοίγει το δρόμο για άλλες σεξουαλικές στρατηγικές. Από αυτή την άποψη, η δυνατότητα επανεξέτασης της εξουσίας του καλλιτέχνη στα σεξουαλικά και φύλα νοήματά του, μέσω μιας διαδικασίας αποδόμησης και στη συνέχεια της ανοικοδόμησης της αρρενωπότητας, αντιπροσωπεύει το κύριο ζήτημα των μετασχηματισμών που εισήγαγε ο Duchamp. Η παραίτηση μιας ταυτότητας που συνδέεται έμμεσα με τις έννοιες της κυριαρχίας (ιδιοφυΐα) και της ανδρικότητας (ο καλλιτέχνης και το μοντέλο του) είναι επομένως πολύ πιο περίπλοκη από ό, τι φαίνεται στην αρχή. Η άρνηση της Duchamp για ταυτότητα - καλλιτεχνική ή σεξουαλική - συμβατικά αρσενικό δεν σημαίνει απαραίτητα να κάνει χωρίς αρσενική εξουσία ως τέτοια. Αντιθέτως, η στρατηγική που υιοθέτησε ο Duchamp για τη σύνθεση της αόριστης και πολλαπλής εικόνας του εαυτού του ως καλλιτέχνη αποκαλύπτει μια συνεχή διαπραγμάτευση με τους ρόλους που αντιστοιχούν τόσο σε μια κλίση (ο καλλιτέχνης) όσο και σεξουαλική ταυτότητα (η υιοθέτηση από τον Rrose Sélavy ως alter ego), το οποίο δεν σημαίνει απαραίτητα την εγκατάλειψη μιας εξουσίας. Η φωτογραφία παίζει κεντρικό ρόλο σε αυτήν τη διαδικασία. Η χρήση του Duchamp - σχεδόν πάντα μέσω του Man Ray - επιβεβαιώνει την τάση του να κινείται προς αυτό που προκάλεσε την κρίση των παραδοσιακών καλλιτεχνικών μορφών. Ο Duchamp χρησιμοποιεί τη φωτογραφία για να συνθέσει την εικόνα του, αλλά προσέχει να μην γίνει ο ίδιος φωτογράφος, προτιμώντας να αφήσει τον Man Ray στο καθήκον του. Προτιμά να αφήσει στον Man Ray το καθήκον της λήψης φωτογραφιών, σε μια εποχή που ο Αμερικανός καλλιτέχνης ακονίζει τις ικανότητές του στην εμπορική φωτογραφία Ωστόσο, ο Duchamp χρησιμοποιεί τη φωτογραφία με παράδοξο τρόπο: εάν στην πραγματικότητα αυτή η τεχνική μπορεί να φαίνεται η πιο κατάλληλη για να διορθώσει την ταυτότητα του προσώπου που απεικονίζεται, παρέχοντας απτή απόδειξη της ύπαρξής του, ο Duchamp το χρησιμοποιεί αντίθετα για να χάσει τα ίχνη του. Η ταυτότητα που αναδύεται από το σύνολο των φωτογραφικών 12
The body 2 πορτρέτων του Duchamp μεταξύ των τελευταίων δέκα και των αρχών της δεκαετίας του '20 εμφανίζεται ως ασταθής, κατακερματισμένος και ανοιχτά τεχνητός σχηματισμός. Δεν είναι τυχαίο ότι ένας σημαντικός αριθμός αυτών των «αντι-πορτραίτων» δημιουργήθηκε τα χρόνια που σηματοδοτήθηκαν από την επιλογή να εγκαταλείψουν τη ζωγραφική για να ενδιαφερθούν για τα βιομηχανικά προϊόντα. Με την ιδιότητά του ως αναπαραγώγιμου αντικειμένου, η φωτογραφία μπορεί να θεωρηθεί από κάθε άποψη ως εμπόρευμα: υπό αυτήν την έννοια, η χρήση που κάνει η Duchamp φέρνει σιωπηρά τον καλλιτέχνη πιο κοντά στη σφαίρα της ανταλλαγής εμπόρων. Στη συνάντηση μεταξύ της ελίτ κουλτούρας και της μαζικής κουλτούρας, η διαφήμιση λειτουργεί ως πρότυπο στην αναζήτηση μιας εναλλακτικής λύσης σε ένα ιδανικό καλλιτεχνικό ανδρικό μοντέλο που εμφανίζεται πλέον ξεπερασμένο. Η φωτογραφία, ειδικά στη διαφημιστική της χρήση, που βασίζεται στην επανάληψη και την απουσία της ατομικότητας των αγαθών, είναι a priori ασυμβίβαστη με την ιδιαιτερότητα του καλλιτέχνη, αλλά ακριβώς αυτή η σύμπλεξη ταυτότητας, φωτογραφίας και αγαθών χαρακτηρίζει το αρκετές εικόνες του Duchamp γύρω στη δεκαετία του 1920. Από τον δέκατο ένατο αιώνα, η μαζική κουλτούρα θεωρείται στην πραγματικότητα ως θηλυκή σφαίρα, στους αντίποδες αυτού του συμβόλου της μοναδικότητας που εκπροσωπείται από τον πρωτοπόρο καλλιτέχνη3. Η μαζική κουλτούρα αντιπροσωπεύει αυτή τη μεταβλητότητα που θα μας επιτρέψει να βγούμε από το αδιέξοδο στο οποίο η τέχνη ήταν εκείνη τη στιγμή: ακριβώς μέσω της εισαγωγής σε αυτήν την καλλιτεχνική πρακτική αυτής της αλλαγής, ο Duchamp θα είναι σε θέση να αποφύγει το παράδειγμα του προτύπου καλλιτέχνη . Η συνύπαρξη ταυτότητας, φωτογραφίας και εμπορευμάτων χαρακτηρίζει τις διάφορες εικόνες του Duchamp γύρω στο 1920. Στην αμφιθυμία τους μεταξύ ταυτότητας και καλλιτεχνικής έρευνας, μεταξύ ελίτ πολιτισμού και μαζικής κουλτούρας, μεταξύ αρρενωπότητας και θηλυκότητας, αυτές οι αυτοπροσωπείες ανοίγουν μια σειρά νέων δυνατοτήτων αναγνώρισης για τον καλλιτέχνη. Η ένταση που δημιούργησε ο Duchamp μεταξύ της έκλειψης του θέματος, που ενυπάρχει στην επανάληψη των αγαθών και της επιθυμίας που δημιουργεί ο καλλιτέχνης, ο οποίος έχει γίνει τώρα γυναίκα στην εικόνα, δοκιμάζει τους αρχαίους μύθους της καλλιτεχνικής δημιουργίας, οι οποίοι εγκαταλείπονται κατά καιρούς για να αποκατασταθεί και να ανακαλυφθεί εκ νέου.
Amelia Jones, Postmodernism and the prendering of Marcel Duchamp, Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Mass.) 1994. [↩] Το 1997 το Μουσείο Solomon R. Guggenheim στη Νέα Υόρκη φιλοξένησε μια έκθεση με τίτλο Rrose is a rrose is rrose, στην οποία οι φωτογραφίες του Duchamp που μεταμφιέστηκαν ως Rrose Sélavy συσχετίστηκαν με έργα καλλιτεχνών όπως οι Claude Cahun, Nan Goldin ή Cindy Sherman που Τόνισαν μια συγκεκριμένη ρευστότητα του είδους και των διαδικασιών αναγνώρισης μέσω 13
The body 2 της μεταμφίεσης και μιας θεατρικής εικόνας του εαυτού μας. Δείτε: Jennifer Blessing (επιμέλεια), Rrose είναι rrose είναι rrose. Gender Performance in Photography, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Νέα Υόρκη 1997 [↩] Δείτε τον Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide. Μοντερνισμός, Mass-cultre, Postmodernism, Bloomington, Indiana University Press 1986, σελ. 44-62; Tania Modleski, Αγαπώντας με εκδίκηση. Μαζική παραγωγή φαντασιώσεων για γυναίκες, Routledge, Λονδίνο 2007 [↩] ΚΑΤΗΓΟΡΙΕΣ ΑΛΦΑΔΟΜΕΝΙΚΑ, ΤΕΧΝΗ, ΒΙΒΛΙΑ TAGAVANGUARDIA, GIOVANNA ZAPPERI, MARCEL DUCHAMP, NOVECENTO, ΔΙΚΑΣΤΗΡΙΟ ΣΚΙΑ 2 απαντήσεις στην «Μεταμόρφωση του Marcel Duchamp» jacopo galimberti 19 ΟΚΤΩΒΡΙΟΥ 2014 @ 11:53 π.μ. Βιβλίο που σίγουρα θέλω να διαβάσω, αν όχι μόνο για να εκφράσω καλύτερα τις επιφυλάξεις μου, που είναι αυτές των Aillaud, Arroyo και Recalcati το 1965. Όταν ο A. Schwarz, το 1964, πούλησε μια σειρά από οκτώ αντίγραφα των έτοιμων με το σημερινό ισοδύναμο 150.000 ευρώ, πώς μπορείτε να ισχυριστείτε ότι ο Duchamp αμφισβητεί την παραδοσιακή φιγούρα του άνδρα καλλιτέχνη; Τουλάχιστον στη δεκαετία του εξήντα, ο Duchamp δεν καταλήγει ξανά στην αναπαράσταση, αλλά στην φιγούρα του που δημιουργεί αξία μετά την χειρονομία της τοποθέτησης μιας υπογραφής, δηλαδή μέσω του υψηλού επιπέδου καλωσορίσματος; Θα μπορούσατε λοιπόν να σκεφτείτε το ζήτημα του ημίγερου ως άνδρα που μπορεί να κάνει χωρίς τη γυναίκα ως ικανή να δημιουργήσει έναν κόσμο ...
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Αναζήτηση στον ιστό: Duchamp photo from man ray homosexuality
The J. Paul Getty Museum Collection Belle Haleine © Man Ray Trust ARS-ADAGP
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Belle Haleine Artist/Maker:
Man Ray (American, 1890 - 1976) Culture:
American Date:
1921 Medium:
Gelatin silver print Dimensions:
22.4 × 17.8 cm (8 13/16 × 7 in.) Copyright:
© Man Ray Trust ARS-ADAGP See more Using one of Man Ray's earliest portraits of Rrose Sélavy (Marcel Duchamp dressed as a woman) Duchamp made a label that he affixed to an empty perfume bottle to create his 1921 artwork Belle Haleine, Eau de Voilette(Beautiful Breath, Veil Water). The image of the perfume bottle appeared on the cover of the sole issue of Man Ray and Duchamp's journal New York Dada, published the winter before Man Ray left for Paris. Exhibitions
A Practical Dreamer: The Photographs of Man Ray (October 27, 1998 to October 8, 2000) The J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center (Los Angeles), October 27, 1998 to January 17, 1999 Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), April 2 to June 25, 2000 Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), July 13 to October 8, 2000
Gaze: Portraiture after Ingres (October 30, 2009 to April 5, 2010) Norton Simon Museum (Pasadena), October 30, 2009 to April 5, 2010
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The body 2 Convergences: Selected Photographs from the Permanent Collection (July 8 to October 19, 2014) The J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center (Los Angeles), July 8 to October 19, 2014
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Man Ray fotografeert Marcel Duchamp in 1925
Serendipity By Lorna Owen Tales of accidental inventions are enormously crowd-pleasing. Many of these stories tend to revolve around one scientist or another who stumbled upon a discovery having bungled what he had originally sought, such as finding the color mauve while looking to cure malaria. But here’s a story that has nothing to do with bubbling formulas over a Bunsen burner but has to do with art and a mouse.
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The body 2 Man Ray, the great Surrealist artist, preferred painting to photography. But he knew that the advertisements and the
portraits he shot of socialites, writers and other artists gained him fame, established his reputation, and kept him in white flannel pants, Breton shirts, and driving the sports cars that he favored. So when the beautiful American model Lee Miller came to Paris in 1929, it was timely for both. She wanted to swap her position in front of the camera for a place behind it; he wanted to swap his time developing his negatives for painting. Although their first encounter was rather rocky—she boldly presented herself with the demand that he teach her photography, he said, no thanks, he wasn’t a teacher; she said she would stay with him, he told her he was on his way to Biarritz for the summer; she said, “So am I,” and she followed him—by autumn, back in Paris, Man Ray and Lee Miller were in love. They stayed together for the next three years, as mentor and student, as lovers and as collaborators. He showed her everything he knew, he taught her all about light, how it hits diverse surfaces, how to retouch photographs, whispering each trade secret. And while he sat at his easel, she worked in his darkroom. One day she was in the midst of printing, when a mouse ran across her foot. Startled she screamed and turned on the light, completely forgetting about Man Ray’s negatives, nude studies of a singer who was no longer available for another sitting, hanging in the development tank. Lee immediately called to Man and told him what had happened. He charged into the darkroom and without saying a word, he snapped off the light. In hopes of saving the negatives he tossed them into the fixer, only to look at them much later. To both his and Lee’s amazement, the interruption of the developing process caused an unexpected effect to occur. Lee described it like this: “The unexposed parts of the negative, which had been the black background, had been exposed by this sharp light that had been turned on and they had developed and came right up to the edge of the white, nude body. But the background and the image couldn’t heal together, so there was a line left which [Man] called a ‘solarization.’” [1] Also known as the Sabatier Effect—named for Sabatier, the nineteenth century doctor who had noted the process in 1862 but with limited exploration—Solarization became ‘the hallmark’ of Man Ray’s and Lee Miller’s artistic symbiosis. They would continue to experiment with the technique, trying to find ways to control it, to perfect it, influencing generations of photographers to come. It can surely be said, photography was raised to fine art thanks to a mouse.
[1]Mark Haworth-Booth, The Art of Lee Miller, 2007. Other sources: Carolyn Burke, Lee Miller: A Life, 2007; Lee Miller Archives. (Image Lee Miller by Man Ray, ca. 1930, Solarized gelatin silver print, reproduced for non-commercial use only.)
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Μετάφραση ΕΥΤΥΧΗΣ ΣΥΓΚΥΡΙΑ Από τη Lorna Owen Οι ιστορίες των τυχαίων εφευρέσεων είναι εξαιρετικά ευχάριστες. Πολλές από αυτές τις ιστορίες τείνουν να περιστρέφονται γύρω από έναν επιστήμονα ή έναν άλλο που σκοντάφτει σε μια ανακάλυψη που είχε ανακαλύψει αυτό που είχε αρχικά ζητήσει, όπως η εύρεση του μωβ χρώματος ενώ προσπαθούσε να θεραπεύσει την ελονοσία. Αλλά εδώ είναι μια ιστορία που δεν έχει καμία σχέση με τις φόρμουλες ανάδευσης πάνω από έναν καυστήρα Bunsen αλλά έχει να κάνει με την τέχνη και το ποντίκι. Ο Man Ray, ο μεγάλος σουρεαλιστής καλλιτέχνης, προτίμησε τη ζωγραφική από τη φωτογραφία. Αλλά ήξερε ότι οι διαφημίσεις και τα πορτρέτα που έβγαλε από σοσιαλιστές, συγγραφείς και άλλους καλλιτέχνες τον κέρδισαν. Φήμη. Καθιέρωσαν τη φήμη του και τον κράτησαν με λευκά παντελόνια, μπλουζάκια και να οδηγεί τα σπορ αυτοκίνητα που του άρεσε. Έτσι, όταν το όμορφο αμερικανικό μοντέλο Lee Miller ήρθε στο Παρίσι το 1929, ήταν καιρό και για τα δύο. Ήθελε να αλλάξει τη θέση της μπροστά από την κάμερα για ένα μέρος πίσω της. ήθελε να αλλάξει το χρόνο του αναπτύσσοντας τα αρνητικά του για ζωγραφική. Παρόλο που η πρώτη τους συνάντηση ήταν αρκετά βραχώδης - παρουσίασε τολμηρά την απαίτηση να διδάξει τη φωτογραφία της, είπε, όχι ευχαριστώ, δεν ήταν δάσκαλος. είπε ότι θα έμενε μαζί του, της είπε ότι πήγαινε στο Μπιαρίτζ για το καλοκαίρι. είπε, «Είμαι εγώ», και τον ακολούθησε - μέχρι το φθινόπωρο, πίσω στο Παρίσι, ο Man Ray και ο Lee Miller ερωτεύτηκαν. Έμειναν μαζί για τα επόμενα τρία χρόνια, ως μέντορας και μαθητής, ως εραστές και ως συνεργάτες. Της έδειξε ό, τι ήξερε, της έμαθε όλα για το φως, πώς χτυπάει σε διαφορετικές επιφάνειες, πώς να ρετουσάρετε φωτογραφίες, ψιθυρίζοντας κάθε εμπορικό μυστικό. Και ενώ καθόταν στο καβαλέτο του, δούλευε στο σκοτεινό του δωμάτιο. Μια μέρα ήταν στη μέση της εκτύπωσης, όταν ένα ποντίκι έτρεχε στο πόδι της. Με έκπληξη φώναξε και άνοιξε το φως, ξεχνώντας εντελώς τα αρνητικά του Man Ray, γυμνές μελέτες για έναν τραγουδιστή που δεν ήταν πλέον διαθέσιμος για άλλη συνεδρίαση, που κρέμεται στο ταμπλό ανάπτυξης. Ο Λι κάλεσε αμέσως τον Μαν και του είπε τι είχε συμβεί. Φορτώθηκε στο σκοτεινό δωμάτιο και χωρίς να πει ούτε λέξη, έσπασε το φως. Με την ελπίδα να σώσει τα αρνητικά, τα πέταξε στον διορθωτή, για να τα κοιτάξει πολύ αργότερα. Προς έκπληξη τόσο του όσο και του Lee, η διακοπή της αναπτυσσόμενης διαδικασίας προκάλεσε ένα απροσδόκητο αποτέλεσμα. Ο Lee το περιέγραψε ως εξής: «Τα μη εκτεθειμένα μέρη του αρνητικού, που ήταν το μαύρο φόντο, είχαν εκτεθεί από αυτό το έντονο φως που είχε ανάψει και είχαν αναπτυχθεί και ήρθαν μέχρι την άκρη του λευκού, γυμνού σώματος . Αλλά το φόντο και η εικόνα δεν μπορούσαν να επουλωθούν μαζί, οπότε υπήρχε μια γραμμή που ο [Άνθρωπος] ονόμασε «σολάρισμα». »[1] Επίσης 19
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γνωστό ως το Sabatier Effect - το όνομα για τον Sabatier, τον γιατρό του 19ου αιώνα που είχε σημειώσει η διαδικασία το 1862 αλλά με περιορισμένη εξερεύνηση - η Solarization έγινε «το σήμα κατατεθέν» της καλλιτεχνικής συμβίωσης του Man Ray και του Lee Miller. Θα συνέχιζαν να πειραματίζονται με την τεχνική, προσπαθώντας να βρουν τρόπους να την ελέγξουν, να την τελειοποιήσουν, επηρεάζοντας τις γενιές των επόμενων φωτογράφων.
https://mouseinterrupted.wordpress.com/2012/04/22/serendipity/
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The Surrealists
Back row, left to right: Man Ray, Jean Arp, Yves Tanguy, André Breton Front row: Tristan Tzara, Salvador Dali, Paul Elourd, Max Ernst, Rene Crevel
But who was the hottest?
André Breton (left) talks to René Crevel (second from right) while Salvador Dali (second from left) and Paul Eluard (right) look on.
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AndrÊ Breton 1896 – 1966
Breton was a French writer, poet, and surrealist theorist, and is best known as the principal founder of Surrealism. His writings include the Surrealist Manifesto of 1924. Anxious to combine the themes of personal transformation found in the works of Arthur Rimbaud with the politics of Karl Marx, Breton joined the French Communist Party in 1927, from which he was expelled in 1933. During this time, he survived mostly off the sale of paintings from his art gallery. Under Breton's direction, Surrealism became a European movement that influenced all domains of art, and called into question the origin of human understanding and human perceptions of things and events.
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Yes, I know that there is something Oscar Wilde/Stephen Fry/Alban Berg about his appearance.
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Salvador Dali 1904-1989
DalĂ, best known for the striking and bizarre images in his surrealist work. His painterly skills are often attributed to the influence of Renaissance masters. His best-known work, The Persistence of Memory, was completed in 1931. DalĂ's expansive artistic repertoire includes film, sculpture, and photography, in collaboration with a range of artists in a variety of media. DalĂ was highly imaginative, and also had an affinity for partaking in unusual and grandiose behavior, in order to draw attention to himself. This sometimes irked those who loved his art as much as it annoyed his critics, since his eccentric manner sometimes drew more public attention than his artwork.
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Philippe Soupault 1897 - 1990 French writer and poet, novelist, critic, and political activist. He was characterized by the Dadaist style and later initiated the Surrealist style with André Breton. Soupault initiated the periodical Littérature together with the writers Breton and Louis Aragon in Paris during 1919, which, for many, dates the beginnings of Surrealism .
Louis Aragon 1897-1982 Having been involved in Dadaism from 1919 to 1924, he became a founding member of Surrealism in 1924, with André Breton and Philippe Soupault under the pen-name "Aragon". In the 1920s, Aragon became a fellow traveller of the French Communist Party along with several other surrealists, and joined the Party in January 1927.
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The body 2 Paul Éluard 1895-1952
At age 16, after a happy childhood, Éluard contracted tuberculosis and interrupted his studies. He met Gala, whom he married in 1917. Around this time Éluard wrote his first poems. He was particularly inspired by Walt Whitman. In 1918, Jean Paulhan “discovered” him and introduced him to André Breton and Louis Aragon. This was his introduction to the Surrealist movement.
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RenĂŠ Crevel 1900-1935
Crevel was born in Paris, he had a traumatic religious upbringing. At the age of fourteen, during a difficult stage of his life, his father committed suicide by hanging himself. Crevel studied English at the University of Paris. He met AndrĂŠ Breton and joined the surrealist movement in 1921, from which he would be excluded in October 1923 due to Crevel's homosexuality and Breton's belief that the movement had been corrupted.
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The body 2 Man Ray
Man Ray was an American artist who spent most of his career in Paris, France. Perhaps best described simply as a modernist, he was a significant contributor to both the Dada and Surrealist movements, although his ties to each were informal. Best known in the art world for his avant-garde photography, Man Ray produced major works in a variety of media and considered himself a painter above all. He was also a renowned fashion and portrait photographer. He is noted for his photograms, which he renamed "rayographs" after himself.
My ratingsBreton: 8 Crevel:7.5 Eluard: 7 Aragon: 7 Dali: 6.5 Soupault: 6 Man Ray: 5
Readymades and Maintenance Labor of Marcel Duchamp
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Michele Casamassima (1900-1945) 2012, oil on canvas, 23Ă—18 cm
Michele Casamassima (1900-1945)
Helen Molesworth Work Avoidance: The Everyday Life of Marcel Duchamp's Readymades* Deep down I'm enormously lazy. I like living, breathing better than working. (Marcel Duchamp) A hat rack and coatrack to hang things on, a comb to straighten one's hair, a cover to protect a typewriter from dust, a urinal for peeing in, a rack to dry bottles, a shovel to remove snow. Almost all of Duchamp's readymades could have been found in an average home or store; they are mundane objects of everyday life. Sharing the attribute quotidian, the readymades are also bound together by the processes of maintenance. [1] They are objects for cleaning, hanging, storing, drying, preening, and peeing: objects whose purpose is to aid in selfpresentation, objects that allow homes and offices to function. They are the unsung aids that allow us to do the work of maintaining house and body, so that we are better prepared to do our other work, like making art, for instance. But this was not the situation of these objects in
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The body 2 Duchamp's studio: the hat rack was suspended from the ceiling; the coatrack was nailed to the floor; the typewriter cover protected nothing but air; and the urinal stood alone, inverted, forever unused (fig. 1).
Fig. 1. Marcel Duchamp. One of four views of his studio, 33 West 67th Street, New York, 1917. This stalled image of the readymades does not come from museums or history books. It is found in photographs of the readymades taken in Duchamp's New York studio. There we see the readymades installed, not on pedestals or in vitrines, but positioned (strategically, in a manner that evokes furniture and objets d'art) around an armchair-a coatrack nailed to the floor in front of a bicycle wheel atop a kitchen stool. There is a photograph in the background of which we spy the urinal suspended from a doorjamb; in the foreground a shovel dangles from the ceiling. More photographs: a film-noirish one of the shadows cast by an off-kilter hat rack; a grainy image of the studio turned into a maze by Duchamp's Sculpture for Traveling 1918), a bathing cap cut into strips and pinned across the room at various intervals. That Duchamp thought enough of these photographs to include them in his retrospective BoĂŽte-envalise (1941), and then to color them, their sepia tones rendering them "historical," is not surprising. During the initial "invention" of the readymades his studio was their major site of reception.[2] Arguably, the readymade has done more to reorganize aesthetic categories than any other twentieth-century art practice. One of its many ramifications was a disavowal of an ontological definition of art. These machine-made objects, first chosen by Duchamp and subsequently installed in museums and galleries (or not, as was the case of Fountain at the 1917 Independents Exhibition), made it clear that the idea of "Art" was produced contextually. Likewise, it has been argued that the inclusion of language, combined with Duchamp's self-conscious eschewing of art's (presumed) unmediated visuality, foregrounded the way that meaning itself is actively produced by viewing and speaking subjects, interpellated as they are by a variety of institutional positions. The readymade was a linchpin in formulating what are now familiar discussions of the contingency, not only of art, but of meaning itself. It was a lever that pried open art (and art history) to debates about meaning and context, particularly the question of how art's meaning is derived in large measure from its institutional and linguistic contexts.[3] However, such arguments have traditionally ignored the content of the readymades. Similarly, these debates have limited the field of art's institutions to the gallery and the museum, leaving out other sites that help to construct art's meaning.[4] Given the readymades' registration of the consequence of context, the photographs from Duchamp's studio, suggesting as they do an expanded idea of institutions, have remained sorely underexamined.
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The body 2 Fig. 2a. Christine Frederick. Diagram from The New Housekeeping (1917). Diagram showing badly arranged equipment, which makes confused intersecting chains of steps, in either preparing or clearing away a meal. (A-preparing; B-clearing) These studio photographs do not show the (glorified) artist at work. Instead, we see ambiguous rooms filled with curious objects. Ambiguous because these rooms are not only Duchamp's studio, they are also his home. If Duchamp's work can be used to understand that art's meaning is bound to its institutions, then these photographs broaden the understanding of what those institutions are. If we understand BoĂŽte-en- valise to be a self-staged museological retrospective, then his inclusion of these photographs of the readymades installed in his home points to the home (be it the artist's or the collector's) as an institution of art on a par with the museum or gallery.[5]
Fig. 2b. Christine Frederick. Diagram from The New Housekeeping (1917). Diagram showing proper arrangement of equipment, which makes a simple chains of steps, in either preparing or clearing away a meal. (A-preparing; B-clearing) These photographs provide us with a context to view the readymades, but one characterized by blurred boundaries. The home, traditionally conceived of as a space of rest, is here crossed with the studio, historically understood as the primary site of artistic work. Adding to this confusion is yet another smudged edge, because work (making art in the studio) and leisure (not working, which takes place at home, or art making as a form of leisure) are brought into extreme proximity. The lack of a hard-and-fast divide between work and leisure is emphasized by these images of functional maintenance objects-objects designed to aid in the cleaning and tidying up of places and people-rendered deliberately dysfunctional. Duchamp's ambivalence toward work did not only relate to artistic production, but he resisted the labor of housework as well. In these muddy waters public and private have swirled together, as the ideas of home and studio, work and leisure penetrate one another.[6] The interpenetration of these elements of human experience constitutes the everyday as theorized by the sociologist Henri Lefebvre. In The Critique of Everyday Life he argues that work, leisure, and private life form an inseparable triumvirate, within which resides the everyday. From this seemingly impenetrable totality, and current conditions of late capital make the reification of everyday life even more pronounced, Lefebvre desires to extract what is "living" from the condition of "alienation."[7] The readymades, particularly as photographed in Duchamp's studio, make manifest Lefebvre's three attributes of the everyday: "work" is registered by the studio; "leisure" is doubly present in the ideological functions or role of art; home, and "private life," is suggested in that the studio is a domestic space as well as a work space. Likewise, in Duchamp's work there is a latent acknowledgment that domestic space, historically conceived of as a space of rest or leisure (for men), is always already a site of work, specifically the work of maintenance.
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Fig. 3. Unknown photographer. Marcel Duchamp's Sculpture for Traveling, in his New York studio, 1918. In his critique of the everyday, Lefebvre sought not simply "entertainment" or "relaxation" but the articulation of different forms of knowledge, knowledge that could aid in the potential and/or intermittent process of "disalienation." It is not in leisure as such where a critique of capitalism is to be found. Rather, a critique may emerge in those moments when the relations between elements of the everyday are made evident or challenged. Duchamp's presentation and arrangement of the readymades exhibit a desire to foil the functionality of these objects, whose usefulness resides in their ability to aid domestic and maintenance labor. Yet in foiling work, the readymades do not offer leisure as work's simple antithesis (nor do they offer art as pure leisure). Instead, their placement in the home/studio tangles the categories of both work and leisure. This presentation of nonwork and leisure has a social and historical context larger than Duchamp's studio, for Duchamp's refusal of work (both maintenance and traditional means of artistic labor) happened alongside one of the most profound shifts in twentieth-century conceptions of work: Taylorism. Just as the photographs of the readymades in Duchamp's studio have not been adequately theorized, the sociohistorical conditions within which the readymades came into being in New York are absent from much Duchamp literature.[8] As Duchamp's work of this period appears concerned with the terms of work, an examination of the contemporaneous shift in the practice, conception, and representation of work seems necessary.[9] The publication of Frederick Winslow Taylor's Principles of Scientific Management (1911) profoundly changed industrialized labor. Taylorism, as "scientific management" came to be called, consists of breaking down a work operation into its component parts through a rigorous system of monitoring the time each physical movement in the work process takes. It was designed to eliminate wasted motion by manual workers, hence wasted work time, to increase their output. This required the development (and the subsequent consolidation) of the managerial class, workers whose job is to monitor, represent, and then alter work procedures, without themselves participating in those tasks. This shift institutionalized the inequitable relations between different types of labor (manual and "mental") and their concomitant "types" of workers.[10] Taylorism was responsible for the assembly line (perfected by Henry Ford), which valorized "streamlined" labor and above all efficiency. The ultimate goal of Taylorism's quest for efficient labor was increased profits, as opposed to a shorter or more comfortable workweek for workers. A lesser-known example of Taylorism's appeal is the vigor with which the Domestic Economy movement adopted it. Although the scientific management expert Christine Frederick is not well known today outside of women's studies, her impact on kitchens across the United States rivals her Taylorist counterpart in industrial production, Henry Ford.[11] In 1913 she published The New Housekeeping after it had been serialized and widely read in the popular women's magazine, Ladies' Home Journal, of which she was an editor. [12] The book was the first in a genre of helpful hint manuals that applied the principles of scientific management to the North American household. In the opening pages, Frederick is sitting and mending while she overhears her husband and a colleague discussing 'efficiency' or 'scientific management.' Frederick's first response is skeptical: "In a factory the workers do just one thing ... and it is easy to standardize one set of operations. But in a home there are dozens, yes, hundreds, of tasks requiring totally different knowledge and movements."[13] Her resistance is soon worn down by scientific management's promise to reduce waste. She exclaims: "I won't have you
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The body 2 men doing all the great and noble things! I'm going to find out how these experts conduct investigations, and all about it, and then apply it to my factory, my business, my home." [14] This equation of domestic to factory space is extraordinary, especially as there is no profit to be made in housework. (And it is homologous to Duchamp's studio-as-home, home-as-studio environment.) Despite the apparent contradictions between factory and domestic work, the "factorization" of the kitchen went on unhindered, accompanied and aided by the mechanization and electrification of domestic space.[15] Frederick, like all good scientific managers, was highly averse to wasting time and effort. She streamlined women's work, further developing the continuous work surface, and reorganized the kitchen into "properly" arranged workstations. Although she extolled the virtues of a mechanized kitchen, she was quick to point out that she believed "strongly that women's liberation from drudgery lies not so much in tools as in her own improved methods of work."[16] The real issue for Frederick was the standardization of housework. It should become modern, routinized, and efficient. "The ideal home life of today," she writes in a manifesto-style language not dissimilar to that of her avant-garde artist contemporaries, is "unhampered by traditions of the past."[17] This relation to domestic space is curious. Ideologically speaking, the modern industrial era has figured domestic space as a haven from public spaces, a place of rest and respite (for men) from the spaces of work.[18] Actually, the home has always been a space of work and production. One of the crises signified by the adoption of scientific management by domestic science was the changing status of domestic space as a site of production. At the turn of the century, the production of such daily goods as bread, soap, and clothes was removed from the home because these staples were now mass-produced.[19] Scientific management's application in the home insisted that domestic space was a site of work and industry, even though the home had ceased to be a site of material production. Domestic economists discussed work that had become, as a result of the displacement of material production, increasingly hard to represent: the "women's work that is never done"– cleaning, cooking, and child-rearing. They emphasized the perpetual labor of maintenance, as opposed to forms of work that result in a discrete object.
Fig. 4. Marcel Duchamp. Installation of the "mile of string" for the exhibition "First Papers of Surrealism," Art of This Century, New York, October 14-November 7, 1942. Philadelphia Museum of Art. In Bodies and Machines, the literary critic Mark Seltzer argues that Taylorism not only altered the work process (by making it more "efficient") but also invented new forms of work. He contends that "the real innovation of Taylorization becomes visible in the incorporation of the representation of the work process into the work process itself–or, better, the incorporation of the representation of the work process as the work process itself."[20] The representation of labor–graphs, flow charts–became a form of labor in and of itself, with manual laborers represented by their newly established managers. We can see clearly the irony of a Taylorized household, as women were asked to represent, manage, and alter their own manual labor. Given the virtual invisibility of housework and maintenance labor, the difficulty, that is, of acknowledging maintenance activities as work, representing them proved to be a rather peculiar task. (After all, a clean house is clean inasmuch as the labor of cleaning is no longer present; the typed office memo is not thought of as the "real" work, its content is.) The domestic economist Lillian Gilbreth described her elaborate system for generating representations of the domestic laborer's movement (fig.2a, fig.2b): To make this, the observer follows the worker around with a ball of twine, measuring the distance traveled. She then makes a plan of the work place, placing pins at whatever points the worker has turned. She then measures the lengths of twine to scale and winds it around
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The body 2 the pins to mark the path traveled. A child may follow Mother around as she clears the table and gets the dishes ready for stacking, unwinding the ball of string as he goes. A sketch of the dining room and pantry is then made and her path traced by the string, pins being inserted, as suggested, at the turns.[21] Gilbreth demonstrates that the representation of work has in fact become part of the work process, as making this diagram is an additional labor to the labor of washing the dishes. This new labor occupies the same space-the kitchen, the pantry-as it represents such acts as a woman carrying dirty dishes. (There are no helpful hints, however, for how to leave the kitchen to make this diagram.) Yet one cannot help but see this image of a little boy making a cat's cradle of his mother's work, all in the name of rationalized work, as slightly amusing, inadvertently playful, as it delayed or postponed the work it was meant to represent and make more efficient.
Fig. 5. Marcel Duchamp. Trébuchet (Trap), 1917. It is precisely this delay or postponement of labor that runs throughout Duchamp's work, adept as he is at isolating moments when work is represented and foiled simultaneously. Think of the difference between Gilbreth's string-filled room designed to help systematize and streamline kitchen work and Duchamp's Sculpture for Traveling (fig. 3). The studio-the place where the work of making art is supposed to happen–is transformed into a maze or labyrinth obstructing or delaying the artist's ability to make art. Similarly, in 1942 Duchamp installed a mile of string, in the exhibition "First Papers of Surrealism" (fig. 4). At the opening visitors found "the premises already inhabited by a dozen boys and girls in athletic gear, kicking and passing balls and skipping rope and chasing each other around through the barriers of string. If anyone objected, the children had been instructed to say that 'Mr. Duchamp told us we could play here.'[22] By stymieing the "work" of looking at art, Duchamp transformed the gallery into a version of his mazelike studio, a place where humor and play were encouragedwork discouraged. In both instances Duchamp represented forms of labor (or alternately leisure), be they making or looking at art, but he did so by disallowing such labors and/or leisures to take place. We must remember that motion-study diagrams were designed not only to represent maintenance labor; their ultimate goal, in the name of efficiency, was to eliminate unnecessary steps. Taylorism's desire to eliminate wasted time meant that it often entered the home as a series of "step-saving" devices. Advertisements and helpful hint manuals told women that they were going to experience an exponential rise in "free time" for "leisure" activities as a result of these "revolutionary" domestic changes and "ground-breaking" mechanical innovations.[23] But the image of the efficient, streamlined kitchen with its Taylorized worker/manager performing well-appointed, rationalized duties in a newly systematized manner and space could not be farther from the photographs of the readymades in Duchamp's studio. In Duchamp's home/studio the readymades were arranged in a way that foiled work, creating unnecessary steps. In other words, the readymades were nothing if not willfully inefficient. Enter Trébuchet (1917) (fig. 5). Duchamp recalled Trébuchet as a "real coat hanger that I wanted someone to put on the wall and hang my things on but I never did come to that-so it was on the floor and I would kick it every minute, every time I went out-I got crazy about it and I said the Hell with it, if it wants to stay there and bore me, I'll nail it down."[24] Trébuchet presents not a step saved but a step wasted, a distraction. Or, it was a perverse "step saver," for when one trips one "misses" a step, saving it in another regard.[25] Trebuchet is a visual pun, but more important, it is a physical set-up for slapstick humor. Seeing it there (like a banana peel), Duchamp and the guests in his studio might
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The body 2 have watched in humorous anticipation, waiting for someone to fall. There are other readymades like this: a hat rack suspended from the ceiling ... go ahead, hang your hat on it; you could pluck one of those marble sugar cubes from Why Not Sneeze Rrose Selavy? (1921) for your coffee (like a plastic fly in a bowl of soup); and if a man pees in the Fountain his urine will drip on him.[26] We have already seen the confusion between the spaces of work and leisure in the photographs of the readymades in Duchamp's studio. We can also see that the arrangements of the readymades interject an element of play among a set of otherwise fairly banal functional objects. Additionally, the objects blur the boundaries between home and work (typewriter cover, comb, shovel) in that their functions are all bound to the labor of maintenance, a stratum of labor structural both to the space of the home and more traditionally conceived work spaces. Not only has Duchamp blurred the traditional boundaries of work and leisure in the studio, but the readymades are functional objects rendered playful through their humorous appeal to slapstick. While Marxism offers us the most sophisticated theoretical account of labor, it has also concerned itself with work's dialectical other, play or leisure. For many Marxist thinkers play has an idealistic, almost utopian dimension, in that it is posited to exist outside the rules and regulations of everyday life. Herbert Marcuse has focused more of his philosophical energies on play than his Marxist contemporaries. He writes that play is a dimension of freedom, a "self-distraction, relaxing oneself, forgetting oneself and recuperating oneself." [27] If for Marcuse play is a dimension of freedom, then he enables play to serve as a critique of society, because of its position outside the conventions of the everyday. One hesitates to instrumentalize play in this way, turning it into a philosophical lever in the service of some utopian vision, but in Duchamp's slapstick-infused readymades, the idea and the actuality of play offer possibilities for examining the tangled knot of work and leisure in everyday life. In 1913 Duchamp jotted a note to himself: "Can one make works which are not works of 'art'?" Can one make something that has no function, that performs no work, that is not beholden to a purpose, even that of art? Something not beholden to leisure either? In such a formulation, art and play exist in an analogously tenuous realm of (im)possibility. Marcuse states it thus: "On the whole play is necessarily related to an Other which is its source and goal, and this Other is already preconceived as labor."[28] But, if play can only be seen in relation to work, and it is seen as the lesser component of this dialectic in that play is enabled or made possible by work ("its source and goal"), then play, in its officially sanctioned role as nonwork, becomes a form of work. (One need only think of the regimentation of "the weekend" or each summer's obligatory Disney movie.) Lefebvre argues that one ramification of this interdependence between labor and play is that "there can be alienation in leisure just as in work."[29] Duchamp attempted to use play, in the form of slapstick, not as a reprieve from work but as a means to stop work. This is where play's potential utopian or critical dimension (a utopia free from labor and a critique of capitalism's dependence on alienated labor for profit) can be seen most fully. Another playful intervention into everyday life is Door, 11 Rue Larrey (1927) (fig. 6). In Duchamp's Paris apartment he built a door "which served two doorways (between the studio and the bedroom, and the studio and the bathroom). The door could be both open and closed at the same time, thus providing Duchamp with a household paradox as well as a practical space-saving device."[30] Herein lies the rub. Imagine any one of Duchamp's readymades in the domestic utopia of Christine Frederick or Lillian Gilbreth, objects lying in wait to disrupt business as usual. They are an anathema to the logic of Taylorized, rationalized, and rigidly systematized domestic/work space. The door is described as a "practical space-saving device," yet it belongs more to a set for a bedroom farce than to the streamlined, efficient kitchen spaces envisioned by Gilbreth and Frederick. Duchamp's rooms-whether filled with string, prank doors, or readymades provoking pratfalls-all confound the logic of work and efficiency. Instead, when Duchamp altered the purposes of both rooms and objects, to provoke play rather than work, laughter becomes their new "function."
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Fig. 6. Marcel Duchamp. Door, II rue Larrey, 1927. In his quirky account of comedy, Laughter, the philosopher Henri Bergson explains the comic effect of slapstick: "Through a lack of elasticity, through absentmindedness and a kind of physical obstinacy, as a result, in fact, of rigidity or of momentum, the muscles continue to perform the same movement when the circumstances call for something else."[31] Laughter, he reckons, comes from "something mechanical encrusted on the living."[32] Duchamp's readymades (re)articulate the working body as humorous. Bodies that continue old motions when new ones are called for and bodies that have become mechanic, routinized, or Taylorized are transformed in Duchamp's studio by his arrangement of the readymades. Laughter is both provoked by the involuntary (tripping) and is itself involuntary, as laughter occurs as an involuntary response to a person or thing not working (properly). Its involuntary nature, the way in which laughter places us outside ourselves, recalls Marcuse's definition of play as that which distracts us from ourselves.[33] Play and laughter do not require us to "be" ourselves but offer a momentary release from identities so often bound up in our daily work and labor. The readymades are thus an anti-Taylorist gesture. They resist the rationalization of domestic and work spaces, first by refusing the distinction between them and second by offering disruption and laughter, physical expenditure in the name of humor, rather than work. Their antifunctionality is not solely about their stymied use and exchange value as commodities but has a more literal component. They are antifunctional as in antiwork: they resist their intended, mandated, standardized use. Similarly the readymades resist the working subject, offering instead the involuntary, distracted subject of play. To paraphrase Marcuse, as this subject, one has the potential to be self-distracted, relaxed, and, perhaps most important, forgetful of oneself. Through slapstick, the readymades focus on and call into question "normal" maintenance operations- keeping the house tidy by hanging things up and putting them away, in their "proper" place (the bottle rack, the coatrack, the hat rack). They disrupt, even refuse, rationalized or habitual movement through space. They help, in other words, to bring the relations of the everyday into focus for us and suggest that experiences of humor may be constitutive of the knowledge of the everyday. By offering a space and time for not working, the readymades offer a space for being "outside oneself." The use of slapstick to call forth humor with this kind of effect saturated early cinema; Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin readily come to mind. In Keaton's One Week (1920), he builds a prefabricated home that refuses to stand erect and is finally run over by a train. Slapstick renders Keaton's labor, supposedly made easier by the readymade aspect of the house, futile and overwhelmingly inefficient. Chaplin's epic Modern Times ( 1936) used slapstick to expose the effects of rationalized work on the body. In the opening scenes, Chaplin leaves work, his jerking body, continuing his assembly-line task, literally screwing everything in sight (the foreman's nose, the buttons on women's dresses). Yet lest we think that slapstick cinema is merely a diversion, Lefebvre argues of Chaplin: "The secret of his comic powers lies not in his body, but in the relation of this body to something else: a social relation with the material world and the social world."[34] Likewise, the readymades are not funny in and of themselves, but encounters (here imagined) with them are, by virtue of their ability to transform everyday movements into slapstick. Their humor comes from what such encounters (real or
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The body 2 not) are able to make evident about the material and social relations between work and leisure. If Chaplin used slapstick to represent the toll of rationalized work on the body, then Duchamp used slapstick in a prohibitive manner. The readymades stop you from moving, from working. If we remember Seltzer's formulation that the innovation of Taylorism is the representation of work as work, then Duchamp is a perverse Taylorist-armed with slapstick provocations instead of stopwatches and diagrams. The readymades, too, represent maintenance labor, albeit as stalled, humorous, and impossible. But the futility of maintenance labor is perhaps precisely what should be acknowledged: a woman's work is never done. Lefebvre observes that "there is a certain obscurity in the very concept of everyday life." He asks, "Where is it to be found? In work or in leisure? In family life and in moments 'lived' outside of culture?"[35] He suggests that family life has become separate from productive life and that leisure has become as fragmented as labor. Ultimately, he concludes that the three constitutive elements of the everyday-work, private life, and leisure-have become discrete, alienated from one another. Yet Duchamp attempts, through humor and slapstick, to hold these three elements together. The readymades show that these categories are not discrete in experience but rather in ideology, for Duchamp's practice presents domestic or private life as neither outside nor separate from the category of work. He uses leisure, in the form of slapstick and play, to expose domestic space as filled with work (be it maintenance work or art work) and in turn transforms that work into leisure or play. In the end, the readymades propose a space filled with neither work nor leisure; instead, they offer a kind of laziness. Characteristic of the readymades' complex relation to both work and leisure, laziness operates as a third term, triangulating work and leisure, offering a criticism of both. Duchamp's laziness was the subject of many of his contemporaries' responses to visiting his studio. Robert Lebel described Duchamp's studio as "a large room with a bathtub in the center which Duchamp used for his frequent ablutions, and a rope an arm's length away which allowed him to open the door without getting up."[36] Georgia O'Keeffe, reminiscing about meeting Duchamp in his New York studio, recalled one of his domestic work stoppages: "it seems there was a lot of something else in the middle of the room and the dust everywhere was so thick that it was hard to believe. I was so upset over the dusty place that the next day I wanted to go over and clean it up."[37] This refusal to clean was memorialized in Dust Breeding (1920), a section of the Large Glass photographed by Man Ray after it had accumulated several months' worth of dust. But nowhere is Duchamp's laziness more evident than in the readymades, where he produced art with the least effort possible–buying it already made. For Taylor, Duchamp's dabblings with play and laziness- his experiments with not working-had a name: Duchamp was soldiering. Taylor described soldiering as "under working, that is, deliberately working slowly so as to avoid doing a full day's work."[38] For Taylor soldiering had two causes: first, the "natural instinct and tendency of men to take it easy"; and second (considered to be more dangerous), "intricate second thought and reasoning caused by their relations with other men." Taylor called this "systematic soldiering."[39] Workers have two modes of foiling the factory: laziness exhibited in the form of individual soldiering and organized resistance in the form of strikes. Taylorism proposed to eliminate both. Striking and soldiering are extremely different critiques of work, one organized, systematic, and social; the other a private rebellion (refusing to dust). But in maintenance work in the home there can be no strike. Duchamp's readymades operate more closely to the second form of soldiering; they are not a strike per se, so much as they are a work slowdown. They temporarily stop or stall activities such as cleaning and tidying by turning housework into slapstick. Likewise, the studio as a place where art is made is suffused with a kind of laziness. Laziness is mostly figured as a parasitical form of work avoidance. It runs the risk of being aristocratic (not working because others work for you) or primitivist (native peoples as unfettered by the work ethic). There are two theoretical accounts of laziness as a philosophical position, and both maintain a similar utopian dimension to the previous discussion of the function or structure of play. Paul Lafargue and Roland Barthes argue that laziness is an attempt to completely escape the logic of work. They do not offer leisure as the antidote to work, but laziness as the refusal of work. Lafargue, a Cuban-born ex-medical student, wrote the radical pamphlet "The Right to Be Lazy" in i88o-a tirade against work that infuriated his father-in law, Karl Marx.[40] Originally printed in French, the tract was translated into English and published in the United States in 1917 (the same year Duchamp purchased the urinal that would become Fountain). Lafargue's
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The body 2 polemic against "progress" belongs to the primitivist side of laziness, extolling unindustrialized native peoples who do not toil for a capitalist exploiter. Lafargue writes: "It [the proletariat] must return to its natural instincts, it must proclaim the Rights of Laziness, a thousand times more noble and sacred than the anemic Rights of Man concocted by the metaphysical lawyers of the bourgeois revolution."[41] Lafargue sees the advent of industrial production as enabling time for leisure, as opposed to the increased profits envisioned by Taylorism. But he never posits that "free time" should be used for "productive" or "creative" forms of leisure. Instead, he insists on feasting and sleeping as the "Rights of Man." [42] The most indelible image from the tract remains a quotation that perversely describes Duchamp's infamous decision to give up art for chess, his relinquishing of a working life as an artist for the life of a game player: "Jehovah, the bearded and angry god, gave his worshippers the supreme example of ideal laziness; after six days of work, he rests for eternity." [43] In fact, Duchamp never stopped making art. He designed magazine covers, made the BoÎteen-valise, and, ultimately, worked for twenty years on Étant DonnÊs (1946-66). The problem exposed by the "untruth" of the abandonment is how terribly difficult it is not to work. Roland Barthes addresses this point in a short interview entitled "Dare to Be Lazy." Barthes describes two forms of laziness, one born of the struggle to get something done, laziness as procrastination from work, or "marinating" in order to work. Barthes says: "Obviously, this shameful laziness doesn't take the form of 'not doing anything,' which is the glorious and philosophical form of laziness."[44] The philosophical form is precisely what is at issue. Barthes asks, "Have you ever noticed that everyone always talks about the right to leisure activities but never about a right to idleness? I even wonder if there is such a thing as doing nothing in the modern Western world."[45] Yet Barthes realized the potential nihilism in the concept of doing nothing. For laziness, he notes, is a problem for the subject: "In a situation of idleness the subject is almost dispossessed of his consistency as a subject. He is decentered, unable even to say 'I.' That would be true idleness. To be able, at certain moments, to no longer have to say 'I.'"[46] Duchamp came closer to doing nothing than most artists. But he was lucky. Generously supported by his patrons Louise and Walter Arensberg, who paid his rent and living expenses in exchange for artworks, and hired by the wealthy Stettheimer sisters as their French tutoralthough since they had been raised in France, all three sisters were completely fluent and obviously needed no tutor-Duchamp largely managed to avoid working.[47] He lived an aristocratic leisurely life, his idleness made possible through the wealth of others and a frugal life-style. Yet while Duchamp may have courted laziness, and let laziness infuse his art practice, ultimately the complete cessation of artistic activity was impossible. Impossible, as Barthes suggests, for it would mean an abandonment of the first person pronoun. Duchamp's readymades are an attempt to think outside the logic of work, a logic in which "the goal of labor is the full reality of human existence."[48] Not to work-to be lazy-is then to deny the full reality of human existence, to deny the category of "I," at least the form familiar to bourgeois capitalism. Duchamp experimented with this idea by evoking the involuntary laughter within which the "I" is no longer central, and by transforming his studio, a place of work, into a site of play. The studio became a place where he could be, in Bergson's term, "absentminded" or, in Marcuse's, "self-distracted." This questioning of the "I" runs throughout Duchamp's work. After all, this is an oeuvre marked by a proliferation of aliases; a deliberate use of linguistic shifters; an emphasis on language and the self as both shared and constructed,[49] and a dismantling of perspectival vision (with its creation of a fixed subject), all concerns that point toward a consistent questioning of the category of "I." Duchamp toyed and played with the possibility of nonwork-the right to laziness-the ability not to say "I." That this position is impossible (or worse yet, romantic) should not deter serious thinking about laziness. Duchamp, by saying that he abandoned art making without really doing so, was perhaps pretending to be lazy, acting at not working. Lefebvre suggests that when "acting explores what is possible" it adds "something real: the knowledge of a situation, an action, a result to be obtained."[50] If what is to be obtained through such play is knowledge (and disalienation), then what knowledge is potentially garnered through laziness? Is it the suggestion that there can be no alienation in laziness, for there is no "I" to separate from or be identical with?[51] Or is laziness a conduit to bring us back to the most fundamental of Marx's demands, a demand designed to alter the terms of alienated life under capital: "The reduction of the working day is the basic prerequisite."[52] Duchamp's challenge to the primacy of the category of work largely took the form of a protest against maintenance labor, pointing toward the changing historical conditions of housewifery, domestic space, and work in the early twentieth century. [53] Duchamp used the readymades to foil maintenance labor, which resulted in a limited artistic production, for maintenance labor permits all other work. The readymades stymie a subject whose identity
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The body 2 would be bound up with, and structured by, the phenomenon of work. Instead, they offer humor and laziness, slapstick and play, modes of experience that gesture toward a different set of possibilities for how we might conceive of the everyday and how we might inhabit it. * Art Journal, Vol. 57, No. 4, Winter 1998, pp. 50-61.
Notes: I am borrowing the term maintenance from the artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles. In the seventies Ukeles did a series of performances entitled Maintenance Art, in which she cleaned spaces ranging from her home to museums to public sidewalks. These performances posited an equivalence between "public" and "private" institutions of art-galleries, museums, and private homes–by suggesting that domestic labor is not exclusively "private." Instead, her work argues that maintenance work is a continuum that connects usually unseen/unpaid domestic labor to the same maintenance work that occurs in "public" institutions. I use maintenance work as opposed to domestic work in this argument to underscore and value this form of labor as such, as opposed to relegating it to the usually denigrated and putatively private "housework." For more on Ukeles's Maintenance Art, see "Artist Project: Mierle Laderman Ukeles Maintenance Art Activity (1973) with Responses from Miwon Kwon and Helen Molesworth," Documents 10 (Fall 1997): pp. 5-22. [2] The readymades were not widely exhibited until after World War II. The most famous one, Fountain, was fundamentally suppressed (hidden behind a partition) during its debut at the 1917 Independents Exhibition. The exhibition history of other readymades is sketchy at best; see Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography( New York: Henry Holt, 1996), and William Camfield, Marcel Duchamp, Fountain (Houston: Houston Fine Art Press, 1989). [3] For the relation of the readymade to structural linguistics, see Rosalind Krauss, "Notes on the Index," in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), pp. 196-209, 210-20. Benjamin Buchloh has done the most sustained work on the institutional implications of the readymade. In discussing what he refers to as the Duchamp legacy he writes: "Beginning with the readymade, the work of art had become the ultimate subject of a legal definition and the result of institutional validation"; see Buchloh, "Readymade, Objet Trouvé, Ideé Reçue," in Dissent: The Issue of Modern Art in Boston (Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1985), p. 113. (In this article Buchloh also underscores the linguistic understanding of the readymade.) Buchloh contends that the most radical element of the readymade is that "the definition of the aesthetic becomes on the one hand a matter of linguistic convention and on the other the function of both a legal contract and institutional discourse (a discourse of power rather than taste)." Hence, he understands Conceptual art and institutional critique to be the fullest articulations of the readymade's critical potential, its ability to critique institutions and structures of power; see Buchloh, "Conceptual Art, 1962-1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions," October, no. 55 (Winter 1990): pp. 117-18. Yet his account neglects the content of the readymades and limits the field of the institutions of art to the "public" institutions of the museum and gallery, missing Duchamp's indication of domestic space and maintenance labor as being inextricable from the matrix of art's institutions. There are artists who may "inherit" these aspects of the readymade legacy such as Ukeles, Mary Kelly, Chantal Akerman, Robert Gober, David Hammons, Louise Lawler, and Sowon Kwon. To this end, Buchloh's argument falls prey to the all-too-common conception, described by Carole Pateman, that "The public sphere is always assumed to throw light onto the private sphere, rather than vice versa. On the contrary, an understanding of modern patriarchy requires that the employment contract is illuminated by the structure of domestic relations"; see Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), p. 144. [4] Most notably the home and the department store. Museums and department stores had a lively interaction during the period of Duchamp's sojourn in New York; see William Leach, Land of Desire (New York: Pantheon, 1993). This essay is part of a larger project concerning the Duchampian readymade, which includes a discussion of the readymades as situated in the ambiguous realm between museums, department stores, and living rooms, the role of mass consumption in procuring the readymades, and maintenance labor, which includes the work of shopping. [5] On the museological implications of Boîte-en-valise, see Benjamin Buchloh, "The Museum Fictions of Marcel Broodthaers," in Museums by Artists, ed. A. A. Bronson and Peggy Gale (Toronto: Art Metropole, 1983). There are other explicitly "domestic" moments in Duchamp's oeuvre. He painted Tu'm to fit a specific site in the home of his patron and friend Katherine Dreier; likewise he made several forays into interior decorating (including painting an elevator with a leaf pattern to match the room) and arranging art in her home; see Tomkins. [1]
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The body 2 This blending of public and private is furthered by the way the photographs of these mongrelized (private/public) rooms function as a form of publicity (in the BoĂŽte-en-valise, history books, etc.). [7] Henri Lefebvre, The Critique of Everyday Life, trans. John Moore (London: Verso, 1991), p. 42. [8] There are two exceptions, yet neither deals with the specifically U.S. context of the readymades; see Molly Nesbit, "Ready-Made Originals: The Duchamp Model," October, no. 37 (Summer 1986): pp. 53-64, on the role of French high school drawing instruction and the development of the copyright. See also Thierry de Duve, "Resonances of Duchamp's Visit to Munich," trans. Dana Polan, in Marcel Duchamp: Artist of the Century, ed. Rudolf E. Kuenzli and Francis M. Naumann (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991). De Duve argues that Munich's different presentation of the distinction between the "high" and the "decorative" arts acted as a catalyst to Duchamp's abandonment of painting. [9] I am not arguing that Duchamp was directly "influenced" by the advent of scientific management. I would hesitate to draw such an unambiguous conclusion based on a seemingly transparent model of (artistic) cause and effect. Rather, I propose that Duchamp worked within what de Duve has called a "field of resonances." In "Resonances," 42, de Duve writes: "There are other means than influence for the artist to be permeated by a context and draw from it some consequences that will show up in the art work itself." This argument presents some of the historical conditions (and hence possibilities) that inform the period when Duchamp was working in New York during the early decades of the twentieth century. [10] Although Taylor presented scientific management as a benign restructuring of the workforce, one that would ease the labor of both manual and managerial workers, he referred to manual laborers as oxen and remarked on their brute animal force. The typecasting of labor was also evident in domestic space as servants (usually African American or immigrant Irish women) were hired by white middle- and upper-middle-class families to do specific domestic jobs. [11] For the influence of Christine Frederick on twentieth-century kitchen design in both the United States and Europe, see Ellen Lupton and J. Abbott Miller, The Bathroom, the Kitchen, and the Aesthetics of Waste (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992). [12] See Christine Frederick, The New Housekeeping: Efficiency Studies in Home Management (New York: Doubleday, 1913). Streamlining the home was highly publicized during the Columbian Exposition of 1893, through the introduction of the new academic disciplines of domestic science and "home economics." See Martha Banta's Taylored Lives: Narrative Productions in the Age of Taylor, Veblen, and Ford (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). After the 191 1 publication of Taylor's Principles of Scientific Management there was a renewed and strengthened interest in Taylorizing the home. Frederick was primarily responsible for and publicly associated with this phenomenon. [13] Frederick, p. 7. [14] Ibid., p. 10. [15] See Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969), and Witold Rybczynski, Home: A Short History of an Idea (New York: Penguin Books, 1986). Domestic science has a long tradition in the United States, starting with Catherine Beecher's Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841). Beecher was the first to propose the notion of the ideal kitchen, thereby situating women's housework within a particularly moral framework-the good home produces the good citizen. This essay focuses solely on the second wave of domestic science and its relationship to scientific management. However, it is important to note that both waves are related, particularly in their ambivalent relationship to the radical feminist movements that coincided with them. [16] Frederick, p. 41. [17] Ibid., p. 234. [18] See Walter Benjamin, "Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century," in Reflections, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken, 1986), pp. 146-62, and Rybczynski. [19] On the development of mass-produced goods for the home, and its effect on women's daily lives, see Susan Strasser, Satisfaction Guaranteed (New York: Pantheon, 1989). [20] Mark Seltzer, Bodies and Machines (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 159. [21] Lillian Gilbreth, The Home-Maker and Her Job (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1928), pp. 92-93. Gilbreth was the wife of Frank Gilbreth, a Taylor collaborator. [22] Tomkins, 333. Also mentioned in Anne D'Harnoncourt and Kynaston McShine, eds., Marcel Duchamp, exh. cat. (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1989), p. 23. [23] It should be noted, however, that this free time never materialized; see Ruth Schwartz Cowan, "The 'Industrial Revolution' in the Home: Household Technology and Social Change in the 20th Century," Technology and Culture 17, no. I (January 1976):pp. 1-23, and Bettina Berch, "Scientific Management in the Home: The Empress's New Clothes," Journal of American Culture 3, no. 3 (Fall 1980): pp. 440-45. If the readymades have not been read in relation to the labor of maintenance and the context of domestic space, given the development of mass consumerism, shopping for the readymades has not been adequately theorized. Shopping, too, blends the terms of labor and leisure, but it does so primarily for [6]
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The body 2 women. In this regard, the birth of Rrose Selavy (in 1920, the year women won the right to vote in the United States) perhaps points to Duchamp's implicit comprehension of the ways in which his work was concerned with issues of everyday life of particular interest to women. [24] D'Harnoncourt and McShine, p. 283. [25] In French the verb tr6bucher means to stumble, trip, or fall. It is also a chess move in which a pawn is used to take an important piece. [26] Camfield, p. 106. Camfield cites Ulf Linde for this reading of Fountain. [27] Marcuse, "On the Philosophical Foundation of the Concept of Labor in Economics," Telos 16 (Summer 1973): p. 15. [28] Ibid. Marcuse argues against the anthropological notion that play comes first as a human social activity followed by work in cultures of accumulation. Instead, he argues that labor "is the starting point, foundation, and principle of play insofar as play is precisely a breaking off from labor and a recuperation for labor." [29] Lefebvre, 39; also see Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1978) on what Frederic Jameson calls the "prodigious expansion of capital into hitherto uncommodified areas," in Postmodernism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), p. 35. [30] D'Harnoncourt and McShine, 300. By troubling the boundaries of public and private within the home, Door II rue Larrey, disallows the assignation of private/domestic in a manner similar to the photographs of the studio. [31] Henri Bergson, Laughter, in Comedy, ed. Wylie Sypher (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1956), p. 66. [32] Ibid., p. 84. [33] In this way the readymades also function as distraction, not only as a distraction from work but also in Benjamin's sense of the term. Benjamin argues that distraction, as opposed to contemplation, is a mode of apperception made possible by new technologies, most importantly film. He theorizes that distraction is an aesthetic mode in keeping with the temporality of everyday life, in contradistinction to the fixed subject of contemplation engendered by perspectival painting; see Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schoken, 1969), 217-52; see also Michael Taussig's discussion of distraction in The Nervous System (New York: Routledge, 1992). [34] Lefebvre, p. 10. [35] Ibid.3, 1. [36] Robert Lebel, Marcel Duchamp, trans. George Heard Hamilton (New York: Paragraphic, 1959), p. 38. [37] D'Harnoncourt and McShine, p. 214. [38] Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: W: W. Norton, 1911),13. [39] Ibid., p. 19. [40] I am grateful to Anson Rabinbach's The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992) for alerting me to the existence of this text. Lafargue was married to Laura Marx. [41] Paul Lafargue, "The Right to Be Lazy," trans. Charles H. Kerr (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1917), p. 29. [42] See Kristin Ross's excellent account of Lafargue and laziness in The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). She writes: "the refusal of work is not an absence of activity, nor obviously, is it leisure since leisure reinforces the work model by existing only with reference to work," p. 59. [43] Lafargue, pp. 12-13. [44] Roland Barthes, "Dare to Be Lazy," in The Grain of the Voice: Interviews, 1962-1980, trans. Linda Coverdale (New York: Hill and Wang, 1985), p. 339. The title of the interview is probably a play on the opening lines of Immanuel Kant's "What Is Enlightenment?" where he chagrins laziness as counter to the Enlightenment pursuit of knowledge. [45] Barthes, p. 341. The example of "doing nothing" given by Barthes is the image of the Parisian concierge sitting idly outside on hot summer days. This image, one that is bound to the fabric of domestic life, is compelling, as it alludes to the invisibility of domestic labor, but it is also a romanticization of it. [46] Ibid., p. 342. [47] On the relationship between Duchamp and Florine and Ettie Stettheimer, see Steven Watson, Strange Bedfellows: The First American Avant-Garde (New York: Abbeville Press, 1991). [48] Marcuse, p. 29. [49] On linguistic shifters, see Krauss; see Buchloh, "Readymade, Objet Trouv4, Id6e Revue," for an excellent discussion of the relation between Duchamp's "Creative Act" and Roland Barthes's "Death of the Author." [50] Lefebvre, p. 136. [51] Lefebvre is critical of a conception of identity where one is possessive of the idea of "I" or one's "individuality." H e argues that the bourgeois subject feels he "owns" his own "self"
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The body 2 much as he owns his material assets. Hence under capital "to be" and "to have" become identical. Duchamp's desire to be rid of the first person, particularly as a marker of individuality, runs through his art practice, particularly in his proliferation of aliases: Rrose Selavy, R. Mutt, and George Welch. So too his experiments with chance can be seen as an attempt to maneuver out of a position of (artistic) production that emanates from an "I." [52] As cited in Lefebvre, 175, from Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3, trans. D. Fernbach (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), 959. As I complete this essay members of the United Auto Workers union at the General Motors plant in Flint, Michigan, are on strike. One of their demands is that once work quotas are met workers should be allowed to leave work "early." As yet General Motors has rejected this demand. [53] Duchamp was most likely aware of these concerns. Katherine Dreier, his friend and patron, had proposed that women should receive wages for housework in her article "A Standard Wage Proposed for Wives," in the New York Sun, May 25, 1914.
Exhibition: ‘In Focus: Making A Scene’ at The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles September 5, 2009, 8:42 pm
Exhibition dates: 30th June – 18th October, 2009 .
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The body 2 . Dora Maar ‘Le Simulateur’ (The Pretender) 1936 .
. Man Ray ‘Rrose Sélavy (Marcel Duchamp)’ 1923 .
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. Unknown ‘Woman Reading to a Girl’ French, c. 1845 .
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. Julia Margaret Cameron ‘Venus Chiding Cupid and Removing His Wings’ Album silver print 1872 . . “Photography, although commonly associated with truthfulness, has been used to produce fiction since its introduction in 1839. The acceptance of staging, and the degree of its application, has varied greatly depending on the genre and the historical moment, but it has persisted as an artistic approach. The photographs in this exhibition, drawn exclusively from the J. Paul Getty Museum’s collection, make no pretense about presenting the world as it exists; instead, they are the productions of directors and actors who rely on stagecraft and occasional darkroom trickery to tell stories. Spanning photography’s history and expressing a range of sentiments, the images in this exhibition are inspired by art history, literature, religion, and mainstream media. Like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and his other books, Lewis Carroll’s photographs are fantasies starring his friends’ children. In the image above, children enact the mythological story of Saint George, the patron saint of England, slaying a child-eating dragon before it could devour a princess.
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The body 2 . Life Imitating Art Well-represented in this exhibition are tableaux vivants (living pictures), inspired by the popular Victorian parlor game in which costumed participants posed to resemble famous works of art or literary scenes. The genre paintings of 17th-century Dutch masters Johannes Vermeer and Pieter de Hooch fascinated Guido Rey. Not self-conscious about being slavish to the past, he carefully studied the paintings and then arranged similar tableaux for his camera. His photographs captured equally serene domestic scenes and mimicked the minute architectural details of 17th-century interiors, such as the leadedglass windowpanes and the checkerboard floor. . Playing Dress Up The exhibition also includes costume studies of people posing as literary characters and self-portraits of artists pretending to be other people. American painter and photographer Man Ray and the French artist Marcel Duchamp met in New York in 1915, and they began a playful, iconoclastic collaboration that resulted in the photograph at right, among others. Influenced by Dadaism, a cultural movement that rejected reason and logic in favor of anarchy and the absurd, their work embraced games of chance, performance, and wordplay. Here an irreverent Duchamp appears in women’s clothing as his alter ego, Rrose Sélavy, a pun on the French pronunciation “Eros, c’est la vie” (Sex, that’s life). .
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The body 2 . Lewis Carroll ‘Saint George and the Dragon’ June 26, 1875 .
. Man Ray ‘Tears’ 1930 – 1932 .
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. Eileen Cowin ‘Untitled‘ from the series Family Docudrama 1980 – 1983 . . Imaginary Subjects A number of photographs in the exhibition explore the medium’s capacity to visualize subjects of the imagination by using darkroom trickery to manipulate prints. An optician and family man, Ralph Eugene Meatyard photographed his children, friends, and neighbors enacting dramas in suburban backyards and abandoned buildings near his Lexington, Kentucky, home. He often used experimental techniques, such as multiple exposures and blurred motion. Uncanny details imbue Meatyard’s otherwise ordinary vernacular scenes with the qualities of a dream or supernatural vision. . Theatricality as a Critical Strategy In recent decades there has been renewed interest in theatricality among contemporary photographers whose highly artificial scenes critique mainstream media and representation. In her series Family Docudrama Eileen Cowin blurs the boundaries between truth and fiction, and private behavior and public performance. Drawing equally from family snapshots and soap operas, Cowin presents staged domestic scenes
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The body 2 in which she and members of her family, including her identical twin sister, perform as actors. In these ambiguous, open-ended narratives, dramatic moments are exaggerated, and the camera’s glare is ever present.” Text from The Getty Museum website .
. Lucas Samaras ‘Photo-Transformation’ November 22, 1973 .
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. Lucas Samaras ‘Photo-Transformation’ September 9, 1976 .
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. Ralph Eugene Meatyard ‘Untitled (Michael and Christopher Meatyard)’ 1966 .
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. Joel Peter-Witkin ‘Mother and Child (with Retractor, Screaming)’ 1979 . . The Getty Museum at the Getty Center 1200 Getty Center Drive Los Angeles, California 90049 Opening hours: Tues – Friday 10 – 5.30pm Saturday 10 – 9pm Sunday 10 – 9pm Monday closed The Getty Museum website
Posted in American, american photographers, black and white photography, colour photography, English artist, exhibition, gallery website, Man Ray, photographic series, photography Tagged: Dadaism, Dora Maar, In Focus: Making A Scene, j. paul getty museum, Joel Peter-Witkin, Julia Margaret Cameron, Le Simulateur, Lewis Carroll, los
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dadart.com Louis Aragon and AndrĂŠ Breton in 1924
https://www.pinterest.at/pin/142778250657605661/
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More about Duchamp's wordplay Article
file:///C:/Users/Katerina/Downloads/More_about_Duchamps_wordplay .pdf Given Duchamp’s lifelong passion for wordplay, as is already manifested in his early humoristic drawings, I take this love as a decisive factor in the way he “found” his readymades. Another factor I find in articles and illustrations in popular magazines of the time that provide a context in which his works originated.
What Does a Man Want? Reflections on “Surrealism Desire Unbound”
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Hans Bellmer. The Doll (La Poupée), ca. 1934. Ford Motor Company Collection//Metropolitan Museum of Art. Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.
file:///C:/Users/Katerina/Downloads/What_does_a_man_wantReflections_on_surrealism_desire_unbound.pdf What Does a Man Want?
Reflections on “Surrealism: Desire Unbound”* Danielle Knafo, Ph.D. This paper is a critical review of the exhibition “Surrealism: Desire Unbound” at the Tate and Metropolitan Museums of Art. The author argues that the majority of the art represents a variety of perverse solutions to male gender anxiety, solutions that most 56
The body 2 often take the form of viewing the female body as a fetish object or as an object for sadistic drives. She interprets such aggression toward females as being a consequence of the era in which these works were created: Europe between two world wars. Female selfrepresentation is juxtaposed with male-generated art and demonstrates how women artists reclaimed their gaze and desire.
Was Marcel Duchamp's 'Fountain' actually created by a long-forgotten pioneering feminist? In a new book, John Higgs looks at the story behind one of the most famous artworks of the 20th century John Higgs Tuesday 8 September 2015 17:52
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'Fountain' ( Getty )
In March 1917, the Philadelphia-based modernist painter George Biddle hired a 42-year-old German woman as a model. She visited him in his studio, and Biddle told her that he wished to see her naked. The model threw open her scarlet raincoat. Underneath, she was nude apart from a bra made from two tomato cans and green string, and a small birdcage housing a sorry-looking canary, which hung around her neck. Her only other items of clothing were a large number of curtain rings, recently stolen from Wanamaker's department store, which covered one arm, and a hat which was decorated with carrots, beets and other vegetables.
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Poor George Biddle. There he was, thinking that he was the artist and that the woman in front of him, Baroness Elsa von Freytag- Loringhoven, was his model. With one quick reveal the Baroness announced that she was the artist, and he simply her audience. Then a well-known figure on the New York avant garde art scene, Baroness Elsa was a performance artist, poet and sculptor. She wore cakes as hats, spoons as earrings, black lipstick and postage stamps as makeup. She lived in abject poverty surrounded by her pet dogs and the mice and rats in her apartment, which she fed and encouraged. She was regularly arrested and incarcerated for offences such as petty theft or public nudity. At a time when societal restrictions on female appearance were only starting to soften, she would shave her head, or dye her hair vermillion. ΗHer
Work was championed by Ernest Hemingway and Ezra Pound; she was an associate of artists including Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp, and those who met her did not forget her quickly. Yet the Baroness remains invisible in most accounts of the early 20th-century art world. In the eyes of most of the people she met, the way she lived and the art she produced made no sense at all. She was, perhaps, too far ahead of her time.
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Clothes show: Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (Corbis)
The Baroness is now recognised as the first American Dada artist, but it might be equally true to say she was the first New York punk, 60 years too early. It took until the early 21st century for her feminist Dada to gain recognition. This reassessment of her work has raised an intriguing possibility: could Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven be responsible for what is often regarded as the most significant work of art in the 20th century? Else Hildegarde Plötz was born in 1874 in the Prussian town of Swinemünde, now Świnoujście in Poland, on the Baltic Sea. When she was 19 she left home and went to Berlin, where she found work as a model and chorus girl. A heady period of sexual experimentation followed, which left her hospitalised with syphilis, before she befriended the cross-dressing graphic artist Melchior Lechter and began moving in avant garde art circles. The distinction between her life and her art, from this point on, became increasingly irrelevant. Increasingly androgynous, Elsa embarked on a number of marriages and affairs, often with homosexual or impotent men. A marriage to Baron Leopold von Freytag-Loringhoven gave her 60
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a title, although the Baron was penniless and worked as a busboy. Shortly after their marriage the First World War broke out, and he went back to Europe to fight. Around this time the Baroness met, and became somewhat obsessed by, the French-American artist Marcel Duchamp. One of her spontaneous pieces of performance art saw her taking an article about Duchamp's painting Nude Descending a Staircase and rubbing it over every inch of her body, connecting the famous image of a nude with her own naked self. She then recited a poem that climaxed with the declaration: "Marcel, Marcel, I love you like Hell, Marcel." Duchamp politely declined her sexual advances. He was not a tactile man. But he did recognise the importance and originality of her art. He once said, "[The Baroness] is not a Futurist. She is the future." Duchamp is known as the father of conceptual art. He abandoned painting on canvas in 1912 and started a painting on a large sheet of glass, but took 10 years to finish it. What he was really looking for were ways to make art outside of traditional painting and sculpture. In 1915 he hit upon an idea he called "readymades", in which everyday objects could be presented as pieces of art. These were a challenge to the art establishment: was the fact that an artist showcased something they found sufficient grounds to regard that object as a work of art? Or, perhaps more accurately, was the idea that an artist challenged the art establishment by presenting a found object sufficiently interesting for that idea to be considered a work of art? Duchamp's most famous readymade was called Fountain. It was a urinal that was turned on its side and submitted to a 1917 exhibition at the Society of Independent Artists, New York, under the name of a fictitious artist called Richard Mutt. The exhibition aimed to display every work of art that was submitted, so by sending them the urinal Duchamp was challenging them to agree that it was a work of art. This they declined to do. What happened to it is unclear but it seems likely that it was thrown away. Duchamp resigned from the board in protest, and Fountain's rejection overshadowed the rest of the exhibition.
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But the reputation of Fountain slowly grew, and Duchamp was rediscovered by a new generation of artists in the 1950s and 1960s. Unfortunately very few of his original works survived, so he began producing reproductions of his most famous pieces. Seventeen copies of Fountain were made. In 2004, a poll of 500 art experts voted Duchamp's Fountain the most influential modern artwork of the 20th century. But is it true to say that Fountain was Duchamp's work? On 11 April 1917 Duchamp wrote to his sister Suzanne and said that, "One of my female friends who had adopted the pseudonym Richard Mutt sent me a porcelain urinal as a sculpture; since there was nothing indecent about it, there was no reason to reject it." As he was already submitting the urinal under an assumed name, there does not seem to be a reason why he would lie to his sister about a "female friend". The strongest candidate to be this friend was Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. She was in Philadelphia at the time, and contemporary newspaper reports claimed that "Richard Mutt" was from Philadelphia. If Fountain was Baroness Elsa's work, then the pseudonym it used proves to be a pun. America had just entered the First World War, and Elsa was angry about both the rise in anti-German sentiment and the paucity of the New York art world's response to the conflict. The urinal was signed "R. Mutt 1917", and to a German eye "R. Mutt" suggests armut, meaning poverty or, in the context of the exhibition, intellectual poverty. Baroness Elsa had been finding objects in the street and declaring them to be works of art since before Duchamp hit upon the idea of "readymades". The earliest that we can date with any certainty was Enduring Ornament, a rusted metal ring just over four inches across, which she found on her way to her wedding to Baron Leopold on 19 November 1913. Not only did Elsa declare that found objects were her sculptures, she frequently gave them religious, spiritual or archetypal names. A piece of wood called Cathedral (1918) is one example. Another is a castiron plumber's trap attached to a wooden box, which she called God. God was long assumed to be the work of an artist called Morton Livingston Schamberg, although it is now accepted that his role in the sculpture was limited to fixing the plumber's trap to its wooden base. Critics often praise the androgynous nature of Fountain, for the act of turning the hard, male object on its side gave it a labial appearance. Duchamp did explore androgyny in the early 1920s, when he used the pseudonym Rrose SĂŠlavy and was photographed in drag by Man Ray. But androgyny is more pronounced in the Baroness' art than it is Duchamp's. 63
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Fountain is base, crude, confrontational and funny. Those are not typical aspects of Duchamp's work, but they summarise the Baroness and her art perfectly. Perhaps more than anything else, it is this that makes a strong case for Fountain being her work, which she sent to Duchamp from Philadelphia to enter into the exhibition, and which he took credit for over 30 years later when both she and the man who photographed the original were dead. To add weight to this claim, Duchamp was said to have bought the urinal himself from JL Mott Iron Works on Fifth Avenue, but later research has shown that this company did not make or sell that particular model of urinal. In 1923 or 1924, during a period when Baroness Elsa felt abandoned by her friends and colleagues, she painted a mournful picture called Forgotten Like This Parapluie Am I By You – Faithless Bernice! The picture included a leg and foot of someone walking out of the frame, representing all the people who had walked out of her life. It also depicts a urinal, overflowing and spoiling the books on the floor, which had Duchamp's pipe balanced on the lip. The urinal is usually interpreted as a simple reference to Duchamp. But if Fountain was Elsa's work, then his pipe resting on its lip becomes more meaningful. The image becomes emblematic of their spoiled relationship.
https://holdthisphoto.tumblr.com/post/32523446997/lee-miller-and-tanja-ramm-1929-byman-ray
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Seeing Dark Things: The Philosophy of Shadows
https://books.google.gr/books?id=AnriBwAAQBAJ&pg=PT80&lpg=PT80&dq=the+clue+sh adow&source=bl&ots=cpA3t_fNp&sig=ACfU3U27rbREkXw3OnHgajkGVnqOVED6IQ&hl=el&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEw jnwZbJxu3pAhWJZMAKHffdCDcQ6AEwCXoECAYQAQ#v=onepage&q=the%20clue%20sha dow&f=false
Επόμενο τεύχος
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