Page 34 - Studio International - June 1966

An interview with Marcel Duchamp

by Dore Ashton

The Marcel Duchamp I have never had much faith in the interview as a means Giacometti, Rauschenberg, and works of African and
retrospective is at the of acquiring significant information about an artist. The pre-Columbian art. There is also a chess set, of course.
Tate Gallery from June 18
to July 31. journalist, as Proust pointed out in his well-wrought at- Duchamp, wearing grey whalebone corduruoys and a
tack on Sainte-Beuve, is always working with the un- checked shirt, settled himself, cigar in hand, in a deep
witting collaboration of other people. Therefore both the comfortable chair, smiling amiably as always. I posed my
questions he poses and the answers he solicits are slightly first question:
vulgar. The 'mob' is looking on. `You have called yourself a Cartesian, yet you say the
This interview with Marcel Duchamp is no exception, role of the artist is mediumistic. Is this a contradiction?'
as I think he would be the first to acknowledge. The `Oh, no,' he answered without hesitation. 'I've never
questions are necessarily limited and so are the replies. read Descartes to speak of. I was thinking of the logical
The interview took place in Duchamp's 10th Street meaning, the reasoning Cartesianism implies. Nothing is
apartment in one of the spacious old brownstones still left to the vapours of the imagination. It implies an ac-
graced with floor-to-ceiling windows. (Duchamp lives on ceptance of all doubts, it's an opposition to unclear
a block which has a house bearing a bronze plaque adver- thinking.'
tising the former residence of Mark Twain.) His own But what about the artist's mediumistic role in that case ?
apartment is comfortably furnished with old but not `You must understand that I am not a Cartesian by
ostentatious furniture, and an impressive collection of pleasure. I happen to have been born a Cartesian. The
works of art. I noticed Miro, Matisse, Tanguy, Brancusi, French education is based on a sequence of strict logic.

Portrait of the artist's father,
seated 1910
Oil on canvas
36 3/8 x 28 7/8 in.

Right
The passage from the virgin to the
bride 1912
Oil on canvas
23 3/8 x 21 1/4 in.
Museum of Modern Art,
New York