Page 21 - Studio International - October1968

to Nicholas, preserve their learned ignorance nation, could not function in the modern manufacturer and his works are not things,
in their quest for transcending experience. world in which we have, as Octavo Paz has they are acts.' These acts, Paz says with a
They do not by any means dispense with brilliantly observed in his new study of slightly tremulous voice, teach us that the
discursive logic. Rather, they augment it Marcel Duchamp, critique rather than ideas, true goal of artistic activity is not the art
with a new kind of logic demanded by and methods rather than systems.* 'Our object, but freedom—freedom from the
experiences that go beyond the bounds of only Idea, in the real sense of the word, is the tyranny of 'taste', a modern invention, and
conventional discursive logic. They turn Critique.' from the tyranny of the consumer society.
their knowledge upon itself, so that specula- The critique, as Paz sees it, enters twentieth- 'The history of modern painting, from the
tion becomes an infinite series of logical century art definitively with the words of Renaissance to the present, can be seen as a
arguments, absorbed finally in the supra- Mallarmé, one of Duchamp's acknowledged progressive transformation of the work of
logical realm of learned ignorance. masters. In a previous essay, 'Los Signos en art into an artistic object: passage from a
The beauty of Nicholas's creation—the Rotacion', Paz had described 'Un Coup de vision to a sensible thing.' The 'readymades',
doctrine of learned ignorance—is that it shuts Des' as a critique which not only encloses he claims, are a critique both of taste and of
nothing out (it carries along classical logic its own negation, but makes of this negation the object as such.
for instance, while augmenting it with the its point of departure and its substance. In But a critique is not a vision, and there is
eruptive insight of intuition that later it, the world as an image has evaporated. hidden, perhaps unconsciously, in Paz's
Nietzsche was to frame in words to per- Throughout his life, Paz wrote, Mallarmé interpretation a nostalgia for the grand
fection) and at the same time, never loses spoke of a book which would be the double visions which, unlike the open spaces of
sight of an ultimate purpose—to understand of the cosmos. Yet, it is remarkable that Mallarmé and Duchamp, are grand enclo-
human experience as totality; to recognize having dedicated so many pages to telling sures. Are, in fact, images.
that the human imagination conceives of the us how this book would be, Mallarmé had The new values proferred in critical jour-
inconceivable, and therefore both the in- so little to reveal to us of his vision of the nals, and used to excavate the motives of
conceivable and the comprehensible form world. 'The truth is that he didn't see it: the X, focus on surfaces, not images. Very often
the content of metaphysical speculation. world has ceased to have a form.' the notion of an image is dispensed with
If the doctrine of learned ignorance were Without a world view, or an idea of cosmos, altogether. Deliberately. For instance, in the
practised today, the study of an artist's life's the modern artist is thrust into the open time of Nicholas of Cusa, mathematical
work would include all the minute data so spaces offered to us by Mallarmé and subse- speculation was very lively. Such a notion
fondly recorded by the critic citing X's quent artists, and from there into the 'zone as squaring the circle became an activity
writings, but only as incidental to the pursuit of silence' implicit in 'Igitur'. The zones of out of which came a wealth of implications,
of the experienced whole meaning of his silence that seem at once threatening and associations, symbols and metaphors. The
oeuvre. The interpreter's own experience of alluring to the modern artist, are perfectly human imagination has not ceased to
the work is what offers insight into its whole characterized both by Mallarmé's poem and square the circle, but it has ceased to gener-
meaning, not his ability to search out facts. by Duchamp's Grand Verre. 'Un Coup de ate associations. There is beauty, of course,
In practical terms, it will mean that when Des' cannot have a final interpretation in the simple fact of squaring a circle. The
he is discussing X's letter to the editor, signed because the last word of the poem is not a artists who today deal with the raw materials
by him and a fellow artist, but partly drafted final word. The Grand Verre, which Paz of mathematics—series, infinite numbers,
by still a third artist, he will remember that says was definitively unfinished in 1923, is indeterminacy and so on—stop short pur-
there are at least two and possibly more similar to this unfinal last word : 'it's an open posively of the metaphorical visions these
truths enfolded in the letter. The one truth is space which provokes new interpretations materials once inspired. They are opponents
that three men had a community of spirit and evokes, in its unfinished condition, the of metaphysics, as are their interpreters. By
which resulted in a letter on that particular Void which is the substance of the work. This virtue of their refusals, their 'zones of
day and under those particular circum- void is the absence of the Idea'. Finally, Paz silence', they reach the irony which passes
stances. The other is that each man had an observes, the poem and the picture affirm even Duchamp's irony: they reach finality,
underside to his mind, something behind simultaneously the absence of signification but not the final analysis. Since theirs is a
the frontal plane of the words, so to speak, and the necessity to have it, and it is in this commentary by default, or by detachment
some moral energy which was other than that the signification of the two works if you prefer, commentary on their
the words. He had temperament, moods, lies. commentary can only close off and never elucidate,
temporary enthusiasms and little idiosyn- Out of all the ironies and meta-ironies in can never image forth a vision. Critiques of
cracies. The two truths, so different in which Duchamp indulged himself, and to critiques, interpretations of interpretations,
texture, would be balanced against the truth which the century is addicted, Paz extracts all embodied in a non-Procustean bed of
experienced in the work, and from the whole certain positive propositions, mostly of a data, may lead to a kind of freedom, but not
process of speculation. philosophical order. Duchamp's gesture, the exhilarating freedom of learned ignor-
It is possible, though, that the doctrine of particularly in the 'readymades', is inter- ance. Rather, it is the freedom of immobility
learned ignorance, which is very similar is preted as a rejection of the bourgeois con- . . . a somewhat deathly release from the
substance to Coleridge's view of the imagi- ception of the art object. 'The artist is not a vicissitudes of experience.

London commentaries are by Charles Spencer, a Corrections the September issue).
frequent contributor to art journals, William Lipke, We regret that it was reported in the September issue Marcel Duchamp ou le Château de la Purité, Editions
an American art historian who has specialized in (On exhibition) that the bust by Ernst Eisenmayer Claude Grandua, Paris, 1967.
twentieth-century British art; Tom Hudson, being shown at the Mercury Gallery is one of an It was incorrectly reported in the September issue
Director of Studies at Cardiff College of Art; edition of 76. It is, in fact, one of an edition of six. that Mr Ben Nicholson was receiving the honorary
Barbara Reise, recently appointed senior lecturer This exhibition continues until 19 October. freedom of St. Ives, Cornwall. In fact the honorary
in history of art at Leeds University; Joseph The first and second prize of the Arts Council of freedom was conferred on Dame Barbara Hepworth
Masheck, an American researcher doing art history Northern Ireland's Open Painting Competition were and Mr Bernard Leach on 23 September.
research and writing in Dublin and London. shared between Harold Cohen, Alan Wood and Charles Spencer contributed the review of the Gar-
Michael Simpson (not Michael Wood, as printed in bitsch Collection in our September issue.
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