Page 48 - Studio International - January February 1975

made subtle use of the modern means of same time published Futurist poetry. archaeology. Thus we first espy the
publicity. It might be said that his entire theoretical human skeleton in the grave, when it is
According to another version Duchamp work was carried by the inspiration he no longer of any use. As long as it was
was an initiate in the occult sciences. The felt as a twentieth-century poet. In 1934, doing its job, it evaded observation,
original source of this theory lies in the in the Prague art review Volné smery, unless of course we were to X-ray it,
Surrealist circle and Breton's interest in Jakobson published a study entitled unless we were persistently to seek to
occultism, and its most recent appearance `Co je poesie' (What is Poetry).'" It is only know what a backbone is, what poetry
is in the literary activities of Jack a few pages long, but it has remained in is.
Burnham. In Artforum" and in the the back of my mind since it first came This essay by Jakobson leads us to the
French magazine VH 101 37 we may read out. The study turns on the curious very sources of structuralist thought.
that Duchamp went to Munich in 1912 dichotomy in the work of the great Czech Structuralism was conceived in the
ostensibly because he was looking for romantic poet Karel Hynek Mácha. In his womb of modern poetry and modern art.
an alchemistic manuscript, and that the poetry, love is an almost disembodied It had no intention of interpreting and
wild 'erotic and alcoholic excesses' of his event that belongs to all being, an replacing the artistic fact with some
years in New York in Arensberg's endless flow of tones, colours and smells: logical construction; quite the contrary, it
company were in fact a compulsory part Of love the moss purled in the gloom, pointed out that a work of art originates
of gnostic practice. In the chapter The flowering tree feigned love's fond inside life and comes out of the life of its
devoted to Duchamp in his book woes, creator and its time as an autonomous
`The Structure of Art'," Burnham mixes His love the nightingale sang the rose, formation capable of containing,
alchemist theory with echoes of his While rosebush sighed its soft perfume. illuminating, making conscious and, in its
reading of Lévi-Strauss and Barthes. The lake's smooth face in quiet own way, forming human experience. As
Here is Burnham's interpretation of murmur far as the artistic structure itself is
Duchamp's text about the Jura-Paris trip Told of a dark and secret ache." concerned, it is no more than a 'skeleton'
with Picabia in 1912 : In the intimate passages of Mácha's that stands high above 'the graveyard of
The "machine with 5 hearts" is the diary, written at the same time (1835), history' as something no longer of any use,
Alchemist's Stone, the Great Pyramid, love is nothing more than a physiological something without life.
or the semiotic structure including act described again and again with brutal
AETHER, FIRE, WATER, AIR and openness : 8. Since that time structuralism has
EARTH. In reality the Jura-Paris road Once again I took Lori home to my flat become an independent discipline, a kind
runs from the Jura Mountains at the in Truhlárská Street. There I fucked of general morphology, if not a new Ars
Swiss border to Paris. Moreover, there her on the chairs by the window. She Magna, purporting to reveal the
is a Jura Mountain Range on the Moon. cried out for me to stop. "It hurts. intelligible laws governing all being —
The Moon being a symbol of the Lord Jesus." When I asked her why, from genetic systems to Baudelaire's
female and the natural, it seems likely she answered, "Because you went sonnet. It is still used, however, to
that Duchamp is implying that the deeper than before." Then she went explain works of art, but if the structure of
"evolution of art" is the traversal from to the WC. And I held her dress. a work becomes a mere analogy of
the completely cultural to the totally How is one to reconcile this diary and everything that exists, then structuralism
natural. The "chief of the five nudes" that poetry ? Jakobson replies : cannot be used to explain its specificity, its
refers to Picasso and his pivotal cubist Both aspects are equally truthful; they aesthetic character. Nevertheless
painting of 1907, Les demoiselles are merely different significations or, in Claude Lévi-Strauss suspects that the
d'Avignon. scholarly terms, different semantic key to 'mystical thought' and to the
And so on. And there is more: plans, of the same subject, the same deepest structures of human
A comet with "its tail in front" is the experience. Mácha's diary is just as consciousness and behaviour lies in art :
trajectory of Duchamp's work poetic a work as his Maj or Marinka; it art in our civilization remains the last
between 1911 and 1926. contains not a trace of the utilitarian; it preserve of 'primitive thinking',' 12 but
The temporal clairvoyance with which is pure art pour l'art; it is poetry for the living art appears to be beyond him. In
Duchamp in 1912 foresaw the course of poet. But if Mácha were alive today, he his mind, Richard Wagner is still the
his own work up to 1926 corresponds to would perhaps have left his lyrics for greatest artist, and the manifestations of
the spatial clairvoyance with which he his own intimate purposes and modern art remain quite unintelligible to
saw Picasso's Demoiselles. It is true that published his diary instead. We would him. He feels that the ready-mades
Picasso showed it to his closest friends have to rank him along with Joyce and are sentences constructed of two
when he had finished it (Duchamp was Lawrence. objects that have a single meaning, and
never one of them) but then he rolled it up The whole of Jakobson's essay deals not the object alone, no matter what it
and left it lying in his studio until with such complex relationships between may have been intended to do or
sometime in 192o. It was first reproduced biography and oeuvre. A poet's life and
in 1925 and exhibited in 1927. work cannot be separated. True, poetry is and he considers Picasso's art, like the
Naturally the whole legend of autonomous and the poetic cannot be rest of abstract painting, to be a blind
Duchamp's alchemism hasn't the reduced to something outside itself, but alley because, as he says, it has lost its
slightest basis in fact and Duchamp at the same time it is not cut off from the `signifying function'. 12 12 Concrete music is
himself quite clearly told Robert Lebel rest of the world and life. It is 'a mere just as incomprehensible to him.'' His
long ago, in response to a direct question : component of a complex structure, but a ideal in art corresponds to his old-
`If I have ever practised alchemy, then I component that necessarily re-forms the fashioned Wagnerianism : he awaits the
have done so in the only way admissible other elements and determines the advent of
in our times, that is, without knowing nature of the whole'. The poetic consists an anecdotal and superlatively
it.'" in the fact that 'words and their figurative painting 12 12 . that 12 12 . would
composition, their meaning, their inner strive, using all the techniques of the
7. and outer form, are not an indifferent most traditional forms of painting, to
Burnham has now made his legend
scientific. By the very title of the book just pointing to reality, but rather they take on reconstitute around me a more
quoted, Burnham has announced his their own weight and value' — and with habitable universe than the one I find
affiliation with the tradition of rationalist them, I would add, the reality to which myself in 12 12 12
structuralism, and not of surrealist these words are a far from indifferent Lévi-Strauss's thinking as a whole
hermetism. The importance of reference. Jakobson's conclusion suggests moves within the dimensions of
structuralism in the history of modern art this idea: nineteenth-century thought, combining
is extraordinary. Its beginnings are in the It is not until a period has died away Hegelian rationalism with mechanistic
enormously stimulating environment of and the obscure relationships between determinism. At the very beginning of his
Russian avant-garde art in the first its various components has decayed, four-volume `Mythologiques' we
quarter of this century. The most when we stand upon the legendary encounter the obligatory assertion that
outstanding exponent of structuralism is graveyard of history, that the freedom is an illusion beneath which is
still Roman Jakobson, and he began `monuments of poetry' tower hidden necessity, and that what we call
among the Russian Formalists and at the gloriously above the manifold rubble of spiritual life is a mere mechanism." And
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