Page 54 - Studio International - January February 1975

symbolic work. It never contains its that the Milky Way bears are those three part of Goethe's Faust:
object, never depicts it, never signifies Draft Pistons, symbols of the breeze that He rationalized his instinctive
it: it points to it. Returning to the wafts into our world from elsewhere. disregard for superficial logic as a
origin of consciousness, it leads us to And that, in the end, is the real conscious principle of poetic composition.76
the world as it is, to the world that `command' of the Bride.
comes into being, endures, and Art, to be at the beginning, must be as Here is perhaps the answer to a question
ceases to exist, that is chaos and order, well before the beginning, where the that is usually brushed aside: why did
accident and necessity, Mallarmé's A world is not yet, and consciousness is still Duchamp leave this work, which he
Cast of the Dice and Constellation. It is empty and void. This is true even considered his chef-d'oeuvre, unfinished ?
both; not in a dialectic suspension of for philosophy. The great works of Duchamp's own explanations are thin and
discursive reason, but in primal unity philosophy can never be reduced to a inconclusive. But the reason seems clear.
where distinctions first begin. Therefore system. They are disturbing because a Duchamp found himself in a blind alley.
the basic method in art is universal dark place persists at their centre that He referred to his Large Glass as an
metonymy (and its derivative, metaphor). seems to be the unique source of `allegory', an attempt to create a
We might also say: endless melody. The everything else in them and at the same language that would have a rational
miracle of the world and the miracle of time, continually seems to undermine meaning. And in fact, Breton and his
consciousness come together. In this them. Philosophy is not science. It is not a followers were able to offer an
sense (and in this sense only) the origins doctrine that explains, but rather it points interpretation of the Large Glass, as if it
of mind are the origins of the world. beyond all explaining. had been written in some hieroglyphics
The structures of art correspond to the A computer cannot create a work of art, that could be entirely translated into
structures of the established world, but but merely a feeble imitation. A language comprehensible to us. In a later
through the interstices of these structures, computer is always and only in the conversation with Arturo Schwarz,"
or in their dissolution, shines the primal world. Duchamp indirectly admitted the error
nature of the world. For this reason Art is an indication away from the of allegorization:
amorphousness, unstructuredness, world and, at the same time, an You cannot express anything through
unclearness, indistinguishability are so indication into the world. Therefore words . . . Love does not express itself
important in a work of art. Thus a work there is always a tension in every work of through words. It is just love . . . You
of art is always to some extent 'blurred', art between speaking and silence, between will distrust completely the original
as Ehrenzweig has said. The language of form and formlessness, between acosmia message, whatever you say about it.
art always contains silence; at the centre and structuredness. This tension is not The approach he chose was wrong. For
of a work of art there is always an obscure symmetrical. Speaking and silence do not almost twenty-five years Duchamp
place that cannot be interpreted in any form a binary system. They are devoted himself instead to roulette,
way if the work is not to lose its essential asymmetrical, paradoxical. The chess, acting as an agent for his friends
meaning. In the article 'What is Poetry' disparity between them is absolute: the and organizing exhibitions for them; he
already quoted from, Roman Jakobson decisive link is missing and this gap is in referred to himself only as an 'anti-artist'
explains the parallel between Mácha's fact the 'art coefficient' that points beyond and an 'engineer'. He almost ceased to
love poetry and the intimate passages in the work and leaves it to the viewer, the believe in art. He felt closest to the
his diary as a double semantic plan of the reader or the listener to find the courage surrealists but, as he said in his
same subject . But as in other cases the to go in the direction it suggests. If this conversation with Parinaud in 1966, he
meaning of a poetic text lies in the gap disappears, the art-ness of the work saw in their art, nostalgically, merely
interstices within it, may not the meaning disappears with it. There remains only a `the most beautiful, youthful dream' —
here lie as well in the space between these `skeleton' in 'the graveyard of history', to his own lost dream. Anaïs Nin, in her
two texts by Mácha, in the painful use Jakobson's words — the skeleton of a `Diary', wrote in August 1935 that
tension that in a sense cancels out the form whose transcendental meaning we Duchamp
meaning of both the poetry and the diary ? are no longer capable of reading, or the looks like a man who died long ago. He
Do they not both exist so that together skeleton of an idea that no longer plays chess instead of painting because
they may more closely embrace that suggests anything to us. In other words, that is the nearest to complete
obscure place from which they both arose art cannot be considered to be contained immobility, the most natural pose to a
and to which they both return, without either in a mere material work or in a man who died. His skin seems made of
being able to include it directly in mere immaterial idea. Both decorativism parchment and his eyes of glass.78

themselves ? Duchamp himself, by the and conceptualism are nothing more than The same year, 1935, Duchamp began to
way, as Katharine Kuh tells us," two sides of the same coin: they are put together his Boîte-en-valise; it was
originally wanted to create his Maria aestheticism; that is, the cult of art that like a final restrospective.
mise a nu on something like a double has lost its paradoxical nature and along It was not until 1946 that Duchamp
semantic plan — or rather in two media: with it, its mission. began working on a new and definitive
along with the Large Glass there was to Anton Ehrenzweig, who has dealt as no version of La Maria, work that would
have existed a verbal pendant that was to one else has with the relationship between continue for another twenty years. His
be 'quite as important as the visual the formless, 'oceanic' depth and breadth title for it was taken from the first words
material' and for which the notes he later of artistic experience and the closed form of his plan from 1912: Etant donnés:I 0
collected in La boîte verte were only a kind of the work of art itself, made some very La chute d'eau, 20 Le gaz d'éclairage.
of rough draft. interesting remarks on Duchamp's There is a fundamental difference
A particularly important parallel to Large Glass in his book 'The Hidden between the two versions. It could be
Mácha's double texts, however, may be Order of Art.' This work, he said, is not said that Duchamp proved the truth of
found in the symbol of the Bride and the artistically independent: the viewer Ehrenzweig's comments (Ehrenzweig
Milky Way in the Large Glass. Willis requires the accompanying texts in The did not live to see this final Mariée). In the
Domingo74 has correctly pointed to the Green Box. first place, the allegorical nature of the
key importance of the brief symbolist The spectator should work his way first version disappears entirely. Just as
phase (1910-II) in Duchamp's work. through the artist's private reasoning the first could be deciphered like a puzzle,
Here, cloud-like formations similar to the . . . A new kind of cooperation between the second cannot, in fact, be interpreted
Milky Way appear. These formations the artist and his public may spring up, at all.
surround the hieratic female figures in which paradoxically rests on a The essential difference . . . lies in the
the pictures Le buisson (1910- II) and Le diminution of the art's ambiguity and fact that the Bride is presented in the
baptême (191i), and they even reoccur in indeterminacy. former as appearance to be deciphered,
a late etching of La Mari& mise a nu... However intangible and abstract while in the latter she is a presence
from 1968. In the Large Glass, when the [Duchamp's concepts] were in the offered to our contemplation
Bride became a mere mechanical- beginning, they became completely is how Octavio Paz puts it. And just as
chemical apparatus, this vague form was realized objects to him with little there is nothing in its content to be
separated from her, Duchamp now surrealistic and irrational qualities.'' revealed, there is nothing in its form to be
called it the Milky Way (or also Top It is a comment that Ehrenzweig analysed. It is a purely naturalistic
Inscription) — but the only 'inscription' repeated when talking about the second presentation which is in itself

44