Duchamp built his life and his work as a series of passages or even ruptures: from Cubist painter to independent artist and individu, from Paris to New York and vice versa, from The Large Glass to Etant donnés, from his identity as Marcel Duchamp to that of Rrose Sélavy, and from one double to another through his ‘certified copies’. Consistently and with passion, he aimed to lay bare the multiple facets of his individuality, in sum, the ‘ready-made’, as expressed in ‘Pensée-cadeau: vers un ami’ (‘Thought Gift: for a friend’), a poem Ettie Stettheimer sent to him in 1922:
I would like to be made to measure
For you, for you
but I am readymade by nature,
for what for what?
since I do not know I have made adjustments
for me—1
For Duchamp, the artist’s true investment in his creation is this lifetime commitment: ‘The artist of tomorrow will go underground.’ Duchamp sought to satisfy his ‘appetite’ for self-understanding, the sort that arises from rites of passage and is necessary for initiation, which he rarely commented on. He understood the liberating effects of an independence of mind, freedom and repudiation, all of which are possible through detachment and indifference. This range of available existential choices gradually led him down the road to self-knowledge, which he followed with patience and humility. His humanist attitude led him to recognize the liberating power of humour and eroticism:
Eroticism is a subject very dear to me and I certainly applied this taste, or this love, to my Glass. In fact, I thought the only excuse for doing anything was to introduce eroticism into life. Eroticism is close to life, closer to life than philosophy or anything like it; it’s an animal thing that has many facets and is pleasing to use, as you would use a tube of paint.2
That said, Duchamp did set up a hierarchy between humour and eroticism. He considered humour fundamental; it prevents one from ever taking oneself too seriously and, therefore, allows for self-contradiction and mental flexibility. It is a process that inevitably leads to what Robert Filliou, one of Duchamp’s artistic heirs, called ‘permanent creation’ or, in the more theoretical words of Duchamp’s frequent reference, Gaston de Pawlowski: ‘Humour is the strict sense of the relativity of things; it is the ongoing critique of what we believe to be definitive; it is the door open to new possibilities without which mental progress would be impossible.’3
In contrast, Duchamp considered eroticism to be a very serious, even ‘quite dangerous’ notion. For him ‘eroticism is the only serious thing I could consider . . . Now that is serious, and I tried to use it as a platform, if you will, for building things, like Bride, for example.’4 By bringing eroticism to the same level as creative acts like drawing, painting, sculpture, thinking or writing, Duchamp removed the sacred aura from art, which was sometimes considered as a religion or a dogma, and brought it much closer to life; artists have carried on doing this since the 1960s.
Two years before his death he reiterated his position: ‘I believe in eroticism a lot, because it is truly a rather widespread thing throughout the world, a thing that everyone understands. It replaces, if you wish, what other literary schools call Symbolism, Romanticism. It could be another “ism”, so to speak.’5 Here, Duchamp admits two wishes: on the one hand, that his position will be understood outside artistic circles, which corresponds with Apollinaire’s prediction in 1913 that ‘It will perhaps be reserved for an artist as disengaged from aesthetic preoccupations, as occupied with energy as Marcel Duchamp, to reconcile Art and the People’;6 and on the other, that he will establish a new ‘ism’ that has strictly nothing to do with style and forms.
For Duchamp, as for Picabia, Brancusi, Man Ray, Breton and the Surrealists, and Jeff Koons today, eroticism has been the basis for all reflection, the infallible means for revealing hidden things, in other words, an act towards self-awareness and knowledge of others:
it is really a way to try to bring out in the daylight things that are constantly hidden – and that are not necessarily erotic – because of the Catholic religion, because of social rules. To be able to reveal them, and to place them at everyone’s disposal – I think this is important because it’s the basis for everything and no one talks about it.7
Again, he could not have said it more clearly than in 1961:
The erotic act is the perfect four-dimensional situation. This idea is important to me: a fixed idea, stemming from a tactile apprehension of all of the facets of an object, provides a tactile sensation of the fourth dimension. Because, naturally, none of our senses have any application in the fourth dimension, except, perhaps, for touch. As a result, the act of love as tactile sublimation can be envisaged or rather felt like a physical apprehension of the fourth dimension.8
Eroticism was central to Duchamp’s most mysterious paintings, made during his trip to Munich in 1912: The Virgin, Bride, The Passage from the Virgin to the Bride, which were surpassed by the esotericism of The Large Glass. Picabia, who was as preoccupied with these questions in his work as he was in his life, reaffirmed these initial pictorial translations of eroticism. ‘I wish my penis had an eye so that one day I could say I saw love up close’, he wrote in his novel Jésus-Christ Rastoquère, published by Au Sans Pareil in 1912. Decades later, Duchamp came up with a similar formula: ‘I want to grasp things with the mind the way the penis is grasped by the vagina.’9 Duchamp gave Bride to Picabia, whom he described as a ‘half-Auvergnat, half-Norman Don Juan’. From 1913 to 1915 Duchamp and Picabia held an ongoing dialogue on the theme of the ‘girl born without a mother’, or the machine as a sexual metaphor. Duchamp constantly asserted that eroticism was the principal subject of his painting on glass, which was a combination of several earlier works as well as his writing. He considered eroticism one of the ‘great cogs of the bachelor machine’.10
Although Duchamp was preoccupied with the description of sexual mechanics (one of the driving themes of hundreds of handwritten notes for The Large Glass), his language remains cryptic. It was only after his total liberation between 1915 and 1918 in the Arensbergs’ Neo-Dadaist circle that his position became more explicit, or more mundane, in certain cases. Duchamp’s friends practically raised sexuality to the level of an artistic gesture. It was flaunted as an anti-bourgeois position that could erase social prejudice. Over the course of those three years Man Ray, Duchamp and others intensified their production of games, plays on words and erotic objects. In 1918 Man Ray made reference to Duchamp’s ready-mades in his photographs Woman and Man, images of cooking utensils that appear as sado-masochistic metaphors for male and female sexual organs.
Several women linked to the New York Dada scene participated in these quite racy games of seduction. Beatrice Wood, Lou Arensberg, who became Roché’s lover, Sophie Treadwell and, above all, the German baroness and author Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, who had left Europe for New York, had their own roles to play in Marcel’s masterful erotic rituals. Elsa and David Bomberg made several erotically charged symbolic objects, including a phallic assemblage of plumbing materials that she entitled God in 1917. Man Ray and Duchamp made a film, now lost, named explicitly after its subject matter, The Baroness Shaves her Pubic Hair. Beatrice Wood, who was mistress to both Roché and Duchamp, captured their parties in anecdotal sketches that are as evocative as the objects mentioned or as Mina Loy’s memories:
Marcel was as clever as a prestidigitator; he could slip a corsage into a woman’s hand with absolute grace and say, ‘Madame, you have a ‘joli caleçon en satin’ (you have lovely satin panties) and leave her with a fanciful kiss and a ‘Madame, you have ‘un sale con de satin’ (a dirty satin cunt).11
It was in this frivolous and libertine context that Duchamp submitted his urinal to the Society of Independent Artists; he was aware of its phallic and erotic dimension, as was Alfred Stieglitz, who photographed it after the committee rejected it. A closer look at the interior of Stieglitz’s 1917 photograph reveals a shadow, the outline of which clearly evokes an erect male organ. This shadow, emphasized by Stieglitz’s lighting of the object, is echoed in certain of Brancusi’s sculptures, such as Princess X (1916), which represents a female bust shaped like an erect phallus, also exhibited at the Independent Artists exhibition.
When Duchamp ‘androgynized’ the Mona Lisa by drawing a moustache and goatee on her, he implied that this straight-faced image concealed Leonardo da Vinci’s homosexuality, but also a ‘hot’ woman. Shortly after he gave birth to his female alter-ego, Rose Sélavy, this ‘impudent widow’, this ‘intellectual woman’, who became ‘Eros, c’est la vie’ one year later when Duchamp added a second ‘r’ to her name. When asked about Rose’s birth in New York in 1920, Duchamp said:
. . . I wanted to change my identity, and the first idea that came to me was to take a Jewish name. I was Catholic, and it was a change to go from one religion to another! I didn’t find a Jewish name that I especially liked, or that tempted me, and suddenly I had an idea: why not change sex? . . . The double R comes from Picabia’s painting, you know, the Oeil cacodylate, which is at the Boeuf sur le Toit cabaret.12
Duchamp used Rrose, alias Eros, to get his erotic messages across through particularly colourful and daring plays on words and puns. In 1939 he published his writings as Occultisme de précision, Rrose Sélavy New-York Paris Poils et coups de pieds en tous genres. In slang, Rrose/Eros, this mistress of the art of transforming ‘storks into swans’, or into signs (cygnes, in French), utters rather unusual words for a woman. Consider this ‘intimate’ question: Faut-il mettre la moelle de l’épee dans le poil de l’aimée?; or these nice turns of phrase: abominables fourrures abdominales (‘abominable abdominal furs’), A charge de revanche/à verge de rechange, un mot de reine/des mots de reins; and finally, quand on a un corps étranger entre les jambes, il ne faut pas mettre son coude près des siennes. Hadn’t Duchamp declared upon his arrival in New York that female modesty was no longer de rigueur? Duchamp, alias Rrose, transformed other puns into images in his silent film Anemic Cinema. The slow, continuously gyrating, white spirals expressed even more trivial spoonerisms, such as: l’aspirant habite Javel et moi j’avais l’habite en spirale.13
Having first chosen the path of veiled eroticism, using a mechanistic language formed into a sophisticated treatise to evoke the sexual act and the collision of flows, Duchamp next put sexually suggestive words in Rrose’s mouth and later became even more explicit in his erotic objects from the 1950s, as well as the series of engravings entitled Lovers (1968). Then he produced his final work, Etant donnés, which openly displays the female slit, the ‘source or spring’ from which ‘these fluids, you know, that love is made of’ spurt. This tableau vivant can be seen as a metaphor for the ‘woman as fountain’, as an indirect way to express the ‘original revolutionary faucet’ that stops ‘running when we stop listening to it’. This work is a relevant and unforeseen reference to images by Courbet, such as the landscapes of the Lou and the waterfalls, Ingres (The Spring, 1856) and Picasso (The Pissing Woman, 1965), which portray the ‘woman as fountain’ and ‘waterfalls’ that splash and ‘spray’ life. Through this work, Duchamp offers us a particularly sanguine message that sums up all of his ‘infamies’ or ‘litanies’: Sélavy, C’est la vie! And in rose, naturally!