Duchamp and His Legacy


For Marcel Duchamp the question of art and life, as well as any other question capable of dividing us at the present moment, does not arise.—André Breton, in Littérature, 1922

He approaches life as he does the chessboard: the gambits fascinate him without leading him to imagine that there is a meaning behind it all which might make it necessary for him to believe in something. . . . Duchamp’s attitude is that life is a melancholy joke, an indecipherable nonsense, not worth the trouble of investigating.—Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art, 1964

What accounts for the immense intellectual prestige which the mystique of Marcel Duchamp has enjoyed in this country—if only in certain circles, to be sure—for more decades than most of us can now remember? I speak at the outset of the artist’s mystique rather than of his art, for it is not so much Duchamp’s art as the penumbra of ideas and mystifications associated with it that has cast a spell over the minds of so many otherwise intelligent people, both in the art world and beyond it. As an artist, after all, Duchamp produced one of the smallest oeuvres in the modernist canon. He was always a lazy revolutionary. His insouciance was often a mask of indolence, his indolence a reflection of the accidie or ennui he perfected as a way of life and somehow managed to endow with an aura of sanctity. That it was a sanctity of negation only enhanced its prestige.

How much that aura of sanctity owed to the effortless celebrity that Duchamp achieved in America while he was still in his twenties is a matter about which, of course, we can only speculate. What is a certainty, however, is that America was essential to the kind of career he elected to pursue once that celebrity had been thrust upon him in the Armory Show of 1913. The painting that made Duchamp an overnight sensation in that show—the Nude Descending a Staircase, painted in 1912—wasn’t the masterpiece of audacity it was taken to be. As William S. Rubin observed in his “Reflexions on Marcel Duchamp” in 1960,“the Nude hardly compares in adventurousness with the great Analytic Cubist paintings of the same year”—the paintings of Braque and Picasso. Indeed, to place the artist who painted the Nude Descending a Staircase in the company of Braque and Picasso, never mind Matisse and Léger, is to define him as a minor figure. In the Paris avant-garde of the period before the First World War, Duchamp did not rank at all.

Only in America was he mistaken to be a major representative of the modernism that had been created by talents more robust than his. The truth is, the sensation that the Nude caused in New York in 1913 was more a reflection of our provincialism than of Duchamp’s originality. Yet who can doubt that the entire career of the Duchamp who is now so admired, so solemnly studied and so widely emulated—the Duchamp of The Large Glass, the “Readymades,” and the enigmatic notes and clues that accompany them—was determined by this early episode in mistaken identity? For that episode and the publicity it generated placed upon Duchamp’s every subsequent artistic effort an obligation to come up with something that would prove to be equally provocative and controversial.

It is in this respect that Duchamp belongs to the history of the avant-garde in America rather than to its greater counterpart in Paris. It wasn’t until the emergence of the Surrealist movement in the early 1920s that Duchamp secured an anchor to which he could attach himself in the Paris avant-garde. Even then, of course, it suited his temperament to use the Surrealist camp as a convenience, as it were, rather than be used by it. Mark Polizzotti, in his new biography of André Breton, gets the matter exactly right when he describes Duchamp as an “amiable fellow traveler” of both Dada and Surrealism who viewed the younger Breton “with a mixture of respect and sarcastic amusement.” But then, of course, he viewed everything in life with sarcastic amusement.

With the Dada movement Duchamp had closer affinities, and many people still persist in portraying him as the very archetype of the Dada spirit—a practice that Duchamp did nothing to discourage. He certainly shared the Dada taste for creating scandal, yet with neither of the two principal activities that occupied the Dada movement—art and politics—did Duchamp have much sympathy. He professed to scorn the creation of the first (though in private he continued to pursue certain projects), while about the second he refused to pay it even the compliment of rejection. Alongside the copious oeuvres of the leading artists of the Dada movement—Jean Arp, Kurt Schwitters, Max Ernst, and Man Ray—Duchamp’s is little more than a provocative patchwork; and with the politics of a Dada militant like Richard Huelsenbeck, Duchamp had no affinity whatever. One can well imagine with what “sarcastic amusement” he might have observed Breton’s tortuous attempt to establish an entente cordiale with the French Communist party in the 1920s, but it is doubtful that he paid the matter the slightest attention. The sheer solipsism that circumscribed Duchamp’s mental universe precluded such interests.

It was this inviolate solipsism, to which his works, his utterances, and his public career made so many arch allusions, that combined with the glamour of Duchamp’s peculiar fame to create his special mystique. By suggesting that he believed in nothing, least of all in art, while at the same time enjoying the status of an admired and controversial artist, Duchamp left it to others to discover and codify what, if any, might be the private pieties and proclivities that actually governed his life and thought. Has any other modern artist ever given so many interviews about such a small number of objects without revealing anything very definite about their meaning or intention?

Those interviews were often brilliant performances. They introduced just enough variation into Duchamp’s account—or rather, nonaccount—of his thought to sustain the interest of his acolytes while disclosing little, if anything, that wasn’t already established as a coefficient of his personal myth. It was in this sense that Duchamp may have been the greatest “performance artist” of his time—an artist, in other words, whose “works” are seen to be mere props for the ritual reenactment of a private destiny.

All through the later decades of his life, when it pleased Duchamp to beguile successive generations of artists and art-world functionaries as an eminence who had achieved a special status precisely because he had given up the mundane task of creating art, it was his historic act of negation that was assumed to be the basis of his moral authority—a moral authority that depended, paradoxically, on the good opinion of the many other artists who treated him as a guru and hailed him as a master while they themselves refused, of course, to follow his example in abandoning the creation of art. These artists understood very well that giving up art à la Duchamp would get them nowhere. Duchamp had already done that to great acclaim, and it was not a gesture that could be repeated with anything like the same effect. Besides, these artists were eager to get on with their careers and achieve the kind of success that had come to Duchamp himself at an early age. They hadn’t yet done enough in their art or achieved enough public notice to endow any decision they might make to abandon the creation of art with the requisite shock and significance.

Their problem—the problem of the Duchampian epigones—was indeed paradoxical: how to honor and participate in the spirit of the master’s negation of art while continuing with the creation of art. The solution, of course, was the sham compromise that goes by the name of “anti-art,” which may best be defined as a species of art that claims, if only provisionally, to be something other than what it is—namely, art—in order to be judged by criteria other than those currently in effect or, better still, not to be judged at all but simply embraced as a form of expression more imperative than mere “art.”

Much of the art of the last fifty years—much, certainly, that belongs to what the art establishment believes to be “avant-garde”—is anti-art of this persuasion, and Duchamp is indeed its patron saint. He set this train on its course, after all, with the “Readymades”—the snow shovel, the urinal, the bicycle wheel, etc.—that mocked the very concept of artistic creation and were yet quickly accepted, albeit in quotation marks so to speak, as authentic and even profound works of art. Today, nearly eighty years after Duchamp perpetrated this bluff on the New York art world, his anti-art legacy fills our museums and in some other quarters, too—the academy and the media—commands an esteem that is often greater than any enjoyed by works of art created by more traditional means. All of which is a reminder, if we still need one, that the conventions of this anti-art legacy have themselves now come to constitute an academy of sorts.

It is a measure of this academic status that the study of Duchamp is now something of an academic industry—so much so, indeed, that in this last decade of the twentieth century it looks more and more as if the university will be the final resting place of Duchamp’s reputation. This may tell us more about the fate of the university at the end of the twentieth century than it tells us about Duchamp—for much of the academic literature on Duchamp amounts to little more than pedantry in the service of uncritical adulation—but it also suggests that the appropriation of Duchamp by the academy may be the ultimate Duchampian irony: a revolution in sensibility buried in a cemetery of scholarly footnotes.

To this vast literature on Duchamp there has now been added something new—an avowedly “humanistic” and “old-fashioned” historical approach to the subject called The Private Worlds of Marcel Duchamp. Its author—Jerrold Seigel—is not an art historian or art-world groupie but the William J. Kenan Professor of History at New York University. His aim in writing about Duchamp is, as he notes in the preface to this study, “to clarify certain features of the avant-garde and of modern cultural history more generally.” In this respect, at least, his study of Duchamp may be considered a sequel to his earlier history of Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics, and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life, 1830 –1930, published in 1986. And while in much of the book Professor Seigel doesn’t write as a critic of Duchamp—on the contrary, he is clearly captivated by the audacity of Duchamp’s performance and determined to give it the benefit of many doubts—in the end The Private Worlds of Marcel Duchamp is really a contribution to the demystification of his subject.

It is for this reason that one wishes the book had begun where it ends, with the chapter on “Art and Its Freedoms.” For it isn’t until the last page of Private Worlds that Professor Seigel explicitly raises the question that is now the principal reason for us to take an imperative interest in Duchamp and his legacy. This is the key passage:

As the claim that dissolving the separate sphere of art would liberate energies capable of creating new forms of life loses what persuasive force it once bore, we realize more and more that art owes what power it has to enrich the rest of life to the very separation and independence against which many avant-garde projects were directed; what we gain by dissolving the boundaries between art and life turns out to be much less than what we risk losing.

This is immediately preceded by an observation that is even more devastating in its assessment of Duchamp’s influence:

As some recent critics have begun to argue, the consequences of merging art into life have not been what Breton and others hoped, leaving life untransformed but art much weakened by the absence of criteria to decide whether any given object belongs within its sphere and, of those objects that do, which are good. The sovereignty of the artist who claims the right to declare that art is whatever he or she designates has clashed with the equal authority of audiences to accept or reject what is offered them; the result is only a higher level of mutual suspicion and confusion.

This is indeed where a study of Duchamp and his legacy ought now to begin, and it is one of the disappointments of Professor Seigel’s book that the subject comes too late to be fully explored. There are some excellent things in this last chapter on “Art and Its Freedoms”—most notably, the comparisons that are made with Picasso, John Cage, Paul Valéry, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, and Nietzsche—but even these are somewhat blurred in the final equivocations about what in Duchamp’s legacy remains “vital and worth preserving.”

As for what Professor Seigel means by those “private” worlds he al-ludes to in his title—in the end they amount to little more than the defeated desires of a Freudian family romance. Professor Seigel describes his study of Duchamp as “only mildly and partially psychobiographical,” but in fact the book is regrettably “old-fashioned” in the way it accords intellectual priority to a quite conventional Freudian analysis of Duchamp and his oeuvre. Did Duchamp feel “neglected as a boy”? Did he suffer from “his mother’s indifference”? Did he entertain fantasies of incest about his sister Suzanne? Did all this leave him sexually “dead-ened” in later life? Was he impotent or merely sexually indifferent to the many women with whom he was thought to have had affairs of a sort in his maturity? Or was he a secret homosexual? And was much of his art, in any case, some sort of masturbation fantasy?

About most of these questions we have no definitive answers. Professor Seigel’s speculations are better informed than most others I have read, but they leave us wondering if he quite understands the extent to which they, too, contribute to the mystification of his subject’s reputation. For what they add up to is a protracted case of voyeurism haunted by impotence, and they leave us with a distinct impression of Duchamp as a man whose relation to art was remarkably parallel to his relation to sex—an impression of total freedom won at the price of a bemused and self-absorbed sterility. And if Professor Seigel believes what he says about Duchamp’s damaged psyche, then what does it mean for him to invite us to “celebrate the courage and originality with which [Duchamp] explored those inner spaces” on the last page of this book?

The question is an important one, for what I have called Duchamp’s mystique derives, above all, from the conception of radical freedom he brought to the artistic vocation—a conception of freedom so fundamentally inimical to the artist’s vocation that it renders it impotent. For in art, as in life, there are only choices to be made, obstacles to overcome, contingencies to engage and accommodate. To “drop out” is to abandon effort and inspiration in favor of a radical passivity—which is what the Duchampian idea of total freedom finally comes down to.

Why, then, should we speak of “courage” when what we are dealing with is failure—a failure of spirit, certainly, and very likely a failure of talent as well? Failure in art, failure in life: isn’t that the unacknowledged subtext of the story that is told in The Private Worlds of Marcel Duchamp?That Duchamp had the “genius” to turn that failure into a myth of success and superiority is an important part of the story, too, of course—maybe even the more important part, for it returns us to the American setting of his career and the role played by American provincialism and gullibility in the creation of the Duchamp cult. And to the study of that subject “psychobiography”—Freudian or otherwise—doesn’t have much to contribute.

In the end, alas—and despite the demurrals of its last chapter—The Private Worlds of Marcel Duchamp is a study remarkably reluctant to face up to the implications of its own findings. Inside this book there is a better book waiting to be written, but the one we have been given leaves the subject of Duchamp and his legacy safely enclosed in the equivocations of the academy.

[1995]