Marcel Duchamp: Going against the flow

Among all artists of his time, Marcel Duchamp and his works remain misread and misunderstood.

Detail from a photograph of Marcel Duchamp's Fountain, by Alfred Stieglitz.

Marcel Duchamp is, like Andy Warhol, one of those figures in the art of the 20th century whose work is genuinely disturbing and disruptive but who is consistently underestimated by naive admirers, such as teachers who think it useful to have their pupils make a Warhol-ised image of a contemporary starlet as an art project.

Like Warhol, the aloof and virginal enigma at the centre of a storm of debauchery, Duchamp was a kind of catalyst, bewitching generations of artists and perhaps especially art students, but whose art refuses to be co-opted, appropriated or imitated. You can’t copy his notorious L.H.O.O.Q. by drawing a moustache on another famous portrait, let alone take the ute to Bunnings, purchase a urinal and call it a fountain.

It is pointless to copy most modernist styles of the past century because each was a distinct artistic proposition that was significant in its time and place, but rarely allows for any development or extension. In that sense, much modernist art is made up of more or less brilliant dead ends. But with Duchamp, the obstacle is something more radical: his work has a core of nihilism that is more important than any of the various tangible forms it assumes in the course of his career.

If Duchamp’s art has a positive force, it is in the sense that Hegel regarded negation as the driving force of history: it is, in his view, the power of negation that drives the dialectic of historical development and prevents us from remaining blocked at any stage of cultural evolution, whether as hunters and gatherers or in medieval agrarian and feudal societies.

Or one could reflect on Descartes’s program of radical doubt as the propaedeutic to building his own philosophy on more secure foundations — quoted, incidentally, on the cover of the third issue of Zurich Dada (December 1918). But in any case, that is why what there is to learn from Duchamp is not to be found on the surface but in the invisible and elusive spirit of his work.

And perhaps this work, with its cathartic charge, has a new relevance today, in a generation whose culture has been so permeated by puritanism, moral outrage, self-pity and self-loathing. For Duchamp was a stranger to all of these conditions: he was essentially apolitical as well as amoral in his approach to art and would have considered today’s moralistic posturings as ridiculous.

His own philosophical position seems to have been more akin to that of the ancient cynics or sceptics; at the end of his life, dismissing the student riots of May 1968, he recommended following the example of Aristippus, the pupil of Socrates who believed in happiness and was happy to accommodate the realities of power.

The most celebrated, even notorious, of Duchamp’s works is the urinal to which he gave the title Fountain and that he signed R. Mutt, possibly a pun on the German word Armut, poverty. Every curator, teacher and student who ever refers to this work repeats the same catechism about the way Duchamp is here “challenging” all conventions and declaring that anything that an artist chooses to exhibit and sign can be considered art.

But Duchamp is not challenging a “conservative” order and inaugurating a new age in which anyone can make anything into art. His critique is much less banal, much deeper and more corrosive than that: he is really destabilising everything from the role of the artist to the business of the art market and the institutions of museology.

Yet this work over which so much ink has been spilled no longer exists in its original form, was never exhibited in public and has exercised its influence on the aesthetic consciousness of the past 100 years almost exclusively in its second-degree incarnation as the subject of a photograph by Alfred Stieglitz, in whose studio it was briefly shown before being lost.

Indeed we can appreciate at once the importance of Stieglitz’s contribution when we compare his photograph to one of the authorised reproductions later produced, which is included in the exhibition. The real urinal, in its display case, is so uninteresting that it is unlikely that it would have made anything like the same impact on subsequent art without the photograph, which was published in the New York Dada journal The Blind Man (1917).

Detail from Marcel Duchamp’s Nude descending a staircase (No2). Picture: Art Gallery of NSW

Stieglitz turned this bland piece of white porcelain into a dramatic image, sculpted in light and shade, especially the deep shadow underneath the urinal. This, and the frontal angle of the photograph, accentuate the work’s disturbing meaning by bringing out the partial plausibility of the title: with the original water input now at the bottom — this was Duchamp’s own choice — it resembles the spout through which a wall-mounted fountain in a garden would pour its water into a basin below.

Stieglitz has enhanced this suggestion of a fountain in a garden by setting the object against what looks at first sight like a backdrop of painted leaves. It comes as a surprise to realise that the background is in fact a bright orange painting by Marsden Hartley, representing a contingent of the Imperial Horse Guard in Berlin (1913), and whose central shape, recalling a Buddhist stupa, coincidentally echoes the shape of the inverted urinal.

Duchamp’s second most famous work is the far more elaborate Bride Stripped Bare, also known as the Large Glass, which he worked on from 1915 to 1923 and, by his own admission, left unfinished. The iconography of this set of images sandwiched between two layers of glass is radically obscure and in fact completely unintelligible on visual evidence before the viewer.

The subject was explained by the artist himself as a convoluted allegory of the sexual relations of men and women, but we would be naive to take this at face value. The real point is that Duchamp is extending the kind of sceptical puzzle he posed with the urinal: if that object was designed to cast doubt on the category of the work of art, as well as the persona of the artist and social context of markets and museums, this one attacks the concept of artistic meaning in a parallel manner.

Here, in other words, Duchamp creates the most disconnected yet specific set of motifs that he can, then asks us to believe that these motifs correspond to an equally gratuitous set of allegorical meanings. Of course the art public, as well as critics and writers, falls straight into the trap and believes that these images do mean these ideas, but it is a deliberate fallacy: meaning is not just a matter of assertion, it is in fact, as the structuralists remind us, a matter of belonging to a system of signs.

Duchamp’s whole career is rather like an extended performance in which he plays with the eager and uncritical apparatchiks of the modern art world, as in the filmed interview included in the exhibition. His interviewer, though one of the most senior museum professionals in New York, is a simpleton compared with the smooth, urbane, relaxed but Mephistophelean figure of Duchamp; but he is the personification of the modernist art establish­ment.

A further example of the way that Duchamp played that establish­ment was the way that he somehow convinced them all to take his early paintings seriously. Looking at them today, in the present exhibition, we can see that the young Duchamp was a reasonably talented painter drawn now to expressionism, now to cubism, now to futurism, but with no clear sense of direction. If he had only produced these works, he would barely count as a footnote in art history.

But instead of acknowledging that these were youthful works made before he had found his way, Duchamp boldly retained them as part of his oeuvre, and persuaded the art world to prize, if not fetishise, that oeuvre as an allegedly organic and coherent whole.

Duchamp not only had all the completely gratuitous forms of the Large Glass — the chocolate grinders and so on — printed in luxury limited edition folios for collectors but also produced little suitcases containing his entire oeuvre in miniature form. Once again, collectors and museums eagerly acquired these packages.

Duchamp had one more surprise in store for the world. After the war, he secretly started work on a final piece, Etant donnes, which he tinkered with for 20 years, and which was only revealed after his death in 1968. This installation cannot be moved from the Philadelphia Museum of Fine Art but a video presentation gives some idea of the experience of seeing it in reality.

Etant donnes is a disturbing work, starting with the way it involves the audience as voyeurs of something they should probably not be witnessing. In Philadelphia we walk up to a pair of weathered old barn doors, bend down and peep through two eyeholes. What we see, a naked woman lying spreadeagled on a grassy hillside, undoubtedly recalls Courbet’s L’origine du monde, painted a century earlier in 1866, but it also looks uncomfortably like the aftermath of a rape.

The title is significant, however: the formula etant donne, in French, is the equivalent of “given” in English, as we use it in mathematical problems. The full French title refers to the “givens” of this situation as, first, a waterfall or the fact that water falls under the effect of gravity and, second, gas lighting.

Both a waterfall and a gas light appear in the installation, but neither explains what we see. As with the pseudo-explanation of the Large Glass, we are left with a manifestly useless and spurious formula that in no sense matches the spectacle of apparent violation that we have before us.

Today ritual expressions of moral outrage and, if one is a man, self-flagellation, would be expected before such a subject; Duchamp is content to muse, no doubt in the aftermath of the war, on the futility of reason in the face of unthinking violence.

The Essential Duchamp, Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney, until August 11