Duchamp and the aesthetics of chance

MARCEL DUCHAMP’S AESTHETICS OF CHANCE:

ART OF THE POSSIBLE

“Curating as a Verb”

(excerpts)

During Europe’s fin de siècle, on the eve of WWI, just as the Kulturkampf (The European Culture War) was coming to a head, the international avant-garde’s progression was thriving. That is, right before it abruptly regressed back to naturalist figuration, in 1915, when “the perceptual conventions of mimetic representation were reestablished,” as the art historian Benjamin H.D. Buchloh noted in his canonical essay “Figures of Authority, Cyphers of Regression.” It was there that Buchloh famously connected the avant-garde’s aesthetic regression – just two years after Duchamp’s Readymade and Malevich’s Black Square – to an overall ideological backlash that idealized “perennial monuments of art history and its masters, the attempt to establish a new aesthetic orthodoxy, and the demand for respect for the cultural tradition.” Buchloh further argued that such culture wars were endemic “to the syndrome of authoritarianism that [realism] appeals to [by affirming] the ‘eternal’ or ancient systems of order (the law of the tribe, the authority of history, the paternal principle of the master, etc.).”

Kazimir Malevich, Black Square, Red Square, 1915 (Soviet Avant-Garde, Supremist Art); Malevich, Self Portrait as Monk,1933 (Neo-classical);

Boris Vladimirski Roses for Stalin, 1949 (Zhdanovist socialist realism)

The Armory &The Independent

Society… From Nude

Descending a Staircase to

Fountain

In 1917, Marcel Duchamp—having made an international splash with his cubist-futurist painting Nude Descending a Staircase, no 2 at The Armory Show four years earlier—would pivot to stage his next scandalous work, the performative readymade sculpture Fountain, at the First Annual Exhibition of The Society of Independent Artists, founded in 1916. The Society’s board of directors, to which Duchamp belonged, decided in its founding constitution that they would accept all members’ submissions for exhibitions, mounted without jury or prizes, thus giving the right to anyone to exhibit upon payment of a modest fee. In so doing, the Society aimed at hosting a yearly exhibition completely free of any established aesthetic criterion associated with so-called old-guard New York art world, in order to “reach the kind of people who have no chance to show otherwise.”

Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, (no 2), 1912; Bottle Rack, 1914; Fountain, 1917

Duchamp’s Aesthetics of

Chance: The Possible

After leaving the Parisian painting circles behind in 1913, and relocating to America in 1915, Duchamp began experimenting with an “aesthetics of chance,” which culminated in his Three Standard Stoppages. The work’s operation was simple: three threads, each having a length of one meter and held horizontally, were dropped from the height of one meter onto a piece of canvas and fixed in position there by means of varnish. Thus favoring contingency over perspective, Herbert Molderings argues that Three Standard Stoppages opened up a way “to escape from those traditional methods of expression long associated with art.” And, in so doing, if chance came to supplant paint as a new medium of choice, it was towards the end of establishing an aesthetic centered around the notion of “the possible.” Molderings thus claims: “Neither ‘likeness’ nor ‘truth’ was [Three Standard Stoppage’s] key aspect, as in all the brands of realism; nor beauty, harmony, or balance, as in the aesthetics of formalism; but rather ‘the possible’ in the sense of what is merely conceivable, the idea that all things can be perceived and conceived differently.”

Marcel Duchamp: Three Standard Stoppages, 1913

Curating by Chance:

Exhibition- as-

Readymade

“Having been elected head of the Hanging Committee of the exhibition…[Duchamp] is faced with the task of installing 2,500 works in three days. To avoid any pre-conceived idea of grouping, Duchamp’s suggestion that a democratic formula should be imposed on the arrangement of the show has been adopted. The works will be hung, commencing in the north-east corner of the main gallery in the Grand Central Palace, according to the artist’s surname in alphabetical order. In the morning at the exhibition hall, witnessed by Roché and Beatrice Wood, the letter “R” is drawn from a hat, which determines for Marcel the works to be hung first.” (Hulten, April 6, 1917) This “curatorial readymade” situation – the chance operation of “dropping” elements into a societal organization and attendant exhibition space – establishes for the first time a willful curatorial modality of chance. And this performative action – taking a chance – constitutes the “verb” of Duchamp’s own readymade “curatorial” method.

The Case of R. Mutt

“The discord amongst the officers and directors of the Society of Independent Artists dominates the atmosphere at the Grand Central Palace until the opening hour of the exhibition. The subject of the dispute is Fountain, the entry sent by Richard Mutt from Philadelphia, who has paid his $6 membership fee and has the right to exhibit. Its defenders maintain that there is nothing immoral in the sculpture and to refuse it would be against the very principles upon which the exhibition has been organized: ‘No jury, no prizes.’ Its detractors led by William Glackens, president of the society, who considers it the product of ‘suppressed adolescence,’ believe the object to be indecent and certainly not a work of art. Reminded of the cartoon strip characters Mutt and Jeff, George Bellows suspects that someone has sent it as a joke.” (Hulten, April 9, 1917)

Placed atop a black pedestal, the “shiny white enamel form causing all the argument” was none other than a male urinal turned on its back. In terms of the work’s “author-function,” before Fountain was a canonical readymade conjured up by Duchamp (the artist) it was therefore an anonymous curatorial intervention enacted by Duchamp (the organizer).

This book with its more than 1,300 illustrations covers 70 years of Duchamp's artistic production. Marcel Duchamp is designed as a double-faced publication: from one direction, entitled Works, it contains a catalogue reproducing Duchamp's paintings, sculptures, and miscellaneous objects (150 illustrated in color). From the other direction, entitled Ephémérides, unfolds a day-by-day account of the artist's life, organized by astrological sign. The greater part of this detailed chronology relies upon unpublished materials. It is enriched by 1,200 documents and photographs, including a number of works by Duchamp that have never before been reproduced. Each section is printed on a different color paper. Sandwiched between these two sections is a concordance listing writings by and about Duchamp, a bibliography (letters sent by Duchamp), exhibition catalogues, a chronology of chess games, and a filmography.

ART OF THE POSSIBLE: A CASE STUDY

DEEP RIVER GALLERY

Deep River Manifesto

“This five-year project was conceived by its founders as an act of poetic terrorism. Deep River—325 square feet of clearing in the art-world underbrush—became a free market of symbolic exchange among the warehouses, public housing projects, maximum-security prisons, and skid row landscapes of downtown L.A. Shamans and jesters engaged us within its walls, while on the sidewalk outside, marginalized ideas informed street-level discourse on aesthetics. The founders followed Gramsci’s dream and Beuys’s practice, in which the artist functions as public intellectual grounded in critical and cultural theory, while engaging in playful acts of medieval foolery. Deep River resisted the absolute power of the Crown by proclaiming, ‘No Critics Allowed.’ Here we remembered the pleasure of looking, remembered that we love art, that making art is a life’s work, for it restores our soul and keeps us conscious / mindful of our critical / theoretical selves / in a world gone mad.”