DUCHAMP TAKES NEW YORK

By John Strausbaugh

OR Books. 159 pages. £15. ISBN 978-1-68219-457-7

Reviewed by Jim Burns

I’ve never been able to make up my mind about Marcel Duchamp. Was he someone who created a body of work that challenged the existing notions of what constituted “art”, and so changed the course of twentieth century painting, or was he just a supreme confidence trickster who fooled people into accepting that he was a genius with radical ideas? His supporters seemed to think that putting a beard and moustache on the Mona Lisa was an original way of cocking a snook at the art establishment. It had been done before, in the 1880s, when a painter in Montmartre pictured her smoking a pipe.

There’s also the question of “ready-mades”, which has led to exhibitions of work people are told is significant because the artists think it is, and critics, particularly those with academic links, are seemingly willing to go along with them. John Strausbaugh, in his informative and entertaining book about Duchamp, tells the story of an artist called René Moncada sending out invitations to view his Vent-Elation on display at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MOMA). People duly turned up to find him standing “next to a gleaming aluminium ventilation grill 12 feet high by 2 feet wide. Citing Duchamp’s principle of the ready-made -  ‘or, in this case, the ready-installed’ – he claimed it as his art”. He was, he asserted, now part of the permanent collection at MOMA.

All good fun, just as it was when Duchamp, John Sloan, and some others, climbed to the top of Washington Square Arch in New York, and declared Greenwich Village independent. But that was in 1917 and it’s unlikely that anyone took them seriously. Perhaps no-one took Moncada seriously, though I have an uneasy feeling that someone, somewhere, might well have written something to persuade us that what he did had a depth of meaning. After all, how many words have been produced to give credence to theories of “conceptual art”, where the thought replaces any practice of realisation or reduces it to a minimum?

Marcel Duchamp was born in 1887 in Blainville, Normandy. His maternal grandfather was an artist, and so were his two brothers and his sister. That could have invited a reaction, which in a way it perhaps did. He had some skills as a painter when he was young, but the fact that he may have realised that he’d never be a major artist might well have inclined him to look for other ways to be noticed. Duchamp, while always cultivating an attitude of seeming indifference, was never backward in coming forward whenever there was a chance of publicity.

Strausbaugh says that in 1912 Duchamp produced a work that “would make him famous and infamous, Nude Descending a Staircase No.2.The figure in it is not discernibly human. It looks mechanical, like a shiny bronze robot. It appears to be tumbling down the stairs as in a blizzard of film stills. (Duchamp rejected any allusions to cinema but it fits)”. He adds that Duchamp was inspired by “photographic motion studies that had included, in fact, Eadweard Muybridge’s 1887 set of thirty-six sequential photographs called  ‘Nude Woman Descending Stairs’ “. But the artists Duchamp knew didn’t like what he’d done, and considered it a “mockery of Cubist esthetics”. Cubism was then very much approved of by the avant-garde.

Duchamp, though still in Paris, submitted it to the Armory Show in New York in 1913, an event that provided a mixture of American and European modernists for locals to react to, either with approval, disapproval, bafflement, or laughter. Duchamp’s work seems to have attracted a great deal of attention, much of it of a parodic type, with newspaper cartoonists having a field day and writers coming up with comments about it looking like “an explosion in a shingle factory”. Duchamp only arrived in New York in January 1915, but his name was known because of the Armory Show, so the Press welcomed him. Strausbaugh quotes the art historian Moira Roth as saying that the decision to come to America was the right one “for a man obsessed with the making of his own image”.  And he further includes Hilton Kramer’s view that “Only in America was (Duchamp) mistaken to be a major representative of the modernism that had been created by talents more robust than his”.

I’d guess that if most people know about Duchamp it’ll be because of Nude Descending a Staircase, and the later work, The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even. Those two pieces are the ones that usually crop up in any general discussion of his work, along with some of the ready-mades, of which Fountain, an upturned urinal, is surely the most famous. But was it really Duchamp’s discovery? There is a story, favoured by some art historians, that it was actually “created” by the  eccentric Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, “one of the most outrageous figures on the New York art scene in the 1910s”.  It was Duchamp who submitted it as an entry for an exhibition by the Society of Independent Artists, an organisation that allowed anyone to send in work provided they paid the appropriate five-dollars membership fee and an entry fee of one dollar.

Duchamp sent Fountain and paid the fees under the name of R.Mutt, but George Bellows, the Ashcan School artist and one of the founder members of the Society, objected to it being accepted. Some other members of the Board of Directors took an opposing view, but a majority decision was to reject Fountain.  And there the matter rested until 1934 when Duchamp claimed it as his work. By that time he was living in Paris, and the Baroness was dead. Strausbaugh, telling both sides of the story, says that the original urinal was probably thrown away : “It didn’t matter. The entire point of Fountain was that the importance was not the object but the idea, the gesture, and the reactions the idea prompted”.

Beyond his provocations Duchamp was famous for playing chess, something he was good at. In fact, he often stated that it was what he preferred to do, though he was never averse to being interviewed about his involvements in the art world. And he did continue to create various works, though none of them appeared to have had the same effect as his earlier constructions or ready-mades. But by the 1960s there were numerous artists who said they had been influenced, in one way or another, by Duchamp. Strausbaugh mentions Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol,  and Jeff Koons.

It’s interesting to note what Strausbaugh has to say about Duchamp’s view of the Abstract Expressionist painters who dominated the New York art scene in the 1940s and 1950s. Duchamp had “denigrated art that was purely retinal and gestural, which pretty well described Abstract Expressionism”. According to Strausbaugh they were disconcerted by the publication of The Dada Painters and Poets, a large anthology edited by Robert Motherwell (usually seen as one of the Abstract Expressionists) with help from, among others, Marcel Duchamp. His views about art were somewhat similar to those of the Dadaists in terms of attempting to explode established notions of what it was and how it was made, if indeed it needed to be made and not just “found”. I think some of the Dadaists (those in Berlin, for example) had more political ideas in mind than Duchamp ever had. It seems that he wasn’t happy to have been in Paris in 1968 when the student protests were taking place. On the subject of his view of the Abstract Expressionists, I think I should point out that, when Duchamp acted as an adviser to Peggy Guggenheim and her Art of the Century collection, he did help her to pick out work by Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still. 

I’ve been selective in what I’ve chosen to comment on in Strausbaugh’s book, and he packs in a lot more details. He doesn’t only discuss Duchamp, but usefully describes the background to his activities in New York. The city was thriving in many ways, and Strausbaugh, who wrote a lively book about Greenwich Village a few years ago, brings in a whole range of artist, writers, and others with whom Duchamp mixed. He knew Man Ray, the artist and photographer, not to mention bohemian characters like Beatrice Wood, Gertrude Drick, and Arthur Cravan. And there were the curious Stettheimer sisters, especially Florine whose work he promoted.

I’m still unsure in my mind how I feel with regard to Duchamp, though I find him fascinating to read about. There is, as Hilton Kramer said, something ironic about the appropriation of Duchamp by the academy.  But it was also Kramer who remarked that “as an esthetic ideologue, as the promulgator of attitudes and ideas about art rather than as a maker of works of art, he was a major force”, which is perhaps why he appeals to academics. All that theorising. Whatever my reservations regarding Duchamp, I thoroughly enjoyed reading John Strausbaugh’s book.