Abstract
Marcel Duchamp: Étant donnés by Julian Jason Haladyn London: Afterall Books, One Work Series, 2010 Reviewed by Nikos Papastergiadis
Marcel Duchamp is a source of endless fascination. The brilliance of his acumen, stunning combination of simplicity and complexity in his work, and the outrageous avant-gardist provocations that paradoxically contained a Zen-like concern with perpetuity are qualities that will ensure his perduring contemporaneity. Each generation of critics and historians will invent a new Duchamp. His works will in equal measure bedazzle and bemuse, delight and frustrate, expand the horizons of his viewers and confirm their worst prejudices. His capacity to redefine aesthetic experience through the utilization of ordinary found objects and his more general attention to the endless process of motion and the sticky point of things will deny the ability of his successors to categorize the meaning of Duchamp with any degree of absolute finality. For instance, in his famous Bicycle Wheel 1913, in which he simply attached a wheel to a wooden stool, the wheel is always shown stationary. But surely the point is that it is turning and not going anywhere.
Duchamp was amongst the first artists of modernity to recognize that we lived in an era of surplus visuality. His focus was on challenging the categories and heightening the faculties of perception. This mode of attention to the way things appear was often grasped by reference to his negative views toward the realm of art that intended to play with retinal illusion or concern itself with symbolic content. It was not a flippant remark when he declared that he had more in common with the merchant. He saw himself as a broker and situation maker. With the legacy of this context and methodology it is also no coincidence that one of the most appropriate ways of approaching his work is in the spirit of creating a dissonant echo of his effects rather than an attempt to decode the precise origin and definitive meaning of his work.
Julian Jason Haladyn has stepped into this field with the deliberate intent of picking up the threads of meaning that are established in the specific work of Étant donnés, known in English as Given. This was Duchamp’s final work. It was a lifelong project that was only unveiled as a public installation in the Philadelphia Museum of Art after Duchamp’s death. Haladyn tackles the significance of Given in a number of ways. First, he studiously and quite fairly assesses the wide range of art historical and philosophical texts that have been written on this work. However, he then proceeds to develop a conceptual framework that splices together critical reflection with biographic experiences. Some of the most engaging sections of this book are found where he combines his own affective response to the journey to the museum, reflections on the institutional setting of the work and, of course, with the experience of witnessing the work itself. Such a self-reflexive approach is complicated further by the fact that, insofar as we can discern Duchamp’s aims, it is clear that one of the most compelling intentions behind this work was to disturb the very condition of neutral spectatorship. As a consequence it should come as no surprise that this small book, while drawing from the discipline of art history, can make no historiographic claims whatsoever.
This is a book that is more concerned with the consequences of Duchamp’s initiation of the transference of meaning away from the body of the artist and onto the viewer. This suggests that the work must be open to the divergent and unpredictable realm of sensory and conceptual response. But since the work was first installed for public viewing in 1968, how far have we gone? Judging from Haladyn’s response to Given, the mode of cultural and visual criticism has ventured some distance from its own foundations, but his account of the effect of seeing the work has not gone very far at all. It is clear that the prevailing responses to Given are shock and shame. It is a work that summons and unsettles the position of the voyeur – it oscillates between pornography and tragedy, farce and poetry. Feminist art historians such as Rosalind Krauss have willingly put forward their discomfort at peering into the scene and resiling not just from the confrontation of an installation of a woman who is seemingly violated, but also from their own self-consciousness of the secondary spectacle of their own body crouched over in fascination. No-one else can see the work while the single viewer such as Krauss or later on Haladyn are looking in. Although a generation apart, they both report the same response of being aghast at the display of a headless woman with her legs spread apart and having the creepy feeling of being a complicitous witness.
There is no doubt that Duchamp’s manipulation of perspective and his positioning of the peephole were designed to heighten not only a specific view into the scene, but also create another equally powerful image in the mind of the viewer. Each viewer reports what he or she sees, but they are also overwhelmed by and anxious of the fact that they feel that others are seeing themselves looking into this horrible scene. Given Duchamp’s lifelong rejection of classical single-point perspective, and his experimentation with what I call ambient perspective, it is obvious that the work of Given is composed in the interplay of both viewers’ perception of the scene in the installation and of the imaginary view of themselves crouched over a peephole in the institution of art. Duchamp was committed to enhancing this partnership between artist and viewer in the construction of a passage from what is real to what is possible. He claimed that the possible is a space of becoming – a movement of the one to the other. He described this space and process with his neologism ‘inframince’.
Krauss and Halady both see the overall strategy proposed by Duchamp. However, there is a significant methodological difference between Krauss and Haladyn. Krauss reports her subjective response in an incidental manner. The encounter with the work is so overwhelming and anxiety-provoking for Krauss that she cannot withhold the feeling of being both shocked at the sight of the image of the violated woman and ashamed that she has sustained her gaze towards the naked sex. Although Krauss also elaborates her responses in formal art historical and psychoanalytic terms, this does not really take her initial response much further than a pure confession. Haladyn quite rightly eschews this approach. As he notes, Duchamp would have anticipated this ‘academic’ and ‘politically correct’ move, but he would have also expected more. Haladyn prefers to work in a way that he says is closer to Duchamp’s own method – ‘endlessly inventive, playful and self-contradicting’. These are indeed worthy intentions but difficult to sustain while also keeping the reader in the clear. For the most part Haladyn takes us further into a subjective sojourn that allows the work of Given to prompt deeper reflections on sexuality and aesthetics, but he also holds onto the hand rails of art history and critical theory. Haladyn performs admirably in this tough and delicate balancing act. His most significant theoretical guide is Foucault. In particular, he finds deep analogies between Duchamp’s method of association and Foucault’s archaeological analysis. In both figures Haladyn sees a willingness to address ‘contradictions not as appearances to be overcome or secrets to be uncovered’ but as sites that stimulate new forms of interpretation (p. 92). Although it is a short book, Haladyn has managed to survey in a comprehensive and even handed manner almost all the major writers who have written on Duchamp’s Given. At the end, I was left wondering what new starting points might have emerged for this field if, at some point after 1968, Foucault had popped into the Philadelphia Museum of Art and furnished a text that saw the scenes of horror but also sneaked out with a smile in the face of anxiety.
This is a bold contribution to the field of Duchamp studies, and it is another wonderful title in a series of books that are dedicated to the presentation of a single work of art. The series itself is a wondrous necklace around the ‘canon’ of contemporary art. It functions best as a peephole into the machinations of criticism, rather than as a further glorification of the artist. They are delightfully light and curiously profound additions to the contemporary interpretations of the cultural existence of art.