At the end of
the eighteenth century in England, Beau Brummell invented the
ambivalent figure of the dandy, who would soon become tied to
the advent of democratic society and of a new kind of spectator
ever more greedy for sensations. At the start of the twentieth
century, in the era of the masses, Marcel Duchamp renewed this
figure of an unheroic resistance, an indifferent antisoldier who
was elegant, distant, cold, highly constructed, and provocative,
as well as inventive. He would also have to make of his entire
being a work and to push the duty of incertitude to the
point of transvestism. Especially in Rrose Sélavy,
photographed by Man Ray at a time when mass society was manufacturing
and spreading the most hackneyed stereotypes of men and women,
Duchamp would make the transition from one sex to the other in
images. The nineteenth century, to which he was still attached,
had imagined unique figures of revolt against the deadlocked game
of power being played out between the sexes. From Leopold von
Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs to Edgar Degas’
The Rape, we are not totally lacking in works that betray
the violence of gender relations. In their wake, no doubt, Duchamp
was both analyst and symptom, the one who saw things clearly and
the same one who was struggling with the contradictions of his
era.
For Duchamp, stating the terms of masculinity’s crisis boiled
down no doubt to making the case against the alienated condition
of women, but things were not so clear. They would be much clearer
in the case of a Futurist like Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who
saw time itself as sexed, the past being feminine, the future
combative and virile. He was not the only one at the time to think
of woman as archaic and as a factor of degeneration, preferring
the machine to natural organs. In the barracks of the European
avant-garde, Duchamp was almost completely isolated; he fled the
Great War, established new contacts in Francis Picabia and Arthur
Cravan, and discovered, on American soil, a favorable audience
in New York. Before that public, he experimented in an ongoing
game, with his comet-shaped tonsure, adopting the position of
an ascetic yet attractive monk and subscribing in this way to
Baudelaire’s requirement that the dandy be seen at all times
as sublime, saintly, and spiritual.
For Duchamp (who would have, up until today, many emulators),
one must experience the abandonment of utopia in order to reinvent
a super-critical position in art. To himself as permanent and
detached work of art, he would add objects that extend that work
by intensifying it and by giving it the longevity of the Museum
piece and of the history of art. This he did with the readymade,
among others. To the dehumanization of manufactured products,
he responded with an indifference to good taste and to the pleasures
of the eye. He abandoned painting, craft, emotion, and the eruptive
manifestations of the body.
Giovanna Zapperi has just finished writing a remarkable thesis
on the subject in which she lays out a personal vision of the
profoundly ambiguous figure of Marcel Duchamp. Françoise
Coblence, well known for her philosophical and psychoanalytical
essays on art and for her pioneering history of dandyism, talks
with her. And Julie Ramos, whose specialty is German Romanticism,
in turn enters into the conversation.
If this discussion
is still quite timely today, that is because the questions raised
by Duchamp have entered into long-term history and have, after
the end of heros (and of heroines), taken on the status of an
unbounded truth in a consumerist society of the spectacle wherein
the struggle between the will to power and the will to surrender
goes on forever.
