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Marcel Duchamp and William Shakespeare
Preamble.
For nearly a century avant-garde
artists have looked to the work of Marcel Duchamp
for inspiration and direction. Scores of art
movements have attributed whole or part of their
motivation to his readymades and other ephemeral
works. Yet, ironically, while the deeper meaning
of Duchamp’s works has resisted exegesis
and remains shrouded in mystery, the movements
derivative of his work have already been categorized
and shelved by art historians.
The status and the relevance
of the art works generated by the avant-garde
has been extensively debated in public and in
the literature. But despite the persistent expectation
of invention and criticism, by the end of the
twentieth century the pursuit of the avant-garde
has stalled in the self-referential stasis of
post-modernism. The idea that anything can be
called a work of art, supposedly under the influence
of Duchamp, has become such a clichéd
defense of artistic license, that it is worth
asking how current practice relates to Duchamp’s
original intent.
The pivotal recognition
must be that Duchamp did not intend his readymades
and other ephemeral works to be understood apart
from his major works, The Bride Stripped Bare
by Her Bachelors, Even, aka Large Glass, (1913-26)
and Etant Donnes (1946-66). He went to great
lengths to emphasise the unity of his life-long
vision. He ensured his most significant works
were collected together in the Philadelphia
Museum of Art and spent considerable energy
constructing a comprehensive portable museum
of miniaturised replicas. If Duchamp is to be
believed and his intentions are to be understood,
it is necessary to see the Large Glass as central
to all he did and that none of the other works
should be considered apart from it.
In a recent talk in the Duchamp
room at the Tate Modern the young woman presenter,
despite having Hamilton’s copy of the
Large Glass sited in the middle of the room,
focused on the small collection of recently
acquired readymade multiples and a couple of
paintings by Picabia. It took a question at
the end of her talk from a member of the audience
to get her to respond to the Large Glass. Her
embarrassed reaction and her inability to say
anything coherent typifies the failure of scholarship
to penetrate the meaning of Duchamp’s
complete oeuvre.
The content of the major
works has not been given expression in the movements
that attribute their inspiration to the influence
of Duchamp. Occasional attempts to use the imagery
of the Large Glass, by artists such as Matta
or Merce Cunningham, have resulted in the trivialisation
of the work’s content. At best it can
be said that the Large Glass and Etant Donnes
have provided an umbrella for the intuitive
responses to Duchamp’s other works.
Aspects of the Large Glass
have been discussed when the work was replicated
by Ulf Linde or Richard Hamilton, or when it
was analysed by Schwarz, Golding etc. So far,
though, there has not been a movement based
on their suggestions that respects the female/male
dynamic of the whole Glass. Even Octavio Paz,
the writer credited with the most insightful
comments on the Large Glass and Etant Donnes,
was only able to suggest a general relation
between the works and traditional mythologies
(as does Calvin Tomkins in a final note of exasperation
in a recent biography).
To overcome the hiatus it is necessary to remember
Duchamp’s frequently declared intent to
recover the basis of artistic expression from
the Renaissance, and earlier periods of art.
When Duchamp looked back to the Renaissance
and earlier, he saw works of art that derived
their content from the overarching mythology
of the biblical and Greek myths. A closer examination
of the mythic content of the Large Glass, then,
should reveal both why it has been held in such
high regard and why it has been so misunderstood.
Duchamp’s statements
that the Large Glass provides the basis for
the meaning of the readymades is given greater
point if the Large Glass critiques and corrects
the inherent logic of traditional mythologies,
and the readymades are specific instances of
its expression. So, to begin to understand the
Large Glass, it helps to visualise it as an
overarching umbrella embodying a consistent
mythic appreciation within which his other works
operate (and hence the works of all who have
been influenced by him). If this were the case,
the enduring influence of the readymades would
be explained, as would their unfingerable quiddity.
So what in the Large Glass
is similar to traditional mythologies and what
is different. What has Duchamp done that no
other artist of the twentieth century has done,
including Picasso, Matisse, Miro, Beuys, Warhol,
and others. What makes it possible for Octavio
Paz to evaluate the contributions of Picasso
and Duchamp and assign Picasso to the past/present
and Duchamp to the present/future.
The mythology central to
Western thought and art over the last 2000 years
is the biblical-xtian. In it a male god creates
the world or nature ex nihilo, forms man and
then woman, puts a negative value on sex, and
institutes an understanding of good and evil
(ethics) that sustains his priority. The mythological
status of Genesis and the Gospels is a consequence
of talented prophets and evangelists who wrote
a cosmology or story of origins in which Adam
and Eve and Christ are created by non-sexual
means as a metaphor for the limitations of human
understanding.
Ironically, though, the biblical-Xtian
believers claim their mythology provides a true
representation of the origins of the world.
In their mythology God has priority over the
world or nature. God and his apologists participate
in an inversion of the natural dynamic by giving
the “word” of God priority over
the “flesh” of mankind.
Compare then the relationships
in the Large Glass. The whole of the Glass is
female and represents the world or nature, which
is prior to the formation of the human female
(in the top half of the work), and the formation
of the male from the female, who do not consummate
their relationship. Because his primary concern
is the logic of myth, Duchamp leaves the sexual
outside the Large Glass, in what he calls the
fourth dimension and, as an aesthete, he refrains
from expressing an understanding of good and
evil.
So Duchamp’s world
is not originally male but female, it is not
created by a male god but is self-subsistent,
and the female is given priority over the male,
who exhibits his complete dependency on the
female. And Duchamp’s artistic expression
is mythic because in the world of the Large
Glass there is no sexual consummation between
female and male. The artist (Duchamp) creates
the artwork out of his mind (as did the prophets
and the evangelists), and he acknowledges its
conceptual genesis by having its entities act
non-biologically.
What Paz and others have
not recognised is that the Large Glass gives
a profoundly logical critique of traditional
mythologies, whose priorities are contrary to
the logical conditions prevailing in the world.
The biblical-Xtian belief inverts natural logic
and makes life dependant on art. Duchamp reverses
the traditional mythologies by re-establishing
the logical priority of life over art. The gradual
but terminal collapse of the biblical paradigm
over the last 500 years, because of its internal
inconsistency and its external injustices, is
the inevitable consequence of believing that
biblical myth expresses much more than the logical
limitations of human understanding.
Once it is appreciated that
Duchamp’s Large Glass captures the mythic
logic behind all mythologies, Western or other
(Paz: “the criticism of myth and the myth
of criticism”), and recovers the logical
order of evolutionary priority of nature, female,
male, and the role of the artist who is capable
of expressing the understanding, then it can
be seen that he articulates the logical conditions
for any mythic expression consistent with the
dynamic of life.
The insuperable difficulty
artists and commentators have had acknowledging
his achievement has been due to the residuum
of the biblical and similar paradigms in the
culture. It is as if the culture is not yet
ready to accept a logically workable expression
of the mythic conditions for an unprejudiced
understanding of life.
So, once it is appreciated
why Duchamp based the readymades in the Large
Glass, it is possible to see how the readymades
have become stranded between traditional expectations
and the logic of a global awareness in which
the contingencies of human life are dependent
on a fruitful relationship with nature. Duchamp’s
relevance has not waned because the content
of his complete oeuvre is, as Tomkins said in
the 1970’s, “ahead of the game”.
Again ironically, the “mystery”
in Duchamp’s work possesses a surprising
clarity and precision that exposes the traditional
mindset as irredeemably mystified.
The twenty first century
has not caught up with the implications of Duchamp’s
work. The current confusion and scepticism in
the avant-garde is symptomatic of its inability
to cross from a discredited and inadequate paradigm
to one logically consistent with nature and
with humankind in nature.
The extreme irony of the
separation of the readymades from the Large
Glass by the avant-garde (an irony Duchamp anticipated)
becomes even more extreme when Duchamp is compared
to the only other thinker to have systematically
articulated the logical conditions for all mythology,
and hence the logical conditions for life on
earth. After 30 years of studying Duchamp and
coming to the realisation expressed briefly
above, I apprehended a similar understanding
when I attended a reading of Shakespeare’s
154 Sonnets.
In the Sonnets, Shakespeare
anticipates Duchamp by 300 years with a more
comprehensive appreciation of the logic of myth.
(Shakespeare experienced the inconsistencies
of biblical thought in the religious atrocities
of his day.) The Sonnets express the logic of
life not just for artistic expression (aesthetics),
but also for any form of language (ethics).
Like Duchamp, Shakespeare’s understanding
is based in the priority of nature, the priority
of the female over the male, the logic of increase,
the priority of the sexual over the erotic,
and the consequent logic of beauty and truth
or aesthetics and ethics. And like Duchamp with
the Large Glass (and Notes), Shakespeare articulated
his philosophy in his Sonnets to provide the
mythic logic upon which all his other works
were based. Because they both recover natural
logic, the logical structure of the Large Glass
is the same as that of the Sonnets.
For those ready to graduate
beyond the failure of twentieth century academicism
to penetrate Duchamp’s works (epitomised
by the post-modern malaise), and the even greater
failure of 400 years of academicism to understand
the works of Shakespeare, a series of volumes
is being prepared that explore the mythic logic
of Duchamp and Shakespeare (and other thinkers
who worked to recover the natural logic of life
such as Darwin, Wittgenstein and Mallarme).
While the full analysis of
the Sonnets and the Large Glass will not be
available until the publication of The Poetry
and the Drama, the Philosophy of William Shakespeare,
(4 Volumes), a selection from the volumes is
currently available at the website: www.quaternaryinstitute.com.
The website institutes a quaternary level of
learning commensurate with the achievements
of Shakespeare and Duchamp. The logical precision
and comprehensiveness evident in Duchamp and
Shakespeare, and apparent in Darwin and Wittgenstein,
create the opportunity to institute a systematic
understanding beyond the level currently available
in tertiary world-wide.
Roger Peters
August 2002
www.quaternaryinstitute.com
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