Boats & Deckchairs

Natural History, Dec, 1999 by Stephen Jay Gould, Rhonda Roland Shearer

Duchamp's object is not, in fact, a commercially produced postcard but an original painting, almost surely by Duchamp himself, on a piece of paper presented, in his customary trickster's way, in a humble guise that would keep its true nature invisible in plain sight. The reverse side (containing Duchamp's note) also features a vertical line in the middle and four horizontal lines to the right, mimicking the address guides of a normal postcard. But these lines have been inked in by hand on this one-of-a-kind objet d'art. Why, then, did Duchamp draw lines at right angles to suggest the paraphernalia of a postcard? And, more important, why did he paint three boats on the picture side and then write an apparently unrelated statement about deckchairs on the reverse?

The boats should have inspired at least a modicum of suspicion from the start. We assume, from the conventional cues of perspective, that we see three boats of roughly the same length but painted in different sizes to imply greater or lesser distance from an observer. The boats, on closer inspection, look a bit "funny"--but not sufficiently so to evoke much attention. Duchamp paints the visible part above the water in near-bilateral symmetry with a supposed reflection in the water below. A yellowish (presumably metal) tip at the bow of each boat appears in mirrored reflection, as does a human figure sitting upright in the middle of each boat. But what are we supposed to make of the rumpled gray material at the stern of each boat? A furled sail (but where, then, is the mast, and why does a little rowboat carry such a sail)? Or perhaps some blankets stored behind the human figure (but why such a large and top-heavy cargo)?

Serious attention to two common themes in Duchamp's output neatly solves all these problems. First, as already stated, Duchamp delighted in concealing important statements (often on scientific themes) by depicting his original works as everyday commercial objects available in thousands of copies at ordinary stores. (In a subject for another time, Shearer has also discovered that none of Duchamp's famous "readymades" really represent, as he claimed, factory-made objects signed by the artist but otherwise unaltered, and thus reconfigured as art.)

Second, as scholars have documented in detail, and as the artist himself frequently noted with relish, Duchamp constantly played with the theme of 90 [degrees] rotations in his art (see the 1955 photograph of Duchamp's face seen simultaneously in profile and frontal view). Several motives underlie this preoccupation, ranging from an immediate and visceral delight in showing that visual "certainties" can often be discombobulated and reoriented by such a simple change, to the more abstract and technical reason that an axis drawn at right angles (90 [degrees]) to all other axes represents an added mathematical dimension, and a right-angle rotation therefore denotes (at east metaphorically) a view in a new dimension.

Shearer and I suspect, but cannot prove, that Duchamp had two motivations, one sneaky and the other quite overt (if we choose to see), for drawing those horizontal and vertical lines on the back of his boat painting: first, to fool us into regarding the work as a postcard and, second, to tell us, at the same time, that we must rotate the picture by 90 [degrees] to see both orientations of the optical illusion described in the note written over these orthogonal lines: one picture (the boats) in horizontal orientation and another; representing the key to the whole work, by 90 [degrees] rotation into a vertical position.