Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst: The Bride Shared. - Review - book review

Art in America, Jan, 2000 by Sheldon Nodelman

The same reservation applied, of course, to the innumerable "versions" and "reproductions" sustaining a continuous process of self-quotation through constantly, if often minutely, varying formats, mediums, techniques and scales. Some of the productions of those years--the film Anemic Cinema, for example, or the various optical contraptions, and later the disturbing erotic sculptures of the early '50s (or were these merely life casts, hence not "sculptures" at all?)--seem to us so remarkable as to demand recognition as "works of art." As such, they would contradict their author's proclaimed abstinence. But blinkered expectations and prejudices, adroitly reinforced and manipulated by Duchamp's own well-publicized pronouncements and pretenses, ensured the continuing success of the myth.

This elaborate performance was not motivated by gratuitous perversity: it was part of a systematic campaign, unparalleled in the history of art and conducted with exquisite self-consciousness, to dissolve the boundaries delimiting Duchamp's works from the world around them and from one another. They could then constitute a free-floating, ceaselessly interactive semiotic field rather than a set of discrete, determinate units of meaning. The more central of these works, those that could readily be taken as embodying such units, had to be surrounded by others, intimately related to them, whose meaning would seem codeterminate but slighter, more ephemeral, more deeply implicated in extra-artistic "life." These secondary creations would, in turn, generate others, even more contingent. So major works like the Large Glass were enveloped in a penumbra of lesser, ancillary works, themselves associated with sketches and preparatory essays of continuously diminishing independence and self-sufficiency, ultimately spilling over the border between the visual medium and the realm of language.

Thus verbal constructions in the form of notes, speculations, project plans were--beginning as early as 1914 with the famous Box of that year--mobilized, "published" and made accessible, so that their own web of suggestions, possibilities and conundrums enmeshed the primary works in yet finer-spun and more intricately interwoven filaments. These elaborations were then followed by the so-called Green Box of 1934, the White Box of 1967 and other posthumous releases. (The contents, in each case, were presented as collections of loose and separate items, leaving sequencing or connections among them to the discretion of the reader.) Meanwhile, these "objectified" clues and intimations were further surrounded by a cloud of innumerable statements, interviews, bits of conversation reported by third parties, etc., through which Duchamp would simultaneously advertise, efface and multiply his secrets.

The boundaries of this field--which is the Duchampian "oeuvre" in the full sense of that term--had necessarily to be made imprecise and ever changing. This was achieved, in part, through the dissemination of great numbers of "works," often inconspicuous and seemingly casual, which would easily be lost from view only to be rediscovered when, in a better informed perspective, their significance would be recognized. That process continues apace. In the recent third edition of his catalogue raisonne, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp(7), Arturo Schwarz lists 663 works, compared with 421 in the previous edition of 1970, and more works have since come to light.(8) We may be confident that "lost" works of Duchamp will continue to emerge for years to come. A complicating factor here is the problem of deciding what are actually works: as sensitivity to the nuances of the Duchampian system develops, more and more items that had been considered ancillary or documentary material, even mere "souvenirs," are seen to be invested with unexpected significance.