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

Art in America, Jan, 2000 by Sheldon Nodelman

Aficionados will no doubt quarrel with some of Ramirez's interpretations, but a new path toward understanding the Large Glass has surely been opened. Ramirez makes profuse use, here and in his treatment of the readymades, of comparisons and putative source materials drawn from later 19th- and early 20th-century science, technology and popular culture. (He thus partially anticipates Linda Dalrymple Henderson's recent magisterial survey of the background of Duchamp's themes, images and ideas in contemporaneous philosophy, science and technology, both at high and at popular levels.)(12) The most original section of Ramirez's book is its treatment of Etant donnes, in which the materially "given" work is, as never before, systematically cross-read against the contents of the Manual of Instructions, understood (as it surely should be) not as a mere practical aid but as a necessary complement, comparable to the Notes for the Large Glass.(13) Regrettably, the book is marred by numerous infelicities and occasional outright errors of translation.

David Hopkins's Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst: The Bride Shared examines the persona of the Bride as a construct within and between the opera of the two artists. Although Duchamp and Ernst were friendly colleagues within the Surrealist milieus of Paris and New York, Hopkins fails to develop a persuasive case for the Bride-mythologem as a truly mutual creation of the two artists: Duchamp's Bride-conception, by all evidence, developed prior to and independently of any analogous formulation of Ernst's, even if the converse is not the case. Conceptual and iconographic materials contributory to the developing Bride-complex are sought within the esoteric tradition (here Hopkins follows the lead of Arturo Schwarz, Maurizio Calvesi, Ulf Linde and others) which played so large a role in fin de siecle Symbolism, as it did later in the Surrealism of the 1920s and '30s. This focus on Symbolism is to be welcomed, as Symbolist ideas surely were an important factor shaping Duchamp's goals as an artist, even if the influence of Symbolist pictorial language (of which Hopkins adduces some striking instances) was transient. Hopkins's discussion is immensely erudite and full of fascinating suggestions, but his arguments are undermined by a distressing tendency to transmute often strained inferences, speculations and metaphoric connections into established facts which am then pyramided into far-reaching conclusions.

Of the entire Duchampian production, it is surely the readymades which have had the greatest impact on the general consciousness, being at least vaguely familiar to many who know little or nothing else about the artist. Thierry de Duve's Kant after Duchamp, investigating the ideological foundations of later 20th-century artistic practice, revisits Kant's Critique of Judgment in light of the altered definition of "art" imposed by Duchamp's invention. The core of the book (much of it previously published in French as an independent work(14)) is a close scrutiny of the most scandalous readymade of all, the Fountain of 1917--or, rather, of Fountain's reception and the polemical manipulations surrounding the piece. Much discussion of the ready-mades heretofore especially that emanating from philosophers and estheticians, often marked by dire mutterings about the "end of Art"--has been conducted around an abstraction largely divorced from the unique characteristics of the individual works, the different circumstances out of which each arose and the particular meanings assumed by each within the context of Duchamp's work as a whole. De Duve's treatment (which should be read together with William Camfield's indispensable account(15)) returns Fountain to the concrete situation in which it was created (in particular, the art politics of the Society of Independent Artists exhibition from which it was so notoriously banished), tracing the gestation of the legend surrounding the event and shrewdly assessing its consequences, intended or otherwise, for all involved. Duchamp is revealed as already at this early date preternaturally sensitive to the invisible dynamics of authorial and institutional legitimacies and adept at exploiting, subverting and transforming them for his own ends. De Duve adds an extended riff on Duchamp's derisive observation that any painting, since it is created from preexistent tubes of paint (read: preexistent conceptions), is itself, inevitably, a readymade.