Parsing Picabia

This work hews so closely to its origin that Lowenthal won't even credit it as collage or pastiche. "Any argument for a late work such as Chilo-sa as being something of a pastiche, or a literary 'collage,'" he writes, "is weakened by the fact that the material being collaged, and the style being pastiched, is consistently derived from one source: Nietzsche's The Gay Science."

But Lowenthal is skirting what may be a more powerful artistic parallel, and that is the idea of a poem as a readymade. We could identify other, perhaps more direct, connections between Picabia's visual and verbal expressions. Some of his poems share the same titles as his paintings. Some share the same theme of machine-age eroticism. (One example is the 1918 "Gear Change," which claims, "I am the factory collaborator / Who reams the cylinders of happiness.")

The poems and artworks alike often represent and simulate a kind of systemic dysfunction, as if the artwork itself were a machine gone awry. This mechanical failure is evident in his most famous mechanomorphs, such as his portrait of Alfred Stieglitz as a broken bellows camera. And it is enacted in many poems, where the conventions of syntax--the very machinery or plumbing of language-are breaking down.

But beyond these points of contact, the notion of appropriation may be the most powerful concept underlying both his artistic and literary practice. For as Duchamp taught us, there are different types of readymades: from the strict readymade, an object that is deftly recontextualized, to the assisted readymade, an item altered physically as part of its transformation. Picabia uses both throughout his writing--taking found language verbatim into his poems and manifestos, and also editing existing phrases to suit his purposes.

Unfortunately, Lowenthal does not devote much space in his introduction to this connection between Picabia's text and art. And George Baker's Artwork Caught by the Tail, an outgrowth of his Columbia dissertation under Rosalind Krauss and Benjamin Buchloh, largely neglects Picabia's poetry. Rather, Baker gets caught up in an unproductive attempt to read the artist through the lens of Jean-Joseph Goux's post-Marxist theory of the general equivalent, which gives everything in a symbolic system (whether money or language) its exchange value. The main flaw of this reading is that it generates several flashy and unnecessary paradoxes, all ultimately reducible to one: Picabia both fits and does not fit Goux's theory.

But along the way Baker offers something valuable, by synthesizing recent scholarship by Arnauld Pierre, Carole Boulbes and others on Picabia's use of scientific diagrams and photographs as source materials for his mechanomorphs. It has long been clear that a number of the 1915 mechanomorphs were copied precisely from scientific diagrams. In addition, Baker relays, there is now mounting evidence that many of the seemingly more abstract mechanomorphs of 1922 were also "[l]oosely copied, partially copied, traced or extrapolated" from diagrams and photographs of pumps, turbines and other equipment published in a popular scientific journal of the time.