Parsing Picabia

Jori Finkel

I Am a Beautiful Monster: Poetry, Prose, and Provocation, by Francis Picabia, translation and introduction by Marc Lowenthal, MIT Press, 2007; 560 pages, $39.95.

The Artwork Caught by the Tail: Francis Picabia and Dada in Paris, by George Baker, MIT Press, 2007; 474 pages, $39.95.

If Andre Breton was the pope of Surrealism, then Francis Picabia was surely the playboy of Dada. It's not merely that he was born into the European elite (the son of Francisco Vicente Martinez Picabia, a Spanish aristocrat, and the well-to-do French woman Marie Cecile Davanne), it's that he used his good fortune for such purposes as avoiding the front lines of World War I, maintaining and recuperating from his opium addiction, traveling extensively and living extravagantly. It's not just that over the years he had three wives (two legal and one common-law), it's also that he had the habit of beginning one relationship before ending another, while enjoying dalliances on the side. At one point, while living in the South of France, he found his life so complicated that he had to install his new lover, his children's Swiss nanny, on his yacht in the harbor of Cannes, while his second wife remained at home.

Something along the same lines could be said for his art as well: the man got around. Some critics have compared Picabia to Picasso in his restless cycling through different styles of painting, from Impressionism and Orphism to his trademark mechanical portraits ("mechanomorphs") of World War I and his neo-classical riffs of later years. He did more than paint and draw: his output includes collage, stage sets, film, performance, prose, poetry and the various insults, taunts and aphorisms that give Dada manifestos their bite.

There has been no shortage of scholarship on Picabia, most recently involving a reappraisal of his late paintings, which were once dismissed as kitsch. But now, for the first time, there's also an annotated, English-language volume of his prose and poetry to help fill in the picture. Translated by Marc Lowenthal, an editor at MIT Press, I Am a Beautiful Monster brings together full texts of Picabia's most important writing: early books of poetry such as Poemes et dessins de la fille nee sans mere (Poems and Drawings of the Daughter Born without a Mother) of 1918 and Pensees sans langage (Thoughts without Language) of 1919, his short scenario for his 1924 film Entr'acte, aphorisms from journals such as 391, and assorted Dada manifestos.

The volume represents about two-thirds of Picabia's collected writings, published in French by Pierre Belfond in two volumes in 1975 and 1978. It's enough material to provide a broad experience of Picabia's writing, which ranges from the melancholy to the deliberately rude. It's also enough to make the translator, who has done a clear-minded job throughout, refer to his output as "logorrhea."

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Picabia began writing seriously in 1917, in part on the advice of his family doctor to stop painting during a bout of neurasthenia. The result was reams of experimental poems in the spirit of the day, at times recalling works by F.T. Marinetti, Blaise Cendrars and Guillaume Apollinaire in their rapid-fire profusion of urban (or martial) imagery and at times emulating Gertrude Stein's manipulation of traditional syntax.

In "Oxygenated," for example, Picabia leaches words of their expected meanings through standard avant-garde techniques, from dispensing with punctuation to creating strange couplings of nouns: "Virgin of uneasy allusions / The priest flees to Tahiti / Where a heliotrope dovecote / Got me worked up in the English cigarette lectern / In my arms the huge pile / Crowned with flies / Soils his mother's tramway / The girls quench their thirst with cocktails at the scarlet down / Above his mouth."

His poetry is often disconcerting, but it's rarely as truly startling as Apollinaire's or Stein's. And do not mistake Picabia for a man of letters. As Lowenthal writes, "Picabia was not merely a light reader, but even made it a point not to read at all. Looking for literary influences on his writing thus is fruitless, and any such clues to his sometimes hermetic poetry would seem by necessity to be biographical and psychological."

Instead, the translator believes Picabia's influences to be much more direct--offering a compelling image of the artist as "literary pickpocket" or plagiarist. As Lowenthal documents through copious footnotes, Picabia lifted expressions from the pages of a Petit Larousse dictionary, which contains many foreign sayings. He took phrases from a 19th-century philosophical treatise by Max Stirner called The Ego and Its Own, which celebrated self-interest as the ultimate development of human behavior.

Above all Picabia copied countless lines from Friedrich Nietzsche, drawn to the philosopher's rejection of Judeo-Christian ethics and his embrace of a new model of behavior based on brute strength and survival of the fittest. Picabia even wrote a long poem, the 1949 Chi-lo-sa (Italian for "who knows?"), by stringing together dozens of aphorisms from Nietzsche. Some were basically taken intact, such as "Pity is the virtue of prostitutes." Others were tweaked, such as "Our thoughts are the shadows of our actions," a variant of Nietzsche's "Our thoughts are the shadows of our feelings."

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.

Taken together, Baker's discussion of the appropriation at the heart of the mechanomorphs and Lowenthal's comments on plagiarism at the heart of Picabia's writing show how far scholars today are going in their attempt to document the artist's various source materials, both verbal and visual. The books suggest that this may be Picabia's greatest legacy: he set academics scurrying on a quest for origins, potentially infinite in its regression (what is the source of the source?), through his sustained, multipronged attack on the very notion of artistic originality, a tactic that remains relevant to artists today. "These days," Picabia wrote in one of many aphorisms on the topic, "there are no more men of genius."

But of course it's hard to tell if this is his original thought either. For not only did Picabia steal many quotes from Nietzsche, but the aphorism genre itself has long been draped in a cloak of anonymity. Popularized in France during the Age of Reason by La Rochefoucauld (to whom Nietzsche himself owes a huge debt), aphorisms historically have been used to represent the voice of the people rather than the individual. Whether tightly composed nuggets of wisdom or, in classic Dada fashion, daggers of willful stupidity, they are made to be recited, reprinted, circulated and otherwise taken out of context.

More precisely, they seem to have never had a context to begin with--aphorisms are usually fragments of language that appear shorn of personal associations, as though born of society itself. In this way, the author of aphorisms is a pilferer of culture. And in this way, Picabia begins to look like a lot like another sponge of an artist, who also had a way with words and a knack for slipping his own, highly unoriginal images into broad circulation. Picabia begins to look a lot like Andy Warhol.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Author: Jori Finkel is an arts writer based in Los Angeles.

COPYRIGHT 2008 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale Group