DUCHAMP IN CAPITALS

 Both London and Edinburgh have mounted exhibitions of the work of Marcel Duchamp surrounded by his heirs. Reviewers are ecstatic. Valdemar Januszczak calls him ‘the most important artist of the modern era,’ Richard Dorment, ‘the most important artist of all.’

From this distance much of the minor Fauve and Cubist work produced at the beginning of the twentieth century has lost its sparkle and can now seem quite scruffy.  Marcel Duchamp’s early work too, was on the scruffy side, but his first mature painting, Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2, is a highly finished, almost monochrome painting, in a Cubist/Futurist style.  A tiny detail seems significant: among the analytical planes are three small arcs of white dotted lines, perhaps more appropriate to an engineering drawing. Were they a signal of the direction the artist was about to take? In a letter, Léger writes of a visit to the Salon d’Aviation with Duchamp and Brancusi where Duchamp exclaimed, ‘Painting is finished. What can be done better than this propeller?’

Duchamp, as we know, is famous for his ready-mades. If they were a great turning point in the history of art then the break-through work should be the bicycle wheel or the bottle rack, which were selected for presentation three years before the more famous urinal. The original urinal of 1917, called Fountain and signed R. Mutt, was rejected and not actually exhibited. It was really something of a prank. The lavatory fitting thrust under the nose of the bourgeoisie was more likely to achieve the desired notoriety than any other mundane manufactured object. But there is a clue to Duchamp’s thinking in his letter to the Society of Independents complaining about the rejection of Mr Richard Mutt’s Fountain (Mutt wasn’t a made-up name but the name of the manufacturer). Duchamp ended with the statement, ‘the only works of art produced by America are its plumbing fixtures and its bridges. Engineering again!

The ready-mades were lost or flung out. But in 1996 a Milanese dealer spotted an opportunity, had some pieces reconstructed, and persuaded the aging artist to sign them.  Nobody, ironically, goes so far as to describe the urinal as Duchamp’s magnum opus. All seem to agree that it is the Large Glass aka The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors that deserves that title. It is no ready-made but a meticulously constructed piece with its complex imagery, some of it cut from sheet lead and lead wire, held between two sheets of glass. It brings together ideas which Duchamp had worked on for years, the chocolate grinder, the water mill, curious pipette shapes that are present in the painting Mariée. With the cylinders of the grinder, the wheels of the mill and a series of cone shapes there is a plethora of ellipses set at diverse angles to one another, that are peculiarly satisfying in their exactitude. What it all means is anybody’s guess and the artist’s notes only add, perhaps intentionally, more mystery. Duchamp liked to downgrade what he called the retinal in favour of the cerebral, but this is a bit of a red herring. He is, after all, a visual artist and the work is a composition of mechanical engineering imagery. It is his answer to that propeller, his way of representing the modern world.

What of Duchamp’s offspring? AA Gill states that 'his heirs are entirely self-referential, mistrusting of craft.’ We can hardly blame Duchamp for that. He himself was a craftsman of watchmaker-like intricacy. When he made the Boxes, his portable museums consisting of sixty-nine copies of his paintings and a celluloid replica of The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, he eschewed reproduction techniques and did everything by hand, several years work. Compare that with the tat at the Edinburgh show, From Death to Death and Other Small Tales at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art where a couple of rag dolls are sewn together and there are several examples of that well known modern cliché where a series of pieces with minimum effort and invention are immaculately framed with deep conservation mounts.

I haven’t seen the London exhibition at the Barbican where Duchamp is at the centre of a multimedia show with Rauchenberg, Johns, the choreographer Merce Cunningham and the composer John Cage but from the review by Richard Dorment in The Telegraph, I can tell he is mainly interested in the urinal legacy. Here is what he wrote on Cage’s contribution, ‘piano pieces by Cage float up from instruments mechanically altered to sound as little as possible like music.’ (My shocked underlining)  Dorment wants to reject craft even when it is present. He would be much happier with Cage’s 4’33, more akin to the urinal as a ready-made of four minutes, thirty-three minutes silence with random background noises. Did Dorment ever even listen to Cage’s piano pieces? Alex Ross wrote of them in The Rest is Noise: ‘The prepared piano his (Cage’s), most famous invention, never fails to surprise listeners expecting to be battered by some unholy racket; the preparation process, involving the insertion of bolts, screws, coins, pieces of wood and felt, and objects between the strings, is conceptually violent but the sounds themselves are innately sweet.’ The junk stuff is carefully tuned in and gives the piano a sound something more like the gamelan. Ross thought Cages pieces have some of the supernatural poignancy of Eric Satie. When I heard the cycle Sonatas and Interludes at the Edinburgh Festival, I thought they were not that far from Debussy.