Marcel Duchamp ON Display

Optics, Exhibition Installations, Portable Museums

Press Release | Surrealist Exhibitions | Catalogue Essay | Catalogue of Works | Featured Works

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Catalogue Essay

After completing the first of his optical machines, Marcel Duchamp asked his friend Man Ray to photograph him standing behind its thin metal frame and swirling glass blades. The painted panes of the Rotary Glass Plates in motion created a series of spirals. It was pure illusion. The work was part of a long series of experiments with what Duchamp called his "Precision optics." In fact, there was nothing very "precise" about the various machines, imprinted discs, films, stereoscopic slides, anagylphic images, and optical contraptions that the artist continuously returned to throughout his life. And that was exactly the way Duchamp liked it. So there he stands behind his odd, oscillating machine in the 1920 photograph, seeming to be smoking a pipe, apparently serene, his body and visage coming in and out of view. Frozen by the camera's shutter, the image perfectly captures the character of Duchamp's work with optics: the twirling blades and moving lines frustrate clear vision, obscure distinctions between figure and ground, and make the artist himself seem like an apparition. What is on view is the act of seeing itself and its simultaneous disruption. And, if one looks closely, one finds that this too was the case in the artist's sustained thinking about display and the art exhibition.

The results of Duchamp's experimentation with l'optique are often thought of as a kind of anomaly or side-track in the artist's production (or not) of art. Many of the optics-related objects maintain a kind of indeterminate status; many were works begun as practical devices, patent-worthy creations, innovations to be sold at inventors' fairs, in short, objects that did not belong to the category of "Art." The way these works operated, however, had everything to do with Duchamp's very particular notions of what counted as works of art, of how to destabilize those works that were considered art (traditional painting and sculpture, for instance), and, eventually, of how to unmoor the space of the exhibition dedicated to displaying those works.

In a letter he wrote soon after he completed his second optical machine, the Rotative Demi-sphere of 1924, Duchamp adamantly told its owner Jacques Doucet that he did not want it to be loaned out for exhibition, since, as he said, "All expositions of painting and sculpture make me ill." He quickly added, "I would also regret it if anyone saw in this globe anything other than 'optics'."1 However, Duchamp would later relent, allowing this and other optical works to be displayed in exhibitions with painting and sculpture. Their oscillations could then all the better undermine the fixity of everything around them - of painting that was believed to be purely and immediately perceived, of vision bound to a disincarnated eye, and of exhibition spaces organized for contemplative, disinterested viewing.2 While his frank statement to Doucet about the art exhibition is evidence for the artist's aversion to the institutions of public display (Salon, gallery, museum), by the mid-late 1930s, Duchamp actively turned to investigating their modes of showing and of putting works on display.

Thus, when, in the final months of 1937, André Breton and Paul Eluard invited Duchamp to generate ideas for the display of an Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme to be held at the fashionable Galerie Beaux-Arts in Paris, the artist used the opportunity to expand these perceptual preoccupations. Duchamp had contributed works to previous collective Surrealist exhibits, however, this was both the first in which the artist famous for his detachment (Duchamp never officially belonged to any movement) was to have a crucial conceptual role, and also the first of the movement's exhibitions to dramatically reconceive what the space of exhibition could and should look like.3

In his capacity as the "generator-arbitrator" for the exhibition, Duchamp's simple but radical innovations were foundational. He masked the molded ceilings of George Wildenstein's bastion of high art with a reported 1,200 suspended coal sacks, had the walls painted black, erected an electrically lit brazier in the middle of the exhibition space, hung works on a set of uprooted revolving doors, and was reportedly also responsible for suggesting that mannequins line the entry corridor.4 As part of his transformation of the main hall into a coal-sack covered "central grotto," Duchamp also hoped to have the lights almost entirely extinguished, with sensor-triggered "magic eyes" illuminating works as the viewer approached them.5 The works would have been shrouded in darkness and the viewer able to see them only when he or she got physically close to a work. However, the project proved unfeasible, so Man Ray, as the exhibition's official "Master of Lighting," adapted the idea by handing out flashlights for the opening night. The solution retained much of Duchamp's original intention: the viewers brought themselves close to the works, leaning forward to focus their hand-held electric lights - an act in distinct contrast to the notion of "proper distance," disembodied viewing, and the "enlightening" clarity of the museum or gallery. If this mode of illumination helped reorder the spectator's body and gaze, the conception of the exhibition space as a disorienting environment also rethought the relationship of the spectator to objects on display.

The results of the collaborative effort between Duchamp and the Surrealists are by now legendary.6 Spurred by Duchamp's ideas, various artists of the group added their own idiosyncratic contributions to this space in which to show the work of over sixty artists from more than 14 countries. The exhibition's checklist and the accompanying mock reference tool, the Dictionnaire abrégé du Surréalisme, outline the division of labor. It is through the photographic traces of the many artistic and press photographers who were attracted by the show that we get a sense of its elaborate details: a bevy of fantastically appareled female mannequins lined the entry corridor, dirt and dead leaves covered the floor, four beds and a man-made lake occupied the gallery's main salle, and Surrealist objects loomed throughout, all of it framed by Duchamp's low hanging, soot emitting coal sacks. The mannequins, however, garnered by far the most of the critics' and the photographers' attention. Each of the readymade models was dressed by one of sixteen appointed artists or poets; the one attributed to (and signed by) Duchamp's alter-ego, Rrose Sélavy, wore the artist's own shoes, hat, jacket, and a electrified red lightbulb in its pocket. As if this were not enough, the spectacular ensemble was joined by several sensorial elements introduced for the January 17, 1938 evening vernissage: a dancer hired to simulate hysteria convulsed with her live chicken throughout the exhibitions various rooms, the smell of roasting coffee beans filled the air, a cacophonous soundtrack blared, and soot and darkness obscured almost everything. The event, in short, was nothing like your typical art exhibition and it would set the terms for the series of manifestations that would follow.

After the exodus of many of the Surrealists out of Europe during the Second World War, André Breton called on Duchamp to install what was to be the first international Surrealist exhibition in the United States. Titled the First Papers of Surrealism after the application papers that most of the émigré artists faced upon entry into the US, the show was held in 1942 at the Whitelaw Reid mansion in New York as a benefit affair for the French Relief Societies. For it, Duchamp devised a simple, economic solution to act against the interior's gilded moldings, Italianate ceiling paintings, chrystal chandeliers, and other opulent architectural details. Having acquired sixteen miles of ordinary white string for the installation, the artist engaged the help of several friends so as to erect a criss-crossed webbing that, in the end, utilized only a fraction of his overzealous purchase.7 The twine traversed the mansion's former drawing rooms, filled for the exhibition with paintings (the overwhelming majority of the work) and other works hung on portable display partitions.

The tangled mesh did not cut off vision completely (it was the frustration, not elimination, of sight that Duchamp desired), nevertheless, the entwinement between and in front of so many of the things "on display" constituted a decided barrier between the spectator and the works of art. As in the 1938 Exposition - what is exhibited in 1942, in fact, is a rethinking of viewing in the typical space of exhibition and of the body's implication in the experience as much as "art" itself. The performative operation both recalls and anticipates pieces such as Duchamp's glass study, To be Looked at (Close To) From the Other Side for Almost an Hour (1918), the Rotoreliefs (1935) with their very specific instructions for observation, and his final mammoth optical machine, Etant donnés, 1. La Chute d'eau, 2. Le gaz d'eclairage (1946-66). Several of the participants were disappointed that spectators could not properly see the works. And this seems precisely the point. This was not, however, the only assault on the senses carried out by First Papers: in all of the major Surrealist exhibitions since 1938, smell, sound, or some other disorienting device also contributed to the reordering of aesthetic perception. In this way, the organizers seem to have planned to permeate the air with the invitation's promised "smell of cedar," but ultimately, the odor was either omitted or went unnoticed by the crowds. For the October 14 opening, however, the 11 year-old Carrol Janis did show up on schedule with several of his friends, proceeding to run around playing ball and causing quite a scene at the exhibition. To the visitor's questions or complaints the children replied as they had been instructed: Duchamp had asked them to come and play.

For the next collective Surrealist exhibition held in Paris after the war, André Breton again asked Duchamp to help design the organization of the space. The two worked out the scheme and general plans before Duchamp returned to New York. There, Duchamp appointed architect Frederick Kiesler to erect the elaborate interior lay-out and several smaller installations for the show that would open at the Parisian Galerie Maeght on September 7, 1947. Kiesler executed the plans, interpreting Duchamp's idea for a "Salle des superstitions," a waterfall of "rain" with a nearby billiard table, a maze of Surrealist "altars," and a piece called Le Rayon vert.8 The latter work referred to an optical illusion, a green luminescence that one can observe at a particular moment at dusk by the sea.9 Although the exact details of the piece remain enigmatic (and few visitors seem to have even noticed it), Kiesler's sketches and photographer Denise Bellon's rare images of it suggest that it was composed of a tilted box frame, one or two photographs of the sea, several pieces of glass, and a slit with a light that seemed to emerge from behind the horizon line of the image. It was seen through a hole cut into the thick, green drapery hung against the walls of the gallery.

If the relationship between the exhibition and perception is highlighted with Le Rayon vert (the viewing of what is on the gallery's walls, in this case, is mere illusion), Duchamp also signaled the undermining of vision in another way through the exhibition's catalogue. From New York and with the help of Surrealist Enrico Donati, Duchamp designed the deluxe catalogues which featured a foam-rubber breast on the cover, with the instruction "Prière de toucher" (Please touch) on the back. The cover was playful, mixing erotics and vision, the body and looking - these were Duchamp's sustained concerns. However, the instruction made clear that the game had a target. For it's lettering was explicitly chosen to mimic the museum's own "Please do not touch," thus reversing the museum's famous order: LOOK, but please do not touch.10

For the "Eros" theme of the 1959 Exposition inteRnatiOnale du Surréalisme held at the Galerie Daniel Cordier in Paris, Duchamp was again invited to be a generator of ideas. French graphic designer Pierre Faucheux drew out the plans for the complex and labyrinthine interior. Its main passageway of was conceived by Duchamp, who suggested the green velvet "breathing" walls that lined the explicitly sensualized space. Walls, those structural elements so stable and solid in the traditional exhibition, pulsed here to the sound of poet Radovan Ivsic's recorded acoustics of heavy breathing and erotic sighs and to the smell of cheap perfume strategically released in the air. The lugubrious interior was carpeted with a thick layer of sand from which emerged protruding stalactite-like forms and works of art shrouded in the dim light. Duchamp's centrality to the show was underscored in his collaboration with Mimi Parent on the design of the deluxe green covered boxed-catalogues entitled Boîte Alerte!; participating artists found a set of 'male' and 'female' pornographic pot holders inside their boxes, objects that Duchamp had Parent fabricate in Paris based on his readymade set purchased in New York. As was his habit, however, Duchamp was not present for the opening night, thus missing the throngs that attended this last major Exposition Internationale in which he would participate, as well as Meret Oppenheim's deliciously spectacular contribution to the exhibition's mingling of the carnal and the visual.11

These various ephemeral displays suggest how committed Duchamp remained to the idea of using the exhibition space as a site for perceptual experimentation. In important ways these collaborative installations with the Surrealists complemented another lasting interest of Duchamp's, his own retrospective exhibition project. Duchamp first mentioned the idea to make an "album of approximately all the things [he had] produced" in a March 1935 letter to his friend and patron Katherine Dreier.12 For the preparation of the album, he made cross-continental voyages to take color notations from his works held in the collections of certain patrons and made painstaking and elaborate stencil prototypes for artisan printers. The reproductive process was slow and time-consuming and Duchamp eschewed practicality for meticulous precision, often laboring more on the Lilliputian copies than he had on the originals. When, in 1941 these were nearly finished, Duchamp used his pass as a cheese merchant to bring the individual "items" to Marseilles from Occupied Paris, making his way to the United States. By that point, he had assembled the first few deluxe versions of this project that had been given the official title De ou Par Marcel Duchamp ou Rrose Sélavy (From or By Marcel Duchamp or Rrose Sélavy), as imprinted between the wood pieces that made up the "M" gracing the top of the work.

What began as an "album" emerged as a "portable museum."13 Over several decades - and overlapping his conceptualization of several Surrealist exhibitions - Duchamp worked on, assembled, and then oversaw the snail-paced production of more than 300 of these exhibition-boxes (or boxes encased in leather valises with an "original" work included for the roughly 25 deluxe models). The works, most often referred to by the subtitle, Boîte-en-valise (Box in the Valise), were executed in small batches, with minute differences distinguishing each of the 7 series that made up the whole edition.14 Each opens to reveal an elaborate collapsible structure filled with photographs of works affixed to loose sheets of black cardboard, hand-colored reproductions on celluloid pulled along sliding rails, a trompe l'oeil construction of a photographic image of Why Not Sneeze? supported by a plaster plinth, a folding image of Three Standard Stoppages that slipped back into place like an accordion, and mounted three-dimensional palm-sized versions of his urinal, glass ampoule of Parisian air, and typewriter cover.

The first Boîte-en-valise to come off the Duchampian assembly line was publicly shown in 1942, just several blocks from the transformation of the Whitelaw Reid mansion with "sixteen miles of string." Peggy Guggenheim (who had, in fact, helped transport several hundred loose reproductions to the United States) exhibited the Boîte-en-valise at her Art of This Century Gallery, which opened just days after the First Papers show. Frederick Kiesler designed the legendary gallery for Guggenheim, devising a remarkable display case for Duchamp's object. In one corner of the space devoted to Surrealist work, he constructed a peephole contraption with a turning spiral handle which, when manipulated, revealed a selection of moving reproductions (the open valise and several reproductions were on view in the embedded case next to the peephole). Kiesler's ensemble perceptively captured much of the playful jabs at commerce and typical museum looking suggested in the "portable museum," as well as Duchamp's persistent concern with how spectators view what is on display.

More than a mere sum of its reproduced parts, each Boîte-en-valise constitutes an infinitely reorganizeable exhibition and archive that invites manipulation, movement, displacement. Please touch, it asks, advocating an experience different from the disinterested and analytic viewing called for by the gallery and museum. However, as Duchamp understood well, to put the Boîte on display in a public exhibition is also to highlight the disparity between its invitation to touch and the gallery and museum's impulse to collect, protect, and keep the art object out of reach. Thus whereas Duchamp's monographic project has long been understood as an exercise in autobiography and a form of copying of the past, the Boîte in fact most provocatively uncovers the systems of showing, classifying, and elevating works in institutions of art.15

The shadows objects cast on walls and surfaces, the way they shift signification through chance juxtapositions and institutionalized contexts, the way the work is "completed" by the onlooker: Duchamp was interested in all the subtle and not so subtle ways in which a work's reception could distort, trick, and undermine the certainty of the eyes and the certainty of the idea of the object - of Art - itself. The current exhibition is rooted in a desire to put on display Marcel Duchamp's preoccupation with display. To show this, we have gathered within the gallery's walls a selection of optical works, traces of the short-lived Surrealist exhibition installations, and several examples of Duchamp's monographic Boîte. To show these objects, however, is to put on exhibit a fundamental tension. For if Duchamp was interested in interrogating the gallery and museum's modes of showing, he did this in part through his design of exhibition spaces that were meant to be ephemeral and about experience, through his creation of a little museum meant to be mobile, touchable, reorganizeable, and boundless, through the manufacture of optical works that throbbed critically, mockingly, between the commercial and the artistic and between destabilized form and frustrated vision.16 To show these works behind vitrines and on the wall of a gallery, then, may seem paradoxical - the Surrealist exhibitions are recalled through the photographic traces of undocumentable experience, all the objects are untouchable, some of the works are frozen still, none of them seem to retain their indeterminate status as ambiguous works of art. But rather than trying to reconstitute what will necessarily escape us, rather than pretending that Duchamp did not put his finger on precisely the problematics of the public exhibition, we have put on display the tension of these objects here and their questioning of the regimented and regimenting ways of offering to see in the institutions of art, including this one. So, look around, for it is the "spectator" as Duchamp frequently declared, that completes the work of art.

Elena Filipovic

FOOTNOTES

(1) Letter from Duchamp to Jacques Doucet, 19 October 1925, reprinted in
Marcel Duchamp: Saltseller, Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (eds.)
(Oxford: Oxford UP, 1973), p. 185.

(2) In her work on Duchamp's optic games, Rosalind Krauss, extending the
analyses of French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard, has underlined the
ways in which the artist's vision experiments and optical illusions work to
"corporealize the visual," offering themselves as counters to those very
notions of good form and pure opticality central to aesthetic modernism. I
am here indebted to these important studies. See in particular, Krauss,
"The Im/pulse to See," in Hal Foster (ed.) Vision and Visuality (Seattle:
Bay Press, 1988), pp. 51-75, and "The Blink of the Eye," in David Carroll
(ed.), The States of "Theory": History, Art, and Critical Discourse (New
York: Columbia UP, 1990), pp. 175-199. And, Lyotard, Duchamp's
TRANS/formers, trans. Ian McLeod, (Venice, CA.: Lapis Press, 1990).

(3) The 1936 Exposition Surrealiste d'Objets held in the Parisian
apartment-gallery of African artifact dealer Charles Rattan is an important
precedent for Surrealism's thinking about the presentation of art. The
1938 Exposition Internationale du Surrealisme remains, however, the
beginning of a striking extension of this concern and the first real
Surrealist recasting the space and architecture of display. Surrealism's
ideological concerns influenced the final tenor of all the displays in
which they were involved, thus their treatment of here is by definition
partial. Nevertheless, the considerable role bestowed on Duchamp testifies
to the formidable contribution he would make to the movement's
self-definition through the exhibition space from the 1938 Exposition
onward. I have discussed the 1938 show's Surrealist and political context
in "Surrealism in 1938: The Exhibition at War," in Ray Spiteri and Don
LaCoss (eds.), Revolution By Night: Encounters between Surrealism,
Politics, and Culture (forthcoming).

(4) The details of this Exposition are documented with lively detail by a
few of its participants, including, Georges Hugnet, "L'Exposition
internationale du surrealisme en 1938," Preuves 91 (September 1958), pp.
39-47; Marcel Jean, The History of Surrealist Painting (London: Weidenfeld&
Nicolson, 1960); Man Ray, Self-Portrait (Boston: Little Brown Press, 1963);
Leo Malet, Le vache enragee (Paris: Editions Boebecke, 1988).

(5) Marcel Jean, a participant in the exhibition and one of the most
important early historians of Surrealism reports on Duchamp's lighting
proposal in The History of Surrealist Painting pp. 281-2.

(6) Several interesting studies have traced the documentation and
reception of this Exposition and some of the Surrealist exhibitions that
followed it, including, Brian O'Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The
Ideology of the Gallery Space(Published as various essays in Artforum,
1976), collected and reprinted (Santa Monica: Lapis Press, 1986); La
Plantete affolle: Surrealisme, dispersion et influences, 1938-47, Ex. cat.
(Marseilles, 1986); Bruce Altshuler, "Snails in a Taxi," The Avant-Garde in
Exhibition: New Art in the Twentieth Century (New York: Abrams, 1994);
Martica Sawin, Surrealism in Exile: The Beginning of the New York School
(Cambridge, Mass: MIT press, 1995); Dickran Tashjian, A Boatload of Madmen:
Surrealism and the American Avant-garde, 1920-1950 (New York: Thames and
Hudson, 1995); and James Herbert, Paris 1937: Worlds on Exhibition (Ithaca:
Cornell UP, 1997), chapter 4. A forthcoming publication by Lewis Kachur
entitled, Displaying the Marvelous: Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dali and
Surrealist Exhibition Installations (Cambridge, Mass.; MIT Press) documents
the 1938 and 1942 Surrealist shows with great detail.

(7) Duchamp speaks about the exhibition preparation, the string purchase,
and the spontaneous combustion of the first webbing of string in his
interview with Harriet, Sidney, and Carroll Janis, 1953. Typescript,
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Duchamp Archives; and, Pierre Cabanne,
Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp (London: Thames and Hudson, 1971), p. 86.

(8) Roberto Matta erected Duchamp's only other installation for the show,
an ephemeral contribution to the "altar" area entitled, Le Soigner de
gravite, and known only through the photographs by Denise Bellon and Willy
Maywald.

(9) A description of this ephemeral installation can be found in Herbert
Molderings, "The Objects of Modern Skepticism," in Thierry de Duve (ed.),
The Definitively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp (Cambridge, MIT Press, 1994), p.
259-62.

(10) Duchamp included specific instructions in the postscript of his letter
of March 15, 1947 to the Maeght gallery during the production of the
catalogue: the topography was to be modeled on the museum's printed "Please
do not touch" directives. Letter in the collection of Jacques Kober. I
thank him for sharing this document with me.

(11) For the opening night, Oppenheim's Festin was composed of a live, nude
female model, painted and covered with foodstuffs, and lying across a
dining room table in a small room off to the side of the main exhibition
spaces. Visitors to the exhibition were invited to sit and eat from the
erotic "feast." For the weeks that followed, a waxen mannequin replaced
the live model in this early and unusual performance piece.

(12) Letter from Duchamp to Katherine Dreier, dated 5 March 1935. Cited in
Affectionately Marcel: The Selected Correspondence of Marcel Duchamp,
Francis M. Naumann and Hector Obalk (eds.), Trans. Jill Taylor (Ghent:
Ludion Press, 2000), p. 197.

(13) See "A Conversation with Marcel Duchamp," filmed interview with James
Johnson Sweeney, 1955. Reprinted in Duchamp du Signe: Ecrits, p. 184.

(14) The details of the Boite-en-valise are treated in Ecke Bonk's exacting
study, The Box in A Valise: de ou par Marcel Duchamp ou Rrose Selavy:
Inventory of an Edition (New York: Rizzoli, 1989).

(15) I treat Duchamp's exhibition practice, Boite-en-valise, Etant donnes,
and relationship to the institutions of art at greater length in The Museum
Laid Bare / Marcel Duchamp (Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University,
forthcoming).

(16) The commercial status of art is another theme that traverses the works
discussed here, including Duchamp's optic work (meant as they were not to
be seen as art objects and, in the case of the Rotoreliefs, to be sold at
an Parisian inventor's fair and then marketed for Macy's), the exhibitions
(with sly references to the department store through works hung on
revolving doors or store-window mannequins at the 1938 Exposition, for
instance), and the Boite-en-valise (with its resemblance to a salesman's
case of wares and its mass-marketing of the art object).

Copyright © 2001 Zabriskie Gallery and Elena Filpovic
All rights reserved.Reproduction in whole or in part in any 
form or medium without express written permission is prohibited.