Marcel Duchamp

There are no ready-made words that can be used to easily describe Marcel Duchamp or categorise him or his work

Like “heimlich” in Freud’s essay on “The Uncanny” there are as many interpretations that can be put on him as there are people who wish to talk or write on the artist, his work and his life.

Starting from a quite fortunate, high intellectual family home he travels through life, always seeming to be successful but never entirely sure what he would like his destiny to be and I think never achieving the peace of mind that the fulfilment of his ambitions and the deserved acclaim that was showered on him should have lent itself to.

His undoubted skill to move within various artistic media appears to be assisted in no small way by his ability to move between the complex personae he either created for himself or which chose to live within him at crucial points in his life.

At times it seems that whenever he was unsure of the response he would receive in respect of  a direction he wanted to take, rather than approach it as Marcel Duchamp, he would stick his toe in the water under a pseudonym and an alternative personality, possibly as contrived as the pseudonym, to gauge the reaction to his creations, thereby creating an unconscious barrier of mental protection against the effects of a possible failure and also an insurance policy against the detrimental effects of adverse publicity on his standing in the art and social world.

Only when the piece had received acclaim did Duchamp reveal himself as the artist.

One wonders if there have been a great number of pieces created by Duchamp, slated by the critics of the time, that were never acknowledged by Duchamp as having emanated from him.

Join now!

The possibility of failure would have been a great fear to him but he would already have ensured his separation from this chance by the anonymity of the author of the piece.

 

Without the benefit of a close psychiatric assessment of him it is difficult to speculate whether the complexity of his character approached that of an American artistic contemporary of his.

“Sybil Dorsett” was the pseudonym the artist was given by Flora Rheta Schreiber in her 1973 true story “Sybil”.

Sybil was subsumed by sixteen separate personalities. Her life was a chaos of predatory personalities ...

This is a preview of the whole essay