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 including childlike, male, nasty, religious and amoral. Within most of us these coexist and are not normally in serious conflict. Within Sybil they each gained some form of dominance within her for indeterminate periods of time and with complex and disastrous results for her life.
Over a period of forty years and eventually after years of psychiatric assistance, Sybil managed to live with some degree of harmony as an amalgam of all these personalities rather than chaotically as each personality quite separate and of dubious relationship and benefit to the others.
Marcel Duchamp’s ability to move with apparent effortlessness from painting, to literature, to sculpture, to theatre, to music,, to illusionist, to humour and his cultivation of successful relationships with people from all the strata of the art world, theatre and society either ensure his place as one of the most gifted people of all time or else someone with the amazing ability to allow different facets of his personality to be released, use themselves to fulfil themselves, then rein them back in to the equilibrium of amalgam before the crucial stage of a personality conflict could be reached.
Perhaps he brought to his art a tremendous amount of the finely honed intellectual manoeuvrings required of a skilled chess player. From his known works he seems to always be conducting a probing assessment of his opponent (the spectator) testing us with each new piece to see if we are still able to be in the game and whether we comprehend where the game is and whether we are ready for the next move. Never giving too serious a message to us or leaving us without an ambiguity that we can use to convince ourselves that our continued involvement with him will be essentially beneficial to us. He coaxes respect and adherence out of us almost without our knowing it.
Within the proliferation of excellent work he produced it is the questions he does not answer, or the questions he does not even ask, that are a major part of the continued attraction and fascination with him. These have spawned a global Duchamp industry, weekly seeking fresh interpretations to label his work with.
I feel that behind a door somewhere Duchamp will be keeled over in laughter, as his essential characteristic was to see sense in nonsense and nonsense in sense.
He gave the art world the freedom to feel that it was all right to examine oneself and without being disparaging to our work or to other’s work to accept that the sense of proportion that had been present in the artwork should also be extended to the assessment of it and that there is a place for the humour, intended or just apparent, present in pieces of art to be acknowledged, indulged in and to understand the enhanced stature of the piece from this.
Although not a “Surrealist”, his work had a very freeing effect on the range of subjects and their treatments which the Surrealists up to then had been wary of, had not dealt with, but now felt capable of being given a fair hearing at least in the art world if not generally.
Not quite as all encompassing as Claes Oldenburg’s “I Am for an Art…..”, Duchamp covered a phenomenal array of subjects in his life.
Apart from his major works of “The Large Glass” and Etant Donnes” Duchamp is probably best known for his ubiquitously named “Ready Mades.”
Within this genre Duchamp is at his best.
He asks the world to drop its guard, defy convention, explore other ways of looking at everyday objects and to enjoy the resultant works, not for what they were as objects, not even for what they have now become in his terms but for what they may become in our own terms, even during a subsequent recreation.
He falls foul of “the art world” as it, like most “professions,” thinks it has to rely on its elitism and exclusivity to secure the mysticism and rarefied world that it purports to exist in.
Like most arguments of this type it was resolved by money.
Just as Bevan “stuffed the mouths of doctors with gold” to ease their moral objections to the setting up of the NHS in 1945, Duchamp’s society backers put their money on Duchamp and the objections to his art decreased in direct proportion to the increase in the amount of patronage he received. Very soon he was fully emancipated.
From his early sketches and paintings through to his final piece “Etant Donnes” there is a flow of energy combined with motion either implied or alluded to that very few artists manage to consistently convey..
There is no still life.
The Gasman 1904-5 Paris is walking.
The Flirt 1907 Paris the couple are flirting
Two Nudes On A Ladder 1907-8 Puteaux are descending the ladders.
Portrait of the Artist’s Father 1910 Rouen the father is looking deep into his son’s soul. Does he know more than we do?
Portrait of Gustave Candel’s Mother 1911-12 Neuilly the lady is about to speak her reaction to what here eye has captured.
Bicycle Wheel 1913 Paris looks ready to turn but can’t decide which way as it is confused by shadows.
Fountain 1917 New York works even better than even Duchamp could have imagined as the implied motion of the absent water, enhanced by thy curvature of the bowl makes this piece remarkable.
His series of doors/windows invite the motion of opening but have the gravitas to preclude that happening.
The closer the study of Duchamp, the instinct is to probe deeper and deeper to try to grasp some of the sparks that lit the engine that ran the brain that fuelled the birth of some of the true “Avant Garde” art.
But I feel that it would be an unrewarding task as Duchamp has built such a maze of detail around his art that while people discourse on this bean feast they will not be able to pursue the brain behind it.
It is no accident that some of his best works were of doors/windows that he may be hiding behind. They are constructed in such a way as to obviate our chance of penetrating them, finding him and exploring the truth if there is one there to find.
Some things are better left to the imagination.
Negative has a better chance of being positive than positive has of being negative.
Francis McCrossan
S4 SA
Marcel Duchamp
Tutor: Paul O’Kane
Word Count 1482
Completed 300503