Common Ground: Marcel Duchamp and William Shakespeare, Preamble.
For nearly a century avant-garde artists have looked to thework of Marcel Duchamp for inspiration and direction. Scores of art movementshave attributed whole or part of their motivation to his readymades and otherephemeral works. Yet, ironically, while the deeper meaning of Duchamp's workshas resisted exegesis and remains shrouded in mystery, the movements derivativeof his work have already been categorized and shelved by art historians.
The status and the relevance of the art works generated bythe avant-garde has been extensively debated in public and in the literature.But despite the persistent expectation of invention and criticism, by the endof the twentieth century the pursuit of the avant-garde has stalled in theself-referential stasis of post-modernism. The idea that anything can be calleda work of art, supposedly under the influence of Duchamp, has become such aclichéd defense of artistic license, that it is worth asking how currentpractice relates to Duchamp's original intent.
The pivotal recognition must be that Duchamp did not intendhis readymades and other ephemeral works to be understood apart from his majorworks, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, aka Large Glass,(1913-26) and Etant Donnes (1946-66). He went to great lengths to emphasise theunity of his life-long vision. He ensured his most significant works werecollected together in the Philadelphia Museum of Art and spent considerableenergy constructing a comprehensive portable museum of miniaturised replicas.If Duchamp is to be believed and his intentions are to be understood, it isnecessary to see the Large Glass as central to all he did and that none of theother works should be considered apart from it.
In a recent talk in the Duchamp room at the Tate Modern theyoung woman presenter, despite having Hamilton's copy of the Large Glass sitedin the middle of the room, focused on the small collection of recently acquiredreadymade multiples and a couple of paintings by Picabia. It took a question atthe end of her talk from a member of the audience to get her to respond to theLarge Glass. Her embarrassed reaction and her inability to say anythingcoherent typifies the failure of scholarship to penetrate the meaning ofDuchamp's complete oeuvre.
The content of the major works has not been given expressionin the movements that attribute their inspiration to the influence of Duchamp.Occasional attempts to use the imagery of the Large Glass, by artists such asMatta or Merce Cunningham, have resulted in the trivialisation of the work'scontent. At best it can be said that the Large Glass and Etant Donnes haveprovided an umbrella for the intuitive responses to Duchamp's other works.
Aspects of the Large Glass have been discussed when the workwas replicated by Ulf Linde or Richard Hamilton, or when it was analysed bySchwarz, Golding etc. So far, though, there has not been a movement based ontheir suggestions that respects the female/male dynamic of the whole Glass.Even Octavio Paz, the writer credited with the most insightful comments on theLarge Glass and Etant Donnes, was only able to suggest a general relationbetween the works and traditional mythologies (as does Calvin Tomkins in afinal note of exasperation in a recent biography).
To overcome the hiatus it is necessary to remember Duchamp's frequentlydeclared intent to recover the basis of artistic expression from theRenaissance, and earlier periods of art. When Duchamp looked back to the Renaissanceand earlier, he saw works of art that derived their content from theoverarching mythology of the biblical and Greek myths. A closer examination ofthe mythic content of the Large Glass, then, should reveal both why it has beenheld in such high regard and why it has been so misunderstood.
Duchamp's statements that the Large Glass provides the basisfor the meaning of the readymades is given greater point if the Large Glasscritiques and corrects the inherent logic of traditional mythologies, and thereadymades are specific instances of its expression. So, to begin to understandthe Large Glass, it helps to visualise it as an overarching umbrella embodyinga consistent mythic appreciation within which his other works operate (andhence the works of all who have been influenced by him). If this were the case,the enduring influence of the readymades would be explained, as would theirunfingerable quiddity.
So what in the Large Glass is similar to traditionalmythologies and what is different. What has Duchamp done that no other artistof the twentieth century has done, including Picasso, Matisse, Miro, Beuys,Warhol, and others. What makes it possible for Octavio Paz to evaluate thecontributions of Picasso and Duchamp and assign Picasso to the past/present andDuchamp to the present/future.
The mythology central to Western thought and art over thelast 2000 years is the biblical-xtian. In it a male god creates the world ornature ex nihilo, forms man and then woman, puts a negative value on sex, and institutesan understanding of good and evil (ethics) that sustains his priority. Themythological status of Genesis and the Gospels is a consequence of talentedprophets and evangelists who wrote a cosmology or story of origins in whichAdam and Eve and Christ are created by non-sexual means as a metaphor for thelimitations of human understanding.
Ironically, though, the biblical-Xtian believers claim theirmythology provides a true representation of the origins of the world. In theirmythology God has priority over the world or nature. God and his apologistsparticipate in an inversion of the natural dynamic by giving the "word" of Godpriority over the "flesh" of mankind.
Compare then the relationships in the Large Glass. The wholeof the Glass is female and represents the world or nature, which is prior tothe formation of the human female (in the top half of the work), and theformation of the male from the female, who do not consummate theirrelationship. Because his primary concern is the logic of myth, Duchamp leavesthe sexual outside the Large Glass, in what he calls the fourth dimension and,as an aesthete, he refrains from expressing an understanding of good and evil.
So Duchamp's world is not originally male but female, it isnot created by a male god but is self-subsistent, and the female is givenpriority over the male, who exhibits his complete dependency on the female. AndDuchamp's artistic expression is mythic because in the world of the Large Glassthere is no sexual consummation between female and male. The artist (Duchamp)creates the artwork out of his mind (as did the prophets and the evangelists),and he acknowledges its conceptual genesis by having its entities actnon-biologically.
What Paz and others have not recognised is that the LargeGlass gives a profoundly logical critique of traditional mythologies, whosepriorities are contrary to the logical conditions prevailing in the world. Thebiblical-Xtian belief inverts natural logic and makes life dependant on art.Duchamp reverses the traditional mythologies by re-establishing the logicalpriority of life over art. The gradual but terminal collapse of the biblicalparadigm over the last 500 years, because of its internal inconsistency and itsexternal injustices, is the inevitable consequence of believing that biblicalmyth expresses much more than the logical limitations of human understanding.
Once it is appreciated that Duchamp's Large Glass capturesthe mythic logic behind all mythologies, Western or other (Paz: "the criticismof myth and the myth of criticism"), and recovers the logical order ofevolutionary priority of nature, female, male, and the role of the artist whois capable of expressing the understanding, then it can be seen that hearticulates the logical conditions for any mythic expression consistent withthe dynamic of life.
The insuperable difficulty artists and commentators have hadacknowledging his achievement has been due to the residuum of the biblical andsimilar paradigms in the culture. It is as if the culture is not yet ready toaccept a logically workable expression of the mythic conditions for anunprejudiced understanding of life.
So, once it is appreciated why Duchamp based the readymadesin the Large Glass, it is possible to see how the readymades have becomestranded between traditional expectations and the logic of a global awarenessin which the contingencies of human life are dependent on a fruitfulrelationship with nature. Duchamp's relevance has not waned because the contentof his complete oeuvre is, as Tomkins said in the 1970's, "ahead of the game".Again ironically, the "mystery" in Duchamp's work possesses a surprisingclarity and precision that exposes the traditional mindset as irredeemablymystified.
The twenty first century has not caught up with theimplications of Duchamp's work. The current confusion and scepticism in theavant-garde is symptomatic of its inability to cross from a discredited andinadequate paradigm to one logically consistent with nature and with humankindin nature.
The extreme irony of the separation of the readymades fromthe Large Glass by the avant-garde (an irony Duchamp anticipated) becomes evenmore extreme when Duchamp is compared to the only other thinker to havesystematically articulated the logical conditions for all mythology, and hencethe logical conditions for life on earth. After 30 years of studying Duchampand coming to the realisation expressed briefly above, I apprehended a similarunderstanding when I attended a reading of Shakespeare's 154 Sonnets.
In the Sonnets, Shakespeare anticipates Duchamp by 300 yearswith a more comprehensive appreciation of the logic of myth. (Shakespeareexperienced the inconsistencies of biblical thought in the religious atrocitiesof his day.) The Sonnets express the logic of life not just for artisticexpression (aesthetics), but also for any form of language (ethics). LikeDuchamp, Shakespeare's understanding is based in the priority of nature, thepriority of the female over the male, the logic of increase, the priority ofthe sexual over the erotic, and the consequent logic of beauty and truth oraesthetics and ethics. And like Duchamp with the Large Glass (and Notes),Shakespeare articulated his philosophy in his Sonnets to provide the mythiclogic upon which all his other works were based. Because they both recovernatural logic, the logical structure of the Large Glass is the same as that ofthe Sonnets.
For those ready to graduate beyond the failure of twentiethcentury academicism to penetrate Duchamp's works (epitomised by the post-modernmalaise), and the even greater failure of 400 years of academicism tounderstand the works of Shakespeare, a series of volumes is being prepared thatexplore the mythic logic of Duchamp and Shakespeare (and other thinkers who workedto recover the natural logic of life such as Darwin, Wittgenstein andMallarme).
While the full analysis of the Sonnets and the Large Glasswill not be available until the publication of The Poetry and the Drama, thePhilosophy of William Shakespeare, (4 Volumes), a selection from the volumes iscurrently available at the website: www.quaternaryinstitute.com. The websiteinstitutes a quaternary level of learning commensurate with the achievements ofShakespeare and Duchamp. The logical precision and comprehensiveness evident inDuchamp and Shakespeare, and apparent in Darwin and Wittgenstein, create theopportunity to institute a systematic understanding beyond the level currentlyavailable in tertiary world-wide.
Roger Peters
August 2002
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