La fusion et pourrit: L'érotisme du couleur marron dans le travail de Marcel Duchamp (2008) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Le Merle, Cahiers sur les mots et les gestes (V.00/N.00 : Pilote) (2011)
Le Merle, vol.0 no.0, Automne 2011 , 2011
La figure de l’artiste est associée à l’imaginaire de ce qui sauve. Figure labile, elle est associée à la métamorphose autant par ses méditations, par ses jeux dionysiaques que par ses pirouettes du côté de la négativité. Cet héritage est à la fois lourd et délicat, source de profondes remises en question, entre l’extase et la dépossession. Que peut-on sauver à notre tour de l’imaginaire prométhéen que la figure de l’artiste charrie? Que souhaitons-nous déposer avant de poursuivre notre chemin? Édité par François Lemieux, ce volume 0; numéro pilote du Merle, rassemble quelques fragments : des gestes et des mots qui réparent et bricolent de l’écoute, de l’attention, de la vulnérabilité, du désir et aussi, quelques joies. Le rôle de l’artiste dans la société actuelle (1973) Hans Haacke Manifeste pour la confusion, l’épreuve et les émotions conflictuelles Jacob Wren TRENTE ROUX CÉLÈBRES Oriol Vilanova Un morceau d’oreille. L’attraction du musée de Vladivostok Oriol Vilanova mark en conversation le merle mark Notes d’introduction pour le contrepoint academique (sic) Marc G. Couroux le contrepoint académique (sic) Marc G. Couroux Memories of Overdetermination (Sedimental Education) Marc G. Couroux De l’art pour la fin d’un monde: Éléments pour une politique de la contraction Erik Bordeleau //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// The figure of the artist is associated with an imaginary of salvation. Unstable, this figure is associated with transformation no less by its meditations and Dionysian games than by its pirouettes on the side of negativity. As an inheritance, it is at once delicate and heavy, a source of constant self-questioning, a shuttling between ecstasy and dispossession. Now that it’s our turn, what of this figure’s promethean imaginary can we salvage? What of it do we want to set down before we keep on moving? Edited by François Lemieux, this pilot issue, volume 0 of Le Merle, is a compilation of pieces: words and gestures that patch together attention, vulnerability and desire, as well as packing some joys. The Role of the Artist in Today’s Society (1973) Hans Haacke Manifesto for Confusion, Struggle and Conflicted Feelings Jacob Wren THIRTY FAMOUS RED HAIR Oriol Vilanova El trozo de oreja. Atracción del museo de Vladivostok. Oriol Vilanova mark in conversation le merle mark Introductory note to le contrepoint académique (sic) Marc G. Couroux le contrepoint académique (sic) Marc G. Couroux Memories of Overdetermination ( Sedimental Education ) Marc G. Couroux Art for the End of a World: Towards a Politics of Contraction Erik Bordeleau ** Édité par / Edited by François Lemieux. https://lemerle.xyz/
Although French/American artist Marcel Duchamp (1887 – 1968) never thematised or theorised colour in any formal way, a distinctive set of ideas underlies his art. His work demonstrates a metaphorical orientation to colour that presumably was part of a general Zeitgeist just after the turn of the second millennium. However, his colour usage was far more revolutionary and conceptual than that of his contemporaries, being more specifically of the order of the parlêtre. During most of his mature period, he produced work in which the names of images and objects he utilised, as well as the inflected figures of speech in titles, constitute a defining part in the evocation of meanings and the articulation of his concepts. In view of the prevalent instrumental role of language in Duchamp’s art, I interpret his use of the colour brown as operating more as a nominal reference to the real world and expressing tropes of fusion and rot than fulfilling an aesthetic, compositional or structural role.
Pierre Mercure and the Contemporary: Reflections of Influence and Ideology in "Tétrachromie" (1963)
2015
This thesis surveys, through his use of integrated serialism in Tétrachromie (1963), Pierre Mercure's interest in contemporary compositional ideologies as influenced by prominent composers with whom he came into contact through the 1950s and early 1960s. Although largely not recognised as a composer of serialism, Mercure (1927-1966) uses a complex system of serial preogranisation in Tétrachromie. In 1951, Mercure studied at the Tanglewood Institute with Luigi Dallapiccola, from whom he initially learned the twelve-tone method. The summer prior to composing Tétrachromie, he attended the Darmstadt Ferienkurse where he most notably studied with Pierre Boulez, Henri Pousseur, and Bruno Maderna. Numerous aesthetic ideologies that existed among these composers adhere to structural elements in Tétrachromie, including systems of intervallic control and row construction. In an analysis of Tétrachromie, the author discusses how Mercure may have created his 24-tone series, and how this series is applied through melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic means, using intervallic analysis, pitchclass-sets, and Klumpenhouwer Networks to garner information about the row. Each of the four sections of Tétrachromie has a unique combination of musical textures, each texture adhering to various levels of serial organisation based on the 24-tone prime row. The analysis also contains some remarks on style and aural response based on a recording of the work's only performance in 1964. iii Acknowledgments I would like to first acknowledge the long-standing support of Professor Mary Ingraham, who not only supervised my thesis, but also provided endless insight and guidance for embarking on this project. I am deeply indebted to her breadth of knowledge of and connections to Canadian musicology, and her willingness to entertain my everchanging ideas and enthusiasms. Professor Ingraham's patience as a mentor and friend across geographical distance, and her willingness to meet through video conferencing has made possible the completion of this work. I must also acknowledge Professors David Gramit, Henry Klumpenhouwer, Christina Gier, and Maryam Moshaver whose encouragement and feedback on idea development, theory and analysis, and effective writing skills have been endlessly helpful in this and other work. The Department of Music at the University of Alberta has been supportive in many ways, including financial assistance throughout my degree program with teaching and research assistantships as well as the Queen Elizabeth II Graduate Award and other valued recognitions. This thesis would not have been possible without the support of my parents, Gerald and Melanie Triebel, my brothers Andrew, Brandon, and Ethan, and many friends and colleagues who believed in me and helped me through the many difficult times during this work. Their presence in my life has been vital to my continued successes. Finally, my son Kaspar, who inspires me to continue to learn and to always be passionate about what I am doing, has played a critical role in my academic journey by helping me to hold love and silliness at the centre of everything.
Marcel Duchamp's Language: Deconstructing the Meaning of the Image
As the ‘inventor’ of the readymade, Marcel Duchamp left an important legacy to twentieth century art. Considered by many critics as the father of post-modernity, certainly a bachelor and bastard father, not only did he successfully displace the question of the ontology of art, but he also questioned art and representation itself. This paper will examine a lesser-known aspect of his work, the ‘Boîtes-en-valise’, (boxes in a suitcase). This will allow me to analyze Duchamp’s impact on visual art, as well as his impact on language and systems of signification. According to Duchamp, the work of art must aspire to transcend the experience of the visible, thus positioning himself as ‘anti -retinal’. He values the idea, the intellectual experience of art, which is why the work that he creates does not exist by itself: works of art are not autonomous. They are manuals, real operating systems that are available to the public, who must use them to complete their interpretation. The text of these manuals will be examined here with the aim of understanding the impact of Duchamp’s language, which is mechanic, neutral and indifferent, but always ends up in an ironic word game. It is a language that also suggests anamorphosis, where the transformation of meaning breaks the relation to the reference. I suggest that this use of language can be thought of as a critique of the institution of art, because the work of art cannot operate without its accompanying commentary. However, it is not up to art history to establish this discourse anymore, for a democratization of the artistic experience is offered by our potential accessibility to this specific language. The ‘boîtes-en-valise’ contain these manuals, as well as all the handwritten notes, letters and sketches of every major work by Duchamp. ‘The White Box,’ for example, is entirely dedicated to the ‘Big Glass’. The last proposition that I will explore concerns the reproducibility of these boxes. Already criticizing authorship and authority, Duchamp uses the reproducibility of the text as a way to position language in the center of the experience of visual art. As such, language is inseparable from the intellectual experience; the work of art does not exist without a public, a public that understands it, that comments on it, that allows art to pursue its trajectory further than the retinal/visual. After all, as Duchamp said, it is the viewers that make the painting.
The Apparently Marginal Activities of Marcel Duchamp by Elena Filipovic (review)
Leonardo, 2017
Th e Hidden Th ird is a collection of well over nine hundred “poetic theorems” or “poetic aphorisms” from the mind and pen of Romanian theoretical physicist Basarab Nicolescu. Th is work is translated from the French Th éorèmes poétiques by William Garvin. Nicolescu is a champion of, and very active in the fi eld of, transdisciplinarity, being founder of Th e International Center for Transdisciplinary Research. Th e poetic theorems are grouped under 13 sections so as to retain some vague coherence in the widely varying subject matter. I say vague because, as Tavares states in his Foreword, “these perplexing theorems follow no specifi c order: straying from the imposition of any narrative sequence or fi xed relationship between cause and eff ect that so oft en restricts digression” (p. 10). Th e sections are as follows:
Marcel Duchamp en toutes lettres / Marcel Duchamp as a litteral artist
Introduction on RELIEF Revue Electronique de Littérature Française, 2016, volume 10, issue 1, 2016
Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) has a peculiar status in the art world. This is, of course, mainly due to the revolutionary concept of the readymade – a concept that has effectively undermined the meaning of the word ‘art’. Duchamp has since then mainly been looked upon as an iconoclast, an artist who aimed at destroying the arts from inside out. It would however be a serious mistake to play down his contribution to the arts to a dadaist conception of destruction. First of all Duchamp never looked upon his readymades as traditional works of art. As a tool the readymade was an ambiguous conception, aimed at the overall importance that was contributed to aesthetics in the valuation of art. Duchamp stressed the importance of personal experience, personal judgement, free from handed down aesthetic values. Secondly the readymade was intended to undermine the idea that a work of art is solely to be looked at. Duchamp stated that he was not interested in ‘retinal’ art. He wanted to expand the effects of a work of art towards other regions of the mind, more cerebral or intellectual – towards what he called ‘the grey matter’ of the human brain. Even though he started off as a cubist, Duchamp did not think much of the intellectual qualities of the painters he knew. He much rather looked for inspiration elsewhere: in contemporary science for instance, both serious and popular, in the language of technique, commerce and advertising, and in literature. ‘I felt that as a painter,’ he stated, ‘it was much better to be influenced by a writer than by another painter.’ Duchamp made no secret of his examples. He considered the work of painters like Matisse and Cézanne as less inspiring than the poetry of Jules Laforgue, the curious novels of Raymond Roussel, the quasi-etymology of Jean-Paul Brisset and the pataphysics of Alfred Jarry. This is why a main part of this review is devoted to the ‘litteral’ character of Duchamp’s work. Although he produced most of his work before the Second World War, it was only in the late fifties and early sixties of the 20th century that the name Duchamp became known to a larger audience. In the Netherlands the reception of Duchamp began in the late fifties through the museum valuation of Dada, in parallel with the introduction of the work of the new generation of artists of Assemblage Art, Neo-Dada, Nouveau realism, Fluxus and Pop Art. Unlike elsewhere this reception also gained a literary dimension, mainly due to the attention of young writers K. Schippers, J. Bernlef and G. Brands, who published some of Duchamp’s texts in their literary journal Barbarber. K. Schippers came in the wake of Duchamp through his interest in Dada, particularly Arp and Schwitters. His knowledge of, and admiration for Duchamp grew when he read the autobiography of Man Ray (Self Portrait, 1963), the articles of Calvin Tomkins in The New Yorker and the monograph of Robert Lebel in 1959. A year earlier he had discovered Marchand du Sel, the first edition of the writings of Marcel Duchamp, of which an English translation appeared in 1963. Schippers published his translation of some of Duchamp’s notes in Barbarber in that same year. These notes are included in his contribution to this issue. They illustrate the translation in French of a chapter from Schippers’ recent book De Bruid van Marcel Duchamp (Marcel Duchamp's Bride), in which he looks back at the circumstances of his encounter with Duchamp’s work – an encounter related to seeing the Nouvelle Vague films of Truffaut, especially Jules et Jim. As Bert Jansen in his contribution to this review discloses, Duchamp, as a Frenchman, was keen on wordplay and puns, especially if they were of an ambiguous nature. Sexual innuendo was present in his early work – in the cartoons he made for humorous newspapers and magazines – and formed the base for most of his later work. Duchamp thought of language as an extra means to attribute ‘colour’ to his images. His reading of the extra-ordinary linguistic theories of Jean-Paul Brisset – Brisset ‘proved’ that the French language was derived from the first words of the frog (words that were an articulation of the discovery of the ‘sexe’) – made him aware of the mechanisms of homophonic words and sentences, in French and later on – after he moved to the United States – also in English. There he elaborated on this discovery with the punning titles of his readymades. Jansen, moreover, discovered some hitherto unknown sources and facts considering Duchamp’s readymades. Dutch author Dirk van Weelden stresses the importance of Alfred Jarry’s ‘neo--science’ of pataphysics as a source of inspiration for Duchamp. As Van Weelden notes, Duchamp was not solely interested in concepts or ideas, his drive was ‘towards the virtual, ambiguous, irrational side of perception’. Van Weelden states that at the basis of Duchamp’s ideas about art, literature, science and philosophy lay the concept of tautology – even ‘patatautology’. The same goes for Duchamp’s ideas about language, as Pieter de Nijs argues in his contribution. Duchamp and Jarry seem to have had a comparable interest in humanoid machinery and eroticism as a driving force. As Dirk van Weelden already brought forward, they also shared an ironic attitude towards science and the widely spread believe in universal applicable scientific laws and principles. More importantly however is a comparable view on the laws of language. Both Jarry and Duchamp strain the laws of language to the utmost, trying to establish new relations between words and sounds in order to draw attention to unexpected, seemingly illogical and therefore surprising, often homophonic relations. Bastiaan van der Velden draws upon his extensive knowledge of French popular 19th century images in order to illustrate Duchamp’s statement that the theme of his Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même (Le Grand Verre or Large Glass) was inspired by a fairground attraction, called Massacre des innocents – an attraction Alfred Jarry was well known with and wrote and spoke about several times. Duchamp knew Jarry’s writings and these might very well have drawn his attention towards the theme of the massacred children known from the Bible, in relation to the puppets representing wedding guests that were supposed to be beheaded in the 19th century ‘baraques foraines’. Next to Brisset, Duchamp considered Raymond Roussel as essentially responsible for his main oeuvre, the Large Glass. Roussel’s famous ‘procédé’ was based on two homophonous sentences. Duchamp visited the theatre play Roussel presented in 1911, based on his novel Impressions d’Afrique, and must have guessed the importance of the homophonic relations Roussel took as a starting point for his novels and theatre plays. Sjef Houppermans, by means of several homophonic equations, links the secrets Roussel verbally hid in ‘L’étang aux grebes ’ (the lake with the great crested grebes), figuring in his play L’Étoile au front, to Duchamp’s latest work, Etant donnés, in which there also figures a lake, clearly visible in the background. In her article Caro Verbeek expands on the importance of one of the sensual experiences generally not closely related to works of art: smell. In several of the exhibitions he designed on request of his surrealist friends, Duchamp installed some ‘smelling devises’, and – in addition – obstructed the view of the visitors by darkening the exhibition rooms or obstructing them in another way. The olfactory experiments he undertook were meant to address other of the visitors’ senses than the habitual visual one. Marian Cousijn takes Duchamp’s exhibition designs as an early example of the growing importance of the curator in the art world. With his exhibition designs and in his later artistic practice, especially in regard to his readymades, Duchamp restricted himself artistically to selecting and displaying. But, as Cousijn puts it, ‘selecting and displaying are also the core tasks of the independent curator’. Duchamp proved early on how powerful an exhibition maker can be. This poses a question, that is also valid for the artistic practise of th
Resonances: Marcel Duchamp and the Comte de Lautréamont
This thesis explores the relationship between Marcel Duchamp’s oeuvre and the texts of the Comte de Lautréamont, arguing that the author’s works comprise an overlooked and undervalued source of interest and ideas for the artist. Scholars have done an extraordinary job of documenting and analyzing a number of Duchamp’s literary sources and inspirations. Their work has elucidated the roles of Raymond Roussel, Alfred Jarry, Stéphane Mallarmé, Jules Laforgue, and Jean-Pierre Brisset, among others, for Duchamp. The work of Lautréamont, however, has received proportionally little attention, despite several indications of its importance for the artist. Among the few who have proposed such a connection, none have yet offered a broadly documented or sustained argument. Other historians, generally working under the premise that Lautréamont only came to Duchamp’s attention by way of the Surrealists, have explicitly rejected the possibility that the Uruguayan-French poet had any meaningful position in Duchamp’s library prior to the Surrealist championing of the author. This thesis proposes otherwise, making the case that Lautréamont was more fundamentally important to Duchamp than yet realized. Historical documents as well as statements by the artist himself and those closest to him suggest a stronger engagement by Duchamp with the works of Lautréamont than has been previously proposed. This relationship seems to have begun by as early as 1912, well in advance of the Surrealists’ discovery of the author, and it lasted throughout Duchamp’s life. Furthermore, an examination of Duchamp’s body of work demonstrates a number of strategic and thematic resonances between artist and author that reinforce what the archival evidence suggests. These resonances should be understood as open readings, rather than exclusive readings. They are proposed as additions to the existing constellation of understanding of Duchamp’s oeuvre, rather than as foreclosures upon other ways of reading Duchamp’s body of work.
Le jeu d’échecs comme représentation : univers clos ou reflet du monde ? sous la direction d’Amandine Mussou et Sarah Troche, éditions de la rue d’Ulm, collection «Actes de la recherche à l’ENS », 2009
Massot : « Cet ouvrage traite d'un point très spécial de la fin de la par e en jeu d'échecs, quand, les pièces ayant disparu, il ne reste que des pions et deux rois ; et encore, dans ce chapitre de pions seuls, n'est-il ques on que des cas par culiers où, les pions étant bloqués, les deux rois seulement peuvent jouer ». Voir aussi François Le Lionnais, Marcel Duchamp joueur d'échecs et un ou deux sujets s'y rapportant, Paris, Édi ons de l'Échoppe , 1997, p. 13--15. 5 « J'aime mieux vivre, respirer, que travailler. Je ne considère pas que le travail que j'ai fait puisse avoir une importance quelconque au point de vue social dans l'avenir. Donc, si vous voulez, mon art serait de vivre ; chaque seconde, chaque respira on est une oeuvre qui n'est inscrite nulle part, qui n'est ni visuelle ni cérébrale. C'est une sorte d'euphorie constante, » Pierre Cabanne, Entre ens avec Marcel Duchamp, Paris, Pierre Belfond, 1967, p. 134--135. 6 André Breton, Manifestes du surréalisme, Paris, Gallimard, « Idées », 1969, p. 130.