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In the Manner of Duchamp, 1942-47: the years of the "mirrorical return"
Art Bulletin, The, June, 2004 by Thomas Singer
Duchamp then thought about the consequences for an artist of growing old.
"The great crisis comes at about forty," he said. "That's when you have to start all over again, or resign yourself to self-imitation."
"You'll feel that soon enough," he told Rougemont, who was thirty-nine. "You'll see. At about forty, you've got to become your own father."
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Duchamp was talking to Rougemont, but he was also talking to himself. Duchamp had turned forty in 1927, the year of his incomprehensible marriage to Lydie Sarazin-Levassor, a marriage that, he laconically explained late in life, "didn't take." (46) The point was that Eugene Duchamp had died two years earlier, and therefore his son had been unable to ask for "his advice, his O.K." And 1927 was also the year in which Duchamp devoted himself to playing chess as a professional and definitively stopped producing, for the next seven years, artworks of any kind that were not directly related to chess.
Thinking back to their conversation about remaking oneself at the age of forty, Rougemont asked Duchamp if it was true that he simply decided one day to give up painting and did so at the very moment of his greatest successes in the United States. "Not at all," he replied in a tone of amused indignation. "I didn't give up art as a conscious decision. I didn't decide anything at all. I'm simply waiting for ideas. I had thirty-three ideas; I made thirty-three pictures. I don't want to copy myself like the others do. You see, to be a painter is to copy and repeat the couple of ideas one came upon here or there.... Since the creation of the art market, everything has changed radically in the world of art. Look at how they produce! Do you think they like doing that, and that they take pleasure in painting fifty times, a hundred times, the same thing? Not at all. They don't even make pictures; they make checks."
Duchamp rose, went to his room, opened the Box in a Valise he had been working on, and pulled out the reproduction of his Tzanck Check. He handed it to Rougemont. Duchamp had meticulously created it, even down to the minuscule watermarking of its lower half, to pay his Parisian dentist for work he had done. The check was numbered 4864 in red in the upper left-hand corner, dated Paris, December 3, 1919, at upper right, paying to the order of Daniel Tzanck $150.00 drawn on "The Teeth's Loan & Trust Company, Consolidated, 2 Wall Street, New York." Stamped in red ink in a vertical line down its center was the authentication: ORIGINAL. The check was a forgery, since the funds to cover it were deposited in a nonexistent bank, but it defied forgery, since it was three times the size of a normal check. What could not be disputed was that it was "the authentic work of Rrose Selavy."
"And your dentist accepted it as payment?" Rougemont asked.
"How could he not? This isn't a fake check, since it's entirely made by me! And signed! What could be more authentic? And at least, it couldn't be passed off as something artistic." The annoying thing, Duchamp confessed to Rougemont, was that he had had to buy the check back from his dentist so that he could make reproductions of it for the Box in a Valise.
