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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
Before lunch on Friday, August 7, five days after Duchamp's arrival at Lake George, Rougemont questioned Duchamp about the reference to the infra-mince, the infra-thin, on the back cover of the March 1945 number of the avant-garde magazine View, an issue devoted to Duchamp.
"What is this category of the infra-thin that you talk about in the special number of View?" Rougemont asked. "Quand la fumee de tabac sent aussi de la bouche qui l'exhale, les deux odeurs s'epousent par infra-mince."
A wonderful piece of poetry in French: "When tobacco smoke smells also of the mouth that exhales it, the two odors are married by [the] infra-thin."
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"Can you give other examples?" Rougemont asked.
Duchamp confessed that examples were all he could give: "It's something that as yet eludes our scientific definitions." He explained that he chose mince, "thin," an everyday word rather than a scientific-sounding term, because he did not want to suggest that the concept had anything to do with the kind of precise measurements one makes in the laboratory. "The sound, or the music," he gave Rougemont as a further example, "that a pair of corduroy velvet pants makes when the two legs brush against one another reveals the infra-thin. Or the hollowness between the two sides of a very thin piece of paper. I'm still working on it.... It's a category to which I've given a lot of thought during the last ten years. I believe that by the infra-thin one can pass from the second to the third dimension."
[FIGURE 12 OMITTED]
On August 9, which must have been the day Duchamp left Lake George to return to New York City, Rougemont summed up his thoughts about his friend. Among the word games Rougemont and his guests had played during the evenings was one in which one person wrote a question while the others simultaneously wrote answers. Rougemont wrote the question, "What is genius?" The "answer" that Duchamp had written was "L'impossibilite du fer": the impossibility of iron. Having read it, he added, "Another pun, evidently." The pun on "fer" and "faire" (to make, to do) is obvious enough, and "L'impossibilite du faire" came to Rougemont's mind when he was thinking about Duchamp's insistence on his "laziness," as he liked to call it. (47) Rougemont was not in the least convinced. "The artist-inventor is simply taking his time," Rougemont wrote in his journal. "Duchamp reveals himself through ironic withdrawals, acts through his almost cunning absences, by his imperceptibly light touches." He was, Rougemont thought, "the Leonardo da Vinci of the age."
"Renvoi Miroirique"?
The expression "renvoi miroirique" first appears among the notes of The Green Box that treat the Splash and the Occulist Witnesses. In short, the Illuminating Gas that originates in the Nine Malic Molds constantly changes its nature as it passes through the Capillary Tubes and the Sieves to fall in liquid form down the spiraling Planes of Flow at the lower right corner of the Bachelors' Domain. Except for the Occulist Witnesses, the entire right third of the lower panel remained unfinished, although the Planes of Flow are visible both in the scaled-down drawing of The Large Glass made in 1913 and in the copperplate etching of the Large Glass Completed of 1965. The drops of the Splash, which are surely related to the Bachelors' onanism, rise toward the Bride's domain, are "dazzled" by the Oculist Witnesses, which Duchamp composed by meticulously scraping away at an area of mirror silvering to form the three patterns resembling figures in an optician's chart, and then pass as mirrored images through the three planes of the horizon that separate the lower and upper panes of glass, where the drops are reflected in the realm of the Bride near the area of the Nine Shots. The Splash, with its mirrorical reflection in the upper panel, is a terminal event: it "ends the series of bachelor operations...."
