In the Manner of Duchamp, 1942-47: the years of the "mirrorical return"

[FIGURE 13 OMITTED]

The essential point, and Duchamp returns to it, is that the drops of the Splash never actually reach the upper panel: "The mirrorical drops, not the drops themselves but their image, pass" into the realm of the Bride. (48) The Malic Molds can never reach the object of their erotic desire because the Illuminating Gas passes up to the realm of the Bride only as a renvoi miroirique. In a note from The Green Box that repeats both the word mirror and the verb form of renvoi, Duchamp writes of the Bachelors that "they will never be able to pass beyond the Mask = They would have been as if enveloped, alongside their regrets, by a mirror reflecting back to them [d'un miroir qui leur aurait renvoye] their own complexity to the point of their being hallucinated rather onanistically." (49) In the Manner of Delvaux demonstrates a further development of the renvoi miroirique. The viewers of the piece are Bachelors twice removed from the breasts of the Bride: once, because all they see is her mirrored reflection; twice, because that mirrored reflection is presented as a photographic image.

In the Manner of Delvaux and the renvoi miroirique are explicitly linked in Duchamp's layout, with the collaboration of Arturo Schwarz, for Marcel Duchamp: Ready-Mades, etc. (1913-1964), the exhibition catalogue for Omaggio a Marcel Duchamp, a show that featured a new series of editions of Duchamp's readymades, presented at the Galleria Schwarz in Milan in the summer of 1964. The front of the dust jacket reproduces the Monte Carlo Bond of 1924, with Man Ray's photograph of Duchamp's face and hair heavily lathered with shaving soap, at top center (Fig. 14), while the back reproduces In the Manner of Delvaux. In the center of the front black clothbound cover, printed in white, is a drawing of the Fountain made earlier in the year and modeled on the famous photograph taken by Alfred Stieglitz immediately after the Society of Independent Artists refused to exhibit it in 1917 (Fig. 15). Printed above the Fountain are the words:

   UN ROBINET ORIGINAL REVOLUTIONNAIRE
     "RENVOI MIROIRIQUE"?

and below:

   "UN ROBINET QUI S'ARRETE DE COULER QUAND ON NE
      L'ECOUTE PAS"

With the white drawing of the Fountain standing out against the black background, the cover suggests a photographic negative. In a series of copperplate etchings done at the same time, the drawing of the Fountain for the cover of the catalogue served as a photographic negative, or as an actual mirrored image, for the copperplate of the Fountain was an exact copy of the cover design, with the result that the etchings themselves produced a reverse mirror image of the original copperplate with the small holes in the urinal off center to the left and the large hole for the flush water off center to the right. (50)

[FIGURE 14 OMITTED]

[FIGURE 15 OMITTED]

"The faucet that stops running when nobody is listening to it" is part of a longer sentence that appeared first in Anemic cinema (1926), and later both as part of the puns and word games that are printed on four pages of music paper in the Box in a Valise and in Duchamp's 1939 anthology of forty-two short writings entitled Rrose Selavy. The longer sentence translates: "Among our articles of lazy hardware [quincaillerie paresseuse] we recommend a faucet which stops running when nobody is listening to it." (51) This recalls Duchamp's Lazy Hardware store window installation of April 1945 for the publication of Breton's Arcane 17, which featured a headless mannequin wearing a skimpy and largely transparent apron with a phalliclike faucet attached to the middle of her right thigh (Fig. 16). (52) The rotated Fountain, of course, functions as a faucet that stops running when no one is using it as a urinal and therefore is not listening to the urine gurgling into it. In addition, the utilitarian disconnection and the rotation of the Fountain produce a quite comical situation, a kind of quincaillerie amusante [amusing hardware]. With the hole at the base--which should be at the top to allow the water to flow down and flush out the urinal--any male who attempted to use the Fountain would find that by a renvoi miroirique his urine would come right back out of the hole to splash on him. (53)