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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

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Infra-thin: Molds and Castings

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Duchamp had told Rougemont that the category of the infra-thin could not be defined scientifically. One reason for this, as he wrote in one of the forty-six notes on the concept that were published as the opening section of Notes after his death, was that the infra-thin was always an adjective and never a noun. (62) Rather than being a thing in itself, it is a concept that reveals itself in a multitude of disparate phenomena. Secondly, Duchamp wanted to keep the infra-thin grounded not in the world of scientific speculation--like the fourth dimension, which is mathematically conceivable but incapable of visualization to the three-dimensional eye--but in the world of our everyday senses and experiences. Consider the examples Duchamp provides Rougemont: the olfactory infra-thin of tobacco smoke exhaled from a mouth, the auditory infra-thin of the corduroy trousers, and the tactile infra-thin of tracing paper. Other examples from the posthumously published notes include the thermal infra-thin of heat remaining on a chair from which one has just arisen and the temporal infra-thin between the blast of a gun and the appearance of the bullet hole on a target. (63) Duchamp's last remark to Rougemont, that he believed that "by the infra-thin one can pass from the second to the third dimension," may sound scientific, in that it suggests geometric concepts, but Duchamp was more likely referring to the relation between the kinds of media in which he was working, in particular, to the shift from the two-dimensional paintings, whether on canvas or on glass, that he had produced during the years leading up to and including The Large Glass, to the three-dimensional works that increasingly interested him following his return to New York City in 1942. (64)

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Duchamp told Rougemont as well that he had "given a lot of thought [to the infra-thin] during the last ten years." Indeed, Duchamp had been thinking about the infra-thin since at least the summer of 1937, when he penned the key note in which he contemplated the idea of "identicals," using the example of "the most identical 'castings'" from "the same mold." He concluded that "All 'identicals' as / identical as they may be, (and / the more identical they are) / move toward this / infrathin separative / difference." (65) In the most general terms, the infra-thin is a liminal concept, a way to think about the passage across infinitesimal thresholds, whether they be sensorial, intellectual, or artistic. The key is the "separative difference" that creates the central paradox of the infra-thin, both by intervening between "identicals," like castings produced from the same mold, or objects and their mirror images, to affirm their otherness, and by intervening between opposites, like molds and castings, or the male and female genders, to affirm their sameness.

Duchamp's concept of the infra-thin may well have grown out of, or at least grown along with, his comic musings about a "transformer ... [of] slight, wasted energies." The following note, probably written in the mid- to late 1930s, was published in Andre Breton's Anthology of Black Humor (1940):

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

Art Bulletin, The, June, 2004 by Thomas Singer

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