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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 exploited this idea when he turned the sculptural object Female Fig Leaf of 1950 into the reversed image that appeared on the cover of Le Surrealisme, Meme early in 1956 (Figs. 20, 21). By rotating the object and then retouching a photographic negative made of it, the Female Fig Leaf appears turned inside out, its concavities become convexities, producing both a casting from the original sculpture and the original mold used to produce that sculpture. The play on mold and casting was built into the Female Fig Leaf itself, for it could be viewed either as a mold to make castings that reveal a female's private parts or as a casting to be used as a fig leaf to conceal a female's private parts.
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Objet-dard of 1951 (Fig. 22) suggests the same play of mold and casting, this time with the additional twist of gender reversals. As a casting, the phalliclike object appears to be the product of a vaginalike mold; as a mold, the Objet-dard could be used for the casting of vaginas. The reversibility of mold and casting, then, is analogous to the reversibility of genders and, as such, demonstrates the quality of difference in the renvoi miroirique. In the posthumously published note quoted above, Duchamp mused about the infra-thin in its relation to sexual difference: "infra-thin separation ... has the 2 senses male and female...." (69) By a happy coincidence, the Objet-dard came from the armature used to support the breast of the fallen Bride of Etant donnes during the casting process. Because the sculpture suggests a phallus and therefore, by synecdoche, a male, Eve and Adam have swapped roles, for Eve's rib has been used to create Adam.
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[FIGURE 22 OMITTED]
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Through the Glass and Back Again
In addition to designing the catalogue cover for the Exposition Internationale du Surrealisme of 1947, Duchamp planned an "altar" for the exhibition's "labyrinth" section before returning to the United States. He conceived the altar (but left its construction to the young Surrealist Matta, with help from Frederick Kiesler, Breton, and possibly others) as an environment displaying the Juggler of Gravity, a figure intended to occupy the right side of the upper panel of The Large Glass but never completed. Duchamp had envisioned an important role for the Juggler in the scheme of The Large Glass, as is suggested first by the very fact that it is gravity that he juggles. In an important note in which Duchamp set down his "Definitive title: The bride stripped bare by her bachelors even....," he added, "The picture in general is only a series of variations on 'the law of gravity' / a sort of enlargement, or relaxation of this law...." (70) Secondly, Duchamp remarked, in the context of a work meant to exemplify the "beauty of indifference," that the ball he juggles is itself "the instrument of indifference." (71) In the diagrams of the Juggler Duchamp made in his notes, he conceived the figure as a sort of high pedestal table, of the type one might find in a cafe, having either three or four legs from which rises a long shaft holding a large platelike surface on which a ball precariously rolls as he dances--or might dance, had the stripping in fact occurred--on the Bride's clothes. (72) Moreover, Duchamp relates the occurrence of the Splash, which initiates the renvoi miroirique, to the operation of the Juggler of Gravity (alternatively called the Tender or Handler of Gravity), with the apparatus called the Boxing Match apparently acting as intermediary. "Direct these splashes," he writes, "which should be used for the manoeuvering of the handler of gravity. / (Boxing match.)" (73)
