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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
"L'impossibilite du fer" had been Duchamp's written response to Rougemont's secret question during one of the word games played at the Lake George house in the summer of 1945. "L'impossibilite du faire" had been one sense in which Rougemont had taken his response. The doing is impossible, and yet somehow it must be done. In creating a three-dimensional installation for the Juggler, Duchamp had definitively passed, as he had mentioned to Rougemont, from "the second to the third dimension" via the infra-thin. In this instance, he passed from the two dimensions of the Glass, on which the Juggler of Gravity would have appeared, to the three-dimensional installation of the 1947 Surrealist exhibition, which hinted at the larger and much more involved three-dimensional installation he was working on secretly in his Fourteenth Street studio. The mirrored image of the breasts of In the Manner of Delvaux first announced this passage. In one of the notes on the infra-thin he remarks that a "mirror ... could serve / as an optical illustration to the idea / of the infra thin as / 'conductor' from the 2nd to / the 3rd dimension." Indeed, he continues in the same note: "Mirror and reflection in the / mirror maximum of / this passage from the 2nd to the 3rd / dimension." (74)
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As a photograph of a mirror image, the Bride of In the Manner of Delvaux served as the transitional work in the movement from the second to the third dimension. Early in his thinking about the project, Duchamp had planned to use the glass of The Large Glass as a photographic plate and to transfer the Bride and other elements onto it by photographic means. (75) When this proved impractical, he satisfied himself by representing the Bride not in the earth tones of the Munich canvas of 1912 but in the black-and-white tones of photography. As a photograph, Duchamp's In the Manner of Delvaux looks back to the Bride of The Large Glass. What is new is that the breasts of the Bride in the collage are photographed as they appear in a mirror image. That is, In the Manner of Delvaux is both two-dimensional and three-dimensional, and it thereby embodies the moment of the passage, the infra-thin separative difference, between the two dimensions. In the first place, the mirror reverses the image, making the photograph we see analogous to a photographic negative, which had an important place in Duchamp's thinking about molds and castings, one of the recurring technical concerns in his work from the 1940s until his death. "By mold is meant," Duchamp wrote, "from the point of view of form and color, the negative (photographic)...." (76) Since the photograph of the mirror-reversed breasts of In the Manner of Delvaux are analogous to a "negative (photographic)," they function as a preliminary mold for the breasts of the fallen Bride of Etant donnes and, by synecdoche, the preliminary mold for the fallen Bride herself. Secondly, in a note entitled "Cast Shadows," probably written about 1913 (it was not included in The Green Box but was published separately by his artist friend Matta in 1948), Duchamp contemplated "mak[ing] a picture using cast shadows.... This for the upper part of the glass included between the horizon and the 9 holes. [C]ast shadows formed by the splashes coming from below like some jets of water which weave forms in their transparency." (77) This is the same area where the Juggler of Gravity was to have performed his dance. That is, these cast shadows would complement the renvoi miroirique of the Splash. An image in a mirror, Duchamp speculated, created the equivalent of a "Shadow projected in 3 dimensions." In the Manner of Delvaux constitutes a photographic image of breasts projected in the "3 virtual dimensions" of just such a mirror. (78) As part of the installation of The Juggler of Gravity, Duchamp repeated the motif of the photographic collage by placing one of the three-dimensional falsies from the exhibition's catalogue cover on a plate below the Juggler.
