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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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The full title of Duchamp's final great work appears twice in the notes of The Green Box: "Given / 1st the waterfall / 2nd the illuminating gas." (9) Duchamp, as I will argue below, began planning this work in 1942, and he executed the piece in "silence, slowness, and solitude" from 1946 to 1966. (10) According to his instructions, the piece, the existence of which was known only to Duchamp, Maria Martins, his lover during the late 1940s, and his wife, Teeny, was installed after his death off the large room containing his earlier work, including The Large Glass, in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The viewer enters a small, dark room, one side of which shows two old Spanish doors (Fig. 26). In the doors are two eyeholes through which the viewer, now a voyeur, beholds the shocking sight of a lifelike nude splayed out on a bed of twigs and holding a lamp containing the illuminating gas in her uplifted left hand (Fig. 11). Behind her rises a hilly, forested landscape down which a waterfall glitters in the bright light. The relation between The Large Glass and Etant donnes, or Given, will be the subject of much of what follows.

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Just as his earlier speculations about the fourth dimension had helped Duchamp generate ideas for The Large Glass, so his current speculations about the infra-thin and the renvoi miroirique were generating ideas about new works.

During the summer of 1945, Duchamp told his friend Denis de Rougemont, "I believe that by the infra-thin one can pass from the second to the third dimension." (11) While mirror images had been important in his thinking about the fourth dimension, they took on new importance with regard to the infra-thin, and especially with regard to the "infra-thin separative difference" that intervenes between supposed "identicals," one example of which would be an object and its mirror image. In a note, Duchamp indicated a parallel between infra-thin and "... Mirror and reflection in the / mirror maximum of / this passage from the 2nd to the 3rd / dimension." Duchamp reconceived the renvoi miroirique, which originated as one of the many processes at work in The Large Glass, as an infra-thin phenomenon. The word renvoi carries different meanings besides the general sense of "return," which includes precisely the more narrow sense of the reflection of an image in a mirror (Le Petit Robert offers the phrase "Les miroirs nous renvoient notre image," Mirrors return our images). Renvoi also refers to a postponement, a deferment, or a putting off, that is, renvoi miroirique can refer to "a delay in glass," a phrase Duchamp used in order to insist that The Bride Stripped Bare was neither a picture nor a painting on glass. But the delay applies to the identity factor in mirror images as well. Mirrors, or any reflecting surface, for that matter, play a substantial role in the construction of human identity and in the fashioning of self-image. In another note on the infra-thin, Duchamp writes, "In Time the same object is not the / same after a 1 second interval--what / Relations with the identity principle?" To return to the phrase from Le Petit Robert example, mirrors reflect our images, but not ourselves--it is a renvoi with an infra-thin "delay included." (12)

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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