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

[FIGURE 24 OMITTED]

The Juggler of Gravity was taken apart when the exhibition closed and now survives only in two photographs. These photographs tell a fascinating story. In the first, the one taken by Denise Bellon, the viewer can see an ordinary household flat iron hanging in the air below the large plate of the pedestal table that holds the Juggler's ball (Fig. 23). (79) In the second photograph, taken by Willy Maywald, the iron has fallen to the ground and lies behind the breast and below the Juggler (Fig. 24). The bottom surface of the flat iron faces the viewer and reveals a surprising inscription: "A REFAIRE LE PASSE" (Fig. 25). The irony of this iron is that the French expression for a flat iron is le fer a repasse. (80) In a simultaneously verbal and visual elaboration of his phrase "L'impossibilite du fer," Duchamp has substituted the homophone faire for fer and rearranged the syllables of le fer a repasse to create the new phrase "a refaire le passe" (the past is to be redone). (81) The fall of the iron enigmatically reveals Duchamp's new project to redo the past by representing the Bride of The Large Glass, who is "the apotheosis of virginity," as the fallen Bride of Etant donnes. Over a period of five years, from 1942, when he made In the Manner of Delvaux, to 1947, when he designed The Juggler of Gravity, Duchamp worked out the techniques he would use in creating Etant donnes, a work that would be the renvoi miroirique of The Large Glass through an infra-thin passage from the second to the third dimension: a combination of photographic collage, like In the Manner of Delvaux, for the background landscape and a three-dimensional sculptural object, like The Juggler of Gravity installation, for the foreground. Duchamp had found a way, as he mentioned during his talks with Rougemont, "to start all over again." Among the paradoxes inherent in this photographic collage is that he avoided self-imitation by presenting a pastiche of another artist, and that he "start[ed] all over again" by remaking an element, the Bride, of the work that he began in 1912 with the Jura-Paris Road project and ended in 1923 with the definitively unfinished Large Glass. The work is the same, and yet it is different. The Bride is represented in a different condition and by a different technique, and the landscape in which she is placed is no longer hidden. And that "difference ... is the authentic work of Rrose Selavy."

[FIGURE 25 OMITTED]

[FIGURE 26 OMITTED]

The essential point in understanding just how Duchamp explicated "L'impossibilite du fer" is to consider that the order of the photographs taken by Bellon and Maywald (which was taken first, which second) does not matter in the least. Obviously, one was taken first, the other second, but the actual sequence is meaningless in the sense of being nothing more than a historical accident. For, as impossible as it may seem, what has fallen (the iron, "le fer," the damnable deed, "le faire") will rise again, and what has risen will again fall. That is, the order is circular, circularity being an enduring motif both in Duchamp's writings and in his works. For once the viewers at the Philadelphia Museum of Art have looked through the "trous du voyeur," the voyeur's holes, drilled into the Spanish double door (Fig. 26), they must turn around and reenter the room dominated by The Large Glass. This is true even if Duchamp himself did not stipulate that Etant donnes be placed in its exact location with only one opening to do double duty as entrance and exit (he did insist that he wanted it near The Large Glass). The placement of Etant donnes was, as Duchamp told Pierre Cabanne on the subject of the cracks in The Large Glass, "the destiny of things." (82) The onlooker physically must pass from the unfallen Bride of The Large Glass to the Fallen Bride of Etant donnes, and then, caught in Duchamp's circular logic, return to the Risen Bride. There simply is no other way out. And so on, by a renvoi miroirique, through the glass and back again. "L'impossibilite du fer," and yet, "A REFAIRE LE PASSE."