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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
25. The relation to and differing attitudes about pastiche, blague, mystification, and hoax in respect to the traditionalists and neoclassicists, on the one hand, and to the avant-garde, on the other, is too involved a story to treat in sufficient detail in this essay. Suffice it to say that the term avant-garde is entirely empty in meaning unless there is an arriere-garde representing the high and fine arts for it to stand in contrast against. See Shattuck (as in n. 17), esp. "The Demon of Originality," 62-81; Parigoris (as in n. 24), 296-308; and Weiss (as in n. 22).
26. Louise Norton [et al.], "Buddha of the Bathroom," Blindman, no. 2 (1917): 6.
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27. Duchamp to Katharine Kuh, "Marcel Duchamp," in The Artist's Voice: Talks with Seventeen Arlists (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 83. On Harold Rosenberg, see The Tradition of the New (1960; New York: Da Capo, 1994).
28. The pages of the First Papers of Surrealism catalogue, Coordinating Council of French Relief Societies. New York, 1942, are not numbered. The translation from Sade's French is mine.
29. Jean Clair, Duchamp et la photographie: Essai d'analyse d'un primat technique sur le developpement d'une oeuvre (Paris: Du Chene, 1977), 104: "A preliminary approach [to Etant donnes] may be found, quite probably, in a photographic collage of 1942 entitled A la maniere de Delvaux: the photograph of a feminine chest reflected in a mirror...." Craig E. Adcock, Marcel Duchamp's Notes from the "Large Glass": An N-Dimensional Analysis (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983), 169, points out that "In the Manner of Delvaux ... shows a woman's breasts reflected in a mirror. The foil surrounding the mirror 'cut' is possibly a reference to 'le tain'--the foil used to back mirrors. Given that the last piece [Etant donnes] n-dimensionally 'mirrors' the Large Glass, its imagery is 'mirrorically returned' to us fundamentally transformed--the mechanomorphic abstractions of the former having become the realistic tableau-vivant of the latter."
30. Duchamp, Manual of Instructions for Marcel Duchamp "Etant donnes: 1[degrees] la chute d'eau, 2[degrees] le gaz d'eclairage" (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1987). The manual is unpaginated, but the title and the years of its "execution" are toward the front on a quarter-size sheet of paper cut lengthwise top to bottom.
31. As for the dating of Etant donnes, the situation is similar to that of the dating of the Large Glass itself. On the back of the Chocolate Grinder, Duchamp inscribed the title, signed the piece, and gave the dates of the work, "1915-1923." But these dates refer only to the years of the actual construction of The Large Glass in New York City. He was already at work on the plans for The Large Glass by 1912, as the date on the Jura-Paris Road note in The Green Box proves. In 1913, he created a complete model of one of its elements, Chocolate Grinder, No. 1, drew out diagrams for the Bachelor Apparatus of the lower half according to both plan and elevation (that is, as seen from above and from the side), and, by the end of that year, drew with pencil on tracing paper a study of the entire piece as seen in perspective.
