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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
47. Thierry De Duve comments on the phrase "L'impossibilite du fer" first in his article "The Readymade and the Tube of Paint," Art Forum 24, no. 9 (May 1986): 115, and then in his book Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp's Passage from Painting to the Readymade, trans. Dana Polan with the author (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 164, 168-70. His argument, in short, is that Duchamp simultaneously asserts the end of the traditional art of painting and the beginning of new forms of art like the readymade.
48. Duchamp, Writings, 63, 65. Henderson (as in n. 34) explicates all of this in considerable detail at numerous points in his book. See her "Large Glass Index," s.v. "Splash," 374.
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49. Duchamp, Writings, 51.
50. Dalia Judovitz notes the similarity of the cover to a photographic negative in Unpacking Duchamp: Art in Transit (Berkeley; University of California Press, 1995), 133. Schwarz, vol. 2, 840, notes the "mirrorical return" of the etchings.
51. Duchamp, Writings, 106, where, however, "couler" is translated as "dripping." See Duchamp, 1994 (as in n. 12), 154.
52. Charles F. Stuckey, "Duchamp's Acephalic Symbolism," Art in America 65 (Jan.-Feb. 1977): 94-99, discusses the installation and concludes that "Lazy Hardware ... foreshadows the voyeuristic gynecological raptures experienced by spectators of the monumental Etant Donnes...."
53. Linde (as in n. 34), 62-63, points to this amusing renvoi miroirique. He also notes, 45, that "the Jura-Paris road is of prime importance in Duchamp's work. The method that he has discovered re-appears and is developed in almost all the work of later years. Indeed, it is upon this approach that The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, the Large Glass, is based."
54. Duchamp, in a 1959 BBC radio interview by Richard Hamilton, claimed he was not an anti-artist (like being an atheist, as opposed to a believer) but "an-artist, meaning no artist at all." This interview, as well as other recordings by Duchamp, can be found at http://www.ubu.com/sound/duchamp02.html.
55. Duchamp, Writings, 187.
56. Duchamp, Notes, no. 9.
57. Duchamp, Writings, 76.
58. See Dawn Ades, "Duchamp's Masquerades," in The Portrait in Photography, ed. Graham Clarke (London: Reaktion Books, 1992), 98-100. Schwarz, vol. 2, dates these photographs, cat. nos. 393-96, to the year 1921, but both Ades, 109, and David Hopkins, "Men before the Mirror: Duchamp, Man Ray and Masculinity," Art History 21, no. 3 (Sept. 1998): 304, fig. 2, caption, date them several years later.
59. Duchamp, Writings, 26.
60. Hopkins (as in n. 58), 317-18, discusses the affinities between the photograph of Duchamp lathered and the Mona Lisa shaved, concluding, "There is undoubtedly a correlation here with Duchamp's own activities as a 'Man Before the Mirror,' ironically assuming Rrose's identity by shaving."
