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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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Literary blague often took the form of pastiche, the most popular examples being the A la maniere de ... volumes produced from 1908 to 1913 by Paul Reboux and Charles Muller, who parodied famous writers from the Renaissance through their own time. (23) Oddly, the pasticheur closest in spirit to Duchamp's double forgery In the Manner of Delvaux was Marcel Proust. In 1919 he published in book form Pastiches et melanges, drawn from a series of pieces published between 1900 and 1908 in the Sunday literary supplement of Le Figaro. The opening piece, "L'affaire Lemoine," recounts a historically accurate story composed of nine different pastiches ranging from the eighteenth-century memoirist Saint-Simon through nineteenth-century writers like Honore de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, and Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, and concluding with contemporaries like the now-little-read Henri de Regnier. The twist is that Proust's forgeries of the styles of others are employed to tell the story of a forgery by Lemoine involving a massive hoax: having claimed to have discovered the secret of the artificial fabrication of diamonds, Lemoine had sold enormous numbers of shares in the venture to some very rich and important people. In his note to the first page of the story. Proust explains that he came on the story by chance and found it suitable for an exercise in imitating "the style of [la maniere d(e)] a certain number of writers." (24)

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Duchamp used double forgery before he made In the Manner of Delvaux. In 1917 the Fountain was offered for exhibition to the New York Society of Independent Artists, which, like its Parisian namesake, was to have no jury to accept or refuse works and to offer no prizes. The Fountain, of course, was a common men's urinal bought in a plumbing supply store, signed and dated "R. Mutt 1917." Both the object, which was not a fountain in any normally accepted use of the word, and its "artist," R. Mutt, were de la blague. One of Duchamp's close friends submitted the work made in the manner of the fictional R. Mutt. The Fountain, which some of the organizers refused to exhibit, was meant to expose the hypocrisy of the so-called avant-garde and the strict limits to their antitraditional cult of originality. (25)

Who, then, is the butt of In the Manner of Delvaux, that forgery of a forgery: Is it Delvaux, Duchamp himself, or perhaps both? And is the blague serious or merely a sly joke? The answer to the second question is surely: both. As Louise Norton (undoubtedly with the assent, if not the active participation of Duchamp and his two fellow editors Henri-Pierre Roche and Beatrice Wood) wrote about the Fountain in her "Buddha of the Bathroom" essay that appeared in the journal the Blindman (1917): "there are those who anxiously ask, 'Is he serious or is he joking?' Perhaps he is both! Is it not possible?" And then by way of explaining this double state of affairs, Norton added, "[T]here is among us to-day a spirit of 'blague.' ..." (26) Blague, in short, can be a serious joke.

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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