My funny Valentine: Etant donnes.
Molesworth, Helen
Etant donnes--the troubling tableau mort that Marcel Duchamp worked
on in secret for two decades-- is one of the great conundrums of
twentieth-century art, its specular drama seemingly antithetical to the
artist's anti-retinal precepts, its meaning contested and elusive.
Taking stock of a wealth of new information revealed by the Philadelphia
Museum of Art's recent exhibition "Marcel Duchamp: Etant
donnes" curator and art historian HELEN MOLESWORTH considers her
own long and complicated engagement with the work and proposes a
startling resolution to the puzzle of Duchamp's late masterpiece.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
" You're my favorite work of art ... "
AS YOU MAKE YOUR WAY toward Marcel Duchamp's Etant donnes at
the Philadelphia Museum of Art, you walk down a long hallway with Paul
Cezanne's Les Grandes Baigneuses (The Large Bathers), 1906,
squarely in your sight line. For all its iconic status, it is a bizarre
canvas. Its scale is monstrous and not particularly in keeping with its
ostensible subject matter: nudes at play in a pastoral landscape. The
nudes (or shall we call them women?) proliferate, seated and standing;
they arch toward one another like so many windswept trees, forming
parentheses around the core of the painting, which remains awkwardly but
decidedly empty. The void suggests that something about the very idea of
this painting struck Cezanne as potentially ridiculous. It's as if
he knew the jig was up: naked women in a landscape? Really? In 1906?
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Hang a right at the Cezanne, head down the long, barrel-vaulted
hallway, and modernism unfurls before you. Let's face it, the PMA has one of the finest collections of twentieth-century art in the
country: Arthur Dove, Man Ray, Constantin Brancusi. This unfolding of
the avant-garde dead-ends, as it were, in gallery 183, the room that
contains Duchamp's last and most abiding work.
Etant donnes is installed alone in an unlit room whose floor is
covered with a worn sisal carpet. You approach a set of massive,
weathered wooden double doors, doors canted ever so slightly inward, so
that your feet have room to plant themselves as you lower your head a
bit to peer through the two peepholes situated just slightly below eye
level. Looking through them, you see a nude woman in a landscape bathed
in a warm, glowing light.
But I have gotten ahead of myself. just on the other side of the
doors there is a brick wall with a ragged hole broken through it. And it
is through this second aperture that you witness the mise-en-scene: a
headless female mannequin nestled in a pile of dead branches and leaves,
legs awkwardly open, labia curiously misplaced as if sliding up the left
thigh, left arm outstretched and lifting away from the body, left hand
grasping a lantern. The background is an exercise in pastoral kitsch,
containing, dutifully, trees against a horizon, clouds, blue sky, a
lake, a waterfall. The falls' moving water is simulated by a
flickering light that looks as if it were made with dime-store glitter.
It is the only movement in the tableau, its glow echoing that of the
lantern. Yet even though both the waterfall and the lantern are included
in the work's full title, Etant donnes: 1[degrees] la chute
d'eau, 2[degrees] le gaz d'eclairage ... (Given: 1. The
Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas ...), neither is the source of the
otherworldly, or cinematic, light that illuminates the landscape, the
splayed body, and the brick wall.
First-timers often pull back in shock. Those who have been there
before frequently linger, puzzled. What is this an image of? Can we even
rightly call it an image} What does it mean? How was it made? Can it
really be that Duchamp produced, of all things, a diorama? Why did the
great advocate of the anti-retinal, the inventor of the readymade, the
progenitor of Conceptual art and institutional critique, make this?
Etant donnes has been a great mystery for many years. Installed at
the PMA in 1969, it was immediately subject to a photographic
moratorium: After numerous unsatisfactory attempts to capture the work
on film, the curators at the time (notably the late, much-admired, and
now deeply missed Anne d'Harnoncourt) decided not to allow any
photos of it, concluding that no picture was capable of conveying the
visual and physical complexity of the piece. One enduring effect of this
decision has been that the reception of the work, by both artists and
art historians, has been slow, subject to the hearsay of who saw what
when. Ultimately, this contemporary iconoclasm meant that the work
hovered like air: crucial but unremarked. Even when the ban was lifted
and images of the work began to circulate, people remained
quiet--leading Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, in an introduction to a 1994
special issue of October dedicated to Duchamp, to bemoan "the near
total silence surrounding the hidden enigma in Philadelphia."
This silence may now be broken thanks to the enterprising and
extraordinary recent exhibition "Marcel Duchamp: Etant
donnes." Organized by the PMA's curator of modern art, Michael
R. Taylor, the show--which marked the fortieth anniversary of the
installation of the work at the museum--was at once overdue and timely,
bringing us as close as we are ever likely to come to this most reticent
of artworks. It gathered every known document, drawing, and object
relating to the work, many of which had been sequestered, unknown to the
public, in the museum's collection or in the hands of the
artist's family for decades. The indispensable and beautifully
written catalogue, while purposely light on critical interpretation,
outlines the production and reception of Etant donnes in exhaustive and
riveting detail, as well as reproducing a crucial passage from
Duchamp's personal correspondence. The combined effect of the
exhibition and the catalogue not only sets the record straight; it makes
possible a new conversation.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
When it comes to Etant donnes, I, too, have been part of the quiet
multitude, even though the work has haunted me for years, I first saw it
as a teenager on a trip to Philadelphia with my mother and my best
friend from high school. I returned to it frequently during the course
of writing a dissertation on Duchamp's readymades (although, in the
finished dissertation, I never mentioned it!) and later became obsessed
with it while working on an exhibition of postwar and contemporary
sculpture made in the "tradition" of Duchamp's so-called
erotic objects of the 1950s. In the catalogue for that exhibition,
"Part Object Part Sculpture" (2005), Etant donnes casts a
shimmering shadow on the whole project; nonetheless, I still
couldn't confront it head-on. Taylor's exhibition and
catalogue have enabled me to face what has beguiled and disturbed me
over these many years.
What disturbed me most was that, evidently, I wasn't disturbed
enough. In other words, I never found Etant donnes "offensive"
or "shocking." As a feminist, I have listened to many a
bilious diatribe against it (for many viewers, it is the aftermath of a
rape or murder), and I have never really been able to articulate why I
did not find it antifeminist or misogynist. Certainly, I was able to
reproduce Jean-Francois Lyotard's handy arguments about the piece
linking the scopophilia of patriarchy to the development of perspective
itself, resulting in the immortal aphorism "Con celui qui
voit" (He who sees is a cunt). I was also familiar with accounts of
the work that read it through the matrix of Lacanian desire; here the
figure is centrally marked as castrated, and the viewer is implicated in
this abyss of lack. And I was able to convince myself, mildly, of the
work's doubly transgressive nature, its simultaneous positioning of
the viewer "as essentially carnal," as Rosalind Krauss has
phrased it, and insistence on representation as such. (It's not a
woman--it's a sculpture of a woman!) But to be honest, I have
always secretly found such accounts, with their insistence on
"desire + looking - voyeurism" as the work's primary
equation, a bit academic. Etant donnes's intense radicality, indeed
its consummate mystery, seemed to elude such formulations. That being
said, I shared the sentiment that the work's radicality stems from
its evocation of desire--desire for art, for bodies, for images, for
sex. Yet beyond that art-historical truism, my thoughts and feelings
remained inchoate, particularly when I found myself in its presence.
"Is your month a little weak? When you open it to speak, are
you smart? ... "
SOME FACTS: Among the previously unknown materials revealed by the
exhibition is a suite of black-and-white photos of Etant donnes
installed in Duchamp's studio on Eleventh Street in downtown
Manhattan, nor long after his death in 1968. They were taken by Denise
Hare, the photographer and artist portraitist, at the request of
Duchamp's widow, Teeny, in advance of the work's laborious
piece-by-piece dismantling, then transfer to and reassembly at the PMA.
(It was the second time the work had been moved in less than five years.
Duchamp had relocated from his longtime studio on Fourteenth Street in
1965, a victim of rising rents.) The photos are clean and modernist in
feel, maintaining a respectful distance even as they knowingly break
open Duchamp's great secret. They show us the studio of Duchamp the
bricoleur, accumulator of junk, hardware-store scraps, and old chairs,
and they give us Etant donnes as jury rigged apparatus: We see the
two-by-fours, the drapery, the tangle of coiled and bunched electric
wires, the lights, motors, and fans. We see, as well, the full wig of
the otherwise headless figure, Duchamp's signature on the
body's right arm (until now, hidden from view), and the
"empty" studio with its secret door. That's right, a
secret door. Duchamp would have people over, and they would leave
knowing nothing of his twenty-year project, because all the work was
sequestered behind this portal.
Some more facts: Duchamp--who as early as 1921 claimed to have
abandoned artmaking for a life of chess and in 1961 infamously stated
that he thought the artist of the future would have to "go
underground"--worked on Etant donnes from 1946 to 1966. During
those years, he let only two people know of its existence: his lover the
Brazilian artist Maria Martins and, after that relationship ended, his
wife, Teeny. A few works relating to Etant donnes did make their way
into public view in the '50s, but without any indication that they
were connected to the clandestine project. Of these, the best known were
the erotic objects; Feuille de vigne femelle (Female Fig Leaf), 1950;
Object-dard (Dart-Object), 1951; and Coin de chastete (Wedge of
Chastity), 1954, all of which were copied in small bronze editions and
reproduced in catalogues as well as exhibited in the '50s and
'60s. Wedge of Chastity, a bubble gum-pink base with a
copper-colored wedge inserted in it, was given to Teeny as a wedding
present. When the wedge is lifted, a shocking pink interior, remarkably
vaginal in nature, is revealed. According to Duchamp, Teeny used to take
it with her when they traveled, leading him to suggest that it was
"like a wedding ring." Female Fig Leaf looks like a mold of a
woman's pussy and was originally given as a gift to Man Ray so that
he could make multiples of it for some much-needed cash. Dart-Object is
perhaps the most curious of the trio, simultaneously phallic and
scatological, oddly lumpen and inanimate.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Once Etant donnes was completed in 1966, a highly select group of
PMA trustees and supporters was allowed to see it in order to ensure
that it would be accepted into the permanent collection and, further, to
guarantee that the work would be placed on permanent public display at
the museum, which contains the world's largest collection of works
by Duchamp, including the early and crucial The Bride Stripped Bare by
Her Bachelors, Even (aka The Large Glass), 1915-23. The work was
installed, the fifteen-year photo moratorium was handed down, and
gallery 183 was opened. Once it was revealed to the public, it became
clear that Female Fig Leaf and Dart-Object were byproducts of the
casting of the central figure. Wedge of Chastity--which is not
technically a by-product of Etant donnes but, given the way it traffics
in playful eroticism and secrecy, belongs among the work's
satellites--on the other hand, remained a closed mystery. (The first
photo of it "open" was in the "Part Object Part
Sculpture" catalogue.)
"Your looks are laughable, unphotographable ..."
JUST AS HARE'S PHOTOS expose some of the physical properties
of the work in the studio--as does a series of oddly less evocative
photos taken by Duchamp for his meticulous assemblage-instruction manual
in 1965--the host of heretofore unknown objects in the exhibition quite
literally fill in pieces of the puzzle. Among them are casts of a hand
holding the lantern, working body fragments, an array of preparatory
drawings, and a marvelous cardboard model of the work with an eye toward
its installation in the PMA. The catalogue continues the process of
revelation by reproducing not only Hare's and Duchamp's photos
but all of Duchamp's letters to Martins, dating from 1946 to 1952,
precisely the period he was at work on the large mannequin. The letters
are those of a forlorn lover (please write me) and of a consumed artist
recounting his labors in the studio. Every once in a while, they are
peppered with revelations of Duchamp's slightly melancholic temperament: "Autumn is quite beautiful here but all the same has a
funeral air, like all beautiful autumns--something like a funeral
relaxation of things."
One of the most persistent pieces of received wisdom about Duchamp
is that he was a paragon of indifference in matters both personal and
aesthetic. But this narrative belies another central quality of his
character. He had three major romantic relationships: a multidecade
affair with the bookbinder and American expatriate Mary Reynolds (she
helped the French Resistance during the war), the short-lived affair
with Martins, and, late in life, the marriage, by all accounts
exceedingly happy, to Teeny. These relationships did not overlap,
although Duchamp maintained correspondences and friendships with
Reynolds and Martins after their amorous relations had ended. Indeed, he
traveled to Paris to be at Reynolds's bedside when she was dying of
cancer. Duchamp was nothing if not loyal.
From Taylor's remarkable account of the work's
fabrication, we learn, for the first time, that after Reynolds died, her
brother provided Duchamp with a trust that gave him enough money to live
modestly without having to work; further, Taylor surmises that
Duchamp's use of parchment in the molding and casting of the female
figure was due to the influence of Reynolds's work as a bookbinder.
We also discover that the figure was cast from Martins's body and
that the original hair on the mannequin was brown (like Martins's)
and was replaced with blond hair after his marriage to Teeny (whose hair
was blond). Finally, we learn that one summer it was so hot in New York that the arm holding the illuminating lantern melted and fell off. The
break was beyond repair, so it was decided that the limb would be
replaced with a cast of Teeny's arm. However, Teeny's arm was
larger than Martins's, a discrepancy that contributes to the
figure's odd, Ingres-like disjointedness. Each bit of new
information, of course, deepens our understanding of Etant donnes, but
it is these details, above all, that seem to me, finally, to pry open
the mysteries of Duchamp's great secret.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
"Don't change a hair for me, not if you care for
me..."
OF COURSE, my long-standing thinking about Etant donnes as being,
in some way, "about" desire places it in a continuum with The
Large Glass and is in keeping with the common art-historical
understanding of Duchamp's entire oeuvre as being "about"
desire; nothing new to add here. With this exhibition I felt I was
finally able to delineate, in a meaningful way, the stature or quality
of that desire. Indeed, the show made me realize the mangy paucity of
Duchamp studies (my own included), in that all the talk of desire is
always generic (be it capitalist or Lacanian) and never approaches the
problem of desire's specificity. It is only now that we can see
that "my woman with the open pussy" (from a letter of
Duchamp's to Martins) is in fact a complicated composite of three
people; Reynolds (the parchment and the money to work), Martins (the
original cast and inception), and Teeny (the left arm, the hair, and the
completion). The figure is a literal conflation of two bodies, the
overall work a palimpsest of, and testament to, three profound love
affairs.
An interpretation: I think Etant donnes is about love and desire,
the kind of love you have with another person with whom you are in a
desiring relationship. The work's composite nature suggests to me
that our capacity for love is infinite; it is not an emotion we run out
of or get filled up with. Certainly, it can fade, and often it does. But
its possibility for reemergence is continual and ever-present. Etant
donnes presents us with a quandary, but not the one that has commonly
been perceived. Its question is not, How do we make an image of our
seemingly unending and unfulfillable desire? but, How do we express this
desire when it is also bound up with the infinite quality of love? How
do we articulate the tension between the obdurately physical and
numinously existential nature of this nexus of love and desire? What is
our relationship not only to desire per se but to the other as such?
Etant donnes's very immobility, its insistence that you see it on
its own terms, is the beginning of the answer. It proposes that love and
desire are not portable, available to be moved around at your, our, or
my whim. Rather, the work spatializes the idea that when one is in the
grip of love and desire, one must meet the other on her own terms.
Duchamp's terms are literally to pin me in place; the work holds me
at a distance, and I am forever craning my neck to see behind the brick
wall, only to find myself, oddly, looking down at my shoes. And
isn't that how it so often goes? As hard as we try to
"know" the other (our lover), we often end up in a
narcissistic loop, talking about ourselves when we mean to be listening.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Etant donnes offers us the encounter with the other in a way that
makes it plain we cannot know her. She will remain forever separate. Her
muteness is compounded by our inability to remember her accurately,
which is how I read the problem of the misplaced labia--as a
physicalization of the distortions of memory. Not only is the work
unphotographable, it cannot be reproduced in the mind's eye,
either. One tends to remember the initial encounter in a general way
rather than the kinds of details typically revealed by prolonged
looking. Truth be told, long looking is difficult, worried as you are by
the thought of being watched by others in the gallery. This is one of
the often-remarked ironies of the work--instead of looking at it, we are
conscious of being looked at. In the context of this exhibition, I was
more conscious than ever of the possibility that I was selfishly taking
"too much time." I was acutely aware that when I was looking
through the peepholes, someone else couldn't be, and this
one-at-a-timeness is analogous to the structure of the monogamous
couple, in which only one person can occupy your heart and mind at a
time. And coupledom is at the heart of the matter, for no matter how
"shocking" or radical Etant donnes is, it also suggests that
we are never free of the societal conventions of such amorous
arrangements, be they the conventions of the affair (Martins was married
when she and Duchamp became lovers) or of the marriage--just as we
cannot be free of certain pictorial arrangements, whether perspectival
viewing or the kitsch of the landscape-as-backdrop.
In Etant donnes there is no completion, only encounter. In this
sense, it's not so much that the work is shocking (i.e., in some
pornographic fashion), but rather that it is shattering, in Leo Bersani's sense of the term. As Bersani says in The Freudian Body:
"Human sexuality is constituted as a kind of psychic shattering, as
a threat to the stability and integrity of the self--a threat which
perhaps only the masochistic nature of sexual pleasure allows us to
survive." More interpretation: I think Etant donnes is an attempt
to create an aesthetic experience of shattering that is similar to the
alienation from the self we encounter when we fall into the space-time
continuum of love and desire. Etant donnes is trying to articulate how
we arrange ourselves in relation to our own desire for the other. This
is where the love part comes in. When we are talking about desire, we
easily start talking about objects, for desire is inherently
objectifying. When we talk about love, we are discussing the radical
interface of (at least) two subjects. With Etant donnes we are, it seems
to me, a long way from the punning schoolboy humor of Duchamp's
early work. We are deep into the problems of adulthood--the time when
love and desire are intertwined, the time when our objectifying desire
is complicated by the ethics of love.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
The work's sensibility is dark. The body is situated among
dead branches, and as lifelike as the mannequin is, she is also dead.
The viewer is pinned facing the door. Although I think Etant donnes is
about love and desire (and their working through in coupledom), I also
think it produces a kind of tension and ambivalence analogous to
marriage's equal summoning of the hope of eternal love and the
truth of inevitable death. After all, Wedge of Chastity sat in plain
view, establishing both the matrimonial bond and the lie of omission.
The secret was established: The couple knows that which those outside it
cannot, but internal to the couple there are secrets as well, things
that cannot be known. The work's title begins with Given, as if a
mathematical proof--it begins with the one thing that is irrefutable,
the aspect of the problem that cannot be solved but must rather be
accepted, as one accepts bedrock. Love and desire are the given; the
arrangement we make of them is the challenge. The feminist implications
of the work might be that when we come to believe that loving and
desirous relations with the other constitute a radical encounter with
the self--and not, as we so often think, a completion of the self--we
are acknowledging our lack of control and authority. The putative
violence of the work is possibly a reminder that when we lack control
and authority, we risk being damaged or marked--if we return to the
mise-en-scene, we will be marked by it, just as we will mark it, leaving
our smudged oil marks on the door, and indelible record, a palimpsest of
our having been there.
On the walk back, the walk away from Etant donnes, nothing looks
the same. One glimpses Jasper Johns's sculptures in vitrines,
marvelous Cornell boxes, and Jim Hodges's curtain of flowers, and
all of it carries the charge of this encounter with Etant donnes, with
the given of our aloneness and the funereal quality of our love and
desire. Etant donnes's only joke might be about the genre of the
nude in the landscape, wherein the rupture of the conventional
patriarchal arrangements of women's subservience to men, allegory,
aesthetics (just fill in the blank here), cracked open by Cezanne, is
completed by Duchamp. If in the Cezanne we see an artist's crisis
of faith with such an enterprise, then in Etant donnes, a work born of
love and desire, completed slowly, in secrecy, and with commitment, we
see the great dilemma and shattering pleasure of what it means to be a
subject of love and desire. It is the viewer who may feel the jig is up
and that the task at hand is no longer to produce an image of love and
desire, but to render our capacities for those feelings ever more
complicated and infinite.
"Each day is Valentine's Day ..."
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
SOME MORE FACTS: As of this writing, thirty-one of the United
States of America have legislation that specifically prohibits same-sex
marriage. Only five permit same-sex marriage: Connecticut, Iowa,
Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont. The federal government does
not recognize the same-sex marriages of these five states, nor does it
recognize the same-sex marriages performed in California during the
period from June to November 2008, when California deemed it legal for
same-sex couples to marry.
HELEN MOLESWORTH IS HOUGHTON CURATOR OF CONTEMPORARY ART AT THE
HARVARD ART MUSEUM, CAMBRIDGE, MA. (SEE CONTRIBUTORS.)
