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6 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An hypothesis, an approach to this work, July 5, 1999
By A Customer
15/02/97DUCHAMP'S NEW LEAP by jj. gurrolaiturriaga Now that in the visual arts scene it is the artist who has become the human "ready-made", it would be nobler to the mind to give credit to the creative forces hidden in a visible object or an alternative art installation which refuses to comply with the creative needs of its arty producer. In this direction I would concentrate in M. Duchamp's ¨Étant Donnés... 1º La chute d'eau / 2º Le gaz d'eclairage. In English: "Given: 1st. the waterfall, 2nd. the illuminating gas"- the work he manufactured in concealment between 1946 and 1966 in his 14th Street studio in New York - for it allows me to offer a hypothetical interpretation of the almost subliminal plateau of M. Duchamp's thought. Also, his profound consideration could come as a heavenly out-haul that could clean some of the adulterated waters of the current cartel of art manipulation. The Philadelphia Museum of Art, which accommodates most of M. Duchamp's work, printed an excellent facsimile of a manual of instructions (I had the luck to purchase ten years ago at the MOMA), which is a sort of non-retinal about 20 pages leaflet with photos and notations in M. Duchamp's handwriting, extremely dissociative, both in the visible as in the literary sense, although precise in the instructive steps to be taken to assemble this construction. It fits in a 5 x 4 m. room enclosure. The sub-title of the piece by Duchamp is an "approximation that can be taken apart, or disassembled ('approximation' intends to convey a margin of ad libitum in the assembly and disassembly of the construction). In the introductory text of this reproduction of the looseleaf binder dated 1966 by M. Duchamp -with an almost merciless quantity of rulings, explanatory notes and photographs to follow the "ORDRE DES 15 opérations de montage général" as how, where and at what precise distance every element should be pieced together - points out in a paragraph that "those who scrutinize this volume will find that the position of the cotton clouds in the sky is ad lib and that the degree of brilliance of the waterfall can be adjusted by slight shifts in the position of the wooden bar that supports a biscuit box containing a round fluorescent light." "Such niceties", continues the text, "lend characteristic charm and an air of enigma to his matter-of-fact guide, which makes no attempt to explain or elaborate upon the meaning of êtant DonnÇs... but simply leads step by step through the process of putting the assemblage together." There have been many approaches to the work. Most of them valid, like the preceding one; others question the prompting of M. Duchamp's own will, its erotic connections with Courbet, Rodin, Man Ray, the voyeurism in the spectator's peekaboo situation; some try to "reconcile his extreme rationalism with the cruel fantasy of the piece." It is my belief that it is precisely inside these "niceties" and the subtlety of the sub-title, "an approximation... etc.), where one can decode and understand the underlying continent that this work signifies in the world of modern art: to isolate the infra second of an individual's creative consideration when it leaps into an aesthetic judgement. "Fond blue sur lequel sont accrochés le nuages en cotton (changeables a volonté) wrote M. Duchamp on a simple cardboard . Just as huge accelerators and scientific machines are put to use to isolate a photon or any other subatomic particle, M. Duchamp in a twenty-year long creative maneuver, manufactures the unbelievable feat, Hamlet's mouse-trap, wherein, by a slip of the mind, he catches the transfixed conscience of the artisan as he transposes his simple soul to one of an artist, if only for a short time period, without regrets, a king of the illusory world for a day. Of course, this is not the only feature that this primal Étant Donnés... offers the spectator - primal for we made an exact replica in Mexico in 1995. The visitor is presented with a real wooden door (brought from Cadaqués, Spain), and through a tiny hole in it, the eye can see an aperture of a brick wall and the figure of a woman, nude, with her legs spread apart, surrounded by a pile of twigs and a lamp with a green light in her hand. A waterfall fills the background under a cloudy sky. We do not see her face. There are also important implications in the position of the figure for it appears to me as performing a "lingua-service" in the height of seductive persuasion to accumulate battery power for "le bec Auer" (the gas lamp that she is holding in her left arm). But all this I will skip to concentrate on the central theme of this article. The quest of M. Duchamp to achieve the utmost transparency and impeccability of his actions in the realm of art went as far as to create a contraption made of bricks, wood pieces, checkered linoleum, heap of twigs and a figure of an outstretched woman with a gas light in her hand in front of a flowing waterfall, etc., to isolate the infra-finesse of the instant of creative impulse, the second where the artisan has to decide the placing of the cotton clouds, the moment of multiple decisions in the illusory world of fantasy, the personal choice, the place where the ego tumbles into the desire to express oneself in art. It is my firm belief that one of the reasons that made this dignified and incredible artist construct this piece - representing a known pattern or model of associative thought (almost as interactive art) - was to isolate the mini-second of artistic hesitancy, the overwhelming moment when art takes hold of the subconscious and suspends reality in its normal flow for a variable in the magical world. The instant the assembler-constructor of êtant DonnÇs becomes the creator, for it is he and only he who will decide how high or how low those clouds (bulky cotton) should be attached to the "fond bleu", which is a simple sheet of carton coated with blue paint. This artisan will be world famous for a short period of time, maybe less than the fifteen minutes of Warhol's parody - and for the most simple and unbecoming reasons. This is why only after his death this work, constructed in secrecy in his 14th street apartment, was revealed to the world through the Cassandra Foundation and later presented to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. One may say with Gloria Mouré's text in the introduction to the Spanish edition of Notas / Marcel Duchamp (compiled as established by Paul Matisse in its first edition, 1980, Centre George Pompidou), about the boåtes (boxes) that follow The Grand Verre (la Boîte Vert, la Blanche and the 1914th one, and the instruction manual of "Given...") that they are "..a plastic place for this "abstract co-intelligence", that must be an open interval (without finite limits) of the impossible boundary, but a separation that reunites exactly where the collusions and non-collusions occur - a pluri-dimentional modules of non-existent structure, without space, time or measurable movements, but present - refectory to whatever analysis and accessible in its unity only through intuition" One can even conclude that the roots of Étant Donnés' paradigm could be traced as far backas the complementary book that followed The Large Glass: the Green Box. Also a self-purpose consensus with what happens in the mind connecting the elements that hold this intimate package. A package with no direct meaning, but that to serve as a link of the observer's inner thoughts. One can read in one section: "we will determine the conditions of instantaneous motionlessness of diverse acts that seem to need themselves one of the other through laws to isolate the sign of concordance between, on one part, that motionlessness (capable of innumerable eccentricities) and on the other an election of possibilities legitimized by those laws and also making them happen." Isn't this also the strategy of Étant Donnés...? THE INFRA - FINE Infra mince or infra-fine, was a recurring concept that Marcel Duchamp held in front of his eyes every time the most simple and unobtrusive set of things presented themselves in front of him from the beginning of this century. Much of it in the company of Francis Picabia, who has a lot to do with all Duchamp's zeal. I have the hunch that the trip Jura-Paris with Appolinaire and Picabia holds many secrets. The book Notes / Marcel Duchamp compiled by Paul Matisse dedicates the first chapter to the infra mince notes written by the artist. M. Duchamp jotted down thoughts that appeared to him as the epitome of levity, of the almost unsubstantial, of the lightest consideration... like the sound of corduroy pants while walking, or painting with mother-of-pearl on glass, the heat of the seat of a chair from where someone has just gotten up, the infinitesimal line that separates an object from its name, a slight difference in two identical or the symmetrical elements, etc. All in the mind. "The slightest result is enormous in its humblest infinitude, tr
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