Chapters on Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Jean Tinguely, Robert Rauschenberg

Marcel Duchamp

"You see, I've decided that art is a habit-forming drug. That's all it is, for the artist, for the collector for anybody connected with it. Art has absolutely no existence as veracity, as truth. People speak of it with great, religious reverence, but why should it be so much revered? It's a drug, that's all. The more I go on, the more I'm convinced of it. The onlooker is as important as the artist. In spite of what the artist thinks he is doing, something stays on that is completely independent of what he intended, and that something is grabbed by society— if he's lucky. The artist himself doesn't count. Society just takes what it wants. The work of Art is always based on these two poles of the maker and the onlooker, and the spark that comes from this bi-polar action gives birth to something like electricity. But the artist shouldn't concern himself with this because it has nothing to do with him— it's the onlooker who has the last word. Fifty years later there will be another generation and another critical language, an entirely different approach. No, the thing to do is try to make a painting that will be alive in your own lifetime. No painting has an active life of more than thirty or forty years— that's another little idea of mine. I don't care if it's true, it helps me to make that distinction between living art and art history. After thirty or forty years the painting dies, loses its aura, its emanation, whatever you want to call it. And then it is either forgotten or else it enters into the purgatory of art history. But that's all just luck, a game between artist and onlooker, or a drug as I said before. I'm afraid I'm an agnostic in art. I just don't believe in it with all the mystical trimmings. As a drug it's probably very useful for a number of people, very sedative, but as religion, it's not even as good as God."

In "The Lighthouse of the Bride", an influential essay on Duchamp written in 1934, André Breton cited Edgar Allan Poe's celebrated insight that true artistic orginality was generally achieved not by instinct or invention but by an absolute refusal to repeat what others had done before. "The unique position of Marcel Duchamp at the spearhead of all 'modern' movements for the last twenty-five years," Breton wrote, followed logically upon one's recognition "that never has a more profound originality appeared more clearly to derive from a being charged with a more determined intention of negation." (pp. 18-19)

It is entirely probable that only a mind that had rejected and laid waste all art, past and contemporary, could have conceived anything so original as this work. The Large Glass stands in relation to painting as Finnegans Wake does to literature, isolated and inimitable; it has been called everything from a masterpiece to a tremendous hoax, and to this day there are no standards by which it can be judged. Duchamp invented a new physics to explain its "laws", a new mathematics to fix the units of measurement of the new physics, and a condensed, poetic language to formulate its ideas, which he jotted down on scraps of papers as they occurred to him and stored away in a green cardboard box for future reference. The picture, if it can be called that, demonstrates among other things, Duchamp's personal concept of the "fourth dimension", which was much discussed in scientific circles at that time; for Duchamp, the ideal fourth-dimensional situation was the act of love— in this case the erotic dance of unearthly machines that have taken on their own form of life. All this naturally required techniques of composition that were entirely original. Duchamp evolved these slowly, by trial and error, and in solitude.

Duchamp has traced the real origin of his Large Glass to a little painting he did in 1911, just a month before his Nude, as a present for Raymond Duchamp-Villon. Since the picture was to hang in his brother's kitchen, Duchamp decided to paint a coffee grinder. "But instead of making a figurative coffee grinder I used the mechanism as a description of what happens," he has explained. "You see the handle turning, the coffee after it is ground— all the possibilities of that machine." This use of machine imagery to illustrate a process was a determining factor inhis development from then on, although at the time he painted the Coffee Mill he had no idea what he was doing. When the machine, key symbol of the modern age, became the object of Duchamp's ironic imagination, a new kind of energy was released in art.

The first element of the Large Glass to take definite shape was the Chocolate Grinder of 1913, a precise rendering on canvas of the little machine that Duchamp had often seen in the window of a chocolate shop in Rouen. This painting, a study of the central organ of the "bachelor machine" in the Glass, was followed by another version in which the radial lines of the grinding drums, instead of being painted, were made by gluing and sewing white thread to the canvas— a mingling of paint and "non-art" materials that had not as yet received the name of collage. Neither of these canvases look "painted" in the usual sense, for the simple reason that Duchamp did not allow his hand to interfere with his mind. "The problem was to draw and still avoid the old-fashioned form of drawing," he has recalled. "Could one do it without falling into that groove? Mechanical drawing was the answer— a straight line drawn with a ruler instead of the hand, a line directed by the impersonality of the ruler. The young man was revolting against the old-fashioned tools, trying to add something that was never thought of by the fathers. Probably very naïve on my part. I didn't get completely free of that prison of tradition, but I tried to, consciously. I unlearned to draw. The point was to forget with my hand."

The young man was also bored with paint and canvas, though, and in the spring of 1913 he got the idea of making the main picture on glass. "The idea came from having used a piece of glass for a palette," Duchamp has explained, "and looking through at the colors from the other side. That made me think of protecting the colors from oxidation, so there wouldn't be any of that fading and yellowing you get on canvas." He bought a large piece of plate glass and began experimenting with it in his studio, using paraffin to outline the shapes he wanted and then etching them in with fluoridic acid. The fumes were so bad that he had to give it up. "Then came the idea of doing the designing part with lead wire— very fine wire that you could stretch to make a perfect straight line. It was very malleable, lovely to work with, and that pleased me." The lead wires were glued down with clear varnish, and the colors applied directly to the glass in the spaces outlined by the wires and then sealed with a protective coat of lead foil. In this manner he made two preliminary studies on glass— Glider, which resembles an old-fashioned porch swing and is part of the "bachelor machine", and Cemetery of Uniforms and Liveries, or Moules Malic. These "malic" figures are actually the "molds" of the Bachelors, in the sense that if hollow molds were made in those shapes and lead poured in, the resulting cast would in each case be a realistic likeness of a gendarme, priest, soldier, or some other uniformed male figure. (pp. 28-30)

In a similar vein Duchamp forumlated the "amusing physics" of the Large Glass, based on such concepts as "oscillating density", "uncontrollable weight", and "emancipated metal". It has been observed that Duchamp's physics, amusing as it may be, really anticipates with startling acumen the subsequent scientific theories of relativity and indeterminacy, but Duchamp himself has scoffed at his supposed prescience. "It was just the idea that life would be more interesting if you could stretch these things a little," he has said. "After all, we have to accept those so-called laws of science because it makes life more convenient, but that doesn't mean anything so far as validity is concerned. Maybe it's all just an illusion. We are so fond of ourselves, we think we are little gods of the earth— I have my doubts about it, that's all. The word 'law' is against my principles. Science is so evidently a closed circuit, but every fifty years or so a new 'law' is discovered that changes everything. I just didn't see why we should have such reverence for science, and so I had to give another sort of pseudo explanation. I'm a pseudo all in all, that's my characteristic. I never could stand the seriousness of life, but when the serious is tinted with humor it makes a nicer color." The whole conception of the Large Glass, Duchamp once suggested, could be seen as the sketch for "a reality which would be possible by slightly stretching the laws of physics and chemistry."

All Duchamp's ideas, notions, and experiments were related in one way or another to the Large Glass. Many of them took the form of highly concentrated notes, which he kept in the green cardboard box. The visual working out of these ideas gradually took shape in a large schematic drawing on one wall of his studio. "All this had to be planned and drawn as an architect would do it," he has explained. "I drew on the wall of my studio with a pencil the final shape, the exact shape of what the Glass would be, with all the measurements and the placement of all these things in perspective— old-fashioned perspective, at least for the Bachelor part. When an idea came to me I would immediately see if I could apply it to the rest of the conception. It all came to me idea after idea between 1913 and 1915, and all the visual ideas were in that drawing on the wall of my studio. So that from 1915 on I was just copying." (p. 34-35)

The Large Glass, meanwhile, was gradually assuming the mysterious aura of a famous work that hardly anyone had seen. Duchamp's efforts to finish it became more and more sporadic. For six months the Glass lay untouched in the studio, gathering a thick layer of dust which Duchamp then proceeded to use as a pigment, gluing the dust down with varnish to one part of the "bachelor machine" (the "sieves") and then wiping the rest away. This gave him a color that did not come from the tube. Man Ray recorded the "dust breeding" in a 1920 photograph that resembles a weird lunar landscape. To arrive at the shapes of the "draught pistons" as the Bride's "Milky Way" (all these terms are from Duchamp's own notes), he made use of the wind; he suspended a square of gauze in an open window, photographed it three times, and reproduced the wind-blown shapes at the top of the Glass. The placement of the Bachelors' nine "shots" (which never do reach the waiting Bride) was effected by dipping matches in wet paint and firing them from a toy cannon at the Glass. The forces of gravity, wind, and "personalized chance" were thus substituted for the workings of his own conscious hand, always in the spirit of hilarity that Duchamp once paraphrased as that "necessary and sufficient twinkling of the eye", and always with the same meticulous, painstaking attention to detail that a scientist might apply to a controlled nuclear experiment.

When the Arensbergs moved from New York to Los Angeles in 1921 they sold the Glass to Katherine Dreier so that Duchamp could continue working on it, and he did so with interruptions, for two more years. Then one day he stopped working. The Glass itself was far from being finished. A number of important elements had not even been suggested visually. The "electrical undressing" of the Bride, outlined in the notes, had not been carried out, and so in effect the willing Bride was not stripped bare at all. After ten years Duchamp was bored with it. "It was too long, and in the end you lose interest," he told Walter Hopps in 1963, "so I didn't feel the necessity to finish it. I felt that sometimes in the unfinished thing there's more, there's still more warmth that you don't get, that you don't change or you don't perfect or make any more perfect in the finished product." With the Large Glass, Duchamp also abandoned all formal artistic production. (pp. 48-49)

John Cage

Toward the end of this period of study, just as he was beginning to feel ready to stop "window shopping" among the world's philosophies and religions, he discovered Zen. Dr. Daisetz T. Suzuki, the first important spokesman for Zen Buddhism in the West, had recently come to America and started giving his weekly lectures at Columbia University. The lectures were attended by psychoanalysts, scientists, painters, and sculptors, as well as by philosophy students. Cage was the only musician who came to them. He went regularly for two years and he felt that they took, for him, the place of psychoanalysis. "I had the impression that I was changing—: you might say growing up. I realized that my previous understanding was that of a child."

Although convinced that what he learned from Suzuki made possible all the new work he was to do, Cage has been anxious that Zen not be blamed for any of his activities. "I went up to Suzuki after one lecture," Cage has related, "and asked him what he had to say about music. He said he knew nothing about music and had nothing to say. I then asked him what he had to say about art, and he said he had nothing to say about art either. Of course, this may jst have been the Zen form of teaching by not teaching. At any rate I got no help from him there and had to do my own thinking." Cage saw that Zen, like psychoanalysis, was an attempt to open up the psyche from within to a more intense awareness (enlightenment, or satori) of everyday life. He soon went on to the conclusion that, if the function of music was truly, as Miss Sarabhai's teacher said, "to sober and quiet the mind, thus rendering it susceptible to divine influences," it could be said that music should try to do externally what Zen and psychoanalysis attempted internally; the "divine influences," in Cage's view, simply signified the Zen idea of "waking up to the very life we are living." Music, then, should not be concerned primarily with entertainment, or communication, or the symbolic expression of the artist's ideas and tastes, but should rather perform the specifically useful function of helping men and women to attain a more intense awareness of their own life, not only in the concert hall but during every waking moment. How could music do this? Cage found his answer in the statement by Coomaraswamy that all art should "imitate nature in her manner of operation" (i.e., rather than in her outward appearances), and this is precisely what he has tried to do in his own music ever since. Cage freely admitted that no music could ever be as interesting as life itself. "Of course what we do is inferior to life in complexity and in unpredictability," he has said. "But this also makes it easier to experience, and hearing it in the special situation of the concert hall may make people aware in a way they would not have been otherwise. I would like to think that the sounds people hear in a concert could make them more aware of the sounds they hear in the street, or out in the country, or anywhere they may be." (pp. 99-101)

Moving to the country, according to Cage, was "a complete change of experience, like moving from one color into another. I realized immediately that I'd had a profound need for nature. I had lived in cities mostly and always hated country weekends— for one thing, there were all those biting insects, unlike city bugs that are only interested in getting food. Suzuki once said that he couldn't conceive of anyone's living a Zen life in the city, and I had rejected this idea at the time, but now I began to see the point of it." (p. 122)

Cage lived and worked in an attic room that he shared with a colony of wasps, and almost immediately he began taking long, solitary walks in the woods. His eye was caught right away by the mushrooms, which grow abundantly in Rockland County, in all shapes, sizes, and brilliant colors. Fascinated, he started to collect books on the subject of mushrooms and to learn everything he could about them. Among the many reasons that can be given for Cage's passionate devotion to mushrooms may be the fact that mushroom hunting is a decidedly chancy, or indeterminate, pastime. No matter how much mycology one knows— and Cage has become one of the best amateur mycologists in the country, with perhaps the most extensive private library ever compiled on the subject— there remains always the possibility of a mistake in identification. Cage has had one or two brushes with disaster himself, once from eating poisonous hellebore that he took to be edible skunk cabbage, and once from downing Boletus piperatus, a raw mushroom that is labeled edible in some books, dangerous in others. "I became aware that if I approached mushrooms in the spirit of my chance operations I would die shortly," Cage has said. "So I decided that I would not approach them, at every opportunity and wherever he has happened to be, to the point that he has frequently been reprimanded by highway patrolmaen for leaving his car to pick attractive speciments he has seen growing near the parkways. For several months in 1960 he even supplied the Four Seasons restaurant in New York with regular shipments of wild mushrooms. With three fellow enthusiasts he founded the New York Mycological Society in 1962, and on pleasant spring and fall weekends, whenever possible, he is out in the woods on mushroom walks. It may be worth noting in this connection that Cage has never eaten any of the hallucinatory varieties of mushrooms. No mystic, he has a deep-seated aversion to trances, visions, and all the spookier aspects of Orientalism. (When a lady once asked him to explain the significance of the legend according to which the Buddha had died from mushroom poisoning, Cage pondered the question for a few weeks and then wrote her a Zen-like reply: "The function of mushrooms is to rid the world of old rubbish. The Buddha died a natural death.") Cage has also been delighted to discover that the words mushroom and music are contiguous in most English dictionaries. (p. 123)

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