How to Isolate the Infrathin

How to Isolate the Infrathin: Marcel Duchamp, Raymond Roussel and the Infrathin, Caitlin Murray


In his 1957 talk, “The Creative Act,” Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) described art as a gap that represents the difference between intention and realization. “What art is in reality,” he later commented, “is this missing link, not the links which exist. It’s not what you see that is art, art is the gap. I like this idea and even if it’s not true I accept it for the truth.”[1] The gap, the in-between, the liminal, the non-retinal, stretch the limits of articulation. When the definitive properties of known words fail, there is always the possibility of invention. Duchamp provided a key to the door that is both open and closed in the form of a neologism, the infrathin. As demonstrated in his posthumously published notes, the infrathin rejects definition— “one can only give examples of it.” [2] Accepting Duchamp’s challenge of definition, I argue that “sensitivity to difference” is central to the infrathin.[3] The role of the artist, as implied in Duchamp’s notes, is to be attentive to difference. Duchamp’s use of the pun is one of the principle ways that he demonstrates the value of this attention. Of the forty-six entries that comprise the “Infrathin” section of Duchamp’s posthumously published notes, two read: [4] The possible is an infrathin (1) and Isolation of the infra thin! How to isolate — (29) Within a structure such as chess, there are almost an incalculable number of moves. Nevertheless, the amount is finite. If you distend or destabilize the structure, the moves become infinite. An infinite number of moves are possible on an infinitely defined chessboard. Duchamp found humor and pleasure in distending the rules. Possibility checkmates truth. The declaration, “it is possible to” is an infinitive and in the Duchampian sense, the possible suggests the infinite. Given that the possible is an infrathin, one of the moves of this paper will be to isolate the infrathin from an infinite number of possible examples. This is a game that could be played and replayed. Another move is this: declaring that the infrathin is a form of difference, one that simultaneously destabilizes and generates. Although Duchamp invented the infrathin game, I argue that he was not the only one playing. Others, such as the playwright, poet, and novelist Raymond Roussel (1877-1933), made moves in the infrathin game of difference before and after Duchamp. Returning to the notes, Duchamp declared, “the passage from one to the other takes place in the infrathin” (1). I suggest, despite the anachronism, that we think of the passage from Marcel Duchamp to Raymond Roussel as a movement from one player of the infrathin to another. This suggestion privileges ideas over influence, affinity over chronology. Both Duchamp and Roussel played the game of difference using the strategy of the pun, a tool that exemplifies the infrathin. Difference for Duchamp creates a gap that destabilizes language, meaning, and identity. For Roussel, the gap caused by the pun is a widening of imaginative possibilities, his “domain of conception” as described by Roussel scholar Mark Ford.[5] Both players made their own rules to suit their own ends. Yet, these were really never ends at all but playful experiments on infinite chessboards of their own creation. Establishing a particular method with which to assess Marcel Duchamp’s practice, may be, as Francis Naumann has noted, “an entirely futile endeavor.”[6] Yet, if we construct the notion of futility as a process rather than a finality we move closer to an understanding of a method that articulates some of the most salient features of Duchamp’s body of work. In “Marcel Duchamp: A Reconciliation of Opposites,” Naumann asks the reader to consider Duchamp’s oeuvre a demonstration of “collective consciousness” in which Duchamp was “simply echoing a basic human concern: to unify or in other ways reconcile the conflicting dualities of life.”[7] Naumann indicates that he is not attempting to establish another working method for Duchamp, but instead, through a softening of terms, is merely making “a casual observation.”[8] Whereas Naumann provides some engaging evidence, the act of reconciliation contrasts with some of the most important concepts in Duchamp’s practice—namely motion and change. Duchamp’s interest in motion extends from his early paintings, such as Jeune homme triste dans un train (Sad Young Man on a Train) to the rotating disks of the electric motor in his final work, Étant Donnés. “Change and life are synonymous, change is what makes life interesting,” he stated, “We are not dealing with absolutes, are we, in this life—we are dealing only with what is in motion.”[9] The word reconciliation, besides its political and religious connotations, also intimates settlement, stasis and immobility. Instead of a reconciliation of opposites, I propose that Duchamp sought displacements and destabilizations. He pushed the limits of possibility, to seek distinctions, amplifications and differences. Naumman argues that Duchamp’s reconciliation of differences can be “traced to his quiet, unaggressive, and comforting personality.” He forgets that it is humor, “black humor and humor in all its hues,” as Arturo Schwarz argues, that “is of cardinal importance for Duchamp and constitutes the ‘invisible motor” of all his activities.”[10] It is not through a reconciliation of opposites that Duchamp’s works defy and destabilize categorization, but through the creation and exposition of the infrathin. What is futile is reconciliation, what is possible is the infrathin. In a 1945 interview, Duchamp stated that, “One can hardly give examples [of the infrathin]. It’s something that escapes even scientific definition.”[11] Faced with the impossibility of definition, Duchamp generated examples. His forty-six posthumously published notes document this attempt. Here are five additional examples, which are as elusive as they are illuminating: Infrathin (adject.) / not noun — never / use as / a substantive the stare infrathin / phenomenon (5) Transparency of the infra-thin (11) The difference / (dimensional) between / 2 mass produced objects / [from the / same mold] / is an infrathin / when the maximum (?) / precision is / obtained. (18) Infrathin / caresses (28) Reflections — on certain woods / light playing on / surfaces. Infra-thin brought about / by the perspective. (42) They are opaque and transparent. The impossibility of definition causes a gap, which Duchamp scholars have filled with numerous interpretive arguments, such as the passage from three to four dimensions, state shifts, shifts in degree and the absence or presence of the body.[12] In the desire to define the indefinable, scholars generated complementary descriptions of the infrathin as difference: a “plane of separation” (Gould), “the finest perceptual difference” (Roubaud), “a thickness, a separation, a difference, an interval between two things,” (Obalk), and “barely perceptible differences, or forms of separation” (Ades, Cox, Hopkins). Nevertheless, the infrathin retains its complexity and defiance. It is a coined word that does not pay up, or at least is not a logical form of payment. The infrathin is not stationary, nor standardized. The infrathin reflects, transforms, and plays. In the play of difference everything is interrelated, but nothing is centralized. Everything is in motion. “In chess there are some extremely beautiful things in the domain of movement,” described Duchamp, “It’s the imagining of movement or of the gesture that makes the beauty…It’s completely in one’s gray matter.”[13] Language, as with chess, also moves in the gray matter. Some of this movement follows the rules; some of this movement distends the rules. In the realm of humor, puns are often maligned. Their slight variations in homophones are viewed as sleights of hand and petty tricks. In one of its earliest recorded uses, the term wordplay was used to signify, “When…blockheads pretend to wit.”[14] Yet, puns were also the tool of Lucretius, Rebelais, and Shakespeare: “I am but as you would say, a cobbler.”[15] Puns beget further puns: “Truly, sir, all that I live by is with the awl.”[16] Puns beget a kind of laughter that forms in one’s gray matter. Puns cause an explosion of meaning, destabilizing “whatever conventional stability the relation between sign and meaning may be thought to possess.”[17] This is not a logical form of intelligence; it is a comic logic, the logic of the worthy fool. Duchamp, “is not an irrationalist,” wrote Octavio Paz, “he applies rational criticism to reason; his crazy and carefully reasoned humor is the backfired shot of reason.” [18] In “General notes. for a hilarious Picture” from the Green Box of 1934, Duchamp wrote: “Ironism of affirmation: differences from negative ironism dependent solely on laughter.”[19] Instead of negative ironism in which a meaning opposite from a word’s literal meaning cancels out both meanings, Duchamp advanced an alternative. He proposed an affirmative ironism, which allows both meanings to remain linked and significant.[20] Laughter is caused by this incongruity. Incongruity, argued Roussel scholar Michel Leiris, is a reflection of Duchamp’s specific method, in which, “Everything, or almost everything, will play itself out in the margin of uncertainty separating the sign from the signified, joined by a bond that is as precise but as tenuous as possible.”[21] Duchamp found this “margin of uncertainty” humorous and generative, declaring, “Humor and laughter are my pet tools.”[22] Previous to the rejection of his Nude Descending a Staircase, No.2 (1912) from the Salon des Independants, there was the acceptance of his cartoons in the Salon des Artistes Humoristes. Previous to the glass, the fountain, and the box, there was le rire, laughter, and Le Rire, the French humor magazine that published his caricatures in the early 1900s. Four years before his alliterative play in Jeune homme triste dans un train (Sad Young Man on a Train) (1911), there was his punning cartoon Flirt (Flirtation) from 1907. Humor was not only central; it was germinal. In Flirt, two lovers sit at a piano, exchanging witty banter as the woman prepares to entertain her partner with a song: She: Would you like me to play ‘Over the Waves’? You’ll see how well this piano conveys the impression the title suggests. He (wittily): Nothing odd about that, Mademoiselle, it’s a watery piano. Image Marcel Duchamp, Flirt (Flirtation), 1907. As Ades, Cox, and Hopkins note, the success of Flirt’s pun is the homophonic play of piano à queue (‘grand piano’) and piano aqueux (‘watery piano’). In many of his works to follow, as in Flirt, Duchamp generates humor “by this principle of small difference, cascading to large…unexpected effect.”[23] As Dalia Judovitz argues in Unpacking Duchamp, humor occupies a central position in Duchamp’s work, “not merely because it represents an individual temperament or disposition; instead, humor represents a strategy that generates displacements through decontextualization.”[24] The pun is one of Duchamp’s most prized and successful methods of generating an “ironism of affirmation” – a multiplicity of meanings. The pun is the star of the play of paronomasia, a form of wordplay based on words that sound alike. Literally, paronomasia is “to name beside” or to “provide a near-relative to.” [25] As Walter Redfern notes, “One near-relative to paronomasia…is the rare word paronomesis, which means illegality.”[26] The pun is a maneuver through a seemingly illegal intersection. The pun intermingles with metonymy and metaphor and contrasts with malapropisms, but at its core, the pun exploits multiple meanings through the play of similar sounding words: French and fresh, window and widow. The incongruity caused by the puns jostling of words yields laughter: “The essence of the laughable is the incongruous, the disconnecting of one idea from another…”[27] “The pun is the foundation of letters, in that the exploitation of formal resemblance to establish the connection of meaning seems the basic activity of literature,” writes Jonathan Culler, “Nowhere is the shakiness of the foundation clearer than in the shifty relation between letter and sound.” [28] In this shifty relation, the pivoting from word to meaning(s) is infrathin. Similar to the Chinese ideogram or Egyptian hieroglyph, Duchamp wanted to transform words into signs to create the plastic being of a word. He described this as “a kind of pictorial Nominalism.” As Thierry de Duve argues, Duchamp wanted to make literal the metaphor of the word reaching a “plastic being.”[29] Expounding on nominalism in his posthumously published notes, Duchamp wrote: Nominalism [literal] = No more / generic / specific / numeric \ distinction between words (tables is / not the plural of table, ate has nothing in / common with eat). No more physical / adaptation of concrete words ; no more / conceptual value of abstract words. (185) For Duchamp, de Duve explains, “the plural form ought to ‘forget’ that it derives from the singular; the feminine, from the masculine; the past tense, from the infinitive,” and so on, forcing words “into the realm of non-language.”[30] By creating conceptual experiments with language, Duchamp expressed his futile desire to construct a new language or non-language. In both his Green Box and White Box notes, he attempted to distend the logic of the alphabet, words and the dictionary. In the Green Box he describes a “blossoming” of the linear alphabet in which the letter A no longer follows B and so on, when “the group of alphabetic units should no longer have a strict order from left to right.”[31] Linearity was another rule to be broken, as in 3 Standard Stoppages (1913-14), in which Duchamp experimented with a new type of line. In the White Box, he transformed the dictionary into a theoretical site of play and experimentation: Look through the dictionary and scratch out all the ‘undesirable’ words. Perhaps add a few—Sometimes replace the scratched out words with another.[32] Or: Take a Larousse dict. and copy all the so called “abstract” words, i.e. those which have no concrete reference. Compose a schematic sign designating each of these words. (This sign can be composed with standard stops) These signs must be thought of as the letters of the new alphabet.[33] Yet, Duchamp never succeeded in creating a new alphabet of abstract or “prime words,” (‘divisible’ only by themselves and unity).”[34] His desire for “prime words” remained a search, another recognition of affirmative futility. Duchamp endeavored to liberate words from commonplace association and definition. “The principle is that a word too much in view, like a landscape, loses its savor, wears itself out and becomes commonplace,” explained Duchamp translator, Michel Sanouillet.[35] Like taste, which loses its freshness over time, words can become stale. Like the dictionary, Duchamp wanted to reinvigorate the map or atlas by creating a “geographic landscapism” in which a map could take on different formations and colors, providing alternative kinds of information. Instead of distances or well-known monuments, the map could notate, “the number of houses in each village, or then again the number of Louis XV chairs in each house.”[36] Whereas geographic landscapism was a method for freshening up the map, Duchamp used the pun to freshen up language. Only a partial realization of a much larger, unrealizable goal, puns allowed Duchamp to play with the abstraction of language within given linguistic structures. As Schwarz acknowledges, “in puns, he redeems the commonplace word and shows its beauty by a process of displacement that is more or less abstract…the word is removed from its ordinary logical context and unexpectedly related to something else.”[37] In this process of displacement, Duchamp found an “infinite field of joy”: I like words in a poetic sense. Puns for me are like rhymes…For me, words are not merely a means of communication. You know, puns have always been considered a low form of wit, but I find them a source of stimulation both because of their actual sound and because of the unexpected meanings attached to the interrelationships of disparate words. For me, this is an infinite field of joy – and it’s always right at hand. Sometimes four or five different levels of meaning come through.[38] Although “always right at hand,” words alone did not provide Duchamp with an “infinite field of joy.” It was the play of words that caused unexpected and manifold meanings. Unlike a topographical map that quantifies the contours of land in relief, Duchamp wanted to add stratifications of meaning to the preexisting landscape of words. In his readymades, Duchamp gets closest to reaching “the plastic existence of the word” through puns. As Schwarz argues, Duchamp’s most important puns “can, in a sense, be considered a form of the Readymade…it ought not be forgotten that many of Duchamp’s works are plastic realizations of puns.”[39] While critics have maligned both the pun and the readymade for their triviality, Duchamp argued that, “On the contrary, they represent a much higher degree of intellectuality.”[40] The intellectual success of Duchamp’s readymades results from a process of displacement that is concurrently physical and linguistic. For an object to achieve physical displacement, Duchamp altered the way in which the object is normally perceived and isolated it from its conventional surroundings. What does a snow shovel shovel when hung from the ceiling? To achieve, a linguistic displacement, Duchamp renamed objects with titles that have no conventional association to the object. Molly Nesbit describes Duchamp’s readymade production as an attempt to, “master not only the commodity but also its means of communication, its language.”[41] As Nesbit describes, Duchamp’s claim to copyright, plainly lettered on his 1920 readymade Fresh Widow was a bluff, a joke on both industrial and artistic commodification. Duchamp’s attempted “mastery” of language in Fresh Widow is also a bluff. His mastery is not an exposition of control or a plateau of power, but a desire for possibilities and movements. Like a chess master moving the pieces on a board, Duchamp demonstrates in Fresh Widow that he understands the moves of language. Image Marcel Duchamp, Fresh Widow, detail, 1920. During the summer of 1915, Duchamp lived with his friends and patrons, Walter and Louise Arensberg in their apartment on West 67th Street on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Only a few blocks from the Arensberg’s was The Ansonia, a Beaux-Arts style residential hotel completed in 1904. Image Google Map directions of the Arensberg’s West 67th street apartment and the Ansonia Hotel. Image The Ansonia Hotel, New York. At the turn of the century, this was one of the largest hotels in New York. “Every day thousands of visitors passed through the arched entrance-ways of the hotel to gawk at the mahogany-paneled lobbies and watch the live seals barking in the lobby fountain,” described Manhattan real estate historian, Steven Gaines.[42] It is hard to imagine that in the summer of 1915, Duchamp would not have walked by The Ansonia and looked up at the hundreds of French windows leading out to private balconies, each one identical yet distinct. Indeed, the Beaux-Arts influence on turn of the century American architecture was astounding. Duchamp would have been surrounded by an architectural landscape that defined itself as “French.” Known in French as a Porte-fenêtre, the American French window assumes its “Frenchness” from its name. For the American upper class, the French style was aspirational, it provided, “a window onto something else.”[43] Image Marcel Duchamp, Fresh Widow, 1920. With Fresh Widow, Duchamp enacts a readily discernible pun through a simple phonemic alteration, the deletion of “n” from “French” and “Window.” Constructed by a carpenter in New York City, Fresh Widow functions as a model of a French window by representation alone. Its form is similar to a French window, with double casement windows closing against each other without a frame in between them. Yet, Fresh Widow is not typical of the class of “French windows” as visible at The Ansonia Hotel. Freestanding at roughly two-feet tall, with black leather covering the glass panes, Fresh Widow does not serve a utilitarian purpose. It is not a “window onto something else,” but the rejection of a view. It is an opaque representation of a French window. Whereas traditional painting styles aspired to represent objects in the real world, Fresh Widow is an object in the real world. Inscribed with its title, it demonstrates the non-articulable space between both an object and its representation and an object and its name. Also, demonstrated by his other readymades, such as Apolinère Enameled (1916) and L.H.O.O.Q (1919), a punning title supports interpretative variability. Is “Fresh Widow” a reference to World War I widows or to Duchamp’s physical displacement from France, or, as is likely, something else entirely? As Duchamp noted in his 1946 interview with James Johnson Sweeney, “For me the title was very important.”[44] It is through the concurrent process of linguistic and physical displacement that the pun, “Fresh Widow,” takes on plastic significance. The displacement demonstrates an illogical-logic. This notion is akin to Duchamp’s desire to represent a new reality in the Large Glass made possible by “slightly distending the laws of physics and chemistry.”[45] This illogical-logic expresses itself in a number of ways that are most clearly described step by step. This is not to say that this process is linear, but is an attempt to describe the key components of the movement towards the “plastic being of a word”: 1. Duchamp has a French window made which is a displacement of the style of the class of French window. 2. Duchamp alters the context of the class of the French window, by placing his French window outside of its utilitarian context. It is decontextualized, displaced from its class. Its objective nature is othered. 3. The title, the act of naming, further fractures the object. The pun enacts a cognitive disconnect, a slippage between our perception of the object and the object itself. The pun amplifies and furthers Duchamp’s destabilization of the object. 4. The readymade becomes a realization of the pun; the language of the pun gains plastic significance. The object moves through language to realize its plasticity. As Duchamp notes: There is a tension between my titles and my pictures. The titles are not the pictures nor vice versa, but they work on each other. The titles add a new dimension; they are like new or added colors, or better yet, they may be compared to varnish through which the picture may be seen and amplified.[46] The destabilization of language begets the further destabilization of both art and meaning. This act, like varnish, is an amplification. Instead of making art or anti-art, meaning or non-meaning, sense or non-sense, Duchamp produced both and neither. By rejecting the fixity of definitions, he proposed an intellectual process that is more elastic. “The word ‘intelligence’ is the most elastic one can invent,” stated Duchamp, “There is something like an explosion in the meaning of certain words: they have a greater value than their meaning in the dictionary.”[47] This elasticity of intelligence, in addition to destabilizing language, art and meaning also destabilizes fixed notions of identity. By becoming Rrose Sélavy, Duchamp displaces his identity. He becomes both male and female and neither male nor female. He becomes an alias, an assumed name, a pun. In the theater, the window is often a liminal space largely occupied by women. “But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?” declares Romeo upon Juliet’s appearance at the balcony window. Yet, in Duchamp’s Fresh Widow, the leather-covered panes of glass prevent the meeting of male and female. More important than crossing the windows threshold is the threshold itself, the space between inside and outside. It is therefore not surprising that Fresh Widow was the first readymade signed by Rose Sélavy (not yet Rrose with the double “r”), one of Duchamp’s alter-egos who exists at the threshold of the male and female. Man Ray, Rrose Sélavy, 1921. Rrose Sélavy, like Duchamp’s readymades, gained plastic significance through the pun. Her name, a pun for the phrase Eros c’est la vie, acquired an extra “R” during the signing of Francis Picabia’s painting L‘Oeil cacodylate in 1921. Andre Breton described Duchamp’s “shifting of a letter within the word, the exchange of a syllable between two words,” as the “alchemy of words…a veritable chemistry…used to liberate words from the only quality specified in the dictionary of meaning.”[48] Rrose Sélavy demonstrates both the “alchemy of words” and the alchemy of identity through the pun. Alchemy is a gendered scientific-philosophical tradition, in which elements such as Sulfur and Mercury are symbolized as Male and Female. The Dictionnaire Mytho-Hermétique, an 18th-century compilation of alchemical symbols, defines female as the following: FEMALE [Femelle]: The Alchemical Philosophers state that their Mercury is both malish and “female” [mâle et “femelle”], meaning that it is an Androgyne.[49] Mercury is not exclusively female, but is both male and female. The androgynous qualities of Mercury were indispensible for preparing the philosopher’s stone, the central symbol of alchemy. Schwarz argues that the name Rose itself, or mystical rose, was an alternative name for the Philosopher’s Stone. As Breton writes in the Second Manifesto of Surrealism, “The Philosopher’s Stone is nothing more or less than that which was to enable man’s imagination to take a stunning revenge on all things.”[50] Duchamp’s revenge was playful. Through word-play and “playful physics” he transformed words into puns and puns into machines of desire in his Large Glass and he destabilized common objects through humor and puns in his readymades. The personification of the pun, Rrose Sélavy is Duchamp’s transformation from male to female. Yet, he/she is not just male or female. He is both and neither. He remains on the threshold, in a transitional, transformative, transsexual state. As Duchamp noted: Infrathin separation—better / than screen, because it indicates / interval (taken in one sense) and / screen (taken in another sense) —separation / has the 2 senses male and female (9) The infrathin separation has the senses of both the male and the female but is not male or female; the separation is something else, perhaps akin to the androgyn or the hermaphrodite. In Plato’s Symposium, comedic playwright, Aristophanes, whom Duchamp described as having a pre-Dada attitude, argues that the nature of eros (think RRose), the expressly sexual component of love, was caused by the separation of primordial humans into male and female: …the original human nature was not like the present, but different. The sexes were not two as they are now, but originally three in number; there was man, woman, and the union of the two, having a name corresponding to this double nature, which had once a real existence, but is now lost, and the word ‘Androgynous’ is only preserved as a term of reproach.[51] Duchamp’s playful androgyny, articulates this infrathin separation in which men and women, unable to return to their androgynous state, can only become whole through sexual intercourse. The Large Glass exposes this failed intercourse between the bride and the bachelors who are separated into distinct realms, unable to physically consummate their sexual desires. Like Léon Foucault’s pendulum from 1851, which oscillates between it’s own inertia and the earth’s gravitational pull, Duchamp’s puns oscillate between semantic poles, begetting further oscillations between meaning and non-meaning, art and anti-art, male and female. The pendulum is always in motion. As David Antin describes, Duchamp’s body of work is comparable to a “perpetual motion machine,” in which any reading of his work is too stable.[52] What exists is activity, the motion between alternative readings. This infrathin space rejects the notion of the “correct” in favor of indifference, from which one finds a multiplicity of meanings in difference. Duchamp’s endgame is not in synthesis, but in difference. The infrathin exalts oppositions and engages in a freedom derived from uncertainty, inconsistency, motion, change, and humor. “Seriousness is a very dangerous thing,” explained Duchamp, “To avoid it, one must call for the intervention of humor.”[53] Through humor and incongruity, wordplay and destabilization, Duchamp keeps the pendulum of the infrathin in motion, like the Large Glass, in perpetual motion, definitively unfinished, always oscillating. It was Roussel who gave Duchamp the idea that he “could try something [with word-play] in the sense of which we are speaking or rather antisense.”[54] Yet, by “antisense,” Duchamp does not mean “without sense.” When asked whether he considered himself anti-art, Duchamp responded, “No, no the word ‘anti’ annoys me a little, because whether you are anti or for, it’s two sides of the same thing. And I would like to be completely—I don’t know how you say—nonexistent, instead of being for or against.”[55] Instead of making art or anti-art, Duchamp made both and neither. Similarly, as Judovitz clarifies, “Nonsense in this context no longer signifies ‘non-sense,’ but instead a gesture whose contextual character strategically stages and engages all different senses.”[56] In destabilizing language through the pun, both Duchamp and Roussel disturb the conventional meanings of words, creating what some scholars have described as “non-meaning.”[57] Yet, just as non-sense refers to the multiplicity of senses, aural, visual, intellectual, for example, Duchampian non-meaning is a rejection of fixed meaning, an embrace of meanings as opposed to meaning. Duchamp’s use of the pun is a reflection of his humorous approach to difference, Roussel on the other hand, although not without humor, used puns as a tool of his special method of imagination. The narrative catalyst of Raymond Roussel’s 1910 novel Impressions of Africa is a shipwreck.[58] Bound from Europe to Argentina on the Ides of March, the characters’ boat is caught in a mid-Atlantic hurricane, leaving them deserted on the coast of the fictive African realm, Ponukele. Captured by the Emperor Talou, the castaways are held captive until ransom can be paid in full from friends and family back home. To stave off boredom, the unusually talented travelers entertain themselves and the people of Ponukele with fantastical performances of theater and invention. Serialized publication of the novel Impressions d’Afrique in Le Gaulois du Dimanche, 1909. The foundering ship Lynceus is perhaps an appropriate metaphor for Roussel’s later adaptation of Impressions of Africa for the stage. As Mark Ford describes, the adaptation “began Roussel’s ruinous affair with the stage.”[59] “It was more than a fiasco, it was a veritable hue and cry,” Roussel wrote, describing the reception of the performances, “They described me as a madman, ‘barracked’ the actors, pelted the stage with coins and sent protesting letters to the manager.”[60] Yet, it was a 1912 performance of Impressions of Africa at the Théâtre Antoine, attended by Francis Picabia, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Duchamp, which nearly thirty years later Duchamp recounted as “tremendous” and “striking,” stating that, “It was fundamentally Roussel who was responsible for my glass.”[61] Roussel and Duchamp shared interests in extraordinary machines, playful inventions, and contemporary science, but perhaps more central to their methods, was the pun. Image Impressions d’Afrique at the Théâtre Antoine in 1912. Asserting a philosophy of individuality, Duchamp stated, “We are always alone: everybody by himself, like in a shipwreck.”[62] Yet, like the characters in Impressions of Africa shipwrecked on the shore of Ponukele, who walked from the flotsam separate but together, Duchamp did not develop his idea of the generative and destabilizing behavior of the pun in solitude. Roussel’s radical use of language illustrated for Duchamp the “madness of the unexpected.”[63] Roussel developed forms of theater, literature and language well beyond the limits of convention and tradition. Roussel’s How I Wrote Certain of my Books (1935) is often referred to as his posthumous “literary testament.”[64] Both the religious connotation of the term as a covenant and the legal association of a last “will and testament” are useful metaphors for the text. Roussel described the book as “secret and posthumous.”[65] Like a will, the text is a secret covenant with his readers, which was sealed by his death before it was published. Is How I wrote Certain of My Books a revelation of a secret, or a furtherance of secret? Michel Foucault contends in Death in the Labyrinth that it, “hides as much, if not more, than it promises to reveal.”[66] The explanatory intent of the book is undercut by the two themes on which it pivots: imagination and language. These are the gears of Roussel’s procédé or method. These gears are enmeshed, rotating simultaneously, yet I will approach the mechanics of each gear separately before returning to their conjoined transmission. Roussel’s expansive domain of conception rotates towards his use of language, an equally expansive endeavor that originates from the smallest units of writing—the word, the phoneme, and letter. Let us begin with a tableau vivant.[67] This is a scene of subjective travel.[68] The site is a dirt road in Egypt. On the road is a camping van, la roulotte, a vehicle similar to a small house on wheels, roughly ten feet long and eight feet wide. [69] The inside is fastidiously decorated with furnishings for a sitting room, bedroom, bathroom and study. Inside is a smartly dressed man in his thirties. He has dark brown hair, a brown mustache. His hygiene impeccable, his bow tie, perfectly fixed. Seated in his study, he has just finished writing a postcard. “Went to see the Valley of the Kings—Cold lunch—sun—heat.”[70] “La Maison roulante de M. Ramond Roussel” (M. Roussel’s motorized caravan), La Revue du Touring Club de France, no. 381, 1926. “I have travelled a great deal,” Roussel writes in How I Wrote Certain of My Books, boasting, “I have travelled around the world by way of India, Australia, New Zealand, the Pacific archepiligi, China, Japan and America.”[71] Yet, the curtain between his lived experiences and his writings was firmly drawn. “Now, from all these travels I never took anything for my books,” he wrote, “It seems to me that this is worth mentioning, since it clearly shows just how much imagination accounts for everything in my work.”[72] Roussel preferred the domain of conception to reality, his imaginary Africa to his experienced Africa, 1001 Nights to Baghdad. As Michel Leiris wrote in 1935, “Roussel never really travelled.”[73] How do we characterize Roussel’s imagination? Roussel scholars have attempted to codify his declaration that, “imagination accounts for everything in my work.” The various discourses on Roussel’s imagination form nodes from which a constellation of imaginative activity appears. Just as constellations include stars that are not visible to the naked eye, my account is far from exhaustive. Scholars and writers have situated or classified Roussel’s imaginative capacities, in numerous fields, both internal and external to Roussel, namely, Psychology, Science, Surrealism, and the Theater. Sublime, surreal, mad, unlimited, delirious, mechanical—all possible thresholds, but no single one is the key. If we conflate Roussel’s works with his imagination, then perhaps Ashbery’s claim in “On Raymond Roussel” provides the most suitable analogy: “What he leaves us with is a work that is like the perfectly preserved temple of a cult which has disappeared without a trace, or a complicated set of tools whose use cannot be discovered.”[74] Uncovering the sources of his domain of conception, is not the main focus of this study. This work has been undertaken most adeptly by the recent exhibition and publication, Locus Solus: Impressions of Raymond Roussel, which adds greatly to Roussel scholarship.[75] Instead, we will return to How I Wrote Certain of My Books to explore what Roussel called his special method. Although Duchamp’s method should not be considered equivalent with Roussel’s, within the labyrinth of Roussel’s method, one finds the pun, the readymade, and perhaps even, a Rousselian conception of the infrathin. “In the beginning was the pun,” wrote Samuel Beckett in his novel Murphy (1938). Though we cannot say with certainty, it is likely that Beckett read translations of Roussel in the experimental Parisian literary journal, transitions.[76] For Roussel, the pun was both the beginning and the end, a tool that “enabled him to fuse narrative and language into an indivisible whole.”[77] The genesis of Roussel’s elaborate narrative in Impressions of Africa was his choice of two words: billard [billiard table] and pillard [plunderer]. From these homonyms, Roussel created two nearly identical phrases: 1. Les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux billard… [The white letters on the cushions of the old billiard table] 2. Les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux pillard… [The white man’s letter on the hordes of the old plunder…] The slight, nearly imperceptible difference between these two words resolved for Roussel the question that all novelists must ask: how do I write a story? From two words, he developed both his short story, “Parmi les Noirs” and Impressions of Africa. In How I Wrote Certain of My Books, Roussel summarized the narrative of “Parmi les Noirs” in unembellished prose: At the beginning we see someone chalking letters on the cushions of an old billiard table. These letters, in the form of a cryptogram, composed the final sentence, “The white man’s letters on the hordes of the old plunderer,” and the story as a whole turned on the tale of a rebus based on the explorer’s epistolary narratives.[78] Foucault characterized Roussel’s duality of language as a, “proliferation of distance, a void created in the wake of the double, a labyrinthine extension of corridors which seem similar and are yet different.”[79] If we adopt Foucault’s metaphor, then the space of Impressions of Africa is also labyrinthian.[80] Starting with the homophones billard and pillard, Roussel expanded his labyrinth, generating further words in a chain of seemingly endless association: “This queue [billiard cue] supplied me with Talou’s gown and train. A billiard cue sometimes carried the “chiffre” (monogram) of its owner; hence the “chiffre” (numeral) stitched on the aforementioned train.”[81] The compounding of successive homophonic associations required both choice and linking, which as Roussel described, was “difficult and required a great deal of time.”[82] Yet, he never explained how he arrived at his initial puns. Why billard? Why pillard? Roussel’s explication of his method, to this point, is only a half-telling. Analogous to half-telling is half-hearing, the second component of Roussel’s method. Continuing his analysis, Roussel wrote: “As the method developed I was led to take a random phrase from which I drew images by distorting it, a little as though it were a case of deriving them from the drawing of a rebus.”[83] Amplifying the initial displacement of the b for the p, Roussel enlarged his phonetic inquiry to include whole sentences: I take as an example that of The Poet and the Moorish Woman. In this I made use of the song, “J’ai du bon tabac.” The first line “J’ai du bon tabac dans ma tabatière” gave me “jade tube onde aubade en mat (objet mat) a basse tierce [jade, tube, water, mat object].”…We recognize in this latter grouping all the elements form the beginning of the story. [84] Whereas billard reconnects with pillard at the beginning and end of a text, the eponymous word or sentence is lost in this methodological expansion. It is destroyed and then resurrected by phonic dislocation. This dislocation generated new narratives as demonstrated in this passage from Impressions of Africa: The diaphanous image evoked an oriental landscape. Beneath the clear sky stretched a magnificent garden filled with seductive flowers. In the middle of a marble basin a jet of water in the outline of a gracious curve sprang from a jade tube…Beneath the window near the marble basin stood a young man with curly hair…He lifted the face of an inspired poet toward the couple and he sang a few elegies in his own fashion, using a megaphone of mat silver metal.” Yet, this is just one possible narrative. “The forms of dispersion authorized by a sentence such as “J’ai du bon tabac” (I’ve got good tobacco),” Foucault argued, “are infinitely numerous.”[85] The syllables within, “J’ai du bon tabac” could be dispersed to form: “geai (jackdaw), tue (kill), péan (paean), ta bacchante (your bacchante).”[86] Every word and every syllable, moreover, provides a generative possibility, just as eros c’est la vie, generated Rose Sélavy. Roussel transformed the banal forms of language such as advertisement copy and addresses into strands of his narratives. James Fabion, in his introduction to Death and the Labyrinth, describes Roussel as having a “preoccupation with the prefabrication of language, with the “ready-made” and artificial quality of words and phrases and sentences.”[87] In an interview with Michel Foucault, Charles Raus associates this “ready-made” quality of language with the development of “ready-mades” in the visual arts, an unstated, but obvious nod to Duchamp. Foucault’s response to the ready-made suggestion, further suggests a comparison of Duchamp and Roussel: What Roussel did was to take a completely banal sentence, heard every day, taken from songs, read on walls, and with it he constructed the most absurd things, the most improbably situations, without any possible relationship to reality.[88] Duchamp’s readymades displaced everyday objects and destabilized the notion of art and non-art. Roussel’s found language, displaced from context and placed in an imaginary realm, destabilized the distinction between reality and non-reality. Although Roussel argued that he took nothing from the world for his works, his language, which is the French language, is of the world. The already present nature of language at least partially determines what can be said in the future. Roussel’s brilliance lies in his recognition of this fact. Returning again to his method, Roussel stated: As for the origin of Impressions d’Afrique, it consisted of reconciling the words billard and pillard. The “pillard” was Talou; the “bandes” his warlike hordes; the “blanc” Carmichael. Roussel’s first pun generated new words. He then assigned these words different meanings from their initial association, i.e. “blanc” becomes Carmichael. Roussel described this dislocation of association as a reconciliation. Nevertheless, an examination of the language in the context of his imagined narrative, reflects, as with Duchamp, difference and destabilization. From billard, pillard and blanc, Roussel developed the story of cabaret singer Carmichael, teacher and captive of Emperor of Ponukele, Talou VII. So impressed was Emperor Talou by Carmichael’s enchanting falsetto, blue silk gown, and golden-locked wig he demands to take singing lessons with Carmichael. Within a short period of time, “Using a falsetto voice, an imitation of a women’s pitch that matched his dress and wig, Talou executed Daricelli’s Aubade, a piece requiring the most hazardous feats of vocalizations.”[89] The plot of Carmichael and Talou enacts numerous layers of difference. As Mark Ford argues, Roussel’s method actualizes “polarities between black and white, male and female, imitation and uniqueness that structure the novel as a whole.”[90] By choosing each word based on “a meaning other than the primary meaning,” Roussel imagined relationships between characters based on dualities. As in Duchamp’s Fresh Widow, the incongruities in Roussel’s language hold multiple meanings simultaneously. Starting with the pun, we again find that the displacement of language can produce doubling, imitation, and transvestitism. We can only wonder if Rrose Sélavy had as beautiful a falsetto as Carmichael and Emperor Talou. “The work must contain nothing real, no observations on the world or the mind, nothing but imaginary combinations,” emphasized Roussel to his psychologist Pierre Janet.[91] Roussel allowed his imagination to wander and evolve in a circular path beginning with the pun, and moving out by rigorous discernment of associations. Roussel, as recounted by Janet, believed he was predestined to have a glorious imagination. “Yes, I have felt that I too carry a star on my forehead,” stated Roussel, “and I will never forget it.”[92] His genius of imagination, as represented by the metaphoric (or was it?) star on his forehead is reminiscent of another star, Duchamp’s Tonsure, a shaved star on the back of Duchamp’s head, documented by Man Ray in a 1919 photograph. Roussel’s star burned with the ecstasy of imagination and imagined glory, like the exploding pyrotechnics of Luxo’s firework displays in Impressions of Africa, in which each burst projected a dazzling array of scenes into the night sky. Reversing L’Etoile au Front, the title of a 1925 play by Roussel, Duchamp’s Tonsure, on the back of the head, is a cerebral gesture. Duchamp admired Roussel for what he described as his “delirium of imagination” and the location of the star on the cranium echoes Duchamp’s desire to turn away from the retinal and embrace “intellectual expression.”[93] Image Many Ray, Tonsure (Marcel Duchamp), 1919. Central to Roussel’s delirium of imagination and Duchamp’s intellectual expression was the small linguistic shifts of the pun. This difference, this infrathin possibility, yielded humorous incongruity, which developed generative destabilizations. As Ford insightfully notes, Foucault’s summation of Roussel’s method of undermining certainties of language, art, and identity, is equally germane to Duchamp: His work as a whole…systematically imposes a formless anxiety, diverging and yet centrifugal, directed not towards the most withheld secrets but towards the imitation and transmutation of the most visible forms: each word is at the same time energized and drained, filled and emptied by the possibility of there being yet another meaning, this one or that one, or neither one nor the other, but a third or none.[94] Whereas formless anxiety might best describe Roussel’s method, formless humor better suits Duchamp. Nevertheless, Foucault’s description provides another possible definition of the infrathin: “the possibility of there being yet another meaning, this one or that one, or neither one nor the other, but a third or none.” Far from a reconciliation of opposites, the infrathin opens an alternative space of activity, a gap in which Roussel and Duchamp’s imaginative/intellectual expressions were invented and tested through play. Avid chess players, both Roussel and Duchamp approached language as they could chess, acknowledging that the value and possible moves of chess pieces are derived from their relationship to other pieces. Instead of favoring the metaphor that acknowledges that this pawn is like the another pawn, Duchamp and Roussel adopt a radical approach to difference. This is an infrathin approach in which one finds similarities in difference and difference in similarities: All “identicals” as / identical as they may be, (and / the more identical they are)/ all move towards this / infra thin separative / difference. (35) ________________________________________ [1] Arturo Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp (New York, NY: Delano Greenidge Editions, 1997), 1: 258. [2] Thierry de Duve, Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp’s Passage from Painting to Readymade, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1991), 160. [3] Marjorie Perloff, “The Search for ‘Prime Words': Ezra Pound as Nominalist,” Paideuma 32, nos. 1-3 (Fall 2003). [4] Marcel Duchamp, Marcel Duchamp, Notes, ed. and trans. Paul Matisse (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1980). [5] Mark Ford, Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 51. [6] Francis M. Naumann, “Marcel Duchamp: A Reconciliation of Opposites,” in Marcel Duchamp: Artist of the Century, ed. Francis M. Naumann and Rudolf Kuenzli (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 20. [7] Naumann, “Marcel Duchamp: A Reconciliation,” in Marcel Duchamp: Artist of the Century, 36. [8] Naumann, “Marcel Duchamp: A Reconciliation,” in Marcel Duchamp: Artist of the Century, 36. [9] Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel, 1: 258. [10] Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel, 1: 258 [11] Hector Obalk, “The Unfindable Readymade,” Toutfait: The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal, May 2000. [12] Dawn Ades, Neil Cox, and David Hopkins, Marcel Duchamp (London: Thames and Hudson, 1999). See Chapter 8, “Replicas, Casts and the Infra-thin.” [13] Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp (New York: Da Capo Press, 1987), 19. [14] “word, n. and int.,” in OED Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), accessed April 18, 2013, http://www.oed.com.ezproxy.lib.utexas.edu/view/Entry/230192?redirectedFrom=wordplay. [15] From the opening scene of Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Julius Caesar. William Shakespeare, The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works (London: A&C Black, 2010), 2626. [16] Shakespeare, The Arden Shakespeare Complete, 2627. [17] Howard Felperin, Beyond Deconstruction: The Uses and Abuses of Literary Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 186. [18] Octavio Paz, Marcel Duchamp (New York: Grove Press, 1981). [19] Marcel Duchamp, The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, ed. Michael Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (New York: Da Capo Press, 1989), 30. [20] Donald Kuspit, “A,” in A Critical History of 20th-Century Art (n.p.: Artnet Magazine, 2006), accessed March 19, 2013, http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/kuspit/kuspit3-17-06.asp. [21] Michel Leiris, “On Duchamp,” October 112 (Spring 2005): 46. [22] Katharine Kuh, The Artist’s Voice: Talks With Seventeen Modern Artists (New York: Da Capo, 2000), 90. [23] Stephen Jay Gould, “The Substantial Ghost: Towards a General Exegesis of Duchamp’s Artful Wordplays,” Toutfait: The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal, May 2000, 3. [24] Dalia Judovitz, Unpacking Duchamp: Art in Transit (Berkeley, CA: University of California, 1995), 118. “paronomasia, n.,” in OED Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), [Page #], accessed April 18, 2013, http://www.oed.com.ezproxy.lib.utexas.edu/view/Entry/138082?redirectedFrom=paranomasia. [26] Walter Redfern, Puns (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1984), 22. [27] John Allen Paulos, Mathematics and Humor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 3. [28] Jonathan Culler, “The Call of the Phoneme,” introduction to On Puns: The Foundation of Letters (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 4. [29] Duchamp, The Writings of Marcel, 78. [30] de Duve, Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel, 127. [31] Duchamp, The Writings of Marcel, 38. [32] Duchamp, The Writings of Marcel, 78. [33] Duchamp, The Writings of Marcel, 31. [34] Duchamp, The Writings of Marcel, 31. [35] Duchamp, The Writings of Marcel, 6. [36] Duchamp, The Writings of Marcel, 78. [37] Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel, 1: 31. [38] Rudolf Kuenzli, “Introduction,” introduction to Marcel Duchamp: Artist of the Century, ed. Francis M. Naumann and Rudolf Kuenzli (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 6. [39] Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel, 1: 45. [40] Francis Roberts, “Interview with Marcel Duchamp, ‘I Propose to Strain the Laws of Physics,'” Art News, December 1968, 62. [41] Molly Nesbit, “Ready-Made Originals: The Duchamp Model,” October 37 (Summer 1986): 63. [42] Steven Gaines, The Sky’s the Limit: Passion and Property in Manhattan (New York: Back Bay Books, 2006), 175. [43] Reference to Paul Cabanne’s interview with Duchamp “A Window onto Something Else.” See: Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp (New York: Da Capo Press, 1987). [44] Duchamp, The Writings of Marcel, 125. [45] Duchamp, The Writings of Marcel, 71. [46] Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel, 1: 83. [47] Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, 16. [48] Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel, 1: 214. [49] John F. Moffitt, Alchemist of the Avant-garde Marcel Duchamp (New York: State University of New York Press, 2003), 220-1. [50] Andre Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1972), 174. [51] See Janis interview for reference to Aristophanes and Dada: unpublished interview with Marcel Duchamp and Sidney and Harriet Janis, pp. 50. For Plato reference, see: Plato, The Dialogues of Plato, illus. B. Jowett, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1892), 1:77. [52] David Antin, “Duchamp and Language,” in Marcel Duchamp, ed. Anne D’Harnoncourt and Kynaston McShine (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1973), 114. [53] Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel, 1: 258. [54] Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, 41. [55] Judovitz, Unpacking Duchamp: Art in Transit, 110. [56] Judovitz, Unpacking Duchamp: Art in Transit, 90. [57] Naumann, “Marcel Duchamp: A Reconciliation,” in Marcel Duchamp: Artist of the Century, 6. [58] Raymond Roussel, Impressions of Africa, trans. Mark Polizzotti (Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2011). [59] Ford, Raymond Roussel and the Republic, 115. [60] Raymond Roussel, How I Wrote Certain of My Books, trans. Trevor Winkfield (New York, NY: Sun, 1977),16. [61] Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, 34. [62] Hans Richter, “In Memory of Marcel Duchamp,” in Marcel Duchamp in Perspective, ed. Joseph Masheck (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1975), 150. [63] Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, 33. [64] Ford, Raymond Roussel and the Republic, 1. [65] Roussel, How I Wrote Certain, 23. [66] Michel Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel, trans. Charles Ruas (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1986), 5. [67] Impressions of Africa is rife with tableau vivants, such as this passage from chapter V: “All at once the curtains opened onto a tableau vivant imbued with picturesque cheer. In a rich timbre, Carmichael, designating the immobile apparition, pronounced this brief apostrophe: ‘The Feast of the Olympian Gods.” Duchamp also employed the style of the tableau vivant in his final work, Étant donnés (1966). [68] Stephen Werner writes: “…it was with an author virtually unknown in his time (and now only partially recognized) that travel in its modern or ‘absolute’ sense received its most radical expression.” Stephen Werner, Absolute Travel: A Study of Baudelaire, Huysmans, Roussel and Proust (Birmingham, AL: Summa Publications, 2010), 50. [69] For more on la roulotte, see: Werner, Absolute Travel: A Study, 51-52. [70] Roussel, introduction to Impressions of Africa, x. [71] Roussel, How I Wrote Certain, 14. [72] Roussel, How I Wrote Certain, 14. [73] Ford, Raymond Roussel and the Republic, 20. [74] Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth, xxvi. [75] See: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, comp., Locus Solus: Impressions of Raymond Roussel (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, 2011). [76] See. Tyrus Miller, Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts between the World Wars (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), Ch. 5, note 59. [77] Ford, Raymond Roussel and the Republic, 2. [78] Roussel, How I Wrote Certain, 4. [79] Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth, 14. [80] Marcel Duchamp also had a special relationship to the labyrinth as described by T.J. Demos in “Duchamp’s Labyrinth: First Papers of Surrealism, 1942,”October, 97 (Summer 2001), 91-119. [81] Roussel, How I Wrote Certain, 4. [82] Roussel, How I Wrote Certain, 4. [83] Roussel, How I Wrote Certain, 8. [84] Roussel, How I Wrote Certain, 9. [85] Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth, 43. [86] Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth, 43. [87] Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth, xiii. [88] Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth, 178. [89] Roussel, Impressions of Africa, 51. [90] Ford, Raymond Roussel and the Republic, 104. [91] Ford, Raymond Roussel and the Republic, 18. [92] Ford, Raymond Roussel and the Republic, 16. [93] Duchamp, The Writings of Marcel, 126. [94] Ford, Raymond Roussel and the Republic, 219.


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The Photographic Idea: Reconsidering Conceptual Photography (1999)

Afterimage, March-April, 1999 by Lucy Soutter

“They were there simply to indicate a radical art that had already vanished. The photograph was necessary only as a residue for communication.” – Dennis Oppenheim on his use of photographs.(1)

This statement by Dennis Oppenheim introduces the paradox inherent in any discussion of photography within Conceptual Art. Since the mid-1960s, conceptual artists have denied any interest in photography per se. To hear the artists tell it, photography was only useful or interesting to them insofar as it was instrumental in conveying or recording their ideas. Time and again artists describe the photographs themselves as either brute information or uninflected documentation. For many years curators, critics and historians have corroborated this reductive understanding of the role of photography in Conceptual Art. Sidestepping the aesthetic properties of conceptual photographs is convenient; it simplifies the distinction between Conceptualism and the more material-based practices of Pop Art and Minimalism. Taking the artists at their word, writers have also been able to divorce conceptual photography from the history of photography more broadly, maintaining a rigid distinction between conceptual and fine art photography of the same moment.

As we know, however, the intentions of artists and the historical effects of their work are rarely synonymous. For example, artists who have benefited from the renewed critical and curatorial interest in Conceptual Art in the last decade have themselves resisted the label “conceptual.”(2) This is understandable – no practicing artist wants to be pigeon-holed as an example of an historical movement. Yet the conceptual designation has been crucial to the historical understanding of this period of work. Along the same lines, the conceptualists’ contrary stance on photography should not be accepted at face value. Despite their professed disregard for photography, the conceptualists participated in an important transformation of the medium, fueling a rise in the prominence of photography that attracted critical attention in the “Pictures” generation of the late 1970s and early 1980s.(3)

First-generation Conceptual Art is an important point of origin for the continuing success of photographs by artists who do not consider themselves to be photographers in the traditional sense.(4) The conceptual artists’ very lack of investment in photography allowed them to generate new possibilities for the medium. However, they were not alone in this enterprise. Fine art photographers during the late 1960s such as Gary Winogrand and Lee Friedlander shared with the conceptualists an interest in identifying and subverting the conventions of photographic vision.

The refusal of conceptualists to take photography seriously on its own terms is rooted in the earliest definitions of their project. From the beginning, ideas were prioritized over the material form in which they were conveyed. Sol LeWitt provided a seminal formulation of this notion in his 1967 essay “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art”: “In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work.” LeWitt dismisses the material form of the piece as secondary, an “afterthought” so to speak: “When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.”(5) Due to its apparent immediacy, photography was an apt medium with which to pursue this idea-driven art.

Critic Lucy Lippard approached Conceptualism from a slightly different angle, coining the term “the dematerialization of the art object” in the late 1960s.(6) Framing conceptual works as a form of disembodied sculpture, the notion of dematerialization has been one of the main obstacles to the serious study of conceptual photography. Like LeWitt, Lippard acknowledges that conceptual works might take a physical form, including photographs, but she does not see the object as the site of the art idea. In the introduction to Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966-72 (1973), Lippard admits to a flaw in the idea of dematerialization, that “a piece of paper or a photograph is as much an object, or as ‘material’ as a ton of lead” but she sticks with the term because of her conviction that a “deemphasis on material aspects” is key to the conceptual project. Thus Lippard gives critical support to one of the central fallacies of Conceptualism. Text and photographs participate in the production of the work’s meaning, but the existence of that form is repeatedly repressed or denied.

The analytic model of Conceptual Art that Joseph Kosuth provides in his 1973 essay “Art After Philosophy” is even more rigorous in undermining the visual, material aspects of the work of art. Playing an end-game with Clement Greenberg’s pursuit of the self-referential art object, Kosuth imagines a completely self-contained, tautological artwork, framed in language: “. . . the propositions of art are not factual, but linguistic in character – that is, they do not describe the behavior of physical or even mental objects; they express definitions of art, or the formal consequences of definitions of art.”(7) Recent writers, however, have begun to remark upon a blind spot in this analytic formulation of Conceptualism. As British art historian John Roberts points out in his 1997 book, The Impossible Document: Photography and Conceptual Art in Britain 1966-76, the majority of conceptual artworks contain photographs, unruly visual elements that cannot be adequately matched by or contained in discourse.(8) This dynamic is evident in Kosuth’s own famous works such as One And Three Chairs (1965) in which the three instantiations of the word “chair” – a dictionary definition, a photograph and an actual chair – are not commensurable. The piece clearly demonstrates the failure of language to contain visual or physical form.

Although Kosuth and other conceptualists claimed not to be interested in photography, in fact photographic properties were at stake in much of their work. The conceptual work of the period provides a sustained exploration of the photographic medium and its conventions. Such diverse artists as Jan Dibbets, John Baldessari and Oppenheim created work in which the idea and its specific material instantiation are both photographic. In other words, these pieces direct their conceptual interrogation towards photography as medium; they question what a photograph is and does. Not all conceptual works that use photographs address the properties of photography in such a direct way. Nonetheless, the non-art “look” of much conceptual photography should not be taken at face value. Deadpan style conceals an investigation that takes place in visual as well as linguistic terms. Viewers unfamiliar with Dibbets’s perspective corrections often assume that they are manipulated or montaged photographs. Perspective correction – square in grass, Vancouver, 1969 looks as if the photographer has cut out a square from a photograph of earth and pasted it on top of the image of the lawn. Closer observation reveals cast shadows on the top and left-hand side of the dirt square and pieces of string marking the edges of the shape that show that the shape is in fact a hole in the grass. This straight photograph can be understood by remembering what we know about the workings of photography: that the monocular vision of the camera transforms three-dimensional space into a two-dimensional perspectival design. The photograph illustrates that it is possible to anticipate this effect and reverse it, for example, by making an irregular trapezoidal shape (as cut in the grass by Dibbets) that the camera will render as a perfect square. The “idea” of this piece is a visual one that can be most effectively grasped by the audience in the process of viewing. When interviewed about his work of this period, Dibbets described it as developing out of his troubled relationship with painting and the fixed viewing angle required by most canvases. Dibbets dismisses the photographs as unnecessary to the original intention of the work: “The documentation about the work isn’t of real importance to me either. I’ve done lots of works without taking photographs.”(9) Yet his documents have an independent existence as self-critical photographs. The most provocative part of the image is the area where photographic representation breaks down, forcing viewers to question their understanding of photographic perspective. The gaping dark square in the well-manicured lawn is disturbingly “wrong,” especially when measured against the dutifully receding architecture. Dibbets makes a linguistic play on this wrongness by calling each piece a “correction,” as if it is the camera that distorts and the artist who corrects. Perspective correction cuts to the heart of conventionalized photographic space and undermines our confidence in the transparency of the photographic index.

In Wrong (1967) Baldessari makes reference to a different photographic convention: that two shapes that touch in a photograph are understood as touching in the world. The image shows the artist standing on the sidewalk outside a suburban California ranch house. The viewing distance and symmetry of the photograph fit the rigid profile of the amateur snapshot, except that the subject is perfectly lined up with a palm tree, which therefore appears to grow out of his head. This faux pas is one that only the most careless shutterbug would make. Baldessari borrows the format of the image with its caption from photography “how-to” manuals, using the convention of “right” and “wrong” illustrations to skew formulaic art school aesthetics. Capitalizing on the medium’s potential to create perceptual confusion, Wrong undermines photography as a reliable system of representation.

Like Dibbets, Baldessari considered painting to be his frame of reference. He turned to photography in part because it seemed to be a way to free himself from painterly signifiers. He commented in a 1990 interview, “I thought, I’m not using paint, it’s a photographic process, and so you can’t claim that they’re paintings . . . I wanted to be less artful than Rauschenberg or Warhol: this is a photograph, here’s a text. That’s it.”(10) Bringing his photographic images and text (hand-lettered by a sign painter) together on canvas, Baldessari reinforces the reading of the works of this period as anti-painting. The image was made by coating the canvas with photoemulsion and projecting a 35mm negative directly onto it in the darkroom. This photographic process was experimental, crude and produced images of rather poor quality. Thus, the technique allowed Baldessari to avoid association with the traditional touch of painting, the pop slickness of photo-silkscreen or the glossy surface of fine art photography.

In Oppenheim’s Reading Position for Second Degree Burn (1970) the artist’s own body functions as a site for conceptual activity. The piece includes a linguistic, propositional caption: “Stage I, Stage II. Book, skin, solar energy. Exposure time: 5 hours. Jones Beach, 1970.” This text sets up the work’s conceptual parameters, but does not make the images redundant. The impact and humor of Reading Position relies upon the two photographs: the “before” image of the artist lying on the beach with a large open book resting on his bare chest and the “after” image, in which the artist’s skin is visibly redder, except for a pale rectangle where the book had been. Oppenheim, also, discusses his piece in relation to painting: “The piece has its roots in the notion of colour change. Painters have always artificially instigated colour activity. I allowed myself to be painted, my skin became pigment. I could regulate its intensity through control of the exposure time.”(11) In some ways, the photographs confirm this reference to painting – though as opposed to the sunburned skin, it is the white rectangle on the artist’s chest that looks like a monochrome painting. Yet the piece is clearly photographic as well as painterly, as is clear from Oppenheim’s reference to exposure time. In effect, the artist is using the book and the sun to create a photogram on his body.

The photography in Oppenheim’s piece bears a special burden because it documents a performance, a mode in which the actions and experience of the artistic subject are themselves identified as a locus of artistic meaning. Photographs of performance or body art have an ambiguous status. By some, including Oppenheim himself, they are seen as mere records of a lost moment of authenticity. By others, they are seen as figurative works of art in and of themselves, gaining their authority by dint of the direct indexical relationship of the photograph to the original event.(12) Reading Position is a demonstration of the principle of indexicality. By comparing his body to a piece of photographic paper Oppenheim is giving the authority of personal experience to the index; he felt the effects of the sun leaving its physical trace on his body. As opposed to a faked or staged photograph (such as Dibbets’s), the presumably painful image created on Oppenheim’s body is incontrovertibly “real” – at least to him. But Oppenheim also underlines the extent to which indexicality is a matter of degree, by contrasting the immediate effects of the sun on his skin to the more mediated process of photography. Comparatively, the photographic index is shown to be constructed rather than natural. Oppenheim signals this with the book, entitled Tactics, he chose to shield his chest.

In his essay on photography for the 1995 Conceptualism exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, photographer Jeff Wall takes the position of a critic. He states that Conceptualism did, in fact, explore the medium specificity of photography and that the movement contributed to the acceptance of photography as fine art. He asserts: “Conceptual art played an important role in the transformation of the terms and conditions within which art-photography defined itself and its relationships with the other arts, a transformation which established photography as an institutionalized modernist form evolving explicitly through the dynamics of its auto-critique.”(13) Wall attributes this transformation to two factors. First, he sees photographic Conceptualism as having undermined the kinds of artistic subjectivity represented by photojournalism by offering a parodic reportage without event. Second, he argues that the work negated the technique and imagination of traditional fine art photography by substituting a pose of amateurism. As he describes it, the resulting photographs are so visually banal that they demand to be viewed with a new kind of intellectual seriousness. While Wall’s overarching point about the impact of Conceptualism on photography is valid, his assessment of the status of the medium in the 1960s is debatable. Characteristics that he describes as unique to Conceptual Art were in fact much more pervasive in photography. Fine art photographers, as well as and perhaps more than conceptualists, defined their project against the professional mode of journalism. Many art photographers resisted the narrative legibility and compositional resolution of journalistic work and instead explored modes familiar to amateur photography.

The Conceptualists and the fine art photographers of the period were grappling with the high formalist theories of the 1950s, although through different channels. Conceptual artists often conceived their works in reaction to Greenberg’s writing on formalist painting. Greenberg’s own position on photography was dismissive; he only wrote one extended piece on photography – a scathing review of a 1946 Edward Weston exhibition. Greenberg saw photography’s uses within an art context as very narrowly circumscribed. For him, the limitation upon the medium’s artistic potential was its indexicality (although it was not a term he used himself). As he summarized the issue: “Photography is the most transparent of the art mediums devised or discovered by man. It is probably for this reason that it proves so difficult to make the photograph transcend its almost inevitable function as document, and act as a work of art as well.”(14)

In Greenberg’s view, photography’s transparent relationship to the world undermines any attempts on the part of photographers to make autonomous works of art. A photograph that respects the obligations of its own medium would be anecdotal and literary. Greenberg exiles realism from painting, yet requires it in photography. In accordance with this opinion that photography ought to have “human interest,” Greenberg finds Walker Evans’s photographs to be exemplary. Weston’s images, however, in attempting to become autonomous works of art through abstraction, fail to be self-referential. For Greenberg they are self-indulgently photographic, failing to show the true nature of photography and displaying an “excessive concentration on the medium.” An overemphasis on the surface of the photograph offers only an “estranging coldness.”(15) If the photograph placed emphasis on itself as index, rather than pointing outward to the world, it lapsed into a presence of its own. Greenberg considered medium specificity and formalism to be synonymous in painting. His analysis of photography, however, did not allow the medium any formal values of its own.

Unsurprisingly then, photographic aesthetics languished during the 1940s and ’50s. While Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) curator Beaumont Newhall had begun to develop a formalist theory of photography in the 1930s, relying in particular on a binary opposition between tone and detail, he was replaced by Edward Steichen after World War II. Steichen’s shows and publications, The Family of Man (1955) foremost among them, prioritized subject matter and did not hesitate to violate the form of photographs by cropping them, enlarging or grouping them theatrically in space. There was no real advocate of formalism in photography until John Szarkowski became Director of the Department of Photography at MoMA in 1962.(16) With a directive and desire to legitimate photography as a fine art, Szarkowski generated a transliteration of Greenberg’s formalist aesthetics into photographic terms. He embraced the notion of medium specificity but rejected Greenberg’s emphasis on the indexical essence of photography.

Szarkowski laid out his approach in 1966, in a brief but highly influential eponymous catalog essay for the exhibition “The Photographer’s Eye.” In it he distills the photographic medium to five properties: “The Thing Itself,” “The Detail,” “The Frame,” “Time” and “Vantage Point.” He defines “The Thing Itself” as the actual, the presence of reality in the photograph, what is called the index. While Greenberg describes transparency as the key defining characteristic of photography, Szarkowski seeks to undermine the power of the index by revealing its artificially conventionalized nature. He writes that our faith in the thing itself “is naive and illusory, but it persists.”(17) For him, photographs offer an illusion of transparency, which need not serve as a limitation, but merely add a frisson of reality to the image. Identifying the trace of the real as one of the defining characteristics of photography, Szarkowski claims it as part of his formalist model, even though it is a semiotic rather than an aesthetic property of the medium. Similarly, “The Detail” is a category designed to refute the notion that photographs are fundamentally anecdotal. The term does not refer to the precision of photographs, but rather to their capacity to resist narrative. Szarkowski asserts that the fragmentation created by cropping photographs allows an image to function as a symbol rather than a story because it is cut off from spatial and temporal continuity. “The Frame” and “Vantage Point” are the two most dearly formal categories. The former refers to the edges of each image and the resulting geometric patterns created within the picture, while the latter describes the spatial relationship between camera and subject. “Time” also becomes a formal category for Szarkowski; it refers to the lines and shapes created in the composition at the moment of exposure.

This brief overview of Szarkowski’s formalist categories reveals that each is threatened by the presence of impinging non-formal concerns. The scheme presented in “The Photographer’s Eye” was effective in legitimating a form of photographic modernism, complete with autonomous artworks and inspired authors. The theory was particularly useful to MoMA in allowing photographs made at any time for any reason to be judged aesthetically without reference to their original context. By daring to attempt to define photography in terms of medium specificity, Szarkowski opened the door to photographers making use of all photographic properties, including those that he deliberately repressed – indexicality, contingency and conventionality. These were precisely the properties foregrounded in the works of Szarkowski’s proteges Winogrand and Friedlander.

In an untitled Winogrand photograph from the early 1970s, a middle-aged woman and a boy walk hand-in-hand toward a cannon. The picture is full of visual incident. It appears to have been taken with a wide-angle lens, allowing the photographer to incorporate a broad swath of space from a close vantage point. Reflective puddles show that it was taken on a rainy day. The wood planks of the ground and the word “boat” on a building indicate that the picture was made in a maritime setting. The figures are framed by buildings and cars, including a wildly painted Morris Minor. The photograph’s force, however, derives from the cannon in the bottom right-hand corner, which points up at an angle towards the two figures in the center of the frame. The visual anecdote created by this composition is entirely an element of the photographer’s position. Szarkowski saw Winogrand as constantly supplementing the subject matter that he found before him: “He believed that a successful photograph must be more interesting than the thing photographed.”(18) In this case, the photograph’s success resides in its creation of a visual anecdote out of unrelated elements in the world. While Szarkowski might see this as a triumph of the photographer’s unique vision, it could also be read as a subversion of originality. Making use of the imaginary sight line between the old cannon and the figures, Winogrand is playing on the same photographic rules targeted by Baldessari in Wrong. As in that piece, the photographer relies upon a perceptual error to give the picture meaning.

Szarkowski writes that Winogrand would look through the viewfinder and if he saw a familiar image he would not take the photograph.(19) The critic reads this as a sign of genius, but we could also understand it as a surrender of control, especially given the extraneous fact that Winogrand often let curators select works themselves from his mountains of contact sheets. That Winogrand avoided composing his pictures suggests less that he wanted the naivete of an amateur photographer than that he hoped to stumble upon someone else’s amateur photographs and use them like readymades. Like the conceptualists, Winogrand exploits a de-skilled photographic aesthetic – though, in his case, with formal ends in mind. For Winogrand there is no linguistic content. The goal is to produce pictures that are interesting to look at specifically because they teeter on the brink of banality. In a process parallel to the way conceptualists defined themselves against formalist painting, many of the fine art photographers of the 1960s and ’70s set themselves up against the narrative richness and formal fullness of both journalistic and fine art photography.

In much of Friedlander’s photography, the “wrong” model of photography is elevated to a signature style. In Lafayette, Louisiana (1968), Friedlander deliberately places a conspicuous vertical object, with no inherent value, in the foreground of the picture field, blocking our entry into the photographic space. While Baldessari’s palm tree is read as a signifier of bad photography, Friedlander uses it as a formal leitmotif. With these obstacles, Friedlander repeatedly demonstrates his resistance to a professionalized photographic aesthetic. Lafayette, Louisiana is one of several parade images in which the photographer avoids conventional frontal views and offers instead an anti-journalistic rear view of the event. In this case we see the backs of three uniformed figures and a lone majorette. Any importance the event may have had, other than as a configuration of shapes in space, is lost. At the base of the telephone or electrical pole, we see the shadow of a head, presumably the photographer’s. This inclusion of Friedlander’s shadow or reflection is characteristic of many other photographs. The projection of the author into the plane of the image is another violation of journalistic practice. With the shadow, Friedlander shows that the work is intended to be self-reflexive and subjective. If it were not so completely associated with Szarkowski and his formalist approach, this series of self-portraits might be seen as a kind of performance piece. In her discussion of the origins of postmodern art, art historian Abigail Solomon-Godeau describes the decline of photographic formalism in the 1960s and ’70s and the corresponding rise of interest in photographic works by artists who were able to approach the medium without the theoretical or institutional baggage of photographic modernism.(20) She sees the fine art photography of the period as characterized by “exhaustion, academicism and repetition.”(21) This state resulted not only from the failure of Szarkowski-style formalism, but also from the photographers’ exploration of medium-specific, but non-formal characteristics of their medium. Winogrand and Friedlander simultaneously fetishize and collapse form in their photographs. Event is indistinguishable from non-event, bad timing is celebrated and tropes of photographic “failure” are used as signatures of a newly self-aware, self-critical tendency. These works were certainly framed institutionally as high modernism and were promoted with an emphasis on mastery and originality. Nonetheless, the photographs have similarities with the conceptual works of the same period and the boundaries between them were sustained with a certain amount of anxiety. Conceptualists and fine art photographers shared common attitudes: neither was content continuing reliance on the transparency of the photographic index or on the naturalness of familiar photographic conventions.

Photographic postmodernism owes a debt to both austere photographic Conceptualism and MoMA-style photographic formalism. Artists such as Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger and Louise Lawler advanced the conceptual exploration of the nature of art into a critique of the political, institutional and semiotic conditions of representation. At the same time, their work has a formal component, relying explicitly on meanings produced within the pictures themselves. Sherman’s “Untitled Film Stills” of the late 1970s, for example, interrogate the conditions of photography from both angles. Like Dibbets, Baldessari or Oppenheim, Sherman preconceives a conceptual project that she then carries out with photographs. Alleged stills from films that never existed, the “Untitled Film Stills” remind us yet again that the photographic index is illusory and that our vision is powerfully influenced by convention. Like Winogrand, Sherman plays with a found photographic aesthetic, though she creates seemingly familiar, cliched images rather than apparently flesh ones. Like Friedlander, she uses her own presence in the images as a formal leitmotif. In her case, however, self-portraiture does not point toward the photographer’s own subjectivity, but rather to a gendered critique of the gaze. Photography produced since the 1970s has relied on discoveries made in the work of the conceptualists and the formalist photographers of the 1960s. While the former worked in opposition to Greenberg’s formalist scheme for painting, and the latter were influenced by Szarkowski’s version of photographic formalism, together they demonstrated that medium specificity for photography could encompass both images and ideas. Inverting Greenberg’s criticism of photography as anecdotal, they showed that a system of reference to the outside word, indexically with all its perceptual tricks and pitfalls, was itself a strength of the medium. Whether tempering photographic modernism with the look of amateurism, like Winogrand and Friedlander, or making use of a banal instrumental aesthetic, like the conceptualists, 1960s practitioners opened stylistic avenues for photography while at the same time generating new subject matter within the dynamics of photographic representation. Contingency, which both Greenberg and Szarkowski identified as a central weakness of photography as a modernist medium, earned photography a key role in contemporary art.

A version of this essay was first presented at Reclame Evening Forums, New York City, December 3, 1998.

NOTES 1. Dennis Oppenheim, cited by Alison de Lima Greene, “Dennis Oppenheim: No Photography,” Spot Vol. 12, no. 1 (Spring 1993), p. 5. 2. Here I am thinking in particular of the panel discussion “When Art Became Ideas: Rethinking the Late 60s and Early 70s” moderated by Robert C. Morgan at the School of Visual Arts in New York City on March 12, 1998, in which Dan Graham, Lawrence Weiner, Robert Barry and Adrian Piper expressed their ambivalence towards art historical labels assigned by the academy. 3. For one of the first discussions of postmodern photography see Douglas Crimps essay “Pictures,” first published in October no. 8 (Spring 1979), pp. 75-88. 4. For a discussion of the peculiar art world status of photographs made by non-photographers see Michael Starenko, “On Photography by Artists,” Artpaper Vol. 9, no. 2, p. 8. 5. Sol LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” Artforum 5, no. 10 (Summer 1967), p. 8. 6. Lucy Lippard and John Chandler, “The Dematerialization of Art,” Art International Vol. 12, no. 2 (February 1968), pp. 31-36. Lippard reiterated the term as the subtitle of her anthology, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966-72 (New York: Praeger, 1973). 7. Joseph Kosuth, “Art After Philosophy,” in Gregory Battcock, ed., Idea Art:A Critical Anthology (New York: Dutton, 1973), p. 84. 8. John Roberts, “Photography, Iconophobia and the Ruins of Conceptual Art,” The Impossible Document: Photography and Conceptual Art in Britain 1966-76 (London: Camerawork, 1997), p. 9. 9. Jan Dibbets, interview with Avalanche 1 (Fall 1970), p. 37. 10. John Baldessari cited in Coosje van Bruggen, John Baldessari (New York: Rizzoli, 1990), p. 29. 11. “Dennis Oppenheim Interviewed by Willoughby Sharp,” Studio International 182, no. 938 (November 1971), p. 188. 12. For a discussion of the production of authenticity in performance and performance documentation see Mary Kelly, “Re-viewing Modernist Criticism,” in Brian Wallis, ed., Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation (New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984), pp. 87-103. 13. Jeff Wall, “‘Marks of Indifference’: Aspects of Photography in, or as, Conceptual Art,” in Ann Goldstein and Anne Rorimer, eds., Reconsidering the Object of Art: 1965-75 (Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art, 1995), p. 247. 14. Clement Greenberg, “The Camera’s Glass Eye: Review of an Exhibition of Edward Weston,” in John O’Brian, ed., Clement Greenberg, Collected Essays and Criticism, Vol. 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 60. 15. Ibid., p. 61. 16. For an overview of the institutionalization of fine art photography in the United States see Christopher Phillips, “The Judgment Seat of Photography,” in Richard Bolton, ed., The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1989), pp. 15-46. 17. John Szarkowski, The Photographer’s Eye (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1966), p. 12. 18. John Szarkowski, Winogrand: Figments from the Real World (New York MoMA, 1988), p. 21. 19. Ibid., p. 26. 20. Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “Photography After Art Photography,” in Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, Institutions, and Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), pp. 103-23. 21. Ibid., p. 112. LUCY SOUTTER, a Ph.D. candidate at Yale University, lectures on photography and twentieth-century art. A practicing photographer, she has published two artist’s books, Obsessive Love (1994) and Art Theory Made Me Cry (1995).


above copied from: http://www.americansuburbx.com/2009/01/theory-photographic-idea-reconsidering.html/

Generic Objects, Gean Moreno and Ernesto Oroza

1.

By generic objects we don’t mean objects that affect a kind of generic quality—brilliantly commonsensical and ordinary objects that come from the rarefied space of the designer’s studio, and draw their value from that space. We mean really generic—milk crates, plastic buckets, shipping containers, wooden palettes, traffic barricades, decorative concrete blocks, urban trash cans and dumpsters, rubber tires, scaffolding, Scotch tape. It’s not that any of these aren’t designed, but rather that they are designed so incredibly well as to function with unparalleled efficiency within the systems of circulation for which they are intended. Their most telling quality is that they have slipped below the threshold of what would otherwise mark their identity as designed artifacts.

Functioning within the large field of conventions inevitably established by global markets and transnational productive systems, generic objects are designed with such programmatic exactitude that spaces accommodating authorial expression are reduced to make room for qualities that foster efficient and competitive performance in commercial processes. The more extensive and decentralized the circuits of production and distribution in which generic objects participate, the more numerous the universal norms by which they are informed. The space for authorial display or geographically specific markers is compressed to a minimum, when not eliminated altogether.



2.

Generic objects are synthetic genetic objects: a genome or a strict chain of codes, a tight script of metric chromosomes, cuts across them and the systems to which they are attached. The shipping container, for instance, like the bucket and the milk crate, is marked by multiple conventions, by a global consensus—a genome—established between all the parts of the system in which it functions. This guarantees compatibility at every interface. The weight and structural resistance of metal used for the container, the dimensions of the cranes and of the storage facilities in ships, the width of the trucks, the width of the interstate highway lanes used by the trucks, the walkways in the storage areas of ports, the width and reach of forklifts—they all work together. It’s an alliance that generates, in proportion to the efficiency of the system, an internal violence—a force, like that of genetic coding, which imposes morphologies, from the minutest detail of the object to the very edges of the system. Everything is determined by everything else.

In the generic universe every artifact plays a double role: it’s a fount of exigencies, putting its demands to the rest of the system, while at the same time it is irrevocably shaped by the enormous pressure that the remaining elements of the system exercise over it. Object and system are co-extensive. The illusion of the individual artifact and the crystallized complete system dissolves into an active and shape-producing field of exchanges and relations, internally held by the tension of provisionally optimal or near-optimal solutions but intermittently bombarded by demands that come from the outside, demands that it must address: new codes or laws, increased volumes of traffic, technological advances in other fields, administrative and marketing decisions, climate, regional conflicts, and so forth.

What we have, then, is a group of objects determined by a metric regime that they themselves empower, a genetic pool and the shapes it produces through relationships of mutual reinforcement, affected occasionally by exterior demands (which then translate into alterations in the system, into new information). In this sense, every aspect of the generic object has its own dimension of necessity. And every object is an elastic surface: if it receives a blow, it channels it to the entire system, and the blow is manifested in the individual objects that make up the system. If the resistance of the container’s metal changes, then the gripping power of the crane has to be altered. The shape or weight required by these objects, for instance, produces invisible expansive waves that mark the global landscape of trade. The process dictates compatible features to all the elements with which the object engages. Likewise in the opposite direction, a massive change at the global scale of trade sweeps down as a series of awesome waves that alters the shape of the individual elements.



3.

One of the visual “frequencies” transmitted by generic objects metonymically signals the massive and elastic systems to which they belong. These are systems to which we often remain physically, if not cognitively, blind. A run-of-the-mill shipping container, once deprived of its emblematic status on the sales catalogue page and the corporate website, becomes inseparable from the systems of distribution, transportation, and storage for which it was undoubtedly designed and manufactured—even when other uses may be possible. One conceives the container, within the stacks in ports and storage yards and on ships, as a small but essential and interconnected part of an intricate web of lines bustling with activity—lines that mark not only the routes of global/national/urban transportation of which it is an obvious part, but also the exchanges of capital that produce and benefit from these routes. These lines also link back to the factories that produce the goods stored and transported by the container, as well as to the offices that draft marketing plans for these goods and to the retail stores where they are sold. These lines to the factory, the ad agency, and the points of retail sale are, in turn, plugged in to lines that lead back to the farms, forests, mines, and rigs that generate or collect the raw materials necessary for the production of goods. And if we are imaginative enough, these lines can be linked to lines that map out the systems that allow the raw material to emerge in the first place. Every container plots a massive arabesque of relations as it dissolves into it and relinquishes the illusion of its singularity.

And this complicated weave of interpenetrating lines is crossed by other patterns, such as the one that tracks the fuel production necessary for the factories to be fired up and to keep the transportation vehicles moving. And woven into it are the patterns of war that keep oil economies in place, and the patterns of intricate investment and political maneuvering that keep those wars going. Even where murky zones appear in this complicated tapestry, they too are abuzz with obscure and connected activity. Discreet realms—the military site, the factory, the boardroom, the advertising firm, the port, the shopping mall—all collapse into one another. Or, more accurately: the idea of a world of discrete realms collapses altogether. Adjacencies become interpenetrations. The container languishing on a dock can beam us, if we zoom in just right, to a woven substrate of invisible materialities, to an intricate matrix of flows and forces that spreads out like a chemical LSD sky before us. It may not be there, but it’s there.

4.

Generic objects encourage us to consider the field over its individual elements. The singular seems superfluous in defining generic objects. Surely, a bucket is a bucket—irreducibly particular. But a bucket is a generic object only in the presence of another bucket (or, at the very least, in its implied presence). Generic objects draw on the dense fields of repeating specimens for their very definition. It is in the presence of other objects of their kind that they actualize their individual capabilities. Coupling and stacking and nesting are, after all, relations between multiples; instant replaceability implies equivalency and sameness among a large quantity of identical artifacts. Generic objects are defined by and live through a monstrous contiguity that mocks atomized conceptions of the world. Fields find meaning and function in ways that their individual components may not.



5.

Within their systems of circulation, generic objects are alien to the way a city produces meaning. Plastic crates used to distribute milk are abstract and autistic objects, blind and rigorously inelastic artifacts that unwaveringly respond to a set of specific demands. They are collections of data, programmed to function with the utmost efficiency, and nothing else. Though the crates surely carry the potential for a social function, they have been optimized to such a degree that their relation to the human is reduced to a single value or dimensional datum, inscribed by the weight of a gallon of milk or the storage capacity of a delivery truck. Milk crates in this environment are surfaces radically devoid of meanings, figures of such alarming blankness on a symbolic plane that their emptiness overwhelms.

Milk crates invariably leave full and return empty. They are part of a loop that, as a continuum of contiguous, melded information units, can remain active forever. If the world stood still, the loop that milk crates sketch out in the city would continue to flow, defying entropy and apocalypse. If one crate exits the loop, due to loss or damage, another simply takes its place. The loop is like a tide cycle or a whirlpool. Its indifference, its inwardness, the silence generated by its centripetal flows, should terrify us. It is monstrous in the way its energy absorbs all forms and meanings. As objects move in this flow, their contours, weights, surfaces, articulations, and inscribed data (date of production, type of plastic, percentages of recycled material, ownership markings) dissolve. It’s as if they move under such pressure that they are rendered liquid-like and incorporated into a perpetual spiral of activity.



6.

Generic objects accommodate the temporal modes of the situations in which they find themselves, and two modes of time are in play here: our segmented, finite, and familiar one; and that of the flow. These two modes of time, in turn, make two scales of perception visible. Generic objects integrated into the cycles of the flow tend towards invisibility; the articulation of their qualities remains hostage to and stalled by a movement exceeding that of everyday life in scale, duration, and inflexibility. All the elements caught in this flow dissolve in a confluence of obscured characteristics. Typological markers melt into pure metrics. The possibility of holding on to a familiar trait is rendered impossible by the abstracting impulse of the flow.

As soon as this object exits the flow, however, it is transformed. If a truck takes too long to recover emptied milk crates, the crates are exposed to forces external to the cycle. Someone steals one to carry the mangoes he will sell on the side of the road to earn his rent money. Once outside its “natural” flow the object becomes visible, familiar, autonomous, gains an identity, reveals potentials that hadn’t coalesced until then. Its time and ours synchronize. In such a situation, we can finally think of what to do with the generic object, how to manipulate it, make it serve new functions.

But these statements need to be qualified. They tie things up too neatly. The responses to the generic object extracted from its system are as varied as they are contingent on particular geographies and behaviors. The nature of the extractions and the places where the loop registers loss are not insignificant with regard to the way generic objects will be “re-drawn” away from their startling blankness.

7.

As a palpitating lattice of activity laid over the city’s orthogonal spread, the flow moves with the ineluctability of a stampede. And as with a stampede, individual elements are picked off. The rear of a supermarket becomes a site where the herd suffers losses. But it’s not the rear of every supermarket. It depends on the neighborhood. Geography and economics, specific demands and patterns of behavior, all matter. Where privation is greater, the voracity swells, the losses multiply. In affluent areas one instead usually finds the predator is satisfied. The flow itself, with its endless supply of replaceable parts, remains coldly indifferent and unaffected by these variations. It is indifferent because it reserves the right of reclamation, always threatening to pull stray elements back into its current.

The collection of points where individual specimens are extracted or expelled from the flow, diagrammed, produces a littoral—pockets of activity closely bound to their systems of circulation, both in terms of physical proximity and in the understanding of the object’s function. When there, generic objects are suspended on a middle ground in which they are regarded as somewhat less abstract than when in the flow, yet neither are they regarded as elements inserted into rhetorical relationships with the broader culture or design disciplines. The object’s alarming blankness is only slightly dissipated by the introduction of a calculus that links real needs to functional potentials.

8.

In the littoral, which usually materializes in economically depressed neighborhoods, the individual’s engagement with the generic object is modulated by need. The pressure of hardship demands appeasement. A contextual strain takes on a constitutive role by exerting pressure on the potentials in objects. If rolls of toilet paper need to be transported, then surely the nesting potential of the buckets used for the task will remain invisible.

If generic objects are patterned information, then in the littoral that information is processed with the efficient satisfaction of a particular goal in mind. The processing is endowed with a discriminating filter that necessity provides. Objects are treated as pure resource. They retain an abject rawness. This inhibits deployment of the artifact in rhetorical terms. What the object or usage of the object may mean, what values it may embody, what criteria it may be judged by—these are matters sacrificed to the necessary resolution of an immediate predicament. It’s almost as if the prerogatives are no longer those of the individual: the situation determines the possibilities for engagement. If there is something like a liberated sweep of the generic object’s potentials in the littoral, it is rendered available and substantive only in relation to the range of hardships that it meets there. The object’s set of freed potentials is an inverted diagram of the needs that structure its context.

Under these circumstances, objects are still not integrated in any fundamental sense, but remain in a condition of partial concealment. The individual’s gaze is pressed too close to them to obtain a full picture. The field of vision is filled by one or a limited number of the objects’ qualities or potentials. Need pushes the individual up against the objects’ potential for satisfying it. If, after being laid off from the supermarket, a person has to urgently figure out how to carry all his cleaning supplies from parking lot to parking lot as he washes cars, the milk crate’s metric precision in relation to the delivery truck will be relegated to a blurred edge of his field of vision, if not simply ignored altogether. Need determines what is useful or adequate at that moment. For an individual whose predicament is how to survive, a bucket is simply a body of condensed physical qualities, a bunch of physical “morphemes,” a complex library of connections, information to be applied, and always in light of a problem demanding an immediate solution. Interpretation and consideration of the object as such is minimal. Hardship engenders urgent relationships based on functionality, it unbinds an ineluctability that—like the ineluctability that renders the crate-in-the-flow an indivisible assemblage of information—possesses the individual to drag generic objects to the ravine of survival. Impossible to plot within moral and rhetorical universes, the object’s use is justified solely by its effectiveness in alleviating need—the very need that determined the scope of engagement that was possible with the object in the first place.



9.

Imagine two adjacent spheres—one the flow of generic objects; the other the realm of human activity in the city. Occasionally, their edges make contact and the flow releases elements. This is how we come to see, just outside a bodega, a group of milk crates captured by human need and intuitive ingenuity. They’ve become chairs in a domino game, a display structure for a handful of sugarcanes, a base for the cooler of the water vendor at the stoplight, the “mobile unit” of a car washer working in the empty lot next door. The transient nature of these activities always threatens to return the object to urban drift along with the leaves blowing on the sidewalks. The abbreviation of the object in the littoral finds a counterpart in the provisional quality the object takes on as solution or appeasement of a need. If another object appears that provides a better solution, the original one will be discarded. The object is always recognized as a temporary substitute. A rock that serves as a doorstop finds a homologue in a bucket full of water. A kind of non-rhetorical analogy occurs. The preferred object is the result of a comparative operation that pivots on the performance and potential of objects, and not on their physical or conceptual similarities; that is, on typologies of use and not of form. In fact, since both rock and bucket are structured by abstract forces—natural processes in one case and super-optimized industry on the other—they find themselves in this context without any affective mnemonic dimension or symbolic baggage. It is their mobilization as pure information that allows them to be interchangeable.

10.

All this is not to say that solutions aren’t repeated, that a bank of local knowledge doesn’t accumulate and grow in the littoral. It is to say, rather, that the transfer of solutions out of their immediate moment, that of linking necessity to potential, is incidental, even if highly significant. Contingent relationships are stabilized as recurring solutions, folded into a common repertoire. Future users can draw on it. This is where experience, repetition, and habit enter the frame and fortify the temporary repertoires of new activities for generic objects.

11.

In summary, the generic object finds itself in at least three situations: first, in the flow for which it is manufactured; second, in the littoral where need determines use and the generic object, due to the very conditions in which it functions, escapes rhetorical manipulation; and third, in a space of symbolic production, for example, within culture or design disciplines. Different criteria are prominent in each situation. The first and second situations, flow and littoral, seem determined by a certain ineluctability—the flow by the autism that propels the avalanche of optimal production; the littoral by the forces that cut through the individual in precarious situations. In both cases, the milk crate is treated less as an object per se than as information. In a cultural environment the milk crate is understood as a sublimated representation of the other two situations.

A relation to the object is, then, to be determined by the situation in which it is encountered: a prohibitive and prohibited one in the flow; a performative one in the littoral, guided by need and survival; and a rhetorical one in cultural spaces.

12.

In the last of these situations, in cultural spaces and within design disciplines, when the question arises of what to do with generic objects, analogy (in a rhetorical sense) has proven the easiest answer. Turn the bucket over and it becomes the lampshade it always looked like. Cut holes out of the shipping container and it becomes the shed it always suggested. But these easy analogies (easy because they lack that leap across deep divides and the magic of conjoining apparent incommensurables that rich analogies thrive on) always attempt to extract the generic artifact from its condition as nondescript and anonymous. They project a designer’s intention onto a thing that was circulating in the world fine without it. The appeal to the obvious, to what the object already suggested, is a thinly veiled pretense to rescue the generic from its dreadfully flat world of sameness by pulling it onto the lifeboat of differentiated artifacts.



13.

The easiest analogies treat the generic less as resource than as topic. The mundane artifact is infused with the designer’s “intelligence.” And the designer is celebrated for his or her resourcefulness, DIY ethics, poetics of the quotidian, critiques of the commodity system, imperative to recycle, and sympathy for the demands of sustainability. The rapport established by these analogies, however, while supposedly doing the opposite, narrows the view and hinders the object by subsuming its productive potential into a set of familiar typologies. It treats the object as only its meanings and manifested physical traits. What is most interesting about the generic quality is that it clarifies objects as compressed and manipulable energy and information, free of the magical cloak of meaning and added value with which the fairy dust of sanctioned creativity wraps them.

14.

It may be more interesting to place these generic objects in scenarios in which they are confronted with “deformative” forces—forces that will “torque” them. These twisting forces can be perceived when unexpected protocols are applied to a situation, by plugging in a vector usually absent from the contexts in which generic objects function, or by plotting generic objects within the coordinates of a program that is alien to them. It’s not, then, a matter of working against the traits inherent to generic objects, of making a bucket or a milk crate do the work of established furniture and architectural typologies as an ultimate horizon of productivity. On the contrary, it is the inherent capacities of the objects that give discipline to the experiment. What possibilities does the stackability of the bucket or the container open up when an unexpected demand is put to it, when a tiny catastrophe makes it swerve off course? What does its modularity permit beyond the functions and contexts it was designed for? What can be done with the object’s portability, with the fact that it’s structured to couple with a large array of other artifacts, just as the container couples with cranes in ports across the planet?

What are the unintended consequences of the artifact’s design, and how does one smoke them out and allow them to reveal their potential? How can new options be inserted into the seemingly closed systems in which these objects function? How can these systems be rendered sites of potential and unexpected plasticity? How is topographical instability introduced into a flattened pattern of uses? What can be done about the fact that these objects are already being put to unexpected uses in which their function is less optimal than their original designed intended? Can additions, joints, inserts, or deformed clones be produced that enlarge the range of their functions and generate new systems for which they can become basic building blocks? One begins to look for ways to tap into these objects’ pregnant infrazones for latent potentialities. One attempts to tease aberrant forms from the objects’ “natural” tendencies through uncommon modulations. One feels for malleable segments or “holes” in the pattern of the original design processes, and applies pressure there.



15.

To consider the generic in this way, we may need to temporarily padlock the studio. We may need to turn a bucket over or bore a few windows into the walls of a container. It is the work one is supposed to be doing. But it comes at the cost of ignoring what is truly amazing about the generic: that it functions in relation to a series of forces; that it is always part of a field of interconnecting vectors; that to think through it is to think in terms of large, nearly unfathomable landscapes. The generic is globalization’s inevitable “aesthetic”—the quality that is dominant in the objects that seem most at home in it, most comfortably bound to massive and invisible materialities and networks.

The scuffed bucket in which we keep our clay-stained baseballs is like Calvino’s suburban trash can: the mirage that it is a self-contained artifact, dumbly sitting there, independent from the world swirling around it, quickly evaporates.1 The object begins to unfold as a pattern constructed of a series of relationships that bind it, irrevocably, to infrastructural circuits, economic pressures, and social contracts. In Calvino’s trash can the city’s entire system of garbage collection and management—not to mention the amounts of energy, accumulated knowledge, and economic demands that lead to its particular morphology—is inscribed. It was inscribed even when the object was still a shiny new waste receptacle on the vendor’s shelf. Bound up in it, like virtual ribbons of data, have always been all the networks and vectors that it will course through—all the systems of design and production it results from, all the systems of distribution and storage it is made to lock into. Understanding how this is already so fantastically complex, so much better than producing a new lamp or a new shed, or turning out a new variant on a typology in the way it has been turned out so many times, one looks to apply new pressures and invent unexpected scenarios until “aberrant” and novel functions in generic objects are set free.

above copied from: http://e-flux.com/journal/view/165