Duchamp After Unbekannt |
2025.11.24 |
Common sentiment? Pfuii! Art can be made out of every possible human feeling, and every possible human feeling can enter the love of art, including disgust, ridiculousness, and the particularly socially relevant feeling of dissent that in the first chapter I called the sentiment of dis-sentiment--the opposite of common sentiment. Among the feelings that sustained both the making and the appreciating of avant-garde art, anger was on top of the list. It is in anger that I want to finish this book. Against Duchamp, first. Who is this aloof prodigy who manages to trap the viewers into making his pictures, sacralizing his objets-dard, and overrating his silence? Who is this cool disciple of Pyrrho who fosters beauty of indifference, this grinning ironist incapable of enthusiasm and commitment? Who is this misogynous young man who paints his sisters Yvonne and Magdeleine "torn in tatters"? Who is this charming bachelor who pictures an idealized bride in the fourth dimension of his Glass and neglects his perhaps boring but rich bride-in-life, Lydie Sarazin-Levassor, to go and play chess all night during their honeymoon on the Riviera? Who is this tactician who embarks on the Rochambeau in 1915 having invented melancholic stratagems against compulsory military service and who leaves his friend Apollinaire behind to be wounded at Verdun? Who is this strategist of his own fame who manages to wriggle his way through the second World War smuggling Boîtes en valise across the demarcation line, and then to embark for America once again, this time on the SS Serpa Pinto? Who is this Narcissus who poses as a woman after having considered taking on a Jewish name, and who doesn't seem to notice, later on, that six million Jews are wiped from the surface of the earth? Who is this dandy who plays chess sovereignly but eschews every concrete historical battle fought by the foot soldiers of the avant-garde? Who is this salon revolutionary, who is he? Un anarchiste de droite? Are we all pawns in his game? How can we have sympathy for the man? Yet, how can we avoid being under his spell? Love affairs are not simple, and the question about Duchamp is the same as that about Beuys: does the work resist the man? Do aesthetics transcend morals? "Transcend" is the wrong word: aesthetics and morals have nothing to do with each other. |
And the new liveliness continues for several paragraphs, providing a readymade foil for Duchamp After Unbekannt.
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