Duchamp Marcel - Duchamp and the aesthetics of chance: art as experiment

Duchamp and the Aesthetics of Chance

Columbia Themes in Philosophy, Social Criticism, and the Arts

Herbert Molderings

DUCHAMP

and the Aesthetics of Chance

Translated by John Brogden

Art as Experiment

Columbia University Press New York

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

cup.columbia.edu
E-ISBN 978-0-231-51974-8

Copyright 2010 Columbia University Press

Originally published as Kunst als Experiment. Marcel Duchamps 3 Kunststopf-Normalmae by Deutscher Kunstverlag, Munich and Berlin 2006.
All rights reserved
E-ISBN 978-0-231-14762-0

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Molderings, Herbert.

[Kunst als Experiment. English]

Duchamp and the aesthetics of chance : art as experiment /
Herbert Molderings ; translated by John Brogden.
p. cm. (Columbia themes in philosophy, social criticism, and the arts)
Originally published: Kunst als Experiment : Marcel Duchamps 3 Kunststopf-Normalmasse. Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2006.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-231-14762-0 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-231-51974-8 (e-book)
1. Duchamp, Marcel, 18871968. 3 standard stoppages. 2. Duchamp, Marcel, 18871968Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. II. Title: Art as experiment.
NB553. D76A15 2010

709.2dc22

2009043390

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at .

Designed by Lisa Hamm

Frontispiece: Marcel Duchamp at the finale of the exhibition Marcel Duchamp, mme, at the Kestner-Gesellschaft in Hanover, 1965. Umbo. Phyllis Umbehr, Unterwssen/Courtesy Gallery Kicken, Berlin.

To the memory of the art historian Franz-Joachim Verspohl

The individual, as such, stands by his very nature under chance.

NOVALIS

W henever art critics and art historians speak about the role of chance in modern art, they invariably cite Marcel Duchamps 3 Stoppages talon (3 Standard Stoppages) of 191314: three threads, each having a length of one meter and held horizontally were each dropped from a height of one meter onto a piece of canvas and fixed in position by means of varnish.

Duchamp regarded the 3 Standard Stoppages as one of his key works. When asked by the museum curator Katharine Kuh which of his works he considered to be the most important, he replied: As far as date is concerned Id say the Three Standard Stoppages of 1913. That was really when I tapped the mainspring of my future. In itself it was not an important work of art, but for me it opened the waythe way to escape from those traditional methods of expression long associated with art. Thus, from what Duchamp wrote in this questionnaire, the 3 Standard Stoppages signified far more than just an experiment with chance. But how did chance relate to non-Euclidean geometry, or the latter to the philosophy of Max Stirner? These relationships are the subject of this book, as is the question concerning the significance of the 3 Standard Stoppages for Duchamps artistic development during his years of radical change, 1913 and 1914, when he concentrated his entire energy on the production of one single work, the large-format glass painting The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even.

Finding no art-historical explanations for Duchamps radically new approach, researchers are occasionally accused of seeking answers beyond the realm of art and, in so doing, getting lost in pure speculation. In the following I shall show that the connection in the case of the 3 Standard Stoppages could not be more direct and that this work is concerned not with speculations entirely unrelated to art but, on the contrary, with the scientific fundamentals of all post-Renaissance painting.

Central to Duchamps preoccupation with modern geometry was the constitutive problem of representation since the time of Alberti: the depiction of three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface through the use of linear perspective. While cubist painting, during the first decade of the twentieth century, had irrefutably brought home the crisis of the old scopic regime based on perspectivalism, it was around that time, and much to the surprise of most scholars of modern art history, that linear perspective reappeared with a vengeance in the oeuvre of Marcel Duchamp. This was not, as Jean Clair put it, a project of restoration expressing a retrogressive move on the part of the artist but rather a process of deconstruction of the perspectival notion of the image. but that of three paintings on canvas, the making of which was inspired not only by Duchamps thoughts on chance but also, and just as much, by his reflections on the status of the straight line in non-Euclidean geometry and on the metaphor of the ray of vision as a thread in the classical theory of perspective.

The decade leading up to the First World War saw a profound transformation of the notion of the image that had held good since the Renaissance: the painting as a window to an empirical, observed, or imagined reality had now given way to the painting as an autonomous reality of forms and colors. In this art-aesthetic discourse, Duchamp adopted the most radical stance. Basing his reflections over the scientific fundamentals of visual representation on the new space models of non-Euclidean and four-dimensional geometry, which operated with higher, invisible dimensions, Duchamp arrived at a notion of the image that transcends the limits of painting. The 3 Standard Stoppages reached beyond the cubists still young redefinition of painting as an autonomous composition toward a scientifically underpinned notion of the image as a functional, epistemic object. Whereas hitherto the term artist referred purely to the creator of paintings and sculptures, it was now extendedfollowing the inception of the 3 Standard Stoppagesto include the invention of experimental setups in which images are both the instruments and the results of an experiment. The 3 Standard Stoppages established a new style in the art of the twentieth century, one of experimental visual thinking. Within the development of Duchamps oeuvre, the 3 Standard Stoppages was a transitional work that united both the autonomous and the functional notion of the imageextremes that, admittedly, do not reveal themselves clearly until one examines the twenty-year material genesis of this work in all its complexity and detail.

Theoretically, Duchamps aesthetic of chance was closely bound up with the category of the possible. His new artistic techniques of 1913 and 1914from the unclassifiable 3 Standard Stoppages in their original form as three canvases to the equally unclassifiable ready-made sculptures of a bottle rack and a bicycle wheel on a kitchen stoolwere based on a new kind of aesthetic that centered around the notion of the possible. Neither likeness nor truth was its key aspect, as in all the brands of realism; nor beauty, harmony, or balance, as in the aesthetics of formalism; but rather the possible in the sense of what is merely conceivable, the idea that all things can be perceived and conceived differently. Waiving the effect of enchantment through beauty, Duchamps aesthetics took the form of a mental and visual experiment that relied on shock, surprise, and discovery for its success and, if successful, suddenly opened up the horizon for the viewer. Ignoring the traditional aesthetic discourse on form, Duchamp gave priority to the intellectual gift of invention, to the pleasure of thinking and visualizing what had never been thought before. With the 3 Standard Stoppages Duchamp established an aesthetic of the possible, an aesthetic in which the boundaries between science and art, artwork and experiment, art and non-art no longer existed. The new approach to the making of art manifest in the