Thomas Girst - The Duchamp Dictionary

Thomas Girst (b. 1971) has studied Art History, German Literature and American Studies at Hamburg and New York Universities. He holds a PhD in American Studies and has been Head of Cultural Engagement at the BMW Group since 2003. As a cultural correspondent, curator, publisher and academic lecturer, he has written widely on modern and contemporary art. Girst founded Die Aussenseite des Elementes (19922003), an international yearly anthology of literature and art. In 1996, he archived the collection of Duchamp scholar Serge Stauffer at the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart. Girst was editor in chief of Tout Fait: The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal (19992003) while he was research manager at Harvard professor Stephen Jay Goulds and Rhonda Roland Shearers Art Science Research Laboratory in New York. His publications include Marcel Duchamp in Munich 1912 (Prestel, 2012), The Indefinite Duchamp (Hatje Cantz, 2013), Art, Literature, and the Japanese American Internment Experience (Peter Lang, 2014) and BMW Art Cars (Hatje Cantz, 2014).

In memory of Serge Stauffer (192989)

Other titles of interest published by
Thames & Hudson include:

Marcel Duchamp
(World of Art series)

Affect Marcel.
The Selected Correspondence of Marcel Duchamp

Dada: Art and Anti-Art
(World of Art series)

Surrealist Art
(World of Art series)

A Boatload of Madmen:
Surrealism and the American Avant-Garde 1920-1950

See our websites

www.thamesandhudson.com

www.thamesandhudsonusa.com

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION :
ABC DUCHAMP

In 1772, Denis Diderot (171384) and Jean le Rond dAlembert (171783) completed their Encyclopaedia or a Systematic Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts and Crafts an enormous undertaking of twenty-eight volumes comprising over 70,000 entries and in so doing altered the perception of how knowledge might be explored, structured and categorized. In time, artists and writers began to recognize that the dictionary format offered exciting possibilities not just for the gathering of knowledge but also for its subversion. A century after Diderot, the writer Gustave Flaubert (182180) dreamed of writing a dictionary that would expose the general folly and fatuousness of his society. In his Dictionary of Received Ideas, he strives to expose the futility of human intelligence, the vanity involved in our eternal quest for wisdom, as well as the nonsense and disappointment that come with humankinds attempts to ultimately make sense of it all. In Flauberts dictionary, under the heading Artist we find observations such as One has to laugh about everything that they say, Make loads of money but throw it out of the window, What they do cannot be considered work, Are often invited to dinner and All of them are pranksters.

Fellow Frenchman Marcel Duchamp (18871968), another Norman native, might have found Flauberts quotes about artists amusing. After all, he himself had a highly developed sense of the absurd and a taste for provocation of all sorts, so much so that his particular brand of modernist art became renowned in his own time and far beyond it for its ironic subversions and sophisticated wit. Most famously, perhaps, Duchamp abandoned painting in favour of signing mass produced objects that became known as readymades everyday objects that even today continue to elicit controversy and debate. Their essential iconoclasm, and the permission they seemed to grant to both artists and viewers in terms of what art could be, point to Duchamps most powerful legacy for later generations. American painter Robert Motherwell (191591), for example, saw Duchamps manifold forays into experimental artistic practice as an awe-inspiring force of sabotage.

Duchamps works and thought processes are so complex, refined and multifarious that his influence has extended well beyond the art world to disciplines as varied as literature, dance, film, music, philosophy and graphic design. His renunciation of aesthetics, of mere visual pleasure, and of personal taste, and his embracing of eroticism, doubt, indifference, chance and modern machinery, put him at the crossroads of many movements and opposing forces today almost more than ever, it seems, and not only within Western culture.

Duchamp had a profound mistrust of what he considered to be a general agreement on the meaning of words, and would no doubt have delighted in the fact that his artworks still elicit diverse responses and interpretations, questioning our very ideas about the nature of art itself. For him, art was not in need of verbal translation. He did not believe in language as such, which he saw at best as an error of humanity,

In 1967, a year before the artists death, a New York gallery published linfinitif, Duchamps limited edition box containing facsimile reproductions of seventy-nine scattered notes and jottings, a number of which were collected in a folder under the heading Dictionaries and Atlases. Here, Duchamp added his own twist to the idea of the dictionary, challenging the widely held belief that this particular literary form might be able to convey axiomatic truths. Among his notes, he advised his reader to Look through a dictionary and scratch out all the undesirable words. Perhaps add a few Sometimes replace the scratched out words with another.

The idea of the dictionary clearly appealed to Duchamp, as it did to the Surrealists, many of whom were his close friends. Georges Bataille (18971962) included entries for his Critical Dictionary within the pages of his Surrealist magazine Documents between 1929 and 1930. In 1938, Paul luard (18951952) and Andr Breton (18961966) published the Dictionnaire abrg du surralisme on the occasion of the Exposition Internationale du Surralisme at the Galerie des Beaux-Arts in Paris. With regard to writings about Duchamp, the multi-volume catalogue of his first retrospective in Paris in 1977 the inaugural exhibition of the Centre Georges Pompidou brought together twenty alphabetical entries from Alchemy to Villon in its third volume, titled Abcdaire. In art historical reference books and encyclopaedias, the importance of an artist is often measured by the number of lines they are granted, which is why those writing on Duchamp are often so eager to maximize the space allotted to him. When the scholar and art dealer Francis M. Naumann (b. 1948) was asked to write the entry on Duchamp for Macmillans Dictionary of Art in the mid-1990s, for example, he insisted on an unrestricted word count, successfully arguing that, whatever he wrote, it should have the right to be as long as the entry for Picasso. Nowadays, with the multilingual, free internet encyclopaedia Wikipedia often the first research website of choice, it seems appropriate that Duchamp should finally get his own dictionary in the form of a digital, as well as a printed, book.

This publication introduces new research on Duchamp and broadens our knowledge and understanding of him, in entries that are presented in a concise and entertaining way. For too long, art historical discourse has kept a broader public from enjoying the life and work of one of the most intellectually stimulating individuals of modern times. When he was only twenty-five years old, his avant-garde friend Guillaume Apollinaire (18801918) predicted that, above all, Duchamp would manage to reconcile art and the people. From his dislike of body hair to his unrequited love for his best friends wife, from his fascination with scientists and philosophers such as Henri Poincar (18541912) and Max Stirner (180656) to eroticism as an integral part of his oeuvre love, life and work, so often inextricably intertwined all are to be found within this dictionary.