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Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp (The Documents of 20th Century Art) by Pierre Cabanne. 

"There is no solution, because there is no problem." —Marcel Duchamp. 

The greatest artists are secular mystics, even when, as is often the case, they don't believe in any God, higher power, or after life. In fact, especially when, like Marcel Duchamp, they don't believe in anything transcendent, including "Art."

When such artists talk about their work they are talking about nothing less than how to see and how to be in the world. They are practitioners of applied philosophy of a personal, everyday variety. I find their discourses more rewarding, more useful than I do the discourse of actual philosophers or mystics.

Such is the case with this collection of five discussions with Marcel Duchamp. I found this book moldering away on a shelf at the Panoply used bookstore in Lambertville, NJ. I think I bought it for five dollars. It was money wel-spent. In this book, Duchamp, already seventy-nine and, as it turns out, with a little less than two years to live, is by turns playful, forthright, self-effacing, contradictory, kind, critical, analytical, but always illuminating. He was at the epicenter of the art-world for the first sixty-odd years of the 20th century. The innovations which he instigated are still unsettling conventions and inspiring artists to this day. If anything, he's so important to art as its thought of and practiced today that he may be the chief, seemingly insurmountable obstacle to anything truly new, as he himself seemed to suspect. His side of these conversations is like reading a flash-review of modern art.

But it's his ideas on the theory behind the practice of art that are most fascinating. Apropos the artist as the functioning "mystic" of the everyday, Duchamp says, "I like living, breathing, better than working...my art would be that of living: each second, each breath is a work which is inscribed nowhere, which is neither visual nor cerebral. It's a sort of constant euphoria."

He speaks most often of "amusement." For Duchamp, being "amused," or expecting to be amused, is the prime motivation for going places, for liking things, for meeting people, even for doing his own art. Duchamp disarms the notion that an artist must create out of some dark pit of despair, or out of a need to discharge some desperate soul-twisting agony. Duchamp's "amusement" is intellectual, detached, and, yes, even "godlike." His work is a byproduct of what interests him in the world, it's a visible mark, or remnant, of his taking interest in it, the way a half-eaten box of donuts might be evidence of someone's (now satiated) sweet-tooth.

(Marcel Duchamp)

Duchamp played peek-a-boo with public fame. Everyone who was anyone in the art world knew him, admired, and, at the very least, had to respect him. He was an artist's artist. In spite of his great success with "Nude Descending a Staircase," he gave up painting in his thirties, largely due to his objection to what he called the "retinal" obsession in art. Duchamp believed that the eye was a fraction of how art should be perceived and practiced. 

"I think painting dies," he declares at one point, "because its freshness disappears. A picture dies after a few years like the man who painted it. Afterwards it's called the history of art. There's a huge difference between a Monet today, which is black as anything, and a Monet sixty or eight years ago, when it was brilliant, when it was made."

Far more important to than the eye is the mind. Duchamp saw aesthetics as "something very different" from the history of art, which, in the end, is the history of pictures. And not necessarily even the most beautiful pictures. "The beautiful things have disappeared—the public didn't want to keep them." Instead, what remains in a museum is "probably even the expression of the mediocrity of the epoch."

Almost equal to his attack on the retinal obsession in art is his attack on the fetishization of the "hand-made" thing. Duchamp is the prophet of the mechanically produced artwork. Warhol's factory concept of art, for instance, owes much to Duchampian aesthetics, as does computer-generated art, which Duchamp anticipated before it even existed. In fact, art has moved so far in the Duchampian direction that most recently one can detect a reaction to the mechanically produced art-work and a return to the now "revolutionary" novelty of the hand-made thing. But this cyclical movement in art fashion Duchamp also recognized and even anticipated. It is one of the reasons that he took fame—or lack of it—with a grain of salt. Trends in art and the popularity of individual artists are as fickle as junk bonds on the stock market.  

Perhaps more than anything Duchamp detested repetition. "I've never been able to contain myself enough to accept established formulas, to copy, or to be influenced, to the point of recalling something seen the night before in a gallery window." How much of this is strictly true and how much of it is what he would like to be true is open to interpretation but what is probably most important is that it reflects Duchamp's idealized vision of an artist and the attitude he should take toward his work.

How much of anything that Duchamp says is totally serious is open to debate. He has, for instance, some interesting things to say about his (in)famous ready-mades. Quite opposite to what one may expect, Duchamp claims that "the choice of readymades is always based on visual indifference and, at the same time, on the total absence of good or bad taste" Well, the absence of good or bad taste one might have guessed, but aesthetic indifference?

Again, one wonders if this can be entirely true.

Like the chess he so loved, Duchamp plays games with art and with his interlocutor, directing by indirection, instructing and informing by sleight of hand, nods, and a wink of the eye. When asked what he believes in, he answers "Nothing, of course! The word 'belief' is another error. It's like the word 'judgment,' they're both horrible ideas, on which the world is based." When asked if he believes at least in himself, he says that he doesn't believe in the word "being." The idea, he insists, "is a human invention...No one ever thinks of not believing in 'I am.'"

And yet at the very end of the last interview, contradictions to what he stated earlier begin to crack the mirror upon which he's projected his image. Duchamp admits that if he were commissioned to do another art-piece he would have to meditate on what to do for months before beginning. "It couldn't be simply an impression, an amusement. It would have to have a direction, a sense." Thank goodness, he claims, he does nothing anymore. And yet, upon his death, it was found that he was working on an ambitious piece. He claims not to believe in being and yet expresses an uneasiness with thinking about death, even at seventy-nine. "It would be much better to believe in all those things (god, heaven, metempsychosis), you'd die joyfully." Instead, as an atheist "you're impressed by the fact that you're going to completely disappear." Who's Duchamp talking about, if he doesn't believe in himself as a "being"?

Who is Marcel Duchamp behind the mask, behind the image in the mirror? "I force myself to contradict myself," he says elsewhere, "in order to avoid conforming to my own taste." Is that the point? That he is nothing but mirrors and masks, as are we all, if only we saw into ourselves half as clearly. That we are nothing but representations of reality that can only be show in fragments. The way Duchamp's great work, the Large Glass, was broken, accidentally, in transit, and yet, as Duchamp himself admitted, looked better, somehow more whole, for being cracked?