G. Craig

Marcel Duchamp (on the Castle of Purity)

Octavio Paz.

Cape Gohard Press

London 1970.

Before reading Octavio Paz I had looked upon Duchamp, much the same as Picasso, as being a unique poison in 20th Century art. I felt that he was in a vessel of his own; in which others riding would swamp his genius. However Paz, in an crudite manner, has shown Duchamp is The major link between the retinal imagery of the Renaissance and the ideology of art today. Len Lye, a leading kinetic artist in New York, wrote in a letter to a young Wellington artist. D. Litchfield, of his affinity to Duchamp in that he fell ideas in art had become more important than form.

Duchamp is a painter of ideas not pictures: his art is not a manual or visual art. It shows a fascination with language, the language of sound, of lies, He has been gradually drawn into the cult of the machine (the movement of the body = the movement of the machine), He does not attempt an illusion of movement but a decomposition of movement via static representation. He views productive machines as equally destructive. The machines which interest Duchamp are anti-machines. Via machinary. Duchamp turns the traditional nude into a plastic creation a meditation on painting and movement, the criticism and culminating point of Cubism the end of Duchamp as a pictorial artist, a criticism of the myth of the nude and the autobiography.

Gradually as the human figure disappears from Duchamp's art the object is replaced by the idea. Painting becomes philosophy, its beauty is not anthropomorphic, it is free from the notion of beauty, humanity is not corporeal. It is the disorientation of reason, getting rid of the idea of objects being similar. Art becomes a system of Prime Wards, divisible only by themselves and by their unity. Duchamp's "Ready Mades" became a criticism of taste, an attack on the notion of a work of art, it is a criticism of "retinal" art. Duchamp is the transition from worshipping the object to worshipping the gesture. Aristotle gives reason for art as imitation Duchamp's reason is to criticize Aristotle. In the "Sutra of Perfect Wisdom." it is stated that each one of us has to endeavour to reach the state of being a Boddhisattva knowing that Boddhisattva is an empty name. Duchamp's beauty is indifference, therefore freedom.

Half of Paz's book is devoted to "La Mariee mise a nu par ses Celibatataires, meme." Paz gives a detailed description and analysis. Briefly, he states that the work is making fun of traditional mythology. He reduces the cull of Godesses (religious and modern) (virgin and romantic) to a mechanical nature: desire becomes an internal combustion engine; love becomes petrol; semen is gunpowder. It is a comic and infernal portrayal of modern love, of what modern man has made of love; the body is erotic because it is sacred. When religion, according to Paz, is separated from eroticism it becomes a system of arid moral precepts; as has happened to Christianity. Accordingly Duchamp became intensely involved with the ideas of Tantra. Myth to Duchamp'becomes a tool with which to deny criticism and criticism to deny the myth. Et-qui-libre? Equilibre. Criticism, becomes an idea which ceaselessly destroys and renews itself.

Duchamp's influence on later modern art has not been direct; abstract expressionism was too retinal. However Duchamp's ideas have had an influence on the mental acrobatics of such artists as Rauschenburg and Johns in Painting, Cage in Music and Cunningham in Dance. The history of art from the Renaissance has been the gradual transformation of the retinal work of art into an artistic object (Duchamp's ready mades - today's multiples). Duchamp's purpose has always been to reconcile art and life, work and spectator. His only recent occupation has been chess; Duchamp has produced little actual modern art but the ideas of modern art.

Octavia Paz has written a valuable critical book on Duchamp in that he has revealed the reason behind the work rather than explained the work. He has managed to give the viewer of Duchamp a new "raison d'etre" rarely obtained via the medium of books on modern art; so often of the coffee table variety. In paperback form, so suitable to the student budget, he has proven Duchamp to be like the cynic philosopher Diogenes and those few who have dared to be free; a clown. The insane wisdom of artistic activity is not the finished work but freedom. Duchamp's wisdom and freedom, void and indifference resolve themselves into the key word: Purity.