Public - Volume 28, Issue 56, 2017

Public Attendant A to Z is a collection of 26 artists, writers, and scholars whose works intersect with Duchamp’s Étant donnés. One artist/scholar was assigned for each letter of the alphabet and given a prompt related to that letter. In sum, this unique collection—both scholarly and artistic—imagines a new context for appreciating Duchamp’s final masterwork. The collection is inspired by SerkanOzkaya’s recent study and art piece revealing Duchamp’s Étant donnés as a camera obscura. Contributors include: Penelope Haralambidou, Michael Taylor, Julian Jason Haladyn, Rodrigo Rey Rosa, Jeff Wall, Christian Bök, Mathieu Mercier, Daniel Bozkhov, Les Levine, and many others.

Rey Rosa worked on arranging the letters in Marcel Duchamp’s full title of Etant donnes: 1. La Chute d’eau 2. Le gaz d’eclairage and came up with possible sollutions for the riddle. [sic]

Mercier spent five years to replicate Marcel Duchamp’s small replica of his entire oeuvre and mass-produced his edition.

This essay discusses Marcel Duchamp’s Étantdonnés: 1° la chute d’eau, 2° le gazd’éclairage … (Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas …), or Given as a camera obscura. It focuses not on the brightly lit assemblage, but on the door that separates it from the viewer and the dark space immediately in front of it, the space outside Given. Through a methodology of ‘redrawing’ Given, it argues the image making abilities of the piece, defines this boundary between its interior and exterior as a ‘Looking Door’,and suggests that the hidden significance of Given might lie not behind the door, but in front of it.

This essay explores the history, meaning and function of the weathered exterior door for Marcel Duchamp’s Étantdonnés: 1° la chute d’eau, 2° le gazd’éclairage.This door – which physically separates the viewer from the mysterious scene inside of a recumbent female nude holding aloft an old fashioned illuminated gas lamp against the backdrop of a lush hilly landscape – was actually part of a much larger farmhouse door leading that the artist found in 1965 in La Bisbal in northeastern Spain. Four years later the door was brought to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where it was permanently installed in Gallery 1759 as part of Duchamp’s extraordinary tableau assemblage. Since 1969 countless visitors have looked through the door’s peepholes where they encounter the startling sight of a realistically constructed simulacrum of a life-sized nude woman lying on a bed of dead twigs and fallen leaves.

Jeff Wall’s lecture on Marcel Duchamp’s great legacy Étant donnés presented at the First Annual Anne d’Harnoncourt Memorial Symposium, September 11, 2009, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. For the first time published by Stefan Banz in 2013 with KMD–Kunsthalle Marcel Duchamp | The Forestay Museum of Art, Cully, Switzerland, and VerlagfürmoderneKunst, Nuremberg, Germany (today Vienna, Austria).

In Summer 1946, Marcel Duchamp spent five weeks in Switzerland, including five days at the Hotel Bellevue (today, Le Baron Tavernier) near Chexbres, on Lake Geneva. There he discovered the Forestay waterfall. No research was ever done as to why the artist chose this waterfall and not another to become the starting point for and ultimately the landscape of his famous final masterpiece, Étantdonnés: 1° la chute d’eau, 2° le gazd’éclairage (Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas) until Stefan Banz started a extensive research about this topic in 2007. This article brings light onto one of the most illuminated footnotes in Duchamp research and in the art of the twentieth Century.

The article asks why the nude figure’s vulva in Duchamp’s Étant donnés appears to be depicted inaccurately? It may be that Duchamp simplified the anatomy in order that it be indicated but not dominate the entire installation. An overly graphic depiction might have detracted from the scene in its entirety. The figure was based on a drawing and plaster cast of Maria Martins, who was fifty-five years old at the time and had five children, which may point to physical changes due to age and childbirth. The weight of the plaster during the casting process might also produce distortions. The figure as presented maintains an extremely difficult pose that, in combination with the physical irregularities, could be the result of an accumulation of errors over the many years of production.

Artist Daniel Bozhkov took pictures of Edward Hopper’s bathroom, which he asso-ciated with Marcel Duchamp’s practice within the ongoing tradition of references to his infamous fountain.

Architect Chollet created a 3D model of Etantdonnes based on Marcel Duchamp’s Manual and offers a guide to construct the installation just like with an IKEA pamphlet.

Napoles created a 3D model of the figure in Etantdonnes based on various pictures taken by Duchamp and after and precise measurements by Melissa Meighan quoted in Michael Taylor’s Etantdonnes.

Though wildly different in medium and subject, Anna Kavan’s novelWho Are You? andMarcel Duchamp’s sculptureÉtantdonnés are both frequently interpreted through the reticence of their respective authors: the artists’ insistence on their privacy is seemingly inherent to the work. Through a reading of Kavan’s novel (and bookended by a discussion of Duchamp), this article examines a few ways that privacy functions as an aesthetic material and offers a tentative politics of privacy: as a refusal ofownership, as a means of turning oppression into an object to be analyzed, and as a connective tissue—a means of world-building.

This is a visual score. The pitches, which are limited to c,a,g, or e, are figurative and should not be sounded. The piece is performed by placing the score in front of a light source. Recommended light sources include lightbulbs, the sun, a lightbox, a tv screen or video monitor. The light source is determined by the conductor; as the score is meant to be exhibited in an art space rather than a concert situation, it would be the curator or gallerist who would serve as the conductor. (I am the composer and light-my namesake, since “licht” means “light” in German and Dutch-is the performer.)

How Mama met Dada. A double image, a double identity; an enigmatic face as a two-source interference pattern in a ripple tank. A furry moire and a radiant gaze (Man rays? Fay rays?);a coy wave, a fetching hat,constructed and destroyed, disguised and revealed, depending on your perspective.

‘Lovingly Rrose Selavy alias Marcel Duchamp,’ 1921, by Man Ray.

In 1917, at the first exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists at the Grand Central Palace in New York, Marcel Duchamp was so fascinated by the paintings of Louis Michel Eilshemius that he not only told all his friends about his discovery but also organized, some time later and together with Katherine S. Dreier, Eilshemius’s first two solo exhibitions in a public institution – the meanwhile legendary Société Anonyme.

In his comprehensively researched and excitingly written study, Stefan Banz examines the question – and is the first author ever to have done so – as to why Duchamp was so passionately interested in this eccentric outsider of the New York art scene and as to whether and to what extent this enthusiasm also had an influence on his own work as an artist.

Stefan Banz’s researches uncover astonishing facts that not only underscore how great and underestimated Eilshemius was but also how strongly Duchamp had been influenced by this relatively unknown artist when creating such famous works as his Élevage de poussière or Étantdonnés.

It emulates the narrative structure of ‘ Thus spoke Zarathustra’ while embedding Aurora shooting massacre in it. This book by Nietzsche contains series of story of the main character, Zarathustra who takes a journey to the village to preach the truth. But it focuses on the perspective that ‘Human’ is the procedure rather than ‘Human’ as the purpose. Since this book is taking the modality of Aphorism, it doesn't have one solid linear line. Rather, Aphorism functions as not narrative platform but as the repetitive machine to become.

This text laces the parenthetical comments from an essay on female spectatorship by a key figure in feminist film studies - Mary Ann Doane - taken from a 1982 issues double issue of SCREEN Magazine on ‘Sex & Spectatorship’ with Austrian artist Valie Export’s narrative of her 1969 performance work, Genital Panic.

‘Q’ erases all text from the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of the letter ‘Q’, leaving only the eponymous letter, punctuation and numeric characters; a found latticework suggesting the potentiality of the remaining 25 letters.

a poem re: Duchamp at Philadelphia Museum. Reprinted by permission of the author from Some Worlds for Dr. Vogt (Black Square Editions, 2015)

Interrogating the ethics of Marcel Duchamp’s Étant donnés

An enticing corpse. Exquisite. Duchamp’s own Black Dahlia. The prototype of all dead women entombed by a gaze that loves them best when they are speechless. On display. Dead.

How do we look at what we see?

How do we see what we look at?

Look at Étant donnés. Be uneasy about the scene before you.