Motherboard

Emma Ferguson
Motherboard, 2007

Αλλοι τρόποι

με τέτοιους τρόπους κερδίζεται η αιωνιότητα
Παπατσώνης

Αλλος τρόπος να κερδίσεις αιωνιότητα είναι
Το αεράκι ν' αφήσεις να φυσήξει την κάφτρα
Της στιγμής, που κοιτάς και σε κοιτάζει η αράχνη
Και σύγκορμος ένστιχτο σημαντικός ενώπιον της αμφιβολίας
Δρέπεις από κάθε λογής κήπο ταχέως τέλεια φυτά
Που τα κρατεί ορθά η ανθοφορία

Αλλος τρόπος η θέα ο καταρράκτης το πηγαινέλα
Των φθινοπωρινών κυμάτων στα ύφαλα των διαβατών
Το πηγαινέλα επίσης του γεγονότος του θανάτου ή της γεν-
νήσεως
Που λειαίνεται σε κάθε ταλάντευση
Και κάποτε απαράλλαχτο με την πραγματικότητα πάνω του
καθρεφτίζει το καθετί:
Ενα ρολόι φαγωμένο από τους χτύπους του
Βράχια και μάτια ονειρόπλεχτα με αλμύρες και με ανάσες
Και δυσκολίες να εκφραστεί η επαφή και η ένωση
Που βαραίνει το μέτρημα του υπολοίπου ή περισσεύματος
της ζωής

Αλλος τρόπος να κερδίσεις αιωνιότητα είναι
Της σιγής ο απόηχος να σου καίει το άσπρο πλάσμα που το
μάζευες αιώνες
Να το ξαναμαζέψεις
Αλλος τρόπος είναι να κρύψεις στον αντικρινό σου
Ο,τι δια της πυράς και δια της τέφρας άστραψε
Σε σπηλιά και ουρανό.

Δημήτρης Παπαδίτσας

Armchairs with Lions

Empire period, circa 1805.
Material : mahogany and mahogany veneer ; painted wood imitating
antique green patinated bronze ; chased ormolu ; metal.

Source: www.galerieperrin.com

The Short Life of the Equal Woman

Gustav Klucis's poster 'Young People - To The Aeroplanes' (1934)
Courtesy David King


Lili Brik on the cover of poetry anthology 'About This', designed by Alexander Rodchenko (1923)
© Rodchenko Stepanova Archives, Moscow


Liubov Popova's 'Production Clothing for Actor no.5' in Fernand Crommelynck's play 'The magnanimous Cuckold' (1921) Gouache, Indian ink and collage on paper
Private Collection, Moscow


Maria Bri-Bein's poster "Hail the equal woman of the USSR" (1939)
Courtesy Christina Kiaer


Maria Bri-Bein
Female Telegraph Operators 1933
Courtesy Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

Christina Kiaer on Russian Female Artists

The great generation of women artists of the Russian avant-garde, including Natalia Goncharova, Olga Rozanova, Aleksandra Ekster, Varvara Stepanova and Liubov Popova, is by now relatively well known, as is its largely gender egalitarian, or at least gender neutral, abstract imagery. But we know much less about women artists of the 1930s under Stalin. Work from this decade is most often simply dismissed as “Socialist Realism” or “propaganda art”, yet many worked in modernist figurative styles, and saw themselves as every bit as revolutionary as the previous generation. Like their Constructivist forebears Stepanova and Popova, they continued to produce exhilarating images of emancipated Soviet women well into the 1930s, until the state ideology of woman reverted to a more traditional, feminine and maternal model of limited equality.


Alexander Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova in their studio (1922). Photograph attributed to Mikhail Kaufman
© Rodchenko Stepanova Archive, Moscow

Take, for example, Popova’s famous costume designs for Fernand Crommelynck’s avant-garde play The Magnanimous Cuckold (1922). The actors all wore prozodezhda, or “production clothing”, in keeping with the Constructivist programme of 1921, which called for artists to abandon painting and enter instead into Soviet mass-media and mass-production as “artist-engineers” or “productivists”. Popova’s Production Clothing for Actor no. 5 (1921) shows a costume for a female actor: a plain blue dress in the style of workers’ overalls with a big black apron – all rectangles and straight lines, forms derived from her earlier Suprematist-style painting. This costume barely differed from those of the male actors. As Popova herself put it, she had “a fundamental disinclination to making any distinction between the men’s and women’s costumes; it just came down to changing the pants to a skirt”. Her bold, consciously androgynous design is as good an icon as any for the new Soviet woman emancipated by Bolshevism, shedding the trappings of bourgeois femininity and becoming a productive worker equal to men.



Varvara Stepanova's poster for the play 'Through Red and White Glasses' staged by the Academy of Social Education (1924)
© Rodchenko Stepanova Archive, Moscow



We find a similarly androgynous, emancipated female costume in the agitational performance Through Red and White Glasses (1924), designed by Stepanova. On the lower left of her poster for this event, under the phrase “through red glasses” (ie, the world as seen by Bolsheviks), she drew three figures dressed in her prozodezhda costumes. The gender of the central, female figure is discernible only by the rounded line of her jaw and the slight fullness of her short hair. Their four anti-revolutionary white counterparts appear on the right side, dressed in upper-class clothes. Here the lone woman is strongly differentiated from the men, with round breasts, a tiny waist and wide hips. The female icon of those who see through red glasses is, again, a productive worker no longer confined by conventional signs of femininity. In 1939 another woman artist of the Russian revolution, albeit a far less famous one, also produced what was meant to be an iconic image of the equality of Soviet women: the poster “Hail the equal woman of the USSR”. Although Maria Bri-Bein had previously worked in a more angular, modernist style reminiscent of Popova and Stepanova, this poster depicts the woman in gently rounded forms, the belted pink sweater emphasising her bosom and hips. She demonstrates her equality by voting at the ballot box (in itself an arguable model of political action in the Soviet context), but otherwise – with her downcast head and bouquet of flowers – she represents a traditional model of demure and fecund femininity. She is closer in style to the anti-revolutionary “white” feminine form of Stepanova’s poster. How did this profound shift come about?


Varvara Stepanova's designs for the performance of 'An Evening of the Book' with the protagonists standing in front, photographed by Alexander Rodchenko (1924)
© Rodchenko Stepanova Archives, Moscow


Models and furniture for Alexander Sukhovo-Kobylin's play 'The Death of Tarelkin', designed by Varvara Stepanova (1922)
© Rodchenko Stepanova Archives, Moscow


In the early 1920s, along with the Bolshevik campaign for the emancipation of women under socialism, the Constructivist refusal of conventional notions of artistic genius – traditionally associated with masculinity – and its rejection of the hierarchy between fine and utilitarian arts – women were more often linked with the latter – facilitated the unusual, widespread participation of women artists in the young Soviet art world. Popova and Stepanova, as we have seen, worked in costume and theatre design, but also designed mass-produced textiles, everyday clothing and propaganda posters, as well as producing mass-disseminated graphic works such as book and journal covers and advertisements. In 1923 Popova created her only propaganda poster based specifically on the theme of the emancipation of women – for the Bolsheviks’ so-called “battle against prostitution”. The slogan “Brother Worker Protect Your Sister from Prostitution” is blocked into a symmetrical arrangement of dynamic Constructivist horizontals, verticals and diagonals, and superimposed over hand-drawn figures (unusual in a Constructivist work) of a large “brother” in the centre and his proletarian “sisters” in the upper right corner, working in a factory and looking out beseechingly at the viewer.


Liubov Popova
Cover design for A Portfolio of Six Prints 1917-1919
Museum of Modern Art, New York


The next generation of women artists of the early 1930s would build on the achievement of the Constructivists in poster design, albeit with two major differences. First, many of them worked in the medium not because of Constructivist ideals of erasing the hierarchy of fine art over utilitarian art, but because the increasingly conservative and centrally administrated Soviet art system made the prestigious field of oil painting less accessible to women, who were always last in line for scarce studio space and supplies. Secondly, they concentrated on “women’s” themes not only out of commitment to the subject, but because they were often the only ones assigned to them within a still largely sexist institutional structure, in which male artists were given the “universal” poster topics. Valentina Kulagina, who had success in the early 1930s, is a transitional figure between the avant-garde women artists of the 1920s and their figurative counterparts of the 1930s. She had studied under the Constructivists in the 1920s and was married to the Constructivist Gustav Klucis, and she worked in poster design out of a continuing Constructivist commitment to the mass-dissemination of art – but also because she realised that the system would not support her if she attempted to practise in the fine arts. Her poster “International working women’s day is the fighting day of the proletariat” (1931) combines the Constructivist photomontage technique used exclusively by Klucis in his posters, on the right, with a monumental drawn figure of a fearless woman whose face appears hewn out of stone, on the left. Photographs of Soviet women in military uniform driving a tractor, working in a factory and laughing together float above a photo of a sexualised “flapper” flanked by two policemen, evoking the decadent bourgeois femininity and sexual violence of the West. As Kulagina’s diaries show, Klucis criticised her for using hand-drawn images in her work, because it departed from the avant-garde orthodoxy against any kind of figuration that was not photographic. Yet many modernist-inspired female artists of the early 1930s experimented with novel forms of figuration, attempting to develop a new kind of modern and realist art to convey the socialist ideal of a strong, equal woman no longer subject to the inequities and objectification faced by those in the capitalist West.


Ekaterina Zernova
Collective Farm Workers Greeting the Tank 1937
Courtesy Lubov State Museum and Exhibition Centre ROSIZO, Moscow

Kulagina’s 1932 photomontage poster “Female shock workers of the factories and state farms, enter into the ranks of the Bolshevik Party” demonstrates the ease with which she moved back and forth between photomontage and figurative drawing in her work. For her, there was no absolute line of difference; she chose the imagery that would best convey her assigned theme. Here she places a giant picture of a kerchiefed peasant woman with upraised hand, presumably exhorting other female workers and farmers to join her as a Party member, on top of photos of smoking factories, tractors plowing fields andwomen marching. She was responding to the tricky assignment of presenting a positive image of the female collective farmer at precisely the most brutal moment of the Soviet government’s forced collectivisation of peasants. Because peasant women were particularly resistant to collectivisation, which destroyed centuries-old arrangements of domestic and religious life, the Bolsheviks made them the focus of their propaganda campaigns.


Valentina Kulagina, “International Working Women’s Day is the day of judging of socialist competition,” 1930. Courtesy of a private collection.


Valentina Kulagina, Female shockworkers strengthen the shock brigades, master technology, and increase the ranks of proletarian specialists (Rabotnitsy-udarnitsy, krepite udarnye brigady, ovladevaite tekhnikoi, uvelichivaite kadry proletarskikh spetsialistov), 1931


Unusually for this kind of propaganda, Kulagina chose a photograph of a woman who was not attractive for her central image. We know that she wanted to stress the seriousness of new Soviet women and their accomplishments, as a counterweight to their objectification, which persisted in the USSRin spite of the rhetoric of equality. In a diary entry of 1934, she complains that when she asked Klucis why he had chosen to foreground a photograph of a particularly pretty woman pilot in his aviation poster “Young people to the airplanes” (1934), he replied that he wanted to show that the pilot had “retained her femininity” in spite of her training and qualification. Kulagina writes: “And I’m thinking – but is that the purpose of the poster?” Of course it was not supposed to be the purpose of the poster, according to the ideals of women’s emancipation of the 1920s, and as illustrated in Constructivist and other images of strong women not bound by the traditional visual language of femininity.

A number of women poster artists of the early 1930s clearly sided with Kulagina when it came to making images of women. The accomplished figurative painter Ekaterina Zernova, who had been a member of the avant-garde painting group OSt (Society of Easel Painters) in the later 1920s, was one of the very few women who would achieve success as a painter within the Soviet art system of the 1930s. Her 1931 poster “The participation of women in socialist construction” offers an iconic image of the woman as a worker, rather than an object of visual pleasure: her face is schematically rendered and of medium attractiveness, while her body is encased in a jumpsuit that obliterates its contours. She is superimposed over smaller drawn images of the collectivised facilities of everyday life, mentioned in the poster’s long slogan, that will support her participation in productive labour: day care centres, nursery schools, public dining rooms and public laundry facilities. Zernova’s assignment would have been to produce an image fitting the slogan, so it was her choice to focus on the androgynous, uniformed and purposeful worker, rather than on the examples of everyday life (byt). Byt was considered a feminine sphere, and was therefore a less prestigious topic most often relegated to women poster artists. Zernova usually managed to avoid this kind of typecasting; she produced many works on industrial and military themes, and was particularly known for her intensely focused paintings and drawings of tanks. Maria Bri-Bein was assigned almost exclusively women’s topics for her posters, but she similarly avoided the stereotypically feminine themes of everyday life, producing instead, in the early 1930s, a striking body of images of steely, uniformed women capably performing various challenging tasks. Her 1934 poster “Woman worker and woman collective farm worker, master the technology of the sanitary defense of the USSR! Strengthen sanitary aviation!” presents a dashing female pilot in black leather and goggles, consulting with an equally square-jawed colleague as they prepare for a long-distance medical flight. Behind them, a group of women collective farmers and workers (one easily identifiable by her jumpsuit and wrench, as in the Zernova poster) is being instructed on the intricacies of the plane’s technology by a uniformed woman with an arm badge. Not only Bri-Bein’s feminist subject matter (fantastical as it no doubt was), but also her schematic, flattened visual language, have strong affinities with Kulagina and Zernova – even though she was a member of AKhR, a more conservative artistic group that favoured traditional realism. Even in her paintings, such as Female Telegraph Operators (1933), we see some of the modernist tendencies of her posters – the geometric blocking of space and almost purist depiction of technological gadgetry, as well as the loving attention to buttons, collars and straps on uniforms and the motif of women working together intimately. In fact, the gorgeously over-the-top butchness of the women in the aviation poster make them ripe for reclamation today as lesbian icons, whether or not (and most likely not) that was part of Bri-Bein’s original intention.


Liubov Popova
Painterly Architectonic 1918
Courtesy Nizhni Novgorod State Art Museum



The era of strong, skilled and unfeminine women in Soviet imagery began to draw to a close, however, in the mid-1930s. Stalin declared in 1935 that socialism had been achieved, and Soviet rhetoric shifted from the frenzied concentration on building up industrial production – including the participation of women in that process – to a new emphasis on an everyday life of cultured socialist consumption (kul’turnost), in which women would return to a more traditionally feminine role and appearance. They would be good mothers and wives, and they would be attractive. As the official Soviet women’s magazine Rabotnitsa (Woman Worker) put it in a 1937 article: “The Soviet woman… must learn to preserve her feminine countenance and to look after herself… she should pay attention to her appearance.” That same year, Zernova painted her large canvas Collective Farm Workers Greeting the Tank, in which the women – the younger one in a tight, fashionable skirt and sporting a big barrette in her hair – hold out bouquets of flowers to the approaching vehicle, while the men raise their hands in authoritative waves, much like the woman worker in her earlier poster. Even her favourite motif of the tank is all but obscured by the relentlessly fecund flowering trees and the Impressionist brushstrokes. And I have already mentioned Bri-Bein’s 1939 poster “Long live the equal woman of the USSR”, in which the solitary woman passively casting her vote for the Party line, again carrying a bouquet of flowers, replaces Bri-Bein’s earlier images of female camaraderie in skilled labour. The sad contrast between the docile womanliness of this figure and the bold, angular women of the aviation poster, bristling with authority in their caps and goggles and straps and buttons, signals the definitive demise of the artistic ideals and new iconic images of the women artists of the Russian revolution.

Text by Christina Kiaer
Source: Tate etc. magazine

A Dome

Vladimir Wassilievich Sterligov
A Dome. 1960.
Collage on paper, 65.9x51.2 cm

Poetry Marathon

The Serpentine Gallery Poetry Marathon is an ambitious two-day poetry event taking place in London during Frieze Art Fair week and featuring unique performances from leading poets, writers, artists, philosophers, scholars and musicians.

An international group of major figures will be brought together to perform in the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2009, designed by architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of the acclaimed Japanese practice SANAA. The event will include performances of new work, collaborations, discussions and experiments.

There is a long and vivid history of exchange between artists and poets. Guillaume Apollinaire made a literary connection to Cubism with his great work of ‘visual poetry’ Calligrammes: Poems of War and Peace 1913-1916. In the same period, Hugo Ball wrote the Dada Manifesto (1916), a movement in which the poet, essayist and performance artist Tristan Tzara was also closely involved. A decade later, in 1924, André Breton, the proponent of ‘automatic writing’, published La Révolution surréaliste (The Surrealist Revolution).

In the 1950s, Abstract Expressionism was an art movement with strong creative connections with writing and poetry of the time, from the work of poets Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery to artist Robert Motherwell’s influential essays on the New York School. Later, in the 1960s, the international artistic network Fluxus formed innumerable close links between visual art and the written word.

The Poetry Marathon is the fourth in the series of Marathons staged in the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion each year. The Marathon series was conceived by Serpentine Gallery Co-director Hans Ulrich Obrist in 2006. The first in the series, the Interview Marathon in 2006, involved interviews with leading figures in contemporary culture over 24 hours, conducted by Obrist and architect Rem Koolhaas. This was followed by the Experiment Marathon, conceived by Obrist and artist Olafur Eliasson in 2007, which included 50 experiments by speakers across both arts and science, and the Manifesto Marathon in 2008.

The Serpentine Gallery Poetry Marathon is curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Co-Director of Exhibitions and Programmes and Director of International Projects. It is held in the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2009, designed by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of SANAA. The Serpentine Gallery Pavilion Commission was conceived by Julia Peyton-Jones, Serpentine Gallery Director and Co-Director of Exhibitions and Programmes in 2000.

Poetry Marathon Programme

Saturday 17 October 2009
12.30 – 9.00 pm

Julia Peyton-Jones
Hans Ulrich Obrist
Tim Griffin
Tracey Emin
Tacita Dean
Agnès Varda
Kenneth Goldsmith
Holly Pester
Eleanor Bron
Enrique Juncosa/Boulevard Magenta
Michael Glover/The Bow Wow Shop
August Kleinzahler
Sean Landers
Tom McCarthy & Henry Blofeld
John Giorno
Mladen Stilinović
Édouard Glissant*
Jimmie Durham
James Fenton
Nick Laird
Christodoulos Panayiotou
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster
Maria Mirabal
Dominic Eichler
Barry Schwabsky & Sean Bonney
Eileen Myles
Olivier Garbay & Cerith Wyn Evans
Richard Hell
Keren Cytter & Andrew Kerton
Kenneth G. Bostock, Cibelle &
Pablo León de la Barra
Don Paterson
Charlie Dark
Joan Jonas*
Nancy Spero*
Sara MacKillop

Sunday 18 October 2009
12:00 – 8:00 pm

Julia Peyton-Jones
Hans Ulrich Obrist
Karl Holmqvist
Olivia Plender
Etel Adnan*
Eugen Gomringer*
Susan Hiller & Sue Hubbard
Michael Horovitz
Caroline Bergvall
Gerhard Rühm & Monika Lichtenfeld
Franz West* read by Gerhard Rühm
Liliane Lijn
Alasdair Gray
Jacques Roubaud
Stuart Brisley
Gilbert & George
David Robilliard read by The Robilliards (Leo Burley & Rosemary Turner)
Daljit Nagra
Nathan Cash Davidson
Jonas Mekas* & Edward Eke
Vito Acconci
Geoffrey Hill
Brian Eno & Karl Hyde
Jeremy Reed/Itchy Ear/The Ginger Light
Saul Williams
Philippe Parreno*
Karl Holmqvist
Grace Jones* & Mark van Eyck

Going There

Of course it was a disaster.
The unbearable, dearest secret
has always been a disaster.
The danger when we try to leave.
Going over and over afterward
what we should have done
instead of what we did.
But for those short times
we seemed to be alive. Misled,
misused, lied to and cheated,
certainly. Still, for that
little while, we visited
our possible life.

Jack Gilbert

Remota Hotel

Architects: German del Sol
Location: Provincia de Última Esperanza, Magallanes, Patagonia, Chile
2004 - 2005

Source : www.archdaily.com

Fences, Neighbors, Wars, Decadence

The winner of this year’s DESTE Prize is Eirene Efstathiou. The other five shortlisted artists for the DESTE Prize 2009 were Athanasios Argianas, Haris Epaminonda, Rallou Panagiotou, Yorgos Sapountzis and Vangelis Vlachos . They show their work in an exhibition that is presented this year in the spaces of the Museum of Cycladic Art and is scheduled to run from 14th March until 30th September 2009.


Eirene Efstathiou
Fences, Neighbors, Wars, Decadence, 2007
acrylic on 4 panels


Eirene Efstathiou
Five Walls from the 80's, 2008
acrylic on 5 panels


www.deste.gr
www.cycladic.gr

Li-Sun Exotic Mushrooms

Pink oyster mushrooms cropping on racks inside the tunnel.
Dr. Arrold came up with the simple but clever idea of growing mushrooms in black bin bags with holes cut in them. Previously, mushrooms were typically grown inside clear plastic bags. The equal exposure to light meant that the mushrooms fruited all over, which made it harder to harvest without missing some

Source: bldgblog.blogspot.com

Bocca della verita

Jules Blanchard, Bocca della verita (1871)
Paris, Jardin du Luxembourg.

Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape

The first of the undecoded messages read: "Popeye sits
in thunder,
Unthought of. From that shoebox of an apartment,
From livid curtain's hue, a tangram emerges: a country."
Meanwhile the Sea Hag was relaxing on a green couch: "How
pleasant
To spend one's vacation en la casa de Popeye," she
scratched
Her cleft chin's solitary hair. She remembered spinach

And was going to ask Wimpy if he had bought any spinach.
"M'love," he intercepted, "the plains are decked out
in thunder
Today, and it shall be as you wish." He scratched
The part of his head under his hat. The apartment
Seemed to grow smaller. "But what if no pleasant
Inspiration plunge us now to the stars? For this is my
country."

Suddenly they remembered how it was cheaper in the country.
Wimpy was thoughtfully cutting open a number 2 can of spinach
When the door opened and Swee'pea crept in. "How pleasant!"
But Swee'pea looked morose. A note was pinned to his bib.
"Thunder
And tears are unavailing," it read. "Henceforth shall
Popeye's apartment
Be but remembered space, toxic or salubrious, whole or
scratched."

Olive came hurtling through the window; its geraniums scratched
Her long thigh. "I have news!" she gasped. "Popeye, forced as
you know to flee the country
One musty gusty evening, by the schemes of his wizened,
duplicate father, jealous of the apartment
And all that it contains, myself and spinach
In particular, heaves bolts of loving thunder
At his own astonished becoming, rupturing the pleasant

Arpeggio of our years. No more shall pleasant
Rays of the sun refresh your sense of growing old, nor the
scratched
Tree-trunks and mossy foliage, only immaculate darkness and
thunder."
She grabbed Swee'pea. "I'm taking the brat to the country."
"But you can't do that--he hasn't even finished his spinach,"
Urged the Sea Hag, looking fearfully around at the apartment.

But Olive was already out of earshot. Now the apartment
Succumbed to a strange new hush. "Actually it's quite pleasant
Here," thought the Sea Hag. "If this is all we need fear from
spinach
Then I don't mind so much. Perhaps we could invite Alice the Goon
over"--she scratched
One dug pensively--"but Wimpy is such a country
Bumpkin, always burping like that." Minute at first, the thunder

Soon filled the apartment. It was domestic thunder,
The color of spinach. Popeye chuckled and scratched
His balls: it sure was pleasant to spend a day in the country.

John Ashbery

Arno Breker Holding a Picture of Joseph Beuys

Photo: Gottfried Helnwein
Helnwein meets Arno Breker at his Studio in Düsseldorf
10. May 1988

Solitude

Martin Eder, Solitude, 2003

Zwölf

Eins Zwei Drei Vier Funf
Funf Vier Drei Zwei Eins
Zwei Drei Vier Funf Sechs
Sechs Funf Vier Drei Zwei
Sieben Sieben Sieben Sieben Sieben
Acht Eins
Neun Eins
Zehn Eins
Elf Eins
Zehn Neun Acht Sieben Sechs
Funf Vier Drei Zwei Eins

Kurt Schwitters

Hotel

Paul Carter Hotel, 2009 (work in progress)

In 2008, Robin Klassnik invited Paul Carter to transport his workspace to the gallery in an attempt to recreate the conditions of the studio in flux. In June 2009 the artist moved in and has been working in residence towards his first exhibition at Matt’s Gallery.

Hotel is a sculptural installation that disrupts the architectural features of the gallery, incorporating elements that have been transplanted from the artist’s studio or reclaimed from other sites. Found materials – including a derelict goods lift and a series of day beds that look like renaissance icons – are re-crafted to explore notions of value and function. Resembling a life-size architect’s model, the installation includes a series of compartments and fixtures that echo the commercial or private buildings from which the materials have been salvaged, suggesting an expanded ‘elsewhere’ beyond the gallery walls.

Hotel is a transitory place: a temporary home or live-work space that sets up a new relationship between the individual and the objects and architectures that surround him. Transferring material elements and pre-existing works from the studio and elsewhere becomes an extension of the acts of editing, layering and containment that take place in the original sites. Reminiscent of Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau, where sculptural and architectural interventions spill over from one place to another, Hotel extends the artist’s practice beyond the notionally private space of the home or studio.

Paul Carter, "Hotel" at Matts gallery
9 September–1 November 2009

The Fortune Telling Doll

In the spring of the year of Horeki (1751) many officers and craftsman were dispatched from Edo (present day Tokyo) to build a large bridge over the Yahagi River in Aichi.
One day a head craftsman was standing at the edge of the river when he noticed what seemed to be a child's toy boat floating by with a doll in it. The boat was only a wooden board, but when he picked up the doll he saw it was too beautifully made to be a child's simple toy. He liked the pretty doll and took it back to the inn where was staying and put it in his room.
That night, in his sleep, he heard a voice in the dark.
"Today such- and- such a thing has happened. Tomorrow such -and- such things will happen to so- and- so. So-and-so will be sick tomorrow. So-and-so will travel to such-and-such a place."
When he woke up the next morning, he thought it had all been a strange dream, but then all the things the voice had spoken occurred to those people just as it had predicted. He thought this was very interesting. "Maybe this was created as a tool by a shaman for sorcery." He thought, as he held the beautiful doll in his hands and looked at it with awe.
The next night, as he lay in bed he heard the voice again. Then the next night he heard it again, speaking and speaking in the dark foretelling the future. In the beginning he loved it and felt he had found a rare treasure, but soon the voice seemed so loud he couldn't sleep and it began to bother him. He wanted to throw the doll away, but when he thought of how much care the previous owner had taken to float it away, he decided he had better be very careful. He took it to the master of the inn and showed it to him. The innkeeper was astonished at the sight of it and backed away fearfully. "This is a dangerous thing you have," he said "I have heard in Shizuoka of shamans who practice this kind of sorcery. That's why the doll came to you. This doll likes you now. It will bring misfortune to you if you try to throw it away now that you have picked it up."
The craftsman became very afraid of the doll now, and wondered what he should do with it. An old man who lived near the inn heard of the doll and told him "I've heard that there is only one correct way to dispose of this kind of doll. You must do as the previous owner did, and put it respectfully on a wooden board. Then place it in a stream as a child playing with a toy boat. This is a doll with a doll's heart, and you must play with it like a little child playing with a toy doll and comfort the doll's heart. Then you must turn your back slowly on the doll and let it go on the stream, pretend to be distracted. Go back slowly, without looking back to see the doll off. In this way you can accidentally 'lose' the poor doll in the stream the way a little child might. If you do this the magic doll will believe it has been lost by accident. It will forgive you and not bring misfortune to you."
The man was happy to hear this. He took it to the stream, and placed the doll on a wooden board and played with it just like a little boy. Then he let the boat go and returned to his inn. The doll floated forlornly away, and he felt relieved to know it go from his life.

Mr President Said

“Mr President Said : I can’t do well when I think you’re gonna leave me, but I know I try..Are you gonna leave me now, can’t you be believing now?”
Wood, plywood, acrylic, felt, iron
2009

Encore cet astre

Espèce de soleil! tu songes : - Voyez-les,
Ces pantins morphinés, buveurs de lait d'ânesse
Et de café; sans trêve, en vain, je leur caresse
L'échine de mes feux, ils vont étiolés! -

- Eh! c'est toi, qui n'as plus que des rayons gelés!
Nous, nous, mais nous crevons de santé, de jeunesse!
C'est vrai, la Terre n'est qu'une vaste kermesse,
Nos hourrahs de gaîté courbent au loin les blés.

Toi seul claques des dents, car tes taches accrues,
Te mangent, ô Soleil, ainsi que des verrues
Un vaste citron d'or, et bientôt, blond moqueur,

Après tant de couchants dans la pourpre et la gloire,
Tu seras en risée aux étoiles sans cœur,
Astre jaune et grêlé, flamboyante écumoire!

Jules Laforgue, 1903

Once More to this Staircase: Another Look at Encore à cet Astre

Fig.1 Marcel Duchamp, Encore à cet Astre (Once More to This Star), 1911

It has been some twenty-five years since Lawrence D. Steefel Jr.'s analysis of Marcel Duchamp's 1911 drawing Encore à cet Astre (Once More to This Star) (Fig. 1) was published by Art Journal.(1) Despite Steefel's suggestion that Duchamp's minor works, primarily his sketches and drawings, be allotted a greater degree of recognition for what they reveal about Duchamp's creative process as a whole, Encore is still generally accorded little significance beyond its being a study for the Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (Fig. 2).(2) I felt compelled to write about this particular drawing because I strongly agree that Encore has-and continues to be-relegated to a minor status as little more than a precedent for the Nude…No. 2. While Encore is indeed a small sketch, it would be, in this case, presumptuous to judge significance merely according to appearances.


Fig. 2 Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, 1911

It is crucial to remember that the end of 1911 was a pivotal period in Duchamp's career. In the last two months of 1911, Duchamp produced several of his most well known paintings, including Portrait of Chess Players, Sad Young Man on a Train, and the major study for the Nude… No. 2, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 1. All of the aforementioned paintings have been in some way related to Encore (some more directly than others), yet these relationships have been far from exhausted. In this article, I intend to more fully situate Encore within this period of Duchamp's life and art by examining Encore in relation to contemporaneous works, as well as introducing heretofore unaddressed precedents and possible inspirations for this drawing. My motivation for writing this essay was not to "explain" this sketch or to unearth its "meaning," for I wouldn't propose to do that with any of Duchamp's works, especially one as enigmatic as Encore. Rather, I would like to suggest a number of possible influences, inspirations, and intentions based on Duchamp's own work of the time and the ideas of more recent scholars.


Fig.3 Charles Willson Peale, Staircase Group: Raphaelle and Titian Ramsay, 1795,
Philadelphia Museum of Art

Encore consists of three main parts.(3) In the center, a heavily-shaded head(4) rests on a hand or fist, with only a thin line describing a right shoulder and bent right arm. To the left of the head is what appears to be a female figure from the waist down; above the waist is a sectioned cylindrical element topped with swirling lines reminiscent of hair. To the right of the head is what has come to be the most important element, a goateed male figure ascending a staircase.(5) The figure's head is drastically turned in order to peer at a grid to the right or behind the figure, which Steefel described as a "barred window." As I agree with Steefel's interpretation of the "female" figure as a "sex object,"(6) I will concentrate primarily on the other two elements of the drawing, after which I will suggest a reading that integrates all three elements.

Joseph Masheck noted that there is an uncanny resemblance between the ascending figure in Encore and the ascending figure in Charles Willson Peale's hyperrealistic Staircase Group: Raphaelle and Titian Ramsay (1795) (Fig. 3), which is, like Duchamp's drawing, in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.(7) While Masheck made a case for Duchamp possibly having seen a reproduction of the Peale painting in Paris (Encore preceded Duchamp's first visit to the United States by more than three years), an association between the two images, though enticing, remains dubious.(8) A more practical-and arguably more similar-precedent for the ascending figure is found in a painting with which Duchamp was undoubtedly familiar, the silhouetted figure of Don José Nieto in the background of Velásquez's Las Meninas (1656) (Figs. 4 and 5).


Fig.4 Diego Velasquez, Las Meninas, 1656, Museo del Prado


Fig.5 Diego Velasquez, Las Meninas, detail

Though the resemblance between the two figures is far from exact, the figures' postures, particularly the positioning of the legs, head, and right arm (if the roughly horizontal line extending from the above the hip of the ascending figure to the central head's left eye does indeed describe an arm) are similar enough to merit a comparison. Even the coffered door to Nieto's left has a gridded appearance akin to the grid to the right of the figure in Encore, albeit on the opposite side. In Encore, the artist's perspective is a bit different, with the stairs in three-quarter view and the head in full profile; a comparison with Las Meninas shows that the ascending figure is drawn from virtually the same angle that Velásquez would have seen Nieto in the mirror (Velásquez would not have seen Nieto as we do in the painting because the artist is off to the side.) Could this figure that so intrigued Michel Foucault have had a similar affect on Duchamp?


Fig. 6 Robert Fludd, Utriusque Cosmi, vol. 2, Oppenheim, 1619

It is not enough to simply claim the figure in the Velásquez painting as a model for the ascending figure without an explanation. The figure of Nieto in Las Meninas has long fascinated scholars because of his transitional status; he inhabits a space that is both invisible to the viewer yet implied by his presence. Even more important to Duchamp, I believe, is the ambiguity of his presence, due to the fact he is neither entering nor exiting the room, but, in Foucault's words, "coming in and going out at the same time, like a pendulum caught at the bottom of its swing."(9) Like Nieto, the figure in Encore is positioned in such a way that he appears to be traveling upward, yet the severe turn of his head and downward gaze imply an impeding reversal of motion, or at least the potential for a reversal of motion, rendering the figure, like the Sad Young Man on a Train and Nude Descending a Staircase, simultaneously static and dynamic.


Fig.7 Ramon Lull, De nova logica, 1512

But why a staircase, and what is its relationship to the title? As Siegfried Giedion indicated, the diagonal planes of a staircase leading the eye upward led to the stair becoming "the symbol of movement."(10) The general interpretation that the figure is ascending toward the sun/star of the poem is made less feasible by the figure's backward and downward glance. Moreover, as Jerrold Seigel noted, "the 'to' in Laforgue's title was a preposition of address, not of physical movement."(11) Regardless, those who champion readings of Duchamp's works that embrace his heavily debated involvement with the history and theory of alchemy(12) may support the reading of the figure ascending toward the sun/star, as ladders and staircases (which have a closely-tied history and symbolism) are legion in alchemical images and texts. Images of ladders and staircases leading to a star, the sun, or a heavenly/celestial realm (Figs. 6 and 7) support the notion that "the vertical…has always been considered the sacred dimension of space."(13) That the direction of the figure's movement remains ambiguous does not necessarily contradict the alchemical interpretation, as the hermetic theologian and neoplatonist Cardinal Nikolaus of Cusa (known as Cusanus) indicated: "Ascending and descending…are one and the same. The 'art of conjecture' lies in connecting the two with a keen intelligence."(14) Another possibility of interpretation takes into account Duchamp's predilection for wordplay, being that "astre" is an anagram for "stare" (which the figure on the right certainly does), which is a homonym for "stair."


Fig.8 Grid in perspective

But at or through what is the figure staring? The density of the vertical lines and the converging horizontal lines are certainly meant to convey deep foreshortening (Fig. 8), so one may deduce that the incomplete, hastily drawn grid contains squares and not rectangles. The grid can represent innumerable possibilities: Dürer's device for drawing perspective (Fig. 9), the checkered mosaic tiles of the Temple of Solomon, generally found in Masonic lodges, and the magic square, to name a few.


Fig.9 Albrecht Dürer, Draughtsman Drawing a Recumbent Woman, 1525

A possibility that I would like to pursue, however, is that the grid represents a chessboard, due to the fact that the grid contains eight squares at its widest point, the same number of squares on a chessboard. The fact that the grid is vertical rather than horizontal should come as no surprise, since chessboards have been displayed vertically in order to study problems since the Middle Ages (Figs. 10 and 11). Duchamp himself had numerous chessboards displayed vertically in his studio, as recorded in several photographs (Figs. 12 and 13).


Fig.10 Illumination from the Manuscript of Alfonso the Wise, 1283, Escorial Library


Fig. 11 Woodcut of a King and a Bishop playing chess, illustrated in William Caxton,
Game and Playe of the Chesse,(London: Elliot Stock, 1883)


Fig.12 Photograph of Duchamp's Studio, 1917-18


Fig. 13 Photograph of Marcel Duchamp taken by Denise Bellon, 1938

Moreover, several of his studies for Portrait of Chess Players show the chessboard not only horizontally, but scattered throughout the composition, in some cases above and behind the heads of the players (Figs. 14 and 15). If the figure on the right is examining a chessboard, it may lead to an understanding of the role of the central "head."


Fig.14 Marcel Duchamp, Study for Portrait of Chess Players, 1911


Fig.15 Marcel Duchamp, For a Game of Chess, 1911

The position of the central head, with the head resting on the hand or fist, is a posture inextricably linked with chess players, as it is seen in myriad representations of the subject (Figs. 16 and 17). Duchamp used this iconic posture for the figure of Jacques Villon in nearly all the studies for Portrait of Chess Players and in the final oil painting (Fig. 18).


Fig.16 William Henry Fox Talbot, Chess Players, 1840


Fig.17 Honore Daumier, The Chess Players, 1868,Musée du Petit Palais


Fig.18 Marcel Duchamp, Portrait of Chess Players, 1911

Duchamp himself appears in this manner on several occasions, as seen in a photograph used for a window display devoted to Duchamp at the bookshop La Hune in Paris in 1946 (Fig. 19), and in the sculpture Marcel Duchamp Cast Alive (1967) (Fig. 20), executed by Alfred Wolkenberg, which bears an eerie resemblance to the head in Encore. There are certainly practical explanations for the intimate communion shared by the game and this posture; chess games can go on for extended periods of time, during which the neck grows tired and requires additional support. However, in several instances, the hand at the chin appears to support the figure mentally rather than physically.


Fig.19 Window Display, La Hune Bookshop, Paris, 1946


Fig.20 Marcel Duchamp and Alfred Wolkenberg, Marcel Duchamp Cast Alive, 1967

No doubt the most famous, reproduced, and parodied image of thought of the twentieth century is Rodin's Thinker (Fig. 21), who, rapt in his all-consuming contemplation, is the icon for the workings of the human mind. Centuries earlier, Michelangelo's depiction of Lorenzo de' Medici at the latter's tomb in Florence (Fig. 22), which has often been cited as a model for Rodin's allegory, was dubbed "Il Penseroso" due to the contrast of his downcast eyes and inward expression with the more active, outward thrust of the sculpture of his brother Giuliano. The fact that both chess players and "thinkers" share the same conventions for representation is far from coincidental, as chess is considered among the most difficult and intellectual of pursuits. Duchamp often stated that art should be more like chess, which is "completely in one's gray matter,"(15) or, in Hubert Damisch's words, "cosa mentale."(16) His desire for art to become "an intellectual expression" was ultimately realized with the Readymades and the Large Glass,(17) but signs of this desire are visible as early as his studies for the Portrait of Chess Players.

There is, however, another association to be made with the posture of the central head, one which may be linked to another important painting by Duchamp produced at or near the same time as Encore. For centuries, the propped-up head had an association with another type of thinker, the melancholic. Melancholy, an affliction thought by medieval scientists to have been brought on by an imbalance of bodily humors and the positions of the planets, was exalted during the Renaissance by humanists as a sign of genius.(18)


Fig. 21 Auguste Rodin, The Thinker,1879-89


Fig. 22 Michelangelo,Lorenzo de' Medici, Medici Chapel, Florence


Fig. 23 Raphael, School of Athens, 1510-11, detail

These humanists championed Saturn, who "was discovered in a new and personal sense by the intellectual elite, who were indeed beginning to consider their melancholy a jealously guarded privilege, as they became aware both of the sublimity of Saturn's intellectual gifts and the dangers of his ambivalence."(19) Among the more famous portrayals of the saturnine artist is Raphael's depiction of Michelangelo (Fig. 23), a self-proclaimed melancholic, in his School of Athens (1510-11).(20) Certainly the most famous image of melancholy (and one of the most analyzed images in the history of art) is Dürer's engraving Melencolia I (Fig. 24), interpreted by Erwin Panofsky as a "spiritual self-portrait,"(21) through which Dürer represented "the melancholic artist, both cursed and blessed with a wider range of knowledge and a glimpse into the realm of metaphysical insight, [who] is painfully aware of the discrepancy between the necessary physical concerns of art and the higher metaphysical understanding that is desired."(22)


Fig.24 Albrecht Dürer,Melencolia I, 1514

Melencolia I has already been linked with Duchamp's work by Maurizio Calvesi, who indicated that both artists had a shared interest in alchemical imagery.(23) A close comparison of the melancholic angel in Dürer's engraving and the central head in Encore reveals that the two figures share two conventions that Raymond Klibansky, Fritz Saxl, and Panofsky called "the clenched fist and the black face,"(24) meaning that both heads are propped up by a fist and the faces are heavily shaded. These conventions, which were originally physiognomic symptoms of a medical affliction, were appropriated by humanists to signify a mental rather than a physical condition.(25) In addition to Dürer's famous engraving, Duchamp could have seen these conventions used by another artist for whom his admiration is well documented, Odilon Redon,(26) whose Penseroso (1874) (Fig. 25) and Angel in Chains (1875) (Fig. 26) owe a debt to Michelangelo and Dürer, respectively.(27)


Fig. 25 Odilon Redon, Renseroso, 1874


If the central head of Encore does indeed reflect the conventions of the melancholic artist, does this possibility have any bearing on the title of the Sad Young Man on a Train (Fig. 27), painted shortly after Encore was produced? While Duchamp insisted that the young man's "sadness" was introduced merely for the purposes of alliteration ("triste" and "train"), Seigel pointed out that the painting's original title, "Pauvre Jeune Homme M.," maintained the same mood minus the alliteration.(28)


Fig. 26 Odilon Redon, Angel in Chains, 1875, The Woodner Family Collection

Moreover, the original title was, like Encore, taken from Jules Laforgue, leading to the possibility that Encore may in some way be a study for the Sad Young Man. Steefel's descriptions of Duchamp in late 1911 as "fiercely intellectual," "private and eccentric under a cloak of pervasive 'Hamletism' and desultory ennui," and subject to "an inhibiting malaise of spirit"(29) support the notion that the "sad young man," who Duchamp clearly indicated is a self-portrait, may in fact be a self-representation as the melancholic artist.

As I stated at the beginning of this essay, I find Steefel's reading of the "female" figure at the left as a "sex object" very persuasive, and her mechanomorphic sexuality is likely an anticipation of Duchamp's other paintings involving "the erratic mechanism of human desire."(30) It is tempting to try to understand Encore, one of Duchamp's many tripartite compositions, as a single idea, an integrated image in which the three elements have some common denominator. Encore seems to be the very definition of Foucault's concept of the heteroclite, of things "'laid', 'placed', 'arranged' in sites so very different from one another that it is impossible to find a place of residence for them, to define a common locus beneath them all."(32) As it is highly unlikely that the three elements were conceived and intended to be seen independently, an integrated reading appears to be in order.

From the various analyses of the elements of Encore I have endeavored to support, a pattern may be inferred: the staircase, a symbol most commonly associated with spiritual concerns; the chess player or melancholic, both of whom are linked to the intellect; and the mechanical/female "sex object," or, like the later coffee and chocolate grinders, a "sex machine." Taken together, the spirit, the intellect, and the carnal are all forms of desire-the desire for salvation, the desire for the acquisition of knowledge or creative growth, and lust. Desire, specifically unfulfilled desire, became one of the critical operators in Duchamp's work, from his distanced disrobing of Dulcinea to the perpetually unconsummated desires of the bride and bachelors.(33) For indeed, by assiduously attempting to locate any logical continuity to conjoin the three figures in Encore, we find ourselves more intimately acquainted with the notion of frustrated desire.


Fig. 27 Marcel Duchamp, Sad Young Man on a Train, 1911

Text by Bradley Bailey
(For Dario Gamboni)

Notes
1. Lawrence D. Steefel, Jr. "Marcel Duchamp's Encore à cet Astre: A New Look," Art Journal 36, no.1
(1976): 23-30. At the conclusion of Steefel's article, an English translation of Laforgue's poem is included under
the title "Another for the Sun," which Steefel indicated came from a translation by William Jay Smith in his
Selected Writings of Jules Laforgue. Ron Padgett translated the title as "Again to this Star," Pierre Cabanne,
Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, trans. Ron Padgett (New York: Da Capo, 1987) 46. Another translation of the
title, "Once More to this Star," is more commonly used in reference to the Duchamp drawing.
2. "Widely recognized as a 'first step' towards the evolution of the famous Nude Descending a
Staircase, painted a month or so after the drawing Encore was completed, the drawing itself has been
disregarded as a work of art in its own right and, more surprisingly, has been persistently misread simply as
an image by all previous commentators, including Duchamp himself referring to what it presumably is 'about.'"
Steefel, 23.
3. For a more detailed ekphrasis, see Steefel, 24-25.
4. Steefel called this element of the drawing a "mask," possibly because it lacks ears and hair. However,
the figure on the right lacks any discernible ears or hair, yet there is no mention of this figure being masked.
To avoid inconsistency, I will simply refer to this element as a head.
5. Steefel indicated that it is a spiral staircase (25), which is certainly the case with Duchamp's later
descending figures. Unless the scribbled out lines above the figure's head, which Steefel claimed may be
"a possible vault of the lower staircase" (26), are the spiraling continuation of the staircase, I see no evidence that
this particular staircase is helical.
6. Steefel, 25.
7. Joseph Masheck, ed., Marcel Duchamp in Perspective (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1975) 7-8.
8. Schwarz stated that "[Duchamp] could not possibly have seen the Peale before completing this study." Arturo Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, 3rd ed., vol. 2 (New York: Delano Greenidge, 1997) 555.
9. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage, 1994) 11.
10. Siegfried Giedion, The Eternal Present (New York: Pantheon, 1964) qtd. in John Templer, The Staircase: History and Theories (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1992).
11. Jerrold Seigel, The Private Worlds of Marcel Duchamp (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1995) 38.
12. See Arturo Schwarz, "The Alchemist Stripped Bare in the Bachelor, Even," in Anne d'Harnoncourt
and Kynaston McShine, Marcel Duchamp (New York: Museum of Modern Art; Philadelphia:
Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1973) 81-98; and Maurizio Calvesi, Duchamp invisible (Rome: Officina edizioni,
1975).
13. Christian Norberg-Schulz, Existence, Space and Architecture (New York: Praeger, 1978) qtd.; in
Templer, 34.
14. Alexander Roob, The Hermetic Museum: Alchemy and Mysticism (New York: Taschen, 1997) 282.
15. Schwarz, Complete Works, vol. 1, 73.
16. Hubert Damisch, "The Duchamp Defense," trans. Rosalind Krauss, October 10 (Fall 1979): 5-28.
17. Schwarz, Complete Works, vol. 1, 73.
18. Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy (New York: Basic Books,
1964) 241-254.
19. Ibid., 251. For more about the melancholic temperment as it pertains to artists, see Rudolph and Margot Wittkower, Born Under Saturn (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1963).
20. Klibansky et al, 232 and Wittkower, fig. 21.
21. Erwin Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1955)
171.
22. Linda Hults, The Print in the Western World (Madison, WI.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996)
95.
23. Maurizio Calvesi, "A noir, Melencolia I," Storia dell'Arte 1-2 (1969): 37-96. Duchamp invisible; Arte e
alchimia (Florence: Giunti, 1986). See also Giuseppina Restivo, "The Iconic Core of Beckett's Endgame,"
in Marius Buning, Matthijs Engelberts, and Sjef Houppermans, Samuel Beckett: Crossroads and Borderlines:
L'œuvre Carrefour/L'œuvre Limite (Amsterdam, Atlanta: Rodopi, 1997) 118-124.
24. Klibansky et al, 290.
25. Ibid., 320.
26. Seigel, 50.
27. Douglas W. Druick, ed. Odilon Redon: Prince of Dreams, 1840-1916 (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago;
New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994) 79-80, 84.
28. Seigel, 59.
29. Steefel, 23.
30. d'Harnoncourt and McShine, 256.
31. Young Man and Girl in Spring (1911), 2 Personages and a Car (1912), The King and Queen
Surrounded by Swift Nudes (1912), and The Bride Stripped Bare by the Bachelors (1912) are but a few examples.
Both Robert Lebel and Harriet and Sidney Janis have noted Duchamp's penchant for the number
three in his work. Schwarz, Complete Works, vol. 1, 128.
32. Foucault, xvii-xviii.
33. Seigel, 41, 94-97 and Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson, The Essential Writings of Marcel Duchamp (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973) 39, 42, 44.

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The Marcel Duchamp online Journal, issue 4, Jan.02