Abstract
For Duchamp, the term “posterity” refers to the future spectator whose judgment ultimately determines the final verdict on a work. Within the terms of the creative act, this spectator overlooks the artificial nature of the tasty affairs and presents the movement or “ism” as an objective, naturally occurring phenomenon. In doing so, he consolidates the validity of the “immediate spectator’s” initial verdict. To demonstrate this point, Duchamp directly involves himself in—and then actively disengages from—Robert Lebel’s monograph Sur Marcel Duchamp. This strategy sees him retain control over the final analysis of his work while avoiding the effects of this analysis; moreover, he performatively stages another element in the creative act by positioning Lebel in the role of posterity.
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Notes
- 1.
The Arensberg collection would eventually include thirty-six of Duchamp’s works, thirty-five of which were acquired by Duchamp himself. As Tomkins notes, “it was clear that he kept a watchful eye on the peregrinations of his paintings and objects” (1996, p. 294). Indeed, Duchamp admits as much when he states: “I wanted the whole body of work to stay together” (1979, p. 74).
- 2.
In November of that year, the influential French art critic Alain J ouffroy proposed doing an interview with Duchamp for the weekly Arts et Spectacles. Soon after, Michael Sanouillet—a Toronto University scholar—undertook a longer interview with Duchamp in the weekly Les Nouvelles Littéraires (in Tomkins, 1996, p. 390). In January 1955 Duchamp appeared on network TV in America as the subject of a thirty-minute program on the NBC-TV series called Conversations with the Elder Wise Men of our Day. The program consisted of a guided tour of his oeuvre conducted by the director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, James Johnson Sweeney.
- 3.
What appears strange, at first glance, is the location of these dots: they seem to show a stress pattern of someone clearly speaking English as a foreign language, as if Duchamp wanted to make the purely declarative nature of the statement obvious. Indeed, when one listens to the audio of the talk, it is striking how the intonation has a distorting effect: the irregular stress makes it hard to follow Duchamp’s argument, thus further contributing to our misunderstanding of his message. As with the hand-written notes, the red dots might first appear as obstacles to interpretation, when in fact they mark the physical emergence of the art coefficient .
References
Camfield, William A. 1989. “Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain: Its History and Aesthetics in the Context of 1917.” In Marcel Duchamp: Artist of the Century. Edited by Rudolf E. Kuenzli and Francis M. Naumann. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Franklin, Paul B. 2016. The Artist and his Critic Stripped Bare: The Correspondence of Marcel Duchamp and Robert Lebel. Edited and translated by Paul B. Franklin. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute.
Duchamp, Marcel. 1973a. “The Creative Act.” In The Writings of Marcel Duchamp. Edited by Michael Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson. New York: Da Capo Press.
Duchamp, Marcel. 1979. Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp. Translated byol Ron Padgett. London: Da Capo Press.
Lebel, Robert. 1959. Marcel Duchamp. London: Trianon Press.
Tomkins, Calvin. 1996. Duchamp: A Biography. New York: Henry Holt & Company.
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Kilroy, R. (2018). Posterity. In: Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69158-9_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69158-9_10
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