Abstract
In his discussion of “the spectator” Duchamp highlights the process at work in the shift from aesthetic experience to aesthetic judgment. Due to the illusion produced in the museum space, the spectator is compelled to offer a verdict which determines the work’s value on the aesthetic “scale.” In doing so, however, he misperceives the content of the artist’s statement as being communicated through the work’s physical properties, a phenomenon Duchamp terms “transmutation.” Ultimately, the artist’s statement is understood on the basis of aesthetic priorities so that the art coefficient, the gap indicating the true nature of his activity, is erased. Duchamp attempts to make this operation visible by provoking his “friend” and critic Guillaume Apollinaire into offering a verdict on Fountain.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Notes
- 1.
This is precisely Lacan’s point when he addresses the value of the work of art “in the social field” from “the point of view of the libidinal relation,” that is, the role of the work of art in sustaining a social (i.e. ideological) fantasy: “It is because its effect has something profitable for society, for the part of society that comes under its influence. Broadly speaking, one can say that the work calms people, comforts them, by showing them that at least some of them can live from the exploitation of their desire” (1981, p. 111).
- 2.
What becomes visible is the “effect of retroversion” that produces “the illusion proper to the phenomena of transference”: the illusion that the meaning of an element which was produced retroactively “was present in it from the very beginning as its immanent essence” (Žižek , 2008, p. 113).
- 3.
In Duchamp’s draft of the seminar the line “after the revelation of the aesthetic osmosis ” has been removed (Fig. 5.3) thus indicating that the “refinement” in question is supported by a fundamental illusion. Ultimately, the raw materials of the artist’s statement are used to sweeten the inert object through which they are interpreted.
- 4.
Duchamp later repeats this explicit separation between textual and visual components by creating a physical and temporal delay which divides the Large Glass from its accompanying notes in The Green Box. Not only did Duchamp place one work in an exhibition space and another in a box, he also published the verbal component twenty years before installing the Large Glass in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
- 5.
The same illusion of “esthetic osmosis ” supports our reading of the Large Glass: despite the physical and temporal disjunction , we have come to see this object (this large piece of glass) as a visual representation of the story recounted in The Green Box.
- 6.
“The fact he made the fountain with his own hand or not is unimportant. He took an ordinary article of every life and, by making its normal signification disappear under a new title and point of view, gave a new and purely aesthetic meaning to the object” (Apollinaire, 1994, p. 22; my translation).
- 7.
“The point of view of the Society of Independent Artists is clearly absurd since it is based on the unsustainable position that art is not capable of ennobling an object when it ennobled it in a very singular manner by transforming an object of hygiene in a men’s toilet into a Buddha. Be that as it may, at the risk that their determination would deliberately deny the role and rights of the imagination, the Independents of New York refused to exhibit Mr. Mutt’s fountain” (1994, pp. 22–23; my translation).
References
Duchamp, Marcel. 1973. “The Creative Act.” Session on the Creative Act, Convention of the American Federation of Arts, Houston, Texas, April 1957. 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 by Ron Padgett. London: Da Capo Press.
Lacan, Jacques. 1981. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York & London: Norton & Company.
Tomkins, Calvin. 1996. Duchamp: A Biography. New York: Henry Holt & Company.
Tomkins, Calvin. 2013. Marcel Duchamp: The Afternoon Interviews. New York: Badlands Unlimited.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Kilroy, R. (2018). The Spectator. In: Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69158-9_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69158-9_8
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Pivot, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-69157-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-69158-9
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)