{"id":116788,"date":"2017-10-18T11:00:22","date_gmt":"2017-10-18T15:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=116788"},"modified":"2017-10-20T16:45:09","modified_gmt":"2017-10-20T20:45:09","slug":"duchamps-last-riddle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/10\/18\/duchamps-last-riddle\/","title":{"rendered":"Duchamp\u2019s Last Riddle"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a>

Serkan Ozkaya,\u00a0We Will Wait<\/em>, 2017, installation view. Photo: Brett Beyer and Lal Bahcecioglu<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

By now, the story has become a legend: in 1917, artist Marcel Duchamp took a urinal, signed it with a pseudonym, and submitted it for an exhibition put on by the Society of Independent Artists\u2014who rejected it. Fountain<\/em>, as he winkingly titled the urinal, was one of his ready-mades: a manufactured object that he deemed artworks in an effort to throw off the yoke of what he called \u201cretinal art\u201d in favor of a more conceptual and cerebral one.<\/p>\n

Duchamp was good at gestures. Just six years after the Fountain<\/em> controversy, he announced he was quitting the art world and would devote the rest of his life to his other passion, chess. Most people believed he had. But when he died in 1968, at the age of eighty-one, his grandest gesture was revealed: Duchamp had been constructing an artwork in secret for twenty years. He left it behind in his studio on Manhattan\u2019s East Eleventh Street\u2014a mysterious, life-size tableau. It featured a realist sculpture of a naked woman lying on a bed of twigs and leaves with her legs spread open. She could have been dead or unconscious, except that her left arm held aloft a gas lamp, behind which glowed a landscape of colorful trees and a waterfall. The uncanny scene was visible through a cutout in what seemed to be a brick wall, which itself was fronted by an old wooden door with two peepholes in it. Looking through the peepholes was\u2014and still is\u2014the only way to see the tableau.<\/p>\n

Duchamp left detailed instructions for how to transport the work out of his studio, and the next year the piece was put on permanent display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It immediately inspired\u2014and continues to inspire\u2014much consternation. The artist Jasper Johns, a Duchamp devotee, called it \u201cthe strangest work of art in any museum<\/a>.\u201d Questions abound: Is it the scene of a sex crime or some kind of psychological projection? Is it a perverse study in artistic perspective? Did the man who invented ready-mades give up on them in old age and return to retinal art? The air of mystery is further thickened by the artwork\u2019s title\u2014\u00c9tant donn\u00e9s: 1\u00b0 la chute d’eau, 2\u00b0 le gaz d’\u00e9clairage … (Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas …)<\/em>\u2014which reads like a logic puzzle without an answer.<\/p>\n

Duchamp died on October 2, 1968. Exactly forty-nine years later, on October 2 of this year, his East Eleventh Street studio was reopened for two weeks to a select group of invited guests. Inside, visitors discovered a full-scale replica of \u00c9tant donn\u00e9s<\/em>, accompanied by another, newer riddle.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

\u201cNobody can convince me that he didn\u2019t look at it this way,\u201d says the artist Serkan Ozkaya. \u201cI find it insulting to think that a master of shadows didn\u2019t look at it in the dark.\u201d Ozkaya is talking about Duchamp and \u00c9tant donn\u00e9s<\/em>, and, indirectly, about his own replica, which is titled We Will Wait<\/em>. We\u2019re sitting in Duchamp\u2019s former studio, alongside a wall of black plastic sheeting that covers the reconstructed tableau. The industrial material gives the space a gritty, worked-in feel. It makes for a jarring contrast with the glowing, untouchable vision that lies just on the other side.<\/p>\n

\u00c9tant donn\u00e9s<\/em>\u00a0is not Ozkaya\u2019s first copy. In 2012, he built a gold replica of Michelangelo\u2019s \u201cDavid<\/a>\u201d at almost double the scale of the original and drove it through the streets of New York. He often uses (or proposes<\/a>) reproductions in his work, casually casting off the presumed value of originality. But in the case of \u00c9tant donn\u00e9s<\/em>, Ozkaya remade the work because he has a theory: he thinks that, in addition to compelling visitors to look in, the artwork is meant to double as a machine that projects out. Given that its form is an enclosed room with two small holes in the door, \u00c9tant donn\u00e9s<\/em>\u00a0is a natural camera obscura\u2014an optical device wherein a scene on one side of a wall is projected, upside-down, onto the other side of the wall through a tiny hole. All you\u2019d have to do to see the image it projects is enshroud the space outside of it in darkness.<\/p>\n

<\/a>

Serkan Ozkaya at work on We Will Wait<\/em>.\u00a0Photo: Deniz Tortum<\/p><\/div>\n

So that\u2019s what Ozkaya did, about two and half years ago. \u201cI hadn\u2019t even seen the work until I had the idea of it operating as a camera obscura,\u201d he admits. But he was excited by the idea of a camera obscura that uses two holes rather than one\u2014it would be truer to the way we see, with two eyes. He began researching \u00c9tant donn\u00e9s<\/em>\u00a0and built a small-scale model of it to test his theory. When he turned off the lights, amid the resulting, overlapping projections, he saw a face. His first thought was that the ghostly visage belonged to the woman\u2019s killer, but a friend saw someone else entirely: Rrose S\u00e9lavy<\/a>, Duchamp\u2019s female alter ego. \u201cOnce he said it, I couldn\u2019t see it any other way,\u201d Ozkaya explains. It didn\u2019t seem so far-fetched that Duchamp had hidden a self-portrait inside his final, cryptic work\u2014he\u2019d kept secrets<\/a> about the contents<\/a> of his art before.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have no way of knowing his intentions anymore,\u201d Ozkaya says. \u201cWe can only speculate. That\u2019s the fun part. I don\u2019t think these answers need to be correct.\u201d<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Left alone with Ozkaya\u2019s reproduction, I struggled in the darkness. My eyes quickly adjusted, and the shadowy white shapes on the wall grew brighter. I searched for images. The largest mass seemed to be a dragon flying through the air; below it, a wide mouth stuck out its tongue. I could not see a face. Instead, I confronted the ghost of \u00c9tant donn\u00e9s<\/em>\u2019s woman. The longer I stood there, and the harder I tried to find another form, the more prominent she became. Where were the eyes to anchor the artist\u2019s face? All I could see were his protagonist\u2019s naked legs extending toward me, her afterimage burned into my brain.<\/p>\n

A small clump of panic rose in my throat. Why couldn\u2019t I find the face? What kind of art critic can only visualize the image of something they\u2019ve already seen? \u201cProjection is a way of perception,\u201d Ozkaya would say to me a few minutes later. He knocked on the door and entered. At my request, he easily outlined the face, which took the place of the mouth I\u2019d seen earlier. More than a full face, it was mostly eyes and nose, but I was struck by how there<\/em> it was\u2014how seemingly tangible, after fifteen\u00a0minutes of nothing. Once Ozkaya had showed it to me, I couldn\u2019t see it any other way.<\/p>\n

And yet, when the room lights came back on, I found myself struggling to recall the face and doubting its existence. Would I be able to find it again if I were plunged back into darkness? Whose vision was I seeing\u2014Duchamp\u2019s, Ozkaya\u2019s, or my own?<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Duchamp studied mathematics, physics, and alchemy and spent much of his life thinking about perception. He built machines<\/a> and painted and printed disks<\/a> that could be spun to create optical illusions; he left behind notes filled with theories<\/a> about the difference between the appearance of an object and what he called its apparition. \u201cFrom childhood the young Marcel was intrigued by how <\/em>things are perceived, which is the domain of scientific optics and physics and not of aesthetics,\u201d Barbara Rose wrote in The Brooklyn Rail<\/em><\/a>. \u201cHow we see\u2014a mental process\u2014interested him at least as much if not more than what we see.\u201d<\/p>\n

On this point, the copy diverges from the original: We Will Wait<\/em>\u00a0is more bound up with the what than the how. In the process, it sets its sights on art history: Is this face a clue in an unsolvable mystery? But the question isn\u2019t simply what we see; it\u2019s also what we allow ourselves to see in the darkness. After Ozkaya first saw the projected face, he reached out to the Philadelphia Museum in the hopes that it would let him test his theory with the real \u00c9tant donn\u00e9s<\/em>. There was initial interest, but someone in the higher echelons of the museum turned down the proposal. \u201cSomebody didn\u2019t like the possibility of the work changing meaning,\u201d Ozkaya speculates.<\/p>\n

But of course, the brilliance of \u00c9tant donn\u00e9s\u00a0<\/em>is that it was conceived as a puzzle. It will never have a fixed meaning, only an ever-evolving body of interpretations. In one, the work is a deconstructed painting<\/a>. In another, it\u2019s a riff on the Black Dahlia murder<\/a>. In yet another, it\u2019s a camera obscura that projects a self-portrait of the artist as Rrose S\u00e9lavy. Duchamp himself might note that there\u2019s no single truth to be found, just as there\u2019s no artwork outside of them. We were given the waterfall and the illuminating gas, the naked body and the arm aloft. Without our attempts at making meaning, we\u2019re left only with our projections in the darkness.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Jillian Steinhauer is a Brooklyn-based writer and\u00a0a former senior editor of <\/em>Hyperallergic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  By now, the story has become a legend: in 1917, artist Marcel Duchamp took a urinal, signed it with a pseudonym, and submitted it for an exhibition put on by the Society of Independent Artists\u2014who rejected it. Fountain, as he winkingly titled the urinal, was one of his ready-mades: a manufactured object that he […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":339,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[31107,29172,31105,15360,15119,6649,31108,31103,31104,31106],"class_list":["post-116788","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-camera-obscura","tag-duchamp","tag-etant-donnes","tag-fountain","tag-jasper-johns","tag-readymade","tag-replica","tag-retinal-art","tag-serkan-ozkaya","tag-we-will-wait"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nDuchamp\u2019s Last Riddle by Jillian Steinhauer<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Forty-nine years after Duchamp\u2019s death, an artist proposes a theory that may illuminate the meaning of his final work.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, 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