{"id":80740,"date":"2014-12-11T13:21:48","date_gmt":"2014-12-11T18:21:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=80740"},"modified":"2014-12-11T13:21:48","modified_gmt":"2014-12-11T18:21:48","slug":"erasing-duchamp","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/12\/11\/erasing-duchamp\/","title":{"rendered":"Erasing Duchamp"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Marcel Duchamp, Mad Libs, and conceptual writing online.
<\/em><\/p>\n

\"6795836748_7bc674c4b7_o\"<\/a>

Five-Way Portrait of Marcel Duchamp<\/i>, 1917.<\/p><\/div>\n

As Marcel Duchamp had it, an artist is nothing without an audience. No work of art\u2014no balloon dog, no poem mentioning cold-water flats, no four-minute-and-thirty-three-second performance by silent musicians\u2014is a great<\/em> work until posterity says so. In a 1964 interview between The New Yorker<\/em>\u2019s Calvin Tomkins and Duchamp, the latter remarked, \u201cThe artist produces nothing until the onlooker has said, \u2018You have produced something marvelous.\u2019 The onlooker has the last word in it.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is also a tidy summary of Duchamp\u2019s short lecture \u201cThe Creative Act<\/a>,\u201d given in Houston in 1957, in which he calls the artist a \u201cmediumistic being,\u201d one whose \u201cdecisions in the artistic execution of the work \u2026 cannot be translated into a self-analysis.\u201d Analysis is the work of the spectator, who \u201cbrings the work in contact with the external world.\u201d Posterity decides if an artist\u2019s works are deserving enough of an extended solo show at the Whitney, or should be reprinted in every iteration of the Norton Anthology until the end of time. The \u201ccreative act\u201d is a transaction between artist and onlooker, and in it, again, the onlooker has the last word.<\/p>\n

This is literally true in Joe Milutis\u2019s new conceptual project Marcel Duchamp\u2019s The [Creative] Act<\/em><\/a>,<\/em> released last month via Gauss PDF. Milutis\u2019s text is a free fourteen-page PDF file that takes Duchamp\u2019s 1957 lecture and turns it into a sort-of Dadaist Mad Libs: <\/p>\n

\n

Millions of artists [verb]; only a few thousands are [passive verb] or [passive verb] by the [noun] and many less again are [passive verb] by [noun].<\/p>\n

In the last analysis, the [noun] may shout from all the rooftops that he is a [noun]: he will have to wait for the [noun] of the spectator in order that his [noun] take a [adjective] value and that, finally, [noun] includes him in the primers of Artist History.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Between each page of text are images of the error messages and broken links familiar to anyone who\u2019s ever used the Internet: \u201cWe\u2019re sorry, this image is temporarily unavailable\u201d; \u201cNo Image Available\u201d; \u201cSorry No Pic.\u201d Of course, nothing is \u201ctemporarily unavailable\u201d here. There were never any images in the first place.<\/p>\n

\"tumblr_inline_nej0pmeUt11qdmnce\"<\/a>

From Joe Milutis\u2019s Marcel Duchamp\u2019s The [Creative] Act<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

It\u2019s not a typical erasure, if such a thing exists; it isn\u2019t like Matthea Harvey<\/a>\u2019s Of Lamb<\/a>,<\/em> for example, a book-length poem derived from erased passages of a Charles Lamb biography. It seems more what we might call pop-Derridean conceptual writing. In the blank spaces he\u2019s made, Milutis could have simply written \u201c[redacted]\u201d\u2014instead, he supplies labels as guideposts of a sort, announcing exactly what kind of absence he\u2019s presenting. And it\u2019s crucial to remember the context here: this is a speech about how we lend meaning to a work of art. By excising certain words like this, Milutis forces us to do the very thing that Duchamp has asked of us.<\/p>\n

But we shouldn\u2019t take this to be all so cerebral. Milutis\u2019s gesture is by and large a playful one. For instance: Where Duchamp repeatedly uses the expression \u00e0 l\u2019\u00e9tat brut<\/em>\u00a0(\u201craw state\u201d) to refer to art before it is deemed good or bad by an audience, Milutis redacts the French, replacing it with \u201c[french phrase].\u201d We might decide \u00e0 l\u2019\u00e9tat brut<\/em>\u00a0should be avoir le cafard<\/em>\u00a0(have the cockroach) or s<\/em>i ma tata t\u00e2te ta tata, ta tata sera t\u00e2t\u00e9e<\/em> (if my aunt feels your aunt, your aunt will be felt).<\/p>\n

This is the kind of niche project that the digital publisher Gauss PDF<\/a> is becoming known for among a small set of literary netizens. The site itself looks deceptively minimal\u2014it\u2019s built using a simple Tumblr template, displaying almost no information about the authors or the works published. It would be easy to land on it from another page, think, What?, and move on.<\/p>\n

And your What?<\/em> wouldn\u2019t be misplaced. Available for download right now on the site\u2019s front page is a JPEG file<\/a> that, when opened, displays the words B\u00caTE NOIRE<\/small><\/em> dozens of times in various sizes and colors. There\u2019s also The Comedy of Hamlet<\/a>,<\/em> in which the consonants in each line have been replaced with the letter h<\/em>, so that every character\u2019s utterance is reduced to giggles. Gauss PDF\u2019s founder, J. Gordon Faylor, has established what is, in some ways, an initiative with a Dadaist spirit. A PDF published earlier this year, Adam Braffman\u2019s \u201cBestseller<\/a>,\u201d compiles hundreds of one-sentence summaries of books that have appeared on the New York Times<\/em> best-seller list over several decades. The names of the books themselves are never given; the summaries are simply strung together as a disorienting narrative. (\u201cMen seek the green turtle with the sea around them. The exploits of a woman and her two daughters from pre-World War I Paris to present-day Los Angeles. King David tells his story in comic and irreverent style.\u201d) And Dandyisms<\/a>,<\/em> a short poetry collection by the conceptual writer and poet Felix Bernstein under the name of his Victorian camp character, Leopold Brandt.<\/p>\n

The most effective conceptual writing, as with all conceptual art, alters a thing\u2019s accepted context. Critics would have you think that all this is merely silly, but in the best cases there\u2019s a method to the madness: these artists are doing the very basic, very necessary work of helping us see with new eyes. When Kenneth Goldsmith transcribed, word for word, baseball sportscasters narrating the longest ever nine-inning game (Yankees vs. Red Sox, 2006), and then published the transcript with no edits\u2014even the commentators\u2019 stuttering is preserved\u2014as a book called Sports<\/a><\/em>, readers didn\u2019t open it hoping for a riveting depiction of that game. Likewise, in 1917, when Duchamp took a urinal, signed it R. Mutt, and then submitted it to be presented in a show by the American Society of Independent Artists as Fountain,<\/em> the committee of curators didn\u2019t approach it looking to pee. Of course, we can glean a lot about sports coverage from Sports<\/em>\u2014and about circumlocution and observation and the human need to keep things interesting. And anyone is certainly able to pee on reproductions of Duchamp\u2019s urinal\u2014many have tried<\/a>. But we understand these works as having new meanings beyond their original context.<\/p>\n

Milutis has complicated Duchamp\u2019s famous ready-made, which has, of course, seen no end of complications since its debut. \u201cMarcel Duchamp\u2019s The [Creative] Act\u201d isn\u2019t already<\/em>-made. It\u2019s still in the process of being made. However tongue-in-cheek this Mad Libs approach is, though\u2014and however many eye rolls it, along with the rest of the Gauss PDF list, might garner\u2014it\u2019s a transaction I think Duchamp might enjoy.<\/p>\n

Rebecca Bates has written for\u00a0<\/em>Guernica,<\/em> Nylon,<\/em> The New Inquiry, and elsewhere. Her poems have appeared in the\u00a0<\/em>Believer,<\/em> Gigantic,<\/em>\u00a0Gulf Coast,<\/em> Best American Experimental Writing, and other places.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Marcel Duchamp, Mad Libs, and conceptual writing online. As Marcel Duchamp had it, an artist is nothing without an audience. No work of art\u2014no balloon dog, no poem mentioning cold-water flats, no four-minute-and-thirty-three-second performance by silent musicians\u2014is a great work until posterity says so. In a 1964 interview between The New Yorker\u2019s Calvin Tomkins […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":676,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[16342,16343,16341,15360,529,16338,16344,10532,16340,696,16339],"class_list":["post-80740","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-conceptual-art","tag-conceptual-writing","tag-dadaism","tag-fountain","tag-french","tag-gauss-pdf","tag-joe-milutis","tag-kenneth-goldsmith","tag-mad-libs","tag-marcel-duchamp","tag-the-creative-act"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nMarcel Duchamp, Mad Libs, and Gauss PDF<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"A new work of conceptual writing turns Marcel Duchamp\u2019s theories into art.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/12\/11\/erasing-duchamp\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Erasing Duchamp by Rebecca Bates\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"December 11, 2014 \u2013 On Marcel Duchamp, Mad Libs, and conceptual writing online. 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