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'A Cessation of Resemblances': Stein / Picasso / Duchamp (Part 2)
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En provenance du cours de University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Modern American Poetry
42 notes
À partir de la leçon
Module 2
The Difference Women Made
Rencontrer les enseignants
Cary NelsonJubilee Professor of Liberal Arts & Sciences
English Department
[MUSIC]
Now the iconic image of the Duchamp's Rrose
is Man Ray's famous photograph of 1920 in the next slide.
21 signed and now you see how the name is spelled,
Lovingly Rrose Selavy alias Marcel Duchamp.
In this soft focus photograph,
Rrose wears a plush hat with a brim that comes down to her eyebrows.
It is the lack of facial hair, Dalia Judovitz notes,
that engenders sexual ambiguity.
Duchamp's shaved face and discreet smile generously framed by a fur collar,
a punning displacement of facial hair,
invokes the illusion of a feminine presence.
Then again, this Rrose hardly looks like a woman,
Duchamp's own masculine features are unmistakable.
But the ambiguity is intentional.
The image is riddling, at once Marcel and Rrose, masculine and feminine.
Now I'm going to show you two further Man Ray photographs of Rrose Selavy.
This time in an even more elaborate head dress,
with a sweeping velvet cape and bead necklace,
recalling Renaissance portraits of painters and even more ambiguous.
So Rrose's first appearance in a Duchamp artwork was in the assisted
readymade called Fresh Widow.
Fresh Widow, in which a miniature French window,
painted an ugly blue green like that of beach furniture,
contains eight glass panes covered with sheets of black leather.
The French window stands on a wooden base, bearing large capital letters,
Fresh Widow, copyright Rrose Selavy, 1920.
It's a brilliant pun made simply by erasing the letter n in both words.
A Fresh Widow, French window.
All you have to do is take off the Ns.
A fresh widow is a recent one, here, perhaps a war widow.
But also, fresh, in the sense of bold, not easy to repress or squelch.
What is this widow thinking?
We don't know because the leather panes are impenetrable.
We don't know what's behind them.
The window is also closed, but the little knobs,
it's just an ordinary little window, but with leather panes which make it very odd.
You can't look through it, suggest it could be opened.
Now, Rrose next appears in another so-called readymade.
Belle Haleine, Eau de Voilette.
Beautiful breath toilette water,
whose punning title overtly plays on Belle Haleine,
title of the opera, and Voilette water, extract of violet.
But the perfume bottle itself, in this slide is empty and Eau de Voilette,
veiled water, invokes the Eau de Toilette of Duchamp's fountain,
which really has toilet water in it, right?
The bottle is labeled with one of Man Ray's photographs of Rrose and
signed Man Ray and Rrose Sélavy.
This same year, Duchamp put together a small wire bird cage,
painted it white, and put inside some 152 sugar cubes.
Although marble, they're made out of marble and they're very heavy,
an ordinary fever thermometer, a cuttlebone and a little porcelain dish.
The construction was named Why Not Sneeze, Rrose Sélavy?
The thermometer used to measure a girl's heat, the phallic shaped cuttlebone and
female dish, the sugar that is really cold marble.
These objects placed in an empty cage create a complex and
witty spectacle of unfulfilled desire.
For unlike all those erotic 18th century paintings of young girls who let the bird
out of the cage and watch it fly about, this cage doesn't contain a bird.
It's empty.
And a good sneeze is needed to change things to [FOREIGN],
water, life, [FOREIGN].
Now what I find especially interesting is that when Marcel came back to France for
a stay in July 1921, he started signing his letters to friends Rrose Selavy,
sometimes with variants like Rose Mar-Cel, Rrose Marcel,
Marcel Rrose, Marcelavy, Selatz, Mar-Selavy, and so on.
After 1925 or so, the Rrose Selavy signature disappears, replaced by
Duchamp's nickname Douche and Tourtorre, but most frequently, simply Marcel.
The bisexual punning and word play, elaborate as it was in the early 1920s,
gradually decreased in volume, although Duchamp's short book of puns,
Rrose Selavy, was not published until 1939.
Stein's own most playfully erotic verse, Happy, happy,
happy Ulva, Happy, happy, happy Ulva come in the same period.
In Alice B Gertrude Stein recalls her first visit, soon after World War I
to Man Ray's tiny studio on the where he showed his pictures of Marcel Duchamp.
Man Ray was photographing Duchamp's earliest 1916-17 and Rrose Selavy had not
yet been born, but it's hard to believe that Stein would not have been aware
of Rrose's presence when she was composing her portrait in geography of plays.
Conversely, although there's no proof that Duchamp based his pseudonym Sélavy
on Stein, or his sexy and feminine Rrose, on her more equivocal Roses.
It's at least astonishing a coincidence that Duchamp,
who never seems to have expressed a particular interest in Jewish culture,
would want to adopt a Jewish name.
And one that was the name of a lesbian writer whose name begins with an S,
even as he chose as his first name the banal Rrose that Stein made so prominent.
The two artists, in any case,
seemed to have understood one another's work perfectly.
Now, portrait next Life and Letters of Marcel Duchamp.
Let me say a word about her portraits.
Stein wrote a whole book,
a number of books called Portraits, which was supposed to the be equivalent,
obviously, of visual portraits of famous people, or photographic portraits.
But the fact is that they are very abstract and
you really can't recognize the person.
And a lot of people have thought this is just gibberish.
And in her biography of Gertrude Stein, Janet Malcolm, I don't
know whether you will be looking at that, but it's a very annoying biography because
she does do a whole biography of Stein but she says these things are just nonsense.
You can't make them out any way.
It's sort of fun, but you can only read her Autobiography Alice B Toklas and
a few other things.
And that these writings,
these portraits are kind of just sheer you know word play and nonsense.
I'm going to try to show you that that's not so,
that they make a lot more sense than you might think.
So bare with me here.
So here's the portrait on the screen.
A family likeness pleases when there is cessation of resemblances.
This is to say the points of remarkable resemblance
are those which make Henry leading.
Henry leading actually smothers Emil, Emil is pointed.
He does not overdo examples.
He even hesitates.
But am I sensible?
Am I not rather efficient in sympathy or common feeling?
I was looking to see if I could make Marcel out of it, but I can't.
Not a doctor to me, not a debtor to me, not a d to me but
a c to me, a credit to me.
To interlace a story with glass and with rope, with color and roam.
How many people roam.
Dark people roam.
Can dark people come from the north.
Are they dark then?
Do they begin to be dark when they have come from there?
Any question leads away from me.
Grave a boy, grave.
What I do recollect is this, I collect black and white.
From the standpoint of white all color is color.
From the standpoint of black.
Black is white.
White is black.
Black is black.
White is black.
White and black, is black and white.
What I recollect when I am there is that words are not birds.
How easily I feel thin.
Birds do not.
So I replace birds with tin-foil.
Silver is thin.
Life and letters of Marcel Duchamp.
Quickly returned the unabridged restraint and mention letters.
My dear Fourth, Confess to me is a quick saying.
The vote is taken.
The lucky strike works well and difficulty.
It rounds, it sounds round.
I cannot conceal attrition.
Let me think.
I repeat the fullness of bread.
In a way not bread.
Delight me.
I delight a lamb in birth.
Now, this is one of Stein's particularly opaque portraits, and
readers seemed to have avoided it as wholly non sensical.
Stein herself, after all, says in the third paragraph,
I was looking to see if I could make Marseille out of it, but I can't.
Thus, presumably admitting her failure to portray her subject.
Then again, she published the piece and gave it a very specific name so
that the reader is challenged, you hereby are challenged,
to understand the portrait's meaning.
And actually, once you get the hang of Gertrude Stein,
she is a very different modernist writer.
And it is a little bit like deciphering crossword puzzles,
but it's very worthwhile, because once you get it,
there are very few writers who can pack as much in and be so funny as she is too.
The title Next, for starters, can be understood either spatially or temporally.
A can be next to B in the picture or A can be next in line at the grocery store
in either case, Next is always a relational term.
One cannot be Next alone, now does that mean Stein is relating Next to
the previous piece in Geography and Plays called,
Tooktee or or that this composition is next on her list.
The question is left open.
Certainly the subtitle is provided.
Life and letters format, so common in the middle-brow portraits of the imminent
Victorians hardly seems appropriate for the iconoclastic Duchamp,
who's hardly a man of letters.
Still the mock title does set the stage for Steins opening sentence.
A family likeness pleases when there is a cessation of resemblances.
If it is implied we can get rid of representation art of poetry,
of the need to make a portrait of still life.
Look like its subject,
then it's particular family likeness can become pleasing.
And Duchamp's own work, "In Advance of the Broken Arm," this is an ordinary snow
shovel that Duchamp bought in a hardware store and
suspended it in a wire from the ceiling.
There are a couple of versions of it.
It doesn't resemble anything else.
But with the title, In Advance of the Broken Arm, that is from shoveling snow,
which was a novelty at the time, and other aspects of this shovel, this has become
one of his very famous, iconic works that you have at the Museum of Modern Art.
You have one in Chicago.
You have one in Yale, in New Haven, In Advance of the Broken Arm,
the snow shovel.
The ready made doesn't resemble anything else, it's a snow shovel.
Like Stein's rose, it is what it is.
As for its family likeness, the shovel has a very particular family,
the ready mades that live with it in the Arronsburg collection in
the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
That is the great collection of Duchamp's work, and he curated it himself, and
arranged them a certain way.
So, you have the shovel, the urinal, the bottle dryer, various,
they're always simple objects that you could buy in a hardware store with various
erotic connotations and uniquely Duchamp's, and they've become very famous.
The Henry and Emile, to who Marcel is now compared.
Surely Henry James who Stein regarded as a model and
again Emile Zola we just talked about a minute ago.
France's great naturalistic writer.
Descriptive as Henry James is, he's never pointed as Zola.
Having made these analogies the author hesitates.
Can Marcel really be placed in this literary context?
But quote, am I sensible?
Am I not rather efficient in sympathy or common feeling?
When you read this sentence aloud or you hear it as you are now.
You almost always read efficient as the deficient.
Am I not deficient and sympathy would be the sentence.
What would efficient and sympathy mean.
For the standard phrasing to refer to someone as to deficient and
sympathy or common feeling.
Is efficient, then, perhaps a misprint?
Or does Stein purposely take the cliché and invert it,
calling herself not exactly overflowing with sympathy, but at least efficient,
capable of the common feeling that has made Zola such an icon?
It is the character of Marcel that seems to escape her.
Still, Duchamp's place in her life remains to be assessed.
Not a doctor to me, not a debtor to me,
not a d to me, but a c to me, a credit to me.
Duchamp is not her mentor nor her disciple.
Indeed, not a d at all, but a c for credit.
The sea of SeLeivy for whose existence Stein can take credit and
in the next sentence she pays homage to the large glass.
This is the famous, the bride and the bachelor's, also in Philadelphia and
in New York, probably one of the famous works of the 20th century.
I've written about it elsewhere, I'm not going to talk about it here, but
a very strange painting on glass, where all her favorite icons come back,
the urinal, the shovel, they're all in there somewhere.
To interlace a story with glass and with rope, with color and roam,
the portrait just wants to have control over her subject,
but the fact is that Duchamp, the dark Norman crusader is a roamer.
He has, at the time of the portrait, gone back and forth, between the US and France,
again, and again, and spent time in Argentina the last year of the war.
One could never be sure where he might be.
Any question leads away from me.
Stein cannot collect Marcel's art, which seems at this moment and
time quite uncollectible, but she can recollect his chess-playing.
The black and white board to be master.
Black is white.
White is black.
Black is black.
White is black.
White and black.
Black and white.
But cheese, chest excuse me.
Is also the paradigm from Marcel's art in which, like her own, words are not birds.
They don't fly away.
And a few lines further down.
The lucky strike works well and difficultly.
It rounds, it sounds round.
The sentence evokes not only the cigarette brand, already in use in 1917,
Lucky Strike, and Duchamp was a big smoker, but
also the difficulty of rounding out sound.
Duchamp's punning titles and anagrams came to be one of his chief signatures as seen
as a man of letters in both senses of the word.
Now Duchamp had by this time invented not only the wordplay of Rose C'est la vie but
also the elaborate verb play of his ready made titles that begin
as early as 1915 with the famous bottle dryer.
Called in French [FOREIGN] which literally means the device to
take the taste out of something.
Now you get this kind of phallic bottle rack,
you have a bottle rack that has no bottles on it.
That has removed it taste and
as that kind of word play that appeal to do Shaw and also appeal to Stein.
And Légataire literally taking the taste out, so that bottle rack which
is a small silver thing.and by the way the name Readymades refers to not
only the fan Fact that Duchamp chose art from whatever he could find.
He didn't make it.
It was ready made but also, this was the beginning, 1917, of ready made clothes.
Clothes that you buy off the rack.
Before that, people had clothes made by a tailor, they went to the tailor.
You didn't have ready mades, but now you had ready mades.
And another famous ready made that Stein must have known
from the period was the Mona Lisa with a goatee and whiskers called LHOOQ, L.
In French, [FOREIGN], which we translate into English like,
she has a hot bottom, or she's hot pants, or whatever.
And that Mona Lisa is showed everywhere.
You see it in magazines.
Duchamp's version of the Mona Lisa with the goatee and mustache called LHOOQ.
[FOREIGN] And there are self-designations Rrose Selavy and
le Marchand du Sel meaning the salt seller.
He often signed his paintings with that salt seller, Marcel Duchamp.
All kinds of puns.
Now how closely aligned is the composition of a portrait like Stein's next
to Duchamp's own work?
Negatively, the relationship is remarkably close.
In both cases, we could say the attack is on readinal art.
Or in the case of language, on representational language.
Normal meaning, normal description of something.
In Stein's case on readinal poetry.
In both cases, language is to be seen as well as heard.
And one letter, rather faux name can make all the difference as
when as when deficient because efficient or French window becomes fresh widow.
Again, both Stein and Duchamp eroticized the actual language as in the "Egg
Be Takers" and part of "Place Nuts of Sacred Emily." And if the family of
Duchamp readymades from the to the Ode de Violet to the androgynous fountain by R.
Mutt and then Rose.
The fountain was signed by R.
Mutt which is a play on the cartoon Mutt and Jeff or in German, R Mutt.
R, just the letter R and then Mutt, M-U-T-T, and nobody knew who had made it.
It was sent to the anonymously and signed by R.
Mutt.
So people had a fit about it.
And it was not shown.
Although they had promised you could show anything you wanted.
And was notorious.
And there were endless articles about it in the newspapers.
Indeed, Stein's poetics is much, much closer to Duchamp's than to Picasso's
vigorous masculine and still essentially painterly aesthetic.
Even if they're cubist, even if they're distorted, they're basically paintings,
aren't they?
Consider Duchamp's playful treatment of Book art and page layout.
In 1922, Henri McBride, who had been close to both Stein and
Duchamp, for years commissioned Marcel,
who was once again living in New York, to design a book for his art essays.
The resulting pamphlet was composed
of 18 cardboard sheets held together by three rings.
Its title, some French Moderns Say McBride is spelled out
in 27 separate file tabs attached to the right edge of each page.
When viewed from the verso, the same tabs spell out the name of the book's
publisher, Societe Anonyme incorporated, and the copyright.
Is designated as that again of Rose C'est la vie.
And Rose autographs it and
you read first Joseph Solomon 40 years later by Marcel Duchamp.
So Rose Marcel's design also effected the typography and
this got very common, it was used in all kinds of places.
It's a wonderful book, Alfred the great photographer, wrote to McBride,
who passed the sentiment on to Duchamp.
In Paris, the young data poet, Pierre heard about the McBride project and
in turn, produced a book in English called The Wonderful book,
Reflections on RRose Selavy.
It's a little pamphlet.
Now this intriguing little pamphlet has been reproduced
page by page in Paul Franklin's book on.
Duchamp and in various other places in 1999 in his journal Etant Donnes.
In the funnest piece the first part of the title, next slide, is dropped and
reflections on Rrose Selavy is followed by an epigraph which is none
other than the revealing sentence in Stein's portrait, Next Life and
Letters of Marseille De Shaun.
I was looking to see if I could make Marseille out of it, but I can't.
So, obviously, Ong De Maseur and Duchamp, himself, knew that book.
Now why would Maseur choose these words as his epigraph,
thus making an explicit link between Gertrude Stein and Rose SeLeivy Duchamp.
The book itself turns out to be what was called a [FOREIGN].
It has 12 blank pages.
But the introduction bike will a woman of no importance and
that references to ask a whiles 1893 play, about a humble woman who learns her
sons is risk to credit employer is her former lover and
hence her son's father provides a clue and you'll get this on Page 33 of that book.
Pierre de M determined to write a wonderful book on Marcel Duchamp.
But in each attempt, he was overwhelmed by the difficulty of such a task.
For I ought to explain that M has always declared
he considers Duchamp the greatest genius he knows.
To speak about the ut evolution an especially the life of Marcel Duchamp
without blundering.
Might not one will hesitate anybody would hesitate.
The thing is impossible.
We know that the author of the new descending a staircase,
lives on chess and love.
The author of this book loves to recall a Sunday afternoon when he slept in
Duchamp's room under the gaze of the king, the queen and the pawns in the chess game.
Black and white move on the checkerboard of life.
After years of hesitation, Pierre de Messo brought me this book.
I preface it without the slightest hesitation.
It is perfectly idiotic or idiotically perfect.
But since it is my duty to be sincere, I must admit for the benefit of the reader
that this lazy naughty little boy said to me the other evening,
[FOREIGN] An agreeable
book must always be unreadable.
The Elizebo, which we hear a lot about now in the art world.
In her portrait, Stein presents Marcel as indefinable, unreadable.
She cannot produce a coherent identity.
For what she knows about the artist's work, glass with rope with color and
realm, his chest playing as dark node in heritage.
She can't really make a whole out of it.
Then although she doesn't say it, what to make a woman of no importance.
Who is Marcel?
So she can refer of various facets of his work.
The Chess Game.
Various other things.
Lucky Strike, but she can't really make a coherent portrait of him.
This is the time where photography had replaced painting in many ways because you
could produce, anybody could produce a photograph of somebody, so
that artists felt they really had to do something else.
They weren't just going to do a straightforward picture.
I think today was selfies, I mean they weren't going to do that.
So when she says, I was looking to see if I could make my sell out of it but
I can't.
But looks ahead to saturate a responses as John Cages not wanting
to say anything about myself.
This is made out of plexiglass.
And the illezebal is, of course, essential to our own esthetic today.
You have hope books written on that, you have in a lot of art shows now,
texts that are purposely unreadable, and you make of them, different things.
[MUSIC]
[SOUND]
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