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    Dada's Diagrams

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF or read online from Scribd
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    18 views19 pages

    Dada's Diagrams

    Uploaded by

    jhjhhjjkly
    Dada's Diagrams

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF or read online from Scribd
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    Dada’s Diagrams | David Joselit In 1919 Marcel Duchamp offered an eccentric wedding present to his sister Suzanne and her husband, Jean Crotti, He called it Unhappy Readymade, and in 1967 he described it to Pierre Cabanne as follows: Tewas a geometry book, which he had to hang by strings on the balcony of his apartmentin the rue Condamine; the wind had to go through the book, choose its own problems, turn and tear out the pages. Suzanne did a small painting fit, “Marcel’s Unhappy Readymade.” That’ all that’s left, since the wind tore it up.* Like many of Duchamp's readymades, this one perished, Or rather, itwas intentionally designed as a catalyst whose physical form would disappear into the various visual and textual reverberations it provoked. Unlike other readymades such as Fountain, whose discursive aftermath was extensive and complex, the surviving issue of Unhappy Ready- made is limited. It includes a 2920 painting by Suzanne Duchamp, a spatially compressed photograph of the same year showing the book suspended on its balcony, and an en- hanced version of this picture prepared for publication in the Botte-en-Valise (Box in a Valise). All three documents give evidence that Unhappy Readymade thoroughly negated the book’s conventional architecture. Pages are cross-hatched by shadows and riven by furrows, the smooth and undifferentiated surfaces of paper are made to resemble the fractal topographies ofa fingerprint. In assaulting the individual page, Unhappy Readymade also disrupted the book's orderly progress. If, as Duchamp fancifully states, itis up to the wind “to go through the book, choose its own problems, turn and tear out the pages,” the photograph documenting this action reveals an ingrown object collapsed into an ungainly mass. In this picture, as in Suzanne Duchamp's painting, no geometric exercises are visible on individual pages (fig. 1). Yet if geometry is not represented, ithas nevertheless been enacted through processes of puckering, folding, and furrowing caused by exposure to weather. The diagrams visible in these documents are inscribed not by the printing press but by the elements. In a gesture of desublimation typical of Duchamp’s art, his Unhappy Readymade thus twins mathematics with chance. He makes this revezberative association explicit in comments to Harriet and Sidney Janis published in 1945. The Janises write: ‘< Marcel Duchamp, Uthiprs Reed, fom Boer vais (tall 2), 1. Suzanne Duchamp and Jean Crt, 2 Marcel Duchamp, then Unhappy Readymade 939, gelatin sve print, Readymade, rom Bitoni, Philadephia Museum ofA GitofVirginia 1934-1941 (bon), 938 collotye), snd Willam Cami Prilagsipbia Museum oft, The Louise and Water Arersborg Ccolleion “This object was constructed fom a text book—a treatise on geometry—opened face up, hanging in midair and rigged diagonally to the comers ofa porch. Itwas left suspended there fora period of time, during which the wind could blow and tear its pages of geometri formulae, the rain

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