Marcel Duchamp and the Artist of Tomorrow | Interalia Magazine http://www.interaliamag.org/articles/marcel-duchamp-and-the-ar...

Interalia Magazine
An online magazine dedicated to the interactions between the arts, sciences
and consciousness.

Marcel Duchamp and the Artist of Tomorrow

More than any other artist of the modern era, the work of Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) has
shifted how art is understood. His views have altered not only the way art is made, but also the
way it is presented to and experienced by the public, erasing the barrier between art and life,
and integrating art into the real world. Jacquelynn Baas discusses his work and ideas in relation
to contemporary artists.

Jacquelynn Baas (http://www.interaliamag.org/author/jacquelynnbaas/)

July 2014
in Articles (http://www.interaliamag.org/category/articles/)
Leave a comment (http://www.interaliamag.org/articles/marcel-duchamp-and-the-artist-
of-tomorrow/#respond)

It’s art, or not art, I don’t know, I don’t care. It’s not the thing I care about the most. I care if I
can provide a new condition, a new perspective, and from that angle, see something completely
new…for me and also for others. So that in the new condition people can look at the world
differently and draw different conclusions.

-Ai Weiwei, 2013[i]

1 of 22 7/7/14, 8:50 AM
Marcel Duchamp and the Artist of Tomorrow | Interalia Magazine http://www.interaliamag.org/articles/marcel-duchamp-and-the-ar...

Marcel Duchamp

More than any other artist of the modern era, the work of Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) has
shifted how art is understood. His views have altered not only the way art is made, but also the
way it is presented to and experienced by the public. Fuller understanding of his perspective
contributes to a deeper understanding of both modern art and the historical roots of current
global culture. While the modern era in general was obsessed with avant-garde revolution,
Duchamp was continually in the vanguard of questioning the artist’s role. Ways in which he
broke new artistic ground include:

1. Crossing traditional art media boundaries to create new experiential art forms
2. Separating aesthetic experience from traditional art objects and spaces by bringing
machine-made objects, tools, and other practical items into the aesthetic realm
3. Uncoupling the identification between art and the unique object
4. Going beyond sight to address all of the senses
5. Including the sixth sense: the mind
6. Engaging the mind by incorporating lettering and words into artworks, thus inviting sight
and sound, sense and nonsense, into the “work” of art
7. Challenging notions of artistic individuality and creative originality by regularly working
in collaboration with others
8. As artist-exhibition designer, creating experiential installations
9. Questioning the validity and usefulness of critical judgment and aesthetic taste
10. Analyzing the value of art by critiquing its relationship to commerce
11. Personally rejecting conventional markers of art world success.

This is an impressive list that delineates an artistic lifetime of searching. But there’s one more:

2. Duchamp realized the time-honored modernist goal of erasing the barrier between art

2 of 22 7/7/14, 8:50 AM
Marcel Duchamp and the Artist of Tomorrow | Interalia Magazine http://www.interaliamag.org/articles/marcel-duchamp-and-the-ar...

and life.

When asked toward the end of his life what he thought his greatest achievement was, Duchamp
said,

Using painting, using art, to create a modus vivendi, a way of understanding life; that is, for the
time being, of trying to make my life into a work of art itself, instead of spending my life
creating works of art in the form of paintings or sculptures. I now believe that you can quite
readily treat your life, the way you breathe, act, interact with other people, as a picture, a
tableau vivant or a film scene, so to speak. These are my conclusions now: I never set out to do
this when I was twenty or fifteen, but I realize, after many years, that this was fundamentally
what I was aiming to do.[ii]

What Duchamp seems to be saying is that he tried using art as a way to accommodate himself
to life and in the process came to understand that life is art, or can be. Every choice we make
about how to behave or respond is a component in the work of art we call our life.

Duchamp influenced countless artists, but his influence has not always been based on much
understanding of what he was actually about. All those “found” objects transformed into
pseudo “readymades,” for example. Duchamp’s goal was not simply to identify ordinary
objects as art, but to replace sensual apprehension with cognitive apprehension (from the
Latin cognit[us], “know”). In his “Specifications for ‘Readymades’,” Duchamp described his
process as “a kind of rendezvous”—a meeting that is the result of intention on both sides.[iii]
His choice of words implies an expanded notion of consciousness encompassing matter as well
as mind.

“Matter is Mind in an opaque state,” English social activist Edward Carpenter wrote in
1898.[iv] Contemporary philosopher Galen Strawson suggests what achieving this perspective
might entail:

The powerfully open state of mind required by true materialism is hard to achieve as a natural
attitude to the world. It involves a profound reseating of one’s intuitive theoretical
understanding of nature.[v]

Duchamp’s goal with the readymades was just such a “profound reseating” of his attitude
toward and thus perception of the world. He found the hardest part to be eliminating attraction
and aversion within himself: “It’s easy to choose something you like,” he said. To find a
readymade, on the other hand,

It’s necessary to choose something tasteless, bland. This is difficult, of course. … I wanted my
choice not to be influenced, in any case, by what I wanted to demolish. That was it, the difficulty
of the problem.[vi]

A good deal of mental energy is required to cultivate this kind of relationship with things-
in-the-world, a relationship that obviates judgment, aesthetic or otherwise.

Duchamp was intensely interested in how art works, questioning presuppositions about art, the
artist, and the creative act. This line of inquiry led him to explore the mind, how it works, and
the potential of art for revelation—not mystical revelation of the divine, but the realization of

3 of 22 7/7/14, 8:50 AM
Marcel Duchamp and the Artist of Tomorrow | Interalia Magazine http://www.interaliamag.org/articles/marcel-duchamp-and-the-ar...

reality. I propose that along with his research into optics, mathematics, physics, technology,
and western philosophy, all of which have been well documented, Duchamp also more or less
systematically researched Asian philosophies and mind-practices, mining their most useful
features to create a distinctly new and distinctly western artistic practice.

The intellectually omnivorous Duchamp would surely have been aware of Vedantic, Buddhist,
and Daoist philosophies, along with Daoist internal alchemy and yogic and tantric techniques
for bringing powerful erotic energy to bear on the modification of human perspective and
behavior—techniques that had been infiltrating European religious and artistic circles since at
least the eighteenth century.[vii] (Labeling these esoteric mind-body practices “Asian” is not
completely accurate, as there is evidence that some early Greeks engaged in parallel
transformative practices.[viii]) Being aware of such practices doesn’t necessarily mean you’d
explore them personally, but there is plenty of evidence suggesting Duchamp was interested
enough to do just that. We don’t really know enough about Duchamp’s personal life to do
much more than speculate. Nevertheless, familiarity with certain perspectives and practices
does allow some of his comments, notes, and artworks to make more sense than they might
otherwise. For example: his startling assertion, “I want to grasp things with the mind the way
the penis is grasped by the vagina.”[ix] It may be helpful to know that this metaphor is
fundamental to the yogacara school of Buddhist philosophy, where a sensory object
experienced as integral to the mind is described as the “grasped,” while its perception is the
“grasper.”[x]

Then there’s his vivid remark in a letter to his artist brother-in-law Jean Crotti: “To my mind,
there is salvation only in esotericism. Yet for 60 years we’ve been witnessing public displays of
our balls and erections.”[xi] He’d written something similar thirty-one years earlier, when
Crotti and his sister Suzanne asked him to send something to show at Tristan Tzara’s Dada
Salon in Paris. Duchamp responded via telegram with just two words, “pode bal,” “balls to
you.”[xii] This might seem a somewhat rude remark to make to one’s sister and friend—unless
they were all familiar with the plentiful balls and erections featured in Indo-Tibetan tantric
images created for personal visualization practice, not for public exhibition. In this light,
Duchamp’s pithy telegram was not simply a vulgar, dadaesque “no.” Both “pode bal” and
Duchamp’s disdain for “public displays of our balls and erections” could have served as
effective shorthand between like-minded people regarding the incompatibility of artistic activity
and social display.

By the end of his life, however, Duchamp had mellowed. When asked in 1966 what personal
meaning eroticism had for him, he responded:

I don’t give it a personal meaning, but finally it is really the way to try and uncover things that
are constantly hidden…. To be able to take the liberty of revealing themand willingly place them
at everyone’s disposal. I think this is important because it’s the basis of everything and no one
talks about it.[xiii]

What Duchamp seems to be saying is that eroticism was for him a way to uncover some
important things that he tried through his own version of esoteric art to “place at everyone’s
disposal.” Why? Because these things, this process, which “no one talks about,” are not just
personal: “it’s the basis of everything.”

4 of 22 7/7/14, 8:50 AM
Marcel Duchamp and the Artist of Tomorrow | Interalia Magazine http://www.interaliamag.org/articles/marcel-duchamp-and-the-ar...

Marcel Duchamp, Design for Poster, Ready-Mades et Editions de et

Sur Marcel Duchamp, Galerie Claude Givaudan,1967. Screenprint,
69.5 x 48 cm.

“It will perhaps fall to an artist as disengaged from aesthetic considerations and as concerned
with energy as Marcel Duchamp to reconcile Art and the People,” Apollinaire predicted in
1912.[xiv] At a March 1961 symposium, Duchamp hinted how this might be:

I am convinced that, like Alice in Wonderland, [the young artist of tomorrow] will be led to
pass through the looking glass of the retina, to reach a more profound expression. …we can
foresee that just as the invention of new musical instruments changes the whole sensibility of an
era, the phenomenon of light can, due to current scientific progress, among other things,

5 of 22 7/7/14, 8:50 AM
Marcel Duchamp and the Artist of Tomorrow | Interalia Magazine http://www.interaliamag.org/articles/marcel-duchamp-and-the-ar...

become the new tool for the new artist.

He concluded with another reference to Alice in Wonderland: “The great artist of tomorrow will
go underground.”[xv] By the time of his death in 1968 Duchamp had in fact incorporated light
into his secret, “underground” work, Given: 1st The Waterfall, 2nd The Illuminating Gas
(1946-66). And art itself had expanded into something that could be an act, a word, an idea,
anything: “art as experience,” to quote the title of John Dewey’s well-known book of 1934.
Today, art encompasses social practice—the intentional transformation of social and ecological
realities.[xvi] Duchamp is not usually given credit for this last development, and when he is, it
tends to be for the wrong reasons. In this way, too, Duchamp’s prediction has come true: the
“great artist of tomorrow” has indeed gone “underground.”

When Duchamp predicted that the young artist of tomorrow “will be led to pass through the
looking-glass of the retina to reach a more profound expression,” he was referring to Lewis
Carroll’s Through The Looking-Glass where Alice, having clambered through the mirror over
her fireplace mantel,

began looking about, and noticed that what could be seen from the old room was quite common
and uninteresting, but that all the rest [on her side of the glass] was as different as possible. …
“They don’t keep this room so tidy as the other,” Alice thought to herself.[xvii]

That last line calls to mind Marcel Duchamp’s marvelously messy studio. This was where
Duchamp’s art came from, this untidy, n-dimensional, other side of the looking glass. As
William James wrote in Varieties of Religious Experience, “our normal waking consciousness,
rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it,
parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely
different.”[xviii] According to Duchamp, with the rare exceptions of symbolists like Redon and
Böcklin, artists since Courbet had little interest in piercing that veil, content with making an
impression on the “retina” rather than trying to “reach a more profound expression.”

6 of 22 7/7/14, 8:50 AM
Marcel Duchamp and the Artist of Tomorrow | Interalia Magazine http://www.interaliamag.org/articles/marcel-duchamp-and-the-ar...

Marcel Duchamp (American, b. France, 1887-1968). Detail, To Be Looked at (from the Other Side
of the Glass) with One Eye, Close to, for Almost an Hour, 1918. Oil, silver leaf, lead wire, and
magnifying lens on glass, mounted in a standing metal frame, 20 1/8 x 16 x 1 3/8 inches. Museum
of Modern Art, Katherine S. Dreier Bequest. Photo: Jacquelynn Baas.

Why was Duchamp so obsessed with the retina? The light-sensitive retina at the back of the
eye is, after all, an extension of the brain. In the process of passing through the eye’s convex
lens, light-images generated by the visual world are flipped, left to right and upside-down (as
with the lens in Duchamp’s To Be Looked At, 1918). When these light-images reach the retina,
chemical events are triggered, creating electrical impulses that travel via the fibers of the optic
nerve to the visual cortex at the back of the brain. There the brain manipulates these signals
into an unreversed, right side up version of the world that, if both eyes are working properly,
appears convincingly three-dimensional.

But ‘reality’ looks very different to a bird, or a bee, or a baby, who is still learning to see. What
appears to be ‘out there’ has less to do with reality than with the structure of our eyes, the
functioning of our brain, and habits developed over a lifetime of looking.[xix] As anyone who
has taken LSD or engaged in serious meditation knows, brain functioning and perceptual habits
can be changed. “Retinal art” would seem to have been Duchamp-speak for art satisfied with
surface impressions, unplumbed reality; and “more profound expression” for art that reflects
and draws us into reality’s deeper dimensions. The more profound expression Duchamp was
after operates not just at the superficial level of eye and brain, but aims to change how and thus

7 of 22 7/7/14, 8:50 AM
Marcel Duchamp and the Artist of Tomorrow | Interalia Magazine http://www.interaliamag.org/articles/marcel-duchamp-and-the-ar...

what we see.

Most observers, even informed ones, would say that Duchamp’s art was too esoteric to concern
itself with social reality. From Duchamp’s perspective, however, there was no such thing as
un-social reality; there is only reality, this heterogeneous world where everything is connected.
During World War II Duchamp submitted for the cover of a fourth of July “Americana” issue
of Vogue magazine a collage entitled Allégorie de genre (1943). “I made a George Washington
in the geographical shape of the United States,” Duchamp said later. “In place of his face, I put
the American flag. It seems that my red stripes looked like dripping blood.”[xx] What
Duchamp described as “red stripes” were made not with paint, but with iodine, on white gauze
that he fastened down with thirteen star-headed nails—metaphorically crucifying George
Washington, the United States, and its flag. The effect is nothing if not visceral. Not
surprisingly, Vogue rejected Duchamp’s design.

Marcel Duchamp (American, b. France, 1887-1968).

Allégorie de genre (Portrait of George Washington),
1943. Collage: tinted gauze, cotton wool, gouache, cut
paper, gold foil, and nails in a wood and glass box, 54.8 x
42 x 8.4 cm. Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre
Georges Pompidou, Paris. Purchase, 1987 (AM
1987-632).

8 of 22 7/7/14, 8:50 AM
Marcel Duchamp and the Artist of Tomorrow | Interalia Magazine http://www.interaliamag.org/articles/marcel-duchamp-and-the-ar...

The “double view” required to see this work as simultaneously the bloodied head of George
Washington and a blood-drenched map of the United States is stimulated by an optical illusion,
a form of mind-training.[xxi] This one teaches us to “juggle gravity” by granting our
perception ninety degrees of flexibility to see both images at once. Duchamp’s title translates
literally as “Genre Allegory”—an oxymoron, since “genre” art depicts events from everyday
life, while “allegory” symbolically conveys moral, historical, or political meaning. A more
imaginative reading of the title combines sounding-out and translation: “all the blood (‘gory’)
of [our] kind.” Allégorie de genre uncannily manages to be both pacifist and patriotic thanks to
this undertone of compassion. One of the things Duchamp is gently prodding us toward here is
a “both/and” dimensionality in our habits of perception—including our perception of history
and of human nature.

I want to cite just a few artists who seem to me to have carried on Duchamp’s legacy of
reconciling art and the people—a few, because his example has been so pervasive that it’s
impossible to be comprehensive. Artists in general tend to be Duchamp’s best interpreters, but
it’s interesting how many ‘Duchampian’ artists are Asian. There was a major exhibition in
Beijing recently, “Duchamp and/or/in China,” featuring works by Duchamp and over twenty
contemporary Chinese artists who acknowledge his influence.[xxii] The reason seems obvious,
at least to me: in one way or another, Asian artists tend to be culturally grounded in a
worldview that Duchamp had to work hard to achieve. When I asked Chinese artist Ai Weiwei
to what extent Daoism had been a resource for his thinking about art, for example, he
responded:

That’s very difficult to analyze, it’s like asking me to isolate to what degree gravity relates to my
job, hmm? …We all know gravity’s there, but we never “know” it. Yet all movements somehow
relate to it. … So I can’t know; I don’t know.[xxiii]

Ai’s negative emphasis on the word “know” says it all. From Zhuangzi we learn that “Nie Que
was questioning Wan Ni. Four times he asked a question and four times Wang Ni said he didn’t
know. Nie Que proceeded to hop around in great glee,” delighted by his realization that there
are no answers to questions like the one I asked Ai Weiwei.[xxiv]

9 of 22 7/7/14, 8:50 AM
Marcel Duchamp and the Artist of Tomorrow | Interalia Magazine http://www.interaliamag.org/articles/marcel-duchamp-and-the-ar...

Left to right: Taikkun Li, Jacquelynn Baas, and Ai Weiwei in Ai’s Beijing home and studio, May
2010. Photo: Taikkun Li.

When Duchamp predicted in 1961 that “the phenomenon of light” would “become the new tool
for the new artist,” he didn’t have to long to wait: Korean artist Nam June Paik would soon be
utilizing light as a tool for artistic enlightenment. Paik’s contribution was his adaptation of the
technology of the moving image—film, single-channel video, and, most notably, television—to
sculptural and installation formats. Through electronic technology, Paik turned performance art
into something broadly accessible, even engaging. Talk about energy: his self-stated goal was
nothing less than to “enrich the synapses between the brain cells of humanity.”[xxv]

Paik reframed the Zen homily about not mistaking the finger pointing at the moon for the moon
to reflect on the nature of art: “What is art? Is it the moon? Orthe fingertip, which points to this
moon?”[xxvi] Duchamp and Paik were of the same mind about art being anything that points
us toward “a more profound expression.” As Paik’s Fluxus colleague (and fellow Buddhist)
Robert Filliou put it: “Art is what makes life more interesting than art.”[xxvii]

10 of 22 7/7/14, 8:50 AM
Marcel Duchamp and the Artist of Tomorrow | Interalia Magazine http://www.interaliamag.org/articles/marcel-duchamp-and-the-ar...

Nam June Paik (American, b. Seoul, Korea, 1932 – 2006). Video Flag, 1985-1996). 70 video
monitors, 4 laser disc players, computer, timers, electrical devices, wood and metal housing on
rubber wheels, 94 3/8 x 139 3/4 x 47 3/4 in. Hirshhorn Museum, Smithsonian Holenia Purchase
Fund in Memory of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1996 (96.4 ).

Even before Duchamp’s death, the Fluxus movement took avant-garde art global.[xxviii] It’s
important to note that this evolutionary process of diffusion has simultaneously been a process
of expansion. Just because there are humans doesn’t mean there are no longer one-celled
creatures; conceptual art didn’t replace or even displace painting. Nothing has been lost:
drawing and painting still exist; so does sculpture. There are more artists, of all kinds, than ever
before, and art (along with of course the art market) is still thriving. And somehow, Duchamp
remains more present than ever, permeating the art world like a genius loci or Kami—a
presiding spirit.

An interviewer recently asked Jeff Koons about his 1990 series of works showing Koons and
his Italian porn star wife “copulating gauzily (and, in some cases, not so gauzily). … To hear
him tell it, he really thought he was making work anybody could identify with, to help relieve
us, he says, of ‘guilt and shame’.” Koons claimed that art

has been a vehicle for me that’s been about enlightenment and expanding my own parameters,
to give me courage to exercise the freedom that I have in life. Every day I wake up and I really
try to pinch myself to take advantage of today and to use that freedom of gesture to do what I

11 of 22 7/7/14, 8:50 AM
Marcel Duchamp and the Artist of Tomorrow | Interalia Magazine http://www.interaliamag.org/articles/marcel-duchamp-and-the-ar...

really like to do.[xxix]

Were it not for the gauzy prose, Koons’s quote could be straight from Duchamp. Who knows
how sincere Koons (a creator of eye candy if ever there was one) is being here, but even the
uncertainty is pure Duchamp.

In a similar vein, Italian artist Gianfranco Baruchello told arts writer Henry Martin:

Every day, just before noon, you can look in the mirror and there’s a voice from behind the
glass that asks you “Have you been Duchamp this morning?” and you have to answer either
yes or no. And every day now, I can say yes, at least a little bit. … there’s this sense of
lightness, this sense of irresponsibility, and these are really the things that are fundamental in
his work.[xxx]

Baruchello first met Duchamp in 1962. Two years later, in Milan, Duchamp signed the backs of
three cracked mirrors, describing them as “readymade future portraits.”[xxxi] The signatures
appear on the front of the mirrors in reverse, giving the effect that Duchamp really is behind the
mirror where you see your own “portrait,” signed by Duchamp.

Baruchello is a wide-ranging artist—one of his art “mediums,” for example, was a functioning,
self-sufficient farm, Agricola Cornelia (1973-81). This might not seem so unusual today when,
just to mention two examples among many, Rirkrit Tiravanija and Kamin Lertchaiprasert are
nurturing The Land in Thailand, and Juan William Chávez is husbanding the Pruitt-Igoe Bee
Sanctuary in Saint Louis. Baruchello seems to have been at the leading edge of the ecological
art trend, and he says his “thoughts in running an agricultural enterprise as an art experience
had revolved…about Marcel.”[xxxii] There is a hint of just how this might be so in a note
Baruchello made after first meeting Duchamp: “He talked to me of the hypotheses about the
total obsolescence of art, which is entirely useless or might become useless.”[xxxiii] Useless as
“art” because it has disappeared into life—as in Fluxus impresario George Maciunas’s 1963 call
to: “Promote non art reality to be grasped by all peoples, not only critics, dilettantes and
professionals.[xxxiv]

Many artists have worked some portion of the vast territory Duchamp staked out, but only some
have explicitly and consistently explored issues that are at the core of the paradigm shift he
effected. Perhaps the most important—an artist who approaches Duchamp in terms of both the
depth of his intelligence and the breadth of his practice—is Ai Weiwei. Born in Beijing in
1957, Ai’s artistic practice questions tradition and provokes the Chinese state while forging a
position that allows him to influence cultural policy and promote individual freedom. He
speaks of individual experience as “the foundation for social change”—a conception of art as
experience capable of creating new political as well as cultural possibilities. What he cares
about, he says, is not art, but providing “a new condition, a new perspective … So that in the
new condition people can look at the world differently and draw different conclusions.”[xxxv]

12 of 22 7/7/14, 8:50 AM
Marcel Duchamp and the Artist of Tomorrow | Interalia Magazine http://www.interaliamag.org/articles/marcel-duchamp-and-the-ar...

Ai Weiwei, Project for Pull of the Moon, 2014. Collaboration with Bert Benally for Navajo TIME
(Temporary Installations Made for the Environment), Coyote Canyon, Navajo Nation, Arizona.
Photo: Courtesy Eileen Braziel.

What I think of as Ai’s first artwork was a collaborative effort: lowering the dirt floor of the
bunker-type dwelling to which his family had been exiled when he was ten years old.[xxxvi] It
“had a very symbolic meaning,” Ai says now.

Because we could not raise the ceiling, the only thing we could do is dig deeper, one step
deeper, one shovel deeper. So we dug our hole one shovel deeper, and then we could live in
there. And during the whole history of China, people have been trying to dig a little bit deeper
rather than raise the ceiling, and now I’m tired of it. I have to raise the ceiling as much as I
can.[xxxvii]

Ai’s personal trajectory led him in 1982 to relocate to New York, where he was drawn to the
work of Jeff Koons, Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and especially Marcel Duchamp.[xxxviii]
Since returning to Beijing in 1994, Ai has become something of a modern renaissance artist: his
art production encompasses objects and installation, photography and video, books and
archives, architecture and, more recently, social media. About Duchamp Ai says,

I really appreciate how much Duchamp, as an artist, had an influence on me. I can’t think
without him, or be what I’m going to be. I’m very lucky to know his work, and also to know
that such an artist can exist in such a time. Of course, there’s no answer for art; there’s no fixed
position. We all have to find our own way, our own approach, and our own “game” to
play.[xxxix]

13 of 22 7/7/14, 8:50 AM
Marcel Duchamp and the Artist of Tomorrow | Interalia Magazine http://www.interaliamag.org/articles/marcel-duchamp-and-the-ar...

What Duchamp taught him, Ai says, is “that being an artist is more about a lifestyle and an
attitude than producing some product. … all activities or artworks should be social.”[xl] One of
the things Ai brings to the situation is his solid grounding in Chinese perspectives on reality. “I
think that competing with nature is basically a Western idea,” he says.

As a Chinese, you’re always part of your surroundings. Nature can be man-made or an

industrial postmodern society. I believe that you’re always part of it and consciously or
unconsciously you’re in there, trying to build up some kind of relationship, which means the
consciousness and awareness will be useful to others. That’s our condition.

When asked about his “yet-unrealized projects,” Ai’s response could not be more Duchampian:
“I think it would be to disappear,” he says. “Nothing could be bigger than that.”[xli] He’s not
talking about death or imprisonment, but about the interdependence of art and context: “I more
and more take myself, the society, and the current political conditions as a readymade.”[xlii]

I want to end with a young Korean artist-duo, Moon Kyungwon and Jeon Joonhoo, and their
remarkable ensemble piece, News from Nowhere. Initially presented at Documenta (13) in
Kassel, Germany in 2012, the installation continues to evolve, with the News from Nowhere,
Chicago Laboratory presented at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Fall 2013. The
project was the joint outcome of a multi-national consortium, “Voice of Metanoia,” convened
by Moon and Jeon to consider the condition of the world today, how it might be imagined in the
future, and the relationship of art to existence.

Work partners but not life partners, Moon was born in 1969 in Seoul, and Jeon the same year in
Busan, South Korea. News from Nowhere began in Seoul in 2011 as a way to address the role
and social function of art, including the direction of contemporary art practice and design in the
context of society as a whole. Their goal was to envision a possible future through
collaborative projects with artists, designers, and architects, and other experts from diverse
fields, such as education, economics, politics, culture, and religion. Their collaborators
included the Japanese architect Toyo Ito, Delft-based global think tank The Why Factory and
Dutch design firm MVRDV, Korean fashion designer Kuho Jung, Japanese fashion designer
Kosuke Tsumura, Japanese design engineers takram design, and Japanese musician Toshi
Ichiyanagi.

The entry/focal point of the installation in Kassel was a dual-screen film directed by Moon and
Jeon: El Fin del Mundo (2012). In Chicago a second dual-screen film, Avyakta (2013), was
added at the conclusion of the exhibition. “Avyakta” is a Vedic term for “not manifest,”
“devoid of form.” I want to focus here, however, on the earlier film, El Fin del Mundo (“The
End of the World”), a hauntingly beautiful narrative that takes place in a single interior space in
post-apocalyptic Japan at two different moments in time.

14 of 22 7/7/14, 8:50 AM
Marcel Duchamp and the Artist of Tomorrow | Interalia Magazine http://www.interaliamag.org/articles/marcel-duchamp-and-the-ar...

Moon Kyungwon and Jeon Joonhoo. El Fin del Mundo, 2012, in News from Nowhere, 2013,
School of the Art Institute of Chicago. High definition video, 13 minutes, 35 seconds.

On one screen we see a male artist who continues working through catastrophe. On the other,
we watch a female descendant of survivors who has been sent by “Tempus,” a corporation now
running what’s left of the world, going about her assigned work of analysis and classification.
But the woman’s intuition is activated and she enters the room where the man lived and
worked. Encountering traces of his artworks, she mentally transcends time and space,
experiences an inner vision of what occurred in this place, and is enlightened by awakening to
aesthetic experience that once enriched life on earth. Her final words before returning to
Tempus: “I can’t forget that moment. My life was never again the same. Now I can dream of a
new world. My future will reflect this.”

Moon Kyungwon and Jeon Joonhoo. El Fin del Mundo, 2012, in News from Nowhere, 2013,
School of the Art Institute of Chicago. High definition video, 13 minutes, 35 seconds.

15 of 22 7/7/14, 8:50 AM
Marcel Duchamp and the Artist of Tomorrow | Interalia Magazine http://www.interaliamag.org/articles/marcel-duchamp-and-the-ar...

Moon Kyungwon and Jeon Joonhoo. El Fin del Mundo, 2012, in News from Nowhere, 2013,
School of the Art Institute of Chicago. High definition video, 13 minutes, 35 seconds.

El Fin del Mundo is an extraordinarily moving film to which I cannot do justice here. It is also
an extraordinarily sophisticated work that references Marcel Duchamp in ways that are subtle
but hard to miss: the artist making a bricolage version of the figure in Given; the fusion of male
making and female knowing into a unified realization of reality; an awareness toward the end
that the artist’s studio has been reversed, meaning that what we’re watching is taking place in
the alternate dimension of a looking-glass. To Moon and Jeon, the mirror signifies “double
meaning: mirror as art. Together, they make a real world.”[xliii] Art here represents access to
creative, collaborative mental freedom that is as essential as shelter and sustenance to survival.
According to Moon and Jeon, “Art doesn’t seem to be a question of representation or technical
things, but rather, a process of seeking the perspectives of individual entities—this process itself
is an artistic practice.”[xliv]

It’s important to note that the future manifested in News from Nowhere is in no way utopian.
The design solutions presented in this vision of a possible future (beautiful, but chilling in their
implications) seem to me not so much solutions as instigations to head off impending
catastrophe. But according to Moon and Jeon, I’m wrong:

We do not create Utopia…nor do we offer any answer or particular message. What’s more,
we’re not advocating the need to revolt against today’s way of life in the hopes of creating a
new world. In our project, the word “rethink” does not equate “reset,” as in starting anew.
Instead, our use of “re-“ involves empathizing and joining forces with others. … To us, the role
of art isn’t about providing answers, it’s about asking questions and participating.[xlv]

Their statement is reminiscent of both Marcel Duchamp’s determination not to let himself be
influenced in his choices either by what he liked or “by what I wanted to demolish,” and Ai
Weiwei’s ambition to take himself along with current conditions as a readymade.

When Marcel Duchamp died Jasper Johns wrote, “The art community feels Duchamp’s
presence and his absence. He has changed the condition of being here.”[xlvi] There’s an
understanding in Mahayana Buddhism that important texts recording the teachings of the
Buddha existed during and for a while after the Buddha’s lifetime and then, having liberated
everyone within their reach, went “underground,” ready to be rediscovered when needed.[xlvii]

16 of 22 7/7/14, 8:50 AM
Marcel Duchamp and the Artist of Tomorrow | Interalia Magazine http://www.interaliamag.org/articles/marcel-duchamp-and-the-ar...

Maybe this is what Duchamp had in mind when he concluded that 1961 lecture with the news
that “the great artist of tomorrow will go underground.” Maybe he really was talking about
himself. His friend and biographer Robert Lebel wrote about him, “Duchamp, because of what
he calls his ‘delay in glass,’ seems to have had in mind the anonymity of future archaeological
excavations, after the final collapse of our own civilization.”[xlviii] Did Duchamp envision the
work of Moon and Jeon? I wonder.

…………………………………………………………

[i] Excerpt from Barnaby Martin, Hanging Man: The Arrest of Ai Weiwei
(http://www.amazon.com/Hanging-Man-The-Arrest-Weiwei/dp/0374167753/saloncom08-20)
(New York: Faber and Faber, 1913): http://www.salon.com/2013/09
/28/ai_weiwei_my_captors_knew_nothing_about_art/ (accessed 3 February 2014).

[ii]From a 1966 interview for Belgian television by Jean Antoine, trans. Sue Rose, The Art
Newspaper, number 27, April 1993; The Art Newspaper, web only [29 March 2013]:
http://www.theartnewspaper.com/articles/An+interview+with+Marcel+Duchamp/29278
(http://www.theartnewspaper.com/articles/An+interview+with+Marcel+Duchamp
/29278) (accessed 3 February 2014).

[iii] The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, ed. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (Cambridge,
MA: Da Capo Press, 1989), 3.

[iv] Edward Carpenter, Angels’ Wings: Essays on Art and its Relation to Life (London: S.
Sonnenschein; New York: Macmillan, 1898), 216.

[v] Galen Strawson, Real Materialism (Oxford University Press, 2008), 36-37.

[vi] Georges Charbonnier, Entretiens avec Marcel Duchamp (Marseille: André Dimanche,
1994), 65-66.

[vii] See: Rending the Veil: Concealment and Secrecy in the History of Religions, ed. Elliot R.
Wolfson (Chappaqua, NY: Seven Bridges Press, 1999); and Marsha Keith Schuchard, William
Blake’s Sexual Path to Spiritual Vision (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2008; originally
published as Why Mrs. Blake Cried, London: Century, 2006). For an in-depth history of the
European “discovery” of Asian religions, see Urs App, The Birth of Orientalism (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).

[viii] David Gordon White, Kiss of the Yogini (University of Chicago Press, 2003), 187.

[ix] From a September 1956 interview with Lawrence D. Steefel, Jr., in: The Position of
Duchamp’s Glass in the Development of His Art (New York: Garland, 1977), 312.

[x] Robert E. Buswell Jr. and Donald S. Lopez Jr., The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism.
(Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 108, “bhāga.”

[xi] Letter to Jean Crotti, 17 August 1952, reprinted in TABU DADA: Jean Crotti and Suzanne
Duchamp, 1915–1922, ed. William A. Camfield and Jean-Hubert Martin (Kunsthalle Bern,
1983), 8.

17 of 22 7/7/14, 8:50 AM
Marcel Duchamp and the Artist of Tomorrow | Interalia Magazine http://www.interaliamag.org/articles/marcel-duchamp-and-the-ar...

[xii] Telegram of 1 June 1921, Affectionately Marcel: The Selected Correspondence of Marcel
Duchamp, ed. Francis M. Naumann and Hector Obalk (Ghent: Ludion Press, 2000), 98. Also
see Cabanne, Dialogues, 65.

[xiii] Cabanne, Dialogues, 88.

[xiv]Guillaume Apollinaire, The Cubist Painters, trans. Peter Read (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2004), 75. Published in 1913, Cubist Painters was written and edited in 1912.

[xv]“Where Do We Go From Here?,” presentation at the Philadelphia Museum College of Art,

published Studio International, volume 189, number 973 (Jan/Feb 1975), 28, in both French
and English. Last line in English in both versions.

[xvi] Just a couple of the recent publications on this topic: Tom Finkelpearl, What We Made:
Conversations on Art and Social Cooperation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013);
Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991-2011, ed. Nato Thompson (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2012).

[xvii] The Annotated Alice, introduction and annotations Martin Gardner (New York and
London: W. W. Norton, 2000), 144.

[xviii]William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience; A Study in Human Nature (New
York: Modern Library, 1902), 378. Subsequent text: “The keynote of it is invariably a
reconciliation. It is as if the opposites of the world, whose contradictoriness and conflict make
all our difficulties and troubles, were melted into unity” (379).

[xix] See: Donald D. Hoffman, Visual Intelligence: How We Create What We See (New York:
W. W. Norton, 1998). See also my essay, “Unframing Experience,” in Learning Mind:
Experience into Art, ed. Mary Jane Jacob and Jacquelynn Baas (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2009), 217-219.

[xx] Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, transl. Rod Padgett (London: Thames
and Hudson, 1971; reprinted Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 1979), 85.

[xxi] Hoffman, Visual Intelligence, chapter four: “Spontaneous Morphing,” especially 95-96.

[xxii]At the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, 26 April – 16 June 2013.

[xxiii] From an interview with Jacquelynn Baas, 18 May 2010, at Ai Weiwei’s studio in
Caochangdi, Beijing, China; published in: Chicago Makes Modern: How Creative Minds
Changed Society, ed. Mary Jane Jacob and Jacquelynn Baas (School of the Art Institute of
Chicago with University of Chicago Press, 2012), 269.

[xxiv] Burton Watson, Zuangzi: Basic Writings (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003),
89.

[xxv] Thomas Kellein, “The World of Art of the World: Nam June Paik as Philosopher,” in
Nam June Paik: Video Time—Video Space, ed. Toni Stooss and Thomas Kellien (New York:
Abrams, 1993), 36.

18 of 22 7/7/14, 8:50 AM
Marcel Duchamp and the Artist of Tomorrow | Interalia Magazine http://www.interaliamag.org/articles/marcel-duchamp-and-the-ar...

[xxvi] The metaphor also shows up in Pradipoddyotana by the ninth-century tantric author
Candrakirti: “The one who sees only the literal, does not see reality—like one who wants to see
the moon, gazing at the finger [pointing at it]” (Christian K. Wedemeyer, Making Sense of
Tantric Buddhism [New York: Columbia University Press, 2013], 105). For more on Paik, see:
Baas, Smile of the Buddha (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 178-187

[xxvii] Gerhard Neumann, “‘Les enfants adorent les nouilles bleues,’ Daniel Spoerri ethnologue
de la culture culinaire,” in Restaurant Spoerri (Paris: Jeu de Paume, 2002), 24.

[xxviii] See: Jacquelynn Baas, Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life (Hanover: Hood
Museum of Art and University of Chicago Press, 2011).

[xxix] Carl Swanson, “Jeff Koons is the Most Successful American Artist Since Warhol. So
What’s the Art World Got Against Him?,” New York Magazine, 13 May 2013:
http://www.vulture.com/2013/05/age-of-jeff-koons.html (http://www.vulture.com/2013/05
/age-of-jeff-koons.html) (accessed 5-7-13).

[xxx] Gianfranco Baruchello and Henry Martin, Why Duchamp: An Essay on Aesthetic Impact
(New Paltz, NY: McPherson, 1985), 84-85.

[xxxi] Arturo Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp (New York: Delano
Greenidge, 2000), 841.

[xxxii] Baruchello and Martin, Why Duchamp, 11. Baruchello remarks on Duchamp’s “answer
to somebody’s question about what he did the first thing in the morning; he said ‘I breathe.’ …
It may be a quip, but it also opens up onto everything that’s yoga in Duchamp, just as eau et gaz
was his way of talking about prana [“life force,” cosmic energy], a whole idea of a science of
the body. … I can’t help seeing that there are any number of parallels between Duchamp and
certain kinds of Oriental wisdom” (91).

[xxxiii] Quoted in Paul B. Franklin and Carla Subrizi, “He Who Calls Himself Duchamp’s
Son,” Étant donné, number 10, 2011, 69.

[xxxiv] George Maciunas, “Fluxus Manifesto,” 1963, published often, e.g., in Baas, Fluxus, 22

[xxxv] Martin, http://www.salon.com/2013/09

/28/ai_weiwei_my_captors_knew_nothing_about._art/ (accessed 3 February 2014)

[xxxvi] Chin-Chin Yap, “Introduction: A Handful of Dust” in, Ai Weiwei, Works: Beijing
1993-2003 (Beijing: Timezone 8, 2003), 16.

[xxxvii] The idea of lowering the floor was Ai’s. His father, poet Ai Qing, was denounced
during China’s Cultural Revolution and the family was sent to live in an underground dwelling:
“We walked into the space, which was an abandoned excavation with just a roof covering, so
you could barely walk in there. It was completely dark; there was no window, just a small hole.
… When I followed my father in, immediately his head hit something—a pillar, a beam. … So
he immediately knelt down, because the blow was very strong. I remember it vividly” (Baas,
Chicago Makes Modern, 268).

[xxxviii] Johns is himself an acknowledged follower of Duchamp; see: Baas, Smile of the

19 of 22 7/7/14, 8:50 AM
Marcel Duchamp and the Artist of Tomorrow | Interalia Magazine http://www.interaliamag.org/articles/marcel-duchamp-and-the-ar...

Buddha, 144-157.

[xxxix] Baas, Chicago Makes Modern, 271.

[xl] Ai Weiwei Speaks with Hans Ulrich Obrist (London: Penguin, 2011), 87, 98.

[xli] Ai Weiwei Speaks,69, 99.

[xlii] Baas, Chicago Makes Modern, 272.

[xliii] From an unpublished interview with Jacquelynn Baas, 14 October 2013, at the School of
the Art Institute of Chicago.

[xliv] Moon Kyungwong and Jeon Joonhoo, et al., News From Nowhere: A Platform for the
Future & Introspection on the Present (National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea, 2013),
132.

[xlv] Moon and Jeon, News From Nowhere, 245-246.

[xlvi] Artforum, volume7, number 3 (November 1968), 6; reprinted Jasper Johns: writings,
sketchbook notes, interviews, ed. Kirk Varnedoe (New York: Museum of Modern Art/Abrams,
1996), 22.

[xlvii] Especially true of tantric texts. Wedemeyer, Making Sense of Tantric Buddhism, 92.

[xlviii] Robert Lebel, Marcel Duchamp, trans. George Heard Hamilton (New York: Grove
Press, 1959), 69.

Art (http://www.interaliamag.org/tag/art/), Creativity (http://www.interaliamag.org

/tag/creativity/), Imagination (http://www.interaliamag.org/tag/imagination/)

About Jacquelynn Baas

Jacquelynn Baas (PhD University of Michigan) was the founding director of the Hood Museum
of Art, Dartmouth College, and director of the University of California Berkeley Art Museum
and Pacific Film Archive, where she still serves as Director Emeritus. In 2000 she co-founded
the arts consortium, Awake: Art, Buddhism, and the Dimensions of Consciousness, which over
the course of its five-year existence generated some fifty exhibitions, educational programs,
artist residencies, and two books: Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art (2004) and Smile of the
Buddha: Eastern Philosophy and Western Art from Monet to Today (2005). She has organized
over thirty exhibitions, including Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life (2011), voted “Best
Show in a University Gallery” by the International Association of Art Critics. This essay is
from her book-in-progress, Marcel Duchamp and the Art of Life. View all posts with
Jacquelynn Baas → (http://www.interaliamag.org/author/jacquelynnbaas/)

20 of 22 7/7/14, 8:50 AM
Marcel Duchamp and the Artist of Tomorrow | Interalia Magazine http://www.interaliamag.org/articles/marcel-duchamp-and-the-ar...

← Dialogue in art and science (http://www.interaliamag.org/articles/dialogue-in-art-

and-science/)
Conversations between Arts and Heritage → (http://www.interaliamag.org/blog/conversations-
between-arts-and-heritage/)

Also In This Issue

Convergent Territories
Issue 3 | July 2014

Colliding Worlds (http://www.interaliamag.org/interviews/colliding-worlds/)

Arthur I Miller
Under the Microscope (http://www.interaliamag.org/interviews/under-the-microscope/)
Rob Kesseler
on Biomimicry (http://www.interaliamag.org/interviews/on-biomimicry/)
Janine Benyus
Dialogue in art and science (http://www.interaliamag.org/articles/dialogue-in-art-
and-science/)
Marina Wallace
on Experimental Philosophy (http://www.interaliamag.org/interviews/on-experimental-
philosophy/)
Joshua Knobe
Converging Territories (http://www.interaliamag.org/articles/converging-territories/)
Lalla Essaydi
Blurring Boundaries (http://www.interaliamag.org/interviews/blurring-boundaries/)
Anna Dumitriu
Poeisis (http://www.interaliamag.org/articles/photograms/)
Susan Derges
Do we have a creative intelligence? (http://www.interaliamag.org/articles/do-we-have-a-
creative-intelligence/)
Murray Hunter
The Chambered Nautilus (http://www.interaliamag.org/poetry/1100/)
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Convergent Territories (http://www.interaliamag.org/imagining-possibilities/convergent-
territories/)
Rob Kesseler
View Issue (/issue)

Latest Blog Posts

Conversations between Arts and Heritage (http://www.interaliamag.org

/blog/conversations-between-arts-and-heritage/)
July 2, 2014
Helen Storey: When Chemistry and Design Converge (http://www.interaliamag.org
/blog/helen-storey-when-chemistry-and-design-collide/)
July 1, 2014
Agnes Denes: Early Philosophical Drawings (http://www.interaliamag.org/blog/agnes-
denes-early-philosophical-drawings/)

21 of 22 7/7/14, 8:50 AM
Marcel Duchamp and the Artist of Tomorrow | Interalia Magazine http://www.interaliamag.org/articles/marcel-duchamp-and-the-ar...

July 1, 2014
Claude Shannon: A Bit more Information (http://www.interaliamag.org/blog/claude-
shannon-a-bit-more-information/)
June 24, 2014
What ants teach us about the brain, cancer and the internet (http://www.interaliamag.org
/blog/the-emergent-genius-of-ant-colonies/)
May 30, 2014
Read the blog (/blog/)

No comments yet.

Home | About Interalia | Privacy & Cookies | Terms & Conditions | Call for Submissions | Log
In | Subscribe

The Interalia Centre © 2014

22 of 22 7/7/14, 8:50 AM