618
PARTISAN REVIEW
Idea, but the Idea is resolved at last into a naked girl: a presence." Yet is
it possible to call the last work by Duchamp a "resolution"? Can the
obviously intentional, near-pornographic vulgarity of that final dio–
rama be calmly assimilated into the rest of the work?
In some sense, Paz's indifference to the visual aspect of Duchamp's
work, his apparent conviction that its perceptual qualities have
nothing
to
say,
derives its justification from the master himself.
Duchamp, who professed never to take a stance on anything ("Ma
position est l'absence de position"), did grow hot under the collar on
the subject of conventional, or rather, modernist painting. This he
derided as merely "retinal" or "olfactory" because it was without ideas.
Paz refers to this position at the very outset of his discourse: " Duchamp
was a painter of
ideas
right from the start and .. . he never yielded to
the fallacy of thinking of painting as a purely manual and visual art."
This sentence, coming on the heels of a comparison between Duchamp
and Picasso, implies of course that Picasso was stuck in that
"fallacy" - along with Matisse, Mondrian, Malevich -all of whom
might be rather chagrined to discover that they were nothing but
technicians whose work was without
ideas.
But, although this is a
generalization to which there are many exceptions, the literary sensibil–
ity is often unimpressed by the power of a visually rendered idea. One
has the sense that Paz, along with the other Duchamp interpreters, is
much more interested in and at home with the textual side of
Duchamp-the notes and in the
Green
and later the
White Box-than
with the silent, visual world of the works. And the concerted effort, the
import, of the entire hermeticist enterprise is to fold Duchamp back
into premodernist art, into tradition. The presence of the text is taken
as permission for a scriptural reading, in which the visual is seen as
figuring forth the underlying model of the Word.
But we must acknowledge several facts. Duchamp may have been
an intriguing writer, but he was a
visual
artist. Whatever he may have
thought of visuality (and I think he came to despise or maybe despair of
it more and more), it was the medium he chose, or perhaps felt stuck
with. Furthermore, he had a high regard for si lence. For the first ten
years of its public life, the
Large Glass
was deprived of words. It stood,
a si lent, enigmatic, visual monument, not yet buttressed by the chatter
of its (L)egend. Duchamp may have been interested in both images and
texts, but it is the physical and temporal distance between them that
seems
to
have compell ed him, not a tradition of continuity and closure.
The text and the all egorical dimensions it promises
to
open behind the
Glass
are never permitted
to
inhere
in the visua l matrix of the work.
