Ascetics / Aesthetics

Before the readymades and the chess career and the fame, Marcel Duchamp was a talented painter. But he turned away from his talent, he renounced it entirely:

You see, I was already disgusted with my hands. I didn’t want to do anything with my hands. I wanted things to get onto canvas or the surface by themselves, from my subconscious if possible.

His skill with a brush was an obstacle, to be bypassed. But it’s hard to move paint with your mind, nor will it “get onto the canvas” by itself. Technical challenges aside, Duchamp’s desire could not stand alone, for once the painting hand is gone, the painted canvas, as the art object, must go as well. The next rung on this ascent is the Readymade, an “ordinary thing” made by a non-artist for an ordinary purpose, but appropriated by the artist as a work of art:

These things were already made, and why not take them? My choice was just as good in the case of a readymade as in the case of a painting painted by my hands and saying, ‘This is the painting I want to sign or to accept as being mine.’ But if I take that bottle dryer and never touch it with my hands and just sign it or decide it’s mine, it’s just the same thing. In other words, I reduce the idea of aesthetic consideration to the choice of the mind, not the ability or cleverness of the hand...

Once talent with the brush becomes suspect, talent in imagining painted canvases becomes suspect as well—and unnecessary. If one is not going to make the painting, why limit oneself to paintings, when countless other not-made-by-you things exist, waiting on your divine powers of elevation? But this position, too, could only be a station, not a terminal. For even readymades were a risk, as the mind is still there, making a choice:

there’s a danger of introducing taste in it. And taste is the danger. Enemy number one is the hand for the artist, and enemy number two is taste.

But how is one to eliminate the role of taste? Does one not risk applying one’s taste, in any method of selection? One way out, is to remove all conscious choice from the process: use chance, flip a coin, throw a dart while wearing a blindfold. Thus the “cut-up” technique, invented by the Dadaists, and still in use, decades later, by David Bowie. Duchamp also tried making art that was completely emptied of meaning, the idea being, I guess, that on such a thing one’s taste could gain no purchase.

Nonsense is hard. Lewis Carroll wrote nonsense verse, and is famous for it, but his verse ‘has an idea behind it’; there is a perverse kind of sense, or a shadow of sense floating on a darkness void of meaning:

‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;

Duchamp wanted none of that. He wrote his piece Rendezvous of Sunday, February 6, 1916, with ‘great pains’: “It took me at least two weeks to do it because I would immediately see some sense coming up, so I’d have to rewrite it.” To sweep away every speck of meaning was an exhausting enterprise. Here’s part of the result:

Afterward, seven or eight posts drink some consequences now appointed; not to be forgotten, between brackets, that without the économat then, with many a similar occasion, come back four times their enormous files.

Duchamp does not say (in the interview I’ve been quoting) what he aimed for, with all these renunciations. Skill, taste, sense—these had to go, but for what? Fun? The sake of something new? He thought they’d lead him astray, they were corrupt, not to be trusted, but what was the pure or perfect goal that could be reached once they had been, painfully, removed? Maybe it was a kind of freedom.

If not in his aims, at least in his methods, Duchamp is a strange echo of St. John Climacus’s advise to ascetics, in The Ladder of Divine Ascent, a 7th century treatise written for aspiring monks. Climacus tells the “athlete of Christ” of the need to learn obedience, which is “the tomb of the will.” One must become as a corpse, which “does not argue or reason as to what is good or what seems to be bad”:

Obedience is an abandonment of discernment in a wealth of discernment.

Abandonment of discernment: in a different domain, that’s what Duchamp wanted. Duchamp aimed to “destroy the will” by deferring, as much as possible, to the hard unthinking world outside his mind; the monk does the same through a complete obedience to his spiritual director. In Duchamp’s sensibility there’s humor, silliness, and certainly an absence of God—and none of these are particularly monkish—but he does not sound unlike the man who renounces his will entire, and places his complete trust in something external, in order to get close to God:

You who have decided to strip for the arena of this spiritual confession, you who wish to take on your neck the yoke of Christ...you who are hastening to sign a pledge that you are voluntarily surrendering yourself to slavery, and in return want freedom written to your account...you should know that you have decided to travel by a short but rough way...But he who has renounced this entirely, even in things that seem to be good and spiritual and pleasing to God, has reached the end before setting out on his journey. For obedience is distrust of oneself in everything, however good it may be, right up to the end of one’s life.