Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Visual Art Secret Kept, Mystery Unsolved
Posted by Jen Graves on Tue, Jun 23, 2009 at 10:14 AM
The legend goes like this.
On Easter Day in 1916, the artist Marcel Duchamp—the man who invented the readymade (or is "invented" the right word?)—gave his friend Walter Arensberg a ball of nautical twine and asked Arensberg to insert an object into the center of the ball. Duchamp asked Arensberg not to tell him what was in the center of his own artwork. He sandwiched the ball between two brass plates held together by four screws, and titled the sculpture With Hidden Noise because when you shake it, the secret contents make a rattling sound.
Duchamp's sculpture is a surrealist exercise in collaboration and symbolism, but it's also a critique of the author's role in creating art. There is always something at the heart of the work, Duchamp insists, that even the artist doesn't know and certainly doesn't control.
According to lore, Arensberg didn't die with the secret. He passed it on to another one of Duchamp's friends, Walter Hopps.
But Hopps died in 2005, and (because I am a total nerd) I've been dying to know: Did Hopps spill the beans before his death? Is there somebody out there now who knows what's inside that ball of twine?
The other day I asked Adelina Vlas, assistant curator of modern and contemporary art at Philadelphia Museum of Art, which owns With Hidden Noise. (An artist's proof is at LACMA, made in 1964, 10 years after Arensberg died, presumably with the collaboration of Hopps.)
"Hopps didn't tell anyone," Vlas told me, "or if he did, that person didn't come forward. Conservators go into the work, and they do know. But curators aren't told the secret. We can't know."
The legend lives.
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(BTW, there's some research to show his readymades were actually one of a kind. I've seen a bunch of them close-up, and if you look at them with that in mind, it seems possible. In Advance of the Broken Arm--a snow shovel--looks totally improbably as a mass-produced object intended to work. His famous Fountain--a urinal--doesn't appear to have the plumbing fixtures in the right spot.)
(arts&letters HURLS Jen onto a car hood, PUNCHES Jen in the face several times)
arts&Letters: Wake up, time to die!
(arts&letters is CLUBBED in the back of the head with a ceramic AK47)
(Cut to RL, in updo and red lipstick, lips quivering, holding the AK47 in shaking hands)
...
Later, "love scene" ;_;
The so called research into Ducamps readymade's being hand crafted really doesn't hold up to actually scrutiny. It's an example of what they call "confirmation bias". Almost all of the so called evidence revolves around the items not holding up to mass market production standards, but that was not at all the case at Duchamp's time. There are plenty of weird porcelain objects from turn of the century France that you could only find one or two examples of. Back then things were just barely above the level of custom with individual manufacturers all making unique versions of things. Part of Duchamps "art" here was his selection of these objects.
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