INTERVIEW: Marcel Duchamp

Abstract

Marcel Duchamp has been called the most fascinating and the most disconcerting inventor in contemporary art. Presented here are excerpts from Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp by Pierre Cabanne, translated by Ron Padgett, which will be published in April by The Viking Press as the first book in the series, The Documents of 20th-century Art. Robert Motherwell, the originator of the series and general editor, writes in his Introduction to the Duchamp dialogues: These conversations are more than mere interviews. They are Marcel Duchamp's 'summing up,' and constitute as vivid a self-portrait as we possess of a major twentieth-century artist, thanks to Duchamp's intelligence, scrupulousness, and disdain for the petty. Here, as throughout his life, he has rejected, as much as one can, that game of rivalry which makes so many modern artists uneasy and angry, or bitter, and sometimes false to themselves and to historical truth. . . . Duchamp's effort to be 'objective' is sustained with an intellectual strength and modesty (though he had his own arrogance) of which few celebrated artists approaching their eighties are capable .... his most successful works, paradoxically, take on that indirect beauty achieved only by those artists who have been concerned with more than the merely sensuous. In this way, Duchamp's intelligence accomplished nearly everything possible within the reach of a modern artist, earning him the unlimited and fully justified respect of successive small groups of admirers throughout his life. But, as he often says in the following pages, it is posterity who will judge, and he, like Stendhal, had more faith in posterity than in his contemporaries. At the same time, one learns from his conversations of an extraordinary artistic adventure, filled with direction, discipline, and disdain for art as a trade and for the repetition of what has already been done .... Despite Duchamp's urbanity, from another standpoint, Duchamp was the great saboteur, the relentless enemy of painterly painting (read Picasso and Matisse), the asp in the basket of fruit. His disdain for sensual painting was as intense as was his interest in erotic machines. Not to see this is not to take his testament seriously. No wonder he smiles at 'art history/ while making sure his work ended up in museums. Picasso, in questioning himself about what art is, immediately thought, 'What is not?' (1930s). Picasso, as a painter, wanted boundaries. Duchamp, as an antipainter, did not. From the standpoint of each, the other was involved in a game. Taking one side or the other is the history of art since 1914, since the First World War.