The Brooklyn Rail

In response to the invitation, I would like to suggest taking a detour.

Being an art historian and researcher interested in what exhibitions make and make see, I would like to briefly recount a story situated within an exhibition to explore the challenging “telegram Marcel Duchamp” hypothesis. The story is an attempt to compare the mediumistic agency of art by displaying works of Duchamp and the healer and researcher Emma Kunz (1892-1963) side-by-side.

There we are, fifty years ago, the final section of the itinerant thematic exhibition La Machine Célibataire (The Bachelor Machines), organized by the exhibition-maker Harald Szeemann. The exhibition aimed to visualize the supposedly modern myth of the “bachelor machines,” a term coined by Michel Carrouges in the 1950s as a tool for grasping the ambivalent mental and libidinal dynamics at the core of creative subjects and their binary epistemology, based on essential oppositions between male/female, human/machine, nature/culture, etc. The “Artist and medium” section culminated on the display of drawings, documents, and photographs by Kunz, alongside Duchamp’s engravings. A surprising and confusing composition, as witnessed by the public reception at the time. In Szeemann’s perspective, the suggestion was to counterpose the mythopoetic figure of the “bachelor”—the masculine voyeuristic, narcissistic, creative subject, as personified by the life and work of Duchamp—and the one of the “medium”—the female generative subject, embodied by Kunz. Her work was to be visualized as the dialectical unity of those two instances within the medium-like agency that, according to Duchamp, was at the core of the creative process.

The room presented four to five of Kunz’s geometric drawings, produced by the deposition of pigments via a pendulum with a jade stone tip, a technique also employed in her healing practice. The display also included some photographic enlargements of flower polarization, a biological generative phenomenon that Kunz observed and activated. Kunz was to represent the promise of an alternative form of creativity, rooted in a gendered and maternal process—albeit informed by the cosmology of the Great Mother—engendering things through an energetic and fertile immersion in nature. Both the pictures and the drawings conveyed a singular mode of presence that was potentially ambivalent. Charged with cognitive and relational excess, they tested the exhibition’s capacity to mediate the situated networks of care that shaped their agency. That was indeed much of Szeemann’s challenge in showing them next to Duchamp’s works. And not just any work, but nine second-state engravings from some late series, including “Morceaux choisis d’après” featuring graphic, stylized interpretations of details from works by the so-called old masters—from Lucas Cranach the Elder to Gustave Courbet. As part of the extensive debates at the time concerning the discovered legacy of Duchamp’s final works—which I will not revisit here—the series explore variations of the dynamics of desire and projection at work within the academic theme of the female nude model and the painter. Within the frame of the exhibition, Duchamp’s expansion of those erotic and voyeuristic perspectives, reinforced the phallogocentric visual economy associated with the figure of the bachelor. In addition, the proximity with Kunz’s embodiment of clairvoyance intensified the apprehension of Duchamp’s works as relating to both a narrow and dubious interpretation of mediumship. A kind of obsessive unconscious, stacked in between the historical and semantic legibility of the voyeur and the frame of a modern art history complacently diverting its own genealogy, the phallocentric prism was indeed at work in this section, as reflected in the essentialist, oppositional rhetoric. This prevented an appreciation of the matrix-like features of Kunz’s drawings, which could have today entered into dialogue with contemporary cybernetics, ecologies of care and collective art practices. Instead, this rhetoric conveyed them to an idealized maternal figure. Conversely, identifying Duchamp with the archetypal bachelor creator hindered an understanding of the transversal, ironic and dissimilative agencies at play in his works.

Nevertheless, while it may seem improbable, I would argue that viewing Kunz and Duchamp through the iridescent lens of mediumship, while maintaining a discursive distance from Szeemann’s intuition, could offer valuable historical and contemporary insights. Partial connections could be cultivated with the relational dimension of the “telegram” theory if we consider the term “medium” to be tied to interdependencies, as is considered in feminist studies and by communication and media scholars. One/we could speculate on the connections between “R. Mutt”—the androgynous pseudonym that signed the readymade Fountain (1917)—and 'die mutter' (the mother)—embodying feral, matricial generativity. One/we could also situate their radical otherness within the interrelation of past and present matters, economies, peoples, affects, institutions, discourses, narratives, and arts that have been muted or undermined by the enclosures imposed by modern agendas. At the end of this story, it may support the comprehension, among others, of the diverse facets and agencies of Duchamp within “the nets of others,” as the philosopher Catherine Perret wrote regarding the artist's many and complex authorships, and beyond the exhausted imaginary of the “bachelors.”