Paris Journal lll: Marcel Duchamp. La penture, meme

Duchamp’s Fountain (photo by Alfred Stieglitz)

One of the most moving images in the current show of early Duchamp paintings, "Marcel Duchamp. La peinture, meme" at the Centre Pompidou, is actually the last work he ever did, Given (Etant donnes) 1: The Waterfall. 2. The Illuminating Gas. For an artist famous for trumpeting cold thought, it’s a memory of lost emotion, a fading and elusive eroticism in the form of a naked spread legged woman that conveys the ephemerality of physical desire. The piece at the Centre Pompidou is a model (produced by Ulf Linde) and when you view the original work at the Philadelphia Museum of Art you can actually see the naked torso through a peep hole. Duchamp worked on this from l946-66 and much of the accompanying text for the current show, ingeniously reflects the same wistful recalling of earlier impulses—in particular the artist’s one time desire to create conventional works of art (instead of the readymades, like Fountain, for which he would become famous) Here is what Duchamp says looking back on the most famous of his early paintings, “For Nude Descending (a Staircase), I wanted to create a static image of movement; movement as an abstraction, an articulated deduction within the painting, without our knowing if a real person is or isn’t descending any equally real staircase. Fundamentally, movement is in the eye of the spectator, who incorporates it into the painting.” The show begins by tracing a burst of interest in erotic drawing based on Cranach, Ingres and Courbet that occurred at the very end of his career and then goes back to his early work as a painter. Duchamp is quoted as saying, “I believe in eroticism a lot {…}It replaces, if your wish, what other literary schools called romanticism. It could be another ‘ism,’ so to speak.” In Duchamp’s eyes, eroticism was as much of a movement as expression and cubism. Besides unifying the concerns of Duchamp’s career, the exhibition of early work also demonstrates one of the reasons that the artist may have given up painting. Duchamp was a student of contemporaries like Kandinsky, Braque, Cezanne, Manet and Matisse. Yet he was plainly not in the same league. There who can do do and those who can’t do teach. Here one might iterate those who can do paint and those who can’t do conceptualize. As he remarked in l949, “The Large Glass (The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even) in actual fact is not meant to be looked at (with ‘aesthetic' eyes). It should have been accompanied by a ‘literary' text as amorphous as possible, which never took shape. And the two elements, glass for the eyes, text for the ears and understanding, were meant to complement each other and above all prevent one or the other from taking on an aesthetic-plastic or literary form.”

Paris Journal 1: The Baguette vs. the Bagel

the hole in the donut (photo: Evan-Amos)

Bagels have come to Paris. They’ve probably actually been here for some time. Yelp lists numerous sites if you are looking for Mecca. Amongst them are Ari’s bagels with four locations at Beaurepaire, Bastille, Chatelet, Saint-Martin and Saint-Philippe. Then if you don’t cry for Yelp, there’s a place called simply Bagel Store in the old Jewish quarter, Le Marais, which you might stop in on your way to the Centre Pompidou. But in reality the baguette is for Parisians (and the French in general), what the bagel is for New Yorkers (and these days Americans in general). Is the donut to the bagel what the madeleine is to the baguette? That’s a little like asking how many angels can dance on head of a pin. Actually, however, a better exercise is to compare and contrast baguettes and bagels, as a way of distinguishing the American and French sensibilities. For starters you don’t toast a baguette. No one has  surveyed the matter, but anecdotal evidence points to the fact that even fresh bagels are toasted about 50% of the time—an odd state of affairs since with the amount of wine they imbibe the French are more likely to be toasted than their American counterparts. This may partially be explained by the fact that a good baguette tends to be treasured precisely because it has just come from the oven and the taste is tantamount to the crunchy crackling feeling of a fresh toasted bagel (not to say that the freshly baked bagel is not an equally valued item across the pond). So what can we conclude? All rather than some like it hot for starters, but the difference between the French and the Americans--if we can extrapolate their tastes in a favored carb as an exemplification of character--is that the French are hot, fast and soft inside while Americans are certainly hot and fast, though they also tend to be clean cut at their centers and a little hard around the edges. Could this crustiness be the result of the fact that Americans are afraid of becoming like the hole in the donut?