Art History, After Sherrie Levine by Singerman Howard

Author:Singerman, Howard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press

FIGURE 24. Albrecht Dürer, The Draughtsman with Reclining Woman, 1525. Woodcut, 3 × 81/8 inches. Kupferstichkabinett Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Inv. 46871877. Photo credit: Bild Archiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz / Art Resource, New York. Photo: Volker-H. Schneider.

Dürer's image is split between the reclining nude on the left and the artist on the right, as though, Lynda Nead suggests, into different, gendered worlds: “The opposition between male culture and female nature is starkly drawn in this image.…In contrast to the curves and undulating lines of the female section, the male compartment is scattered with sharp, vertical forms.”16 But it splits as well between the draftsman's view and the viewer's, along lines and looks familiar from Laura Mulvey's “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” The viewer is presented with the conventional artistic nude, the object of pleasure in looking, of what Mulvey calls “fetishistic scopophilia”; Dürer's draftsman takes Alfred Hitchcock's point of view: voyeuristic, investigatory, gynecological.17 That view is also Duchamp's—or the position that Duchamp inserts us into— in his so-called secret work, Étant donnés, a piece he began in 1946, well after “giving up” art for chess (fig. 25). As Clair and others have noted, Dürer's wood engraving was a source for Étant donnés, not only for the splayed nude in the landscape, but also for its voyeurism. Duchamp replaces Dürer's tools of measure and visual mastery—his transparent gridded veil and focal stylus—with two peepholes drilled into a heavy, worn wooden door. In so doing, he installs not only Dürer's image, but also the mechanisms of Paul Willemen's “fourth look”: “When the scopic drive is brought into focus,” Willemen writes, “the viewer also runs the risk of becoming the object of the look, of being overlooked in the act of looking.”18 This is some distance from Damisch and the Renaissance chessboard, and, for that matter, from Duchamp's or Levine's chessboard on the wall. Here, I will note only that Joselit discusses the trap and the game—Trébuchet and the chessboard—in gendered terms: “Trébuchet initiated a second aesthetic order in which the manoeuvres of the game spill out into everyday space, where not merely an inanimate surrogate like a chess piece is tripped up, but the artist himself.” And as Joselit's reading of the paintings that led up to the readymades makes clear, the game in question in Duchamp's studio was that of the relations between the sexes, figured by chess as it is situated between medieval romance and an attempt, often faulty, at Renaissance mastery: “While women— sisters, virgins, and brides—are represented in the cubist paintings of 1911 and 1912 as fields of immeasurable carnality imperfectly formalized by immanent systems of measurement, men tend to be captured inside the agonistic space of the chessboard,” the space Trébuchet takes out into the world.19

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