Duchamp and the Aesthetics of Chance by Molderings Herbert; Brogden John;

Author:Molderings, Herbert; Brogden, John;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophy/Aesthetics
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2011-10-21T16:00:00+00:00

When they [Gleizes and Metzinger] said there is no reality outside the mind they were using the word mind in its rational sense. I do not feel that this type of thinking was an influence on me.... We are not all material or rational.... There is more to man than these concepts would imply. In order to explain the part of man that is important but not material or rational I use the word spiritual. It does not imply a religious stand.52

Like Bergson and Le Roy, Duchamp took a definite stand against scientific rationalism and positivism in his art after 1913, but it was an inward rather than an outward stand. While the philosophers Bergson and Le Roy pleaded for metaphysics instead of physics, the artist Duchamp opted for a “playful physics.”53 He stretched scientific reasoning, often unnoticeably, beyond the very limits of rationality. In the already quoted letter to Paul Matisse, Duchamp explains that the influence of the third dimension on a meter-long thread falling through space “invalidates ‘irrationally’ the concept of the ‘shortest distance between two points’ (classical definition of the straight line).”54 The “idea of the fabrication” of the 3 Standard Stoppages only seems to observe the discourse framework of scientific argumentation. A more than basic knowledge of geometry and scientific theory is required in order to know that the “checking” of a geometrical postulate by means of a physical experiment is a completely unscientific, “irrational” approach. In this regard, the 3 Standard Stoppages are not all that far removed from the “antiscientific stance of the Bergsonian Puteaux Cubists,” except that they do not favor the aesthetic categories of taste, harmony, and expression but rather cloak their criticism of science in a pseudoscientific guise.

Whether Duchamp was absolutely opposed to Bergson’s philosophy, as Henderson maintains in Duchamp in Context, is open to doubt, as this thesis takes no account whatsoever of the numerous points on which Bergson and Duchamp agree when it comes to the criticism of science and reason.55 Almost nothing is known, however, about Duchamp’s knowledge of Bergson’s writings. This has yet to be made the subject of research.56 Some of Duchamp’s notes make direct or indirect reference to Bergson’s ideas.57 He even once confessed to having been directly influenced by Bergson’s philosophy: “I agree that in so far as they recognize the primacy of change in life I am influenced by Bergson and Nietzsche. Change and life are synonymous. We must realize this and accept it. Change is what makes life interesting. There is no progress, change is all we know.”58 What we do know for certain is that Duchamp shared the Bergsonian views of Le Roy, with whose central theses he had familiarized himself probably not through Le Roy’s writings themselves but through his reading of Poincaré’s La Valeur de la science. Indeed, Duchamp never left any doubts about his criticism of rationalism in art and philosophy. “My work has been an attempt to show that reason is less fruitful than we think,” Duchamp said in one of his interviews with Laurence Stephen Gold.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.