I Used to Be Charming_The Rest of Eve Babitz by Eve Babitz

Author:Eve Babitz [Babitz, Eve]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Writing, Biography
ISBN: 9781681373799
Goodreads: 44097585
Publisher: NYRB Classics
Published: 2019-10-08T00:00:00+00:00

I WAS A NAKED PAWN FOR ART

“HIS POSITION was extraordinary,” my wonderful friend Walter Hopps informed me. Walter was the One, when it came to all this—long ago, when hardly anyone knew—who knew. “One way to look at it—these things are never set in granite—is that Picasso and Matisse fulfilled the dream of the nineteenth century, and the two artists who hold the really extreme positions unique to our time are Duchamp and Mondrian. Art for the mind and not for the eye. The irony is, Duchamp did so many beautiful things. But not just stuff you decorate walls with. His great contribution to art was elsewhere.”

Meaning that in the nineteenth century a urinal could only say—if it could say anything—“I’m a urinal.” But after Marcel, a urinal could also say, “I look like a urinal, but Marcel says I’m art.”

“In other words,” Walter may or may not have ended, “Duchamp playing chess with a nude in a photograph may be art.”

Of course, if you’re the nude, being “art” seems beside the point. At least with the Naked Maja, you could be airbrushed and posterity would think of you as perfect, whereas on that day, sitting naked in the museum, having to play chess with someone who hardly spoke English and was so polite he pretended that the reason he’d come was to play chess—well. And afterward, when the photograph began showing up on things like posters for the Museum of Modern Art, and Nude Descending a Staircase became almost interchangeable with Nude Playing Chess, and Duchamp being so immortal, I just wasn’t sure I wanted to be identified. Maybe it would be better to be “and friend.”

On the other hand, if they’d asked anyone else—or if I’d chickened out and some other woman was immortalized—then, hmmph. . . . Recently, when a woman called and said she was doing a book on Duchamp on the West Coast and could she please use that picture, I said, “You’re not going to use it on the cover, are you?” But when I found out the cover photo was to be of Marcel alone, I felt insulted. Mixed emotions hound me after nearly thirty years of mixed emotions. I want to be on the cover, immortal, but I don’t want anyone knowing it’s me. Except my friends and people who like it.

Otherwise, I’ll just be “and friend.” Anyone who thinks the nude should have been thinner, or in any way different—to them, I’ll be a floating image of “elsewhere.”

Immortality or no.

•

In the 1913 Armory Show in New York, there was a scandal over Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase. If you look at that picture today, you might ask yourself—Pourquoi? It’s not as though it’s a photograph or anything naked you could see. It was so diffracted and cubistic, who could tell? Maybe it was a scandal because people had to take it on faith that there was anything there at all besides olive-green, beige, and black corners that may or may not have been a staircase.

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