Living & Arts

Duchamp and Dadaism in Philly

Duchamp-and-dadaism-in-philly

Visitors become voyeurs after viewing the Duchamp exhibit.

In print | October 22, 2009

The unsettling fascination of a first glimpse of Étant donnés: 1. La chute d’eau, 2. Le gaz d’éclairage affirms the singular story of its development. This piece by Marcel Duchamp, a French American who lived from 1887 to 1968, is part of the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s permanent collection, housed discreetly in a dark, unassuming corner on the first floor of the museum. To see the piece in its dioramic frame, we must peer through two peepholes carved into an old, dense wooden door. The exhibit Marcel Duchamp: Étant donnés (open now until Nov. 29) is now an essential part of the museum’s collection.

Duchamp was a prominent figure in the international Dadaist and Surrealist movements. His collective oeuvre proved to be small yet highly influential. In 1923, Duchamp seemed to have lost interest in art despite considerable success. For the next twenty years, the French-born artist managed to convince even his closest friends of this purported self-removal. Meanwhile, Duchamp had begun a new project—Étant Donnés. Duchamp and his wife searched for twigs, bricks and other materials, which were then brought back to Duchamp’s New York City studio on 14th Street and finally assembled.

Étant Donnés itself was revealed posthumously, much to the astonishment of everyone except his wife, who had been involved in its creation. Before his death in 1968, Marcel Duchamp requested that his final work be eventually placed in the Philadelphia Museum of Art through the Cassandra Foundation. A year after his death, the piece was installed according to the artist’s intricately mapped vision.

The exhibit is arranged so that we see the process before we are permitted to see the final project. Upon entering, you encounter glinting rows of black-and-white and Polaroid photographs aligned methodically in their frames like the plastic keys on an electric piano, all with the same splayed, headless female figure, like images of a crime scene. There is almost a sense of irreverence in revealing the artist’s process. In the April 1, 1969 Philadelphia Museum of Art Bulletin entitled “Étant Donnés: 1. la chute d’eau, 2. le gaz d’éclairage: Reflections on a New Work by Marcel Duchamp,” authors Anne d’Harnoncourt and Walter Hobbs reflect upon this notion, though not specifically in reference to this exhibit. “One of Duchamp’s greatest triumphs in Étant Donnés,” d’Harnoncourt and Hobbs note, “is that one cannot imagine him at work on it. The illusion negates the process that went into its creation.”

Experiencing Étant Donnés is, without question, incredibly creepy. We cannot help but be voyeurs in order to see it. It is life-size naked figure of a woman, faceless and splayed on a nest of twigs with the lower half of her body appearing as though it had been ripped, her legs pried apart. She holds a lamp glowing in her hand, and in the distance we see a picturesque backdrop of forest radiant with the colors of autumn and an electrically operated waterfall embedded within the horizon. Violent death and eroticism stare at us, drag us forward and push us away, encouraging curiosity despite our revulsion.

Genevieve Woodhead ’12, who visited the museum for her “The Body in Contemporary Art” class, felt dismayed at the organization of the exhibit. “I had never seen the piece before,” Woodhead says with a small shrug. “The whole exhibit leads you up to the piece—but it shows you pictures of it [thus giving it away], and that first experience of the piece is so important, so integral… it’s so different in a photo.”

This experience is best when it is not rushed. The 1969 Philadelphia Museum of Art Bulletin explicitly states: “The first shock of encounter with the scene behind the door will always be a private and essentially indescribable experience. What one actually sees can be reduced to words, but the initial impact is one of the most crucial aspects of the work, and one which cannot be rendered secondhand.” With that in mind, an ideal time to visit would be on a weekday evening when the museum is less crowded. Looking into Étant Donnés is “like nothing I’ve ever seen before,” Woodhead said.

The exhibit also houses various objects produced during the two-decade period following its inception. It contains a series of fascinating sculptures, photographs, notes and other objects all linked to the creation of Étant Donnés. Now shown to the public for the first time, this series of smaller projects gives insight into his final work. Small bizarre, erotic sculptures, for instance a sink stopper cast in bronze, allude to the male and female anatomy on various levels of abstraction.
The exhibit itself helps and hinders the notion of art as an experience. However fascinating it is, its elusiveness frustrates those who have for some time been anticipating viewing it. Because of this uncertainty, we can only fling assumptions about the piece that we have no choice but to conjure in our minds.