Versions of surreality
Dalí’s collaborator Philippe Halsman took a series of photos of Sal’s divine whiskers for the 1954 book “Dalí Moustache”, including the Mona Lisa embellishment above (a real moustache, apparently), which I’ve lined up against Marcel Duchamp’s celebrated “LHOOQ” from 1919.
At least one commentator has chastised Dalí for being far too late with this gag, regardless of whether this was intended as a mere pun or as a renewed declaration of war on old-school painting. But maybe Dalí knew something about Duchamp that still isn’t widely known.
“Parody” is the word most often used in describing “LHOOQ”. Others are hot bum, hot ass, hot arse and hot pants. Commentators do the jitterbug when they “translate” the title. Pronounce the letters aloud in French slowly, quickly, in a slurred fashion, with gusto, and you ought to hear Elle a chaud au cul, common street lingo for “She has a hot arse” or “She is hot in the bum / ass” or “She’s got hot pants” or, Duchamp once dubiously offered, “There is fire down below”, by which someone else presumed “She’s horny”.
Maybe “LHOOQ” is supposed to be read in English as “look”, said another, which is a good title for an artwork, after all. I suggest that, read in English when very, very drunk, the letters suggest, “Shhhe’s sooooo cute.” Any takers?
The most interesting thing about the postcard view of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa that Duchamp randomly defiled in 1919 is that it’s apparently not a randomly defiled postcard of the Mona Lisa.
Most commentaries on “LHOOQ” consider the title and leave it at that. Some report that Duchamp, an idea man and a prankster as much as an artist, was devaluing a dignified (and famous) woman as just another potential sexual conquest. It’s commonly recognised that Duchamp was knocking great art off its gilt pedestal — “LHOOQ spelled the end of painting” — but others note that he was also cleverly rescuing it from the reprint factory and giving it fresh creative life.
Some have the gay interpretation: Sigmund Freud famously decided that Leonardo was homosexual since he had difficulty finishing his work. In that inability Freud saw his sexuality sublimated to art. And Duchamp supposedly once said that the Mona Lisa is in fact a man — Leonardo was painting himself, not in drag but as he really saw himself, as a woman.
This is Man Ray’s 1921 photo of Duchamp as Rrose Sélavy. That was a pseudonym he used, another pun: It could be Eros, c’est la vie (”such is life”) or arroser la vie (”toast to life”).
Elsewhere is the notion that Duchamp was wisecracking on his friend Guillaume Apollinaire’s brief time in jail, falsely accused of involvement in the notorious 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre.
Amusingly, the great American minimalist painter Barnett Newman saw a whole ‘nother side to the equation in a 1992 rant: “Those who put the moustache on Mona Lisa are not attacking it, or art, but Leonardo da Vinci the man. What irritates them is that this man, with half a dozen pictures, has the great name in history, whereas they, with their large oeuvre, aren’t sure.”
That’s just too minimalist. The crucial thing about “LHOOQ” is a discovery that’s addressed on precious few websites that discuss the artwork. Wikipedia briefly covers it here.
In a 1997 study Rhonda Roland Shearer raised doubts about just how “found” Duchamp’s found art was, though some of her research has been challenged. But her analysis of “LHOOQ” is quite compelling. It seems the supposed “postcard” is actually a lithographic reproduction that very deliberately (and somewhat painstakingly) combined Duchamp’s own face with that of the Mona Lisa.
This was no hurriedly scribbled protest at all. The point, it’s been suggested, was to fool the critics with a manipulation of the world’s most famous painting that wouldn’t even be noticed because everyone would be distracted by the graffiti.
Apart from initially indicating that he was making a dada statement, Duchamp kept his mouth shut about “LHOOQ”, but the dozen or so versions of it he kept making well into old age could be taken as progressive clues to his original intention. All of the subsequent variations, however, utilised unaltered reproductions of the Mona Lisa.
The biggest hint of all, perhaps, came in 1930, when the 1919 original was publicly exhibited for the first time — side by side with his newest version of the work. No one spotted the truth.
The original is pretty much permanently on loan to the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris. The owner is the Communist Parti Francais, to which Duchamp gave it, through his friend and party member Louis Aragon. Much could be written about pedestals and Mona and Marx too, I suppose.
The other versions started coming out one per decade. The 1920 is unaccounted for, the 1940 stolen, the 1930 in a private collection. The 1958 is in Barcelona, an Italian has the 38 replicas made in 1964 and the 1960 rendition belongs to American painter Dorothea Tanning, who reintroduced Duchamp to Alexina “Teeny” Sattler, ex-wife of Henri Matisse’s son Pierre. They married in 1964 and stayed that way until he died.
New York’s Museum of Modern Art is the place to go to see the last one Duchamp made, 1965’s “LHOOQ Shaved”, a playing-card reproduction of the Mona Lisa to which he did nothing other than adding the title, in French, “LHOOQ rasée”.
The original “LHOOQ” appeared seven years after “Nude Descending a Staircase (No 2)” and six years after Duchamp’s first readymade, “Bicycle Wheel”. The son of a Blainville notary who loved art was by then 32 and firmly in the grip of dada’s militant post-war mockery of all things military. He and his posse wanted to tear everything down and start all over.
Duchamp had come to Paris in 1904. Three of his siblings would ultimately become artists and two brothers were already there having a go. Marcel scarcely attended the Académie Julian while dabbling in fauvism, symbolism and cubism, and then, with the Puteaux Group, also known as the Golden Section, which included Fernand Léger and Juan Gris, he “automated” cubism with blurred shards of flying geometry that anticipated futurism.
Even cubists freaked out when “Nude Descending a Staircase” was shown at the Salon des Indépendants (Duchamp declined to change the “offensive” title but quietly took the painting home with him in a taxi), and the uproar it caused at the 1913 New York Armory Show (”That’s not art!” President Teddy Roosevelt bellowed) made Duchamp famous. There was, of course, much more in that exhibition to convince Americans that European art had charted an entirely new course.
Duchamp jumped ship in New York in 1915 and, with his old pal Francis Picabia and his new buddy Man Ray, started to get the dada ball rolling in parallel with the Zurich mob.
The readymades culminated with the urinal he entered in the 1917 Society for Independent Artists show, entitled “Fountain” and bearing the signature R Mutt. The exhibition organisers decided it wasn’t art and had it chucked out. In 2004 “Fountain” was designated “the most influential artwork of the 20th century” by 500 renowned artists and historians.
Around 1913 Duchamp tried his hand as a composer with a piece for three voices called “Erratum Musical”. Each singer was assigned a set of 25 cards, each card bearing a musical note. The sets were jumbled in a hat, then drawn one by one, and the score composed accordingly.
Far more audacious was a proposal to drop numbered balls corresponding to different pitches through a funnel, at different speeds, into open-top railway cars rumbling by below you. “This lack of definitive versioning,” Kenneth Goldsmith says bafflingly on the website NewMusicBox, “would resonate later in remix culture.”
In 1923 he ended seven years of toil on “The Large Glass: The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even” and officially declared it unfinished. Then he went off and played chess, extremely well (the photo shows Duchamp at the chessboard with Man Ray), though he stayed on the art scene as a critic and promoter and helped Ernst and Breton edit surrealism’s VVV in New York. In the 1960s pop art retrieved him from obscurity and Duchamp became involved, to no one’s surprise, in optical illusions.
But meanwhile, in secret for 20 years, he’d been working on a masterpiece. “Given: 1 The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas” — currently on display at the Tate Modern in London — requires viewers to look through a peep hole in a wooden door. There, in a marvellous landscape, they see a nude reclining woman whose face is hidden. Her legs are spread and in one hand she holds aloft a gas lamp. Is it Liberty?
Photobucket, which hosts all my images, gets upset about nudity, so no way I’m going to get away with showing a vagina. That’s why you can only see a nude arm in the montage below. That’s not liberty, that’s self-censorship.
Marcel Duchamp died a happy man in France in October 1968, a few months after playing an intriguing, aurally enhanced chess match with John Cage at Toronto’s Ryerson College. The epitaph on his grave in Rouen sounds like famous last words: “Besides, it’s always other people who die.”
And the following year Duchamp was fully immortalised by the Bonzo Dog Band in a song called “Ready-Mades”: “Wendy Wetlips stares from a poster / Ignoring the drawing adorning her smile” …
As for me, as usual, I couldn’t resist:
Okay, now everyone say, “Warhol!”, like Seinfeld used to say, “Newman!” on TV — like you’re really disgusted … “Warhol!”
