The images posted here register Marcel Duchamp's movement from figuration, via abstraction, to indexical strategies. While Surrealism managed to find new tactics through which to present the body, corporeality, and "the real," Duchamp, according to David Joselit, struggled and agonized over the loss of the body to vision in representation. Joselit argues that, like Picasso (recall our discussion of "Girl with a Mandolin") Duchamp was preoccupied with the loss of the body to vision. (p.21). How does "3 Standard Stoppages" speak to this problem set. Consider--paraphrase and discuss the importance of-- Joselit's claim on page 29 that"For if the meter, as a conventional standard of measurement, is the negation of carnality, the 3 Standard Stoppages endow it precisely with the qualities of a body and even a will. By allowing gravity to pull the length of string that represents a meter into a gentle curve, Duchamp invested it with weight and mass--he embodied it. Moreover, Duchamp anthropomorphozised the string, furnishing it with a kind of volition by stipulating that it will 'distort itself as it pleases.' "
Beyond paraphrasing and explicating this passage, if you can, discuss how it relates to Surrealism and "nature convulsing as writing."
Louise ORourke
ReplyDelete- Duchamp was preoccupied with the loss of the body to vision because a canvas is flat and is not a true representation of the carnality of the body. Duchamp wanted to show how language and the body cross. Breaking down the body into pieces on the surface one then can begin to speak about the different angles. Speak in parts of the body, separations by black lines. He envisioned the 3 standard stoppages as the building blocks of his language. he took a meter and made it become nothing. The meter long string became a mere swiggle on the ground. Nature took control of the string once it was released and did what it wanted with it.
He takes apart the body in this way by flattening the body instead of painting a 3d form he turns it into a 2d form. He breaks the body up into "melon slices". Showing all the different angles on one plane as opposed to painting a fake representation of a 3d object on a 2d surface. He takes a women's body and turns it into a system of measurement. Breaking it down into geometric shapes and angles.
This has relation to surrealism because it is distorting reality. Taking the real and distorting it. Surrealism is suppose to be a continuum of the fluidity of nature in order to convey and to say that surrealism relates to what Duchamp is doing in some ways can be said but in others I'm not sure. For me Duchamp uses black lines to separate each angle he has broken the body into, so would that not be the same as the white spaces around letters. On the other hand he is distorting the real which is what the surrealist photographers had been doing. Taking a photograph of the real and manipulating its continuity. Rather manipulating it and making it a continuum. So in some ways they relate but in the fact that there is separation through black lines they do not. Also another relation to surrealism is that Duchamp has overcome the boundary of the nature of the body by breaking it down into distortions or "melon slices".
Duchamp's attempts at abstraction such as noted in "Apropose of Little Sister" like Picasso begin to deconstruct the body into geometric shapes that represent the body. Duchamp's abstraction eventually evolves into indexical representation as noted in "3 standard stoppages". The question is how does Duchamp maintain the corporeality of the body and what exactly is the corporeality? Corporeality referring to the body proper is lost in the transition, however, vision is elevated to the surface. It is true that no longer does one see anything that resembles a body but what is left is the essence/soul of the body. In "3 standard stoppages" the string is given life, it's interaction with gravity gifts it mass and weight which binds it in the realm of the real. Duchamp's explanation that the string may "distort" itself at will in-fact gives it a will of its own as if the string were a living body. This vision is only possible by the means of a paradoxical opposite. the meter is in fact a unit of measurement and founded not in nature but in culture and stands in staunch opposition to carnality; asserting this births its counter, the counter to culture/meter being nature/body/corporeality. This representation places itself in the real which is naturally full of distortion and thusly is part of surrealism. "3 standard stoppages" is deeply entrenched in surrealism in that it becomes a sign which removes it from the realm of being and places it on another plane (the surreal). the ability of the string to distort makes it a visualization of noise that can be read by spaces in its curvature. As long as the string is moving continuously it is just noise but as the string moves and rests then moves again it may be read as writing.
ReplyDeleteLogic: Taylor, how does one deconstruct and represent at the same time? That does not make sense, nor do you propose it purposively as a paradox. This may be an issue at the level of rhetoric rather than logic, but it is impossible to distinguish the two here.
ReplyDeletePEOPLE: EDIT YOUR OWN TEXTS. WATCH OUT FOR LOGIC AND INTERNAL CONTRADICTION. Last weeks posts were full of self-undermining statements. You all contradict your own selves. Read, read aloud, read to room mate and friend. As yourself: does this make sense? And if it doesn't either a) fix it or b) argue for why you rely on a lapse in [conventional]logic.
“3 Standard Stoppages” is pushing the viewer to realize “the real” and it is pushing the viewer towards the recognition that nature, itself, is always convulsing into writing. Writing is a designed organization of spacing of symbols that through language has been deemed with importance in that it goes on to describe our own existence in the now, “the real”. It is this recognition of spacing that the Dadaist recognized and decided to use as a means of signifying their important messages that needed to be conveyed. This spacing was lost on the Surrealist because they found that spacing was not needed. Spacing was the repetition of importance that was already being signified by the actualization of nature and was already being communicated through the use of being. The Surrealist realized that the index was a cut of the real and in using the cut, the frame, as a signifier they were able to communicate the sought after desire of pushing their work to be “realer” than “the real”.
ReplyDeleteDuchamp’s work is Surrealist because it is cutting from nature the writing of it’s own indexical existence and displaying it for the viewer to observe and hopefully realize the constant flux of the “real”, as only nature can truly reveal to us. For nature is a constant existence of noise and through color, shape, texture, doubling, and other evolutionary tendencies it is signifying its own importance and it’s own “truth” (“the real”; “the now”). So through these convulsions of cutting into “the real”, of revealing the latent image, Duchamp is convulsing into writing the representational, the symbolic, nature of nature itself.
In "3 Standard Stoppages" Duchamp is attempting to transition from the carnality of his earlier works to a more semiotic form. The meter length of string is a sign created by man for the purpose of measurement it negates carnality by being not human, it lacks all attributes of the body. Duchamp by elevating the string above the ground and letting it fall back to earth imparts upon it characteristics of the body, i.e. will. The dropped string is able to fall and land as it chooses, the string is freed to create its own shape. Duchamp reads the dropped strings as letters in an unknown alphabet, each time a string is dropped. Reading the three strings together invokes a sense of visual noise and pause turning the strings sign into writing. this writing is not influenced by man leaving nature as the writer. This natural writing fits in perfectly with surrealism, being that it is beyond the unconscious and in a reality outside human influence.
ReplyDeleteIn 3 Standard Stoppages, Duchamp drops individual strings that had been measured to be the same length as a meter. By allowing the string to determine it's own position, Duchamp gave the inanimate object a sort of agency. It will "distort itself as it pleases." This deconstructed the foundations of measurement by demonstrating that a meter can only measure that which is level and without curve. "When you see a sign it will open on fact in an unmediated way." This positivism was brought into question by using a standard mode of measurement and proving that it's application only applies to and can only ever represent itself. When standardization became necessary as the population grew and demand needed to be met with supply, individualism became obsolete. Each person was a type and each type had a set of measurements that their body had to adhere to.
ReplyDeleteIt was the work of Surrealists to overcome the binary of nature versus culture. Photography, unlike painting, re-captured the individual body. This deconstruction of measurement showed how the standardization of bodies was absolutely absurd. Each individual person is unique and is created and developed under entirely specific and individual circumstances. Even if I have a similar body type to another individual I still have individual imprints of my own that indicate our differences; the scars on my knuckles from punching walls, the chip in my tooth from two separate forms of abuse, the scar on my ankle from shaving, the freckles and moles that have developed from my skin being exposed to the sun. These differences are infinite considering how the body is constantly changing internally and externally.
If there were such a binary between culture and nature, the act of spacing would fall onto the side of culture. Measurements are just that, spacing. The string that Duchamp used removed the spacing as well as proving its falsity. We have learned to trust and communicate through spacing, but what Duchamp did was to disprove any claim on “the standard,” thereby removing the idea of a line between nature and culture. The delicate and erotic curves that the strings made when given the opportunity to fall on their own negated the standardized form of measurement and enforced the “carnality” of nature. This “natural” fall of each string is “convulsed into writing” by transgressing past a form of measurement into a symbol of nature or the “real.”
"The interplay of the mensurable and the immensurable, the geometric/semiotic and the carnal." 55.
ReplyDeleteThe encounter between body/space/presence/index and systematic measurement. 3SS gives a kind of raw "utterance" to chance, space, gravity, nature, the unknown which "man" has struggled to "write on" for so long. He takes a unit of measurement and subjects it to the raw immensurable presence of nature so that the line, the text, is not "master" of space at all, but always absorbed by the overwhelming grace and power of its counterpart: space/time/chance, in short, that which cannot be controlled, the "forces" of Body, nature. It is in the interplay that Duchamp seems most interested, but more than this, the rescuing of The Body. Duchamp's 3SS implied that the string/line/meter is endowed with a kind of will or life only because it encounters the immeasurable, the presence of, i.e. And so, he was, it seems clear, critiquing the sign by watching it unravel, come to life, loose control of itself in the presence of its counterpart. His 3SS was an attempt to resuscitate, it seems, or get at the seemingly dichotomous relationship between the Body and the Sign, which brings us back to surrealism and its photographic treatment of this unyielding dualism.
55. "A graphic language of phenomena themselves."
55. Speaking of Tu M' "lines swell into organic growths, or fleshy agglomerations are attuned into lines:... there is no way to extract one vocabulary from the other. The "juxtaposition of mechanical and visceral."
Nature writes the string... convulses it, just as much as that "stoppage" punctuates nature, makes some kind of "meaning" out of it. And so, Presence is its own kind of utterance--communication.
ReplyDeleteIn the standardization that is a meter one may think of a line. Meters do not typically exist in curves but rather in something rigid and is given use value, most often, in a two-dimensional field of horizontality (x-axis) and verticality (y-axis). Taking the meter out of this rigid line, i.e. the meter stick/ruler, and inserting into something more flexible and subject to chance/will, i.e. a string, with in a three-dimensional space, results in the loss of a rigid quantification: the loss of the meter and the birth of a corporeal/embodied meter (one “invested with weight and mass”). Duchamp furthers this by raising the meter through vertical space (y-axis) into a realm containing physical depth (x, y, and z axis). This is not depth by representation (i.e. orthogonals/perspective on the plane 2D) but depth in the real. As the string falls, changes shape, and lands differently with each stoppage, the quantification of the meter is even more arbitrary and the control of matrixes such as gravity, will, and chance is less understood to be quantified: because each string falls differently(though constant in weight , mass, and measurement) gravity, will, and chance are variable. Therefore, gravity, will, and chance are unquantifiable in the effects upon the things/beings within their matrixes.
ReplyDeleteJust as language, the signs of standardization are arbitrary and relative. The effect of gravity/will/chance is relative to the subject, regardless of how identical (same string, cut the same length, dropped from the same point) the subjects are. Just as the subject of the string contains its own volition with in these matrixes and negates standardization, language will contain its own volition upon the body and negate corporeality.
Connecting this back to Picasso, line is the basis of Art. Picasso reveals the two-dimensionality of Girl with a Mandolin by conveying the representation of the corporeal on to a two-dimensional plane with the actual limitations/abilities of the two-dimensional plane. The only moment within the piece that retains traditional chiaroscuro and curve in order to give the appearance of plentitude is the breast: the sign of corporeality. This breast, this sign, surrounded by application of two-dimensionality through Cubic collage is then understood as flat. It is the demonstration of the impossibility of three-dimensionality upon a two-dimensional plane; likewise it is the denial of corporeality through a representation/mediation of signs.
“Nature convulsing into writing” parallels the thought that the subject can standardize nature; burying seeds three inches into the earth, in full sunlight, and watering twice daily in order to result in flowers. Nature is body and it already is coded by matrixes. Therefore, if the corporeal has its own volition with in these matrixes and negates standardization, nature also has its own volition and negates standardizations. Language, the representation of signs, subsequently negates corporeality and nature.
Duchamp's is interested in the relationship between the semiotic and the carnal. More to the point, he was interested in the moment where the body and the semiotic meet the space where the body becomes the symbol. To do this one must first find a new way to represent the body not through painterly mimesis, but through an abstraction, which he notes only as a side effect to his process one which he describes as more visceral. This description is a bit problematic for me, since I am unsure what it is he means by this. To be visceral is to be inside, a soft organ in ones abdominal cavity, but what Duchamp was doing is collapsing the body into what is called pulsions, meaning that pulsion does not have to be "localized around individual subjects or even clearly defined organs" 24 so if Duchamp is working to set the body free from its anatomy into the what is called "an amorphous libidinal band", meaning from a body into a shapeless, formless, desire rising directly from what Freud called the Id, basically leading the viewer back to "virtually primordial point where language and the body cross." 27 What I think is being said here is the body "attains the status of sign while retaining potent residue of its carnality…Rather than focus on sign vs. carnality Duchamp positioned his work, in the space between, where one is perpetually transforming and falling back into the other…'embodied semiosis". 18 there is also talk of Lyotard's theory of 'disintensificaion' which is confusing me but I know the notion of 'great ephemeral skin' is important to Duchamp's work, but I am confused when in the same sentence the text is talking about the band being an acephalous body, being split apart and spread out as a single surface and then this 'great ephemeral skin' and in the same paragraph we also are introduced to the tensor sign which I am again confused about.
ReplyDeleteAll in all I guess I have more questions than answers when it comes to this particular essay. As for the '3 Standard Stoppages' Duchamp is using the measurement of the meter something who's meaning is directly related to its relationship to other 'real' things meaning the meter means nothing when it is not considered within a framework of measurements i.e. Without the measurement of pounds then a stone (equivalent to 14 pounds) would be useless and meaningless. Therefore by letting gravity do its job and letting the string fall into whatever curve shape it willed itself in, Duchamp anthropomorphized the string by giving it a will so to speak quoted as saying it will " distort itself as it pleases". 29