To Have and to Care.
by Paul O’Kane November 2005
COITUS THROUGH THE GLASS
Marcel Duchamp writes:
“
When one is interrogated by shop windows, one is pronouncing one’s
own sentence. In fact, the choice is a round trip. From the demands
of the shop windows, from the inevitable response to the shop windows,
comes the end of choice.”
Then, having described the consumer’s encounter as:
“
...the coitus through the glass...”
he explains:
“
The sentence consists in cutting through the glass and in regretting
it once possession is gained.” 1
For Duchamp, the freedom of ‘choice’ heralded by mass production and modernity, veils its antithesis, a fatal, incarceral addiction (“The end of choice.”) Meanwhile, he does little to conceal a certain gynophobia when metaphorically overlaying consumerism with an unholy trinity of penetration, castration-anxiety, and the petit-mort of his ‘regret’.
The pained, sexual metaphor of “coitus through the glass” doesn’t only wear Surrealist Freudianism firmly on its sleeve, it also perpetuates a Baudelairean motif -earlier exploited by Manet, Courbet, Zola and others- wherein commodities, prostitution, and artworks converge and commune within the modern milieu.
Today, the idiosyncratic desires of those resignedly, or willingly, branded ‘consumers’ (arguably more dignified than ‘workers’) are hi-jacked and kidnapped by monolithic profiteers within who’s world we now seem to live. Given such a regime, our aims and ambitions are reduced to negotiations that meekly hope to reunite us with some lost or imagined wholeness or authenticity. Meanwhile, the omnipresence of oppressive monopolies means that where, when, and with whom we begin such negotiations seems arbitrary. We might begin (relying on hunches as much as evidence) with that which is familiar; in the home perhaps, at the market, the mall, or down in the old bazaar.
ANDRE BRETON
“The finding of an object serves here exactly the same purpose as the dream, in the sense that it frees the individual from paralysing affective scruples, comforts him and makes him understand that the obstacle he might have thought unsurmountable is cleared.” 2
In Andre Breton’s L’Amour Fou (Mad Love), a flea market ‘find’ has a double nature (it is an ornamental spoon which reads equally as a shoe). This ambiguity renders it undecidable, and this ‘undecidability’ might promise to deliver the finder altogether beyond problems of choice. It could be the kind of fulfillment we are looking for, accompanied by the satisfying certainty of a ‘bargain’ (two objects for the price of one) which compensates consumers for their loss of every other form of righteousness and orientation.
However, Breton’s vivacious, poetic and Freudian spirit means that the shoe-spoon’s undecidability opens a fissure between perception and reason, at one moment becoming a fractal infinity at which his adventurous mind -initially beguiled- baulks and takes refuge in psychoanalytic interpretation. Like Duchamp, Breton eroticises the consumer encounter, but without Duchamp’s critical, ironic distance.
The object’s effect on Breton’s delicate masculine balance becomes comparable to that provoked by ‘Nadja’ -the heroine and psychic muse of his other famous novella- as ‘free association’ provoked by the undecidable shoe-spoon stirs the poet’s mind into an obsessive fetishism guided only by the myth of Cinderella.
WALTER BENJAMIN
If Breton and Duchamp can’t help sexualising the modern, consumerist exchange, one more inter-war commentator can be called upon to raise the tone and take this everyday encounter to a higher plane. Walter Benjamin, also drawing upon Baudelaire (and, elsewhere, comparing the Surrealist ‘Revolution’ with its Marxist equivalent) is intrigued by a less positional consumer event wherein desire becomes reciprocal and commodities all-but come to life. Furthermore, for Benjamin -reconciling Marxism and modernity with messianic Jewish thought- the theological image of ‘soul’ is worth entertaining.
“The intoxication to which the flaneur surrenders is the intoxication of the commodity around which surges the stream of customers. If the soul of the commodity which Marx occasionally mentions in jest existed, it would be the most empathetic ever encountered in the realm of souls for it would have to see in everyone the buyer into whose hand and house it wants to nestle.” 3
A consumerism that is elsewhere demonised and sexualised becomes relatively blameless for Benjamin as he no-longer judges the profane encounter by any local scale nor any merely contemporary point-of-view. Just as he famously characterised ‘progress’ as a helpless, disoriented angel Benjamin here views the consumer encounter as allegorical, thus offering an opportunity for it to be considered in terms of untimely, supernatural forces.
Writing under Baudelaire’s spell, Benjamin implies that modernity might be survived by radical empiricists who forgo the vanity of knowledge and turn their backs on utopia to find glimpses and shards of redemption amid profane experience. There is no point in searching for the world as it ‘is’ (realism), nor in adhering to any fixed vision of what it could be (ideology), instead, while attending to necessities, we can take time-out to suggest what this world, this life, might allude-to beyond its immediate appearance (allegory) and thus enjoy a kind of virtual, aesthetic justification.
By discerning the survival of ‘soul’ amid consumerism’s short-lived crass cornucopia, Benjamin insists that we rescue a soul of our own. There must be some kind of ‘infinite’ within apparently profane events, if only to justify -by a kind of empathy or reflection- some enduring grace of humanity amid the dehumanising effects of modernity and the escalation of fascism.
Benjamin’s ‘infinite’ is gleaned from a disorienting reciprocity like that produced by arcade shop windows, which for him form a hall-of-mirrors representing ‘dialectics at a standstill’. Disorientation is crucial, and if necessary must be induced for it wrests what is experienced from the imposition of banal, bourgeois judgments and suspends all within the magic medium of experience itself. Benjamin thus offers one way out of Breton’s (femme) fatal, fetishism and Duchamp’s ‘coital’ brand of consumerism.
Benjamin demonstrates a second way in the same writing via the figure of a: “poor wretch who passes a shop window containing beautiful and expensive things... These objects are not interested in this (poor) person, they do not empathise with him.” The inter-war poor may visit or pass-by the modern, democratic, public spaces of arcade, store, market or mall, but not as consumers and never as dawdling flaneurs. Reciprocal “intoxication” and “empathy” is lost when ‘objects are not interested in (the poor wretch)’. Here, the poor’s marginalization -though tragic- means that they remain oblivious to addictions which ensnare more privileged classes. Instead, the poor are fine-tuned to urgent, fundamental, truly ‘radical’ needs that Marx hoped would provide fuel for their just redemption.
TODAY
“It may well be the secret of fascist propaganda that it simply takes men for what they are: the true children of today’s standardised mass culture, largely robbed of autonomy and spontaneity, instead of setting goals the realisation of which would transcend the psychological status quo no less than the social one.” 4
As Adorno perhaps recognises in the preceding citation, the Big C of Capitalism has today morphed into the more convenient small ‘c’ of consumer-ism’. (Thus this everyday trade is perhaps surprised to find itself elevated to the status of a principle, an ideology or a disease) But anti-ideological consumerism denies its own ideological status while boasting of its totalitarian, global ambitions.
Today, the equivalents to Benjamin’s inter-war poor, are relentlessly battered by technologically accelerated marketing and lose any potentially disruptive distance and difference by becoming themselves consumed as barely-credit-rated, heavily indebted participants in the mutually abusive spectacle. While remaining segregated and marginal to bourgeois ‘lifestyle’ and ‘opportunity’, today’s poor (a strangely unfashionable word if used too close to home) are nevertheless central to marketeers who soft-target their low, naive budgets, if only to prime the pumps of more profitable flows.
Meanwhile, for those once described as petit bourgeois, the dehumanising workplace, with its repressive homogenisation of idiosyncratic needs, becomes a safe island upon which to rig-up some acceptable performance of identity. The barely elasticated bonds of conservative complicity are justified by a fearful, threatening world promoted enthusiastically by 24-hour news media.
An off-the-peg i.d. as a dutiful drone is also more-than-welcome in those homes to which we once withdrew to indulge an idiosyncratic distraction, to cultivate a more ‘real’ self, or even to brew-up a counter-culture. Now, a ‘workstation’ provides the heart and hearth of every household and a laptop can be carried between ‘home’ and ‘work’. The laptop is a department store already ‘in the bag’ which sparkles and sings like the ultimate musical box as we elevate its lid and feel it brim with promise and possibility. Every monitor and screen becomes a captivating aquarium, swimming with choice, into which technologically liberated consumers gaze with a strange new intensity, not simply in search of entertainment, but as if lives depended on a destiny latent in a microns-thin screen.
DUCHAMP’S ‘FRESH WIDOW’
Duchamp so meticulously considered his wise-cracking artworks that
the escape routes they provide reach from the inter-war years into
our own posterity His own peculiar shopping list included snow shovels,
urinals and bottle racks -all of which continue to trouble relations
between high art and lowly things, between shops and galleries, between
use, need, and luxury. Having once obscured a Surrealist painting exhibition
with a mile of string, Duchamp made works involving ‘traps’ laid
on floors, and secret objects hidden in places where, to this day,
they can only be heard.
But of all his sensory investigations, that special ‘conceptual’ sense, exercised keenly enough by Duchamp to influence generations, may appear to have least relevance to physical, worldly experience. And yet, Duchamp’s career trajectory, having strategically backed away from painting, needed to tumble and clown around the phenomenological and haptic values central to sculpture in order to achieve its enduring conceptual potency.
Through Duchamp’s ‘Large (cracked) Glass’ we might yet drink each other in while nevertheless contemplating something more than simple desire. That ‘something more’ might be the sense that the ‘other’ -however enormous, insignificant, different or desirable their image can be made to appear, always represents a responsibility and demands a certain care that should temper any ego that would only ‘have’, ‘be’, and ‘become’. If 20th century mass wars and mass visual technologies leave us any lesson learned, it might be this one.
In 1920, Duchamp commissioned a carpenter to make a pair of ‘French Windows’ to the size of a salesman’s sample. They were then conjured, by a slip of his tongue-in-cheek into ‘Fresh Widow’. This work’s devastating title seems to simultaneously allude to both the optimism of a morning marketplace (fresh!) and the machinic WW1 killing fields that ‘mass produced’ only corpses and grief (‘widow’). Thus, as in the ‘coitus’ and ‘sentence’ pronounced so threateningly by our earlier Duchampian shop window, the market, death, and sexual coupling are difficult to disconnect in this artist’s mind.
But what is of ultimate importance for the following is that Duchamp also left an intriguing request to accompany ‘Fresh Widow’ to the effect that its square panes must be kept ‘polished like glass’ - despite the fact that they are skinned in opaque black leather.
Compared to the questionably erotic fantasy of a ‘coitus through the glass’, ’Fresh Widow’s’ eternal dependence on a weird frottage might drag us into images of an onanistic bachelorhood (also evident in the ‘Large Glass’ and implicit in the solipsistic studio dream of ‘Bicycle Wheel’). But we can continue to read ‘Fresh Widow’, and the perverse service forever connected to it, as a highly sensitive response to those terrible 20th century aporias -the blindspots of the horrific wars. Duchamp’s request, to polish black leather ‘like glass’, if taken as a command, could be yet another anti-militarist allusion to the ruthlessly enforced, ceremonial condition of a soldier’s gleaming boots and the likely contrast of this image with that of an all-too-messy mud and blood trench.
CARE
Whatever Duchamp had in his consistently elusive mind, his request may offer to this future we presently inhabit, yet another means by which to transcend the consumerist facts of our lives. First, the ominous black panes of ‘Fresh Widow’ serve as a constant reminder to trust some sense less easily duped and seduced than our all-too-susceptible sight. Furthermore, as part of Duchamp’s ‘anti-retinal’ project, the black leathered squares symbolically combat seeing while (again, as a demonstration of Dada anti-war disgust) refuting the rhetorical modern ‘light’ of ‘freedom’, ‘progress’ and ‘reason’.
But having rejected seeing while teasing-out some conceptual, historical and political considerations, the strange curatorial request attached to ‘Fresh Widow’ goes on to insist upon the mysterious value of touch. It thereby implicates a greater intimacy, commitment, risk and responsibility than seeing and thinking alone are likely to command.
Taking this touch most positively, (and leaving sex and death momentarily aside) the ‘meaningless’ polishing of matt, black, leathered windows, might approximate the soothing “there there” motion well known to carers, healers and parents. Such a mutually rewarding act, softly, repeatedly insists that while both subject and context are shown to remain ‘there’ -intact, whole, present- ‘there’, it is not yet ‘the end of the world’, nor of our selves. Life persists despite the most dramatic tragedies.
Finally, ‘Fresh Widow’ demonstrates that Duchamp’s special sense can be relied upon for its surprising opinion whenever we are aroused to choice by the consumerist spectacle. This Surreal salesman’s ‘sample’, far from calling on us to commingle with commerce as it might, subtly placed on its future audiences the light burden of a responsibility to care which might contest, or balance desires to own, have, be, and become, on which consumerism thrives.
‘Fresh Widow’ therefore reads as a mute call to maturity, a silent appeal amid a ‘clamour of being’ for a time in which the other is placed above and beyond the self, and when caring becomes the priority and foundation of a society long-abused by its own hi-jacked and exploited desire.
END
For Rachael House & Jo David, curators of:
Thy Neighbour’s Ox 2
Space Station 65 Gallery,
London, December 2005