canned chance; an escape from taste

David Need is in New York and visited MOMA yesterday. He sent a note to a listserv we're on that he came upon Marcel Duchamp's Three Standard Stoppages. There are two artifacts by that title in MOMA -- a boxed set of three wooden templates and glass panels, and then a painting that uses the template shapes.

Duchamp took three meter-long strings and dropped them from a meter's height above treated canvas. Then he fixed them just how they landed, producing three wavering curves that he called stoppages and mounted on glass panels. Then he cut a wooden template along each of these three stoppages.

The whole lot fits in a repurposed croquet box, which gives it a sanctioned feel. Keep in mind that at this time (around the onset of WWI) the definition of the meter was the distance between two lines on a standard bar of 90% platinum and 10% iridium at 0° Celsius. Of course that distance was based on an erroneous geographical measurement...

The official box and the painstakingly traced and cut out templates are all an ironic expression of the impossibility and futility of an absolute measurement, of a means of understanding the world becoming a fetishized end in itself almost by dint of its being fixed within a physical medium. And of course we've taken it to a higher level of absurdity with the definition of the meter now -- it no longer has to do with the atomically indeterminate medium of matter; it's based on the speed of light in a vacuum, a quantum constant so far as we know.

Duchamp described the set as "canned chance," which he explained in an interview with Pierre Cabanne:

The idea of "chance," which many people were thinking about at the time, struck me... The intention consisted above all in forgetting the hand, since, fundamentally, even your hand is chance.
Pure chance interested me as a way of going against logical reality: to put something on a canvas, on a bit of paper, to associate the idea of a perpendicular thread a meter long falling from the height of one meter onto a horizontal plane, making its own deformation. This amused me. It's always the idea of "amusement" which causes me to do things, and repeated three times...
For me the number three is important, but simply from the numerical, not the esoteric, point of view: one is unity, two is double, duality, and three is the rest. When you've come to the word three, you have three million -- it's the same thing as three. I had decided that the things would be done three times to get what I wanted.

The crucial Duchampian concern of putting art at the service of the mind rather than the eye is expressed here, in two different ways. "Forgetting the hand" has to do with his rejection of taste and craft, using some kind of standardized measurement rather than a brushstroke or drawn line. And his numerical concern shows that the resultant artifact is a compilation or transcription of ideas instead of a mere image to look at on the gallery wall and judge against contemporary tastes.

He made the painting with the stoppages as an example of how to use them, kind of a placeholder painting, and maybe his penultimate one (Tu m' was his last, and intentionally so). Note that he uses three sets of the three stoppages.

This is all a key time for Duchamp, as he's rapidly transitioning from being a painter into a conceptual artist. A year before, he's exhausting the possibilities of Futurist and Cubist representation with the Nude Descending a Staircase #2 scandal at the Armory Show; the same year as the stoppages he's attaching a bicycle wheel to a stool in his Paris studio; the word "readymade" is coined the next year as he moves to New York and begins the Large Glass.

The whole stoppages project was really part of the metaphysical work that goes into the Large Glass (the bottom half of which is shown below), connecting the 9 "malic molds" on the left to the cones or "pistons." Again, 3 threes.

Duchamp described the Large Glass as "a delay in glass," which echoes the idea of a stoppage or some thing canned. He stopped working on it in the 20s, leaving it "definitively unfinished, and then it was famously shattered in transport in 1926. After that, the bulk of Duchamp's work becomes writing puns, conducting optical experiments, seeding Dadaism and Surrealism even while remaining ambivalent and peripheral to them, making boxed sets of miniatures of his preceding work, etc. All conceptual, not retinal. All the resultant artifacts were more or less discards to him.

Here's another interview chunk that I think David will appreciate:

Cabanne: When you were young, didn't you ever experience the desire to be artistically cultured?
Duchamp: Maybe, but it was a very mediocre desire. I would have wanted to work, but deep down I'm enormously lazy. I like living, breathing, better than working. I don't think that the work I've done can have any social importance in the future. Therefore, if you wish, my art would be that of living: each second, each breath is a work which is inscribed nowhere, which is neither visual nor cerebral. It's a sort of constant euphoria.
Cabanne: That's what Roche said. Your best work has been the use of your time.
Duchamp: That's right. I really think that's right.