Stranger Than We Can Imagine (6 page)

If Duchamp’s most famous artwork was not conceived by him, how does this affect his standing as an artist?

The key to his work can be found in a posthumous tribute paid to Duchamp by his friend, the American artist Jasper Johns. Johns spoke of Duchamp’s ‘persistent attempts to destroy frames of reference’. The frames of reference he was referring to were those of the traditional art establishment, where art was understood to be paintings created by the talent of an artist and then presented to a grateful audience. The reason why Duchamp presented
mass-manufactured objects as art was to challenge and ultimately undermine the understanding of what a piece of art was.

Duchamp experimented with chance by dropping pieces of string onto a canvas on the ground, and then gluing them in the position they fell. The aesthetic result was produced by luck, not talent. He did this to undermine the idea that an artist could take credit for their work. He was not prolific, but there was a consistent intention in his work after he abandoned painting. He continually explored the idea that art could not be understood as the product of an artist, for as he said in 1957, ‘The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.’ His ‘persistent attempts to destroy frames of reference’ were necessary to reveal the spectator’s role in the existence of art and to demonstrate that what is observed is in part a product of the observer.

All this leaves us in a strange position. If Duchamp did not conceive or produce
Fountain
, even though he thought he did, and if his goal was to reject the simplistic idea that art is what is produced by artists, then does
Fountain
make him a better, or a worse, artist?

‘Persistent attempts to destroy frames of reference’ were common in the art of the early twentieth century.

Cubism was developed by the painters Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in the years after 1907. Painting had begun to move away from lifelike representations of its subjects, but few were prepared for these startling and confusing works. They were strange, angular abstracted images in drab and joyless colours. A common adjective used to describe them was
fractured
, for a cubist painting often looked like an image reflected in the pieces of a broken mirror.

In a cubist painting, the artist’s starting point was the recognition that there was no true perspective or framework from which we could objectively view and understand what we were looking
at. This was an insight remarkably similar to Einstein’s. As a result, the painter did not choose one arbitrary perspective and attempt to recreate it on canvas. Instead, they viewed their subject from as many different angles as possible, and then distilled that into one single image. Here the adjective
fractured
is useful, but misleading. It is not the subject of the painting itself that has become fractured, as is often assumed, but the perspective of the observer. That ‘fractured’-looking image should not be thought of as a straight representation of a deeply weird object. It was the painter’s attempt to condense their multiple-perspective understanding of a normal subject onto a two-dimensional square of canvas.

Cubist painters weren’t radical in their choice of subject. Like the painters who came before them, they were more than happy to paint naked women and still-life groupings of fruit and wine. It was not their subjects that made them radical, but their attempt to create a new and more truthful way of seeing the familiar. As Picasso once said, ‘I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.’

This is the opposite approach to the cubist’s contemporaries, the expressionists. The most famous example of expressionism is probably
The Scream
by the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch, in which a man standing on a bridge is depicted as a hellish howl of anguish. Unlike cubism, expressionism sticks with one perspective. Yet it can only justify doing so by recognising how subjective that single vision is. It highlights the artist’s emotional reaction to their subject, and makes that an integral part of the work. It understands that the painter’s vision is personal and far from objective, but it embraces this limitation rather than attempting to transcend it.

This desire to see in a new way is consistent across other art forms of the early twentieth century. Another example was the development of montage in cinema, a technique primarily developed by the Russian director Sergei Eisenstein during the 1920s. Montage removed the natural links of time and space, which usually connected sequential shots, and instead juxtaposed a number of separate images together in a way that the director found meaningful. In
October: Ten Days that Shook the World
, his 1928 film about
the 1917 Russian Revolution, Eisenstein intercuts images of Russian churches first with statues of Christ, and then with religious icons from increasingly distant and ancient cultures, including Buddha, tribal totems, and Hindu and Aztec gods. Contemporary Russian religion was, through this montage, revealed as a contemporary expression of a universal religious spirit. He then immediately began intercutting images of the Russian General Lavr Kornilov with statues of Napoleon, and in doing so forced the audience to see the general as part of a similar ancient historic tradition.

Unlike Braque’s or Picasso’s cubist canvases, Eisenstein’s montages played out in time, so he was able to string together different viewpoints into a sequence rather than merge them into one image. Eisenstein used this clash of perspectives to create many different effects in his filmmaking, from the rhythmic to the symbolic.

The atonal music that Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg and Anton Webern composed in Vienna from 1908 onwards was just as startling and strange as cubism. Schoenberg rejected the idea that compositions had to be based on a central tone or a musical key.

In traditional composition, a stream of musical notes complement each other in a way that sounds correct to our ears because the pitch of every note is related to, and determined by, the central tone of the key chosen by the composer. Without that central tone, which all the other notes are based on, we become adrift in what Professor Erik Levi called ‘the abyss of no tonal centre’. This is similar to Einstein’s removal of the Cartesian x, y and z axes from our understanding of space, on the grounds that they were an arbitrary system we had projected onto the universe rather than a fundamental property of it. Without a tonal centre at the heart of Viennese atonal music, the compositions which followed could be something of a challenge.

Developments in music echoed relativity in other ways. Igor Stravinsky, for example, made great use of polyrhythms in his 1913 masterwork
The Rite of Spring
. A polyrhythm is when two different and unconnected rhythms are clashed together and performed at the same time. The effect can be disorientating, as when
different perspectives on an object were clashed together in a cubist painting.

Perhaps more than painting or music, the literature of the early twentieth century has a reputation for being wilfully challenging. What is it about the likes of James Joyce’s
Ulysses
, Ezra Pound’s
The Cantos
or T.S. Eliot’s
The Waste Land
that makes them so unapproachable?

In prose, it is the ongoing story or narrative that acts as the reader’s touchstone. It doesn’t matter whether the story is told solely from the point of view of one of the characters, or takes the more God-like third-person perspective of an omnipotent narrator. Nor does it matter if the story uses multiple narrators, such as Bram Stoker’s
Dracula
, which switches between the voices of many different characters in order to advance its plot.
Dracula
’s varying perspectives are not confusing, in part because they are clearly separated in a way that Eliot’s are not, but mainly because all those different voices are telling the same story. This ongoing narrative in prose helps us make sense of everything that happens, in a similar way to the central tone in traditional music or the x, y and z axes of Cartesian space.

Writers like Joyce, Eliot or Pound rejected this singular narrative framework. They frequently shifted narrator, but they did so in a very different way to Bram Stoker. In the second part of
The Waste Land
, the poem’s voice abruptly switches to a conversation between women in a British pub, concerning the return of a demobbed soldier husband. There is no introduction to these characters, nor do they seem directly related to the rest of the poem. The effect is jarring and confusing, because there is no central narrative from which this switch of scene makes sense.

The original title of the poem was ‘He Do the Police in Different Voices’, a reference to a line in Charles Dickens’s
Our Mutual Friend
where Betty Higden, talking about her son, remarks that ‘You mightn’t think it, but Sloppy is a beautiful reader of a newspaper. He do the Police in different voices.’ That shift between different voices, clearly, was an important part of what Eliot was trying to do. But
The Waste Land
is a better title because that change of viewpoint isn’t what the poem is about.

It is about death or, more specifically, the awareness of death in life. The Arthurian reference in
The Waste Land
alludes to an arid spiritual state that is not quite death but in no way life. By getting away from the expected touchstone of a consistent narrative, Eliot was free to look at his subject from a multitude of different angles. He could jump through a succession of different scenes taken from a range of different cultures and time periods, and focus on moments which thematically echoed each other.

The bulk of James Joyce’s
Ulysses
concerns a stream-of-consciousness account of a day in the life of Leopold Bloom of Dublin.
Ulysses
is regarded as one of the great twentieth-century novels, but even its staunchest supporters would refrain from describing it as a cracking yarn. Joyce’s aim, when he sat down to write, was not to produce a good
story
. As he explained to his friend Frank Budgen, ‘I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.’ He was trying to use the medium of a novel to grasp Dublin from every perspective. Using only a typewriter and reams of paper, Joyce was attempting to do to early twentieth-century Dublin what RockStar North, the Scottish developers of the video game Grand Theft Auto V, did to early twenty-first-century Los Angeles. In Grand Theft Auto V every aspect of the city, including its movies and culture, social media and technology, race relations, stock market, laws and business culture, is recreated and satirised.
Ulysses
is admittedly not often compared to Grand Theft Auto V, but I suspect those familiar with both titles will let the analogy stand.

Modernism is now used as an umbrella term to cover this outpouring of innovation that occurred across almost all forms of human expression in the early twentieth century, most notably in the fields of literature, music, art, film and architecture. Movements such as
cubism, surrealism, atonal music or futurism are all considered to be aspects of modernism.

It’s not a name that has aged well, if we’re honest. Describing work from a century ago as ‘modern’ is always going to sound a little silly. It suggests that the focus of modernism was on the new – on what was then modern. This is true to a point. Cars, aeroplanes, cinema, telephones, cameras, radios and a host of other marvels were now part of culture, and artists were trying to come to terms with the extent that they were changing everyday life.

Certain forms of modernism, such as futurism, were undeniably a celebration of the new. Futurism was an attempt to visually represent and glorify speed, technology and energy. It was a movement with distinctly Italian roots. Italy, a country which includes men like Enzo Ferrari among its national heroes, produced futurist painters who were besotted with a combination of style and speed.

Modernist architecture was another movement which was in love with the new. In architectural terms this meant new materials, like plate glass and reinforced concrete. The architect Le Corbusier talked of houses as ‘machines for living in’ where ‘form follows function.’ There was no place for decoration or ornamentation in that worldview. He wrote about taking a stroll across Paris on an autumn evening in 1924 and being unable to cross the Champs Élysées because of the amount of traffic. This was a new phenomenon. ‘I think back to my youth as a student,’ he wrote, ‘the road belonged to us then; we sang in it.’ But Le Corbusier was in no way upset by the changes that he saw. ‘Traffic, cars, cars, fast, fast! One is seized with enthusiasm, with joy … the joy of power,’ he wrote. ‘The simple and naive pleasure of being in the midst of power, of strength.’ For architects like Le Corbusier, the manic new world was a source of inspiration. He did not say if the novelty of not being able to cross the road eventually wore off.

But while futurist artists and modernist architects were clearly thrilled by the startling culture they found themselves in, modernism was not just a reflection on that brave new world. It was not the
case that modernist artists simply painted pictures of cars in the same way that they used to paint pictures of horses. Modernist work could critique modern life as much as celebrate it. It could include an element of primitivism, such as Picasso’s use of African masks and imagery, which fetishised a natural, pre-industrial life. There was also early twentieth-century art, such as Gershwin’s
Rhapsody in Blue
or the Laurel and Hardy films, which were products of their time but which are not considered to be modernist. Modernism, then, was trying to do something more than just acknowledge the time it was created.

Joyce intended his work to be difficult. We can see this in his reaction to the obscenity trial that resulted from an attempt to publish
Ulysses
in Prohibition-era America.
Ulysses
was originally serialised in a New York magazine called the
Little Review
, alongside the poetry of Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. The baroness’s poems may now seem more overtly sexual, but it was Joyce’s work which was singled out for obscenity.