Of course, as we have seen in the case of Picasso, these things are always overdetermined. Though Duchamp made a big splash with his painting, Nude Descending the Stairs, the shock success of the Armory Show of 1913, he had never been much of a painter, so it is perhaps no surprise that in the years following that success he abandoned painting for ever and took up the idea of the readymade, first with his Bicycle Wheel (1913) and Bottle Rack (1914), and then, in 1917, with his most famous work, the urinal he called Fountain. On the other hand it could be argued that he had never been very good at painting only because he had always been suspicious of it, had sensed from the start, what he was only to articulate much later, a deep suspicion of the whole enterprise of easel painting. Who can tell? (Who can tell why some sinners repent and others do not, some addicts manage to kick the habit and others do not?) In any case, as his most discerning critic, Thierry de Duve has shown in fascinating detail, the story of Fountain is a kind of parable, largely orchestrated by Duchamp, of the nature of art in our age. Readers of literature, eagerly snapping up the latest Goncourt or Booker Prize winner would do well to ponder its implications.
Duchamp submitted Fountain anonymously (he ‘signed’ it ‘R. Mutt’) to the hanging committee of the first exhibition of the American Society of Independent Artists, on whose jury he himself was. The society based itself on the Parisian society of the same name (the Salon des Indépendants) set up in 1884, to wrest control of the future of art from the Academy. In both cases the motto was the same: No jury, no prizes. In theory anyone could hang, for why should I, an independent artist, submit to the judgement of a jury of straight-laced traditionalists who wouldn't be able to discern good art if it was thrust into their faces? Duchamp had been invited onto the committee because of the triumph of his Nude at the Armory Show. His presence guaranteed the Independents' avant-garde credentials. Unfortunately neither life nor art is ever as simple as that. What the Independents of New York wanted was to be both liberal and avant-garde, to do what they wanted and have themselves proclaimed as important avant-garde artists. We have seen what such self-naming leads to in the case of Don Quixote and others. It was no different here. The Cervantes who drew the right conclusions from their efforts was, of course, Duchamp. By submitting not a new version of the Nude, but, anonymously, a signed urinal, he lit up, as with a flare, the contradictions of art today: for Fountain was, as everyone knows, rejected by the committee as obscene and ‘not art’.
Actually, as de Duve shows, the story is a little more complicated than that, and Duchamp had to ‘help’ his readymade into the limelight. The offending object, anonymously submitted, would have simply disappeared had not Duchamp made sure it was photographed by the most famous photographer of the day, Joseph Stieglitz, and reproduced in a small satirical magazine, The Blind Man, whose first issue was devoted to the Independents' show. Thereafter Fountain literally disappeared, so that all we have is Stieglitz's photo, from which numerous models have of course been made and exhibited round the world, perhaps the most famous piece of modern art, and still as capable of dividing viewers as it ever was. Is it art? Is it art because of its intrinsic merits? Or because the institution says it is? And if the latter, does that mean that we have reached the end of art as it was known in the West since men began to draw in caves? It calls into question all competitions and all juries where art is concerned, and it reminds us of the dream of every artist (and all impresarios, whether publishers or galleries or agents) to be both unbeholden to any tradition and yet proclaimed King of the New.
Had Beethoven had Mozart's lyric gifts, Stravinsky says somewhere in his conversations with Robert Craft, he would never have developed his rhythmic capacities to the degree that he did. Duchamp was always more interested in conceptions than in the possibilities of drawing or working in three dimensions. When he took a bottle-rack or a urinal and relabelled them and exhibited them, he made all those who saw what he had done think again and think hard about what constitutes a work of art, what the function of art is in our society, what it is that gives us pleasure, what our relation is to the objects we use in everyday life, etc., etc. When Picasso took a toy car and made of it the head of a monkey he saw in what he had made something touching and funny and added a baby monkey clinging to the mother's belly, calling the whole thing Mother and Child. The wit is as sharp as Duchamp's, but there is more: his welded sculpture tells us something about monkeys, about ourselves, and about mothers and their children. It's absurd to ask which is better, Duchamp or Picasso. Both, in a sense, fulfil the Bakhtinian principle of releasing the multiple voices which would not have been given a hearing had something not been made (or nudged into being) by an artist.
Both Picasso and Duchamp grasped what was at issue, and both have their ‘descendants’. Those of Duchamp have of course grabbed more of the headlines, though it is difficult not to feel that, in their case, the Master has made them redundant. Duchamp himself, supreme ironist that he was, was extremely reticent in what he chose to say and extremely choosy about the art he subsequently chose to make, thereby, in Kierkegaard's terms, retaining our trust in him as a ‘real’ artist. His descendants and disciples, lacking the clarity of his insight into what is really at issue, have been less parsimonious. Picasso's descendants have had, so to speak, a larger field to play in. One of the chief among them is of course Bacon. We have already examined his contrast between ‘illustration’ and the sort of art he himself was trying to make, but he was equally forthright about abstraction. Talking to David Sylvester about the great Rembrandt self-portrait in Aix-en-Provence (figure 5), he points out that ‘if you analyze it, you will see that there are hardly any sockets to the eyes, that it is almost completely anti-illustrational’. And he adds:
I think that the mystery of fact is conveyed by an image being made out of non-rational marks. And you can't will this non-rationality of a mark. That is the reason that accident always has to enter into this activity, because the moment you know what to do, you're making just another form of illustration. But what can happen sometimes, as it happened in this Rembrandt self-portrait, is that there is a coagulation of non-representational marks which have led to making up this very great image. Well, of course, only part of this is accidental. Behind all that is Rembrandt's profound sensibility which was able to hold onto one irrational mark rather than onto another.
Bacon is trying to say something very difficult, and very close to himself as a painter, and it is a tribute to David Sylvester that he takes the trouble. What differentiates a painter like him (and Picasso) from someone like Duchamp, this passage suggests, is that while he is just as aware of the chance nature of the marks he is making, he also has a sense that he can, because of who he is, because of what he has learned in the course of his life, make a more than merely arbitrary choice about which marks to reinforce, which to ignore, and here he is claiming Rembrandt as a precursor. But he immediately notes that abstract expressionists too have claimed Rembrandt as a precursor, and he goes on to differentiate himself from them. With Rembrandt, he says, the marks have been done in