‘Etant Donnés: 1. La Chute D’eau 2. Le Gaz D’eclairage’ / ‘Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas‘.

This is the title of Marcel Duchamp’s final artwork, assembled in his New York apartment in secret over the two decades between 1946 and 1966. The haunting imagery of this bizarre diorama has enthralled art critics and historians for years, but it also captured the dark imagination of Olivier Theyskens for his magazine NºD.

Belgian art historian Paul Van Beek constructed the following fictitious interview* with Duchamp, to explore the possible motives, opinions and musings of this most illusive chess-playing artist.

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MARCEL DUCHAMP
by Paul Van Beek

Paul Van Beek: Marcel Duchamp, why did you request this conversation? As far as I know it is the first time you have asked for an interview in the whole of your long career.

Marcel Duchamp: Yes. I am not someone who pursues things. I don’t like chasing after things, first of all because it’s tiring. You see, I prefer breathing to working. What’s more, it doesn’t usually lead to anything. I don’t expect anything. But chasing after things is the consequence of a need. I don’t have that, because actually I feel pretty good even though I haven’t created anything for a long time. I don’t attribute to the artist that social role in which he thinks that he has to do something and make an effort for the public. I hate that sort of thinking.

PVB: But then why did you ask for an interview now?
MD: For exactly that reason. You see, there is the creator of the work on the one hand and the person who looks at it on the other. According to me, the one who looks at it is just as important as its maker. In my opinion, the spectator is just as much of a creator of the work as the maker himself, and vice versa, the creator is just as much one who looks at his work. For more than 20 years I have been working in secret on a major definitive work, more or less a ‘viewing box’ entitled Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas. The only person who knows of its existence is my wife Teeny. It’s about time a person who will look at it plays his rile of spectator. As you know, chance is very dear to me, coincidence is my most loyal friend, but I don’t want her to run away with my work, when I’m dead for example, at the viewer’s cost.

PVB: Am I right in thinking you are working on a diorama? Is that the right word?
MD: Yes, it is a diorama, if you like. Given is very similar to a display in a natural history museum with a stuffed wild animal in the midst of three-dimensional scenery from its natural environment, and with a painted background. The landscape in the background is like that of my L.H.O.O.Q from 1919. In my new work I am constantly trying to create references to earlier work. The title Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas is a notation from my Green Box and refers to The Large Glass, on which I worked for eight years when I was about 30. I have also tried to give away little bits of my secret in small new works, but few people, if any, have understood my ‘messages in a bottle’. As early as 1947 I called my rubber breast, Please Touch, ‘my secret’, it was a breast from my plaster model of Given. In 1959 I tried to make it clear that I was working with gaslight and water, by means of my ready-made called Water & Gas On Every Floor. In 1965 I shaved the moustache and beard off my 1919 L.H.O.O.Q, in the same way as I shaved off the pubic hair of my mannequin. And this year I published the etching Le Bec Auer, in which I drew her outline. In this way I have sent out into the world a great many ‘messages in a bottle’ and ‘purloined letters’. But no one has picked them up or found them.

PVB: You have made up a whole stage setting, or what would you call it?
MD: It is, if you like, an installation, one in which at first sight all you see is an old, weathered, double wooden door with no handles framed by bricks. It is only when you cautiously come closer to admire the work with you own eyes, supposing that it is one of my ready-mades, that you discover two small holes at eye-level. You peep through the holes and there, straight in front of you, lies a naked woman on her back on a pile of branches and leaves, her legs opened wide. You look straight into the hole between her legs. She has no pubic hair or genitals, just a notch. Her face is out of view. She is holding up a burning gas lamp.

PVB: It strikes me as a revolting sight! Is the woman dead? Has she been attacked and left behind mutilated somewhere in the woods? Or is it a masquerade? Is the woman a woman?
MD: Exactly@ What exactly is going on here? A shaved vulva? A dry vulva? A stretched vulva? An open wound where a penis has been? Perhaps its even an anus as unsullied as the Virgin Mary?

PVB: All this raises a great many questions! I suppose Given is as direct and shocking as The Large Glass is hermetic and remote?
MD: It is not so simple and dualistic. Those who are looked at and those who look are one and the same. même. How often have I had to explain in America that the two parts of The Large Glass, the bachelors at the bottom and the bride at the top, are one and the same. Même! Même! I always repeated, so in the end I added it to the title of The Large Glass: ‘La mariée mise a nu par ses celebataires, même’. But they didn’t understand it, and in the English translation même became ‘even’, which I suppose is possible too. There are even scholarly theoreticians who make it into m’aime and on that basis put forward a curious incest theory, according to which I had a relationship with my sister Suzanne, all very interesting. In my etching Le Bec Auer you see the same recumbent woman as through the holes in Given, but now in the company of a man. THe man’s head and the woman’s crotch are next to each other. Yet the man is not interested in her genitals, and apparently not in his own either, even though it’s standing straight up like ‘a pole in the air’, but remains invisible behind the man’s head. What you do see is the upright Bec Auer gas lamp which the woman holds ostentatiously in her hand.

PVB: How important is eroticism in your work?
MD: Very important. If it is not visible or striking, it is certainly implicit. I have a great belief in eroticism, because it is really something very general, something that everyone everywhere in the world understands. If you like, eroticism replaces what other literary schools have called symbolism or romanticism. You might say it could form yet another school. Eroticism is the means by which one tries to reveal things that are constantly hidden. To be able to permit oneself to expose them and voluntarily bring them within everyone’s reach, that’s what I think is important because that’s the basis of everything and yet it is never talked about.

PVB: You say ‘implicit’ but it seems to me that in Given it is more a question of explicit sex!
MD: I think it’s time to give my work back its subversive character. It is time, if you like to put your hand under Miss Beatrice Wood’s skirt and blindly feel her sex with your fingers. That has always been my method. I envelop an idea as a vagina envelops a penis. Under the Underwood typewriter cover, sex and machine are the same, même. Despite the many articles and even monographs that have been written about me, I am astonished that the machines are discussed but rarely, if ever, the genitals. This is a cleaning up operation that involves the dilution of the sexual fantasies and obscene wordplay that I inject like heroin into my works, to make them more suitable for consumption, or to disregard them completely and concentrate on comments on my interest in esoteric subjects like alchemy and mathematics.

PVB: What do you think about the various interpretations by André Breton, Michel Carrouges and Robert Lebel?
MD: Each of their interpretations applies its own personal emphasis, which is not necessarily right or wrong, but interesting. though only interesting when one takes account of the person who wrote it. Nowhere is the literature on my work so much concerned with itself as when it is about my alter ego Rrose Sélavy. She is described and analysed from every angle: from the point of view of mathematics, androgyny, psychoanalysis, identity, incest and bisexuality. In all these hyper-theoretical analyses, Rrose Sélavy’s scabrous humour and hidden eroticism has been lost. Were you not struck by the fact that Rose is not only a terribly ordinary girl’s name but it is also the colour of her lingerie and that which is beneath it? How often I have alluded to this, in covert terms – because I think it should remain concealed – but I never thought that the secret would be kept so long. Even now I do not intend to reveal everything. That is a job for both the work and for the spectator.

PVB: So he who looks and she who is looked at are the same?
MD: If you like. Gladly.

PVB: It is not necessary as far as I’m concerned.
MD: Yes, yes, it’s what I want. It’s not up to me to decide, but it would be very nice.

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*This conversation only took place in the mind of Paul Van Beek.

The artwork is on permanent display in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Above: The view through the peephole door of ‘Etant Donnés: 1. La Chute D’eau 2. Le Gaz D’eclairage’ / ‘Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas‘.
Mixed media assemblage, approximately 242.5cm high, 177cm wide, including: an old wooden door, bricks, velvet, wood, leather stretched over an armature of metal and other material, twigs, aluminium, iron, glass, plexiglass, linoleum, cotton, electric lights, gas lamp (Bec Auer type), motor, etc.

Above: The exterior view of ‘Etant Donnés: 1. La Chute D’eau 2. Le Gaz D’eclairage’ / ‘Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas‘.

Above: ‘L.H.O.O.Q.‘ by Marcel Duchamp, 1919.

Above: ‘The Large Glass: The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even‘ by Marcel Duchamp, 1915-1923.