Dandyism and Abstraction (An Excerpt)

More on the Uses of Uselessness

Marcel Duchamp, Bicycle Wheel, 1951 (third version, after lost original of 1913) Museum of Modern Art, New York

In 1988, I published an essay called “Dandyism and Abstraction in a Universe Defined by Newton,” a tale about the displacement of Newtonian mechanics of cause and effect from the physical world to the realm of art.  Its characters include a few figures of fashion (Beau Brummel and his admirers) and many artists (among them Manet, Whistler, and Duchamp).  My point was that dandies like Brummell and dandified artists like Duchamp found ways to opt out of those patterns of cause and effect that reduce us to functions of institutional power.  Refusing to do anything useful, they made ideals of stasis and inconsequentiality.  Rereading this essay, I saw that I didn’t make any great claims for their refusal.  Its only benefit is an elegant isolation of the spirit (which does not preclude an amusing social life) and the satisfaction of knowing that one is not getting with any program but one’s own.  It might seem that I am equating the independence of the dandy with the purity of an autonomous work of art, but, in one of this essay’s twists, I avoid that equation.  The following excerpt takes up the story with Analytic Cubism.

. . . Analytic Cubist paintings by George Braque and Pablo Picasso are rife with passages that refuse to depict anything or to express an emotion, and some of these refrain as well from asserting the picture plane, maintaining the integrity of the edge, or insisting on the materiality of pigment.  Thus these passages do nothing to advance the logic of pictorial autonomy that critics and historians of modern art dedicate so much effort to explicating. The institutions of art criticism and art history clash at many points, but they share a dedication to the fallacy that a good painting is a mechanism whose every part functions perfectly, giving explicators an opportunity to display their verbal command of pictorial cause and effect. But critics and historians have accounted for only the grossest features of Cubism. Their dedication to a causal view of painting prevents them from describing or even noticing the passages where Braque and Picasso indulge in pointless reiteration or leave gaps that neither deprive their images of clarity nor provide them with the benefits of well-managed ellipsis. As the dandy’s ineffably unfunny joke opens a void in a social pattern and fills it with the force of his baffling will, so a passage of nonfunctional brushwork resists the demand that every element in a painting work with every other to establish the autonomy of its image.

This is the dandyism not of the Cubist painters’ persons but of their works. The twentieth-century art world’s most dandified personage was Marcel Duchamp, who rejected painting as too “retinal,” too implicated in patterns of stimulus and response—cause and effect. He was bored by the predictability of such patterns, in Cubism no less than in the Impressionist paintings that received his most intensely dismissive scorn. In its occasional refusal to cause thoroughly pictorial effects, Cubism had pointed him along the antiretinal path; that refusal, however, looked incomplete to Duchamp, who believed, rightly, that Cubism’s occasional blank spots were not enough to protect it from a retinal response. He designed his readymades to correct that vulnerability.

Bicycle Wheel, 1913, is elegant but vacuous. The wheel revolves yet is as inert as the exquisitely arranged figure of Beau Brummell. No blankness can protect itself from interpreters, of course, and a variety of meanings have been projected onto this and other readymades. These may be the twentieth century’s most vigorously analyzed objects. However diverting they may be, the results of this analysis should not be allowed to obscure Duchamp’s command of inconsequentiality. To be clear, I don’t say that the commentaries offered by his supporters are negligible, only that they do not take into account the readymades’ indifference to the task of offering a coherent significance. In 1967 Duchamp told Pierre Cabanne that Bicycle Wheel “was just a distraction. I didn’t have any special reason to do it.”  

Perhaps Duchamp was disingenuous, yet Bicycle Wheel’s motion has a rather specific quality: “I enjoyed looking at it,” said the artist two years later, “just as I enjoy looking at the flames dancing in a fireplace.”  Duchamp liked the sort of motion that calms the desire to act (see his hypnotic Rotary Glass Plates of the 1920s), and he liked chess, a game of minimal physical gesture. Flames on the hearth, chessmen, the spinning bicycle wheel on its stool—all move constantly, yet all stay in the same place.

Pablo Picasso, Harlequin, 1915. The Museum of Modern Art. In the rectangle on the right, partially covered with white paint, I see a negative profile of Pierrot.

I have never read an interpretation of Duchamp’s readymades that accounts for his enchantment with pointless motion.  He became a dandy by extending this indifference to cause and effect from his art to his person, rendering him elegantly nondescript. Like Jules Laforgue’s Frenchified Hamlet, the public Duchamp was a variation on the commedia dell’arte’s Pierrot. I don’t mean, of course, that he dressed the part; a dandy’s outfit is never a costume—never a matter of looking bohemian or rebellious, of wearing overalls to dinner or a monocle on 57th Street. (I make no complaint against such gestures, but they are beside the present point.)  Duchamp was Pierrot not in his outfit but in his person. Where particolored Harlequin, Picasso’s favorite alter ego, is the allegorical figure of active effort on the fronts of style and sensibility, Pierrot is the figure of the self as the palest of monochromes: abstemious, idle, resistant to institutionally approved interpretation and to the causal forces that institutions try so busily to control. 

Laforgue said of Charles Baudelaire’s poems that they are “as vague and inconsequential as the flutter of a fan, as equivocal as make-up, so that the bourgeois who reads them asks: ‘So what?’”  The comment does not make common cause with obtuse sensibilities.  Rather, it points beneath the lush surface of Baudelaire’s verse to a dandified refusal to engage any topic in a way that the general reader will recognize as effective.  Duchamp’s readymades are similarly similarly defiant in their refusal to perform.  And his Large Glass, 1915–23, doesn’t so much deny the rational relations of cause and effect as elaborate them to the point of absurdity and beyond; the work is so complex a machine for the production of meaning that it baffles meaning, defeats interpretation. One could argue that the Large Glass is too richly significant for any commentary to be exhaustive, but I think it would be truer to say that it is a meaning-machine designed not to work.

When earnest members of the public run across such machinery, they tend to assume even now that they are faced with a hoax. I have no wish to be cruel, but I ought to point out that dandies and their present-day descendants do not respect the public enough to hoax it. They are too fastidious to want to be noticed by the uninitiated, or to make a mark in history as it is popularly understood. Dandified emptiness and immobility are means to freedom from institutions—means ironically deployed, for, as the dandy knows, only the image of such freedom is possible.

The dandy objects to Isaac Newton, or, since one can imagine Duchamp but not Beau Brummell pondering Newton’s axioms of motion, it is better to say that the dandy objects to the utilitarian view of the world that appeared as Newtonian physics engendered John Locke’s cause-and-effect psychology. The scientific developments that produced “the mechanization of the world picture,” as historians call it, give their tone to much of modern thought and feeling, even when, or perhaps particularly when, we invoke notions like “the organic” or “the creative.” Though we appreciate modernity’s benefits, sometimes it oppresses.  After all, every modern convenience is an emblem of the attitudes that guide our science and technology, our corporations and bureaucracies—all the institutions that reduce us to data. Like the work of art, the self is the target of reductive policies wielded by every institution, whether academic, economic, or political.

Resisting this reduction with a strategy of emptiness, Ad Reinhardt insisted that art should display “no object, no subject, no matter. No symbols, images or signs. Neither pleasure nor pain. No mindless working or mindless no-working.”  Reinhardt’s monochromes look to me like logos accompanying these strictures, but they are not that for a sympathetic critic, Lucy Lippard, who argues that his black canvases in particular gain their significance by acknowledging what the theologian Paul Tillich calls “the unconditional and infinite character of the Ultimate.”  Reinhardt appears to have believed that there are realms where concepts like “the Ultimate” make sense; undeniably, he intended his art to have purposes, both transcendent and earthly. Yet I don’t think his sense of mission would have been so strong, his grappling with institutions so vigorous, if he had never formed a dandified image of himself as a presence utterly disengaged and self-sufficient: the imaginary source of all authority. Having devised that image, Reinhardt could discard it and get on with the moralist’s and the mystic’s neglect of selfhood. Nonetheless, to see his black paintings fully, one must find amid their ambitiously transcendent meanings their meaninglessness, which is equally ambitious and obsessively self-centered.

The critic Max Kozloff has argued that “Reinhardt’s excessive craftsmanship dissolved into a puzzling darkening of image and variation.” By contrast, he said, Andy Warhol’s art signals an “ostentatious lack of effort.” Further, “Warhol refuses to be understood by accepting everything; Reinhardt rejects interpretation by despising everything”—that is, everything worldly. These differences reveal similarities: “both artists. . . thwarted all expectations of what art looks like.”  Interpretation refused to be thwarted, and by 1971, when Kozloff published these remarks, commentators had defined Reinhardt’s and Warhol’s careers as effects of formal, historical, and cultural causes.  Even now, however, the work of both artists preserves a degree of unaccountability, a willful resistance to interpretation. With his silverish wig, Warhol was obviously a fop. Less obviously, he shared with Reinhardt a dandified disinclination to be at the world’s disposal. He gave in to his culture so thoroughly that it could only sweep over him and through his art, leaving both unmoved; Warholian inertia shows in his lack of affect and his numb, self-enclosed repetitions.

The postwar American art world has produced few sharply resistant figures—Warhol, Reinhardt, Jackson Pollock, Jasper Johns, maybe several more. The unassimilable core of their art is difficult to see because work like theirs receives the full weight of institutional anxiety.  Aside from Max Kozloff and a few other connoisseurs of ungraspable nuance, the American art world’s commentators make a strenuous effort to exaggerate the legibility of defiantly illegible artists. But I think there is another reason that illegibility is so rarely seen. It is scarce. American myths of unencumbered individuality obscure the institutional authority that one must recognize before one can resist it.

Unbeknownst to itself, much American art in the postwar era has been willing to exemplify the virtues and embody the attitudes approved by our institutions. Toeing an unacknowledged line, this art has been staunch and proper in its optimism, in its programmatic clarity, in its reliance on a mechanistic notion of form as the cause that produces the effect of interpretable meaning.  This obedience to institutional expectations is largely unconscious and so are the satisfactions of inertia.  That is why one sees in this era so few sharply focused, thoroughly self-conscious incidents of arrogant, dandified indifference.

Here is a link to the original essay, in the Artforum archive. First there is a transcription of my text, then reproductions of magazine pages, with reproductions.