COMMENTARY : Duchamp the De-Facer : The artist who challenged the eye <i> and</i> the mind is celebrated at the Norton Simon and in a book about his California connection

Marcel Duchamp has been dead for almost 23 years, but you’d never know it by scanning the current landscape of art.

His legacy is everywhere. The master of the Dada gesture is one of those rare and evanescent artists who don’t so much “influence” a group of followers as create a climate in which all subsequent painters and sculptors--including those who vigorously resist--inhale his oxygen.

With such once-notorious but now sanctified works as his simple commercial reproduction of the Mona Lisa with a beard and mustache gaily scribbled over her famous smirk, Duchamp’s achievement was to have greatly enlarged art’s purpose. Not merely giving retinal pleasure to the eye, art was placed more profoundly at the service of the mind.

For him, any claim that a great work of art had set an unimpeachable standard against which subsequent developments must be measured meant that the mind, in embracing a timeless absolute, had stopped thinking. And when the mind stops thinking, rigor mortis isn’t far behind.

The Mona Lisa’s status as Masterpiece-with-a-capital-M made it a prime example. Currently, a version of Duchamp’s transformation of this venerated icon can be seen at the Norton Simon Museum in a rather loosely themed show called “Impossible Realities: Marcel Duchamp and the Surrealist Tradition,” organized by curatorial assistant Lori Hunt.

Made by the artist in 1963 as a replica of the lost 1919 original, this cheap, color offset lithograph features a penciled beard and mustache over Mona’s face, with the letters “L.H.O.O.Q.” added below, rather like a caption. As even casual students of modern art know well, the cryptic letters create a sentence, when pronounced in the Frenchman’s native tongue, which can be translated as, “She has a hot ass”--thus solving for all time the enigma of Mona’s famous smile.

Framing the tight-lipped grin with a beard and mustache underscores this erotic implication: While changing the portrait’s female gender to male, the whiskers also transform the orifice into the image of a pudendum.

Like a graffiti artist marking up a common billboard, Duchamp literally de-faced the Mona Lisa. The woman became a man, her mouth became her genitals.

Or to be more precise--an essential task in the vicinity of this particular artist--he didn’t deface Leonardo’s painting, which hangs safely in the Louvre. Instead, his blunt transformation of her features made illegible the reverent image of a classic painting lodged in the public mind.

That image, its once thrilling aesthetic edge cauterized by piety and fame, had come to stand between Leonardo’s actual painting and any modern viewer of it. Duchamp’s work is as much about restoring an experience of freshness to the stale conventions of the Renaissance masterpiece as it is about creating a new work of art.

Breathing the pungent air of Duchamp’s art leads, as often as not, to gleeful lightheadedness. For those who embrace him, the giddiness can take two forms.

One approaches a kind of religious fervor--a metaphysical mania--in which the dizzying hall of mirrors opened up by his art is regarded as an arcane path to the core mysteries of the universe, which must, at any cost, be mapped out as a modern cabala. This tumble into Alice’s rabbit-hole, with no way out, has probably led to more clotted and (unintentionally) hilarious prose than has been inspired by perhaps any other serious artist of the 20th Century.

By contrast, the other kind of champion sees in Duchamp an eternal skepticism, which offers a more pragmatic means by which to make it through the day. In his carefully plotted work, the keen-witted Frenchman showed a way to keep the ever-enclosing walls of modern conformity and convention at least temporarily at bay. (Have you figured out my bias yet?)

For those who don’t appreciate Duchamp’s aesthetic scamperings--and they are many, despite the demonstrated significance of his work--the gas around his art is perceived to be more like bovine methane mixed with chloroform.

“In the conventionally arranged and well-lit exhibition at the Tate,” sniffed one mandarin on the occasion of the artist’s 1966 retrospective in London, “everything looks innocuous. Almost all the pictures he ever painted have been assembled, but they are all shockingly disappointing.”

Another critical visitor unveiled a panoply of snide terms, dismissing Duchamp’s art as “pallid rehearsals” that were “surpassingly unfunny” and that consisted simply of “pointless acts.” Finally, he pronounced the whole of the artist’s career as amounting to “resplendent triviality.”

Duchamp’s London retrospective was not his first. That had come three years before, in--of all places--Pasadena. Indeed, from that show came most, if not all, of the half-dozen multiples and other assorted Duchamp documents now in the collection of the Norton Simon Museum. Organized by the young Walter Hopps, director of what was then the Pasadena Art Museum, the 1963 retrospective has long-since entered into the annals of local legend.

How could this internationally influential artist have reached his 76th year without already having been honored with such a retrospective reckoning? How could an obscure museum in a provincial outpost have snared this plum assignment? What were the ramifications of that momentous display for artists here and elsewhere?

You could be forgiven for having no answers to these and other questions, which were rekindled last year when the Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Santa Monica staged a partial re-creation of the Pasadena show. The Duchamp retrospective, like many other pivotal episodes, is just one tip of the submerged and invisible iceberg that is the history of art in Southern California.

Although voluminous critical and historical analysis has been made of Duchamp’s place in 20th-Century art produced in Europe and New York, his activity on the West Coast has been largely ignored--this despite the far from inconsequential fact that his principal patrons, Louise and Walter Arensberg, happened to live on Hillside Avenue in Hollywood. Duchamp traveled to California on four occasions: in 1936, 1949, 1950 and for the 1963 Pasadena show. Three times he visited the Arensbergs, who had also assisted in his 1942 expatriation from war-ravaged France.

Still, you’d be hard-pressed to find out what he did here, and why. The California connection has been pretty much a blank.

For this reason, the recent publication of “West Coast Duchamp” (Grassfield Press: 128 pp., 57 illus.; $39.95 cloth, $24.95 paper) is a notable event. Issued in association with Shoshana Wayne Gallery and edited by art historian Bonnie Clearwater (see accompanying story, Page 78), “West Coast Duchamp” seeks to fill in the blank.

With a caveat or two, it does so admirably. Composed of seven essays by seven authors, and with four additional appendices, it’s not exactly what you would call “a good read.” The writing skills on display vary widely, and the rambling and self-conscious essay on the Pasadena retrospective is, disappointingly, the weakest of the lot.

None of the authors have attempted a significant conceptual leap in our understanding of this major artist (which would probably take a miracle). Instead, where the collection succeeds is on the level of straightforward, art historical research, with information cobbled brick by brick. If for no other reason, “West Coast Duchamp” is an important book.

In addition to an illuminating look at life with the Arensbergs by Naomi Sawelson-Gorse, two of the most useful bricks appear at the beginning of each section. In the first, art historian Francis M. Naumann unearths the heretofore obscured identity of the collector who acquired Duchamp’s notorious 1912 canvas, “Nude Descending a Staircase,” from the landmark 1913 Armory Show.

It was, surprisingly enough, a Californian. One Frederic C. Torrey, a 49-year-old print dealer from San Francisco with no prior record of commitment to the European avant-garde, saw the Armory Show on a visit to New York, couldn’t get the Cubist “Nude” out of his mind, got off his return train in Albuquerque, N.M., and cabled the administrators of the show: “I WILL BUY DUCHAMP NUDE DESCENDING STAIRWAY PLEASE RESERVE.” A few days later, back in San Francisco, he consummated the deal with a payment of $324.

Naumann reports that Torrey kept the painting for about six years (he sold it to the Arensbergs), during which time it was shown widely in the Bay Area. Duchamp’s artistic presence in California is thus coincident with the larger interest in his work in the United States.

The book’s second most useful feature has to do with the Western Round Table on Modern Art, a 1949 symposium sponsored by the San Francisco Art Assn. as a rebuttal to one organized the year before by Life magazine and held at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Clearwater’s essay sets the stage for this event, which included among the participants philosopher George Boas, critics Alfred Frankenstein and Robert Goldwater, painter Mark Tobey and architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

The book’s first appendix, which includes a complete transcript of Duchamp’s comments during the three-day symposium, is what finally stands out. Here, the artist gets to speak for himself.

What the cosmopolitan Frenchman has to say is revealing, especially at a moment when American art was on the brink of international influence. In a heated exchange between Duchamp and the pompously narrow-minded Frank Lloyd Wright, the Midwestern architect takes an apparently unwitting cue from Joseph Goebbels and denounces modern art as degenerate, because it was informed by the work of “primitives” and embraced by homosexuals.

Curtly, Duchamp dismisses Wright’s noxious claim, on the grounds that neither primitivism nor homosexuality is degenerate.

Duchamp went on to outline a central tenet of his artistic philosophy. It’s worth quoting here, because the distinction he makes between mere taste, which he derides, and a far more important quality, which he poetically describes as an “esthetic echo,” goes to the heart of Duchamp’s pivotal importance for contemporary art.

“Taste,” Duchamp explained, “presupposes a domineering onlooker who dictates what he likes and dislikes, and translates it into ‘beautiful’ or ‘ugly’ when he is sensuously pleased or displeased.

“Quite differently, the victim of an esthetic echo is in a position comparable to that of a man in love, or of a believer, who dismisses automatically his demanding ego and, helpless, submits to a pleasurable and mysterious constraint.

“While exercising his taste he adopts a commanding attitude. When touched by the esthetic revelation, the same man, in an almost ecstatic mood, becomes receptive and humble.”

Duchamp focused here on the role of the spectator in relation to the work of art. The overthrow of art as a closed vehicle for the purely expressive self, and the rise of art as the fulcrum for an open dialogue with a spectator, has been among the great fights waged in contemporary culture. It’s good to have Marcel Duchamp around as an ally, in as full and dimensional a way as possible, because the battle is still going on today.