Eng | De ou par marcel duchamp par Ulf Linde

Brief directions for the hanging of
DE OU PAR MARCEL DUCHAMP PAR ULF LINDE

1. Adapt the entire exhibition to an ideal spectator: a person in a wheelchair. Mount a wheelchair ramp on the entrance steps so that the person in a wheelchair does not have to enter from the back, on Jakobsgatan. Examine the angle of the ramp.

2. Build a temporary wall/entrance outside the entrance, to clarify an outside and an inside (the boundary that is present in both The Large Glass [the bride’s clothes] and Étant donnés [the wooden door 1]). Outside, all of official Sweden is on display: the Government Offices at Rosenbad, the Riksdag (parliament), the Royal Palace, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Sager Palace, the institutions. Inside: the desired. Let the contracted construction company decide on form and appearance (ref: Ready-mades).

3. In the staircase inside the entrance, hang a replica of the matrix for the golden ratio 2, the one that Ulf Linde hung from the ceiling of the Duchamp Room at old Moderna Museet. Adapt at the top of the stairs so that its height is suitable for the person in a wheelchair. This means that the rest of us will have to bow our heads slightly to get into the exhibition (ref: Le Surréalisme en 1947).

4. Overture. Cover the walls of the Nike Hall with Duchamp-pink textile (the colour for the inside, the desired, according to colour samples produced by Henrik Samuelsson and Ulf Linde), pleated in the classic style so that it corresponds to the architecture of the hall (ref: the glass display case in the secretariat at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts).

5. Construct a freely interpreted replica of Ready Made Malheureux (1919), a geometry textbook with its covers torn off, whose pages flutter in the draft from a small table fan. Emphasise the shadow on the wall by means of a single light source, to get a shadow play that brings Bicycle Wheel and Tu m’ to mind. Add to this a sound system with 16 speakers arranged in a circle (22.5º between each speaker) with occasional sounds that relate to works by MD and to phrases by MD and UL. HS and JS to work this out.

6. Mount a wheelchair ramp on the stairs from the Nike Hall. The visitor is then directed to take the route through the Upper Hall outside the auditorium and enter the exhibition itself in the Northeast Room, by the door just before Café Mejan.

7. Drape the entrance with pink textile that serves to maintain a different humidity zone according to instructions from MM’s curators. Same shade of pink as in the Nike Hall. Choose the type of textile based on what is most suitable for the humidity requirements.

8. Immediately inside the entrance is a temporary wall, a rectangular shape placed at an angle 2 x 11.25º, i.e. 22.5º together, forwards and to the side, as if it was stuck into the floor. Build the wall with a depth of 30-50 cm. [?]

9. The entrance wall, the floor and the outside walls of the room within the room measuring 505 x 817 cm which will take up a large part of the Northeast Hall are to be painted Duchamp green (the colour for outside); in other words, all visible surfaces except the ceiling (cf.: The Green Box). Except for the three objects by the entrance, then, it will be an empty space the spectator encounters – a green outside. The only other feature is a rotorelief machine placed directly on the floor. Allow its power cable to snake randomly across the floor (cf.: Trois Stoppages étalon 3). Its rotation is silent and it will be the only thing in the green space to catch/distract visitors’ perception.

10. Place two objects by the entrance wall, a bit like mirror images of each other.

11. The first is a portrait of Marcel Duchamp by Irving Penn, in which Marcel Duchamp is posing in a corner measuring 22.5º. Borrow the picture from MM’s collection, alternatively from a private collection. Mount it in a frame inside a box (preferably made of copper) with a mirror on the back. Hanging: on the wall mount a mirror which is shrunk about 7 mm in relation to the copper frame. Mount the copper box with a mirror on the back so that the mirror faces the room and the picture is turned towards the wall. Using four copper rods, mount it so that it protrudes 17 cm from the wall.
The spectator will first see a mirror, and behind the mirror the portrait reflected in the second mirror. To see the whole picture, the spectator will have to change sides, looking at it from the right and the left side. Recurring reference: À regarder (l’autre côté du verre d’un oeil), de près, pendant presque une heure. Or: La mariée mis à nu par ses célibataires, même.

12. A counterpart to the Duchamp portrait – a replica photographed by Hans Hammarskiöld (who was a close friend of Irving Penn) in which Ulf Linde has taken the place of Duchamp in Penn’s image. Linde is seated in his wheelchair in an identical, 22.5º corner. This image to be shot in August. It should have the same format as Penn’s original, and a similar frame. It is then to be mounted on the other side of the entrance in the same way as the other image (see directions under 11). The spectator encounters a mirror and sees, behind it, fragments of an image in another mirror.

13. On the back of the entrance wall, at a height suitable for a person in a wheelchair, are two peepholes (ref. Étant donnés). Inside, a monitor with a sketch based on Marcel Duchamp’s reciprocal ready-made 4: using a Rembrandt as an ironing board. Hologram: a delay in glass – in which the displacement of two colours creates an illusion of depth. As if by a happy coincidence, the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts happens to own one of Sweden’s national treasures: Rembrandt’s Claudius Civilis 5. Institutional repassage.

14. The room within the room is a replica, on a somewhat displaced scale (in order to achieve measurements that follow the numbers 1, 2, 3, 7, 8), of the Duchamp Room inaugurated in 1989 at old Moderna Museet. The room was by Ulf Linde. At the back, almost inaccessibly, in the far corner and at a suitable height for a person in a wheelchair, hang Moulin à café (1911), the key to Duchamp’s and Linde’s world.

15. At the entrance place the replica (from the original room) of the door Duchamp made for André Breton’s 6 Galerie Gradiva in Paris in 1937. 7 The replica is Ulf Linde’s replica from MM, somewhat reworked in relation to Duchamp’s original. Linde preferred transparent Perspex to Duchamp’s milky white.

16. Inside the cube place a fitted carpet in Duchamp pink (the colour for inside), which deviates from the original at old MM, where the carpet was grey.

17. Across the ceiling suspend, as in the original, a rope that forms the matrix for the golden ratio – the same matrix the visitor has already met immediately inside the entrance, on the stairs with The Lion and The Wild Boar.

18. Hang and place the works inside the cube in accordance with the original, the room at old Moderna Museet, where the hanging – based on the golden ratio, was low.

19. Transform the North Hall – the middle hall – into a room with a mezzanine (one upper and one lower domain, ref.: The Large Glass and Étant donnés). A ramp leads to the upper domain. The ramp ends in a platform from which the spectator can partake of the contents of the upper domain. It is not possible to make one’s way out onto “the floor” and approach the paintings since the floor is an illusion made of stretched white canvas. This is fastened a few decimetres above the platform. The spectator views the paintings from a distance. It is not possible to approach them. The walls and floor of the space are all white. Daylight is let in through the lantern (which must therefore be protected against UV rays).

20. As a side effect, the room will be burglar-proof. Hung here will be some of the treasures on loan from Moderna Museet, works for the acquisition of which Ulf Linde was instrumental. They are: Francis Picabia: Première rencontre 8 (1925); Francis Picabia: Prenez garde à la peinture 9 (1916); Giorgio de Chirico: Le cerveau de l’enfant 10 (1914); Jacques Villon: Composition en jaune et bleu 11 (1921); Jean Arp: L’oiseau 12 (1922).

21. By the entrance from the Northeast Hall, visible when you come out of the Gradiva door in the replica of the old Duchamp Room since the “floor/ceiling” of the North Hall will be lower than the height of the door, place Mascot för rörelse i konsten (“Mascot for movement in art”) 13 by Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd. The work was originally made for the exhibition Rörelse i konsten (“Movement in art”) at Moderna Museet. Due to the weight of the sculpture, the floor underneath it needs to be reinforced.

22. Make it clearly visible that the floor/ceiling at the entrance and exit is made up of three lines – two green and one white (cf. Duchamp’s liberation in 1912: he became one in relation to his two brothers, Jacques Villon and Raymond Duchamp-Villon; previously they were all of the same colour/tone).

23. Instead of a static hanging of the paintings, place them according to an imaginary room within the room, a slightly leaning rhombus that displaces the works 22.5º horizontally and vertically. A similar rhombus, in the shape of a pyramid, can be found in À regarder (l’autre côté du verre d’un oeil), de près, pendant presque une heure. The works, and the spectator’s gaze, is thus made to move in relation to the Northeast Hall, a delay which renders the works present but at the same time unreachable.

24. From the platform, a visitor who is not in a wheelchair can walk down a flight of seven steps (the platform is the eighth step) leading to the lower domain and towards the entrance to the final hall, the Northwest Hall. A person in a wheelchair instead uses the ramp to go back down and reach the lower domain.

25. The lower domain is the workshop: the spectator’s work, sketches, studies, drawings and a host of other material. Choice of building materials, floor and construction to be left as it turns out when everything is being built and mounted. The carpenters decide the form (cf. Ready-made). Some light seeps in from the upper domain. Other than that, only indirect light from the illumination of the objects. Mount the objects on the walls (which could possibly be painted black or Duchamp green). A simple construction of glass along both the longer walls allow for a small variation in depth between glass and wall – so that smaller objects will also fit.

26. Remaining as a possibility: the small room between the North Hall and the stairs to the Nike Hall. Like the object in À bruit secret.

27. Immediately inside the entrance to the Northwest Hall, place Tatlin’s Tower, borrowed from Moderna Museet’s collections. It is a 1:10 scale model of the original which was never built where it was intended, in Moscow. Place the work as close to the entrance door as possible, as if it were actually a little too close, but still giving a wheelchair enough space to get past.

28. The lighting of Tatlin’s Tower will be dependent on the other work in the space, but it should be kept subdued, more restrained than the way it is normally lit.

29. The other work in the room is the never previously shown replica of Marcel Duchamp’s last work: Étant donnés: 1. La chute d’eau, 2. Le gaz d’éclairage (1946–1966). The 1:10 scale replica is by Ulf Linde. Place it on a podium. Build a temporary wall from the right door frame to the west wall. In order to avoid wear and tear it is recommended that the work be run in intervals of seven minutes.

30. The work has two dimensions in the replica: as model where, for the first time, the entire construction is made visible, which demonstrates that the measurements match Moulin à café (1911). This can be studied at intervals by means of directional lighting from the ceiling. The other dimension is to show, by means of the model, how the spectator sees the original in Philadelphia. A small video camera is mounted (by JS). The image is projected on the shorter wall so that the spectator can see a 1:1 version of what the individual visitor sees through the same peepholes in Philadelphia.

31. Exit is through a door to the left in the south wall, by means of a climate lock that serves as a humidity zone. The walls of the lock are clad in the same pink, pleated textile as in the Nike Hall (or white, if the pink becomes too much). Exit through the inside, a corridor enclosed in the desired. Inside meets outside.

Jan Åman
with
Henrik Samuelsson
Susanna Slöör
Daniel Birnbaum
Daniel Daboczy

PROGRAM

From Duchamp to Thessaloniki and London

- A talk between Andreas Angelidakis, Rob Montgomery and Jan Åman.

Andreas Angelidakis is regarded as one of the worlds leading architects when it comes to integrating the physical space with the digital world. He is the architect behind the biennials of both Athens and Thessaloniki and has developed the Athens city centre. With his shifting works – he is as much an artist as he is an architect.

Rob Montgomery is an artist and works with poetic statements in the urban environment. He is currently displayed at the Nuke Gallery in Paris and was one of the participants of the Vienna biennial this summer. He is also one of three partners in Dazed & Confused and Another Magazine and a leading publicist and expert of contemporary urban culture.

When?
Wednesday 9th of November
18:00
Free entrance

Where?
Konstakademien
Fredagsgatan 12
Stockholm

Foreword
DE OU PAR MARCEL DUCHAMP PAR ULF LINDE

At the end of the 1950s, few people imagined that Marcel Duchamp would come to be seen as the century’s most important artist, the most significant for the further development of art. He was regarded as challenging and groundbreaking, but peripheral all the same, and certainly not comparable with Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse in terms of influence.
In Stockholm, however, Marcel Duchamp became a central figure of the art scene that was evolving around Moderna Museet at this time. Pontus Hultén, Ulf Linde and soon also artists such as Per Olov Ultvedt and Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd were interested in the poetry of Duchamp’s works and saw the potential of his rich artistic universe.
The new museum became a creative workshop, driven by equal parts experimental zeal and thirst for knowledge. Many of the original works had, through the agency of Duchamp, been placed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, if they hadn’t been lost. The most important ones couldn’t be moved. Under Ulf Linde’s direction, replicas were created instead so that Duchamp’s works could be shown to a Swedish and soon enough an international audience. At the same time, an intense public discussion about art and the conditions for art was going on.
When, in 1960, Ulf Linde published the book Spejare (translated as “The Scout”), it became a milestone in the Swedish art debate. To people’s delight and dismay, the discussion about art moved off the painter’s canvas to focus on the spectator instead.
De ou par Marcel Duchamp par Ulf Linde has evolved gradually, over a period of several years, during a continuing dialogue between the members of the exhibition team and Ulf Linde. We are proud to be able to present not only replicas of Duchamp’s works which have never been shown before, but also the text that summarises Linde’s studies of Marcel Duchamp – studies which have gone on for more than half a century. During all these years, Linde has tried to elucidate the inherent poetry of the works. Along the way he saw something no-one else had seen: the inherent geometry of the works. These insights will probably change for ever the view of the oeuvre as a whole. We all sensed that Marcel Duchamp was consistent, but no-one knew about his mathematical precision.
This is not just an exhibition about an artist’s works. At the heart of it is the spectator, and the imaginary meeting between two gazes inside a work – in progress.
De ou par Marcel Duchamp par Ulf Linde is anything but a grandiose conclusion. On the contrary, it signals a new start for Stockholm to manifest itself even more clearly as a hub of knowledge about Marcel Duchamp, spectating and art as such. This unique collaboration between the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts and Moderna Museet emphasises that a continuation will follow for both institutions, separately as well as together.
It is difficult for us to imagine a better way to embark on these efforts than with De ou par Marcel Duchamp par Ulf Linde.

Susanna Slöör
Permanent secretary, the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts

Daniel Birnbaum
Director, Moderna Museet

Text: Jan Åman
De ou par Marcel Duchamp par Ulf Linde

Better to say it right at the outset: De ou par Marcel Duchamp par Ulf Linde is not an exhibition about Ulf Linde. It does not have a biographical basis. It does not in any way cover Ulf Linde’s life, either within or without his artistic and literary achievement. Most of his texts on art, and works by most artists in which he has taken an interest, have been left out. Neither Pierre Bourdieu nor the News of the World have contributed methods for its realisation. Put simply, the exhibition does not approach its subject from a sociological or cultural policy perspective.

De our par Marcel Duchamp par Ulf Linde is not an exhibition by Ulf Linde, either. It is true that it’s based on years of continuous conversations with Ulf Linde about that which the exhibition deals with. But in fact the subject himself has had no idea, right up until the opening, about what kind of exhibition it is that bears his name. “You do whatever the hell you want to”, he declared already a couple of years ago. Which has been duly noted. Instead, De ou par Marcel Duchamp par Ulf Linde is an exhibition for Ulf Linde, shaped for one ideal visitor – in a wheelchair. Rather than the artist or the artworks, the core this time is the spectator. That is a position we all can and must share. But when this someone is Ulf Linde, there are consequences. An exhibition based on Ulf Linde as spectator necessarily becomes just as much an exhibition about Marcel Duchamp. For nearly 60 years, Ulf Linde has been – in his own words – obsessed by Marcel Duchamp’s oeuvre. He probably knows more about the The Large Glass than any other living person. Maybe more than Marcel Duchamp himself ever did…Ulf Linde was one of the big authorities on Duchamp already in the early 1960s. This was a position he developed thanks to his writing and, not least, his extensive production of replicas of Duchamp’s works. These were made in close dialogue with Marcel Duchamp himself. In addition to conversations held in Stockholm, their correspondence was considerable. Among more heavyweight early players, only Robert Lebel and Richard Hamilton had the same opportunities of exchanging thoughts directly with the artist. In a famous photograph from the first big Duchamp retrospective – the one Walter Hopps arranged at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1963 – a 76-year-old Marcel Duchamp is playing chess with a naked woman named Eve Babitz. As a backdrop to the pair is Ulf Linde’s first replica of The Large Glass, authorised and signed, as so many of Linde’s early replicas, by Marcel Duchamp himself. The work has been a central hub of Moderna Museet’s collections ever since it was made. Despite the fact that Marcel Duchamp, without making a big point about it, withdrew from the turbulence of the art market in order to work in obscurity, it is today one of the most valuable works of art in Sweden. And this despite the fact that it is a replica. And this despite the fact that it was created by a writer who has never called himself an artist. No work by a modern Swedish artist comes anywhere close – either in terms of historical significance or pecuniary value. That’s how strange reality really is. In 1977, when Ulf Linde together with Jean Clair curated the Centre Pompidou’s opening exhibition, Marcel Duchamp, his position as one the leading Duchamp interpreters was strengthened. Since then Linde has chosen to stay in Sweden to pursue his studies and his making of replicas. It is only in connection with De ou par Marcel Duchamp par Ulf Linde that some of Linde’s central texts on Marcel Duchamp, written between 1963 and 2011, are being made available in English. An unavoidable justification is the fact that Ulf Linde has been obsessed by an artist about whom Guillaume Apollinaire claimed, as early as in 1911: “The reunification between art and the people is reserved for an artist who has succeeded in tearing himself away from aesthetic considerations and instead devotes himself to energy”. Duchamp opened art. Duchamp shifted the focus. Duchamp shifted the focus from the flat surface in a painting to the transparency of glass and later to requisitioning entire spaces. He shifted the focus from cubism’s idea that the surface of the canvas could show both the outside and the inside of the object, to asking whether it was possible to say anything at all about man, art and reality. He shunned denominations but played with terms in a way that has made many see him as much as a philosopher and poet as an artist. Marcel Duchamp shifted the focus from artist and artwork to something very few artists had taken an interest in: how posterity creates a continued story about a work of art. For Duchamp himself, this implied a way of living and working that differed radically from that of his contemporaries – and for that matter, even more from that of our era’s artists. Duchamp chose not to participate in the struggle over attention and the market. He retreated from the limelight for almost 50 years. He worked in obscurity, even if he was seen as a forerunner at an early stage. He freed himself of competition and intrigue, with the clear risk of being forgotten about, in order to achieve the peace he needed to develop his ideas about “art in art”. He did not begin communicating again with the rest of the world in earnest until he was nearing the end of his life. He mounted his first one-man exhibition, at the Chicago Arts Club, when he was already in his fifties.

He did everything contrary to custom and convention, and to all the ordinary ways of getting acknowledgement. But now, 45 years after his death, Marcel Duchamp is the 20th-century artist who created the most meaning. Aside from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, it is to Stockholm and to Moderna Museet – thanks to Pontus Hultén’s and Ulf Linde’s early sensitivity and, not least, to Ulf Linde’s replicas – that people with an interest in Marcel Duchamp’s art travel from all over the world. Ulf Linde has dedicated nearly 60 years to continuing studies of Marcel Duchamp. These have included meticulously executed replicas of Duchamp’s most important works, as well as the translation of The Green Box, in which Linde’s attention to detail is particularly apparent. If the translation had been into English and not Swedish, it would have been an international event in itself. In Francis M Naumann’s major Duchamp monograph, Linde’s two replicas of The Large Glass are at the heart of the concluding discussion about the future reception of Duchamp. In De ou par Marcel Duchamp par Ulf Linde the earlier replicas are complemented with what is perhaps the most challenging: Ulf Linde’s replica of Duchamp’s last work, Étant donnés – at a scale of 1:10. Where Duchamp’s original can be seen as a precursor to whole-room installations – he makes the spectator stop outside and look in on the space like a voyeur, through two peepholes in a wooden door – Linde instead lets us see the construction in its entirety. This is in order to demonstrate how the work that Duchamp only had made public after his death, in 1968, is based on the early painting Moulin à café, from 1911. Marcel Duchamp’s work has, since the 1960s, attracted interpretations from just about every school of thought. He has been interpreted through the lens of psychoanalysis, post-structuralism, feminism, cultural sociology, post-Marxism, post-modernism; every new theoretical current seeks a new idea about Duchamp. Ulf Linde’s approach has been different: in his making of replicas, he sets out from what he himself calls facts. These are the result of his extremely detailed studies of Duchamp’s works, which have led him to observe that formal reality is a reflection of a complex inner reality. Just as every person is made up of different parts forming a complex individual, Linde shows how Duchamp’s collected works form a whole which is as coherent as it is complex. Ulf Linde saw that Duchamp sought the continuing conversation, that he sought the handover. That is why there is also a remarkable connection between Linde’s early texts – such as the small but crucial Duchamp monograph that was published in connection with the exhibition at Galleri Burén in Stockholm in 1962 – and his later texts. Only now is he ready to make public the results of the mathematical analyses of Duchamp’s works which have occupied him in recent decades. Ulf Linde is the opposite of the modern notion of the artist. Linde does not create anything new from an empty canvas or sheet of paper. Linde’s manner of working is more that of a transcribing monk. His own work is born by means of already existing works – in which complete attention is devoted to each detail. In a number of books about Marcel Duchamp – from Spejare (translated into English as The Scout), published in 1960, to the current manuscript Verkets hemligaste poesi – och dess djupaste (“The work’s most secret poetry – and its deepest”), completed only a few weeks before the opening of the exhibition – , Ulf Linde has told a story which is as much his own as it is Marcel Duchamp’s. From one oeuvre another has taken shape, one that gives the rest of us quite a lot to think about when it comes to the nature of spectating – as well as the nature of art and man. It is about the absolute opposite of passive viewing: with precision and sharp senses, with paper, pencil, brush and a pair of compasses, and with a library, to spend decades searching for an artist’s most secret poetry. It is precisely this that De ou par Marcel Duchamp par Ulf Linde is about. Duchamp never asserted that all routine spectating is artistic creation. He pointed out that when a work leaves the artist’s studio, he or she needs an audience willing to receive the work in order for it to be given meaning. Art happens in dialogue with the spectator – in what the world manages to make of an artwork and/or an artist after the work has been created. Almost everything that is created – art, literature or anything else – falls into oblivion, no matter how highly a temporary market has valued it. A very small number of things and thoughts survive the harsh ravages of time – and thereby, in Duchamp’s view, step beyond the values that can be measured in money and newsprint. Due to luck – as Duchamp himself used to say – or because the artist reaches someone who is capable of passing the works on, of handing over that which has been said and thus create new statements and make them interesting for future generations. Duchamp wasn’t merely amused by Ulf Linde’s early interpretations. He authorised both the replicas and the summary of The Green Box. What Duchamp was interested in was something completely different from our era’s obsession with copyright. A central part of his oeuvre is about how works of art continue to have an effect by being recreated – by the artist himself, who spent decades making miniature copies of his own works, but also by spectators’ texts, replicas and conversations. This leaves exhibition organisers faced with a dilemma, albeit a gratifying one. For if Duchamp asserted that the spectator and posterity create the long-term significance of works, Linde has shown how this is carried out in practice. As an exhibition, De ou par Marcel Duchamp par Ulf Linde must therefore be based on something other than just “showing” Ulf Linde’s and Marcel Duchamp’s work. It’s not enough to document the process or safely exhibit some works of art, no matter how significant. In order to respond to both Duchamp’s and Linde’s approaches, the exhibition has begun from the inside, in numerous and lengthy conversations held over a number of years with Ulf Linde himself – and then it has sought its own way. In his works about Duchamp, Ulf Linde uses – just like the cubists did – classical geometry as a basis, taken from the one-point perspective and the golden ratio of the Renaissance. There is no doubt whatsoever that Marcel Duchamp studied mathematical theory. His two older brothers – twelve and fourteen years his senior – were part of the more theoretical cubist school in Paris. Mathematical reasoning was part of their daily life. Duchamp’s life as an artist was formed by listening to and then relating to older artists: artistically, mathematically, conceptually and socially. Across the ceiling of the Duchamp Room in old Moderna Museet, Linde had lengths of rope extended according to an old golden ratio matrix. The play of shadows caused by the lighting above this net created an illusion of the cracks that exist in the original Large Glass – but it also provided a hidden key to Duchamp’s works. The matrix recurs in a few places in De ou par Marcel Duchamp par Ulf Linde. So do 22.5-degree angles and the numerals 1, 2, 3, 7 and 8, which are the basis of Linde’s work on Duchamp. Another recurrence is the boundary that Duchamp drew between an outside and an inside in art. In The Large Glass this boundary is named The Bride’s Clothes, in Étant Donnés it consists of an old wooden door that Duchamp had found in the village of La Bisbal, near Cadaqués in Spain. On this side of that boundary we are in our shared public context. In the social space where the individual coffee bean has already been ground to anonymous coffee, and where we are dressed in the institutional uniforms of conventions. On the other side is what we covet – art within art, sexuality, rapture, that which lacks designation and is impossible to share with anyone else. It is a merciless boundary that turned Marcel Duchamp into the most significant artist of the 20th century and Ulf Linde into his interpreter.

One of the better-known portraits of Marcel Duchamp was taken by Irving Penn. Wearing a suit and black shoes, with a scarf around his neck and holding a pipe to his mouth, Duchamp is standing in a corner, leaning against one wall. The image is a typical studio job: two temporary walls have been placed on a concrete floor. There is one detail, however, that makes it different from the typical: the angle of the corner in which Duchamp is standing is unusually acute.
Irving Penn must have liked this corner. He later photographed other famous personalities in the same position, including Truman Capote and Igor Stravinsky. But Duchamp was probably the first subject to pose there. And it is therefore equally probable that he was involved in arranging the portrait, as was his wont.
Ulf Linde has made the observation that the angle of the walls in the photo must be half of 45º, or 22.5º. That angle has become a key for Ulf Linde’s work about Marcel Duchamp.
They meet in a pointed corner measuring 22.5º.
For the wider public, Marcel Duchamp is known above all for the works or acts that took out a new bearing for what an artwork or an exhibition can be.
To submit, as early as in 1917, a completely ordinary urinal to the Society of Independent Artists in New York – albeit signed by one “R. Mutt” who was completely unknown to the exhibition jury (on which Marcel Duchamp himself sat) – is asking for notoriety. Until then, modern artistic revolutions had been about developing what it was possible to say within the frame and on the canvas.
One of his ready-mades was never carried out. But Duchamp chose to speak about it anyway – it is included already in the The Green Box. In an interview at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, in 1961, he was asked to comment on the “reciprocal ready-made”. It differs from other ready-mades by being associated with an everyday act. With laconic clarity, Duchamp explained: “You take a Rembrandt… – and use it as an ironing board.” The interviewer asked if that isn’t hard on the painting. Almost absent-mindedly, Duchamp replied: “It is…”.
Duchamp’s most famous work is probably L.H.O.O.Q., Leonardo’s Mona Lisa with an added moustache, from 1919. With its publication in Picabia’s periodical 391 it became a symbol of the DADA movement, even if Duchamp never saw himself as part of any movement.
In 1938 Marcel Duchamp helped his friends André Breton, Paul Éluard, Man Ray and Salvador Dalí to put together the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme. Duchamp’s contribution, besides showing five of his own works, was to help “install” (a term not used in the art context at the time) the exhibition.
Among other things, Duchamp’s installation consisted of suspending 1,200 coal sacks from the ceiling of one of the exhibition rooms. Visitors were forced to crouch down under the sacks, opening drink in hand, and watch suits and dresses get increasingly blackened by the coal dust. Marcel Duchamp, who boarded a ship to London on the same day and thus missed – as he usually did – the opening, had suggested yet another measure which in the end was not carried out. He wanted the Galerie Beaux-Arts, where the exhibition was being held, to be in complete darkness. Visitors would be given torches at the entrance so that they could light their way through the gallery to catch a glimpse of the paintings hung on walls and screens, under the dust from the coal sacks.
A few years later André Breton asked Marcel Duchamp to help him stage the exhibition Le surréalisme en 1947. Duchamp, who also on this occasion left before the opening, was nevertheless helped by the artist Frederick Kiesler to arrange a rope that extended like a spider’s web throughout the exhibition space, from floor to ceiling and between the exhibition screens. This web made it difficult even to approach the individual works of art and look at them.
Duchamp was ruthless.
But he was ruthless for a reason.
His ruthlessness was just one side of the coin that was made visible in 1912, when his painting Nu descendant un escalier was turned down for the Salon des Indépendants. Duchamp’s brothers, Jacques Villon and Raymond Duchamp-Villon, were asked by the exhibition jury to tell Marcel that his painting was unsuitable – and at least get him to change the title of the work.
Being betrayed by one’s kin can amount to a deliverance.
It is no exaggeration to say that the brothers’ actions created the most significant artist of the 20th century. Until 1912, Marcel Duchamp had been working in close concord with his two older brothers. After his painting was turned down, Duchamp could at last see art and the artist’s life for what it was. Even his own brothers chose career before art: they preferred not to ruffle the feathers of either the prevalent public, current art theory or a stuck-in-the-mud jury.
Duchamp was no longer content to maintain a view of art as a social alternative to an ordinary salaried job. As he once said about his early years as an artist: “It was a bit the Montmartre-style bohême life – you lived, painted, were an artist – all that really doesn’t lead anywhere.”
Duchamp now resolved to make art beyond all ingratiation. Art that was utterly “dry”.
David Bowie has described how, with Station to Station in 1976, he was looking for a new “dryness” to the sound. He was tired of all the effects – tape echo, fuzz, tremolo and string reverb – that characterised rock music in the 1970s. He wanted to let the electronically amplified music speak for itself, in a dry and precise manner. Unfortunately that is not what happened in the end.
Much earlier, Marcel Duchamp had gone all the way – in art. He steered away from the personal brushstrokes and flat surface of the canvas. The transparency and delay of glass – and the “dryness” of geometry – became his weapons.
It is true that the cubists had already had their way with the one-point perspective. But Duchamp wanted to go further. He sought art that better matched how we see and experience the world. We see, think, make references, feel – all in the same instant. In order to get there, he had to throw ordinary art on the fire.
Duchamp was clear: he had to break the prevailing way of thinking in art, which included the recent attainments of the so-called avantgarde – he wanted to observe an object from two directions at once (with one eye shut, close up, for an hour…); he sought movement in the stationary; language in momentary seeing; chance in precision; seriousness in laughter. He simply wanted us to pull out a torch and search our way towards…art.
Mathematics became his weapon.
Exact geometry became his weapon.
Dryness became his weapon.
From this point on he dedicated most of his life to only two works, La Mariée mis à nu par ses célibataires, meme (The Large Glass) and Étant donnés: 1. La chute d’eau 2. Le gaz d’éclairage. The first he worked on for eight years, signing it in 1923 – as being “definitively unfinished”. Étant donnés he worked on in secret for 20 years, between 1946 and 1966. Only after his death in 1968 was it donated to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, subsequently becoming known to the world.
With his singular ability to work out a future chess game about his art, he laid out clues and created connections between his own artworks, in which the superficially provocative works are part of the same whole as The Large Glass and Étant donnés. Using a Rembrandt for an ironing board was more than an iconoclastic manoeuvre; as Olle Granath as pointed out, the French word for ironing clothes is repasser – to reuse, recreate. Duchamp was always looking for art within art, that which can be glimpsed behind and underneath all the historic layers, moulds and prescribed interpretations.
For decades, Marcel Duchamp put a lot of effort into assembling his oeuvre in boxes – collections of meticulously made replicas of his own works. He called them “portable museums”. Even though he wasn’t interested in exhibiting in galleries and museums, he thought it worth the effort to compile his artistic estate into a convenient whole – as if waiting for a select few interpreters to carry on the handover.
The first time I heard Ulf Linde talk about his mathematical studies of Duchamp was in 1995, when I visited him together with the Russian artist Yuri Leiderman. It was on that occasion that Ulf Linde delivered the classic line: “I don’t believe in ideas, I only believe in facts.”
It has taken time to understand that Duchamp really was as exact, as complex and as open as Ulf Linde shows him to be. These days, mathematics and art are usually irreconcilable quantities. They weren’t for Duchamp, and not for Linde either.
What distinguishes Ulf Linde from other Duchamp specialists is that he has concentrated, with the tenacity of the religious convert, on the only thing, on the only thing that Marcel Duchamp himself left to posterity: his artworks, his artistic testament.
On Marcel Duchamp’s own recommendation, Ulf Linde has approached the works as a collective whole. It isn’t enough just to see and interpret if one wants to get truly close to the thought and the work. Hence all the replicas. Recreating an extant work of art requires the same “dryness” of attitude and method that Duchamp himself strived for. It really isn’t that strange that it has taken 60 years.
Ulf Linde therefore takes liberties – as in the replica of Étant donnés – that extend even beyond Duchamp’s own “directions”. Ulf Linde has realised that an artist who allowed himself complete freedom in relation to art would hardly have created rules and regulations for his last work (the instructions stipulate that only the technical staff be allowed to see how the work is constructed) without leaving something to be discovered. Joseph Brodsky gave him the key – Duchamp’s own notes for the installation of the work in Philadelphia. An exact replica at a scale of 1:10 could be made without Linde even having to get on the plane to America.
As the opening of De ou par Marcel Duchamp par Ulf Linde approached, one of Marcel Duchamp’s lesser known works cropped up more and more often in conversation. As a wedding present in 1919, Duchamp’s sister Suzanne received instructions for setting up an “unhappy ready-made”. She was instructed to tear off the covers of a school textbook in geometry and mount the bared contents on her balcony in Rue Condamine in Paris. According to the instructions, the book was to be mounted in such a way that it was exposed to the elements: rain and sun to make the print fade, and the wind to tear away page after page. Mathematical exactitude ultimately dissolved into a poetic nothing: “there is no art, only artists”.

Text: Daniel Birnbaum
DEFINITIVELY UNFINISHED

“Only that which is incomplete can be comprehended – can lead us further” , reads a formulation by Novalis. With Romanticism came a new view of the unfinished, of the artwork as necessarily uncompleted – open. The poetics of Romanticism is an aesthetics of disappearing: the dream is not about the permanence of the work or the whole, but about poetry’s fleeting moment, that pure act which always annuls itself – if possible without leaving any trace behind. The poetic triumph includes the disappearance of the self.
Maurice Blanchot has captured this evanescence in the following lines: “Thus Novalis dies – almost symbolically – without having written the second part of Heinrich von Ofterdingen, the one that was to be called ‘Completion’ – and Goethe keeps muttering, with sombre mien: unfinished books, uncompleted works. Perhaps. Unless one of the purposes of Romanticism was to introduce a wholly new kind of completion…”
Many years ago, I began a commentary on a selection of Novalis’ fragments with the above observations. The selection was published as the first volume in a series of ten books, and there followed a mysterious gap halfway through the series: after Volume , which was devoted to René Daumal, came Volume. Number in the series, which to date – almost twenty years on – still has not reached its readers, was said to be reserved for an as-yet unfinished volume by Ulf Linde, entitled 7/8 – an analysis of an ever-recurring numerical relationship in the works of Marcel Duchamp. Back then all of this was merely rumour. No-one I knew was quite sure whether such a manuscript really existed.
I have now seen the manuscript. It appears to have lain there, just about ready to be sent to the printers, for two decades. Definitively unfinished, one might say. Linde writes: “Most people who know anything at all about Marcel Duchamp know that he was interested in geometry and mathematics. It is therefore puzzling that so little has been written about how this can be traced in his art, even though he himself has clearly pointed out where the first traces are to be found. In one of his interviews, Pierre Cabane asked him to explain how he developed the complicated system of measurements in The Large Glass, and Duchamp replied: ‘The explanation is in Moulin à café.’”
Duchamp really does say exactly that in an interview anyone interested in his art will have read, so it is rather odd that so little has been written about this. But then it is also difficult to comprehend how this small, indistinct painting of a coffee mill, done by Duchamp for his brother Raymond’s kitchen as early as the autumn of 1911, could be the key to something as exact as geometrical relationships. It seems, as Linde points out, to have been pulled off quickly and appears anything but precise. Trying to measure it is no easy task, because the image lacks fixed points from which to begin. It seems rather unlikely that it would contain a truth about Duchamp’s entire oeuvre. A geometrical truth.
The very idea that there should exist a hitherto unknown key to Duchamp’s works has come to seem increasingly unlikely, since just about every hermetic teaching and complicated philosophy – from alchemy to psychoanalysis – has been applied with the utmost seriousness but to scarce elucidative effect. Is it not the case, instead, that Duchamp set a sort of hermeneutic trap and is now smiling ironically somewhere at the endless attempts at picking the lock with ever new tools of interpretation: very amusing.
That is what I have usually thought, but Linde’s approach is different. It is resolute and practical in nature. Instead of pondering the symbolism of the coffee mill, he first took an interest in its mechanics, its purely physical construction. How does it actually work? To get an answer he acquired a simple coffee mill of the sort the artist likely had as a model. He took the mill apart and familiarised himself with its parts: the mill housing and the movable part, the spindle. He turned the crank handle and learned its various positions, he opened and closed the little drawer for collecting the ground coffee. Simple manipulations, one might think. But with material results: “No more was required in order for Moulin à café to reveal its composition. And from the composition there followed the measurements.”
It is not a new interpretative key that Linde has found, which opens the work on a philosophical level. Instead he helps us see Duchamp’s oeuvre in a way that makes it cohere in a totally new way. If Linde is right – and I am inclined to believe he is – there is a consistency that no-one had previously imagined, from the small, blurry painting of 1911 to the complex representation called Étant donnés, which only became known posthumously. Linde shows us the links between the various artworks and how certain patterns occur again and again. Perhaps one can say that he shows, with the help of geometry, how the oeuvre in essence is one.
In 1920, Duchamp’s sister Suzanne painted a small oil on canvas entitled Marcel Duchamp’s Unhappy Ready-made 5. Her brother had sent her – as a wedding present – a brief set of instructions urging her to hang a school textbook in geometry from her balcony, with the help of string. The wind would eventually solve the geometrical tasks it found valuable and, page by page, disperse the Euclidian world view: “… and the rain, the wind, the flying pages, it was an amusing idea.”
The meeting between chance and geometry, between the wind and the textbook, is perhaps an appropriate image for Duchamp’s at once exact approach and his openness to that which cannot be foreseen, for other geometries than those we learn at school. The pages of the geometry book flapping in the wind also take us back, perhaps, to thoughts which had occurred already to the writer I quoted at the beginning. The small painting of a coffee mill comes across as imprecise, and yet it bears a mathematical truth. We find this tension between perfection and formlessness in all that grows around us, and in our own bodies. He who thinks that a slightly frayed leaf drying on the pavement is not the bearer of an inner perfection has a thing or two to learn. Marcel Duchamp’s Unhappy Ready-made is perhaps the perfect example of the aesthetics of evanescence that we associate with Romanticism. The notion of an enigmatic geometry amid the immensity and complexity of life, revealed in glimpses to those willing to see, occurs in Novalis too: “Men travel in manifold paths: whoso traces and compares these, will find strange Figures come to light; Figures which seem as if they belonged to that great Cipher-writing which one meets with everywhere, on wings of birds, shells of eggs, in clouds, in the snow, in crystals, in forms of rocks, in freezing waters, in the interior and exterior of mountains, of plants, animals, men, in the lights of the sky, in plates of glass and pitch when touched and struck on, in the filings round the magnet, and the singular conjunctures of Chance.”

[ö.a.: Översättningen av det avslutande citatet (6) är hämtad från Thomas Carlyles Novalis från 1829. Övriga citat är översatta av mig.]

Text: Susanna Slöör
From the spectator’s point of view

1, 2, 3 and 7 and 8

Am I one of eight, or am I one and the others seven? This question holds the foundation of Marcel Duchamp’s collected works – that is Ulf Linde’s conclusion after studying Duchamp for almost sixty years. It also invites us to reflect on the “ego”, and in particular on how the ego understands life in relation itself and to others. The result is in keeping with Ulf Linde’s general view that art is ultimately about how it feels to live. The painting Moulin à café (The Coffee Mill) from 1911 contains the relationships and numbers that, it turns out, permeate Duchamp’s oeuvre with remarkable systematism. These are 7, 8 and 1, 2 and 3. Together, these numbers underpin a philosophy of life, if you will.
In Marcel Duchamp’s enigmatic instructions for his most significant works – the glass painting The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, even (La mariée mise à nu par ses celibataires, même, 1915-1923) and the peepshow-like spatial assemblage Étant donnés: 1º la chute d’eau, 2º le gaz d’éclairage (1946-1966) – , the numerical connections and symbolism serve as bait and set traps. For Ulf Linde, the work with Duchamp has brought a series of confirmations of an early hypothesis that the bride is a metaphor for the artist and the creative act. Ulf Linde’s Swedish translation of The Green Box was originally published in serialised form in the periodical Konstrevy, between 1961 and 1963. The box contains a loose-leaf system of enigmatic instructions for how The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, even, commonly referred to as The Large Glass, can be constructed and interpreted. Ulf Linde himself regards the original [are there several?] translation as the pinnacle of his fascination and obsession. He copied every illustration to the smallest detail. Even the letterhead of the stationery from a restaurant (Brasserie de l’Opéra) is minutely rendered. Where lay the allure in trying to get to grips with Duchamp’s thought by recreating several of the works? Ulf Linde has not just completed three versions of The Large Glass, of which two are 1:1 scale, but he has also made replicas of ready-mades and a 1:10 scale model of Étant donnés. The first full-scale glass, from 1961, Duchamp had signed and later this was also done with ten or so ready-mades that Ulf Linde had worked on. The collection now belongs to Moderna Museet. In a televised interview from the end of the 1990s, Ulf Linde describes a wish to be able to “lift the fontanelle and peer down into Marcel Duchamp’s brain”. What was he like as a person, as a boy?
The search set out from practical investigations into how Marcel Duchamp’s thoughts arose in interaction with the artistic workmanship. The replicas and models were not the subject of a mechanical and exact copying. Rather, they were based on very careful studies of details in the works (an inductive method) and on analysing the partially camouflaged directions for assembly which were contained in instructions and notes (a deductive method). The result included both reviving the act and recreating the work. A metamorphosis of spectation was triggered in which the artist and spectator variously exchanged forms with each other in time and space. In order to describe the process, a new character is needed to make it possible to move freely between the ideas’ authors.

Marsulf [Marchulf?]
It is impossible to approach Marcel Duchamp and Ulf Linde without reference to the playful disposition they share. Sticking a finger or a pair of scissors into “Art’s” pompously inflated balloon – art seen as concept – is wholly to their taste. Marcel Duchamp used language, symbolism, music and mathematics in order to deploy wit (the literary joke) as a battering ram against words, things, concepts, truths and absolute knowledge. Possibly this can be compared to restoring enlightenment to the realm of enchantment, or rather to the realm of falling in love. There the dual occurs when one meets the other. According to Duchamp, two represent the dual, not the plural. If you count to three, the rest are included. The relationships between 1 and 2 and 3 have met with approval in Ulf Linde’s interpretation. An enchanted chemistry – alchemy – may thus do for creating the joint name Marsulf. It can represent the thoughts that the interpretation, too, sustains and engorges.
In alchemy, the microcosm is a reflection of the macrocosm and vice versa. Soul and matter are reflections of a whole. The planet Mars is linked to iron, and sulphur is one of the alchemist’s most important catalysts. The compound Marsulf is simply pyrite, in which there are two Ulf for each Marcel. In popular parlance the substance is known as fool’s gold. August Strindberg, incidentally, took fool’s gold to be gold during his alchemy experiments. In the natural state, amusingly enough, the glittering stone forms a cube or a dodecahedron after platonic or numerological models for the visible but illusory world. Thus, in the company of these gentlemen, art could be seen as fool’s gold, from which it is the spectator’s task to create gold, or an inner clarification and ennobling of the soul.

Very amusing
“Amusing” was a word in vogue during the 1920s, which Marcel Duchamp, nearly forty years later, would utter with a sphinx-like smile to those, including Ulf Linde, who attempted to interpret his artistic intentions. “Very amusing!” It is probably not too far-fetched to claim that the exclamation may in itself contain a clue or a trap. Marcel Duchamp would have perfected his ear for the images and shortcomings inherent in language after his move from the backwater that was Paris to New York in 1915. There he periodically supported himself by giving private French lessons, which of course gave him insights into the fine art of linguistic confusion and the way in which different languages create mental images and abstract concepts. Perhaps the linguistic no man’s land that opened up in the shifts between English and French offered dizzying perspectives. On one of Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades, À bruit secret, With Hidden Noise, are two engraved [?] texts, one in English and one in French. Ulf Linde is on the right track in pronouncing the French with an English accent and vice versa, but the riddle closes itself halfway. In my little game, mainly intended to introduce the creative system – which is based on distorted and admittedly deranged associations – , “amusing” with a French accent might sound like “a muse thing”. Something for the bride, perhaps? The heart turns delighted somersaults at the etymological possibilities that present themselves.
The historical uses of the verb “amuse” can, in principle, offer the perfect quick guide to the world of Marcel Duchamp: to divert the attention of someone, deceive, mislead and pass the time. If we simplify things and look at the verb “muse”, even more doors open. “To be absorbed in thought”, or sniff with your nose in the air like a dog that’s lost the scent. “Muse” as noun stands for a protectress of the arts. In all there are nine muses and she who celebrates love poetry and verse is of course Erato. The thought of Rrose Sélavy (eros c’est la vie), Marcel Duchamp’s alter ego or fourth inner dimension, is, in that case, “very amusing”. Additionally, one can allow oneself to be amused by the synchronous nature of the thought that arises without various authors’ mutual knowledge. In a comment on Kant in the 1910s, Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote that: “if one could turn the right-hand glove in the four-dimensional space, one would be able to pull it onto the left hand”. In a similar way, Duchamp regards man’s inner or fourth dimension as female. Man, in that case, would have a woman’s genitals turned inside out.

The bride given
The first note in The Green Box reads, in translation:

1. THE BRIDE STRIPPED BARE BY HER BACHELORS, even: in order to separate the ready-made, serially produced from the ready-found.
This separation is an operation.

In an article appended to the translations in the periodical Konstrevy (1963), Ulf Linde comments that the original [?] uses ready-made for tout-fait. The English expression was probably something Duchamp had invented even before he went to America. The reason for this is likely to be that Ready-made is pronounced in the same way as ready maid. A ready maiden; a bride ready to be stripped bare.
It is here that the Marsulf character becomes important for a further discussion. There is of course an international industry of interpretations and thoughts on Duchamp – not least about the term “ready-made”. In Marsulf’s world, however, it is the ready bride who constitutes the amusing entrance (peephole) to the oeuvre as a whole.
If the numbers (1, 2, 3 and 7 and 8) and their interrelationships, originally emanating from the small painting The Coffee Mill, recur with mathematical regularity in Marcel’s works made after 1911, it is also true that the works are permeated by erotic metaphor. A hint of this can be found in Duchamp’s portable museum, La Boîte-en-valise (1936-1941), containing detailed models of his earlier works. It was “serially produced” by hand, albeit in smaller numbers than planned. The placing of the ready maids/mades such as the ampoule Air de Paris, the protective cover …pliant de voyage…(Underwood) and the urinal Fontaine allude to different parts of The Large Glass, in which the bride, as we know, is undressed. The upper part is the bride’s (artist’s) domain, in the middle is the separating, trisected crossbar of glass (the work), and the lower part is the bachelors’ (spectator’s) domain.
We are cheered up by La Belle Hélène in several of the works (Air de Paris, Belle Haleine). Mona Lisa with a moustache (L.H.O.O.Q), she of the warm behind, Ulf believes to be an original. Duchamp, a master engraver, probably produced his own plate which was used to make the prints for his portable museum. In Duchamp’s secretive last work, the peepshow installed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art with the instruction that no-one is allowed through the closed door, a naked bride lies on a pile of twigs. Étant donnés was presented posthumously, at which point work on it had been going on behind the closed doors of the studio for twenty years. The world believed that Duchamp spent his time playing chess. Étant donnés means being or having been given. Maybe it is the bride that is given, even? But in Swedish it is easy to associate with the word “giv” in the card playing sense of “deal”: handing out cards for a round, the turn to hand out the cards, the cards received, or the round of play that follows. That, at least, would be a suitable interpretation for the continued discussion.

In the eye of the spectator
Ulf Linde’s Duchamp research thus interconnects the various works by means of the recurring mathematical relationships, the bride mystique and erotic metaphor. The latter [?] lives handily on in replicas and models. Ulf Linde made the first glass, in 1:1 scale, for Moderna Museet in 1961; the second and most complete was made thirty years later. The basis had been formulated by Duchamp in The Coffee Mill, painted in 1911, and the exhibition De ou par Marcel Duchamp par Ulf Linde is taking place in 2011, an even century later. The workings of chance are as “amusing” as ever, as if this were art’s privilege.
During the work on interpreting the meaning of The Large Glass, the enigmatic notes in The Green Box were a beginning. Ulf first presented these thoughts in his book Spejare (The Scout), published in 1960. In it he also laid the foundations of the view of art that caused a furious debate in Sweden. “The great art debate” at the beginning of the 1960s dealt with, among other things, the artist’s and the work’s more or less absolute role in relation to the spectator’s role. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” is a concept that goes a long way back, to the early days of aesthetics in the 18th century and even further. Duchamp may have been inspired by the French writer Paul Valéry in taking the spectator’s co-creative role into account. Ulf Linde found these ideas in both of them and thereby confirmed notions that he been entertaining himself. Ludwig Wittgenstein also helped stock the conceptual larder. Human beings are thus equipped with a way of seeing that encourages or obliges us to choose to see something from a certain angle, e.g. to see something as art. Not least, however, Linde was inspired by the writer Lars Ahlin. Ulf formulated the thought thus: “The spectator is a co-creator of the work by applying his or her empathy to respond to the artist’s address.”
Ulf Linde seems consistently to have taken an interest in artists, poets, writers and thinkers in general who confirmed and refined thoughts already present, or about to emerge, in him. The compound Marsulf should be understood also against the background of his discussions with Ahlin. These were particularly lively in the transition from the 1950s to the 1960s. This period coincides with Ulf Linde’s intensive work on interpreting The Large Glass. It could well be the case that an evening’s hours-long telephone conversation with Ahlin was immediately followed by a nightly call to Marcel Duchamp in New York. The latter would clam up in the face of speculations about the contents of the glass, but responded generously regarding colour blends and construction. The defensive reaction “Amusing!” could perhaps be interpreted as a confirmation as well as a trap, the fool’s mirror in which you will only see yourself.
Ulf Linde’s classic view is that The Bride Stripped… (The Large Glass) is a meta-artwork about the art of looking at art. Seeming to confirm this, Duchamp would sign the description of the meta-artwork as well as the replica of The Large Glass (1961) and a collection of produced ready-mades – brides that were both willing and ready (1963-64). The erotic game in which the bride plays the first round thus includes the maiden, i.e. the artist, and her courting bachelors, an anonymous group of spectators who could be anyone. The artist’s intention (to stand naked) is never revealed, no matter how eager the bride is, [and] the bachelors remain bachelors in this alternating game of desire. (The artist also fails in this respect, if we bear in mind Ulf Linde’s later qualification of his statement to the effect that the artist should be regarded as the first spectator of his or her work.) In the shift between inner and outer, which requires its separation in order to be understood, we can thus construe the erotically charged shortcoming of art, which is perhaps the very prerequisite for the continued existence of the creative urge. Rrose Sélavy (eros c’est la vie) draws attention to our “hunting hearts” (coeurs volants), doomed or incarnated to hunt ever on.

The explosion
To “hunt” one’s way to further insights means that one has to define one’s egos, at least two of them. Marsulf through Marcel operates (acts and appears) with the help of his masculine and his feminine aspect, respectively. Marsulf through Ulf hunts with the help of Lars Ahlin and George Herbert Mead, introduced to him at around the same time by Johan Asplund. Let us therefore return to the last sentence of the paragraph from The Green Box mentioned above: “Separation is an operation.”
The separation, or making a distinction, is in itself an operation on which language and thought rest. But at the same time, the division between words and concepts (establishing opposites, or comparisons) and, by implication, their definition, means that they lose meanings along the way. Even as they come into existence, words and concepts contain the seeds of their own dissolution, or perhaps dilution is better. Exactitude disappears, which in turn encourages a resumption of the separating and clarifying process. This applies in particular to the abstractions we employ to understand ourselves, existence and each other. It is this circumstance that constitutes a pillar upon which the compound Marsulf rests: the critique of the claim to absoluteness of language and words. Only in poetry, in the sense of transferred meanings, can the insight suddenly appear. It is with the help of poetry, and thus during the operative influence of the doing, that the game is kept alive.
But the game requires its players. The first player, the ego, meets the second (him or herself as well as the other). We get the numbers 1 and 2 (dual) as well as 3, i.e. everyone else, anyone. In Marsulf’s world, the first player is both spectator and artist. The spectator in general is an actor [?] (the operator is a Paris singing the praises of his belle Hélène).
By means of poetry, metaphor and visions, the glass, the separating membrane, the individual’s cage and carnal castle, is exploded. Metaphor loads the slingshot, fires the cannon round, to allow the event surprisingly to pass. The solipsist slips out and becomes a part of himself, the other, and anyone at all. Art creates the conditions for this sudden recognition of kinship in the face of solitude. The shots and the explosion are an eternal movement in Marsulf’s interpretation of the stripping of the bride in The Large Glass. The other works (the willing girls) indicate, like Cupid’s arrows, the way towards falling in love and the expected orgasm.

I and me
Narcissus falls into a trance before his own reflection. Lars Ahlin claimed that words should be seen as a mirror held up before the reader, and not as film frames flashing past. Ulf Linde translated these thoughts to the image, as a mirror for experiences and sudden insights, and says that it carries a basis for communion as well as an individual, ineffable experience, a free and exact vision.
The spectator encounters his or her ego in the relationship that the artwork establishes, and is at the same time reflected in the other. This ego (oneself) is general, and shares the common basis: symbols, signs, language, culture and convention. But it is also private/individual, indivisible and immediate, unaffected by agreements made beforehand. The individual is capable of partaking of that which is shown, but which cannot be described, or conveyed by general means. They might be new insights, ideas or a brush against the outer reaches of human capacity. In mystical terms it describes wisdom, the moment when one must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after one has climbed up on it, as Ludwig Wittgenstein so vividly describes it in his Tractatus Logivo-Philosophicus (1921), which ends with the words: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”. Such an experience can also be shared, but there is no way of establishing with certainty how the common understanding arises. It is uniform [solitary?], but those who have been struck partake of the pact or insight that the solitude is shared. Love and the shared experience of solitude are states that are awakened, beyond cause-bound contexts.
But the dual nature of the ego must nonetheless be further complicated. We thus have an ego that could be described as a generally divisible “oneself”, anyone. The only distinguishing characteristic is the position, the location, in time and space, which is personal and anonymous. But the individual, the “ego” also carries a position vertically in relation to others. This ego may be red-haired, intelligent, well liked, the subject of opinions and decked with adjectives and titles. One is dreadfully individual, but dressed in the streamlined uniform of recognition and position (the boundaries), like the anonymous bachelors in the lower part of the glass. Two forms of anonymity arise. Paradoxically, it is equally apparent in a personal as in an individualised, shaped, general dimension, which shows the quagmire in which conception formation finds itself. Concepts, and abstractions in particular, are incapable of creating distinctions that are sufficiently multi-faceted. Marsulf further shows how chance playfully forms the foundation of desirable systematisation. Our hunting hearts, or the urge for context, give rise to new separations or attempts at transgressive liaisons.

The bean or the powder
The opening question about whether Duchamp should see himself as one of eight or as an individual in relation to the other seven calls for an explanation. The Coffee Mill (1911) was originally painted for a brother’s kitchen during a period when Marcel was re-evaluating his relationship with painting and art. Ulf Linde’s view is that the seemingly random numbers seven and eight can be linked to the number of family members:
“The three brothers, Gaston Duchamp (Jacques Villon), Raymond Duchamp Villon and Marcel Duchamp had three sisters, Suzanne, Madeleine and Yvonne. With their father and mother a family of 8. Marcel Duchamp noted his own plight within the family. He could only see the other members of it. He was a leftover eighth – 1/8.”
The coffee mill grinds individual coffee beans into a homogenous powder: “Duchamp was the man who refused to fall in with the homogenous meal – the powder.”

Text: Henrik Samuelsson
POSTERITY

Marcel Duchamp spoke about how it was important for the artist to relate to posterity. A notion of freeing art from the preconceptions and self-imposed limitations of its own time by turning towards a public relocated to an imagined posterity.

Was it the case that Duchamp saw in his encounter with the young Ulf Linde a proxy for both this idea and his life’s work? Someone who unexpectedly crossed his path at the right time, equipped with what was required for the journey towards the future. Duchamp the chess player saw the possibilities and made his opening move … After having spent long periods over the past fifty years sitting amid a jumble of cryptic notes and musings, surrounded by a cloud of cigarette smoke, it seems likely that Linde is not totally averse to this thought – viewed from the vantage point of posterity.

He who believes that creative work can only be liberated in the encounter with the future will have to be prepared for a pretty lonely journey out of his own time. It might be a good sign that the road is sparsely peopled: that gives freedom of movement and, if nothing else, a certain relief. It has long been apparent to many people that Duchamp had the strength of character required to travel this road. That Linde had what it took to meet Duchamp in this peculiar terrain – backwards, if you will – is now becoming apparent to more and more people. Possibly this was a common trait in Duchamp and Linde: the ability to see beyond one’s own desires in and of the present.

By literally recreating Duchamp’s works, Linde offers us an alternative – another way of seeing and interpreting by means of the craft. In his practical work on the copies, Linde began to track the poetic codes: in the formal clarity and the exact measurements, but also in the small deviations. These elegant shifts, at first (apparently) imperceptible, form significant patterns and contexts for the attentive observer. All of this done with an unreserved acceptance of the time needed to wait the fleeting moment out. The revelation.

First: the one deposits his statement, the seen. The other works on the description of seeing. Two people shaded from each other, on either side of the work – waiting – until transparence occurs in the work on the formed and in a possible vision. Then: the encounter with someone else’s gaze through the work, and a perception that one is not completely alone. (My shadow falls together with someone else’s, across the linguistic common.)

In the winter of 1991-92, John Stenborg and I assisted Ulf Linde in the work on the latest version of The Large Glass. It turned into an experience in which many of our conceptions of what the craft of art can be were turned on their head. As we worked, the field of artistic work changed before our eyes: meanings became expanded and were freed of our prejudices – our preconceptions.

It was very hard work – but fun. Perhaps it was the sort of fun that arises when difficulty turns into sheer absurdity and ends up teasing out the feeling that you are in the middle of a wonderful joke. When you feel as if you are glimpsing the clever mechanism behind the pun, in the midst of its sense-expanding shock effect …

We often said: this can’t be done. Later, when it was done, despite everything, we said: how did we manage to do that?

What regulates the relationship between original and copy? That is a question which it is of course impossible to give any general answer to. (And most probably not a particularly interesting or even sensible one, either). When we began work on the new copy of The Glass there were, despite everything, some given preconditions – whose consequences would turn out to be unforeseeable.

Linde had a limitless material at his disposal. A meandering and yet open construction based on a long period of obsession. Calculations involving all the measurements of The Glass, strange drawings, language games, notes from conversations with Duchamp, poetic whims … And everything seemed to be in constant movement in his head: a sort of eagerly turning tombola from which lottery tickets with cryptic signs unrelentingly popped out. Usually accompanied by delighted cries, or roars of indignation. A winning ticket, or not …

In the course of our work, then, new contexts kept revealing themselves – new ideas which had to be considered as well as old ones which had to be reconsidered. For an assistant craftsman, a lot of this was difficult to embrace. And yet there was a strong feeling of participation … (Does what is seen in crafting really carry such significance?)

The thing that was easiest to understand was Linde’s verbal interpretation. It was delivered on a daily basis in front of the work – in the midst of the crafting – in what were much like improvised lectures. These expositions were very concrete and always included thorough instructions about what had been formed: the exact measurements, the rhythm of the drawing, the designation of the colour, the various materials’ characteristics and looks.

Added to this was the warmth from the other side of The Glass – Marcel Duchamp’s own handwriting and gaze.

In the midst of this flow we tried, quite simply, to make everything – from the impression of the whole, via an endless series of quibbles about material and technique, formal tricks and thematic riddles, down to the tiniest details – as alike as possible. Gradually we understood that everything we couldn’t comprehend then and there had its significance and effect all the same. This for the simple reason that we often did better than what we actually could do.

The original comes first, it heralds the copy. A good copy requires a sort of expanded attentiveness on the part of its craftsmen. You have to be attentive to the original, receptive to the point of self-effacement. All this at the same time as you are ready to use what appears to happen to the material you are literally holding in your hands. In the end you realise that there isn’t much that appears to happen. The essential emerges from entering into the material, into the viscosity and look of the colour, the alloy of the lead wire and its consequent resilience, etc. It is all this that later suddenly turns to your advantage. A quality which is new and yet neutral in the moment, a poetic artefact to dare to incorporate when it appears.

Ulf Linde has never devoted himself to copying, in the simple sense, anyone else’s art. With receptivity and precision he has interpreted that which has heralded his own work – he has placed himself on a level with what interests him, without necessarily making his own presence manifest.

With this approach – meeting art with his eye, inside and out – Ulf Linde has established a domain in which interpretation becomes art in its own right. An equal in an encounter, eye to eye.

That is, in a simple sense, beautiful.