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