Abstract
It is argued that, with the term “tasty affairs,” Duchamp attempts to explain how the artist is subordinated to the workings of the aesthetic field when, in his struggle to achieve identity, he produces work that conforms to the spectator’s taste. After having his work judged as “art,” the artist (for psychological reasons) submits to the specific criteria governing this judgment, controlling principles which assume the form of a movement or “ism.” Duchamp sheds light on this phenomenon by strategically engaging and disengaging in the Surrealist movement and using Fountain to render the logic of these tasty affairs explicit. He shows us that, in their actions, the Surrealist group were effectively adhering to the priorities laid down by Apollinaire in his response to Fountain.
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Notes
- 1.
We recognize, once again, the “effect of retroversion” that conceals the logic of symbolic identification : having seen himself, in his own imaginary self-image, as a mediumistic being, the artist, through the actions of the spectator, achieves this identity in symbolic terms; that is, by subordinating himself to the workings of an exterior signifying network (the aesthetic plane ). Crucially, this phenomenon is obscured through “the illusion proper to the phenomena of transference”: an identity that was determined by an external apparatus is misperceived as having been there from the very beginning as an immanent essence; in the inner life of his self-experience the artist sees himself as an “autonomous personality,” a mediumistic being (Žižek , 2008, p. 13, 122).
- 2.
This is the precise twofold logic of symbolic identification described by Lacan: first I see myself as “ artist,” then I begin to act accordingly (like a mediumistic being). The process, Žižek writes, is “by definition a misidentification […] I identify with this misperception of me, and truly ‘become myself’ when I, in effect, start to act according to this misperception” (Žižek, 2008, p. 45).
- 3.
Duchamp offers us here a succinct definition of Žižek’s concep t of ide ology : an objective form of belief which operates “at the level of what individuals are doing, and not only what they think or know they are doing” (2008, p. 28; author’s emphasis). For a full discussion of this point see Kilroy (2016).
- 4.
Žižek refers to this as the logic of an “enlightened false consciousness ”: at the level of knowledge, one claims to recognize “the distance between the ideological mask and the reality”; however, at the level of practice, one “still finds reason to retain the mask” (Žižek, 2008, pp. 26–28).
- 5.
References
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Duchamp, Marcel. 1979. Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp. Translated by Ron Padgett. London: Da Capo Press.
Janis, Harriet & Sidney Janis. 1945. “Marchel Duchamp: Anti-Artist.” In View. Issue 5, no.1, pp. 18–54.
Kilroy, Robert. 2016. “The Sublime Object of Iconology: Duchampian Appellation as Žižekian Interpellation.” Seachange: Art, Communication, Technology, Issue 6.
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Kilroy, R. (2018). Tasty Affairs. In: Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69158-9_9
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