Regressive irony: Duchamp’s legacy


April 19, 1917. Marcel Duchamp invites Arthur Cravan to lecture at Grand Central Gallery. Most accounts indicate that Cravan began to swear and disrobe and was arrested. Walter Arensberg had to bail him out of jail. Later that evening, back at the Arensbergs, Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia recalls Duchamp beaming about the incident and exclaiming, “What a wonderful lecture!”

One expects a lecture, and instead the unexpected occurs: the drunken lecturer curses, takes his clothes off, and is arrested. The poet-boxer Arthur Cravan is expected to behave in a socially proper, predictable way, and instead he behaves unpredictably and antisocially, to the extent that the police—the social superego—intervene. Instead of a lecture, one experienced what art history calls a Dada “performance,” although Cravan didn’t intend to be “theatrical.” He made a spectacle of himself, but he was only expressing his irrepressible self, however socially irreverent the result...


The full text is published in "tema celeste" No. 84, March-April 2001.




Donald Kuspit