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corps etrangers

24Sep09

With this work Duchamp formulated the question of
whether there exists between the designations of art and anti-art a third possi-
bility-a locus of indifference in aesthetic specification. The work of the artist
begins at this site of indetermination, out of the not-deciding, as movement, a
movement that-”as critique of painting”6-becomes an open-ended passage
from the center to the margin of the field of determination in art. Duchamp
spoke of a “great delay”-a process which in no way refers to production. It
doesn’t have to do with the time or tempo of the creative process, but rather
with the movement itself as the structure of representation. “Delay,” as end-
lessly slowed-down movement, replaces
the appearance of the image. Move-
ment becomes image. In the notes to the Green Box (1934) Duchamp wrote:
“Use ‘delay’ instead of picture or painting; picture on glass becomes delay in
glass-but delay in glass does not mean picture on glass” (in Sanouillet and
Peterson I973:26). Thereby neither the category of the presentation itself (art
as the representational form) nor the genre (picture, painting, sculpture) is
nameable: Time, which can in no way be fixed, alone steps into the gap of in-
determination-”A delay in glass” (Daniels 1992:73). Delay, referring to what?
Correlative sizes of the site, the relative time, and fixed coordinates are not
discernable. In terms of the motionless and static connotations of glass, this
formula of retardation works like an ironic reversal of the dynamism of the
avantgarde (the “Dynamo” of the Futurists,
for example)-the process of end-
less slowing down until the melting point is reached.