Duchamp's "Luggage Physics": Art on the Move
"Well, it had to come. How long will it last?" wondered Marcel
Duchamp in a letter to Katherine Dreier about the onset of World
War II following the invasion of Poland. "How will we come out of
it, if we come out of it?" At fifty-two, and thus too old for
military service, Duchamp envisaged doing "some civilian work to
help. What?? Everything is still a mess," he exclaimed. In Paris,
half deserted and in darkness, he was "waiting for the first bomb,
to leave for somewhere in the country."[1 <#foot1>] The eruption
of the war had Duchamp packing his bags again, just as he did
during World War I when he first came to America. In this period
he was producing materials for a box packed in a valise, a folding
exhibition space that would assemble reproductions of his artistic
corpus. Resembling a portable museum, The Box in a Valise
(1935-41) collected 69 miniature reproductions and replicas that
he intended to assemble in America.[2 <#foot2>] Traveling between
the unoccupied and occupied zones with a cheese dealer's pass in
the spring of 1941, Duchamp anxiously transported across the
German lines a large suitcase filled not with cheese, but with
materials for his boxes.
...
The materials for assembly
and reproductions for fifty boxes were shipped off to New York in
1941 in two cases, along with Peggy Guggenheim's recently acquired
art collection, under the label "household goods." By 14 May 1942,
when Duchamp got his papers and headed from Marseilles to New
York, most artists and intellectuals had already left France; this
escape route would soon be cut off.[4 <#foot4>] Fleeing the
ravages of war in the nick of time, Duchamp would once again
assume the migrant condition inaugurated by his arrival to the
U.S. during World War I.
Duchamp's repeated attempts to take refuge from war reflected his
enduring aversion to militarism and patriotism. Speaking of the
reasons for his first migration to the U.S. during WWI, he stated:
"I had left France basically for lack of militarism. For lack of
patriotism, if you wish" (Cabanne 59). He held this conviction
throughout his life, although after WWII it was colored by
ambivalence and regret.[5 <#foot5>] Even as early as 1905, "being
neither militaristic nor soldierly," he availed himself of the
exemption of "art worker" by becoming a printer of engravings (the
other option was to be a typographer) in order to reduce his
military service (Cabanne 19-20). Duchamp's aversion to war
largely overlapped his discontent with art and his sense that he
was incompatible with its endeavors. In a letter to Walter Pach
(27 Apr. 1915), he notes the combined impact of war and art on his
decision to leave France:
For a long time and even before the war, I have disliked this
"artistic life" in which I was involved.--It is the exact
opposite of what I want. So I tried to somewhat escape from
the artists through the library. Then during the war, I felt
increasingly more incompatible with this milieu. I absolutely
wanted to leave. (Duchamp, Amicalement 40)
His disenchantment with art is based on its exclusive cultivation
of visual aspects (what he called the "retinal") to the detriment
of intellectual expression. Trapped by professional and market
pressures that left artists to merely repeat themselves by copying
and multiplying a few ideas, he actively sought to escape. War
appears to have exacerbated this rising disaffection with art and
with the artistic milieu by bringing it to a crisis. However, the
challenge of implementing his decision to leave both war and art
behind and the questions this decision raises gained renewed
urgency upon the eruption of WWII.
http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/text-only/issue.905/16.1judovitz.txt
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