Modern Intellectual History, 15, 1 (2018), pp. 243–260 C© Cambridge University Press 2017
doi:10.1017/S1479244317000233

art: to be “inside” or “outside”
culture

thomas ort
Department of History, Queens College, CUNY

E-mail: thomas.ort@qc.cuny.edu

In the opening pages of his remarkable book about Marcel Duchamp, Jerrold
Seigel writes that the French artist “cared more about his personal independence
than he did about art itself. Beneath the succession of avant-garde movements
there had always lurked an impulse of radical individualism, and no one
represented it better than Marcel Duchamp” (PW, 10). Given the subject matter
of this essay—the place of art in Seigel’s thinking—it may seem odd to say so,
but in one respect Seigel’s attitude to art mirrors that of Duchamp: he cares less
about art itself than about the impulse of radical individualism in modern society
revealed through it.

This is not to say that Seigel is indifferent to art or that his attitude to it is
identical to that of Duchamp—far from it. But as much admiration as Seigel
possesses for the heroism of a figure like Charles Baudelaire, who remained
wholly committed to art even as he mined the unstable ground of individual
experience on which it stood, he has been preoccupied above all with, let’s say,
modern art’s antiheroes, with those figures who have indulged individualism in
its most extreme forms, resisting all limits on their subjectivity, and who in the
process have carried art outside the boundaries of art. The chief exemplar of this
current is undoubtedly Marcel Duchamp, but Seigel traces its arc from its roots
in Bohemia, through figures like Alfred Jarry and Arthur Rimbaud, and finally
to its culmination in the avant-garde of the early twentieth century.

This current is by no means exclusive to the sphere of art (and has been
examined in its different forms elsewhere by Seigel, notably in The Idea of
the Self), but has been powerfully present within it because of what Seigel
calls art’s “potential orientation toward pure individual autonomy” (MBL, 524).
Unmoored from any shared system of values, art in modern society, he argued
in Bohemian Paris, has been tasked with the necessity to “create meaning out
of the confrontation of an individual consciousness with the world of direct
experience” (BP, 123). But this difficult project has been fraught with danger:

243

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244 thomas ort

“Because modern art had only the resources of individual personality to invest in
the transcendence of everyday life, it had to employ dark energies that had seemed
inimical to art before . . . [A]rtists had now to construct the ideal out of the very
elements of existence that threatened to corrode and dissolve it” (BP, 123–4).
The heroism of Baudelaire’s life was to shoulder this burden self-consciously, to
indulge his private fantasies and derange his senses, in order to map the world’s
imprint on them and transform the experience into art.

In The Private Worlds of Marcel Duchamp, Seigel approached modern art’s
individualistic orientation somewhat differently, from the perspective of the
changes in urban life that seemed to encourage the liberation of the subjective
imagination. Drawing on Robert Herbert’s study of French impressionism,1 he
emphasized the way the mixture of physical closeness and psychological distance
characteristic of life in the modern metropolis seemed to make the city “more
freely available as a receptacle for the observer’s imagination or fantasy” (PW,
45). As a result of its anonymity and objectivity, the city became a kind of
canvas onto which individuals could project their moods, states of mind, and
private preoccupations. Impressionist painters like Eduard Manet, Claude Monet,
or Gustave Caillebotte made this condition a theme of their work, but it was
Baudelaire, again, who described it with the greatest precision. Seigel cites a
passage from Paris Spleen (1869) in which the poet glimpses an unknown woman
through a closed window and then constructs a story of her life that is the pure
product of his imagination:

Out of her face, her dress and her gestures, out of practically nothing at all, I have made

up this woman’s story, or rather legend, and sometimes I tell it to myself and weep . . .

Perhaps you will say “Are you sure that your story is the real one?” But what does it

matter what reality is outside myself, so long as it has helped me to live, to feel that I am

and what I am? (Baudelaire, “Windows,” cited in PW, 45).

Here, the anonymous world of the city nourishes the creative imagination and
deepens the poet’s sense of his self, but also threatens to cut him off from
reality outside the self. Because modern art required that the poet or painter
process experience through the screen of individual temperament, it also risked
substituting private visions and subjective fantasies for any recognizable reality.
As early as the 1870s, the critic Jules Castagnary warned that, for some painters,
external reality had become little more than a “pretext for reveries” (PW, 46).

While impressionist painters and poets like Baudelaire may have sometimes
indulged their imaginations at the expense of reality, they did not at the
same time deny that their private visions were the products of their own

1 Robert L. Herbert, Impressionism: Art, Leisure and Parisian Society (New Haven and
London, 1988).

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art: to be “inside” or “outside” culture 245

subjectivity. Yet Seigel identifies another, even more radical, strand of modernism
whose adherents downplayed any role of their selves in the generation of such
reveries. “These more radical figures,” he writes, “pushed the cultivation of
inner experience beneath the level where reality and particular temperament
mutually nourished each other, to a point where individuality itself gave way
to the impersonality of objective conditions” (PW, 48). Stéphane Mallarmé, for
example, denied that his poetry was born of the externalization of his inner
experience, maintaining instead that it was impersonal, that through it he had
become a mouthpiece of the universal. Rimbaud similarly proclaimed that his
self was not the agent of his own thoughts, that rather than thinking he “was
thought,” and that the same unspecified external power that did its thinking
through him made his poetry “objective” (PW, 226). It is this path that is the
chief object of Seigel’s attention, the path forged by a form of individuality so
radical and so free of the usual limitations that hem it in, that it appears objective
and universal.

Seigel’s interest in this current is to unravel the claims of vanguard figures
like Duchamp to have dissolved their individual subjectivity and subverted
their personal coherence, thereby opening themselves up to an unprecedented
kind of liberty grounded in chance and fluidity. He boldly argues that far from
dismantling subjectivity, such claims are actually a bid to “give the self greater
purity and a more exalted claim to independence” (PW, 13.) As such, they are
part and parcel of the individualistic orientation they wish to transcend rather
than a rebellion against it. They represent the aspiration to a form of subjectivity
that is lighter, purer, more elemental, and more fluid than the one that takes as its
starting point the heterogeneous elements of social and cultural life—the usual
building blocks of personal identity. The claim to dissolve the self, therefore, is
best understood as an attempt to live “outside of culture,” to free the self from
the limitations that society and culture impose on individuals (PW, 13–14). This
extravagant program, first elaborated by avant-garde artists like Duchamp, has
since taken on a multitude of forms, all of which Seigel views with suspicion.
Indeed, a significant part of his project has been to show that the attempt to
generalize or institutionalize the kind of exalted freedom to which Duchamp and
others aspired is a utopian endeavor that can never be realized.

∗ ∗ ∗
Seigel embarked on his analysis of these grand programs of individual

liberation though an exploration of the institution of Bohemia. In Bohemian Paris,
he argued that Bohemia is a space within bourgeois society—not external to it—
for the dramatization of ambivalence about its values and social identities. That is,
it is a space wherein individuals can enact the tensions and conflicts of bourgeois

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246 thomas ort

society and demand that they be faced. Perhaps the central conflict dramatized
by Bohemians concerned the place of the individual in postrevolutionary
society, namely the balance of individual emancipation and social cohesion.
The development of each individual’s “free subjectivity” threatened all too easily
to devolve into selfishness and egotism, corroding social bonds.

While in Seigel’s explanation Bohemia is not coextensive with the world of
artists, the place of artistic life in modern society nonetheless lies at its core.
With the end of the patronage system in the arts and the triumph of market
relations, artists lived out the postrevolutionary social transformation. On the
one hand, they were now subject to the utilitarian values of the marketplace; on
the other hand, they were liberated from dependence on aristocratic patronage
and became free to develop their talents in any way they wished, leading to a wealth
of aesthetic innovations. Success in the market might therefore be interpreted
as the realization of the emancipatory possibilities of the new society. Lack of
success, conversely, could be understood as the incapacity to make the most of
the new freedoms and thus as a sign of personal failure. In this way, the new
society rendered a harsh verdict on those individuals who failed to find room
in it for their artistic inclinations. In doing so, it seemed designed to discourage
sensitive, poetic natures before they had a chance to blossom and, more broadly,
to circumscribe the space available to all people of strong feeling and vigorous
imagination, whether they be artists or not.

And yet, one of the earliest commentators on Bohemian life, Félix Pyat, writing
in the 1830s, noted a peculiar paradox of postrevolutionary society: even as artists
grew apart from the rest of society, increasing numbers of people were claiming
to be artists. Pyat understood this expansion of the ranks of artists in terms of a
search for originality, a desire for separation from the mores and expectations of
existing society. He remarked that these young “artists” were turning themselves
into gypsies—“the Bohemians of today”—in their ambition to live more freely
and spontaneously, outside the bounds of workaday society (BP, 17). Most of
them, he felt certain, would never find success as actual painters or writers, but
they persisted in the illusion that they might, and in the meantime neglected
their other affairs and responsibilities. Pyat dubbed this malady “artistism” (BP,
18). Although Pyat did not put it in these terms, it seems clear that the rise of
artistism is intimately linked to the emancipatory possibilities that individuals
experienced in postrevolutionary society. That is, the appeal of the realm of art
lay precisely in its provision of a space to explore one’s free subjectivity outside
the bounds of traditional constraints and responsibilities, and whether or not
one had any chance of actually becoming a working artist. “Art” became a place
to test the limits and possibilities of one’s freedom as an individual.

For Seigel, artistism is part of the prehistory of Bohemia, before Bohemia
became fully elaborated in the late 1840s and the 1850s as the reverse of bourgeois

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art: to be “inside” or “outside” culture 247

life. But the notion already contained one of Bohemia’s essential elements: its
association not with the creation of artworks but with the life of the artist and
its attendant freedoms. Many denizens of Bohemia, to be sure, were true artists,
wholly committed to their craft as the materialization of their imagination. But
others were drawn to it chiefly as a way of life, as a space wherein they could
exercise the full freedom of their senses and imagination without having to
translate them into a finished aesthetic form. These were the Bohemians “for
whom art meant living the life, not doing the work” (BP, 58). As Henry Murger,
author of Scenes of Bohemian Life—the inspiration for Puccini’s La Bohème—put
it, “Their everyday existence is a work of genius” (cited in BP, 4, 58).

Seigel contrasts this trajectory with that of Charles Baudelaire, who
unquestionably inhabited Bohemia but staunchly resisted the confusion of art
and life endemic to it. Baudelaire loathed the disorder of Bohemian existence and
always emphasized the discipline required to produce genuine works of art. At the
same time, Bohemia possessed for him a kind of gravitational allure that he could
never escape. Imagining his self as at once centralized and vaporized, concentrated
and diffuse, Baudelaire’s centralized self corresponded to the contained and
controlled dandy in him, while the vaporized self pertained to the dissolute
Bohemian. Baudelaire experimented with all manner of self-diffusion, with losing
his self in crowds, in sex, in drugs, in nature, in political causes, in whatever really,
because it allowed his self to take on the shape and texture of things outside so
that he could then reproduce them from within. For him, the Bohemian “cult of
multiplied sensation” was a critical part of artistic creativity (BP, 114–16).

But only a part, for the other half of the equation was concentration, without
which there could be no real art at all. In his dazzling portrait of the poet, Seigel
puts it this way:

The person who first lost himself in the world in order to impress its shape on his spirit had

then to condense his being into himself like vapor returning purified from the surrounding

air. Then he was ready to give forth a distilled vision that was both nurtured by external

reality and born wholly from within (BP, 117).

This distilled vision is art, and it required both Bohemian self-diffusion and
dandyish self-containment. In either case, it was wholly dependent on the
individual, on the processing of experience through the prism of the self. Whereas
intoxication diffused the self, allowing it to receive the world’s imprint, the
centered individual gave new shape and form to this impress, transforming it by
mind and hand into art.

For Seigel, Baudelaire’s heroism consisted of his willingness to live for the
Bohemian multiplication of sensation while upholding the boundary between
art and life that other Bohemians obscured. But many of the poet’s modernist
successors either were unprepared to shoulder this burden or willfully forsook

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248 thomas ort

it. One of these was undoubtedly the writer Alfred Jarry, who, in the eyes of
André Breton, paved the way for the twentieth-century avant-garde’s wholesale
annihilation of the distinction between art and life. Seigel ties Jarry’s breakdown of
this boundary to an aesthetically grounded individualism derived from symbolist
poetics and anarchist politics, both of which maintained that no external force
had the right to restrain an individual’s visions or ideals. On this basis, he argues
that Jarry turned his own interiority into confrontation with the world and the
limits it imposed on his imagination.

Seigel’s analysis of Ubu roi (1896) emphasizes Jarry’s partial identification with
the play’s central character, the bumbling and aggressive Père Ubu, who claws his
way to the throne of Poland, only to be deposed soon after he achieves his goal. He
draws particular attention to Ubu’s aggression and its meaning for Jarry. What
they both shared is a dread of the limitations of material existence so intense
that the only possible reaction to it was violence. Jarry, like Ubu, was a man who
would be king or be nothing, who was “unable to live in a world that did not
reflect his own selfhood back to him” (BP, 316). Renowned for his outrageous and
provocative behavior—and also for carrying a revolver with him—Jarry wished
to abolish the distinction between his thoughts and his actions, his dreams and
the world in which he lived. He sought to live by his literary program alone,
only to discover that his fantasies were forever circumscribed by the reality of
material existence. This made the everyday world practically uninhabitable for
him and accounts not only for his exceptional eccentricity, but also for his
relentlessly self-destructive behavior. In the end, Jarry drank himself to death
and apparently welcomed his demise as the ultimate liberation of his dreams
from the materiality of his bodily self. Unlike Baudelaire, who embraced the
derangement of his senses through drugs and drink as a byway to art—the only
realm of genuine transcendence—Jarry accepted derangement for its own sake,
as an escape from the bonds of ordinary existence.

Though Breton hailed Jarry for his breakdown of the boundaries between art
and life and considered him one of the surrealist movement’s most important
predecessors, he always resisted the tendency toward nihilism and personal
dissolution that Jarry represented. Breton was likewise drawn to the poetry of
Rimbaud, another of surrealism’s key guides, but remained wary of his well-
documented descent into systematic sensory disorganization. What he saw in
their examples, however, was the attempt to throw off all external constraints on
the imagination and to live life according to its claims alone. Indeed, he went
further than they in aspiring to transform reality itself from the perspective of
dreams and unconscious life, that inexhaustible reservoir of the imagination.
With Surrealism, art ceased to be an end in itself and became a vehicle for the
remaking of life, a kind of advertisement for a way of life that reached beyond
the limitations of the present. “Its purpose,” Seigel writes, “was to draw people

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art: to be “inside” or “outside” culture 249

out of the here and now, and into that better life . . . [T]he claim to be a poet or
an artist was now justified only because it contributed to a life beyond art” (BP,
372). In this way, Breton and the surrealists effaced the boundary between art and
life, making art serve ends external to art itself.

And yet, the surrealists were still committed to the production of art, at
least most of the time, as a special signpost to transcendence, and, as such,
differed from their Dadaist counterparts’ more aggressive program of anti-
art. Despite the groups’ shared influences and personalities, Seigel sharply
distinguishes between the two, arguing that while the surrealists remained largely
committed to the renewal of art, the Dadaists forsook it as a special sphere of
activity altogether, indeed reveling in its destruction. To be sure, surrealism’s
original method of “psychic automatism” possessed much in common with
Dadaist practices, namely its grounding of artistic activity in unconscious mental
processes unguided by reason, morality, or aesthetic tradition. Seigel maintains,
however, that these emanations of unconscious life were not meant to replace art
but rather to extend the poetic imagination; they were the starting point of artistic
activity, not its terminus. Breton, moreover, remained wary of the flirtation with
the irrational inherent to psychic automatism, and so in 1924 steered surrealism
toward other, less disorganized repositories of unconscious life. He found these
mainly in modern urban existence: in advertising, in shopping arcades, in
restaurant menus, in chance encounters, in anything that aroused hidden desire.
These were all incitements to an individual’s fantasy and therefore potential
gateways to transcendence. Through their “explicitly Freudian identification of
the psychic depths as the real source of the energy earlier sought in a free life,”
writes Seigel, the “Surrealists modernized the Bohemian unification of art and
life” (BP, 383).

If this program attained its most characteristic embodiment in works of
literature such as Louis Aragon’s trance-like Paris Peasant (1926), Seigel also makes
clear that the boundaries between surrealism and Dadaism were permeable and
unstable. While the surrealists continued to produce more or less recognizable
objects of art, they forever justified their activity as aiming “beyond art.” They
also identified themselves with the spirit of provocation and confrontation more
typically associated with Dada and were not immune to mystification and
obfuscation, sometimes deliberately driving a wedge between themselves and
their audience in order to avoid the false comfort of public approval. And if
in practice most surrealists continued to produce recognizable objects of art,
they were in principle committed to the devaluation of art. With the arrival
of Dadaism and surrealism, the purpose of art was thus fundamentally altered.
Now, the vocation of art, Seigel maintains, was “to call men to a freer and more
fulfilling existence by releasing the transformative energy present in life itself,
and directing that energy against the resistances and barriers that repressed or

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250 thomas ort

impeded it” (BP, 384). For the avant-garde, art ceased to be associated with the
creation of a special category of objects standing apart from the rest of life and
became identified instead with a posture of liberation from any limit placed on
an individual’s imagination.

No artist better embodied this transformation than Marcel Duchamp, who was
the first to substitute industrially produced objects for traditional works of art. His
readymades called into question the notion of art as a form of creative expression
guided by the artist’s personality, not to say the existence of the category of art at
all. Seigel ends Bohemian Paris with some brief reflections on Duchamp’s legacy,
anticipating his next major project—a sustained examination of the French
artist’s career. The Private Worlds of Marcel Duchamp is significant not only
for completing a line of inquiry first developed in Bohemian Paris, but also for
deepening Seigel’s investigation into modern selfhood. In his reading, Duchamp’s
abandonment of art and proclaimed dissolution of personal subjectivity represent
one of the most radical claims for the autonomy of the self heretofore imagined.
The form of subjectivity aspired to by him is the model for the purified form of
selfhood fully described in The Idea of the Self. The path to Seigel’s magnum opus
runs through Marcel Duchamp and twentieth-century avant-garde art.

∗ ∗ ∗
The brilliance of Seigel’s analysis of Duchamp resides chiefly in his ability to

discern consistent patterns of meaning in those works of the artist that had long
been celebrated for their purposive meaninglessness or free-floating signification.
Seigel’s distinctive psychobiographical approach enables him to link Duchamp’s
mysterious and seemingly impenetrable creations to long-term preoccupations
partly rooted in his familial and personal relations. In making sense of what
others have dismissed as insensible, Seigel exposes as false Duchamp’s claims to
have dissolved his own subjectivity. Rather than slipping the bonds of his own
subjectivity, Duchamp developed a private language that, due to its inscrutability,
only seemed driven by accident and chance, whereas it was in fact a vehicle for
the persistent exploration of his inner concerns and for the maintenance of the
purity of his self.

One key to these preoccupations, according to Seigel, is a note first written
by Duchamp in 1913 and subsequently published by him in 1966 in reference
to his work the Large Glass (formally known as The Bride Stripped Bare by
Her Bachelors, Even, Fig. 1), his most complex and arguably most important
creation. The note describes—in rather cryptic terms—the experience of gazing
into shop windows, of having one’s desire aroused by the displayed objects, and
of the inevitable disappointment that accompanies their possession. The note
suggests that a state of perpetually aroused desire had for Duchamp far more

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art: to be “inside” or “outside” culture 251

Fig. 1. (Colour online) Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even

(1915–23). C© Succession Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris/Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York, 2017.

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252 thomas ort

appeal than the satisfaction thereof because, as Seigel states, “desiring carries
us outward toward a still-imagined state, promising an expanded and altered
form of existence; but once satisfaction occurs, we have only the particular things
chosen, and we return, frustrated and chagrined, to the previous boundaries of
the self.” Or, to put it another way, Duchamp preferred his transactions with
the external world to be governed primarily by (unfulfilled) desire because it
allowed “the self to set the terms of its relations with objects” (PW, 30–31). In
such a state, the self is not required to make any compromises with external
reality; it resides in a hermetic realm of pure aspiration. Once desire is fulfilled,
however, the seal is ruptured and the self is subject to the social and material
limitations of that which is possessed. What Duchamp was seeking, in Seigel’s
view, was a kind of selfhood “freed of the particular opinions and practices of a
given culture, and able—at least in the imagination—to transcend the limits that
any and every culture imposes on its members” (PW, 13). This is the meaning
of Seigel’s assertion that Duchamp and other avant-garde artists aspired to live
“outside of culture.”2

The contrast between Duchamp’s work and that of his cubist contemporaries
also helps clarify his inclinations. Although Duchamp was a sometime member
of the Puteaux cubist circle along with his brothers Gaston and Raymond, he was
never comfortable in a group setting and definitively parted ways with it in 1912
when its leading personalities, Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, rejected Nude
Descending a Staircase—the painting that made him famous in America—for
an exhibition they were organizing. In their well-known pamphlet On Cubism,
Gleizes and Metzinger described the act of contemplating a cubist painting as
effecting “a sensitive passage between two subjective spaces,” that between viewer
and artist. They acknowledged cubism to be an art of subjectivity, but insisted that
those working in the new style endeavored to enclose their subjective experiences
“in a symbol likely to affect others.” That is, they emphasized the importance of
communication between subjective spaces, the necessity for crafting symbols that
would enable a passage between the two. They harshly condemned as obscurantist
art that failed to effect such a transition, that reveled in its unintelligibility or
deliberately attempted to “fabricate puzzles” (cited in PW, 52). Although it is
impossible to know if Gleizes and Metzinger had Duchamp in mind when they
penned this critique or when they rejected his painting for their show, Seigel
clearly believes that this may have been the case, for Duchamp was already pushing

2 In his most recent book, Between Cultures, Seigel further explores the resistance to the limits
that all cultures impose on individuals. Here, however, his interest is on self-conscious
attempts to straddle two cultural situations, to inhabit a space “between cultures”—to be
at once part of and distanced from both cultures—rather than to live, more extravagantly,
“outside of culture,” in a state of pure individual autonomy.

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art: to be “inside” or “outside” culture 253

aesthetic subjectivity to its limits, even in his early works. He was renouncing the
passage between subjectivities for the freedom of his own private world.

Whatever notoriety Nude Descending a Staircase brought him in 1915,
Duchamp became best known for his readymades: ordinary or slightly altered
objects elevated to the status of art. The readymades, in Seigel’s words, “stand as
Duchamp’s signatory challenge to artistic tradition, his irreparable violation of
the sacred precinct where art had reposed in sovereign independence from the
rest of life” (PW, 115). They once and for all abolished the line between art and
nonart, showing that any object that could be experienced aesthetically could
be understood as art. As art historian Clement Greenberg explained, through
the readymades Duchamp effectively redefined the meaning of art as “an act of
mental distancing—an act that can be performed even without the help of sense
perception. Any and everything can be subjected to such distancing, and thereby
converted into something that takes effect as art” (cited in PW, 116).

As insightful as such readings are, Seigel suggests that Duchamp came to the
readymades for other reasons as well: he saw them as a “defense against personal
fixity,” as a way of avoiding repetition and becoming linked to any particular style,
taste, or habit that might stabilize his personal identity. Crucially important to
his designation of objects as readymades was that they be chosen out of “visual
indifference”; that is, more or less randomly, without advance planning and
without regard for the nature of the object. The idea behind such indifference
was not merely to demonstrate that any object could be appreciated as art, but
rather to forestall the possibility that any trace of the artist’s personality would
enter into the process of selection. As such, readymades were “a way to preserve
an undefined, fluid existence, in contrast to that of the conventional artist, whose
presence in a series of works could be recognized by known elements of style”
(PW, 116). They were thus conceived not only as a means of challenging the
traditional boundaries of art, but also as a vehicle for the dissolution of artistic
subjectivity.

But in this aspiration at least, they failed, for, as Seigel strikingly reveals, the
readymades were by no means selected out of indifference. On the contrary, they
are marked by Duchamp’s long-standing preoccupations and form part of the
private symbolic language he was developing through his other works, especially
the Large Glass. For one thing, Duchamp did not articulate the concept of the
readymade until 1915, two years after he had begun working with found objects.
His well-known Bicycle Wheel (an inverted wheel of a bicycle mounted on a stool,
Fig. 2) dates to 1913, while Bottle Rack (a bottle-drying rack) dates to 1914. These
readymades avant la lettre were not originally conceived as the substitutions
for art of which they would later become representative, but rather are best
understood, according to Seigel, as akin to Duchamp’s many puns and thus as
fully laden with significant though largely private meanings for the artist.

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254 thomas ort

Fig. 2. (Colour online) Marcel Duchamp, Bicycle Wheel (1951, reconstruction of lost 1913

original). C© Succession Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris/Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York, 2017.

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art: to be “inside” or “outside” culture 255

Bicycle Wheel, for example, was created at a time when Duchamp was engrossed
with the idea of motion and seeking to transcend linear movement in favor of
the kinds of movement that produced no directional progress, or what he called
“delay,” a central feature of the Large Glass. Bicycle Wheel likewise visually echoes
elements of the Large Glass, namely its waterwheel and chocolate grinder, both
notable for their nonlinear, rotational movement and thus also symbolic of
“delay.” Bottle Rack is similarly marked by Duchamp’s preoccupations. The phal-
lic implications of the rack’s prongs—extended upward, awaiting wet bottles to
be fitted onto them—are difficult to overlook, and Duchamp, apparently, did not
deny such a reading, belying his claim to have selected the object out of indiffer-
ence. But Seigel suggests an even more pointed interpretation of Bottle Rack, link-
ing it directly to the themes of the Large Glass: “What makes the rack resonate so
perfectly with the Large Glass is the absence of the bottles for which the prongs call
out . . . so that the female counterpart to the symbolic male anatomy exists only by
being imagined; male and female await each other in fantasy, while being denied—
or spared—physical contact” (PW, 126). These proto-readymades, then, were by
no means the product of a dissolved subjectivity; on the contrary, they form part
of a private language designed to express Duchamp’s persistent concerns.

Even Duchamp’s most notorious readymade, Fountain (Fig. 3), the porcelain
urinal he submitted to an exhibition in New York in 1917, well after he had
articulated the concept of the readymade, is not free of the artist’s personality.
For one thing, it was clearly intended to provoke and offend and, as such, was
hardly selected out of indifference. More importantly, it too contains the marks of
Duchamp’s preoccupations and can be readily linked to the Large Glass. The one
way Duchamp altered the urinal was by displaying it on its side, inviting viewers
to contemplate it from the perspective of the hole—the orifice—normally used
to pipe water into the curvilinear, almost uterine, space of the urinal. (And what
else is a urinal besides a receptacle designed to capture the bodily fluid of a man?)
As such, Fountain “called up the imaginary relations between male and female
personae that existed in his conception of the Large Glass” (PW, 137). It functions
too as a sort of female counterpart of the bottle rack. In this case, it is a female
presence that beckons for a male complement that never arrives, again echoing
the suspended desire or “delay” of the Large Glass. In Seigel’s analysis of the
readymades (and many of Duchamp’s other works), the French artist’s brilliance
seems to reside less in the successful effacement of his personality than in the
consistency and thoroughness with which he explored his private concerns and
constructed a symbolic language to express them.

And yet, it is important to reckon with Duchamp’s claims to have slipped
the bonds of his subjectivity because, in doing so, he believed he had attained a
special kind of liberty characterized by fluidity and instability, and free from the
usual constraints of culture. Seigel concludes Private Worlds with a discussion

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256 thomas ort

Fig. 3. (Colour online) Marcel Duchamp, Fountain (1917, original, photographed by

Alfred Stieglitz). C© Succession Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris/Artists Rights Society
(ARS), New York, 2017.

of the nature of the freedom aspired to by Duchamp, contrasting it to other
liberatory projects pursued by modernist and avant-garde artists in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries. In the process, he lays out his understanding of the
differing kinds of freedom the sphere of art offers in modern society. As such,
this discussion serves as a useful coda to this essay.

∗ ∗ ∗
While Duchamp never became a fully fledged member of the French surrealist

movement, André Breton admired him greatly because he saw in him an artist
who found his way around one of the central dilemmas of avant-garde artistic

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art: to be “inside” or “outside” culture 257

practice. If the shared aim of vanguard movements was to reinvigorate life from a
basis in art, infusing it with the freedom of the imagination previously confined
to the sphere of art, then they seemed to forever miss their mark. The necessity
to articulate their goals through a new artistic style or program meant that each
venture had a tendency to become a matter of habit and routine, soon arresting
the imagination in a prescribed form that had at first lent it wings. It was this
tendency toward fixity and the ossification of the imagination that Duchamp
had eschewed through his readymades. Seemingly lacking any consistent stylistic
features and apparently selected at random, they embodied the freedom from
every fixed condition of life that Breton exalted.

Seigel contrasts this form of freedom to that which the poet Paul Éluard located
in Picasso’s art. Éluard saw in Picasso an artist who traveled the difficult “path
from subject to object,” who found a means of translating his intensely subjective
inner experiences into external forms that were nonetheless accessible to others.
The symbolic language he constructed possessed a “poetic reason” that enabled
communication across subjectivities rather than closing it off (PW, 236–7). Seigel
maintains that what Éluard appreciated in Picasso was his articulation of a style,
“a visual synthesis of a subjectivity with the objects that confront it” (PW, 237). A
style in this sense opened people up to new dimensions of experience by allowing
them to participate in an artist’s highly personal encounter with the world without
losing their way. In short, Picasso invented a style that expanded rather than
contracted shared forms of experience and enabled rather than foreclosed what
Gleizes and Metzinger called “a sensitive passage between two subjective spaces”
(quoted in PW, 52).

It was this transitional space that Duchamp renounced in the Large Glass
and the readymades. Duchamp found freedom precisely in the dismantling of
common ground between artist and audience because it ensured the preservation,
for him at least, of a private space uncontaminated by exchange with the external
world. According to Seigel, the disparity in the kinds of freedom represented by
the examples of Duchamp and Picasso arise from the differing ways they conceive
of the relationship between the self and the world. The clarity and force of his
explanation deserves quotation at length:

Duchamp’s pure freedom requires that the inner play of fantasy meet the world of material

things wholly on the former’s terms: it is lost when one breaks the shop window and

discovers that the objects which beckon there only yield to possession by imposing the

actuality of their limitations on desire’s infinite wish. Such freedom cannot be experienced

through direct interaction with the world, but only at a remove . . . Such spaces are worlds

in themselves, into which objects enter only as symbols, so that the ideas they stand for

encounter no material, mundane resistances, but echo endlessly off each other in a kind

of constant interior reverberation. (PW, 239)

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258 thomas ort

The kind of freedom embodied by Picasso’s art, on the other hand,

is less pure but also less isolated, is fulfilled not in self-reference but in representation,

the power to see the world in some independent way. Being able to give the world a

personal shape does not liberate anyone from the conditions of living in it but testifies to

an individual’s ability to discover possible ways to think and act that had not been visible

before; each style sets up a particular mode of interaction with the external world, giving

to it an order it does not possess in itself. (PW, 240)

This latter form of freedom may be modest as compared to Duchamp’s, but its
emancipatory potential lies in its recognition that every individual may also be,
or perhaps already is, the author of another such personal world. In this vision,
the self finds its freedom in ongoing exchange with the external world, in the
ceaseless invention of new representations of this interaction—new styles. No
one representation is true or universal; all are partial and particular, the product
of one subjectivity’s relations with the world. Art constituted in this way belongs
“to the self that forms its being within the world” (PW, 242). The readymades
do not. They are animated by a type of selfhood free of the usual limitations
that society and culture impose on individuals; they are unalloyed receptacles of
the imagination, ready to embody any private symbolic intention projected onto
them. It may seem paradoxical that industrial products are more open to such
intentions than traditional objects of art but, as Seigel explains, it is precisely their
anonymity and impersonality that make them so available to individual fantasy.

It should be clear, then, that one way of thinking about art locates its freedom
within the heterogeneous elements of social and cultural life, and seeks to craft
ever new resolutions to its multifarious demands. The other kind—Duchamp’s—
finds it outside: it casts off “the burden of reconciling contradictions that
membership in complex cultures imposes on individuals, opening the way to a
lighter, more elemental kind of selfhood” (PW, 13). The abolition of the boundary
between art and life is nothing less than the abolition of the distinction between
the self and the world, between the realm of the imagination and the world of
material and cultural limitations. The attempt to live life as if it were a work of art
is an attempt to live by way of imagination alone, undiluted and unadulterated by
the constraints of society and culture. Under the guise of a dissolved subjectivity,
it represents the most radical form of individualism that modern culture has
spawned: a form of selfhood purified of any contamination by the external world.

And it is precisely in this aspiration that the central irony of the avant-garde
project inheres. Conceived in rebellion against bourgeois society, it actually
represents the most complete unfolding of its core individualistic principles:
Duchamp and his predecessors and heirs pushed art’s “potential orientation
toward pure individual autonomy” to its limits (MBL, 524). In other words,
for all of its sound and fury, the revolt of the avant-garde was a revolt from

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art: to be “inside” or “outside” culture 259

within the culture of bourgeois modernity, not external to it. Or, as Seigel puts
it, “Increasingly we understand that the avant-garde belongs to our culture, the
culture of modernity, and never more wholly and loyally than in its claims to be
in revolt against it” (PW, 15). In short, it is not possible to be “outside of culture.”
The dreams of absolute rebellion and the freedom of a dissolved subjectivity were
born squarely within modern culture, not outside it.

Paradoxically, as much as Duchamp has become the standard-bearer for
the avant-garde abolition of the boundary between art and life, he may
have understood the limits of this project better than most because for him
the endeavor was always a private one. Unlike so many of his disciples
and admirers, he did not believe that the freedom sought therein could be
generalized or institutionalized, that it could be realized through a project of
political transformation. Scrupulously keeping himself at arm’s length from the
revolutionary political projects of his day, Duchamp aspired to a kind of freedom
that belonged to the “realm of pure inwardness” and could not be extended to
the public or material world (PW, 248). Indeed, he may have pointed to this
distinction in his confounding and much-reviled final work, Given (Fig. 4).

Inviting viewers to peer through a peephole in a heavy wooden door, Given
reveals a totally nude woman, legs spread in possible postcoital satisfaction. For
Seigel, this crude, almost pornographic, work was Duchamp’s way of completing
his “definitively unfinished” Large Glass, of transporting the bride and her
bachelors from the arena of expectation and unfulfilled desire to that of possession
and fulfilled desire—to the world of ordinary material existence. Duchamp left
instructions that Given not be displayed until after his death, as if to say, in Seigel’s
words, “When the breath of desire no longer lifts me into the world of unrealized
aspirations, then the elements of my picture will return to the dead world of time
and space, where we can examine them as they would be in a state that belongs
wholly to the here and now” (PW, 110). Given is the condition in which nothing
is left to the imagination and in which there is no transcendence: everything is
given, materialized, satiated, and, ultimately, dead. It is “an account of what art
becomes when erotic energies, preserved as engines of fantasy within the delay
of the Large Glass, turn from imagination to ordinary life” (PW, 111). And it was
precisely what Duchamp believed art should never be (and why so many of his
admirers were perplexed and repulsed by it).

This may be why, perhaps, he resisted the impulse of his peers to realize in
politics the freedom he sought through art. To do so would be to materialize that
which belongs to the realm of imagination and desire, to break the glass of the
shop window and submit to the limitations of material possession, a transaction
that can only issue in disappointment and disillusion—or worse. In respecting
the boundary between private fantasy and shared reality, Duchamp also preserved
something of the boundary between art and life. Art for him remained a sphere

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260 thomas ort

Fig. 4. (Colour online) Marcel Duchamp, Given 1. The Waterfall 2. The Illuminating Gas

(1946–66). C© Succession Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris/Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York, 2017.

of transcendence from ordinary life and the limitations of material existence,
albeit an entirely private and personal one. In this sense, for all the extremity of
his assault on the category of art, Duchamp may have in fact remained an artist.

For Seigel, then, Duchamp’s legacy is a mixed one. He is a figure who pushed
individual autonomy to its limits, reveling in the unbounded freedom of the
imagination, while also sundering the bonds of communication between artist
and audience. At the same time, recognizing that his refuge was a private and
personal one, he resisted the attempts to generalize the freedom he located therein,
maintaining the boundary between private and public reality, the freedom
of the individual imagination and that which is possible to materialize and
institutionalize. If he is Seigel’s exemplary antihero of modern culture, then
Duchamp is not without his heroism either.

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