htc touch pro 6850 6950

Kant After Duchamp. By Thierry de Duve.
Published by The MIT Press, Cambridge, 1996, 484 pp. 13 illustrations. $39.95 hardcover

Clement Greenberg Between the Lines: Including a Previously Unpublished Debate with Clement Greenberg. By Thierry de Duve, tr. by Brian Holmes.
Published by Éditions Dis Voir, Paris, 1996, 158 pp. $32.95 paper.

Du Nom au Nous. By Thierry de Duve.
Published by Éditions Dis Voir, Paris, 1995, 124 pp. 120 F. paper.

La Déposition: À propos de Déçue la mariée se rhabilla de Sylvie Blocher. By Thierry de Duve.
Published by Éditions Dis Voir, Paris, and F.R.A.C. Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, Marseille, 1995, 60 pp. 19 illustrations. 120 F. paper.

Jeff Wall. By Thierry de Duve, Arielle Pelenc, and Boris Groys.
Published by Phaidon Press, London, 1996, 160 pp. TK illustrations. price TK.


Kant After Duchamp will be seen as the most important and lasting recent book on art, but it’s going to take a while to sink in. I’m tempted to say that, just as Marcel Duchamp referred to his Mariée mis à nu par ses célibataires, même, as a “delay in glass,” Kant After Duchamp might be called a delay in words. Not just that it’s dense, which it is, but that it’s cagey. Every sentence, it seems, makes a claim, which means that every one demands thought, argument, criticism. All that tends to stop you in your tracks, makes you want to pour over it: has de Duve really gotten this just right or not? But the reason answering that question matters so much is that each sentence is not just significant in itself, but is also going to count for something at various other points in the book, perhaps widely scattered. So that same writing that keeps stopping you in your tracks also keeps sending you backward and forward to other passages elsewhere in the book, and the supposed linearity of reading, and of writing, is thereby completely short-circuited.
When de Duve’s book Résonances du readymade: Duchamp entre avant-garde et tradition was published in 1989, its back cover announced the imminent publication that same year of another book, Kant After Duchamp, which in the event did not appear. Also in 1989, de Duve published Au Nom de l’art: Pour une archéologie de la modernité, whose three chapters (one of them titled “Kant [d’]apres Duchamp”) were described by their author as “complementary pieces” to the same “puzzle” as the four of Résonances. Interleaved, with some revision, and with the addition of an eighth essay, those seven chapters (composed, according to the dates appended to them, between 1978 and 1989), form the present Kant After Duchamp, some of whose chapters were composed in English, others in French. Whether the volume that has finally appeared under that title seven years later is or can be the same book is a nice question, but when dealing with a self-proclaimed nominalist like de Duve, the presupposition ought to be that the same title names the same book.
Who knows what accounted for the delay that brings this (presumably definitive) version seven years behind schedule; certainly the preparation of a long book puts a writer to a severe test, and his publisher as well. Reading one can also be a trial for readers, and the most consequential books often do not achieve their resonance until well after their publication, because it takes so long to assimilate them. I suspect that Kant after Duchamp is one of those books whose importance will grow with time, but in any case it is difficult to assimilate, and my remarks on it here are meant to be provisional at best. In short, this is one of those books you don’t read, but only re-read, and apparently it has also been the sort of book you can’t write, but only re-write.
The book consists of eight more or less self-contained chapters—at least it was possible to read the chapter on “The Readymade and the Tube of Paint” and “The Monochrome and the Blank Canvas” as self-contained essays when they were first published in, respectively, Artforum and Reconstructing Modernism (ed. by Serge Guilbaut, MIT Press)—yet these separate chapters are woven of many of the same fine threads, though they shuttle back and forth among disparate levels of analysis, between “the universal and the singular,” between “the specific and the generic,” between “anything and everything,” between “ after and before,” to quote the titles of the four overarching sections among which the eight chapters are paired.
De Duve’s project, to the extent it can be summarized, would be to understand the relation between the readymade and painting, the avant-garde and the tradition—or, as it is personified here, between Marcel Duchamp and Clement Greenberg. It has to do with reconciling one’s love of painting with the feeling that Duchamp’s Fountain—the notorious upturned urinal signed “R. Mutt”—is central to artistic modernity. One might call it an impossible project, except that I believe de Duve is correct in finding it to be an essential project for the understanding of art in the twentieth century (which does not necessarily make it any the less impossible). The swarming Duchampians may be no more satisfied with the result than the sparse Greenbergians, but those who prefer the cortex and the retina a little more tightly wired—and who would wish to mend the diremption between aesthetic experience and artistic form which de Duve acutely diagnoses—will not fail to find encouragement here.
That the book is all of a piece, with subtle interconnections belying the apparent diversity of its parts, does not mean it is all equally convincing. (That’s the problem with projects grand enough to be impossible.) The opener, “Art Was a Proper Name” (representing the universal as opposed to the singular) is an immensely lucid dialectical tour of ways that the question of art might be, and has been, approached. I call it dialectical because, while de Duve seems to want to be seen as a Foucauldian archeology, it much more closely resembles a Hegelian phenomenology. (Not only is de Duve more Hegelian than Foucauldian, despite his dedication of his book to the memory of Michel Foucault; it is also more Hegelian than Kantian, despite Kant’s nomination in its title.) In any case it is a bravura demonstration of the way ideas, reaching their limits or exposing their limitations, reveal their substance only as they morph into other quite different ideas. But de Duve reveals his own limitations here, for his notion of art as a proper name—“just as with Peter, Paul, or Harry, or Catherine, Fanny, or Valerie”—completely falls apart when he tries to make this something more than an image or metaphor and calls upon Saul Kripke’s theory of proper names in Naming and Necessity (Harvard University Press, 1972) to undergird his account, thereby claiming to “take the chance that if some day the theory you accept it shown to be false, your theory of art will collapse.” While I can hardly claim the philosophical acumen necessary to verify Kripke’s theory, which is that proper names are such insofar as they have reference and not because of any meaning they may also possess, what is clear is that de Duve fails to show that the word “art” could possibly be such a thing, and yet his theory does not collapse. Why is art not a proper name? One could cite a number of reasons, all from within de Duve’s own argument, but here I will adduce just one: because, as he says, “aesthetic judgments are always comparative, even though it would be useless to try to say precisely what they compare.” A moment’s though will suffice to remind is that Peter, Paul, or Harry, Catherine, Fanny, or Valerie are not, as such, subject to comparison: we “baptize” something as art taking into account our understanding of the tradition of art, but although we may sometimes say, “Funny, you don’t look like a Valerie,” we are embarrassed to have done so because we know that being Valerie has nothing to do with resemblance to, critique of, or any other relation to other individuals with the same name. Proper names are not bestowed through judgment. As Walter Benjamin puts it: “The names [parents] give do not correspond—in a metaphysical rather than etymological sense—to any knowledge, for they name newborn children.” The reason de Duve’s theory does not, nonetheless, collapse is because what he wants to get at with this notion of the proper name is something important and until now inadequately conceptualized: the moment of impassioned judgment in which one declares, “Now this is art,” or, perhaps, inversely, “This has nothing to do with art.”
De Duve’s fumble over Kripke, and the unimportance of that fumble for the substance of the book, tells us that, although he uses philosophy brilliantly but often awkwardly, Kant After Duchamp is not a work of philosophy. De Duve calls himself, rather, a historian. This is a title that Molly Nesbit, for one, has denied him, however. As evidence, she offers de Duve’s crucial interpretation, in his chapter on “The Readymade and the Tube of Paint,” of Duchamp’s readymade in the form of an inscribed metal comb—peigne in French. De Duve understands the readymades punningly, and peigne not only means “comb”; it is also a subjunctive form of the verb peindre, to paint: it implies, for de Duve, “qu’il peigne” (let him paint!) or, better, “que je peigne” (I ought to paint; if only I could paint). But Duchamp, Nesbit says, always avoided any use of the word Peigne to designate this object; as a title, she tells us, it is a later accretion.
If Nesbit is right—and no more than I am philosopher enough to argue with Kripke am I historian enough to want to argue with her—then de Duve has some serious explaining to do. Not that his theory (here, that “the readymade is to art in general what the tube of paint is to modern painting”) would necessarily fall apart without the word peigne, but he would have to produce a convincing account for the absence of the word. This might not be so difficult—so studious an avoidance begins to seem significant in itself, like Sherlock Holmes’ dog that didn’t bark in the night—but failure to do so would severely undermine de Duve’s position. Still, de Duve’s account can be said to be historical in basis precisely because it is more likely to stand or fall on such historical particulars than on its philosophical treatment of concepts.
De Duve is more Hegelian than Kantian precisely because, to the extent that philosophy does come into his purview, it is always embedded in a story. What art was, what art is, what art will be are not necessarily the same but can be seen as undergoing a historical development. Aesthetic judgment once took the form of a statement like, “this is beautiful”; subsequently, according to de Duve, it took the form, “this is art”; something different, he gives us to understand (because “art was a proper name”), must be in the process of emerging. Perhaps because of this philosophical historicism, Kant After Duchamp provides—for the first time, to my knowledge—a genuine intellectual meeting place for practitioners of art, of art criticism, of art history, and of philosophical aesthetics, though this possibility comes only at the price of some severe challenges. Will philosophers, for example, be willing to undertake the fine-grained examination of actual artistic activity that would give their discipline a more concrete content? Will historians become more searching in their treatment of the concepts that organize their field? Will it suit artists and critics to become any less simply opportunistic in their use of ideas on the one hand and facts on the other?
Clement Greenberg Between the Lines constitutes a sustained footnote to Kant after Duchamp—to the big book’s acknowledgments, in fact, where we read of de Duve’s first encounter with Greenberg, at the latter’s Central Park West apartment, which led not to a theoretical discussion but with an exchange of judgments: Warhol vs. color field painting. “A few years later,” de Duve continues, “we had our theoretical discussion—in public—but that’s another story,” the story that is told in Clement Greenberg Between the Lines. I suspect that some readers, rendered faint of heart by the 460 pages of small print in Kant After Duchamp, will turn to the smaller book in hope of gleaning something of de Duve’s position without having to work quite as hard at it. That would be unfortunate. Kant After Duchamp is a book that concerns everyone who cares about modern or contemporary art; Clement Greenberg Between the Lines concerns only those who care about the right reading of Greenberg (even if that means anyone who has been convinced of the importance of that by having previously read Kant After Duchamp).
There are a number of reasons why that right reading would be important. One of the most interesting, and one that intersects most significantly with Kant After Duchamp, has to do with its bearing on de Duve’s opening question: “is artistic emotion textually transmissible?” It’s not just that both books are full of arrestingly original and cogent arguments, but that those arguments exist not, primarily, to prove a point, but to communicate a feeling. In Kant After Duchamp De Duve does not attempt, for example, to demonstrate that Fountain is central to modern art, but rather to unfold the complex of feeling (a feeling, to be sure, informed by a great deal of learning and thinking) that would place Fountain, like it or not, at the center of one’s internal organization of the field. In the book on Greenberg, he does not want to prove that Greenberg had a good eye or a good theory, but to show the interrelation of his feeling for Greenberg’s writing with that for Jackson Pollock’s painting.
Speaking of Greenberg’s early reviews of Jackson Pollock, de Duve laments, “It’s been a long time since I’ve read anything similar (or wrote anything similar, I admit).” I myself would have wished to see from de Duve more day-to-day criticism of new art; I remember asking him for that some time in the late 1980s, when I was editing an art magazine, but the bait was not taken. Although de Duve once wrote an excellent essay on Robert Ryman (it’s in his book Essais Datés I: 1974-1986) his explication of the work of a young French artist, Sylvie Blocher, and (in a collection of essays, Du Nom au nous), on the grand old man of Canadian art, Michael Snow, show a strange refusal of Greenbergian incisiveness: these are, unfortunately, fairly typical ventures of an academic into the contemporary scene, lumbering and over-elaborated, however learned; and in the case of Blocher, the reproductions suggest that work in question was hardly worth the chin-pulling. And yet the critic comes into play when the historian’s at work. In Du Nom au nous, “Vox Ignis Vox Populi,” a remarkable essay on the controversy surrounding the $1.76 million purchase by the National Gallery of Canada of Barnett Newman’s Voice of Fire, is witty, profound, and totally comfortable in connecting past and present: everything we want criticism to be.
Almost as good is de Duve’s essay for the Phaidon Press monograph on Jeff Wall. As a compendium of reproductions, this volume is more redundant than is usual with the series, since images of his work are already widely published, but its selection of Wall’s writings and interviews (including a new one with Arielle Pelenc) is useful, and while the essay by Boris Groys is disappointing, de Duve’s contributes something new to the literature on this artist. De Duve’s title—“The Mainstream and the Crooked Path,” echoing ones like “The Universal and the Singular,” “The Generic and the Specific”—immediately announces it to be a sort of sequel to the essays in Kant After Duchamp. But it’s still a refreshing surprise to read an essay on Wall in which Greenberg is more important than Walter Benjamin, and Cézanne more central than Manet (though neither Benjamin nor Manet is given short shrift). Although de Duve’s history has its questionable moments here—he concedes far too much to the myth of photography’s cataclysmic effect on 19th century painting—he finally succeeds in wresting the content of Wall’s work away from the social history of art. De Duve does not acknowledge the Mexican artist Yishai Yusidman’s understanding of Wall’s work as representing a sort of salonization of the avant-garde, but his discussion of Wall’s Diatribe, 1985, as a “politically correct but aesthetically unconvincing work” shows how the tendencies Yusidman decries are indeed present in Wall’s work, but as a problem Wall has elsewhere overcome. Among the signal features of de Duve’s style is his ability to modulate between an impressive forthrightness—how many of us would be willing to say, for example, that Cézanne solved a problem for which Poussin has produced no more than an “expedient”—and an almost sibylline reticence, as in what seems to be a tactful demurral about Wall’s recent ventures into a digitalized “grotesque.” Only his willingness to assume considerable familiarity with the existing literature on Wall gives the essay a last whisper of scholasticism.