the picture (c. 1916-1917) shows Duchamp “exhausted after an evening that likely involved some form of excessive consumption”;
he recalls Duchamp’s artist-friend (and, before he went to the front, fellow expatri-
ate) Albert Gleizes’s criticism of Duchamp for such habits, and Duchamp’s response:
“if I didn’t drink so much alcohol, I would have committed suicide long ago!”
+
Dreier’s deeply repressed sexual fantasizing and frustration in relation to Duchamp.
Duchamp was highly seductive to the women of the New York Dada circle and frustratingly un-
available to most of them, in particular Dreier.
While she gave him money to support him, this older German woman was clearly not Duchamp’s type.
Their personal correspondence shows a frustrated sexuality turned maternalism on Dreier’s
part, a polite and gentle distance maintained on Duchamp’s.
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Duchamp liked to proclaim that he
considered himself an engineer rather than an artist.46 The gesture of the readymades
highlighted his confusion of the boundaries between engineering (the making of
machines) and art, but this gesture is also tinged with what we might call a machine-
age primitivism.
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Léger in the 1950s told the story of going, before World War I, to an airplane exhibi-
tion with Duchamp and Brancusi: “Marcel . . . walked around the motors and pro-
pellers without saying a word. Suddenly he turned to Brancusi: ‘Painting has come to
an end. Who can do anything better than this propeller? Can you?’ ”
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his readymade gesture thus explicitly reverses the dynamic at play in the
Ford system: while the assembly line functions specifically to take the individual prod-
uct away from the individual worker (in what Marx noted to be an alienation of the
laborer from his products), Duchamp’s gesture is to return individuality to the massproduced object
/ ??? return individuality to… ? dnes: massproduced object: affection, relations, life
/ back to individual life (toho je plne contemp art), aj ostatne veci, toho je vela… to je malo.
/ vtedajsia machine je dnes internet/softver