The object's strategies of being. Marcel Duchamp’s impact on Female artists.

One of the biggest influences on my musings had Marcel Duchamp and his alter ego Rrose Selavy. In my essay I would like to produce feminist reading of Duchamp and compare the two gender constructs.

Rrose Sélavy, was one of the pseudonyms of the artist Marcel Duchamp. He duplicated himself by selecting a feminine semblance. The feminine alter ego created by Duchamp is one of the most complex and pervasive pieces in the enigmatic puzzle of the artist's oeuvre. Rrose Sélavy lived as the person to whom Duchamp attributed specific works of art, readymades, puns, and writings throughout his career. By creating for himself this female persona whose features are beauty and eroticism, he deliberately and characteristically complicated the understanding of his ideas and motives. Rrose Sélavy appeared in the annals of art in 1920 as Rose Sélavy, which sounds like: "Rose, c'est la vie." In 1921, she acquired the extra "r" when she added her signature to L'Oeil Cacodylate, a painting by Francis Picabia. The pun that is Rrose Sélavy is an expression of everything Duchamp's art is about. The French phrase “Eros, c'est la vie” translates to English as "eros, that's life". It has also been read as "arroser la vie" ("to make a toast to life"). French surrealist poet Robert Desnos tried to portray Rrose Sélavy as a long lost aristocrat and rightful queen of France.

Photographic documentation of Rrose also exists. In 1921 Man Ray collaborated in the one-and-only issue of the New York Dada magazine, publishing a photograph he had taken of Duchamp in the feminine attire of Rrose Sélavy wearing a little hat with a band and geometric patterns, and holding an elegant fox neckband, feeling its warmth with “her” hands. The photograph depicts a face with an elusive expression—mysteriously smiling lips, eyes subtly indifferent. He put on the table ideas a kind of "female masculinity" and "masculine feminity". “I wanted to change my identity and had the idea of taking a Hebrew name. I was a Catholic, and this new religion already meant a change. But I did no find any Hebrew name that I liked, or that struck my imagination, and I suddenly had an idea: why not change sex? That is how the name Rrose Sélavy came about. ” No less important is the fact that in Rrose’s visiting card the first title is the corporate “Precision optics”. It is a clear invitation that, when doing business with Rrose, one should view matters carefully without overlooking anything, or, at least, without down-ranking some observations for which special optics are required. We are concerned with gnostic optics. The gnostic idea is that man is a tiny light turned on in the dark prison of the world, full of pain and evil. Escape from the world is possible only through purification, which can be pursued by transformation into a divine creature. Rrose is both an erotic creature and a pure one. Through her birth, like the birth of Spring from the sea waves in Botticelli’s painting, Duchamp achieved an unprecedented conquest of knowledge and vision.

These androgyny and gender deceptions have a deep history. For instance, Duchamp made the Mona Lisa a man when drew a mustache and a goatee to her. Duchamp had this idea that he could take the identity and meaning of anything and make it over. “L.H.O.O.Q.” - the title when pronounced in French, puns the phrase "Elle a chaud au cul", translating colloquially in "She has a hot ass". A cheap postcard-sized reproduction of the Mona Lisa is one of the most well known act of degrading a famous work of art.

Marcel Duchamp's concept of the "Readymade" suggested that an artist could select an ordinary object, present it as one's own, and declare it a work of art. His innovation was certainly among the most scandalous and significant transformations to the history of modern art. For sure one of Duchamps best-known readymade pieces is a urinal, titled ‘Fountain’ and signed ‘R.Mutt’, which he submitted to an exhibition in New York in 1917.

As we can see sometimes artists create more than paintings and sculptures — they create people. Andy Warhol also showed us the reference to the Selavy. The series, titled Altered Images, was Warhol's homage to Marcel Duchamp's alter ego. The artist transformed himself into a striking females. Some have guessed Warhol was trying to get closer to his silkscreened idols – Marilyn Monroe and Liz Taylor. “Drag queens are living testimony to the way women used to be to be, the way some people still want them to be, and the way some women will actually want to be” - Warhol said. “Drags are ambulatory archives of ideal movie-star womanhood. They perform a documentary service. Drag is never “just.”

However, the thing is most interesting for me is the place of Duchamp readymades in mapping of feminist ideology. The object of my research in this case is transferential relationship. The majority of feminist artists interested in Duchamp have approached him through the readymades, but in such a way as to intersect these objects of institutional critique with an erotic politics of subjectivity.

Maureen Connor, for example, reconstructs Duchamp’s readymade bottle rack piece of 1914, anthropomorphizing the menacing rack by making it life-sized, turning the prongs inward in this case, and by embellishing it with fabric or with cast body parts such as lungs. Connor approaches Duchamp through deep questions of sex and of body subjectivity.

In another piece by Sherrie Levine called Penis, a rather unsubtle title, 1989, she again turns the prongs inward and constructs an explicitly feminist reply to Duchamp by marking the phallic pretension of the ostensibly neutral rack, and yet she does so by draping it with pink lace so it’s a kind of play on the masculine-feminine. Sherrie Levine has also negotiated the Duchampian function in pieces that interrogate both the readymades and more complexly the corporeal politics of The Large Glass. After Duchamp, 1991, she has reconstructed his infamous Fountain of 1917, a readymade urinal rotated and hung as a work of art. Sherrie Levine reconstructs it in bronze, emphasizing the aesthetic exchange value of the mass-produced but now with the Duchampian reference, highly valued readymade object. As Levine herself has noted, The Fountain now becomes a kind of gorgeous anthropomorphic sculpture and yet produced by a woman artist I think it intervenes rather aggressively into this masculine genealogy of modernist form. Levine literalizes Duchamp’s metaphoric narratives of the interrelationships among sex, desire, and aesthetic values.

Eva Hesse was a pivotal figure in the development of post-war international art as well. Her early death has become something of a feminist role model. However, Hesse's dramatic life - her evacuation at the age of three from Nazi Germany, her mother's death from suicide when she was ten, her struggle to gain recognition as a young artist in New York, especially in the male-dominated field of sculpture, and her struggle with cancer - have possibly stood in the way of a full appraisal of her work. Hesse died in 1970 of a brain tumour at the age of 34. In early 1965, she developed a series of colorful paintings and gouaches, using the idea of abstracted forms within compartments. The shapes have both a mechanical and an erotic quality, suggesting machine parts and reproductive organs. Hesse was drawn to Surrealist art, particularly works by Marcel Duchamp such as "The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even", in which sexual desire is portrayed as a driving mechanical force upon the body. Like other artists of the mid-sixties - Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt and Robert Smithson - Hesse used techniques from industry. In the late 1960s, Hesse began to use latex in her work. She was aware of its instability, she was also fascinated by its translucent and supple qualities. Although she acknowledged the influence of Duchamp and his notions of chance, it was the paradoxes of the material that most inspired her work at this stage. Hesse used latex for 16 major works, and in that process for a number of small works, as well. In a number of these works, other materials were also used - wax, fibreglass, plastic tubing, plaster tiles. Hanging works from 1969 and 1970 revealed Hesse's obvious dialogue with Marcel Duchamp. They express ephemerality, and energy in space; they are both beautiful and repellent. There is also a psychological suspense evoked.

German Dada feminist artist Hannah Höch was mainly focused on women as they were expressed in the media, as compared to how they looked in actual life. She often would form women in her pieces from dolls, mannequins, brides, or children which were often thought of as unimportant in her society (“Gee!! I wish I Were a Man”). This type of art represented feminism in a unique way, relating women in the media to actual women in society. Höch is known and recognized as the only German woman who participated in Dadaism, which is thought of as an important feminist achievement by many females and artists. Most of the men involved in Dada didn’t like that Hannah Höch was involved in the movement and opposed her being included in their first international exhibit held in 1921. The Berlin Dadaist’s unofficial spokesperson, Hans Richter, referred to her as “the girl who procured sandwiches, beer and coffee, on a limited budget”. I believe that this statement and comments like these that had a negative connotation on Höch’s gender as a woman and as a feminist artist, ended up making her a stronger person and a better artist. Höch is the mother of photomontage, an aesthetic built on splicing and rejoining existing photographs to create surreal, immersive imagery. With pieces like "Cut with the Kitchen Knife through the Beer-Belly of the Weimar Republic," Höch not only pushed the boundaries of collage, she ripped through issues concerning the beauty industry, gay and lesbian relationships and racial discrimination. Marginalized for her bisexuality in Germany, she championed intersectional feminism nearly a century ago.

Hannah Wilke (1940-1993) was a conceptual feminist artist based in New York whose practice consisted of sculpture, photography, drawing, performance, assemblage as well as installation. Wilke was a very controversial artist and is known to be one of the first feminist artists to have used vaginal imagery in her work, becoming a huge influence on the feminist art movement. Wilke deals with issues surrounding feminism and femininity as well as the broader issues of life and death and how they affect the mind and body, especially female, within her work. I feel the context of her work really becomes more clear and impacting in the art of her last years whilst suffering with Lymphoma sadly causing her death in 1993. For me, Wilke is one of the key turning points in how the female body was and is represented in western culture. Within her work she reflects upon something many women suffer from on a day-to-day basis, not only through female related illnesses, but also struggling to meet the high standards of feminine beauty of an image-conscious society. Thus in 1976 in front of Duchamp’s Large Glass at Philadelphia Museum of Art, Hannah Wilke performed C’est la Vie Rrose, a feminist version of Duchamp’s notorious chess game with a naked Eve Babitz at the Pasadena Museum in 1963. And this, for those of you who know Duchamp studies, is a kind of thorn in the side of people who want to argue for his radicality in terms of gender issues. Here the identities of chess players are transformed. The author-artist in the Wilke piece is a female and it is she who is unclothed. The opponent is also female but dressed in a butch style with heavy leather jacket and closely cropped hair. A pointed comment on the overtly misogynist character of Duchamp’s image, Wilke presents the female nude as both author of and sexual object of both male and potentially butch or female desire within the piece.

Niki de Saint Phalle throughout her long and prolific career, a former cover model for Life magazine and French Vogue, investigated feminine archetypes and women’s societal roles. Her Nanas, bold, sexy sculptures of the proverbial everywoman, are playful and empowering, while the whimsical lithographs My Love We Won’t and Dear Diana offer humorous takes on girlhood obsessions. The savvy My Heart Belongs to Marcel pays homage not to Daddy (as in the popular song), but to Marcel Duchamp, the influential Dada artist and a personal friend. Her particularly Dadaist gesture involved creating assemblages of objects with paint pellets in them, and then shooting them, perhaps her own sort of violent protest against the patriarchy still ruling the art world. Niki de Saint Phalle's My Heart Belongs to Marcel Duchamp (1963) reveals the complex inner feminine emotions that would soon be repressed by feminist dogma.

Rebecca Horn is one of a generation of German artists who came to international prominence in the 1980s. Horn’s work is truly interdisciplinary. In addition to sculptures and installations her practice has included performance, painting, writing and filmmaking. While her work is indebted to Surrealism, particularly Meret Oppenheim’s fetishistic objects, Horn’s desiring automatons provide a feminine response to both Marcel Duchamp’s bachelor machines (see The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) and the kinetic art of Jean Tinguely (see Metamechanical Sculpture with Tripod, 1954). There are also strong links between Horn’s work at that of Louise Bourgeois (see Cell (Eyes and Mirrors), who hints at a similar mix of eroticism and violence in her emotionally potent installations.

Several contemporary feminist artists have also grappled with Duchamp’s paternal influence. Sarah Lucas, Tracey Emin and Rachael Whiteread were three of the most prominent female artists of the 1990s as part of Young British Art (YBAs). These women artists are frequently associated with a radical working class aesthetic; producing sculpture founded on Marcel Duchamp’s readymades. This phenomenon was characterized by tabloid culture, irony, diverse materials and exploration of contemporary experience, as well as traditional themes of art. Their approach, which was influenced by Duchamp’s readymades, was resulted in new artistic forms of expression. Through adopting the methods of Pop Art, Conceptualism and Minimalism, they presented a more youth orientated and accessible artistic content. Sara Lucas in her famous work “The Sperm Thing” gives us an allusion to young boys and act as mirror for sexism. I consider them like new stars in the feminist galaxy.

The labyrinth of my theoretical manoeuvre is intended to match Marcel Duchamp to feminist agenda. The Duchamp, particularly the Duchamp who turned himself into Rrose Selavy, is one who has subjugated his masculinity in order to fulfill the needs of women. He filled aesthetic vocabulary of female artists by new metaphors of readymades. I will not analyze in this essay works of such authors as Louise Bourgeois, Yoko Ono, Cindy Sherman and many others, but all of them I would index as post-dada&proto-feminism reaction. I tried to show the Duchamp's gender games and disclose how they serve to perpetuate readymades. At the same time this dialogue is an intervention which brings to the fore an array of histories of women as agents of culture as well as diverse feminist perspectives that create a slippage in the boundaries between female-nature and male-culture. Feminism is undoubtedly an extensive issue, but this essay just began to explore the works of several artists within a feminist context and how they undermind feminine stereotypes using Marcele Duchamp strategies. A distinctive feature of dada boy’s discourse was appropriation of femininity in order to shore up the self-sufficiency of the male preserve. In my opinion exactly this manner of self-representation, which Duchamp breathed in all the post-duchampian movements, had a significant influence on female artists as well as on the whole epoch of contemporary “laddishness”. Cultural reverse has occurred. Now women appropriate masculine identity, objectifying their reflection in readymades. We are clearly live in an age of Duchamp and Dada potency. Marcel Duchamp’s most striking gesture is the readymade - the century’s most influential development on creative process. Duchamp shifted somehow my understanding of feminism. After learning more about Marcel D. and analyzing multiple pieces of his work, I have gained a lot more knowledge that has strengthened my view and understanding of feminist art and how woman had to work very hard to get her pieces involved with the movement and be respected by their male counterparts.

Literature review: A. Lyford. Surrealist Masculinities: Gender Anxiety and the Aesthetics of Post-World War I. University of California Press, Berkeley 2007. A. Schwarz, Marcel Duchamp, 66 Creative Years from the First Painting to the Last Drawing. Gallery Schwarz, Paris, 1972. D. Hopkins, Dada’s Boys: Masculinity After Duchamp. Yale University Press, New Haven 2007. F.M. Naumann, New York Dada, 1915-23. Harry N. Abrams, New York, 1994. J. Robinson, New Realisms: 1957–1962; Object Strategies between Readymade and Spectacle. Exhibition catalogue. Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, 2010.J. Carrick. Nouveau Réalisme, 1960s France, and the Neo-avant-garde: Topographies of Chance and Return. Burlington: Ashgate, 2010. J. Loesberg, A Fountain, a Spontaneous Combustion, and the Mona Lisa: Duchamp's Symbolism in Dickens and Pater, Studies in the Literary Imagination, Vol. 35, No. 2, Fall 2002 Ian Walker, So Exotic, So Homemade: Surrealism, Englishness and Documentary Photography Manchester University Press, Manchester 2008. I. Chilvers. A Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Art, Oxford University Press, 1999. L. Nochlin, "'Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?' Thirty Years After" in Women Artists at the Millennium, edited by Carol Armstrong and Catherine de Zegher. Cambridge, 1971. L. Zelevansky, Sense and Sensibility: Women Artists and Minimalism in the Nineties, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1994. M. Collings, Sarah Lucas. Tate Publishing, London, 2002. N. Lusty. Surrealism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, Ashgate Publishing, Aldershot 2007. S. Worth, ‘Feminist Aesthetics’; McIver Lopes, eds, The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, London and New York: Routledge, 2001.

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