Duchamp’s Incest

Duchamp’s Incest

Duchamp was the artist who influenced what is called ‘contemporary’ more than anyone else
Duchamp is at the root of many of the aesthetics we carry around with us
without even knowing it
you have to start with Dada, from one of his manifestos, the one by Tristan Tzara in 1918
‘DADA means nothing’, nothingness is the frame in which Dadaism wants to frame the world,
‘The work of art must not represent beauty, which is dead’.
‘There is a great destructive, negative work to be done: sweeping, cleaning. Without purpose or project whatsoever, without organisation: untamable madness, decomposition’.
nigredo, indeed
Duchamp took the thrust of Dada and carried it to its extreme consequences
one cannot understand Duchamp without understanding the Large Glass, its real name is ‘Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même’, ‘The bride stripped bare by her bachelors, also’
‘In all my life I have made but one work, the Large Glass,’ he said
Duchamp is complex
ingenious, complex and tremendously obscure
One cannot understand Duchamp without reading Arturo Schwarz
Duchamp the ‘unfrocked’ artist, as he called himself
Duchamp son of Romanticism, of occultism, even the satanic one
Duchamp portraying himself with horns made from shaving foam, an echo of 19th-century Baphomet
Duchamp heir to a tradition that goes back a long way
it starts from alchemy
in alchemy the last stage of the great work, the work in red, the rubedo, comes with the union of the masculine and the feminine
the androgyne
the Christ in the first centuries was represented as androgynous
the Christ is the Christian rubedo
but Duchamp lives in the age when the universe has been turned upside down, Blake, Eliphas Levi, madame Blavatsky
God is bad, Lucifer is good
everything had to be turned upside down
Duchamp had a sister, Suzanne
he had a passion for her
an obsession with her
morbid, erotic, sexual
all of his most significant works revolve around his relationship with his sister
in that obsession the occult of those times germinates
in the Large Glass Duchamp brings together all the instances that revolve around his relationship with his sister
the Large Glass is the representation of the alchemical dynamic of the androgyne
he and his sister
the theme of incest has already been cleared by the Romantics
siblings in Percy Shelley’s Laon and Cythna and implicitly in Byron’s Manfred, both 1817,
half-brothers, as in Byron’s Bride of Abydos of 1813,
first cousins, again in Bride of Abydos and in the 1818 version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,
adoptive siblings, as in Southey’s 1801 Thalaba the destroyer and 1831 version of Frankenstein and Percy Shelley’s 1818 revision of Laon and Cythna,
on the other hand, Byron had sex with his half-sister, daughter of the same father, Augusta Leigh
here, as Arturo Schwarz writes, ‘incest is seen as a means of resolving the contradictions of the male-female duality’

1 16 T, just read it in French

incest for Duchamp is the way to create the new androgyne
he interpreted more deeply than anyone else the essence of the extreme phase of western nigredo
he created an ancient but desecrated androgyne.
Duchamp disguised himself as RRose Selavy
puns: the rose is Levi, Eliphas Lévi, the author of Baphomet into which he tried to transform himself with shaving foam
androgyny yes, but an obscure one
everyone smiled at Duchamp’s work depicting the Mona Lisa
‘he put a moustache on the Mona Lisa’
they call that work ‘ironic’
the work is called L.H.O.Q. in French, it sounds like the phrase ‘Elle a chaud au cul’, ‘She is hot in the ass’
a woman, but with a moustache, an androgyne, but with flames around it
a terribly serious thing
everything he did went in the direction of creating an androgyne
a satanic one
not a Christ
an antichrist
and for me Duchamp, let me believe it, knew it, he was aware, fully aware of what he was embodying, he knew he was working with the force of the antichrist, ingeniously inserted into the alchemical logic of nigredo, nothing was done by chance, he knew that history was asking him to destroy
and he did it to the very depths, to the innermost soul of the West, its Christic soul
According to Jean Arp, one of the founders of Dada, Tristan Tzara invented this word, Dada, at 6 a.m. on 6 February 1916, if numbers were to have a meaning, 666 is a rather recognisable number
the destruction of the Christian West has never encountered a more destructive moment than this
Duchamp coined the expression ‘underground’, artists according to him must go ‘underground’,
they are left there
chasing the antichrist