Duchamp’s Endgame (4/4): Points of Contact, Points of Resistance

TB: (Tamara Beheydt) You recently published a book on how Marcel Duchamp was influenced by masters such as Da Vinci, Dürer and Ingres, and how he left clues in his art for perceptive viewers to ‘decipher’. Then you expanded on the arguments in the book by writing three complementary essays for GLEAN. Let’s start at the beginning, with your artistic relation to Duchamp.

KG: (Kendell Geers) Duchamp has been a compass in my practice since the very beginning. I grew up in Apartheid-era South Africa, where military service was compulsory for every white man. The only way not to go to the army was to study. As the first person in my family to finish school, going to university seemed unimaginable. At the time I was passionate about mathematics and wanted to study quantum physics, so I was offended that I even had to indicate a second choice on the application form for university. As both a protest and a joke, I wrote down the most inconceivable, ridiculous degree I could think of — B.A. (F.A.), Bachelor of Arts in Fine Arts. I was accepted into both programmes. My curiosity took hold and for the first time in my life I asked myself what art was. It was the end of the year, and I snuck into art class, where the teacher was giving an extra class on Dada. She spoke about a group of artists who had decided that, if all the atrocities of the war were the result of the rational, logical brain, they would pursue the opposite — the irrational, the illogical. She might even have mentioned that Duchamp was against conscription and fled to New York to avoid going to the army. I had no clue what art was — but somehow studying it to avoid going to jail for six years or joining a fascist army made sense.

TB: How did you become politically aware at such a young age?

KG: My mother was 16 when I was born. Five years later she left because she could no longer bear the violence of my father. As a sex worker she was considered an illegitimate mother and, in the divorce, was denied any right to see her children. We grew up in a toxic sludge of poisonous masculine abuse. My uncles were all policemen, and I witnessed Apartheid through the eyes of their prejudice. I was constantly being beaten up because I was asking the ‘wrong’ questions, but that was what you might call white trash ‘normal’.

When I was 11 years old, my father noticed bruises on my thighs and backside after I had been beaten by my teacher. My only crime had been a pathetic attempt to defend myself from a regular bully. A few days later, the teacher gave me an envelope to pass on to my father. I was terrified that it might be connected to the caning and lead to more punishment, so I opened it to discover a reply to a letter my father had written in which he congratulated the teacher for giving me corporal punishment. My teacher literally wrote that ‘it was so pleasant to receive a letter from a parent who believes that a good cane serves the purpose of a 1000 lines.’ It was in that moment, I think, that I understood how power was structured around a complicity between the father, the teacher, the police, the state and the church. My father was a drunk and violent misogynist who went to church three times a week. I ran away from home when I was 15 and at the same time it was clear that I was not going to serve in the Apartheid military, regardless of the consequences.

TB: How did those experiences eventually influence your art?

KG: I am fascinated by how habit can normalise anything, including a crime against humanity. I still think about how not delivering that letter to my father broke a chain of command and exposed power relations. Ever since running away from home, I’ve been asking myself whether it is possible to unlearn cultural prejudice and heal from generations of family trauma. Art history is also a performed habit, masking cultural and ideological prejudices coded within its internal power dynamics. It was also clear to me that the history of art is a European construct built around the same values and morals as colonialism and imperialism. I was taught, for example, that Andy Warhol’s race riots are about how we are desensitised by repeated exposure to violent images — but would we still be desensitised if they were images of white people being mauled by police dogs ?

On the other hand, that system with all its codes has become universal. I think of it as an operating system and as what I like to call a point of contact. When I looked through the art history books, I couldn’t relate to that language because my identity, class, culture and history were so fundamentally non-European. I decided to create a new language based on my own reality and experience, which I called Points of Resistance. I also developed what I called TerroRealism, an idea strongly inspired by Oswald de Andrade’s Anthropophagic Manifesto (1928) that devours European culture to absorb it into the Indigenous body.

If my work was so easy to copy, then maybe the problem lay in the blueprint of my practice. I suddenly found myself questioning everything I ever believed in. If Duchamp had stopped painting in Munich in 1912, leading to the birth of the readymade and conceptual art — and consequently the language that until then I had taken as gospel — I decided in Munich that I would take up the ultimate heretical challenge: to start painting.

TB: You feel disrespected and erased from the art world and decide to paint, whereas Duchamp gradually moved away from painting after 1912. Is that also when you started researching his Munich works?

KG: Before I could justify the radical switch, I needed to first make a lot of mistakes while teaching myself how to paint; more fundamentally, however, I had to fully understand why Duchamp had stopped painting. I decided to observe his paintings more closely. I wasn’t afraid to do so, because my understanding of Duchamp had completely shifted from viewing him as a subversive hero to thinking that everything that’s wrong with the art world begins with him: ready-mades, multiples, the white cube. After Duchamp, anything that was not a painting and could be dragged into the gallery was defined as conceptual, regardless of its epistemological significance. The vast majority of conceptual art since is no better than a dad joke with a one-liner punchline.

What began as an Anti-Art challenge against the values and aesthetics of the bourgeois salon system in the beginning of the twentieth century eventually blossomed into an art that was against itself and disconnected from the history of art. Something seemed fundamentally amiss with what art had become, and I increasingly wondered where exactly it all went wrong. I kept arriving at 1912 as a pivotal point. It was the year Einstein published his manuscript on the Special Theory of Relativity; Kandinsky publishes Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Picasso makes the first Cubist collage, Mondrian begins to transform his trees into linear abstractions and Malevich was on the verge of painting his Black Square. I wanted to understand why these artists made the decisions they did. I imagined myself as Duchamp in Munich and instead of looking at the paintings and drawings he made, I looked through them, trying to understand the creative process and logic that framed their structural decisions. That’s how I suddenly understood that the structural skeleton of Duchamp’s works aligned with paintings by Dürer, Da Vinci and Raphael.

TB: How did the book come about 12 years later?

KG: I first spoke about the structural connection between Duchamp’s LE PASSAGE de la vierge à la mariée and Da Vinci’s Virgin of the Rocks in 2014 at a conference in New Delhi. I continued developing my research and when Wilde Gallery invited me to make a statement exhibition during Art Basel in 2023, I decided that the exhibition would take the form of a book about Duchamp. I thought that if I could prove that Duchamp’s work has been fundamentally misunderstood, then the art world might reconsider their assumptions and misunderstandings concerning my own work. In truth, a handful of gatekeepers control the narrative — wealthy collectors supported by auctioneers, curators, museum directors and self-proclaimed influencers.

TB: The book invites us to forget everything we think we know about Duchamp. Yet as you point out, he often deliberately misled the viewer himself, leaving clues throughout his career. Was he steering people in the wrong direction to test the degree to which they understood what he meant by ‘art in the service of the mind’? Does an artist have any real control over their own narrative?

KG: In April 1957 Duchamp introduced himself as a ‘MERE ARTIST’ at a Houston conference of the American Federation of the Arts. There, he said that ‘[a]ll in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.’ ² He seemed resigned to the fact that his work had been misinterpreted, if not fundamentally misunderstood. On the other hand, he also encouraged this obfuscation. The most bizarre case must be that of Arturo Schwarz, who saw in Duchamp’s work evidence of a latent desire to have sex with his sister. When Schwarz first proposed this ridiculous theory, Duchamp’s wife, Teeny, was understandably outraged, but defended Schwarz instead.

In his catalogue raisonné of Duchamp, Schwarz references a remark Duchamp made about a bird in the etching Morceaux choisis d’apres Courbet, suggesting that it is a falcon. Schwarz explains that in French there is a play on words between the word ‘faucon’ and ‘faux con’ (‘false vagina’ / ‘false idiot’), since above the bird we can clearly see the exposed genitals of a woman whose legs are raised. Although the bird is crudely drawn, many people have remarked that it does not look anything like a falcon. Duchamp devoted more attention to the female figure, who is unmistakably the woman in Courbet’s Women with White Stockings.

Given that Duchamp was obsessed with ocular tests, it stands to reason that his statement might have been a test designed to put art in the service of the mind. A decent art historian should have known that the model in the Courbet painting being quoted was Joanna Hiffernan, who also modelled for Woman with a Parrot. In fact, the bird in Duchamp’s etching does look a lot more like a parrot than a falcon. The difference between the two is that a parrot simply repeats what it’s told without looking or thinking. If the ‘faucon’ is really a parrot, then the ‘faux con’ is really a sly reference to a ‘vrai con’ or real idiot.

TB: This is exemplary of your approach in the book: in light of your arguments, the art historical discourse about Duchamp starts to seem like a copy-paste exercise, repeating information without looking back at the works.

KG: Too many art historians have been distracted by Duchamp’s statement that he was against retinal art and therefore assume there is nothing to look at. However, this attitude flies in the face of the fact that he published a magazine called The Blind Man and instructed that his work was ‘To Be Looked at (from the Other Side of the Glass) with One Eye, Close to, for Almost an Hour’. The reading of the letters ‘L.H.O.O.Q.’ below the Mona Lisa is by habit inevitably limited to the French ‘elle a chaud au cul’, ignoring the fact that Duchamp was living in New York at the time and in English the letters phonetically read as ‘LOOK’. I believe what he really meant was that we should look past the retinal image to see the iconography, structure and symbolic framework hidden in plain sight.

I don’t think that Duchamp was any different than other European artists of his generation. In the book I try to make the case that art is an open-source language, with each generation of artists editing, cutting, pasting and adapting the code for their time and place. Mondrian, Malevich, Kandinsky and of course Duchamp were all struggling with the realities of a world torn apart by industrial acceleration and the atrocities of different wars. The Salon and Impressionist languages of art felt inadequate for what these artists were experiencing, so they turned to abstraction.

We know that Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe is iconographically quoting Titian’s Le Concert champêtre but compositionally refers to Raphael’s Judgement of Paris, which in turn alludes to Adam’s pose in the Sistine Chapel. Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon also quotes from Raphael. When discussing Manet and Picasso in these terms, by rule of habit we assume that Duchamp’s language came out of nowhere. He was certainly more discrete about his sources, but I do believe his challenge to restore art to the service of the mind was really an invitation to play a game of chess within matrix of art history. Duchamp writes in one of his notes, ‘To lose the possibility of recognizing 2 similar objects — 2 colors, 2 laces, 2 hats, 2 forms whatsoever — to reach the Impossibility of sufficient visual memory, to transfer from one like object to another the Memory imprint. Same possibility with sounds; with brain facts.’ ³ He literally uses the term ‘brain facts’, which means the same as ‘the service of the mind’. He also seems to be suggesting that we risk being blinded by habit to the possibility of two works of art communicating with each other in terms of structure – as in the case of LE PASSAGE de la vierge à la mariée and Da Vinci’s Virgin of the Rocks.

TB: When Duchamp says he wants to put ‘art back in the service of the mind’, he follows Kandinsky in taking a stance against retinal art — how do you project this to today?

KG: In his book Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky rallies against what he calls ‘the vulgar herd [who] stroll through the rooms and pronounce the pictures “nice” or “splendid.” […] This neglect of inner meanings, which is the life of colours, this vain squandering of artistic power is called art for art’s sake.’ ⁴

After the 2008 financial crisis, the art system shifted its priority from the artist to the collector, broker and agent. Sales became the main way of measuring value and success. If everything that sells is defined as a work of art, how do we determine the historical significance and importance of a work? This is what Maurizio Cattelan’s work Comedian is really about, as he laughs all the way to the bank. The transaction itself becomes the work of art, and I find it hilarious that it’s been referred as a ready-made object akin to Duchamp’s Fountain.

In 2014, the artist Walter Robinson coined the term Zombie Formalism to describe art that visually references an existing art-historical language but in reality consists of empty ornamental signifiers. These works that ‘all have certain qualities—a chic strangeness, a mysterious drama, a meditative calm—that function well in the realm of high-end, hyper-contemporary interior design.’ ⁵ Zombie Formalism has since given way to the faux surrealist paintings of Zombie Figuration and the swarms of found objects with vague visual puns that are Zombie Conceptualism, with both taking over the white cube.

TB: What is your own relation to the market? You are represented by galleries, and the book was made possible thanks to the support of Wilde Gallery.

KG: To some degree every artist, regardless of class or background, sells their soul to the devil in order to pay the rent. The reality that artists need patrons in order to survive goes way back through time. I don’t have a problem with the commercial art system as a patronage system, but it is extremely problematic that artists now seem to be judged by museums, curators and critics according to their market ranking. The challenge today is how to separate the cultural value from the price of art. Do we even have the skill set necessary to justify a contemporary work of art in the larger context of art history?

TB: You also curate exhibitions like ‘IncarNations’ at Bozar in 2019 and most recently ‘Everything is True – Nothing is Permitted’ at Brutus in Rotterdam. How strictly do you separate your identities as an artist and a curator?

KG: The question of identity is extremely complex for me. My ancestors were Dutch sailors who arrived in the Cape Colony almost four centuries ago. But because of the colour of my skin I am not usually considered an ‘authentic’ African, and yet I am certainly not considered European either. I am an immigrant who falls between the cracks of cultural perception and am therefore unwelcome on both sides of the border. The family, culture, history and context I was born into are considered illegitimate because they are associated with a crime against humanity. In practical terms this means that I don’t actually have an identity or a culture to speak of, and so I gave birth to myself as a work of art.

Perhaps it’s on account of that sense of not belonging that I embrace a holistic approach to the question of art and aesthetics. I curated ‘IncarNations’ to draw attention to the fact that Africa was never ‘discovered’, because it was always there on the other side of the Mediterranean. The exchange of ideas, materials, mythology, culture and even religion between the two continents has been a constant since the time of the pyramids. It is not insignificant that in 1491 the Kongo Kingdom converted to Christianity and established diplomatic relations with the Netherlands, Portugal and the Vatican.

When I create a show, I see it as one large work of art — a Gesamtkunstwerk. Being an artist allows me to take liberties with the exhibition design that a curator might consider inappropriate. The design of ‘IncarNations’ was based on the mirror that we find on the belly of the Nkisi objects (sometimes termed ‘nail fetishes’). The mirror was a good way to point out that the front of the African mask represents the European perspective, based on aesthetics, while the back is the African point of view because the mask was meant to danced with and the spirit of the mask embodied. More importantly, it was a way for me to exhibit the building of Bozar itself as part of the exhibition, drawing attention to the fact that it was built during the colonial era with profits as well as materials from the colony.

I designed ‘Everything is True – Nothing is Permitted’ around the leaks, cracks and crumbling walls of the old warehouse in the Rotterdam port area. I wanted to use these as a metaphor for the state of art today. In the basement there is a corner with a permanent leak, where I decided to install Marcel Broodthaers’ La Pluie above the water to create a direct connection between the building and the video.

TB: I have to ask: if this exhibition is your artwork, where does that leave the artistic autonomy of the other artists? Could one think that you are appropriating them to make your work?

KG: In an orchestra, there is a conductor and there are musicians. Together they form something very different from what they might be individually. I’m not appropriating other people’s work because I am not speaking on behalf of anyone. The juxtaposition of works and the intersections between them add layers and dimensions that might not manifest in isolation. Both as an artist and a curator, I believe a work of art becomes powerful through contradiction. That’s way I also challenge my point of view by including works that disturb me.

TB: Most of the works are either videos or reproductions of photographs, not shown in their original or most preferable version.

KG: On Instagram, you can’t show a nipple, but you can show dead babies. We are constantly bombarded with imagery that would be inconceivable 10 years ago. Adding to that, AI now has the technical ability to manufacture an image better than any human. That leaves us with the alarming question of what the function of an image might be today. Can a human being still make an image as powerful as Guernica, capable of holding our attention amid the graphic violence of news feeds or the seduction of AI?

My invitation to the artists began with André Breton’s statement from the Second manifeste du surréalisme (1929), namely that the most surrealist act is to randomly fire a gun into a crowd of people. What remains of that ‘Surrealist’ act a century later, when guns are fired randomly into crowds every single day? How do we reconfigure the avant-garde function of art when tyranny is being normalised and life is cheap? We now live in a world of free-floating signifiers where words are disconnected from meaning and the image is reduced to entertainment. The only thing that we can still trust is our body, the border of which is now the skin. It’s only a matter of time before our bodies will no longer belong to us.

TB: The visceral of the exhibition reminds me of passages in your book, where you mention the contrasting energies of the Greek gods Apollo and Dionysus. How does that exist in art today?

KG: I admit to being influenced by Nietzsche, who uses Dionysus as a symbol of the primal, instinctual and irrational forces of human nature and contrasts him with Apollo, who represents order, reason and beauty. He saw Dionysus as a force that could lead to ecstatic experiences – and those are what makes the true artist different from a producer of luxury goods. I cannot think of a better analysis of the true artist than the letter Rimbaud wrote to his friend Paul Demeny in 1871. ‘The Poet makes himself a seer by a long, immense, and rational dissoluteness of all the senses. All the forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he consumes all the poisons in him, to only keep their quintessences. Inexpressible torture where he needs all the faith, all the superhuman strength, where he becomes, above all others, the great patient, the great criminal, the great accursed, – and the supreme Savant! – For he arrives at the unknown! (…) Let him die of his bound through the unheard-of and countless things: other horrible workers will come; they will begin from the horizons where the other has succumbed!’ ⁶

TB: The press release and wall text of the exhibition mention ‘the true artist’. Why do you use these specific words, which seem rather radical?

KG: It’s a silly, humorous reference to the neon work by Bruce Nauman, The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths. I admit that my words are intentionally provocative, to incite in the reader to reflect on what a true artist might be.

Humour in art is widely ignored. We don’t dare to say that the bulging loin cloth in Cranach’s The Lamentation of Christ or the tap in Dürer’s etching The Bath House represent cocks. Humour is a fundamental part of my practice because it allows me to say things that might otherwise be forbidden.