Review

Reviewed Work(s): Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp's Passage from Painting to

the Readymade by Thierry de Duve
Review by: George H. Bauer
Source: SubStance, Vol. 22, No. 2/3, Issue 71/72: Special Issue: Epistmocritique (1993), pp.
350-352
Published by: University of Wisconsin Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3685298
Accessed: 18-07-2017 18:20 UTC

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 350 Reviews

for the indus

tory?
Conley's book is brilliant in its own way, and even necessary. But it also
shows how perilous the road to hermeneutic liberation can be.
Peter Brunette
George Mason University

de Duve, Thierry. Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp's Passage from

Painting to the Readymade. Minneapolis and Oxford: University of Minnesota
Press, 1991. Pp. xxii + 224.

Walter Arensberg's name is now inextricably linked to that of Marcel

Duchamp. His name. His name appears nowhere in the index of Pictorial
Nominalism. Yet even if this is a "word book" and not a "picture book" (it is the
fifty-first volume in Wlad Godzich and Jochen Schulte-Sasse's series on Theory
and History of Literature with a foreword by John Rajchman of the College de
Philosophie in Paris) ten pictures are needed to certify the aesthetics of the
nominally pictorial. It is there, in the pictures' legends, that the couple as muse
is named repeatedly, along with the name of the museums, the collectors and
the photographer: The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection. Louise was
Walter's bride and she indulged him and his bachelor pursuits of other maids,
of art, and readymades. His passion was for cryptograms and with his two
secretaries he searched relentlessly for the "author" of those works attributed
to Shakespeare. Bacon was the name he fixed on. "I have almost solved it!"
was his repeated claim. Finally, as Beatrice Wood recounts in her autobiog-
raphy, I Shock Myself.

... he found messages in the cryptograms from which he concluded that

Shakespeare was buried in an incestuous position with his mother and that
rare unpublished manuscripts were to be found in the grave. He set sail for
England to see to the opening of Shakespeare's grave and to arrange for
these great manuscripts to be given back to the world. (85)

Thierry de Duve thinks he has solved It. Pictorial Nominalism is the

English translation of Nominalisme Pictural: Marcel Duchamp, La Peinture et la
Modernitd published by Les Editions de Minuit in 1984. In 1987 Rudolph
Kuenzli and Francis Naumann published an English translation of one chapter
("Resonances of Duchamp's Visit to Munich") of this book written by a
"young Belgian philosopher, critic and historian of art," as Rajchman describes
him, in Dada/Surrealism 16, the Duchamp Centennial number. Republished in
1989 by MIT Press as Marcel Duchamp: Artist of the Century, Charles F. Stuckey
called it "the best such anthology of Duchamp studies since Joseph Macheck's
1975 Duchamp in Perspective," but confronted with "Thierry de Duve's 'pic-

SubStance 71/72, 1993

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 Reviews 351

torial nomina
in America, J
fully displaye
French "noms" (name and noun) "Marcel Duchamp," "Peinture,"
"Modernit ," become "Passage," "Painting," and "Readymade." Rajchman, in
his foreword, tells us what "it" is that is de Duve's Pictorial Nominalism. It is "a
new, detailed, and extensive reexamination of the oeuvre of Marcel
Duchamp." It isn't. "It points to a new aesthetic." "It... participates... in a
revised history of modernism." It "might be read as an elaborate response to
Greenberg."
Clement Greenberg, in this story, plays the Montague in his love o
modern abstract; the Duchamp family of conceptual artists are the Capulets
and the barrier is the name, is naming. Arensberg didn't bring home the Bacon
but the name is of little consequence now that language produces the subject
If Arensberg asserted that Shakespeare was not an author, de Duve in hi
"Pictorial Nominalism" and poststructuralist position wants to examine the
event, the passage, the revelation that occurred that brought Marcel Duchamp
to abandon painting and become an "anartist" and an erased readymade.

'Tis but thy name that is my enemy;-

Thou are thyself though, not a Montague.
What's Montague? It is not hand, nor foot
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!
What's in a name? that which we call a rose,
By any other name would smell as sweet.

For de Duve, the newly made Rose is fathered by circumstance. The conception
not immaculate. Putting aside the first passage of virgin to bride, he sniffs the hol
left by other art historians and biographers-the Munich trip of 1912. He pricks up
his ears to listen to a "field of resonances": psychoanalysis, photography's inven
tion, industrialization, painting as craft, "the state of questions and artistic prac
tices." What comes out of this 'ear-ing was a Lacanian "Revelation of th
Symbolic" in which "olfactory masturbation" gave way to "a sort of pictorial
nominalism ... of which Bicycle Wheel would take account in 1913, although
Duchamp would not yet be aware of this" (98). Something was conceived, was
being born, but dared not speak its name. Readymade.
Clement Greenberg, as old philosopher, critic, and historian of art, was
the papal theologian of the church of abstract impressionism-the craft cul-
mination of retinal art where sniffing paint had become an end in itself. An
end. Father Clement was incensed at the unwise step of the virgin's descent
into bride. Then the readymade conception was deemed scandalous and an
unsanctionable break. Young Fra de Duve in this rewriting of the story, now
her-story, reasons angelically that the abandonment of church and family was

SubStance 71/72, 1993

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352 Reviews

not radical n
arose from
transition in
Painted Icon
changed. Fo
Duve, his "p
parties "dof
and Rose. "C
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In closing h
of two clans
this clan cla
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avant-gardis
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theory's Pict
. does not be
belongs" (18
Those who d
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flip back to
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Art Through
she also teas
Deaf" in MD
tively Unfin
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oxymoron.
As a regard
with an exot
to it than j
Whatever ha
Geo
Unive

SubStance 71/72, 1993

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