IN ADVANCE OF WHOSE BROKEN ARM?

George Heard Hamilton

If ever there were a watershed -- some probably think of it more as a trough -- between the artistic past and whatever the present is turning out to be, it was Duchamp‘s snow shovel, that quite unprepossessing object which in 1915 left the safety of a shelf in a hardware shop on upper Broadway for the perilous pleasures of the world of art. What an odd fare for something so commonplace! It was never to be quite the same thing again, nor, which is more mysterious, were we. For of what other object, man-made and mass-produced (pace the plane and the bomb), can it be said that, because of one man's decision, the course of Western culture was altered?

This didn't happen all at once. The "original" snow shovel, the one Duchamp first selected in the shop, paid for, and took home where he inscribed it with the mystifying title, In Advance of the Broken Arm, was seen in New York only once or twice. Those were the days, so blithe in retrospect, when America was still "too proud to fight" in the First World War, when Prohibition was still a few years away, and Walter and Louise Arensberg were keeping open house for the bright young men -- Duchamp, Picabia, Gleizes, and Jean Crotti among them -- who had somehow managed to get from Europe to Manhattan. One was amused by the shovel, and a little startled to read in the paper that a man had actually broken his arm shovelling snow, thereby proving the truth, not only of Duchamp's title, but of Oscar Wilde's remark that nature does too, imitate art. But then the shovel was lost, for almost thirty years quite forgotten.

That is, by all but Duchamp's friend, the American artist Katherine S. Dreier who had been so excited by abstract painting when she first saw it at the Armory Show in New York in 1913 that she became an abstract painter herself, somewhat in the style of Kandinsky (her best painting is an abstract "portrait" of Marcel, now in the Museum of Modern Art in New York). In 1920, Miss Dreier, with Duchamp's assistance, founded the Société Anonyme, Inc. (the pun was Man Ray's), a sort of impermanent museum with which for ten years she did as much as any other American to make the country safe for modern art by exhibiting the paintings and sculptures she and Duchamp had collected for that purpose. The Depression curtailed her activities and the foundation of the Museum of Modern Art in 1929 eclipsed them. But in 1941, she and Duchamp presented the collection of the Société Anonyme to Yale University, thereby establishing the first archive for the study of the modern movement in an American educational institution.

In 1945, we decided to hold at Yale a retrospective exhibition of the work of the three Duchamp brothers -- Jacques Villon, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, and Marcel Duchamp -- borrowing a few items as best we could, for the times were not auspicious but there seemed no reason to wait, to round out the materials available in the Société Anonyme. On that occasion the snow shovel reappeared in the world of art, not the "original" but a new one, another actual shovel, carefully lettered like the first. (I brought it back on the train from New York one balmy April evening, startling the commuters who thought I must have heard a dire report about our fickle New England weather.)

Now, and this is of perhaps some interest for cultural history, when the shovel was put on exhibition, nothing happened. Nobody came to see it -- the papers were too taken up with the fall of Berlin -- and it just dangled from the ceiling in an empty hall. Miss Dreier had insist that, since it really wasn't a painting or a piece of sculpture, it couldn't be hung on a wall or placed on pedestal. And how right she was! Even standing it in a corner wouldn't do, for then it suddenly became a shovel again. And, as Gertrude Stein might have said, "If it wasn't a shovel, what was it?" (That was hard to say, art and life being what they are. When our little exhibition went on a tour, a janitor at a Museum in Minnesota the next winter mistook it for a shovel, as well he might, and went to work on a snowdrift, doing Duchamp's inscription no good.)

Twenty-one years have passed, the time it takes one legally to come of age, and what has happened to the snow shovel? What vote has it cast, for or against all the art towards which it stands in so ambiguous a relationship?

Some of us have never had any doubts about what the snow shovel was, but we had to have Duchamp's help if we were to help others to understand it. And we had to disencumber it from two concepts which had arisen since it first appeared. These were the romantically psychological overtones clustering around the Surrealists’ "found objects," and the formal aesthetic developed for evaluating mass-produced, machine-made objects which were thought to possess a kind of functional beauty. With the absolute formal perfection of a steel ball-bearing, for example, or the magical associations of a bit of driftwood, the snow shovel has never had anything whatever to do. In itself even, and this was the hub of the argument, it had nothing to do with art. No wonder that at first we were so baffled, because the structure of the ordinary American snow shovel is not even particularly functional, any more than the work it enables one to perform is agreeable. On the contrary, if the shovel is to take its place at all in an artistic context, and it has, historically, then the reasons for its transformation must be sought somewhere other than in itself.

The argument lay close at hand, buried among the notes for the great Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (the Glass picture, now in the Philadelphia Museum) which Duchamp had had reproduced in impeccable facsimile in 1984. Eventually I was to have the privilege of translating them with his help, for Richard Hamilton's brilliant typographical facsimile which we published in 1960. There, at the end of one of the notes, was the clue, one of Duchamp's private words, a new word, even in French: cervellités, meaning "brain facts" (from cervelle, French for "brains, minds").

Now we knew. The snow shovel, like its ominous title, is a brain fact. Not the shovel itself, of course, for it is of no consequence, but the decision which took it out of the shop and put it right down in the middle of our lives. The decision itself had occurred in the mind; the shovel was the outward and visible embodiment of that decision. If this was so, as it certainly seems to have been, then many other matters fall into place. Every work of art whatsoever has always been a "brain fact," nothing less, and perhaps not even anything more. With one stroke, with one decision taken in a hardware shop (Why there rather than elsewhere? Perhaps because such shops sell "durable" goods?) Duchamp had annihilated all that haughty aesthetic talk about empathy, pure painting, significant form, etc. Art is what one decides it shall be. We do not so much find it, or make it, as determine it. Consequently it has no value whatsoever except in so far as it exists in the context of a mental event.

This was difficult to understand, and even harder to accept. Has the work of art no absolute value at all, no "beauty" existing over against us? Are we alone in this inhospitable world, even in our aesthetics? The prospect is bleak, and would be dreadful were it not warmed by Duchamp's kindness, patience, and wit. But we cannot prove him wrong, any more than we can prove the opposite point of view right.

The snow shovel, then, was the ultimate insult, far worse than the urinal or Mona Lisa's moustache. They were bad enough, but they only offended our prudery and our cult of the old masters, and that was part of the fun. The snow shovel has never been fun, or funny. Like some gauche and tiresome stranger it seems never to have been meant to be liked. But now we cannot do without it. From now on we know that every work of art whatever, prehistoric or Pop, must be seen in its own terms, as part of a human, all-too-human situation -- the triumph of consciousness over matter and, what is more important for us in this century, of will over taste. Maybe only one unfortunate shoveler may have broken his arm, but Duchamp has twisted every one else's.