Hold Please

Good day everyone.

Well, most everything continues to be on hold.

No change on the windows. The contractor tells me he is trying to get here on 8/29, or perhaps a couple of days before then. I’ll believe it only when they actually show up.

Anne is away on a trip until tomorrow, so I have been a bachelor. That doesn’t change much, but for various reasons I have been cleaning the house fairly extensively while she’s away.

I’ve also been reviewing a book for a friend. (Not that one, a different friend. Yes, I know more than one author, and at least two have been willing to let me review early drafts of their work. Weird I know, but fun for me.)

It’s also been hot for a couple of days, 30+ here in Vancouver is nasty. (For you Fahrenheit users, 30 C is 86 F.) I am not a fan of heat, so I have mostly hidden from it in the coolest part of the house.

That all means there is — once again — not much to share this week, though I did finish a book: Spellbound by Marcel, by Ruth Brandon.

Long time readers will know that for various reasons Marcel Duchamp came up for me regularly while I was attending art school. It became something of a joke and it drove me a bit nuts. I was given the book for my birthday as a result of that history.

As for Duchamp, lots of people have heard of the infamous Fountain, and/or his painting Nude Descending A Staircase, and some know the term “readymade”, but few know much else about his life or work.

Having read this book I now have a better understanding of why so little is known about him and his work. Even more, I think he was basically an awful person.

The book mostly covers the period starting around the time he painted Nude through his second marriage. But it turns out there is surprisingly little written or known about him, at least directly. As a result the author expends a lot of ink discussing the people around Duchamp, particularly those who kept diaries. Brandon had access to a lot of sources I never encountered in my own research, and she manages to expose a few things that are probably not common knowledge.

Duchamp left France for New York thanks to WWI, and once in the US he fell in with a group of artists and socialites whose primary interest seems to have been sex. Duchamp himself wanted many women (and a few men), but he would not commit to anyone. He was not the worst example of this behaviour in the company he kept, but he hurt a number of women as a result of his attitudes.

He eventually married twice, the first explicitly for money. That marriage failed after just a few months given his wife didn’t come with a substantial dowry, and he still wouldn’t settle down. His second marriage came much later and it actually did last until his death. The book discusses the episode that might have changed him, but at least until that happened my judgement is that he treated women terribly. Many of those women loved him anyway — he was a big name in the art world after all — but… ugh.

As for art, his production was astonishingly limited. He may be the most important artist in history — a view many hold — but his actual artistic output was trivial. The physical production of art bored him, and he spent a lot of time (when he wasn’t seeking carnal pleasure) doing other things. He gave up painting — saying he didn’t like “the retinal” — which only makes sense given his deep interest in more esoteric things like puns, wordplay, and especially chess.

In any event, I found the book both interesting and frustrating at the same time. Duchamp is barely mentioned in many chapters because there is simply so little confirmed information about him. Brandon spends a lot of time setting the stage only to have Duchamp make a brief appearance and disappear. I can’t blame her, but I learned a lot more about his personal life than about his art, which I found somewhat disappointing.

That seems to be everything I’ve got this time around, and I have no clue what next week will bring. I hope you’ll come back so we can all find out.