Inside The Green Box

See below for an excerpt from the paper I gave at the 2013 AAH Conference (11-13 April), University of Reading. The paper was entitled: 'Curatorial ‘Translations’: The Case of Marcel Duchamp’s The Green Box':

In his 1923 essay, ‘The Task of the Translator’, Walter Benjamin questions the rationale underlying one of the key principles of translation, asking: ‘What does a literary work 'say'? What does it communicate?’ He goes on to suggest that:

It 'tells' very little to those who understand it. Its essential quality is not statement or the imparting of information. Yet any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information - hence something inessential.

The implication here is that translation should not be understood as a process of transmission. As such, it can only relay information; a good translation will communicate something that exceeds its representation as words on the page. This characterization of translation bears similarities to Benjamin’s concept of the aura which is described as ‘the unique phenomenon of distance’, a distance that is destroyed through the reproduction and subsequent distribution or transmission of the artwork. In the digital realm, the potential for artworks to be rendered literally as the sum of their parts, in binary code, is even more palpable. And it is a particularly relevant concern for literary and text-based objects, which can be manipulated and isolated according to particular search functions. While digitization and the application of text-reading software afford new opportunities to engage with textual materials, in a museum-gallery context, increasing interest in the book as an object of art, rather than a medium of art, leave us with questions about how these opportunities might be realized.

The focus of my PhD is on issues pertaining to the digitization of heritage collections and in this paper, I want to examine the display and representation of art texts digitally, and explore the extent to which the relationship between visual and textual art has been defined by a practice of ‘translation’. However, rather than expanding a theory of curatorial translation, my purpose is to introduce Benjamin’s notion of translation as a way of conceptualizing both the curatorial and the artistic process; I believe this approach offers a different way of thinking through ideas that are often linked with the aura, and the transformative potential implied by translation seems fitting for my case study, Marcel Duchamp’s The Green Box. Working at the University of Leeds Library and the Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery has informed my choice since I’ve studied a copy of the box held in the Library’s Special Collections. But this is not a straightforward or uncomplicated example of an artist’s book; in fact, as a box, it is debatable whether the term ‘book’ applies at all. Somewhere between archive, work of art and literary text, it is a commentary on Duchamp’s famous work, The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors Even. The box and its contents, a collection of loose facsimile notes, are ostensibly good candidates for digitization but their random accumulation and method of production complicates the process of generating a digital reproduction. By challenging the well-established dichotomy between copy and original, Duchamp’s work provides an opening for thinking about a form of translation that goes beyond the transmission of information.

In undertaking the research for this paper, I’ve cross-referenced the Leeds box with the Tate’s copy, which is available through the Tate website. The results of this comparison have been very interesting, if not conclusive, and I’ll touch on these findings at in the second half of the paper, before reflecting on the practical considerations associated with digitizing The Green Box.

In 1934, Marcel Duchamp announced the publication of The Green Box - produced in an edition of 320 - as a literary counterpart to his seminal artwork, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelor, Even, also known as The Large Glass. Comprised of 93 separate documents, plans, sketches and notes held in a green felt-covered box, reproduced from originals made by Duchamp, the box gave an insight into the artist’s creative process during the conception of his Large Glass. Even the box itself was representative of how he had compiled the notes, storing them away in a green cardboard box for future reference. Out of the edition of 320, Duchamp added to 20 of the boxes one original note, alongside the 93 reproductions. The edition I worked from contains 93 notes and, so far as I can tell, includes no original note.

As I’ve already indicated, the idea of artistic and curatorial translation seems particularly relevant to Duchamp’s box. The pretext for publishing it was what George Heard Hamilton called ‘Duchamp’s elegant invitation to the reader to thread his own way, with the aid of the notes, through the artist’s mind’. Yet, contrary to this apparent desire to explain The Large Glass, Robert Lebel has claimed of Duchamp that, ‘his work was meant for no one but himself, and he took every precaution to see that nothing of it should be intelligible to an outsider’. How, then, are these contradictory impulses to be reconciled? Keeping in mind the sort of process that attempts to capture the essence of the work beyond a mere likeness or literal communication of language, I want to think about ways in which The Green Box has both resisted and played into the notion translation.

Throughout his famously short artistic career, Duchamp was renowned for making difficult art, often more engaged with intellectual than aesthetic concerns. The words ‘insoluble’, ‘enigmatic’ and ‘ambiguous’ have frequently been used to describe his work, particularly the piece he laboured longest over, The Large Glass. To suggest, therefore, that he published The Green Box purely as a means of explaining his artistic rationale would appear somewhat out of character. Instead, it seems to be the case that the Glass was only one dimension of the larger work, The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachlors, Even. Sometime after the publication of the box, Duchamp remarked that the Glass was not just an object to be looked at, but a ‘wedding of mental and visual elements’ in which ‘the ideas […] are more important than the actual visual realization’.

Of the relationship between the Glass and the box, Richard Hamilton sums up this juxtaposition of mental and visual elements very well, when he writes:

It was his (Duchamp’s) intention that the ‘Large Glass’ should embody the realization of a written text, which had assisted the generation of plastic ideas, and which also carried layers of meaning beyond the scope of pictorial expression. The text exists beside the glass as a commentary and within it as a literary component of its structure. Without the notes the painting loses some of its significance and without the monumental presence of the glass the notes have an air of random irrelevance.

The box and the Glass, then, are co-dependent entities. While neither reveals itself easily, a fluid dialogue between the visual and the textual components does unlock a greater understanding of the work. As such, the two are engaged in what could be described as a reciprocal process of translation; one is not a literal translation of the other but together they do give the viewer the key to begin deciphering its mysteries. Likewise, it was Duchamp’s belief that it is not the artist who creates the work but the viewer who completes the creative cycle. Both, again, are co-dependent entities.

As interesting as the relation of the box to the Glass, was Duchamp’s approach to reproducing the notes as a printed book. As Paul Thirkell suggests the box was, ‘produced in a medium carefully chosen by the artist to best convey the conceptual aims of the piece’; for Duchamp’s purposes, a print process that would give an accurate idea of the original notes was the chief aim, and he eventually chose a photomechanical technique. Various Duchamp quotes support the view that he meticulously and obsessively worked to recreate each note, piece by piece, and these have frequently been cited by critics. For example, he once stated in an interview:

I had all of these thoughts lithographed in the same ink which had been used for the originals. To find paper that was exactly the same, I had to ransack the most unlikely nooks and crannies of Paris.

However, as Roland Shearer and Stephen Jay Gould have since discovered through comparison with the originals, the ink and paper of the print boxes are deliberately and unashamedly different. It is possible that Duchamp was implicitly aware that if he created an exact copy, he could not avoid losing something of the spontaneity of the originals in the conversion, or translation, from one format to another. It seems certain, at least, that he was playing with all the theories of value the concept of the facsimile sets up. By introducing subtle variations into the reproductions, Duchamp was creating a likeness that was somehow unlike. Furthermore, by adding original notes to 20 of the printed editions, he was effectively destroying the template the copies were based on.

Part of the attraction of the The Green Box is its elusiveness; the disorder of the notes and their arbitrary sequence is integral to the artwork. While the digital medium does provide options for supporting that sort of representation, it could be argued that something is ‘lost in translation’ in the production of the digital surrogate. Digitization therefore complicates a notion of translation that explicitly works against the transmission of information. However, complete versions of the box are quite rare, partly because it was produced as a limited edition, partly because of its loose leaf format, and there are perhaps only two or three copies in the UK. Consequently, there are many practical reasons for creating a digital version of the box and putting it online. As well as increased potential for research, being able to directly compare multiple editions will reveal more about how they were produced and compiled.

My own experience of studying the Leeds box in relation to the Tate’s online version has been a difficult and sometimes frustrating process, which has confounded the method of cataloguing I initially planned to apply. The fact that some of the notes are double-sided is also potentially confusing, since it requires the production of multiple digital images per note. Far more confusing though, is the experience of trying to reconcile one version of the box with another. While both the Leeds and the Tate editions are complete, the Tate’s does have a 94th note. However, even taking account of this addition, comparison of the boxes has thrown up some questions. For example, there are at least two leaves in the Leeds edition of the box that don’t match any of the Tate’s counterpart images online. Equally, there are two or three Tate images that I have so far been unable to find the counterparts for in the Leeds edition. These omissions could partly be due to human error on my part and will require further checking but I’d feel confident enough to say there is some disparity between the two copies. Furthermore, in a few cases even where the notes are the same, the shape they’ve been torn into is different; here’s one of the more obvious examples (see below), which casts doubt on the received wisdom that Duchamp created a set of templates to replicate the shapes of the original scraps of paper. The torn edges introduce an element of contingency to the box since each tear is slightly different.

This is in keeping with the earlier suggestion that Duchamp deliberately misled critics and commentators about his painstaking efforts to replicate the notes and find the papers and inks from which the original ones were made. He seemed to enjoy upsetting the distinction between copy and original that privileges the authentic work of art. And it was a successful move on his part for the extent to which these pieces could be viewed as copies is challenged by the differences the comparison of two boxes has revealed.

The closeness of the comparison has been made possible through digitization. It could also be argued that it is precisely the capacity to render exact digital copies that highlights Duchamp’s deviation from the facsimile format, a model that usually implies exactitude and uniformity. The assumption of fidelity to an original that has become associated with the box diverts attention away from a more significant aspect of Duchamp’s work; the fact that his concern is not with a static likeness but with a moving and developing process. The art is constituted in the process, and any attempt to represent the material art, digital or otherwise, must be mindful this.

References

Benjamin, Walter, 'The Task of the Translator', in Illuminations. London: Pimlico, 1999, pp. 70-82

Duchamp, Marcel, The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even: A Typographic Version by Richard Hamilton of Marcel Duchamp's Green Box, trans. by George Heard Hamilton. London: Lund, Humphries, 1960.

Lebel, Robert, Marcel Duchamp, trans. by George Heard Hamilton. London: Trianon Press, 1959.

Further Sources

(suggestions from panel members)

Fluxus Group works, Joseph Beuys etc. (see also Huyssen chapter)

Nigel Henderson, Win Henderson, Hans Ulrich Obrist (on Richard Hamilton).

Duchamp, Marcel, The Portable Museum: the Making of the Bôıte-en-Valise de ou par Marcel Duchamp ou Rrose Selavy. Inventory of an Edition by Ecke Bonk, trans. by David Britt. London: Thames & Hudson, 1989.

Sarat Maharaj, Sarat, 'Perfidious Fidelity: The Untranslatability of the Other', in Global Visions: Towards a New Internationalism in the Visual Arts, ed. by Jean Fisher. London: Kala Press in association with the Institute of International Visual Arts, 1994, pp. 28-35. URL = http://www.iniva.org/library/archive/people/m/maharaj_sarat/perfidious_fidelity