Marcel Duchamp and Alison Knowles | Color Swatch

Marcel Duchamp and Alison Knowles

Color Swatch

19 x 14.6 cm.

Unique

Last month this work sold at Christie’s auction house for $50,800 US, more than twice its high estimate of between $15,000 and $ 20,000. 

The Association Marcel Duchamp confirmed the authenticity, and the following ‘essay’ accompanied the sale: 

"Executed in 1968, Color Swatch belongs to the final, quietly subversive chapter of Marcel Duchamp’s career, when the artist distilled his lifelong interrogation of authorship and choice into gestures of striking economy. At first glance, the composition—two overlapping discs, one red, one blue, suspended against a black ground—appears almost disarmingly simple. Yet its origins lie in a moment of selection rather than invention: Duchamp chose the configuration from a group of color swatches, elevating it through the act of designation.

The present work relates to a small silkscreen project conceived in dialogue with the Fluxus artist Alison Knowles, whose close association with Duchamp underscores the collaborative and process-oriented spirit of the piece. What emerges is less a conventional work than a meditation on perception and authorship: an image that hovers between design, experiment, and readymade."

Knowles’ account from her website contradicts at least the “close association”: 

"Through Daniel Spoerri, the Something Else Press arranged to meet Marcel Duchamp. [The] screen print was preceded by a four by five colour swatch showing two circles one red, one blue. He selected this color swatch one day while we are having tea at his tenth street apartment in New York. There were eleven color swatches, each showing blue and red circles but in different intensities. He selected one and left it out on table saying "Oh, that's it." I put the others in my brief case and we kept talking. Teeny Duchamp walked by the table, saw the color swatch and said "MARCEL, when did you do this?" He asked for a pencil, smiled and signed the color swatch. This color swatch was quickly framed and the rumor quickly spread through New York that we had Duchamp's last readymade! I kept this little swatch for about a year and then sold it to a collecter in Remsheid. Richard Hamilton, to whom I gave a copy of the final print, called this work a piece of memorabilia, not a readymade. Duchamp died the following year but I am sure he would have agreed. I like the story very much because it describes the process as important as the product according to a master."

The Something Else Press (which Knowles co-founded with her husband Dick Higgins) had arranged to use Duchamp’s Coeurs Volants (Flying Hearts) graphic as the cover to Emmett Williams long-form Concrete Poem Sweethearts [below, top]. The image is a proto-Op-Art collage Duchamp made in 1936 for the cover of an issue of Cahiers d’art [see below, centre] which featured an essay by Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia (ex-wife of Francis Picabia) on Duchamp’s optical machines and experiments. It is composed of a blue heart inside a red heart, inside a blue. If the viewer squints, or looks away slightly, the vibrant colours cause the work to throb, pulse or flutter.1

According to Peter Frank’s Something Else Press: An Annotated Bibliography, Higgins and Williams decided to capitalize on “Duchamp’s assent” by publishing a silkscreen poster, which would be produced by Knowles. Reportedly only twenty-two copies turned out satisfactorily. 

The collector in Remsheid that Knowles sold the signed swatch to was Vice-Versand publisher Wolfgang Feelisch. 

Calling this a work a ‘readymade’ by Duchamp takes his notion of an artistic exploration of authorship and repurposes it to one of finance and provenance. It brings to mind the phrase "an angry nihilism”,

which conservative writer Robert Fulford used to describe all of Duchamp’s readymades.2 

1. One of my favourite works by General Idea appropriates, infects and deactivates Coeurs Volants (Flying Hearts), see below, bottom, and next post. 

2. Writing for the right-wing National Post in 2015, Fulford went on to say that "Duchamp must have imagined it would soon be forgotten, but critics and journalists put it in books that established it as a historic breakthrough”, suggesting that the result is all art has become "hopelessly debased”. However, later in life Duchamp told his biographer Calvin Tompkins: "I'm not at all sure that the concept of the readymade isn't the most important single idea to come out of my work."

"Which, a lot going on here, starting with Richard Hamilton of all people being kind of a bitch about Duchamp memorabilia, especially after getting a copy of the print. But they’re both not wrong, and I’m sure Duchamp would have approved of the mess.

I don’t think I’m so into Knowles’ takeaway from the story, though I am very interested in what she took away from the meeting, namely the other ten other color swatches that she made, and Duchamp touched but didn’t sign. That Duchamp memorabilia sets my heart aflutter.

But let’s put all that aside and conjure up in our minds the world inside the sentence, “the color swatch was quickly framed and the rumor quickly spread through New York that we had Duchamp’s last readymade!””

- Greg Allen, greg.org

Emmett Williams | Poems 1950-2003

Emmett Williams

Poems 1950-2003

Berlin, Germany: Edition RZ, 2004

12” vinly picture disk

Edition size unknown

Released three years before his death in 2007, this LP features over thirty short spoken word performances ranging in length from a quarter of a minute, to three and a half. The recordings were made between 2000 to 2003. The Last French-Fried Potato was originally released as a 20-page booklet in the Something Else Press Great Bear Pamphlet series. 

“This tiny sampling of my poetic oeuvre is a very mixed bag, as they say; so much so that I’m inclined to call it a bag of tricks. To confuse matters, some of the poems were meant to be looked at rather than read aloud, and others were intended to be performed with sound effects and slide projections.”

- Emmett Williams

The End Of The World 0:17

Once Upon A Time   0:24

Good Evening, Herr Goethe… 0:16

Good Evening, Dear Friedrich… 0:16

For Marilyn Monroe 0:23

Ach Bun Was   0:24

The Moon Is Green / Der Mond Ist Grün 0:44

Oracle 1:34

The Last French-Fried Potato 0:17

I Think Therefore I Am 1:42

A Book About Eggs 0:47

Litany And Response For Alison Knowles I 1:41

Litany And Response For Alison Knowles II 0:48

A Selection From 5,000 New Ways 2:16

Duet 1:32

Do You Remember? 2:20

Triadic Landscapes   1:31

Rotapoems, Six Variations On A Poem By Dieter Roth From His Lyrical Collection "Scheisse" 3:29

For Diter Rot 0:34

A Fragment 3:23

Souvenir Portraits From The Passing Parade In Dreamland 1:16

Portraits Of The Artist With Holes In His Head 0:47

Portraits Of The Artist As Primitive Man 0:30

Portraits Of The Artist As Dowager Empresses 0:34

Portrait-Studies Of Wholesale Meat Distributors 1:10

A Portrait Gallery Of Snoopers And Snuffers 0:50

Performance Art 0:36

In Vino Veritats 0:15

Vergissmeinnichte 0:28

Aphrodisiacal Applesauce 3:46

A Broken Alphabet   1:33

Accordion-Fold Artists’ Books

Leporellos by Kiki Smith, Kay Rosen, Nancy Karp, Emmett Williams, Diane Borsato, Raymond Pettibon, Miranda Maher, Robert Morris, Peter E. Clarke, Dave Dyment, Athena Tacha, Dennis Oppenheim, Hansjörg Mayer, Niki de Saint-Phalle and Lucio Fontana. 

The Paris Review

The Paris Review is an English-language literary magazine established in the spring of 1953, seventy-one years ago, in Paris. It was founded by Harold L. Humes, Peter Matthiessen, and George Plimpton (who served as editor for fifty years, until his death in 2003).  

Literary critic Joe David Bellamy called the Review "one of the single most persistent acts of cultural conservation in the history of the world”, publishing writings by Jack Kerouac, Philip Larkin, V. S. Naipaul, Philip Roth, Terry Southern, Adrienne Rich, Italo Calvino, Samuel Beckett, Nadine Gordimer, Mona Simpson, Rick Moody, and Jean Genet, and interviews with Ernest Hemingway, T. S. Eliot, Jorge Luis Borges, William Faulkner, Pablo Neruda, William Carlos Williams, and Vladimir Nabokov, among many hundreds of others. 

In 1965, the journal launched a series of prints by major contemporary artists. Underwritten by Drue Heinz (actress and wife of ketchup magnate H. J. Heinz II), the series was conceived of to encourage an ongoing relationship between the arts and literary worlds. Artists who contributed prints include Louise Bourgeois, Willem de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Keith Haring, David Hockney,   Robert Indiana,  Ellsworth Kelly, Sol LeWitt, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Motherwell, Louise Nevelson, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, Larry Rivers, James Rosenquist, Ed Ruscha and Andy Warhol.

This copy (Winter 1966) was sent to me by Michael Dumontier, because of a project by Daniel Spoerri and Emmett Williams. 

In 1960, Spoerri creating his first "snare-picture”, which he defined as "objects found in chance positions, in order or disorder (on tables, in boxes, drawers, etc.) are fixed (‘snared’) as they are. Only the plane is changed: since the result is called a picture, what was horizontal becomes vertical.” The first example - now in the collection of MoMA - collected the remmnants of a breakfast with his girlfriend Kichka. Another collects the debris from a meal with Marcel Duchamp. 

Two years later, he began the Anecdoted Topography of Chance, a means of storytelling through the contents of a table, much like the “snare pictures”.  The work was first published as 53 page pamphlet and four years later it was translated and expanded by the Something Else Press. Dieter Roth published a German version in 1968. The original French version was reprinted by the  Centre Pompidou in Paris in 1990, and the Atlas Press in London reprinted a further-expanded English version in 1995. 

"In my (Tr. Note l.) room. No. 13 on the fifth floor of the Hotel Carcassonne at 24 Rue Mouffetard, to the right of the entrance door, between the stove and the sink, stands a table that VERA painted blue one day to surprise me. I have set out here to see what the objects on a section of this table (which I could have made into a snare-picture) (see Appendix II) might suggest to me, what they might spontaneously awaken in me in describing them: the way SHERLOCK HOLMES, starting out with a single object, could solve a crime; (see Appendix III) or historians, after centuries, were able to reconstitute a whole epoch from the most famous fixation in history, Pompeii.

   In case it might be helpful in understanding this experiment, I should state that it was after constructing a pair of eyeglasses equipped with needles to poke the eyes out that I felt the urge to recreate objects through the memory instead of actually displaying them.”

- Daniel Spoerri

 

Emmett Williams | Genesis: A Light Poem

Emmett Williams

Genesis: A Light Poem

Lodz, Poland: International Artists' Museum, 1991

22 pp., 24 x 24 cm., hardcover

Edition of 95 signed and numbered copies

Genesis: A Light Poem - translated into Polish by Piotr Bikont and Andrzej Chetko - consists of twenty-two pages with embossed typography on hand pressed white paper, and a portrait of Emmett Williams on front and back cover. 

During the book presentation in Lodz the artist recited the poem in a room lit by candles. After reading each letter he blew out a candle. By the time of the poem's end, the room was dark. 

Emmett Williams | THE VOY AGE

Emmett Williams

THE VOY AGE

Stuttgart, Germany: Edition Hansjörg Mayer, 1975

[254] pp., 9 x 6.7", softcover

Edition of 1000

Three-letter words (or word fragments, misspelled words) are mathematically arranged within the confines of a ten-by-ten grid. A broken verse narrative poem that diminishes in size until the grid appears as small as a punctuation mark.

This title sold at auction last month for $125 US, exactly between the $100 - $150 estimate. 

Dorothy Iannone | (Ta)Rot Pack

Dorothy Iannone 

(Ta)Rot Pack

New York City, USA: New Museum Store, 2009

[27] pp., 13 x 9.8 x 1.6 cm., loose leaves

Edition of 60 signed and numbered copies

In 1967, Dorothy Iannone accompanied Emmett Williams on a trip from New York to Iceland. Williams was going to meet up with Dieter Roth, whose forthcoming book he was editing. After an eight day long sailing trip - with only a few other passengers - they arrived in Reykjavik. Roth was waiting for them at the pier, with fresh wrapped fish in newspaper under his arm. 

"And when I saw Dieter," Iannone writes in An Icelandic Saga, "I knew I would change my life". She separated from her husband a week later.

The pair lived together in Düsseldorf, Reykjavik, Basel and London until 1974 (which Iannone called “their seven year embrace”). He became a muse to her and features in much of her artwork. 

Many of these works appeared in her first solo show in the US, which was held when she was 75 years old. To accompany the exhibition The New Museum published this deck of twenty-seven tarot cards. 

Based on drawings made in 1968 and '69, the cards depicts scenes from artist Roth’s life, often together with Iannone. They are pictured fishing, hunting, cooking and fucking. The card for patience portrays Roth teaching class, indigestion features him dining with friends, reverence depicts him giving Iannone oral sex (as does Pacifies, above, bottom). 

In the top right corner of each card Iannone illustrates an image of Roth’s own artwork. Depending on the context of his work, he used many variations of his name: Dieter Roth, dieter roth, DITERROT, Dietrich Roth, etc. The title (Ta)Rot Pack refers to the common variation where he dropped the 'h' in his name. 

In addition to the deluxe set of cards which are signed and numbered and housed in a handmade cherry wood custom box, a trade edition (unsigned, unboxed) was also produced in an edition of 190, for a total of 250. 

Emmett Williams | Guardian Angel: active-passive

Emmett Williams

Guardian Angel: active-passive 

Köln, Germany: Edition Hundertmark, 1985

16 pp., 15 x 21 cm., staple-bound

Edition of 500 copies

The 20th booklet in the Hundertmark Booklets series - whose full title is Schutzengel: aktiv-passiv / Ange gardien: actif-passif / Guardian Angel: active-passive / Angelo custode: attivo-passivo - features a series of black dots with white centres laid out in various arrangements on the page. 

Available from the publisher, here, for 16 Euro.

Primary Information

The previous post concludes a week of Primary Information titles. Fourteen posts are, of course, not enough to do justice to the publisher, and there are several glaring omissions: 

Fantastic Architecture and An Anthology of Concrete Poetry, which I never bought as I have the original Something Else Press titles. Both are essential. 

James Hoff’s TopTen, which I was also lucky enough to get the original, pre-PI version. 

The box set of Great Bear Pamphlets, which deserve a full week themselves. I’ll try to get to them next month. 

Women in Concrete Poetry, which deserves a deeper dive than I can accommodate right now. 

Tony Conrad’s Writings, which I need to finish reading. 

Avalanche, which I missed out on and which is now sold-out. 

Visit Primary Information here. 

Emmett Williams in Fluxus 1

Emmett Williams

TIPOGRAMMA ABCEDFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

New York City, USA: Fluxus, 1964

18.8 x 20.9 cm.

Edition size unknown

An untitled and uncredited portrait of the artist and the poem TIPOGRAMMA ABCEDFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ, black offset on gray paper.