This article is based on a lecture given by Professor Sarat Maharaj at the Institute of Contemporary Art and Social Thought, CAA, Oct. 29, 2010.

There are so many different ways of thinking of art and Duchamp's work, and there is no one correct way of thinking. Duchamp never agreed or disagreed with anybody's interpretation of his work, even when people came up with the quite ridiculous interpretation of the strange sexual relationships he was supposed to have had with his sister, and in order to prove this, you have to turn the Duchamp paintings upside down to look at them in this crazy way from the bottom upwards. Even when it was so ridiculous, the interpretation was that Marcel Duchamp was so open and generous and he allowed it to float. He said every interpretation must stand the test of debate, and if it is plausible and if it makes sense, in a particular moment, that is fine. So we end up in the 21st century with a vast body of work around Marcel Duchamp.

I'm looking at you, and many of you look so wonderfully fresh and young, and if you are going into Duchamp, you might be asking where on earth do I begin, because there is just so much material? There is such an unending amount of interpretation and readings of Duchamp, and all seem more or less interesting, and have something to offer, even when they are based on something as stupid as turning the Duchamp works upside down when you look at that. So I think one of the questions you might want to mull over is that Duchamp poses for us the issue of how do we understand works of art. How do we understand them? Is it the same thing that we are looking at down the ages? Is it the same work of art that we are examining over the years? Or does the work of art itself have a life, during which it undergoes transformation of its own, which is largely produced through the relationship with the viewer and the reader?

Duchamp's famous statement was that the work of art is only 50% of the equation in the scene of art and the viewer comes with the other 50%. And it is that equation that builds up into the moment of understanding and reading the work of art. That has led to a situation today: are we saying that the work of art gives us the 50%, we come with 50%, and then 100% of the semantic situation opens up? Or are we to go along with that with Duchamp? Or have we arrived at the situation today where we say the work of art gives us 100% of the meaning, and the viewer gives us 100% of the meaning? Which one of these should we take? There is always a sense that the viewer today brings almost 100% of the meaning to the work of art, and that the viewer is not patient enough, not, what should one say, structured enough to get involved in the thinking of the artist? I'm just asking this as a question that we do not esteem very much, or give that much attention to the artist's thinking. We feel we know what the work means. We just simply wander through the Tate Gallery, giving two seconds to every work, and we feel we have judged it, we know it. If we face a work like Chen Chieh-jen's film, we have to really sit there, we really have to get absorbed in it, and we feel we don't have the patience for this, don't have the discipline for this. If you relate it to Chen Chieh-jen's “long shots,” and you relate it to the demand that makes on the viewer, the discipline it requires on the part of the viewer, then you begin to see one of the problems that we have in our time: viewing, the production of meaning, and semantic production are things that require a deep engagement with the work, which we very rarely see in the viewing of a work. I'm not saying that we shouldn't look at works like that, but it is certainly one of the issues that comes up with Marcel Duchamp's understanding of how meaning is produced, the relation between work and viewer.

A second very famous statement of his comes to mind here, I've used the word “problem,” that Duchamp's work produces or highlights the problem of how meaning is produced and what the viewership involves in the act of reading the work, looking at the work. But Duchamp himself might have been a little bit unhappy about the use of this word “problem,” because his famous statement is: “There is no solution, because there is no problem.” And I ask you to think about this. What can this mean? There is no solution, or there is no answer, 100% answer, because there is no problem. In my research into Duchamp, my thinking around Duchamp, I felt that Duchamp actually derived this idea loosely, because Duchamp was one of the most highly-read artists come across. He loved reading, and for a period of his life he worked at the Sainte-Geneviève Library in Paris. In the library, he just spent his time reading. During this period, he read two texts I feel that deeply influenced his thinking. Why I say this is looking through his notes, looking through the bundles of Duchamp's notes. Incidentally, Duchamp never had a notebook. He wrote on any piece of paper he found, and put it in a box. So the famous Green Box and White Box are made up of hotel bills, gas bills, bus tickets. This is what he wrote notes on. That's why it's so beautiful, and worth looking at itself. It is so interesting. It is not writing in this linear way where you have pages and where you try to put all sorts of markers, saying Lund or Berlin, but you get totally mixed up in the end. So Duchamp said let's start off the mixed-up version to begin with, with this very beautiful box of scraps of paper. You might want to try this up for yourselves. Can you keep order with your ideas if you organize them in this way?

But Duchamp was deeply influenced, as I say, during this period of reading by two works that were published around 1907–1910, and perhaps even up to 1915. Works of one by a great scientist of France, called Jules Henri Poincaré. Jules Henri Poincaré was a scientist whose physics and mathematics became increasingly important as became closer to the 21st century. For a long period in the 20th century he was highly regarded, but there were many sights to his thinking that were not understood, or at least the general laws of physics could not understand what Jules Henri Poincaré was talking about. But it's very much like Duchamp's work as we move closer to the 21st century, more and more people begin to know about Duchamp and get involved in aspects of Duchamp's work. But with Jules Henri Poincaré, there were two things I feel that influenced him. One was not only the conception of the 4th dimension, but the idea of what is creativity in scientific thinking, and what is creativity in artistic thinking. This was a question that Jules Henri Poincaré wrote very beautiful account of how we understand creativity...

This is wonderful information to know that this text is in Chinese. You want to read it in Chinese and English and French because that makes a wonderful project in translation, too, for us to grapple with. But I think Jules Henri Poincaré's notion of creativity has been very valuable for the notion of creativity that we are struggling with today, turbulence and creativity, the notion of chaos, creativity, turbulence and production of a new structure. This has become increasingly important as an area of thinking after, you could say, 1950. After about 1950, many scientists were aware of turbulence and confusion, and that it might have a creative force, but generally, the understanding of turbulence and chaos was disregarded, and became an invisible object and invisible epistemic object. By that I mean many objects of thoughts come into life, but at the moment they come into life, they do not always get the full attention they need. They have to go into deep sleep. They go into Inga's room (in her work Sleeping Heights), and they live there in a kind of state that neither awake nor actively dreaming. In the state of sleep, many ideas passed from 1915 right up to 1950 when they began to examine it again. Jules Henri Poincaré's ideas are similar in that sense. You can say to some extent, that's the case of Marcel Duchamp, that's the case of James Joyce, that though they were figures of the early part of the 20th century. It's only about 100 years later, in a full sense, that their works become public. So this notion that works of art, scientific epistemic objects, do not get the full attention and treatment they deserve at the time of their birth is very important to bear in mind.

The second thinker after Jules Henri Poincaré that I feel Duchamp was deeply touched by is (well, there are two ways of pronouncing his name, because he is half English and half French, and we might say) Henri Bergson. I think Bergson's famous work Creative Evolution is a work that touched Duchamp. But I want to say something about Duchamp in reading and writing in a minute. These two figures, Jules Henri Poincaré and Bergson, both suggested that there were no real solutions to scientific thinking. You cannot say you've “solved” the problem of the universe, because every attempt to solve the problem only opens up new questions. And that opening up of new questions and opening up of new epistemic spaces is a very important contribution that Duchamp made to the field of art. We used to think in old-fashioned art history, we think of art history as Futurism and Cubism, a little bit of Fauvism. Then we say they didn't solve the problem of color, they didn't solve the problem of composition. Then we say maybe the surrealists try to solve the problems of color and composition. But that way of doing history, that way of thinking, is based on a very simplistic notion of problem-solving, whereas Duchamp, Jules Henri Poincaré, Joyce, Bergson thought of problems as being produced by the search for solutions, so they put it the other way around, you could say, in the opposite direction.

So for all this group of thinkers at the beginning of the 20th century, many things were explored, which did not get understood straight away. And much, much later in the century, they began to come to light. I'm thinking also, I mentioned this before, that in 1969, as late as 1969, when Duchamp had just finished bringing all his works together with Richard Hamilton at the Tate Gallery, it's called “The Almost Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp.” When he made this exhibition which Duchamp participated in with Hamilton, it was a project of the two greatest artists and thinkers of our time. When they put this exhibition together, at the end of the exhibition, they offered the whole exhibition to the Tate Collection, but the Tate Gallery said “No, thank you.” They were not interested. They didn't see the importance. They were busy collecting paintings at the time. They didn't see the importance of the Duchamp works. When the Tate Modern opened 30 years later, 40 years later, they were struggling to buy fake Duchamp's for one million pounds from different places. So you can see how the history of Duchamp's work, the history of a body of works is never straightforward. It's always in a very complicated relationship to museums, curating, social life and journey of works. What's always of a very strange relationship.

You might ask why Duchamp became so popular as time went on, given that he was known to about only 10 people for the great part of his life, when the great The Large Glass was only really exhibited once, and then put away in storage. For the great part of its early life, it's very puzzling to us how Duchamp became so popular, increasingly popular, after the 1960s, maybe popular in a very contemporary sense from the 1990s onwards with the interest in the art of people like Damien Hirst and Gillian Wearing, because the Duchamp tradition essentially came and was continued to explore in Goldsmith College.

First of all, it went to Newcastle University, which is right up there in the north of England. If you can imagine Richard Hamilton was a professor up there, you should travel from London to Newcastle. With his students, he began reconstructing The Large Glass. So in many ways you are very privileged to have such famous art professors with you whom you might be doing all sorts of constructions and things, but you can see that is so important, far more important than art history lectures about artists. The importance is to get somehow involved in understanding work from the inside, in understanding its ways of thinking, its ways of constructing meaning from the inner side. We do very little of that these days. We do very very little of reconstructing artworks in order to understand. Then we somehow feel if we read one or two books of art, that's enough. But trying to understand from within, the view from within, as Varela's phase, is a very very important way of doing art. Thinking through the construction of the work, this is what Richard Hamilton started with his students in Newcastle. Those students would eventually become the next generation of teachers of the Young British Artists, so they would be fantastic artists like Richard Donald. But this construction of the Duchamp's Glass was one of the most important events in the history of art. The actual making by the students by the lectures hailed. It took a whole year to read the notes, to translate them from French with the help of the librarian, and to do it in a way in which Richard Hamilton did not know French, so he described this event as an event of “mono-lingual translation,” in which the translator is mono-lingual. We seem to contradict the very idea of translation, so please try and understand this Dadaist concept of what is a mono-lingual translator. I have subsequently gone on to use this concept of mono-lingual translation to examine post-colonial relations with the colonial world. But this reconstruction also showed that there were very few clues in Duchamp's work as to whom he has read, and whose thinking he was influenced by.

I think in all his writings as far as I can see, Duchamp only mentioned by name a few people, very few people, if one looks at the notes. One very short and important note on Nietzsche, one note on Henri Poincaré, one note on the mathematician Jouffret, [Microsof1] and perhaps here and there a scattering of notes on really crazy poets, who played with language in a way that makes up a separate body of Duchamp's notes, which are the word-play notes. So it is very hard. Over many years when I visited Madam Duchamp, Duchamp's wife, she tried to show me all of Duchamp's books, and spent many hours going through Duchamp's notes, and even with Jackie Duchamp, Jackie Matisse-Monnier, who was the granddaughter of Matisse's side and stepdaughter of Duchamp side. I must come back to tell you about her role in Duchamp's work that his daughter and many relatives actually were involved in producing the “Green Box Notes,” and how they all sat on the kitchen table, and produced together in stencil machine. So this is very interesting.

But looking through Duchamp's library, it's very hard to say what book he might have read and when. He traveled so much; we mustn't forget the extent to which Duchamp was also quite an exile, and an emigrant in many ways. So this experience of emigration in Duchamp's thinking makes him quite interesting. From the point of view of the migrations, we have today from the post-colonial point of view to look at an artist who made works in different parts of the world. He is probably also one of the few artists, we could say, who made a work in the Southern Hemisphere. During the period of exile in Argentina, there is one extremely important work, which is called To Be Looked at (from the Other Side of the Glass) with One Eye, Close to, for Almost an Hour. I've interpreted this as looking from the point of view of the other back to Europe and back to the Northern Hemisphere. So we had a very interesting discussion of this in the São Paulo Biennale, where looking from the South, what would a southward way of looking amount to? Duchamp was always interested in looking sideward, looking in different and odd angles. One of the works that Raqs Media Collective, for example, I feel have touched on in a clock that they are looking at, is the Duchampian idea that the two needles of the clock, which come together at the 12 o'clock there, but seeing from the sideward, you would see that the needles of the clock disappear, and that is the evolution of clock time.

In order to experience density, duration and stretched-out time, such as we do during sleep, we break away from the notion of the productive measure of time. And if you think of all capitalist modes of production are centered around timing, and precise timing, of the worker at the assembly line, according to Ford, who was trying to perfect the method of the assembly line serial production, a worker must be so totally absorbed in the moment that the commodity appears before him/her on the assembly line for production, leaving no time to think about anything else. The object must pass on, and the next one must be coming up to the table for production. There mustn't be a single moment left in the worker's mind for any imagination. This is something written into the whole system of linear time and production, so this is why for Duchamp the brief with linear time, with clock time. To some extent, if you go back and discuss with Raqs Media Collective, whose work includes a poster of the clock, you might begin to sense some of its deeper meaning. So it's toward also reverse time, two of the clocks are about invented cities, Mabel, Maconti, which are made-out cities, moves backward might be abolished.

I think you can see for Duchamp there is something very important, but you couldn't really say in any hard and fast way that is a way referring to Bergson, or Jules Henri Poincaré, or this philosopher or that philosopher. What does this tell us about is the artist's way of working. It suggests that the artist takes ideas from all sources. The artist does not always acknowledge all sources the way a scholar does or an academic does. The artist is like a filter that ideas pass through him/her. They are reconstructed, recreated, and they become launching parts for other ideas. Sometimes we can hear some thinkers in artists' work, but we can never pinpoint it. So this way of using sources, I like to call “the dark matter of the universe,” in which we are told by the scientist that the matter we know of the universe is only one fraction of the matter that really exists in the universe, but the body of matter that exists in the universe we cannot see, and we cannot quite measure in any way. This is called dark matter. This dark matter is a metaphor in some ways which we might use to understand how an artist, such as Duchamp, used the reading of his time, books from his time, and sources from his time.

It's not just that the artist is not interested in books, he's not a reader, and does not go to the library. That's quite the opposite. It's a different use of the material found in the library. It's a different use, it's a creative use of all that information. It's not a sense of academic and scholarly “mastery” over the material. It's not about gaining mastership or control over the ideas of a philosopher, or a thinker, but it is about a creative reading and a creative mobilization of a body of ideas through that reading. So I would ask you to think of these two modes and modalities of reading when you are troubled by the fact that you have to use the library, and what sort of use you are expected to read of the library. Maybe in our time, artists and art historians felt we must really try to master Duchamp, and that is the last point I want to make. Can you ever master Duchamp? We cannot. That's because Duchamp himself tried to master all the thinkers that he himself examined, and was deeply inspired by the investigated.

So in 1956, Richard Hamilton wrote a letter to Marcel Duchamp saying: my students and I have put together a map of the “Large Glass,” we think this is what the story of the “Large Glass” is, and we are beginning to construct it. What do you think? You can imagine sending it to Duchamp in 1955–1956. There was no reply from Duchamp for one year, and Richard Hamilton thought Duchamp might have thought, “Oh, these crazy people are trying to reconstruct my Glass,” and guessed that he wouldn't be bothered to answer. But suddenly, I think on the 20th of June, 1957, Duchamp wrote to Hamilton saying: I have looked at the map that you and your class have sent, and it is one of the most beautiful readings of the Large Glass Notes. He invited Richard Hamilton to begin translation with George Heard Hamilton, who was another American thinker, busy with translating some of Duchamp's notes. He invited Richard Hamilton to begin the type of graphic translation of the Large Glass Notes.

Richard Hamilton was now trying to take each note and put it into a form that you could organize as a book. (I'm sorry I didn't know I was going to do this Duchamp thing, I should have brought those wonderful pieces of books that Richard Hamilton made. He spent five years making a book, again with his students.) So imagine how teaching and working in an academy at that time was so different from what teaching and working in an academy has become in a college like Goldsmith today. It's simply about giving these lectures and sweeping in and sweeping out with very quick references to artists, rather than trying to understand the process of creativity, of an artist from within. I think that would be a very valuable thing for us to bring back into our understanding: how do artists think and try to work from within their thinking? That, to my mind, is one of the best and most important dimensions of historical thinking and theory than simply doing a class on Michel Foucault, and then sticking a few pictures of Duchamp around it, and thinking this is how we understand the art and theory. That is the problem we have today. That is the problem we face in a place like Goldsmith College. I say very openly because I see this as a problem for the field. And I feel that what has happened in Goldsmith College over the last 5 to 10 years is that many disciplines just feel that they could dip into art and use art to illustrate some of the theoretical positions, not use art or get involved in art by getting under the skin, and understanding that art gives us a totally different way of thinking about the world, thinking about life.

Therefore we should value what our practice has to offer what is a mode of thinking, making it quite distinct from the straightforward way of academic thinking. Well, when The Large Glass was made by Richard Hamilton's students in the 1960s, again it didn't get a wide reception in England. England was very hostile to contemporary art, and one of the reasons is that England had fought two wars in the mainland, generally with Europe, which it expected to have very extremist views. Germany, France, Italy, modernism, and the avant-garde were associated with extremist politics from the English point of view. And generally, there was a great doubt if you read the art criticism and art history of the earlier part of the 20th century. Right up to Picasso, everything is acceptable generally, and Picasso was the most avant-garde course taught in the quota in institutes of art right up to about 1980. So nothing beyond Picasso was taught at the quota.

When I arrived at Goldsmith College, I had to apply to the university for permission to introduce the course on Marcel Duchamp, James Joyce and Richard Hamilton. That first went to a big debate whether this was a valid area of study to introduce into English art history: weren't they part of the Extremism of Europe, or weren't we, in a way, tied up with the Fascist thinking of modernism in Europe? So you can see all cultures in one word or the other goes to a similar pattern of censorship. Even very liberal, very open cultures sometimes can have quite closed attitudes towards certain worlds. Of course Duchamp was available, anybody could read Duchamp if they wanted to, not that it was easy to find, but in principle there was no censorship. But there is what I call “a closure to certain epistemic objects.” Certain epistemic objects are not visible at certain times, and there is an invisibility created around them, like around turbulence, around Duchamp, around Joyce. Until these works went to the United States, where they became part of the industry, the academic industry, they returned to England, with a kind of validation to them, and began to become more and more mainstream in England.

I think this might be an interesting thing for you to bear in mind when you ask yourself: why are you interested in Duchamp, what is it about Duchamp that makes you interested, what are the conditions of the interest that have emerged in part of your studies today. Because we have an internationalized version of Duchamp, but we also have a hidden Duchamp which we still have to bring to light again and again through this intense study or get involved in Duchamp's thought processes. That requires you to read Duchamp's notes very carefully, to experience that very carefully, and not to go only by art historical writing on Marcel Duchamp. In fact, it's very surprising that the great art historian of Marcel Duchamp has largely spoken about the social-political reception of Duchamp. That's the Duchamp they speak of. Duchamp is a creator. Duchamp was writing the notes.

People have spent a long long time with those notes. Very few people have read from within the notes. That's an area that still remains quite hidden. Artists have looked at it, artists have responded to it, but generally, there is very little writing around the notes, very little commentary around the notes. It's largely Ecke Bonk, Richard Hamilton and I who have written about the notes and have gone back to the notes every year. We read the notes again and again, as we try every year to read Ulysses by James Joyce. You know, we develop a little bit of crazy ritual around these things. But that's the only way you can maintain involvement with an art project that Duchamp said was definitively incomplete. The only thing you could say about the work was that it's incomplete, and will never be completed. It was a work in progress. Yes, as Joyce said, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake were works in progress. They were never completed, and never will be completed so that the viewer and the reader will bring the other 50%. But still, Joyce's phase about Finnegans Wake is very applicable to Duchamp's work, and that is that his writing “will keep the professors busy for centuries.” The professors would be busy trying to say “he read this book; this is where this comes from,” and they can do all the academic work, but it still never explains the work. I think that's who you are as practitioners, as curators, and possibly as people get involved in Duchamp. I would suggest not only as an artist, but as a thinker whose work gives us models of thought. This is why Duchamp is of interest today. Then you would need to ask this question again and again, what are the conditions of interest as we meet Duchamp? Why am I interested in Duchamp?

I would like to describe then the start of my own interest in Duchamp. I grew up, as you may have heard now, in Durban, South Africa, which was also a highly censored society in many ways. Things that you are allowed to read or not allowed to read, allowed to see or not allowed to see, and that largely because of the race laws, not because there was cultural censorship, but there was racial censorship. Though we might consider ourselves as originating from Asia, under the apartheid system we were classified as non-whites. Chinese were non-white, but Japanese were honorary whites. Because there were never more than a hundred Japanese allowed in South Africa at one time, they were largely to do train delegation. There was a large Chinese community in South Africa who had come during the time of the British Empire from Guangdong, South China, and Fujian, through Hong Kong and Taiwan. They had come to work in the mines, and in sugar plantation, very much as many Indians were taken by the British from India to work in the sugar plantations and mines. So we mustn't forget this dimension of the history of Chinese presence in South Africa and in the apartheid regime. But both of us, the Indians and Chinese were not allowed to use the library, not allowed to enter the art galleries, not allowed to go to the museums, because we were classified as aliens, non-citizens and therefore have no rights to use the library. When the apartheid regime was in full swing began to segregate the universities, there were 9 segregated universities, but people were of different colors or different ethnic classifications.

I went to a university in South Africa for non-whites of Asian origin. You can see how descriptive the title was. And there we were, for the first time, allowed to study things that under general law we were not allowed to visit or see. Durban, for example, had one of the most beautiful portraits by Wyndham Lewis who had quite Fascist thoughts but a wonderful portrait of T.S. Eliot, which England did not buy but bought by Durban. So the first modernist work by the modernist I saw as a young boy was the portrait of T.S. Eliot by Wyndham Lewis. This great work was in the gallery down the road, but we were only allowed as non-white to see it on Tuesday afternoon for two hours between 3 o'clock and 5 o'clock. When the gallery was cleared of white people, then non-white people, Indians, Chinese, Zulus were allowed for just those two hours into this gallery.

So the reading of Duchamp started under these circumstances with very restricted access to all of this material. Because the university was segregated and because I began to study under some of the leading white artists who were also among the leading critics of the regime, one of those absence of history, that they showed me the great artist of South Africa, the critical artist who was eventually banned by the regime, Walter Battiss. They introduced me to Marcel Duchamp's works and the African National Congress. Mahatma Gandhi's reading classes had already begun reading Joyce, because the first commentary on Joyce was not from England but from India. The first critical reading on Finnegans Wake came from India, because Indian scholars responded to Joyce as an Irish critic of the empire. So the rapport was there crossing the colonies.

What I'm trying to say is that there are very different conditions of interest in Duchamp, the conditions of reading and involvement in Duchamp and in Joyce and in the radical thinkers. For someone like myself, coming from the margins of the empire as compared to reading Joyce or Duchamp from within the academic industry of the United States or now in Britain, whatever the case might be. When I, ironically, arrived in England and set up the course in James Joyce and Marcel Duchamp, it was as someone who had basically not been allowed to study them. That's the irony of the situation. Of course, the work that you have downstairs, the famous Fountain image, is the urinal. I don't know what the Chinese word is, but the French word is pissoir. This was shown in a summer school where some of the radical white artists in South Africa were trying to defy the laws of racial segregation. They held a class in which we were all invited, all races to defy the laws, and the work we looked at was this work, the Fountain. It was shown to us by the great artists, radical artists who were also involved in gender politics. We didn't know it at the time; we were young students and totally innocent about politics. But she just showed us the Fountain, and analyzed it at a school called Islamic High School for non-whites of Asian origin. This was the situation in which this image was shown and discussed. So once again, if you just imagine the host of contradictions that surround the first time we ever saw the image of Fountain, and what it could mean for art: why was this a work of art? Or was it not a work of art, what was it?

Duchamp was always asking wonderful questions which I have discussed with Francisco Varela on several occasions. He asked how to make a work of art that is not a work of art, or not immediately part of our traditional understanding of what a work of art looks like. About that question, I could say something about myself. I first came across when I was shown this image by this radical group of white artists and some dramatists who came from Cambridge University to South Africa specifically to produce Marat/Sade in the Gandhi community where I grew up. So just imagine this very contradictory picture of a very closed society, a radical opposition to the race laws, colonial closures, apartheid racial closures against all of that sort of set-up, how important and how liberating it was to encounter someone like Marcel Duchamp. So, many societies have their own journeys to Marcel Duchamp.

I always like to stress that each society, each group of people, and each individual must recount their own journey into Duchamp, and that you shouldn't really just go by this superficial Duchamp that we have now got through the over-publication of simplified books of Duchamp. This way of understanding Duchamp through getting into his work, working with fellow artists who are also struggling to understand Duchamp from within, and then coming to an understanding of the circumstances in which Duchamp's works were produced. You will come closer to the broader meaning of the term “mono-lingual translation” when you are translating but are not always sure if you are equipped with the language to begin the translation process. That's as much as I think I need to say, and maybe it should be a question and answer. We have great Duchampians with us; we listen to them and take on board what they have to say.

Thank you!

Discussion

Gao Shiming (ab. Gao): The best way to explain Duchamp is to become a Duchampian or a Duchampist, and to respond to him with your own work. This is the best way to annotate him. We have often emphasized that art history is a flashback, a flashback from “I,” from Wu Shanzhuan, and from Inga. The best way to explain Duchamp is to annotate him with your work. This is very critical. Before we enter the discussion, let's invite two Duchampians to respond to Duchamp and the lecture just made by Professor Maharaj with their work.

Why did Sarat emphasize how he encountered Duchamp in his life? He wants to emphasize the colonial atmosphere. This is a very important point. He deliberately talked about it in order to trigger a topic related to our discussion this week: within modernism, he just mentioned Britain's vigilance against modernism in Europe at that time and regarded it as a movement with socialist tendency, as well as his separation and isolation in a non-white school in Colonial South Africa. Modernism can be contested and used by various parties. This reflects its political nature. Its politics are multifaceted, very paradoxical and tangled. These are the questions we can discuss later. For now, we hope that Inga and Wu can share their understanding of this question, as they have specifically done works related to Duchamp. Wu, I especially want you to talk about the question of “the encounter between Duchamp and Karl Marx.”

Wu Shanzhuan (ab. Wu): This is the first time I’ve sat here in a classroom since I graduated from this academy. I told Inga that I was invited to listen this time and didn’t need to do anything. I'd like to say that we are not “Duchampians,” but fans of Duchamp. What makes me most comfortable is that when I feel discouraged in the art profession, I think about Duchamp, who also worked in this field, and I become very relaxed. I am still very proud of my profession. Although I have been completely depressed and defeated at times, when I remember that Duchamp was there, I feel comforted.

Gao: Duchamp is the reason for him to continue to work as an artist. It's not just difficult; it's also a purpose.

Inga Svala Thórsdóttir (ab. Inga): I think this point what Wu says is Duchamp plays a role now like as a comrade, often when you are, like Wu says, exhausted, then it's so good to know that he was there. Because you talked about your biography, in ours, it was like I was painting in Iceland when Wu came to Iceland. At that time painting was also very classical. We had to do what to call you in this and that. I went to Paris in Pompidou and saw an exhibition of Duchamp, and got really this physical moment of enlightenment. I couldn't really form it, but the urge was to react to Duchamp. That is basically to use his readymades. At first when we met, we talked about this on paper, and there were two readymades easy to use: In Advance of the Broken Arm, or the Fountain. Wu said, “We have to do this. We do this.” So we started to work and what later became Thing's Right(s), which is what we have the forming since then. When we first got this Dialogue with Marcel Duchamp by Cabanne, that was a great pleasure.

Gao: Maybe you should talk more about the readymade and Thing's Right(s), and the relationship between artwork and things, and readymade, and also about ownership. Yesterday afternoon, we were talking about from curatorship to ownership, to authorship, and how it reminds us of your work Thing's Right(s).

Inga: The question of creation is, what you described clearly, a drive in Duchamp's work. I guess to all people who seriously study art this question comes up—what is art to do? And in our work, as an artist, you try to make something visible, make the work that shows the thinking. From Duchamp, like when we pissed into the pissoir, this action was of direct dialogue with Marcel Duchamp. And Thing's Right(s), people might say, where is the question of the right of things? We were looking for a way to talk about it, to verbalize the right of things. That's why we came to the Human Right Declaration, to try to take various established Utopian texts which were made. Actually I think at this moment of the Human Rights Declaration in history, when it was born, it was a turning point in history.

I think Gao Shiming's question was so probing, but we approached the question of creation, in other words, we did just in doing shopping, we went shopping and came to what later became To Buy Is to Create. That was kind of frustrating, too, as an artist. But we always remember Duchamp: people play chess and keep on thinking. You don't have to produce, and maybe in my opinion, one of the biggest problems of society and of art is production.

Why do we need production? Maybe that's the right of things. That's the uncritical attitude toward production. Production is seen as a solution for everything, because production is also what Wu raised. Wu made an exhibition in a gay bar in Iceland at that time. He used only readymades, cheap things. And the question was “how to do nothing.” That is a very important question. The title of the exhibition was “But Still Red.” He came to Iceland and bought red color in the supermarket, from the capitalist, and it was still red.

Wu: That was damned shocking. I was shocked.

Gao: And not enough.

We are approached to work on the thing. After having gone through painting very nicely for four years, without any struggle of getting famous, I could go through the whole history, in classical standards. I had to make, you know, more and more: you want to do something yourself. I realized I needed to pulverize, and that was Thing's Right(s). In that pulverization work which we have used very often in the Thing's Right(s), the question of labor is very high, because I write always like pulverizing. One of the first objects was a shopping trolley. It was the first shopping trolley in China; there were none in Beijing or Shanghai, but we had one in a suitcase.

Wu: In 2003, and that was a big one.

Inga: We were stupid and we stole a very heavy one. It was 25 kilos, steel. We pulverized it in Wu's hometown, and we exported it back to Germany and showed it there. It was like 300 hours of labor. I actually figured out that was the first one. There was one chair, another chair, on the table. I pulverized all. I created a machine to pulverize steel, but there was the mixing of the first chair and the second chair. One chair was heavier than the original chair, and the other one was lighter. I was laboring and of course, I didn't want to lie, so definitely I didn't mix the table and the chair, but mixed the chair and the chair. So this equation came—a chair is a chair, which is that chair equal chair, so pulverized chair and a chair, so Thing's Right(s).

Gao: Wu, you'd better not escape from this topic. Because in fact, this is the key. Where does Thing's Right(s) come from? It came from reflecting on art things and its relationship with capital, like putting money in a bank, and later your idea of the gold brick. So this is very important. Besides readymades, artworks and art things, there is also labor, and commodity. This is a clue, the relationship between these and thing's rights. You need to talk about this.

Wu: One thing that shocked both me and Inga is that no matter what you create, once it is done, it will always become just another “thing among things.” For example, Qiu is a genius, but when he goes out on the street, he becomes just “one among the crowd.” This was shocking to me. In the end, he was just “one of them.” Then we have a question: whether being one among the crowd is superfluous. Suddenly, we realize that it is superfluous! For example, would Einstein become “one of them” if he were walking down the street? Isn't “one of them” a kind of redundancy? So later we came up with the idea of “an extra for thing's rights all,” which suddenly burst out from such a situation—then we found what the ownership of rights is, a form of redundancy. Then a concept of “thing's rights” was introduced. Specifically, when you ask who this person is, one might reply, “I don't know, but he is ‘one of them.’” You always know that he is “one of them,” thing among things. What really came to us was a great, sometimes shock. I suddenly realized that we may not know what is creation.

Inga: Because Sarat talked about copyright and manufacturing yesterday, we actually were thinking quite a lot about it, and we came to one word related to that: “second-handed water.” We found it important to give attention to water, and the form we chose was to put water in different values of used bottles, and label them “Second-handed Water.” I think this touches on the question of copy or copyright. Yesterday's talk reminded us of this.

Gao: It also reminds me of your slogans “To Buy Is To Create,” and “Copying Is Power” in 1996.

Inga: “To Buy Is To Create” is in 1992, and we came to the Second-handed Water. In the 1990s many artists wanted to make a company, and actually Wu started very early his company, his Red Humor International. In this “water” one, we kind of copied. You know, in Germany at that time, and still you could buy water. Actually have to buy. If you do not buy, the water is not quite good, and people do not feel comfortable with it. In the restaurant, if you order normal water, it looks like you are poor, you don't have money. So we wanted to oppose this, but at that time, we still copied: manufacturing the water, selling the water. But it was not about that “copy industry;” it was more about “rights of things” and human.

Gao: It is very important to ask these questions. Now we can interpret the interaction between Wu and Inga and Duchamp. At least I personally did so, which might be wrong. But it is true that when I think of thing's rights, I suddenly think of Duchamp's approach to something. The most famous work is Fountain. He signed the name of the manufacturer rather than his own name. Many art historians have talked about this and given a lot of explanations, but for me, when he signed the manufacturer's name instead of Duchamp's name. He not only liberated the meaning of this thing. If it is an artwork, he signed Duchamp's name, it was Duchamp's work. This meaning has been locked in the art world and the art system. When he signed the name of manufacturer, “Mutt,” this thing became a product, that is, the transformation from a creation to a production. This product entered the field of large social production and social consumption. Its scene has completely changed. There is not only the liberation of author's rights, but also the liberation of ownership. When we understand the creative perspective of Fountain, we think of the work of Inga and Wu, and how they face a ready-made product. It can be seen as very violent to call a thing a ready-made product, so “thing's rights” is to overcome this violence. Here, I think Thing's Rights by Inga and Wu is a response to Duchamp and the attitude towards things in the past century beginning with Duchamp.

Maharaj: I think that's very interesting. It's important also. Inga and Wu's comments are fantastic. It's so interesting to see this kind of reading of Duchamp and thinking around it in terms of your own experience and your own work. But it's important to remember this big journey, from this wonderful drawing that Qiu Zhijie made. It's a big journey from this work to that work, from the openness to the kind of closure Duchamp sets. It's very important for us to see this journey of things and readymades. Duchamp's readymade is not just one thing. Many different phases in thinking about it, and it was always trying to renew the dark and dive. In this early phase, it's interesting to understand the readymades in one of his notes, one of the earliest notes: he says that the readymade is really such a rare event. It is something that happens when you have a thought in your mind as certain intellection. This is where I feel he was very influenced by negative theology in some of his thinking. You have an idea in your mind, but you haven't yet seen it. And then one day, you find the right object to which this idea corresponds, and then you inscribe the object with the date, time, and such and such.

So it's been ready-made in different ways. This is almost like a Zen event that finds the right object at the right time, and then rejects the inscription in it. So the inscription isn't what in the1980s becomes finding any object in shops and just putting your signature. It's a readymade that was used in this very open-new way, a different way from this early element, which was to some extent taken over by the surrealist kind of notion. The finding of objects is one thing, but Duchamp is speaking about “injecting.” He used the word “inscription,” “inscribing,” and “semantic inscribing.” You almost inject meaning into this object by this inscription you put on it.

Lu: Semantic. Sarat said that there is a semantic thing injected into readymades. The meaning is circulating, and the meaning is still in the composition of vocabulary and factors. Semantics is injected step by step, like an injection.

Maharaj: Yes. This is why I think that creative act in Duchamp's work is often seen in such erotic and sexual terms—not only from a male point of view, it's also from a female point of view. But if you just take the words “seminar,” “insemination,” “semantic,” and “semen,” you can see the relationship between this whole body of ideas that it has to do with. This moment we are sitting together is a moment of insemination, Derrida would say, where the passing of semen, we needn't associate it only with male semen. It's genderless in the sense. It can be gendered. It can be a male patriarchal seminar, so on and so forth. But for the moment we take it in its fullest sense as being beyond gender. Then you see how for Duchamp this is why the urinal isn't in its masculine position, but has been turned around into a de-gendered position.

I know that Qiu Zhijie has given us a penis drawing which the relationship with the object is vain. But it could be as much the female body and the female organ that we could have drawn of the venue, but still makes sense because of the way the urinate is placed—you can straddle it. Of course, again, it brings us lots of questions about the body and urination, and you know Jackson Pollock and Eastern ways of urinating, Western ways of urinating, all sorts of questions have been analyzed, as I tell you, in great detail, in long Ph. D thesis about this. We should bear this in mind as the way Duchamp opens up all these questions to us. But the sexuality, the fact that, I suppose that Qiu Zhijie has said this is sex and pornography. That's not untrue, I think to some extent, Duchamp is looking at a world that is far more closed about sex, and far more peephole view of sex, that you just saw it as if through a hole.

But maybe the fullest notions of creativity and artwork were brought out in Octavio Paz's famous essay on Duchamp in 1968. Octavio Paz was again reading from the Southern perspective, and came from Mexico. He was an ambassador to India and became very involved in the erotic art of India, the temple art: How come these temples have essential erotic figures, and relationship between the secret sexual and divine knowledge through the cultivation of sexuality and erotic feeling? Octavio Paz became very interested in that in India, and then did this essay on Marcel Duchamp, which is one of the most beautiful essays you could find because it's so beautifully constructed and so beautifully written. I would suggest that it would be interesting to read again in terms of our age of hardcore open sexuality all over the world compared to 1968 and 1969 when Octavio Paz viewed the work and based around sundry sex[T2] [Microsof3] . Sundry sex also interested Michel Foucault. Michel Foucault however said Eastern forms of sexuality have to do with duration. They are about constructing long periods of the gathering of sexual energy and building up of consciousness around sexuality. Whereas he said Western notions of sexuality in more recent times have become simply a momentary timed, clock-time basis of the sex act, and therefore have become part of the production system, this non-productive duration of sexuality.

So those are very important things for us to recuperate from Duchamp, and to bring back to light: Is the whole area of artificial insemination reducing sex to a kind of activity that is basically reproductive sexuality? We might ask is digital sex simply reducing sex to a matter of spectacle and representation? So what is left about with regard to bodied sexuality? Less and less experience anymore that is highly cultivated and durational in the way we find in the sex literature of China, Japan, and the famous Kama Sutra which is not about productive sex, but about creating these states of consciousness and body relationships. So maybe that's what the wonderful thing that comes out of the meaning of the word inscribe, with inseminating the readymade and giving it this particular kind of meaning at a particular moment. So I'm very interested in the way that you have extended the meanings around the question of the readymade, but certainly Duchamp himself would begin to see shifts in the way he thought about the readymade, until that last work. You know, very few people even knew that Duchamp was making this work, Étant donné, from the 1940s to 1968 when he died, so it was a secret work. Why did Duchamp make this work in secret? At that moment, he was involved a work that was going to be completely about closure, opacity, not transparency, but opacity. Why is that a value in our time?

Gao: Sarat, could you please talk more about Dadaist epistemology? Because Ursula, a friend of Inga and Wu, wrote a very beautiful sentence about their work, describing its anarchist structure, and I've “borrowed” it from Ursula's essay to use as the title of my own thesis on Inga and Wu. It's connected with Dadaist epistemology or methodology in thinking about Duchamp.

Maharaj: Yes, or in fact, the anti-methodology of Feyerabend. Paul Feyerabend was from Austria, and as a young man, he was forced to join the German Army for a short while. But he escaped and eventually ended up in England and became a famous philosopher of science. Towards the end of his life, when he was asked if he was fulfilled being a scientist, he said no, the thing was that all his life he really wanted to be an assistant to Brecht, but he was never able to get to that position, and that's why he came to science. However, you can see that it deeply influenced his notion of science: is there a fully rational method by which we can understand the phenomena of the world? That is the epistemological question that science was concerned with.

Great scientists and philosophers of science like Karl Popper, who from the 1930s on largely theorized the notion of the falsified ability of knowledge, and how propositions are put forward, how they have to be not verified but falsified. This is very complicated area of scientific debate, what counts as knowledge, what is knowledge, how can we prove it is knowledge? Against Popper's model of knowledge, we have Feyerabend saying no, knowledge is a much more chaotic affair, much more pieces, much more broken. It's not always this singular progress that we think it is. Knowledge goes forward, it goes backward, it jumps sideward, and we get pieces of knowledge, and therefore these pieces viewed attitude is like a collage. This collage is the montage mentality, is Dadaism, as a model for knowledge construction as opposed to the very linear composition based on the notion of rationality that Karl Popper had richly theorized.

So the Dadaist epistemology is questioning the dominant model of knowledge production based on this idea of knowing as a linear progress—we know more and more and more about the world. Dadaism reverses this process. It may also tie up with the idea that, I mean, I've therefore used the term and come on to develop it a bit more: Dadaist epistemics. In Sanskrit thinking in ancient Indian philosophy, knowledge is just as bad as ignorance. A lot of knowledge is when you know a lot about Duchamp but you've not got into Duchamp. You know a lot about art, but you haven't gone into the creative act. You can talk a lot about art, but you haven't experienced the art event. This for Indian philosophy is a very bad kind of knowledge. While you are only into the history, and as it were theory of philosophy, philosophizing as a direct search for enlightenment, in which the body experiences have totally enlightened. That is lost.

So in fact, the choices between a lot of knowledge and a lot of ignorance both are equal. What you really have to look for is non-knowledge, which in Sanskrit is avidya (ignorance). Avidya and vidya (knowledge) come from the same Sanskrit root vid, meaning “to know” or “to see.” This root is related to the Latin word “video.” In Latin, videre means “to see.” [Microsof4] This third moment is what Duchamp was talking about: it's not right to be an artist, it's not right to be an anti-artist. The right position is what he called to be a pan-artist. So it's the third way of knowing, the third position, that forms the second principle of Dadaist epistemics.

I think those two would be the critique of the rationalist view of knowledge accumulation based on the idea of capital accumulation. This is one model of knowledge, which has been questioned by Dadaist epistemics. Secondly, what is knowledge itself? Is it “I'm the knowledge center,” an all-knowing center in the way epistemic would be? Or is knowledge really in that sense just another form of ignorance, because you haven't gone through the processes of creating and producing knowledge, which is what this third position refers to? So I would leave it at these two principles.

Gao: Thank you very much! In addition, another topic that I am particularly interested in is Dadaist epistemology and the last paragraph of Ulysses, as well as the relationship with montage.

Maharaj: Well, watch the same way that you don't have the accumulation of story in Ulysses, it's 24 hours of embodied experience, and the last moment is the most intense experience. The very last moment that we arrive in the concluding section of Ulysses where Molly's famous orgasmic expression is the repeated word “yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.” That is the orgasmic “yes” in the moment of sexual enjoyment, of enlightenment, of completeness. This is the deities' view of sex, the temple erotic sculptures showed how enlightenment and orgasmic moments are very tied up together. That is the moment when time is embodied. That is the moment we enter into a totally different time space, and that has nothing to do with the way the world is ordered. So sexuality that is kept outside spirituality is a very Judaeo-Christian-Islamic monotheistic view of the expression.

The Asian view is that sexuality, body, spirituality, enlightenment are all part of one journey and one experience. For us, to bring that as a subject into the world is very difficult, because we live in a world of sexual censorship, largely given to us by the monotheistic religion. How to go beyond that? This is why Duchamp and Joyce are very important in the sense that Duchamp reverses to Sanskrit philosophy, Joyce's Ulysses is full of references to Sanskrit and Indian philosophy of sexuality of this kind. This model of sexuality and spirituality tied together would be one of the big answers to religious fundamentalism today. For religious fundamentalism today, if you read the last report of the suicide bombers who attacked the Twin Towers, one of the letters shows is: to what extent he found the body, found sexuality as absolutely unacceptable, considering them as the dirty side of life. Whereas within the Asian framework, it's not the dirt; it is from this body we have to begin a journey of experience and sense. You cannot treat sexuality as something you can cut out or block off, you cannot sweep it under the carpet. So maybe we need to rethink that in our politics that sexuality, enlightenment and spirituality function together in any model of society seeking a creative life. By creativity, we don't mean just this theistic creativity, but sexual creativity, body creativity, emotional creativity, mental creativity, and then of course the relationship between people who use this political creativity to.

I think that's how I try to answer that, but you must read the six “yeses” as Molly leads it. You must listen to some of the various recordings. Maybe you, as a class, would like to listen to the recording of James Joyce's last section of Ulysses. It's very beautiful to hear it read in an Irish voice, but also to listen to Molly's great celebration, her screech of joy—sexual joy—offer to the cosmos.

Gao: We can ask Chen Heng to lead the reading. He interprets it very well. Chen Heng has translated times for Sarat. His professor is the commentator of Ulysses of the Penguin version.

Thank you very much, Professor Sarat! In fact, I don't think Ulysses is a stream of consciousness novel. We all know that Eisenstein tried to “hit it off” with James Joyce to engage with the works of Karl Marx.

I think we are very lucky today. I often “envy” our students. I never had the chance to attend such a lecture when I was in school, and neither did Wu. Having a world-class scholar come to analyze these questions with you is a rare opportunity. Today, we saw Professor Qiu's interpretation of Duchamp from the perspective of sex. I disagree with this view because it reflects Duchamp's symptom rather than his pursuit of thinking. Second, we've heard Professor Sarat's explanation of Duchamp from the perspective of knowledge production and modes of production. It's somewhat reductive and carries certain risks, but as a summary, it is acceptable. Third, we've seen that the best artists use their own work to explain Duchamp's work, because history is always defined by a continuous cycle of return. It is very important for us to understand Wu and Inga through Duchamp, and likewise, to understand Duchamp through them. Then, for my personal work, which I hope to collaborate on with Professor Lu, our next step is to interpret the political economy of Duchamp. This is what Wu hinted at today: the intersection between Marx and Duchamp.

Lu: Let me briefly discuss this from a philosophical point of view. Alain Badiou has written extensively about Duchamp. There are mainly two points: one is that an artist's important demonstration should not enter the realms of theory or philosophy, but rather mathematics. Many of the things that Sarat just talked about were considered from the perspective of mathematics. For artists, this is relatively simple. We are often exhausted by complex theoretical concepts. This is the first point. Second, from Duchamp's perspective, Badiou believes that what artists can learn is to abandon their personal identity and historical traditions, which is very important. He believes that Romanticism should be completely abandoned. Duchamp firmly said “no” to Romanticism. These two positions are still very useful for contemporary Chinese artists.

Gao: By comparing the histories of literature and art, we can find a significant difference: the presence of Duchamp in the history of art. He divides art history into two distinct periods: before Duchamp, and after Duchamp. This is a miracle. To repeatedly interpret such a miracle is what Professor Sarat Maharaj suggested to us today. He recommended that we read Duchamp's notes once a year rather than relying on interpretation of Duchamp in the given art history. He reminded us that Duchamp's notes were not written in his notebook in a linear manner, but on various types of paper such as tickets, envelopes, invoices, and so on that he encountered in his life. I think it's extremely important. It means that he was not writing statements as planned, but his individual experiences, his entire thinking process, his knowledge production and art production are completely intertwined. He started at this level, which we should consider carefully. In addition, Sarat suggested that we read Ulysses once a year. This is his personal methodology. It is very important because we should not allow what are called classics to alter our field of perception.