DUCHAMPED

Information Nested Inside Information

A brief history of information processes in linguistics, visual arts, the universe, and how Marcel Duchamp helped art overcome its greatest existential threat with an impeccable joke called The Fountain.

The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message, as it were, unless it is used to spell out some verbal ad or name. This fact, characteristic of all media, means that the “content” of any medium is always another medium. The content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print, and print is the content of the telegraph. If it is asked, “What is the content of speech?” it is necessary to say, “It is an actual process of thought, which is in itself nonverbal. An abstract painting represents direct manifestation of creative thought processes as they might appear in computer designs. What we are considering here, however, are the psychic and social consequences of the designs or patterns as they amplify or accelerate existing processes. For the “message” of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs. The railway did not introduce movement or transportation or wheel or road into human society, but it accelerated and enlarged the scale of previous human functions, creating totally new kinds of cities and new kinds of work and leisure.”

Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man by Marshall McLuhan, 1964

Introduction

During my time at art school, Marcel Duchamp emerged early as a supervillain. When I found his work in my overpriced textbooks, I thought, “who’s this dude in drag painting mustaches on Mona Lisa and is that really art with a capital A?” Once I was able to wrap my head around Duchamp’s “work,” I was truly inspired, and to pay homage to Duchamp I have perverted his namesake to mean:

Duchamped

verb

present tense: duchamp

1. to steal

“I dare you to duchamp it, I double dare you to duchamp it.”

2. the act of appropriation for one’s own art

“I’m duchamping Hello Kitty for my next masterpiece”

For those with no previous knowledge of Marcel Duchamp, I must begin by introducing his acclaimed 1917 artwork The Fountain.

As the story goes, Marcel Duchamp infiltrated The Society of Independent Artists and engineered the terms of membership, thereby ensuring that any member of The Society was entitled to display their artwork, provided their fees were duly paid. Duchamp then proceeded to purchase a Bedfordshire urinal. He then wrote “R. Mutt” (French slang for Moneybags) upon the urinal and anonymously submitted it to The Society of Independent Artists Inaugural Exhibition. Imagine the uproar at The Society. Apparently, they debated the validity of the work and promptly hid it away, hoping to never see it again.

To understand my particular appreciation for The Fountain, consider art history as an evolving information process; nested within the historical continuum of humanity’s pursuits of knowledge, both are evolving information processes that are nested inside the universe and its historical continuum. Information processes are encoded and decoded information, similar to how an artist encodes their message into an art object and a viewer decodes, thereby interpreting the object’s meaning. Highbrows in the audience can insert semiotics here — semiotics is the scientific investigation of signs. The artist has an idea, the signified that they inject into their signifier, which constitutes a sign. Semioticians, such as linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, would explain it like so: there are two components to a sign or message — the signified and the signifier. A ‘signifier’ is the form that the sign takes, and the ‘signified’ is the concept it represents.

What makes The Fountain so very special is that Marcel Duchamp overcame art’s greatest existential threat and with an impeccable joke no less. With the advent of the daguerreotype, the first commercially successful photographic process, artists were promptly given notice that they needed to expand their services beyond painting allegories and replicating reality. Much like how robots take jobs from humans today, the camera presented eighteenth-century artists with a similar dilemma. While art has always made good use of allegory, the majority of art’s evolutionary development was to perfectly render visual information, as observed from one’s “point of view” into different storage mediums, such as painted canvases and marble sculptures. In response to the advent of commercially viable cameras, art spawned Impressionism and Fauvism, movements that provided artists with the opportunity to explore ideas and emotions through colour and line. Shortly after art found its freedom, Cubism crept onto the scene and completely collapsed the canvas in on itself. Marshall McLuhan notes in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man: ‘Cubism, by giving the inside and outside, the top, bottom, back, and front and the rest, in two dimensions, drops the illusion of perspective in favour of instant sensory awareness of the whole.’

And herein is art’s existential threat: art’s raison d’être was to render in perfect detail a “point of view” as observed through the human eye. This was upended by the camera, which did an impeccable job of recreating in great detail what the eyes see. And then by artists themselves with first with Impressionism by distorting reality like a kaleidoscope and then with Cubism which collapsed perspective space thereby revealing the surface of the canvas. Where was art’s evolutionary trajectory to go from here? What was to be art’s raison d’être? This was Duchamp’s genius.

Shortly after The Society of Independent Artists contradicted its governing rules and hid The Fountain out of sight, the following excerpt appeared in a pamphlet titled The Blind Man and summarized Duchamp’s intentions: “Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made The Fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that it’s useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view — created a new thought for that object.”

Information In The Universe

To appreciate Duchamp’s genius and how he was able to save art from its greatest existential threat, one must examine how human culture is nested or stored in the universe and as such, is an extension of a greater evolutionary process, specifically, information processing in the universe. Luckily, Ray Kurzweil’s book The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology provides an accessible overview of how information storage came to fruition in the evolutionary stages of the universe. The story starts with Epoch One: the organization of base units when physics and chemistry culminated into atoms, which occurred early in the universe’s historical continuum.

Epoch Two occurred with the rise of biology when atoms organized into DNA and RNA, which in turn produced genes and chromosomes, all of which propelled the evolution of biology.

Eventually, biology pushed on to Epoch Three when new functions and complexities developed, such as opposable thumbs, eyes, and the wondrous cerebral cortex. In Epoch Four, eyes and cerebral cortexes worked together with opposable thumbs to make cave paintings, manuscripts, sculptures, steam engines, cameras, televisions, cell phones, supercomputers, and the imaging hardware that now facilitates humanity’s ability to reverse engineer that which came before. Language also came to fruition in Epoch Four, which resulted in the interconnected network of human brains, an entirely new kind of universe for information and the shared knowledge of human culture to proliferate and evolve. I’ll leave you to explore Epoch Five and Six in this diagram below.

(If this subject is of interest, download The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology chapter one here. Alternatively, if videos are more your thing, see David Christian’s Ted Talk The History of Our World in 18 Minutes.)

Information In Art

With the understanding that human culture is nested, or stored, in the universe, and as such is an extension of a greater evolutionary process, let us review the historical continuums of art and linguistics to appreciate how developments in these fields led to art’s existential threat with the advent of the camera and set the stage for The Fountain, Duchamp’s impeccable joke.

Back at art school, before discovering Duchamp and his cheeky antics, I was making my way through early art history when I came across Barnett Newman’s 1947 essay The First Man Was an Artist. Newman theorized that the first man started reproducing his surroundings such as the trees, hills, and presumably the mates he was courting, by crafting lines in the mud with sticks. My impassioned art history professor introduced cave paintings followed by the widely celebrated Hellenistic Greeks and their impeccable carvings. Note the quality and storage of information that evolved in these early phases of art. The stick-in-mud-drawings produced by Newman’s first man were prone to rapid information degradation; a rainstorm would wash away these images leaving nothing days or months later. Cave paintings, however, were protected from the rain, thus adding significant information storage longevity. In contrast, the impeccably rendered scenes of the Hellenistic Greeks were produced in marble and on pottery and offered superior information integrity to cave paintings.

Forking From Art To Linguistics

To understand the next phase of art history and how art came to face its greatest existential threat, one must review information processes and storage in linguistics, again, the underlying information exchange framework that’s allowed human culture and shared knowledge to proliferate and evolve. The Hellenistic Greeks are a big part of human culture for a reason; they refined and enhanced the Phonetic alphabet. No discussion of the Hellenistic Greeks and the Phonetic alphabet would be complete without reference to The Mighty Marshall McLuhan, Canada’s quintessential philosopher. McLuhan’s work goes to great lengths to emphasize exactly how the Greeks and their use of the Phonetic alphabet put a lot of pressure on human eyeballs. The Greeks were originally an oral culture and information storage was maintained by saying or singing verses over and over again, and passing those verses down from generation to generation, by singing-saying those verses, old to young, young to old, over and over again. The primary storage medium for the pre-Phonetic Greek oral culture was the brain — quality flawed, victim of entropy and death. In contrast to brains, the Phonetic alphabet captured information in a tangible form; handwritten manuscripts written on papyrus with the idiosyncratic penmanship of the scribe. (Imagine a scribe who drank heavy, surely this would affect the quality of their penmanship and the resulting manuscript?) Papyrus manuscripts, much like cave paintings, provided greater information longevity than brains or mud drawings. With manuscripts, the Greeks transferred the stress of decoding information from their ears to their eyes. Consider how eyes bounce word to word, sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph, while brains decode the phonetic sounds into meaningful words, rendering the author’s voice. Further, when reading, the brain’s imagination produces supporting images and arguments as a splendid array of additional information cascades through the reader’s neural network.

Another Hellenistic Greek development that resulted from all that pressure the Phonetic alphabet put on their eyes was Euclidean geometry, which allowed The Greeks to render their visual “point of view” onto the surface plane with absolute accuracy.

(The Phoenicians, a seafaring people who established a complex trading system, needed an information storage framework to keep track of their money, so they stared writing and the Phonetic alphabet came to fruition. The Phoenicians invented the Phonetic alphabet and The Greeks duchamped it.)

Forking From Linguistics Back To Art

During the Renaissance, Euclidean geometry was first reintroduced by Italian architect Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446), as a means of rendering the recession of space on two-dimensional surfaces. And it looked great because we still talk about superstar Renaissance artists like Leonardo, Michelangelo, Rapheal, and Donatello, who took up the technique to produce their masterpieces. Those perfectly rendered Renaissance images transcoded significant volumes of information that could be rapidly decoded in split seconds through a viewer’s eyeballs and into their brain. For example, a painting of a slouched person with poor posture and a wrinkled face is universally decoded as an old, non-threatening individual. Conversely, a subject rendered youthful, tall, and muscular with thick lush hair, arms outstretched, palms facing up in a non-threatening manner would be perceived as powerful, trustworthy, strong, and persuasive. In the historical continuum of art, the use of Euclidean geometry represented an evolutionary leap in transcoding visual information by rendering perspective space with “point of view” that so closely resembled the human experience of seeing. Additionally, art’s information storage framework benefited greatly with this development. Instead of stick-in-the-mud-drawings, cave paintings, or impeccably realistic but heavy to carry sculptures, art was now rendering hyper-realistic and easy-to-carry paintings, that could be rolled up and popped onto the back of a horse for transport.

Linguistic And The Advent Of The Camera

While Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Donatello were working away on art’s historical continuum, rendering reality and allegory with Euclidean geometry, Johannes Gutenberg and his printing press came to fruition around 1440, dramatically propelling linguistics along its information processing and storage trajectory. The printing press, as The Mighty Marshall McLuhan highlighted, further standardized the Phonetic alphabet in mass-produced printed form: books, lots and lots of books, all perfectly rendered in uniform fonts.

(Why is uniform print important? Imagine you hear about the best book ever, you buy a copy, but it was written by that drunken scribe—this would make reading your copy painfully slow.) Further, the printing press dramatically reduced the cost to manufacture books, and thus knowledge was not only portable, uniform, and cheap, but if you could read, information was easier to acquire and consume, which dramatically raised the average intelligence of humanity.

With the proliferation of book reading, did the sequential nature of the Phonetic alphabet facilitate the development of the camera, a mechanical device that sees? McLuhan highlights that with the Phonetic alphabet, the brain eventually broke down everything into sequences (word to word, sentence to sentence, day after day, year after year, decade after decade). Did brains naturally deconstruct everything into sequences, including the very act of seeing? And wouldn’t this inevitably lead to the development of the camera?

Additionally insightful, McLuhan notes in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man that “Rational, of course, has for the west long meant ‘uniform and continuous and sequential.’ In other words, we have confused reason with literacy, and rationalism with a single technology.”

Evolving Information Processes

In all three instances—linguistics, art, and the universe—information processing and storage evolved. In the historical continuum of the universe, matter begot atoms, atoms begot DNA, RNA and genes, which in turn begot eyes and cerebral cortexes which gave rise to language.

In the historical continuum of linguistics, cerebral cortexes begot words, stories, songs that were stored in brains that died. Then cerebral cortexes begot manuscripts and the printing presses, which dramatically improved information storage.

In the historical continuum of art, there were stick-in-the-mud-drawings, cave paintings, realistic-but-heavy-to-carry-sculptures, hyper-realistic-easy-to-carry-paintings, and finally, Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre invented the first commercially viable camera, a simple way to make a picture, and art faced its existential threat.

Art’s Existential Threat

With the advent of the camera, art’s evolving information processing framework was complete. The camera renders in perfect detail exactly what eyeballs see. Newman’s The First Man Was an Artist traced art’s journey from the medium of mud to cave paintings—both poor storage mediums. Hellenistic Greek sculptors did an excellent job mimicking reality with their marble carvings, but try carrying a large stone bust—your back breaks. “These sculptures are bloody heavy,” Renaissance artists thought, and set to work mastering perspective space with Euclidean geometry on two-dimensional surfaces.

Their goal: to instantaneously communicate copious amounts of information in milliseconds, saving heaps on materials and production time. They could easily roll up their canvases for ease of transport. But what, Dearest Reader, did the advent of the camera mean for turn-of-the-century artists who made their bread and butter producing images of reality?

“The camera took our fucking jobs!”

To survive, artists reinvented themselves, creating new artistic practices such as Impressionism and Cubism, thereby freeing art from copying mere reality. And where-o-where was art to go? How could art continue to evolve and perpetuate its evolutionary trajectory of creating and storing information to expand beyond the camera, the canvas, and traditional mediums?

In Conclusion

To continue art’s evolutionary trajectory and expand the framework of art beyond the camera, the canvas, and traditional mediums, Duchamp pivoted to ideas — non-tangible abstract information. The Fountain’s allegory, as clearly outlined in The Blind Man pamphlet, is simple: The message or signified is the actual ‘act’ of creating a work of art, which Duchamp attached to the signifier, a urinal.

Duchamp’s genius was to employ toilet humor. The fact that The Fountain is a childish joke helped propagate it, like a virus infects a host and spreads across the interconnected network of brains that constitute humanity, which in turn propelled The Fountain to be the most influential work of modern art.

So, the next time you steal something, or remix Hello Kitty into your next artwork remember, you are not stealing, you are duchamping.