Other Andrew Otwell Art History papers

© Andrew Otwell, 1997

Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Conclusion
Illustrations
Bibliography

Chapter 4.

Kiesler's Theories and the Large Glass

The Kiesler Triptych represents a unique meeting of the ideas of the two artists. In 1913, Duchamp had written a note he included in the 1966 box of notes titled A l'Infinitif (an additional box of notes for the Large Glass project) that discussed the reflective glass of the shop window as a catalyst for a relationship between viewer and object. Kiesler's own writings on the Large Glass and his ideas about store window display came together in the View fold-out. Indeed he seems to have composed the Triptych so that the Large Glass itself stands in for a shop window, which "displays" to the viewer Duchamp and his work.

Kiesler's Triptych relates significantly to his theories about display. From his shop windows and stage designs for Juilliard in the 1930's to his designs for the Art of This Century gallery in 1942, through his work on exhibition design in the late 1940's, Kiesler's work is marked by a concern for the display of objects for an audience. Kiesler wrote throughout his life on issues of display and discussed them in his writings from the 1920's until his death in 1965.[1] Although Kiesler's own ideas were often esoteric, his goals were not: Kiesler shared the belief of many artists in the early decades of the century that good art could better society. He spent his life trying to find ways to display that art in the clearest possible way to the greatest number of viewers.

Held writes, "For Kiesler, art had a single purpose: the creation of a new world-image; that is, a balancing of the Technological, Natural, and Human environments which he perceived as unstable . . . ." Art would either show what these balanced environments would look like or would point out current imbalances and suggest solutions.[2] For example, Kiesler wrote in 1942 of his designs for the Art of This Century gallery that they would "dissolve the barrier and artificial duality of 'vision' and 'reality,' 'image' and 'environment' . . . [to produce a gallery where] there are no borders between art, space, and life."[3] As we shall see, Duchamp's studio in the Triptych was to be just such an example of a borderless space.

Kiesler was willing to use any available means or site to point out environmental imbalance and to suggest solutions. One of the earliest and most essential was in the area of commercial display, specifically in the department store window. Kiesler's ideas about shop window display, formulated in the late 1920's, are the basis for nearly all of his subsequent concepts and designs. In 1930, he published Contemporary Art Applied to the Store and Its Display.[4] The title is fairly self-explanatory: in the book Kiesler discussed the aspects of contemporary avant-garde art and architecture that he felt could be used profitably in department store merchandising. But the relationship was not merely an economic one. In keeping with his hopes to better mankind through modern art, Kiesler saw the department store as a valuable conduit through which to speak to the public. He titled an early chapter "Contemporary Art Reached the Masses Through the Store." In it he stated, "The department store . . . was the true introducer of modernism to the public at large. It revealed contemporary art to American commerce . . .[and] has been the interpreter for the populace of a new spirit in art."[5] Just as he hoped that his Art of This Century galleries twelve years later "promoted contracts between inanimate objects and people searching for the contact,"[6] the department store was an active agent in spreading the message of avant-garde art.[7]

Contemporary Art is more than a manifesto on art and society, though it certainly is that, with chapters such as "The Ideology of the Show-window." It is also a guide, with specific examples of Kiesler's and others' work, for how to set up effective merchandise displays in a department store. Lisa Phillips has noted that Contemporary Art's review of European art and architectural styles of the previous twenty years was invaluable to American artists. The book was also a display of the works of the members of the American Union of Decorative Artists and Craftsmen (AUDAC) which Kiesler helped found. AUDAC was "committed to progress through industry and promoted the new discipline of industrial design in America . . . ."[8] In the book, Kiesler discussed principles of design--adapted from his European theater work--in his job as window designer for Saks Fifth Avenue from 1928 to 1930 (see fig. 45). Though less extensive than Kiesler's writings, Duchamp's own ideas about shop windows appear in his notes for the Large Glass. An understanding of the ideas of both is crucial to an analysis of the Duchamp Triptych.

Kiesler begins Contemporary Art Applied to the Store and Its Display with the statement, "The book was written . . . because the store window is a silent loudspeaker."[9] To Kiesler, the window is an active agent in the process of selling commodities: "After the passerby has halted, the silent window has a duty: to talk, to demonstrate. To Explain. In short: to sell."[10] Kiesler was never an artist driven by profit margins or monetary success. His desire to sell merchandise is not at all at odds with the loftier goals of the rest of his ideas. To Kiesler, the movement of commodities, which begins when a store display catches the eye of a consumer, was the basis not only for building businesses and driving innovation, but for changing needs on an individual level. Kiesler, through architecture and display, hoped to change the lives of those who came in contact with his work. Part of that change involved pointing out, through art, where the "imbalances" in man's world existed and how to correct that balance. Kiesler writes in Contemporary Art, in a set of statements that reads like a geometry proof:

What makes people purchase?

Real and artificially stimulated needs.

Usually artificial needs become genuine needs.

Habit asserts itself and makes them vital.

This is the joint work of artists, scientists, and business men.[11]

The window, as "the most direct method of contact . . . [and] a modern method of communication," was the agent that affected these changes to consumers' needs.[12] Here Kiesler adds businessmen to the people--artists and scientists--whom he believed contributed to progress in modern life. The savvy businessman could drive change no less effectively than technological innovation, though his motives had to be good. "Development of industry for industry's sake," Kiesler wrote in 1939, "is worse than art for art's sake."[13]

Kiesler surely considered himself a scientist as much as artist; portions of Contemporary Art deal with the use of "scientific research" in design. He would later head the Laboratory for Design Correlation at Columbia University's School of Architecture from 1937 to 1942.[14] During that period, he produced a series of articles on "Design - Correlation" for Architectural Record magazine which explored his new ideas and analyses. In some ways, Kiesler may have seen himself as a sort of businessman, as well, "selling" the value of art to the American public. Kiesler even noted that "window and store decoration has grown to be a science and an art."[15]The display manager of a store was himself an artist who "has to paint the picture for the public. His canvas is space, his pigments merchandise and decoration, his brushes light and shadow."[16]

Kiesler's statements on "needs" and the role of the window bear comparison to Duchamp's writings on the same subject. Although his writings on windows are essentially contained in a single note dated "Neuilly, 1913" from A l'Infinitif, there can be no question that they played a large role in his thoughts about The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even. His A l'Infinitif note reads:

The question of shop windows [therefore]

To undergo the interrogation of shop windows [therefore]

The exigency of the shop window [therefore]

The shop window proof of the existence of the outside world [therefore]

When one undergoes the examination of the shop window, one also pronounces one's own sentence. In fact, one's choice is "round trip." From the demands of shop windows, from the inevitable response to shop windows, my choice is determined. No obstinacy, ad absurdum, of hiding the coition through a glass pane with one or many objects of the shop window. The penalty consists in cutting the pane and in feeling regret as soon as possession is consummated. Q.E.D.[17]

Duchamp's note exhibits some striking similarities to Kiesler's ideas about shop windows.[18] First, the window is an active agent to both. For Duchamp, the window "interrogates," "examines," and "demands" a response from the potential consumer. While Kiesler's window more gently "talks," "demonstrates," and "explains," it too acts on the viewer. Although Duchamp may have chosen to stop before the shop window, his response to it once engaged is inevitable. He is seduced by its properties into a "coition through a glass pane" with the merchandise behind it. For Duchamp, much of the appeal of the window may have been due to its reflective properties. Like mirrors, reflective glass surfaces give the illusion of a three-dimensional world on a two dimensional surface, a property he discusses in many of the A l'Infinitif notes.

There can be no doubt that Duchamp was still very interested in the properties of shop windows and display in 1945. In April of that year, he collaborated with Breton to design a window display at Brentano's bookstore on Fifth Avenue for Breton's new book Arcane 17.[19] This installation (fig. 18), also called "Lazy Hardware" after part of an aphorism by Duchamp he had used as a title, included a nude headless mannequin and the wine bottle from the View cover.[20] Charles Stuckey has analyzed this display and concluded that its sexual overtones--the viewer's head is at the level of the mannequin's crotch, and I would add that a wine bottle at the display's base points to the same place--relate to Duchamp's 1913 note.[21]

A crucial difference between Duchamp and Kiesler is that Kiesler is concerned with putting the store's merchandise (literally) in the best light. Though he titled a brief manuscript "Merchandise that Puts You on the Spot," the window is in general a helpful agent of sales and the goal is to cause a passerby to stop, look, and happily purchase. For Duchamp, the reverse is true. Purchase of the objects behind the window results in the "penalty" of regret. This regret is inevitable, suggesting that Duchamp is interested in the contemplation of, and not the result of, the purchase. Like the frustrated actions of the Bachelors in the Large Glass, the anticipation of gratification is far more satisfying and energizing than the end itself. The sexual component of Duchamp's note is quite significant in the context of the Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even.[22] It is fundamentally different from Kiesler's innocent suggestion, "Why doesn't the window hold instead of a display--a play? A stage play--where Mr. Hat and Miss Glove are partners. The window is a veritable peepshow stage."[23]

I suggest that the reader view the View Triptych as if the Large Glass (fig.1) were the glass front of a roughly box-shaped window display (with street traffic and crowds bustling around on all sides). The perspective of the left and right panels emulates the view one has of interior walls seen through a window. By recognizing the overlaid Large Glass as a shop window in the View Triptych, we can see many of Kiesler's ideas at work. Kiesler's understanding of the Large Glass, perhaps influenced by Duchamp, places it in the position of "active agent" between the "merchandise" of Duchamp and his studio and the viewer. In short, the Large Glass is the "silent loudspeaker" that provides contact between contemporary art and an audience. To Kiesler, this would be an effective and clear way of presenting Duchamp to the public. The fold-out was a display of the avant-garde in a magazine that, in assistant editor Parker Tyler's words, sought to establish a "popular front" in the avant-garde.[24] To understand how Kiesler constructs this relationship, we can examine the display techniques he discusses in Contemporary Art Applied to the Store and Its Display. Despite the fifteen year gap between the publication of the book and the appearance of the Triptych, there can be little doubt that the ideas contained in Contemporary Art were the basis for Kiesler's later works.

Kiesler begins the section on "Conceiving the Show Window" with the advice to a designer that "in conceiving a window you must remember: merchandise first, decoration afterwards."[25] He details how the store front must be stripped of its needless distractions, including framing elements, so as to focus on the merchandise behind the glass. In a related manuscript, he reminds the display manager to "consider the proportions of a show window frame. Here alone a great effect can be achieved . . . . when choosing the proportions for a window, avoid one thing - the normal."[26] In the Triptych Kiesler has carefully avoided anything that would contain the panels visually. He sets the Triptych against wavy background lines that overlap the Triptych on the left panel, further confusing its outer boundaries. These lines also suggest an indeterminate location for the composition and emphasize the "continuity" between art and its environment more effectively than cropping the pages to fit the photos would have done.

By doing away with a frame for the work, Kiesler allows its composition to focus the viewer's attention on its contents. In Contemporary Art he discusses using the shape of the display to augment this emphasis. The window designer should use asymmetry in windows to create "mobile and kinetic" rhythm. He cautions, however, that "because of the asymmetry which characterizes practically every modern creation in the arts, focusing the gaze of the spectator on the mathematical center is wrong." He suggests that to avoid this the "inflexible sides become flexible," just as they have in the Triptych.

By moving one or both sides towards the center you diminish the size of the window but increase its effectiveness . . . . This kind of window can have sides that are curved, square, or flat . . . . The plan is variable, but no matter how treated, gives you two side wings and a flat open space towards the center . . .[where] a figure might stand contrasting with the background.[27]

At the risk of overestimating visual associations separated by fifteen years, I would suggest that Kiesler has habitually followed his own instructions closely in the Triptych, even going so far as to arrange the outer "wings" and to include a figure. He has manipulated the photos of the square enclosure of the studio in such a way that perspective changes in a single panel. This is evident in the right panel (fig. 33) in the area just above the cut-out flap, where the photos are arranged to make the windows curve towards the center and twist towards the picture plane. However, the center part of the right panel is not manipulated and remains at a more direct angle.

Other window design techniques appear. Kiesler offered advice in Contemporary Art on using multiple floor levels in a display. The result of manipulating the walls and floors is to give "different depths and different backgrounds in one display . . . . These varying depths are very desirable in a display in which many different kinds of merchandise are introduced." The montage of photos that comprise the left panel of the Triptych are less manipulated than those on the right. The effect though, is that the space seems oddly deep and the far wall indeterminate. Here, the focus is on the various levels of the bookcase, the contents of which are easily read. Further, Held has characterized Kiesler's overall design aesthetic as based on polarization, and suggests that disparate elements in a composition served to emphasize a chosen point in it.[28] Perhaps the photographic negative of the left panel exists to balance the positive images of the rest of the composition.

An additional element leads me to believe that the Triptych is meant to suggest a display window with the Large Glass at its front. Kiesler observes in the text that accompanies "Les Larves d'Imagie" that "The 2 flaps when locked assume the image of the 'livreur de grand magasin,' one of the moules malic" (see #11b on Hamilton diagram, fig. 2). In his notes, Duchamp assigned identities to each of the original eight Malic Molds that first appeared in the 1913 drawing Cimitère des uniformes et livrées (no. 1) The "livreur de grand magasin" is the only one of the nine that carries a store-related identity. Kiesler clearly chose the shape of the cut-outs carefully, with the intention of cementing the association with shop windows.

"Design - Correlation:" Kiesler and the Large Glass in 1937

Kiesler had published an elaborate interpretation of the Large Glass in 1937. The work served as the focus of one of Kiesler's series of "Design - Correlation" articles for Architectural Record.[29] Landis as well as Gough-Cooper and Caumont have discussed this article, and the question of craft in the artists' aesthetics.[30] Although Landis does not specifically discuss the "Les Larves d'Imagie," these authors conclude that Kiesler was interested in Duchamp's craftsman-like approach to his work. Kiesler wrote the article before he had examined the notes in the Green Box, and it may reflect issues in his aesthetic that became less important after the 1930's. In the article, Kiesler points out connections in the Large Glass to higher geometries which, coupled with a friendship with Duchamp, may have spurred his own interest in related subjects in the 1940's and later.

Kiesler and the photographer Berenice Abbott visited the Milford, Connecticut home of Katherine Dreier in the early part of 1937. Dreier owned the Large Glass at this time; photographs show that it was installed in her living room near Duchamp's last painting Tu'm, which she had commissioned him to paint in 1918. Abbott's photos of the Large Glass from this visit, which illustrated Kiesler's "Design-Correlation" article, are striking (see fig. 52). They incorporate dramatic backgrounds or view the work from behind in raking light. One image turns the Large Glass on its side, making the Oculist Witnesses seem to hover in a bright sky over a dark landscape.

Kiesler's intention in the "Design - Correlation" series, as in Contemporary Art Applied to the Store and Its Display, was to introduce to the readers of Architectural Record the technical possibilities suggested by various art and crafts. "Industry," he wrote in August 1937, "will gradually adopt the progress made by the avant-garde."[31] Often visionary in tone, his articles often seem out of place among straightforward articles on new brick-making compounds or the latest institutional buildings. For example, Kiesler's pair of articles on the history of photography included the prediction that television would one day be used as an integral part of the architecture of the future. In one, he suggested the unconventional idea of finding inspiration in the series of accidents, intuitions, and chance discoveries that had made photography possible.[32]

In the Large Glass article, Kiesler set out to detail some of the technical innovations Duchamp had made in the work's construction. He called it "nothing short of being the masterpiece of he first quarter of the twentieth century. It is architecture, sculpture, and painting in ONE." Many of Kiesler's observations, based on his study of the Large Glass in Dreier's house, are quite insightful. He notes,

The glass plate cracked [in] 1931, cutting strokes across the pane that would have broken any other composition, but not the singular masterpiece of tectonic integration. Strange for the factualist is the magic of subconscious creation with which the outburst of broken glass-streaks which now veins the whole picture was anticipated by Marcel Duchamp . . . . it seems to me that not until the breakage had actually occurred was the cycle of the subconscious image with its realization completed, and the time right to give its message to the public.

This statement ties the "artistic" and technical achievements of the Large Glass to each other. Because the glass was broken, yet held together, the Large Glass not only exists to "give its message to the public" but can be admired for its "tectonic integration," and its structural soundness.[33]

Kiesler also investigates Duchamp's methods. He writes, "We look at it not to interpret its bio-plastic exposition of the upper half of the picture or of the mechanomanic lower part; such physio and psychoanalysis will be readily found here and there, now and later - but I bring to the technicians of design-realization the teaching of its techniques."[34] Kiesler clearly had some idea about the Large Glass's mechanical vision of the sexual relationship, but chooses to analyze its construction. Landis suggests that Kiesler's avoidance of the sexual theme, which had been articulated by Breton in the 1934 "Phare de la mariée, indicates his privileging the work's technique over its content.[35]

Kiesler suggested that the smart designer or architect could find in the Large Glass an

outstanding (tectonic) achievement in its new joint-design. The ligaments of steel-or-what-not, single or double spaced, wires that are used, instead of paint strokes, for contourings . . . create precise form articulation . . . . The structural way of painting is Duchamp's invention.[36]

Kiesler then compares Duchamp's construction methods to the stained glass window techniques of the middle ages, an analogy he had made visually in the photo montage on the first page of the article (fig. 46). He points out that the lead wire outlines in both look similar to the veins and stem of a leaf, perhaps implying their natural appearance. Finally, on the last page of his article, Kiesler shows examples of the use of glass in industry.

Kiesler suggests an additional aspect of the Large Glass. Kiesler's first statement in the Architectural Record article, which appears in a caption above the Large Glass and adjacent to the title reads: "Architecture is control of space. An Easel-painting is illusion of Space-Reality. Duchamp's Glass is the first x-ray painting of space."[37] Further, Kiesler wrote: "To create such an X-ray painting of space, materiae [sic] and psychic, one needs as a lens (a) oneself, well focused and dusted off, (b) the subconscious as camera obscura, (c) a super-consciousness as sensitizer, and (d) the clash of this trinity to illuminate the scene."[38] Duchamp's unique position as both artist and scientist was necessary to produce the work. Here Kiesler describes him as both as an objective observer--a lens and a camera--and as having a sensitive creative faculty or "super-consciousness." As Linda Henderson has shown, x-rays and other newly discovered invisible rays had been widely popularized by the turn of the century.[39] As a member of the European avant-garde Kiesler--like Duchamp, the painter Frantisek Kupka, and the Cubists--was clearly well acquainted with these concepts through popular literature. He mentioned their significance in July 1937 in an article on the history of photography.[40]

Kiesler's connection of architecture, easel painting, and the concept of "space-reality" suggests that he had some understanding of discussions of higher dimensions that many artists shared in the 1910's, and which by the 1920's incorporated the new theme of "space-time" from Relativity Theory.[41] It is likely that his association beginning in 1923 with the De Stijl group and its leader Theo Van Doesburg exposed him to these ideas. Kiesler was an official member of the De Stijl group, and contributed to its journal, De Stijl.[42] Van Doesburg's ideas may have reinforced for Kiesler the importance of the unification of the arts under architecture.[43] An article van Doesburg published in 1924 listed sixteen points about new directions architecture should take. Van Doesburg wrote, in part:

10. TIME AND SPACE.- The new architecture takes account not only of space but also of time as an architectural value. The unity of space and time gives architectural vision a more complete aspect. 11. THE PLASTIC ASPECT is obtained by the fourth dimension of space time. . . . 15. COLOR. . . . with the birth of modern architecture the painter-constructor found his true field of creative action. He organizes color aesthetically in space-time and makes a new dimension visible plastically. . . ."[44]

These points sound not dissimilar to Kiesler's ideas of the 1930's, and the titles of his Endless Theater and Endless House-- projects that occupied him from the 1920's through the 1950's--also imply a conflation of space and time in his work.[45] He told an interviewer in 1961 that "the atmosphere has gotten thick with space bullets, and people are again--finally--interested in the Endless [House and Theater projects]. The push came as nuclear science, fission, fusion, and satellites unexpectedly rocketed everybody's imagination into outer space and suddenly made the Endless a natural."[46] His statement, which casually links his work with nuclear science and the space age, suggests a familiarity with current scientific developments, though not greater than that of many intelligent people at the time. He seems to have been interested in concepts of space and time primarily because they seemed to reinforce his own theories of continuity and endlessness.[47]

In the same 1961 interview Kiesler had stated, "When the first space-niks were shot into the void of night and remained in space, this was a shock. Now our whole existence becomes more and more related to everything around us, unavoidably correlated to the fate of our solar system, or at least part of a mighty super galaxy."[48] However, in general Kiesler's writings do not demonstrate a deep interest in higher geometries or in Relativity Theory. His own engagement with these concepts may have been similar to that of another artist: Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. Henderson has characterized Moholy-Nagy in this way:

Although Moholy-Nagy was never deeply concerned with the fourth dimension or Relativity Theory, his publications, along with those of his disciple[s]. . . . stand as classic statements of the generalized 'space-time philosophy' which was the final product of the interaction of art and Relativity in the 1920's. Expressing a dynamic vision of modern art and an optimistic belief that good design could improve society, these books regularly included a reference to 'space-time.'[49]

Kiesler, like Moholy-Nagy, reached artistic maturity after the concepts of higher dimensions in art had been largely incorporated into the avant-garde, and were now given a new inflection by superficial references to Einstein's complex theories. These issues appear in Kiesler's writings and art, though he seems not have felt the need to study them in depth.

Kiesler was surely also aware of the renewed interest in higher dimensions as well as non-Euclidian geometry among Breton and the Surrealists.[50] Their common interests in these subjects may have been a factor in collaborations between Kiesler and the Surrealists. As Henderson has pointed out, André Breton was interested in Relativity Theory both because it expanded upon earlier understandings of the fourth dimension that had been important to Cubism and because it contributed to the dismantling that he endorsed of traditional ideas about reality.[51] In an essay in 1939, Breton cited the painters Matta and Gordon Onslow Ford as artists using automatic painting techniques to depict higher dimensions of space.[52] Henderson notes the titles of Yves Tanguy's The Meeting of Parallels (1935) and Max Ernst's Young Man Intrigued by the Flight of a Non-Euclidian Fly (1942) as examples of this interest among the Surrealist artists.[53] Kiesler's own somewhat mystical ideas about cosmic "endlessness" and space-time may have had more in common with Surrealism than with De Stijl's scientific approach. This difference may have also caused friction between Kiesler and Duchamp who had no interest in proving, as Kiesler did, that everything was "part of a mighty super galaxy."

Aspects of Kiesler's work refer to what Henderson calls a common "generalized 'space-time philosophy.'" In his 1937 "Design-Correlation" article on the Large Glass Kiesler is concerned with the architectural use of windows.[54] He introduces the Large Glass here not for strictly commercial purposes, but because "glass is the only material in the building industry which expresses surface-and-space at the same time . . . . It satisfies what we need as contemporary designers and builders: an inclosure [sic] that is space in itself, an inclosure that divides and at the same time links."[55] Though, again, Kiesler had not read Duchamp's notes by May 1937, these observations about the properties of glass are similar to some notes Duchamp published much later in A l'Infinitif. Duchamp had written, in notes dated 1913-1915, about using mirrors or reflective glass panes to depict real three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface. This image is simultaneously real--in its accurate visual recreation of three-dimensional reality--and an illusion. Duchamp further extrapolated that a four-dimensional object could therefore be depicted on a three-dimensional surface. According to the notes, the Large Glass may be an attempt at depicting four dimensions.[56] If Kiesler did have a general understanding of higher dimensions, as his writings suggest, his concern with the properties of glass to denote surface and space may have led him to observe in the Large Glass some of the work's most important aspects.

Duchamp responded to Kiesler's article with a brief letter that expressed his pleasure with it:

What a surprise you gave me! It gave me very great pleasure to read your article . . . first the spirit of the article, then your reinterpretation and the presentation of your ideas! Thank you for having wanted to look at the glass with such attention and to clarify points that few people know about . . . . I am sending you a copy [of the Green Box] by the next post, hoping that in glancing through it you will see how right you are.[57]

Landis discusses this letter in her chapter on Duchamp and Kiesler. She believes that the two were friendly rivals who, during the 1940's participated in an unspoken series of statements and responses in their works and exhibition designs. She examines this rivalry in her analysis of Duchamp's last work, Etant donnés: 1. la chute d'eu, 2. le gaz d'éclairage, as "a thoroughly Duchampian response to the particular aesthetic and design innovations of Frederick Kiesler."[58]Landis believes that Duchamp based Etant donnés in part on Kiesler's display theories, filtered through his own unique, craftsman-like approach to art and science.[59]

A discussion of Etant donnés is not germane to this thesis, though Landis is correct that Duchamp certainly found some new inspiration for his early paintings and the Large Glass during a Munich trip in 1912 that was very different from the training he had received in France.[60] In Munich, Duchamp may have come into contact with what Landis calls the "'craft' side of modern art," that German designers had produced. After his return to France, he began to fashion himself as a kind of scientist and inventor as well as an artist. Linda Henderson sees this, and his increasing interest in new developments in science and four- dimensional and non-Euclidian geometries, as part of a declaration of his difference from (and indifference to) the Parisian art world. The interest in science led Duchamp, around 1913, to a unique machine aesthetic that would be shared with his friend Francis Picabia. This new aesthetic led directly to the creation of the Large Glass.

In the 1920's, Duchamp combined his interest in science with his interest in design and actually established himself as an engineer, constructing the optical machines Rotary Plates (Precision Optics) and the Rotary Demisphere. Even in the 1940's his interest in maintaining an identity as both artist and inventor was strong. Kiesler picked up on this identity, calling Duchamp an "artiste/ inventeur" and placing him, as Henderson points out, not in an artist's studio with paint and easels, but in the studio of a "tinkerer" surrounded by projects.[61] The artist told Pierre Cabanne in 1967 that "those who make things on a canvas, with a frame, they're called artists. Formerly, they were called craftsmen, a term I prefer."[62]

There is no question that Kiesler would have admired Duchamp's interests and abilities in science and invention. After all, Kiesler saw himself as both artist and scientist, too. His Laboratory for Design-Correlation at Columbia not only taught design, but performed studies on sensory perception, including the theorization of a "vision machine." Kiesler's own background included study at the Weiner Technischen Hoschule and the Akademie de Bildenden Künste. Landis concludes, "Kiesler was the product of that particularly German fusion of a machine aesthetic with an arts and crafts movement that characterized such institutions as the Wiener Werkstätte and the Deutsche Werkbund, and the ideological innovations to which Duchamp may well have responded during his visit to Munich in 1912."[63]

Certainly, the two artists used those similar interests differently. Whereas Duchamp used the machine as a metaphor for clumsy, repetitive, and frustrated human relations, Kiesler embraced the potential benefits of the man / machine relationship. He had demonstrated this view already in 1923 in one of his early stage sets for Karl Capek's R.U.R. Though the play was a warning about the increasing role of machinery in the world, Kiesler's set (fig. 47) was "full of admiration for a technology that functioned with precision . . . . Kiesler's 'electromechanical' set was a huge montage, compiled from the most diverse apparatuses and machine parts (megaphone, seismograph, tanagra device, iris diagram, light bulb) . . . ."[64] Despite the message of the play, Kiesler reveled in the possibilities of machines to expedite social change through communication, innovation, and increased knowledge.[65]

Even in the 1930's, Kiesler felt that craft and construction techniques were critical to art. He wrote in 1937, just months before his article on the Large Glass, that "many painters might object to being called handicraftsmen because they feel as though they were the aristocrats of the order of fine arts . . . . craftsmen and technicians know that the technique of the work is its final expression."[66] Kiesler emphasized the technique and craft in the Large Glass in his "Design - Correlation" article in order to share it with other designers. These technical aspects of the work, as Landis suggests, were some of the "points that few people have understood" Duchamp thanked Kiesler for noticing.[67] By the 1940's, however, craft played a much smaller role in Kiesler's aesthetic.

In fact, issues of craft and technical matters play no significant role in the View Triptych, beyond the portrayal of Duchamp as an "artiste-inventeur" surrounded by projects.[68] By contrast, Peter Lindamood's short essay "I Cover the Cover" describes Duchamp's laborious trial-and-error method of producing the smoking bottle and starry night background for his cover design (fig. 3).[69] It is likely that Duchamp also recognized Kiesler's brief mentions of higher geometries as "points that few people know about."[70] Though Kiesler was not as engaged with these issues as Duchamp, in the later 1940's Kiesler was to become more interested in "environments" of correlation between art, architecture, and space that seem analogous to Duchamp's ideas about higher dimensions. If their friendship did include a subtle reciprocal exchange of ideas, Duchamp's interests may have found their way into this important aspect of Kiesler's art after the View project.

Kiesler and "Environments"

In the Triptych, Kiesler presents Duchamp and his work as unified, even overlapping, and existing wholly within the studio. Clearly, the architecture of the studio, isolated from the crowds and traffic of the outside world and shaped by Kiesler's montage, has become part of that correlation of man, art, and environment. Always the careful window designer, Kiesler has even adjusted the space of the studio by manipulating perspective and inserting objects into it. This cements the visual correlations between objects and controls the space of the room.

Ultimately, the "shop-window" scheme may be a visual metaphor for a concept important to Kiesler in the 1940's: that of the constructed "environment" for art. "Environments" are related to Kiesler's general theories about the natural and artificial environments that make up the world. Kiesler sought to create contained environments of total correlation between art, artist, and space in an architectural setting, as in his designs for the Art of This Century gallery.By the mid-1940's Kiesler began to realize the importance of the spectator in this equation. His work, including the View Triptych and other magazine pieces, often takes into account the participation of the reader by requiring her to physically manipulate the pages in some way. I suspect that his increased interest in the role of the spectator may have been due to Duchamp's own ideas on the subject.

Kiesler had been interested since the early 1920's in unified spaces for art making and art performance, for viewing and studying, and for living. He prefixed the titles of some of his works with the term "Endless" (as in the Endless Theater, Endless House, or Endless Sculpture) to denote that the work was intended to provide these many functions. Lisa Phillips has noted that many of his early theater designs were marked by kinetic movement of light and sets in what he described as a "living plastic reality."[71] This aspect of his work grew out of his exposure to similar ideas in the De Stijl and Constructivist movements, such as van Doesburg's 1926-28 Café Aubette in Strasbourg, a "cinema-dance hall" that combined architecture, murals, design, and film.[72] Other European movements also conceived of total environments, like Kurt Schwitters' "Merzbau" or El Lissitzky's "Proun Space." Kiesler's ongoing projects for the Endless Theater and Endless House explored for those categories of structures how design could improve life for the users of them.[73]

In the 1930's and 1940's, Kiesler began to recognize that the space between objects was as important as the objects themselves. He applied his concept that that universe was held together in correlation by continuous tension with renewed interest to his design work. He wrote later, "Isn't the dimensioning of space-distances, the exactitude of intervals, the physical nothingness which links the solid parts together so perfectly--isn't this the major device for translating nature's space-time continuity into man-made objects?"[74] Kiesler also began to explore the concept in paintings and sculptures, often also titled "Endless." The designs for the Art of This Century galleries are among the first of his attempts at expressing the importance of the space between objects. There, he brought paintings off the walls into the space of the viewer by attaching them to movable arms or setting them on pedestals that could be set in any of a number of positions.[75]

Kiesler's work took a new direction in the 1950's with his first attempts at painting, which he termed "Galaxies."[76] Although the first of these works appeared after the View Triptych, they are interesting examples of Kiesler's mature "environmental" art, and are related to his two gallery installations of 1947. The "Galaxies" were not single canvasses, but groups of paintings of several sizes that were intended to be installed as a group in a room or environment (fig. 48).[77] The artist wrote in 1952,

These galaxies . . . differ from 'paintings' in that they are not one painting but a group of several' and their distances are pre-fixed in relation to one another. While painting is an addition to space, a galaxy is an integration with space. Therefore, the intervals between the units of a galaxy are as important as the units themselves, particularly since those intervals flow in an connect with the surrounding area.[78]

Kiesler also wrote that "the power that binds these units together is not composition in perspective, but the observer."[79] The Triptych may be a bridge between Kiesler's displays of the 1930's and 1940's and his environmental work of the 1950's.

We have seen that the writings of both artists can lead to an interpretation of the View Triptych as a kind of "display" of Duchamp's work and life that is activated by the Large Glass as a window. The Large Glass/ window can elicit a kind of "dimensional jump" which allows it to, in Kiesler's words, denote "surface-and-space at the same time." Kiesler had written that glass walls can produce "an inclosure that is space in itself, an inclosure that divides and at the same time links."[80] The Large Glass, then, is the View reader's link to the space of the studio behind it. True, that the space is an illusory one with no physical depth in the flat pages of the magazine, but it is defined as symbolically real by the presence of the Large Glass as the point of entry into it.

The idea of moving between dimensions was still of great interest to Duchamp during the 1940's. He had developed the concept of "infra-thin" to conceptualize more clearly the infinitely thin barrier between dimensions. In notes published after his death, Duchamp defined "infra-thin" as many things: the infinitely thin area of contact between an object and its mold, the residual warmth left on a seat from a body sitting on it, the sound of pants legs rubbing together, or the smell of tobacco smoke left in a mouth after exhalation.[81] In fact, this last example appeared as the short text on the back cover of the Duchamp View, which suggests its importance to him in 1945 (fig. 3). Later that year, he told Denis de Rougement that the infra-thin was "une catégorie qui m'a beaucoup occupé depuis dix ans. Je crois que par l'infra-mince on peut passer de la deuxième à la troisième dimension."[82] Perhaps the Large Glass in the Triptych acts as a infra-thin barrier between regions, similar to Kiesler's conception of a glass that is "surface-and-space at the same time."

The increased degree of participation by a viewer is critical to the role of the Triptych in Kiesler's works. For the Large Glass to function as a window (or gateway) into the space/ dimension of the studio, the reader must manipulate the two cut-out flaps (fig. 34) This action is not merely closing and latching the two pieces, but also unlatching and opening them to reveal what is behind them. Kiesler had required similar work on the part of the readers of VVV in 1943. In issue number three of that magazine, he had recreated his display of Breton's Portrait of the Actor A.B.in His Memorable Role in 1713 in Art of This Century. In the gallery, the viewer looked into a wooden box and pulled a lever that opened an iris to reveal Breton's "poem-object." Kiesler includes a photo of the mechanism of this display unit in the VVV piece (see fig. 49). The VVV version of Breton's poem-object could be operated in a similar manner: the viewer spread two halves of a circular photo of the iris to reveal the image of Portrait of the Actor A.B. behind it (see figs. 49 and 50). Kiesler called the page an "Instrument to facilitate the co-reality of fact and vision, and specifically to demonstrate the transformation of visions into eidetic visions."[83] On the other side of the page, Kiesler provided a "correalist tool": an image of one of the pedestal/ chairs that he had designed for Art of This Century that could be rotated around a pivot, suggesting the varied uses for the object (fig. 41).

Kiesler's VVV piece was derived from his displays in the "Kinetic room" at Art of This Century. The artist had also designed several other displays that required the viewer's participation, including a sort of conveyor belt that passed works by Klee in front of the viewer, and the so-called "Paternoster" that rotated the small reproductions of works in Duchamp's Boîte-en-Valise past a peephole when the viewer turned a large wheel.[84] The Boîte-en-Valise (Box in a Valise) was a project Duchamp worked on in the late 1930's. Duchamp produced an edition of 320 Boîtes, which were "portable museums" of small replicas, photographs, and color reproductions of the artist's works that could be packed into a small case (fig. 19).[85] Kiesler disassembled a Boîte--itself a work that required viewer participation--and placed it in the rotating display. Kiesler's displays were not meant merely to engage otherwise inactive viewers, but to cause the spectator to become aware of "his own act of seeing, of receiving, as a participation in the creative process no less essential and direct than the artist's own."[86] The displays, Kiesler hoped, would force the viewer to contemplate her place in the correlation of space, art work, artist, and viewer.

The View Triptych, with its movable sections, is meant to affect the viewer no less strongly than the Art of This Century displays. The action of moving the pieces even suggests the creative act of "completing" the Large Glass. Further, the viewer is led to seek associations between the elements of the Large Glass and objects in the studio, another sort of "completion" of the Triptych that recalls Kiesler's statement that "an object doesn't live until it correlates."[87] Therefore, the action of the reader in searching for a correlation between, say, a hanging saw and the Pendu Femelle, does more than visually complete the work, it activates it and enlivens it. The viewer performs a creative act, literally bringing the Triptych to life by her mental effort.[88]

The Triptych appeared at a crucial moment for Kiesler's work between Art of This Century in 1942 and his "Galaxies" and gallery installations of 1947. The evolution of Kiesler's aesthetic in these years is significant: there is clearly a sense of an organic, dynamic whole apparent in the designs for "Blood Flames" that is not evident in Art of This Century. He elaborated on his ideas for Art of this Century in "Blood Flames" (fig. 42) and in Breton and Duchamp's plan for a "Salle de Superstition" in the 1947 Galerie Maeght exhibition (fig. 13).[89] The art works in the former, though displayed unconventionally, are presented as discrete objects in several separate rooms with different architectural schemes. In the two 1947 gallery shows, Kiesler began with a consideration of the overall dynamic of the installation and attempted to associate all the works with each other in a unified design. In each of the conceptions for the 1947 installations, the linear dynamic forms weave in and out of the physical space of the gallery (figs. 43 and 44). As in the Galaxies, Kiesler may have been trying to depict not a physical grouping of objects, but a mental one that he hoped would be activated by the spectator. The Triptych falls somewhere between the ideas of these years. Although like the 1947 installations Kiesler conceived it as a dynamic, unified environment, the list of works and montaged feel of it tends to emphasize individual elements, more like the Art of This Century gallery.

The participation of the spectator in completing the work of art was of interest to Duchamp in this period, too. His most notable comments on the role of the spectator appeared in the late 1950's and in interviews in the 1960's. These statements came during the time he was constructing Etant donnés in secret in his studio. "The Creative Act," a lecture Duchamp delivered at a meeting of the American Federation of Arts in 1957, includes his famous statement that "the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his own contribution to the creative act."[90] In an 1966 interview he asserted, "The artist's accomplishment is never the same as the viewer's interpretation . . . . A work of art is dependent on the explosion made by the onlooker."[91] Duchamp had certainly been interested in the role of the spectator long before these statements, though. His A regarder (l'autre coté du verre) d'un oeil, de près, pendant presque une heure (To Be Looked at,[From the Other Side of the Glass] With One Eye, Close To, For Almost an Hour of 1918 (fig. 20) implies from its title the presence of a viewer and specifies exactly how she should view the work.

Kiesler's and Duchamp's conceptions of the role of the spectator differ in subtle ways that suggest that Duchamp's last work was more than simply a response to Kiesler's ideas. Kiesler, even in the 1940's, was concerned that the viewer of art take from it some meaning; he continued to view art as a device that could point out imbalances in the universe, and that could suggest ways to correct them. He lamented in 1957, "We, as a public, have no inner contact with art. As a people we have lost connection outwardly as well as inwardly with art as it existed, for instance, in the time of the cave dweller . . . . There, art remains a part of everyday life, a ritual closely interwoven with fate."[92] In all of his work, from set design to shop window to magazine layout to Galaxial painting, Kiesler tried to entice the viewer into a consideration of the meanings of artworks. He could use the simulation of the "completion" of a work to accomplish this. Duchamp had no such beneficial social purpose to his works. His statements about the role of the spectator do not presume that there is a preexisting meaning to be drawn out of a work. Rather, the viewer completes a work "by deciphering and interpreting [a work's] inner qualifications and thus adds his own contribution [emphasis added]." The artist effectively abandons the work to the world, and although he may specify terms of viewing--as in A regarder or even in the carefully selected notes in the Green Box--he cannot presume an interpretation or even an acceptance of the work.

Chapter 3 Conclusion

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