There Will Be a Quiz: 1,200 coal bags suspended from the ceiling over a stove (1938)
Duchamp’s installation of empty canvas coal bags in a darkened exhibition space for the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme
Quick takes for slow pokes:
This is what art’s signature looks like hanging from a surrealist ceiling
& remember, most folks say surreal
when they really mean unreal
Don’t stumble walk underneath these unstable terms…
But wait, instead of coal it’s just hot air hitting canvas
Did appropriation artist Elaine Sturtevant’s 1973 replica
done from memory
include the full 1200 bags?
It’s a Proprioceptive Art: Sixteen Miles of String (1942)
For the NYC Surrealist exhibition, First Papers of Surrealism, Duchamp wound ordinary string tautly throughout the show’s space, floor to ceiling & wall to wall, where artworks were installed (making them tricky to approach). He thus “subverted the expectations of the exhibition viewer, this time with an intervention [approx. one to two miles of string, not actually sixteen] that interrupted the view across the space.”
More stumble walk, stutter stoop
or is it loop & hang yourself
tied up in threaded dread?
Marcel’s hosting a surrealist family intervention!
We’re flooding the zone, getting
in your face obfuscating the retina
They’s having to side-step, shuck & jive
bow & scrape at the D’s proprioceptive art
Our bodies tied to our eyes, chez la vision d’ Marcel
String theory never felt so stringy
Bloodied & Out of Vogue: Genre Allegory (George Washington) 1943
Vogue fashion magazine invited Duchamp to do an “Americana” cover for its Feb.,1943, issue.“Duchamp produced Genre Allegory, an assemblage of cut paper, cotton, nails, and gauz stained with iodine in a wooden box with a glass top. The central form is a visual pun that reads both as the right profie in silhouette of George Washington… and as a map of the United States turned on its side… [with its] clear reference to the American flag [with gold stars and red and white stripes on a blue ground… [but further that] since the iodine-stained gauz suggests blood wounds… [Duchamp] seemingly gave vent to his longstanding antimilitarism and distaste for patriotism. Vogue returned the work as unsuitable.” And says one critic, “it’s a star-studded map of the United States turned sideways. Duchamp constructred the nation out of gauz, leaving it puckered and stained, as though it were a patch set atop a festering wound.”
Your bloodied & unsuitable Geo Wash flag
gone out of vogue in a flash
He’s Not My President!
they chant at the current
malignant grifting version
Neither Excited States nor United Snakes
of A’murica here
for me or thee says Dee
And hey, more than just ‘turned’ on its
up∙side (whoopsie) downer
Bent like a blue note kinda sub-genre?
Using a lit word to lite a fire?
Stephen Bett is a widely and internationally published Canadian poet with 23 books and 6 chapbooks in print from Blazevox Books, Chax Press, Ekstasis Editions, Spuyten Duyvil, Thistledown Press, and several others. His work has also appeared as an Ebook (Argotist, UK) and in well over 200 literary journals in Canada, the U.S., England, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Croatia, Finland, and Turkey, as well as in eight anthologies, on radio, and on YouTube. His personal papers are archived for scholarly use at Simon Fraser University Library’s “Contemporary Literature Collection.” His website is StephenBett.com