…its moment the moment existence.
But how to get it?
How to get it?
I didn't have the resources to reproduce the electrical potential of that heartbeat on
an oscilloscope.
The vernacular, as it very often does, came to my rescue.
On my perambulations around the city, I noticed a bounding dot in a window, rotating, in a
pub, in the saloon or pub, or bar, advertising beers.
And there was this sort of surface, illuminated surface, and the bounding dot was produced
by rotating a cylindrical sleeve with a vertical slit behind an opaque outer cylinder inscribed
with a narrow transparent wave.
This allowed the light from central bulb to be seen as a dot of light traveling in a lazy
arc.
I had it.
I wanted to animate the first three leads, as I say.
I isolated them into three windows.
I needed, as I pointed out, the horizontal structure with the three windows.
And in those days, the sixties, Canal Street in lower Manhattan was Aladdin’s cave for
discarded hardware.
So I found, as I say, a beautiful spirit level with three windows.
I etched leads one and two – these are from various exhibitions – I etched leads one,
two, and three into the three circular windows in proper sequence linked by a calm horizontal
line.
I inserted it into a rectangular box with a neon bar behind.
I made a band with vertical slits which rotated with a motor.
And I will not forget my excitement when the heart began to beat, inscribing perfectly
the course traced on the electrocardiogram by Duchamp’s heart.
I had him alive and in my hand.
[Laughter] I mounted it on the wall at home and there it was beating away when people
came around.
Morton Feldman, my friend Morty, came around and watched through his thick lenses.
And then he closed his eyes and listened to its various squeaks as the motor rotated and
say ah, it's like Chinese opera.
[Laughter] And he offered, in his brilliant way, Morty did, three or four hypotheses on
the sound.
Then Bob Smithson, who I learned was more interested in Duchamp than he ever let on
to me because he was hard on the Dada people, he came and gave it his basilisk stare.
I think it annoyed him.
I showed the portrait of Marcel Duchamp at the Byron Gallery in my exhibition in 1966
with the drawings and cardiogram.
And I was in the gallery when Duchamp came.
He looked at this record of his own heart beating for some time.
And watching Duchamp watching his heartbeat was somewhat eerie.
He said nothing and neither did I. What was he thinking?
We never discussed his portrait, but when Barbara Novak met him in the street he would
inquire quite anxiously is it still beating?
Now, Duchamp was brilliant of course, like Joyce was brilliant as another superb brain.
And I believe that as a young man before he became a benign and very happy old man, he
was quite demonic in the way he assimilated and influenced people.
I said that to John Cage, and John was very – he didn't want to hear that.
He couldn't.
John thought his own kindness was shared by everybody.
But when I looked at him looking at his work, did he realize that its true existence would
begin when he had departed?
Implicit in the work was this necessary cruelty for, the young man I was then, that was a
work of presumption, perhaps of considerable presumption.
But I had enough sense to know that if you're going to run with the big dog, you better
win.
You better play for keeps.
I had turned Duchamp’s ongoing heartbeat into an artwork to be hung on the wall of
the gallery and museum.
If he insisted on his notion that any artwork on the institutional wall decayed into an
antique for the future, that idea ran full-tilt into his own heartbeat.
With each of the oscilloscope’s little tizzy, would his theories suffer a little death?
I felt a reasonable answer was yes.
Artworks exist in the present which relays them from moment to moment through the vicissitudes
of history.
I felt I had created the world that literalized that idea as moment to moment was paralleled
heartbeat by heartbeat.
But there were complications.
Who owned the heartbeat?
I had recorded it, yes, but only he could produce it.
Was it a ready-made made by Duchamp, made by his heart, an involuntary ready-made?
I had a denoted an artwork just as he had named secular, casual objects from the quotidian
world artworks.
Now as I thought about it, I was on the street where there was a heavy traffic in ironies.
I had appropriated his heartbeat.
Had I stolen it on some primitive level?
Had I eaten his heart?
He had used me to make him, rather his vital faculty, immortal.
How much of his identity resided in this electronic record and how much of mine?
Was my method too clever?
Was it his work or was it mine?
Could I refute my refutation?
Could he refute my refutation?
I had to go further.
The following year, I made two other oscilloscopes showing only lead one.
And counting his heartbeat on the cardiogram, I got his resting heart rate.
So one oscilloscope showed his resting heartbeat.
Boom, boom, boom.
I think it was about 70.
I don't remember exactly.
That was simple enough.
The other oscilloscope on the right was more dangerous.
I found a slow motor on Canal Street that retarded his heartbeat to about seven beats
a minute.
The blue whale’s heart beats six beats a minute.
So I was taking Marcel Duchamp’s heartbeat to a blue whale’s heartbeat.
And I could make him live when he died indefinitely.
So when he died, I counted up the number of heartbeats, the quota of heartbeats, his allotted
quota of heart beats in his lifetime.
I slowed them to seven beats a minute, thereby making him, when you divide that into the
number of heartbeats that he had in his lifetime, made them live two hundred and… more, two
hundred and ten years I think it was.
So that slow heartbeat will go for about two hundred and ten years.
So I had finished my job.
With his death, the work began its proper life.
A cruel business.
So there is a darkness at the heart of the humor.
There is humor at the heart of the darkness.
Stuart Davis said something to me once that I never forgot.
He said what is an artist without his secret?
And I felt I had Duchamp’s secret.
And in a curious way, I felt that he had provoked me to reveal much of my own.
One last word.
I have been harassed and bothered and annoyed by the lack of insight by critics who insist
on connecting me as influenced by Duchamp.
I obviously had a great interest in chess from my child.
I was very interested in multiple identities.
And there is a woman here who very kindly, a scholar, [inaudible], flown over from Dublin
and has written a book, the first book as I understand it, in which she deals with that
canard and attaches influences to a wonderful comic novelist and the various identities
that I’ve assumed to a great comedy novelist named Flann O’Brien with three personas.
I'm also happy to hear Christine Kennedy who originated the retrospective that was seen
at the Grey Gallery I two its years ago now, certainly more than a year.
And also I wanted to welcome Whitney Rugg who gave up two theatre tickets to come down
here [laughter] from New York.
But I, in the sixties, watching my wife dealing with a male art history department at Columbia
University, became a vigorous feminist.
These personas are obviously were just finished with this.
You know who he is.
That is William McGinn who is a very interesting nineteenth century gentleman whom I have appropriated.
This is Patrick Ireland who died last May 20th.
This is a kunsthistorisch [German: art history] gentleman called Sigmund Bode who wrote one
of the… what some feel is an important text, [inaudible], that I think someone referred
to.
And that is Mary Josephson.
That is my female persona.
Now she has nothing whatever to do with Rrose Sélavy or anything Rrose Sélavy is interested
in.
She’s a feminist and she was a writer.
And she has given me many, many years of comfort and solace [laughter].
But so anyway, the carelessness of people who if you're interested in somebody as I
was in Duchamp who was a wonderful guy, and to then proceed to see all your work in that
light.
What's his name?
Mark Rothko and I were close friends.
Nobody sees Rothko in my work, etcetera.
So this art historical nonsense, since there are so many historians here, I want to charge
in that fashion.
So there you are.
That’s Marcel Duchamp, eternally living upstairs.
[Applause] Brian, don’t wander off.