JEAN LANCRI, OF SHADOW IN (OR ON?) MARCEL DUCHAMP

Compte rendu par Pierre Juhasz

February 13, 2015

It took Jean Lancri's incisive gaze, his transversal theoretical culture and his sensitivity as a visual artist to lift the veil on the question of shadow in Marcel Duchamp's work and provide a masterful interpretation of the ultimate work of the inventor of the ready-made: that of the installation entitled Given: 1) The Waterfall 2) The Illuminating Gas, erected one year after the author's death, in 1969, by virtue of the contract passed by the artist and to which he devoted the last twenty years of his life; in short, a posthumous work, which would contain, according to Jean Lancri, like a supplement of work. In eighty successive and progressive notes – as many arguments built up through the notes – the discourse, imbued with psychoanalysis and semiotics, reveals not only the importance of shadow in all of Duchamp's work, but more particularly, of this strange shadow, hitherto unnoticed, which grows with the lookers-voyeurs, placing their face on the door of Given, where they are invited to look, through two holes, at a woman who exhibits herself. "It could be, according to Jean Lancri, that this installation was only programmed by Marcel as a decoy to bring the 'lookers' of his final work to make work themselves, beyond his demise, even unbeknownst to them" (p. 7). Thus the lines gradually concentrate on the door of Given, a door haunted by this ghost work – the halo left by the multiple faces –, this work both "acheiropoietic and cephalopoietic, [...] elaborated, on the one hand, in Marcel's head; produced thanks to the pressure of all heads minus one, in this case, minus that of M.D., definitively withdrawn, as for him, 'from the field' of the living" (p. 56).

Through the maze of language – of languages: French and English –, through the play on words that Duchamp was fond of, but also the author of the work, with the support of his aphorisms, maxims and writings, such as "a guest + a host = a ghost" or even at the examination of the terms dyer (dyer) and dier (dyer) and the homophony with the term elsewhere, Jean Lancri shows how the ultimate work of the one whose epitaph inscribed on the tomb is "Besides, it's always the others who die" would be a masterful memento mori. "We would have there, he writes, launched beyond death and from the beyond, bet like a throw of dice, like a very last throw of 'D', a call from Duchamp to Marcel [...]. If one must see Oneself as another (as Paul Ricœur will say), here he is by himself designated as another; at the very heart of an apostrophe shared in two languages, gnawed by the most fundamental alterity that exists, that of death" (pp. 48-49).

Imprint of successive faces, "like a photo, notes the author, the blackish halo is an index (in Peirce's sense)" (p. 58), but also index. "The Duchampian device would function like a gigantic camera" (pp. 58-59). Supporting Rosalind Krauss's thesis concerning the photographic in Duchamp's work, the author emphasizes: "At the height of the scopic drive, when the body of a visitor to Given becomes the voyeur of a woman who exhibits herself, it is blindly and in the shadow of the mind that this body produces the shadow of the halo: blind spot, blinded in its center by the flash of seeing, by the brilliance of desire" (p. 59).

"The shadow bearers work in the infra-thin" Duchamp had written. It is this aphorism that Jean Lancri chooses as an epigraph at the threshold of his work. Later, he notes: "An infra-thin work finally, [...] where Duchamp, in his beyond-the-grave habit and livery of 'shadow bearer', would discreetly continue to 'work in the infra-thin'; where he would never cease to 're-come', through interposed heads (present and to come), to work" (p. 56).

Jean Lancri's text is precise, precious, powerful. It gives us to understand and to feel how Duchamp's work, "infra-thin and minimal; minimal and liminal" (p. 56), haunted by all faces except his own, by the depth of the shadow he propagates, continues to mischievously haunt the becoming of art.

Pierre Juhasz