Duchamp’s Labyrinth:

First Papers of Surrealism, 1942*

T. J. DEMOS

Entwined Spaces
In October of 1942, two shows opened in New York within one week of each
other, both dedicated to the exhibition of Surrealism in exile, and both represent-
ing key examples of the avant-garde’s forays into installation art. First Papers of
Surrealism, organized by André Breton, opened first. The show was held in the lavish
ballroom of the Whitelaw Reid mansion on Madison Avenue at Fiftieth Street.
Nearly fifty artists participated, drawn from France, Switzerland, Germany, Spain,
and the United States, representing the latest work of an internationally organized,
but geopolitically displaced, Surrealism. The “First Papers” of the exhibition’s title
announced its dislocated status by referring to the application papers for U.S. citi-
zenship, which emigrating artists (including Breton, Ernst, Masson, Matta,
Duchamp, and others) encountered when they came to New York between 1940
and 1942. But the most forceful sign of the uprooted context of Surrealism was
the labyrinthine string installation that dominated the gallery, conceived by
Marcel Duchamp, who had arrived in New York from Marseilles in June of that
year. The disorganized web of twine stretched tautly across the walls, display parti-
tions, and the chandelier of the gallery, producing a surprising barrier that
intervened in the display of paintings.1
The second exhibition was the inaugural show of Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of
This Century Gallery on Fifty-seventh Street, which displayed her collection of
Surrealist and abstract art. Guggenheim gave Frederick Kiesler free rein to design

* I am grateful for the support and criticism of Benjamin H. D. Buchloh and the editorial advice
of Hal Foster. Thanks also to Rachel Haidu, Mary Joe Marks, Judith Rodenbeck, and Margaret Sundell
for their responses to earlier versions.
1. Duchamp commissioned John Schiff to photograph the space. The catalog credits Duchamp
with “his twine,” “sixteen miles of string,” though probably around one mile was used. For a documen-
tary account of the show, its history and reception, see Lewis Kachur, “The New World: ‘First Papers of
Surrealism,’” in Displaying the Marvelous: Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dali and Surrealist Exhibition
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001).

OCTOBER 97, Summer 2001, pp. 91–119. © 2001 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
92 OCTOBER

the exhibition space. Originally a Romanian though Austrian by choice, Kiesler

had practiced architecture in Vienna while connected with the Bauhaus and De
St ijl avant- gardes before settling in New York in 1926. His installation for
Guggenheim’s gallery was more extensive than that of First Papers. In contrast to
Duchamp’s menacing barrier, Kiesler’s design went to extraordinary lengths to
integrate works into a gallery space that became sculptural. In the Surrealist
Gallery, frames were removed from paintings in order to produce an uninter-
rupted connection with viewers. Paintings supported by wooden arms floated

away from the walls, which were rendered concave. Kiesler painted the back-
ground and ceiling black and the floor turquoise to darken the environment, and
alternate sides of the gallery were illuminated for two minutes each, divided by a
few seconds’ pause. In the Abstract Gallery, works by artists such as Kandinsky,
Arp, and Mondrian were hung in midair with string. Interactive and mobile, they
could be variously tilted and suspended at any height.
While the two installations appear to have little in common, within the
scholarship there is an all-too-quickly accepted continuity between them. It is
common to read, for example, that Duchamp’s offered a model for the
“transparent” relation between viewer and work of art established in Kiesler’s
Opposite: Marcel Duchamp. Installation for First Papers of Surrealism, New York. 1942. © 2001
Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP Paris/Estate of Marcel Duchamp. Above: Frederick
Kiesler. Surrealist Gallery, Art of This Century Gallery, New York. 1942. Courtesy of Frederick Kiesler
Archive. Below: Kiesler. Abstract Gallery, Art of This Century Gallery. 1942. Courtesy Kiesler Archive.
94 OCTOBER

installation.2 Ultimately, this interpretive position derives from Kiesler, who

claimed Duchamp’s work as a guide for his own interests in what he called “corre-
alism,” or the establishment of the complete integration of artistic media, space,
and viewers. “It is architecture, sculpture and painting in one,” Kiesler observed of
Duchamp’s work. 3 However, to claim that the two installations were similar
ignores their antithetical forms and effects. While Kiesler employed string to sup-
port paintings, its use minimized any physical separation between painting and
viewer. This was to facilitate the transformation of paintings into what Kiesler
called “eidetic images,” as if they had lost their materiality and hovered as dream
images in space without physical support or frame. Kiesler’s string was the answer
to his desire to negate any nonaesthetic barriers between viewer and work of art,
or rather to render those barriers aesthetic. Duchamp’s string, on the other hand,
acted as the maximal obstacle between paintings and viewing space. It even elimi-
nated viewing areas between partitions. If Kiesler made every architectural
attempt at an uninhibited “correlation” between the viewer’s perception and the
aesthetic objects holding his attention, then Duchamp’s installation achieved the
utter opposite by restricting visual access to the paintings, effectively dislocating
objects from their visible exhibition, and subjecting the gallery space to a stub-
born and disorienting labyrinth of string.
To accept any continuity between the two installations, moreover, is a direct
result of a failure to adequately historicize the aesthetic developments of 1942 and
especially those relating to installation art. Against conventional opinion, I argue
that each installation articulated a very unique response to the avant-garde’s geo-
graphical, political, and historical displacement. Duchamp’s installation, far from
a flippant work or a simple, Surrealist-inspired gesture, acted as a sophisticated
negation of certain reactionary tendencies within Surrealism once it entered into
exile. This becomes even more intelligible, in fact, through a revised comparison
with Kiesler’s designs. The installations, then, represent two models, opposed but
productively related, with which we might measure the historical antinomies of
the avant-garde in its context of exile during World War II. By rendering the exhi-
bition’s container biomorphic and fusional, Kiesler’s installation provided what

2. Cynthia Goodman suggests: “One source for the illusion of ‘transparency’ may have been
Duchamp, whose concurrent installation of Surrealist art at the Whitelaw Reid mansion suspended the
paintings among sixteen miles of string” (“Frederick Kiesler: Designs for Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of
This Century Gallery,” Arts Magazine 51 [June 1977], pp. 93–94). Also see her more recent “The Art of
Revolutionary Display Techniques,” in Frederick Kiesler (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art,
1989). On the relation between Kiesler and Duchamp, who first met in 1925 at the Exposition
Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris, see Jennifer Gough-Cooper and Jacques
Caumont, “Frederick Kiesler and the Bride Stripped Bare” in Frederick Kiesler 1890–1965, ed. Yehuda
Safran (London: Architectural Association, 1989).
3. Frederick Kiesler, “Design-Correlation: Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Big-Glass’” (1937), in Frederick Kiesler:
Selected Writings, ed. Siegfried Gohr and Gunda Luyken (Ostfieldern bei Stuttgart: Verlag Gerd Hatje,
1996), p. 38.
Duchamp’s Labyrinth 95

can be seen as a compensatory “home” for a displaced Surrealism. Conversely,

Duchamp’s installation enforced a “homeless” space that resonated with geopoliti-
cal dislocation and refused any compensatory strategies of display. Together, they
reveal the historical entwinement of the desires for the home and the insistence
on a homeless reality, which defines the displaced avant-garde in 1942.
In this regard, the condition of displacement suggests a new way to compre-
hend developments in installation art during the war years, different from
conventional art-historical genealogies that see them as solely related to the critiques
of institutions and commodification; for installation, embodying the physical and
ideological mediation between objects, viewers, and their surrounding space,
immediately concerns issues of placement, location, and contextualization—the
very issues that became sensitized and overdetermined in the context of geopoliti-
cal dislocat ion. Once we accept the proposit ion that the construct ion of
installations in 1942 was in some way more than superficially related to the artists’
own displacement, we need to ask what was at stake? How did the work of installa-
tion define, analyze, negotiate, or compensate for the condition of displacement?

Displacement and Mythologization

Before directly addressing the installations, it is necessary to retrace the
developments of the 1930s to understand how Surrealism arrived at its conflicted
position in 1942. From its beginnings, Surrealism had been engaged with “home-
lessness,” but a homelessness defined through psychoanalyt ic theor y and
particularly by Freud’s essay “The Uncanny” (“unhomely,” or unheimlich in
German). According to Hal Foster, who has explored the artistic and theoretical
terms of the Surrealist uncanny at length, Surrealist art probed the primordial ties
between mother and child in “nonregressive ways.”4 This Surrealism was conse-
quently dominated by shock, montage, doubling, and estrangement, which
blocked any regressive temptations to retreat to the maternal home (the ultimate
locus of the heimlich, according to Freud). This work thus reflected the realization
of the irredeemable loss of the mother-child union (due to repression, castration
threats, paternal injunctions, social law, etc.). The refusal of any facile reconcilia-
tion was precisely the productive tension and homeless condition in which
Surrealism thrived.
Its homelessness, however, would be significantly redefined between 1935
and 1942. By 1935 it had transformed into an oppositional politics that refused
the “home” as ideological site of the national. This antinational politics of home-

4. Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993). Foster notes that for the
Surrealists, “refinding a lost home is one with facing a deathly end,” p. 206. Also see Rosalind Krauss’s
discussion of the Surrealist uncanny in “Corpus Delicti,” in L’Amour Fou: Photography and Surrealism
(New York: Abbeville Press, 1986).
 This page: Vichy political
poster. Circa 1942.

Opposite: Surrealist Map

of the World. 1929.

lessness united the notoriously antagonistic Bataille and Breton in solidarity,

bringing them into the streets as Contre-Attaque, which occupied a contestatory
space outside nationalism’s ideology of the home. If the street once represented
the privileged Surrealist site of amorous fantasy, the disorienting “coincidence” or
“l’amour fou,” it soon became the place in which to protest the nationalism of Nazi
Germany and the Soviet Union, but also that of France’s Popular Front govern-
ment. Contre-Attaque combated the ideology of the “home,” which had become a
propagandistic metaphor for national identity in France. In one of their many
fliers, they claimed that
A man who acknowledges the homeland, a man who struggles for the
family, is a man who commit s treason. . . .The homeland st ands
between man and the wealth of the soil. It requires that the products
of human sweat be transformed into cannons. It renders the human
being a traitor to his fellow men. The family is the foundation of social
constraint . . . [and] has served as a model of all social relations based
on the authority of bosses and their contempt for their fellow men.
Father, homeland, boss: such is the trilogy that serves as the basis of
the old patriarchal society and, today, of fascist idiocy.5

The figure of the home, frequently referenced in political rhetoric and propa-
ganda posters of the collaborationist Vichy government, and in France of the
1930s, had become a powerful emblem for nationalism. But it was filled with con-
tradictions. It signified the familial integration of social classes and regional

5. “La Patrie et la Famille” (1936), signed by Bataille, Breton, Maurice Heine, and Georges Péret,
reprinted in Tracts Surréalistes et Déclarations Collectives 1922–1939, ed. José Pierre (Paris: Le Terrain
Vague, 1980), pp. 293–94. See also “Les 200 Familles,” “Appel à l’Action,” “Sous le Feu des Canons Français . . .
et Alliés,” “Ni de Votre Guerre ni de Votre Paix!” and “N’Imitez pas Hitler!”
divisions within a homogeneous spatial and social unit, but one that nevertheless
existed under patriarchal authority. It acted as a unifying metaphor for society
(grouped together in the national home), even though its private architecture was
otherwise seen as economically, spatially, and socially divisive.6 The home, with
nationalism, patriarchy, and capitalism condensed under its roof, was thus a cen-
tral target of Contre-Attaque. Politically homeless, the Surrealists counterattacked
nationalization as a false form of social integration, which they presciently
claimed would ultimately result in war between nations, betraying any truly unify-
ing postnational organization of society. Their homeless politics, however,
remained rhetorical and did not enter into artistic form. This owed mainly to the
overdetermination of politicized art by the socialist realism of the Communist
Party, with which the Surrealists broke ties. As a result, the Surrealist defense of
artistic freedom and individuality—against the Party’s controlling doctrine—
resulted in a problematic and limiting refusal of any politicized art in the later
thirties.7
Increasingly isolated by their critique of nationalism, the Surrealists soon
found themselves without political party or popular support in a period increas-
ingly dominated by party politics and nationalization on the right and the left.8

6. For an extensive examination of the development of nationalism in France, see Fascist Visions:
Art and Ideology in France and Italy, ed. Matthew Affron and Mark Antliff (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1997).
7. For Breton’s statements on this posture, see his “Speech to the Congress of Writers,” in
Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1982) and, along with Leon Trotsky, “Manifesto: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art,” Partisan
Review 4, no. 1 (Fall 1938); reprinted in Free Rein, trans. Michel Parmentier and Jacqueline d’Ambroise
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995).
8. Consider Jean Grenier’s criticism of Surrealism in 1936 in the Nouvelle Revue Française: “[Breton]
proclaims the rights of the intellect and sides for the ideal Revolution, against actual revolutionaries.
But that is quite useless: the age of heresies is over . . . we are now in the age of orthodoxies. . . . To be a
98 OCTOBER

Consequently, their homelessness again shifted sites. Due to the political situation
that proscribed any public, independent position outside of dominant parties,
Surrealism, under Breton, was forced to relocate its protests within the bourgeois
space of the gallery. This effectively concluded its homeless political activities on
the street.9 There, the street became merely a nostalgic representation. This was
best exemplified in the “Surrealist Street,” the hallway filled with mannequins fan-
tastically dressed by different artists, which was assembled in the 1938 exhibition
at the prestigious Galeries Beaux-Arts. With the active struggle against national-
ism displaced by an art that defined its independence through its resistance to
politicization (at least in Breton’s terms, marked by the return to the aesthetics of
the uncanny), Surrealism increasingly changed from a self-fashioned political and
artistic movement into a predominantly artistic one.
By 1940, with the German occupation of France and the gradual emigration
of many Surrealists to New York, the movement’s political disenfranchisement,
loss of artistic relevance, and resulting anomie were only heightened.10 While
homelessness was once defined by the psychic uncanny, and later through the pol-
itics of antinationalism, it now referred to the lived experience of geopolitical
dislocation. As a result, Surrealism was forced to renegotiate its new existence in
the context of exile in the U.S., a country that hadn’t even appeared on its 1929
“Surrealist Map of the World.” Abandoning Europe to its self-destruction was in
many ways the last resort of a melancholy defeatism for a movement that had long
struggled against nationalism and war. In the “Prolegomena to a Third Surrealist
Manifesto or Not,” written in New York in 1942, Breton registered such a resigna-
tion: “Man must flee the ridiculous web that has been spun around him: so-called
present reality with the prospect of a future reality that is hardly better.”11 Faced
with the loss of its national and geographical home (one that the Surrealists never
overtly supported or celebrated) due to the unfathomable devastation of world
war, coupled with the recognition of its political impotence, Breton outlined the

revolutionary, today, against Stalin, is like being a monarchist against Mauras and Catholic against Pius
X. These are very noble attitudes, but they are admissible only for young people. Maturity . . . hungers
for achievements. What is urgent is not to proclaim a faith, but to join a party.” Cited in Susan
Suleiman, “Between the Street and the Salon: The Dilemma of Surrealist Politics in the 1930s,” in
Visualizing Theory, ed. Lucien Taylor (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 157, n. 28.
9. See Suleiman, who traces “the gradual, reluctant, perhaps totally unwilling but nevertheless
indubitable movement of Surrealism during the 1930s from the street to the salon,” p. 149. Suleiman
notes that this also owed to a disillusionment with Contre-Attaque’s protests, which problematically mim-
icked fascist street tactics.
10. For the history of the avant-garde exodus from Europe in the late thirties and early forties, see
Martica Sawin’s Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York School (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1995) and Exiles and Emigrés: The Flight of European Artists from Hitler, ed. Stephanie Barron (Los Angeles:
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1997).
11. André Breton, “Prolegomena to a Third Surrealist Manifesto or Not” (1942), Manifestoes of
Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), p. 286
(originally published in VVV 1 [June 1942]).
Duchamp’s Labyrinth 99

surprising new directions of Surrealism in its journal VVV in 1942: “V as a vow . . . to

return to a habitable world.” Once committed to the tension of psychic homelessness,
and later to its politicization as an antinational politics, Surrealism, brought to its
knees in geopolitical exile, now longed for a home.
If Breton’s Surrealism had gradually but begrudgingly moved from the street
to the salon during the 1930s, then in New York it moved from the salon into
myth, where it could “return to a habitable world” disallowed by the “so-called
present reality” of dislocation. Myth, in other words, offered a way to balance ideo-
logical contradictions in a period of extreme compromise. Breton’s new myth,
supported by a number of artists (Matta above all), corresponded to a belief in
what he called the “Great Transparents.” These refer to entities that surround
human beings but remain invisible to the senses. “Man is perhaps not the center,
not the focus of the universe,” he reasoned in the most extensive passage on the
Great Transparents:
One may go so far as to believe that there exists above him on the ani-
mal level beings whose behavior is as alien to him as his own must be to
the day fly or the whale. There is nothing that would necessarily pre-
vent such beings from completely escaping his sensory frame of refer-
ence since these beings might avail themselves of a type of camouflage,

Matta. Les Grands Transparents.

100 OCTOBER

which no matter how you might imagine it becomes plausible when you
consider the theory of form and what has been discovered about
mimetic animals.12

Matta produced a drawing for the article. Nearly abstract, the work balances
between linear scrawls and suggestions of biomorphic and anthropomorphic
shapes, compositionally divided into separate circular areas. The transparency of
forms suggests the diaphanous quality of the mythical beings nearly “escaping our
sensory frame of reference.” For his illustrated essay on myths in the First Papers
cat alog, Breton used a photograph by David Hare to illustrate Les Grands
Transparents.13 The photograph’s nude figure is only partly legible, its upper half
disfigured through brûlage, suggesting a transcendent pneumatic being from
another world. Breton further defined his myth by locating the habitat of the
Great Transparents in “the realm of the Mothers,” to whose credit it was Tanguy’s

12. “Prolegomena,” p. 293.

13. Other illustrated “Myths” included “L’Age d’or,” Orpheus, The Graal, The Philosopher’s Stone,
The Automaton, Triumphante Science, Le Surhomme, and the Myth of Rimbaud (First Papers of
Surrealism [New York: Coordinating Council of French Relief Societies, Inc., 1942]). The catalog was
partially designed by Duchamp. A barely disguised reference to the transformation of violence and
warfare into cheesy art, its cover photograph depicted a stone wall perforated by bullet holes, while the
back, in parodic reverse, showed a close-up photograph of Swiss cheese.

David Hare. Les Grandes

Transparents. 1942.
Duchamp’s Labyrinth 101

to have “visually penetrated” in his work of 1942.14 While avant-garde montage

and fragmentation had earlier encouraged a materialist focus on the constructed-
ness of representation, here that fragmentation was made to point to a metaphysical,
idealist beyond.15 Although the expressions of geopolitical homelessness inter-
sected with the intimations of uncanny experience, the new focus was nevertheless
on habitability, secure space, and a restorative and compensatory subjectivity, and
not on shock, destabilization, or fragmentation. Perhaps as an attempt to compli-
cate matters in his “Prolegomena,” Breton referred to Roger Caillois’s theory of
“mimetic animals.” In a recent essay, Caillois examined the conspicuous insectoid
mimicry of the adoption of one form to another, which he termed a “homomorphic”
assimilation. This transformation, however, could never suggest the habitability
Breton wanted. Rather, homomorphy, according to Caillois, describes a state of
radical loss, subjective detumescence, and out-of-placeness. It announces a disori-
entation of total desubjectivization rather than a comforting space of mythical
Heimlichkeit. Caillois’s mimicry dispossesses being of its physical location so that it
“no longer knows where to place itself.” What results is a schizophrenic “deper-
sonalization by assimilation to space,” a sudden materialization in which “the
body separates from its thought.”16 Conversely, Breton’s myth anthropomorphizes
and deifies space. Instead of representing an inquiry into the de-individualizing
generalization of space, it proposed a new religion.
The problem was that Breton’s myth represented an escape from the
sociopolitical, rather than a complicating development within it. While some on
the left had in fact suggested that their own revolution exploit the regressive
desires and forces of the atavistic, which fascism had instrumentalized, Breton’s
myth, and the aesthetic constructions it encouraged, retreated to a homely space
that was postrevolutionary.17 Contemporary audiences were immediately suspi-
cious of the new directions of Surrealism, particularly against the backdrop of
fascism. When Meyer Schapiro first read the new issue of VVV, he responded,
“This is the issue on which surrealism may well fall; it is an assault on the construction

14. André Breton, “What Tanguy Veils and Reveals,” View 2 (May 1942), n.p.
15. Breton’s idealistic Surrealism, however, had long been challenged by Bataille’s materialism. See
Bataille’s critique of Breton’s “Second Surrealist Manifesto,” “The ‘Old Mole’ and the Prefix Sur in the
Words Surhomme [Superman] and Surrealist,” in Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings,
1927–1939, trans. and ed. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985).
16. Roger Caillois, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” trans. John Shepley, October 31 (Winter
1984), pp. 28, 30. Caillois also considered the intrauterine nostalgia of mimicry, but quickly dismissed
it as paradoxical: “to employ a psychoanalytic vocabulary and speak of reintegration with original
insensibility and prenatal unconsciousness” would result in “a contradiction in terms” precisely
because “the generalization of space” comes “at the expense of the individual,” p. 31.
17. For example, Ernst Bloch advocated the utilization of a dialectical conception of myth for the
revolution against fascism in his Erbschaft dieser Zeit (Heritage of Our Times) of 1935. Hal Foster discusses
Bloch and the potential for the dialectical reclamation of myth as antifascist within Surrealism in
“Outmoded Spaces,” in Compulsive Beauty.
102 OCTOBER

de l’homme.”18 Harold Rosenberg flatly replied that Breton’s “desire for a new myth
is reactionary.” Recalling Contre-Attaque’s antinationalism, Rosenberg advocated
the “the painful negation of myths, and of the myth-seeds, Church, Fatherland,
Family,” especially since “the production of myths, which disintegrate humanity
into warring cults, has become the chief occupation of the world’s most brilliant
talents, such as Goebbels, Mussolini, and thousands of editors, advertising men,
and information specialists.”19 And in perhaps the most far-reaching examination
of myth, Dialectic of Enlightenment, exiled Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer
found, contra Breton, that far from being without myth, society was dominated by
it. Fascism, however, was only its most barbaric manifestation. Rather than revolu-
tionize myth against fascism (Bloch’s approach), or negate fascist mythology with
Enlightenment science (liberal humanism’s answer), the critical goal of Adorno
and Horkheimer was to uncover how the Enlightenment itself reverts into myth.
For them, it was urgent to reveal how myth enforces a deadly forgetfulness regard-
ing history and provokes the idolization of capitalism through increasingly
powerful means of control and manipulation. Were Adorno and Horkheimer to
read Breton’s call for a “new myth,” they would likely have viewed it as the creation
of a compensatory shield against the traumas of exile and war, an acritical mim-
icr y of fascism, and an impossible attempt to build a home in an age of
homelessness.

Framelessness
If Surrealism in exile longed to return to a “habitable world” through its
mythological construction, then this was accompanied by a corresponding shift in
its exhibition presentation that would return Surrealist objects to a habitable
space. Frederick Kiesler provided such a space in the installation design for
Guggenheim’s Art of This Century Gallery. Increasingly identified with Surrealism
and its nostalgia for the home during the early 1940s, Kiesler, also a displaced per-
son, reiterated Breton’s call for a new myth: “The artist’s work stands forth as a
vital entity in a spatial whole, and art stands forth as a vital link in the structure of
a new myth.”20 His own myth sought an aesthetic unity that would propose its own
kind of metaphysics and idealism: that of pure presence and absolute integration.
The installation pursued this ideal integration by attempting to eliminate any
mediation between painting and viewer, or between art objects and surrounding
space. This explains the urge behind the removal of frames and the turn toward
string as a support mechanism, which would introduce art objects within the

18. In a letter to Kurt Seligman, cited in Sawin, p. 217.

19. This is in the form of a debate between three fictional characters in Rosenberg’s “Breton—A
Dialogue,” in View 3, no. 2 (Summer 1942), composite quotation, n.p.
20. Kiesler, “Notes on Designing the Gallery,” in Selected Writings, p. 44.
Duchamp’s Labyrinth 103

viewer’s own physical area and away from the separate wall, thus closely connect-
ing the viewer to the art object . Furthermore, the designs of the spaces
corresponded to the general aesthetic of the displayed work, reconciling objects
and context. The Surrealist Gallery’s walls were hollowed out, mimicking the bio-
morphic form of many of the paintings’ compositions, whereas the paintings of
the Abstract Gallery, mostly of a geometric abstraction, were supported by cords
in geometric shapes. Similarly, the viewing space would assimilate visitors by offer-
ing biomorphically designed furniture, and paintings hung at different levels
corresponding to dynamic viewing perspectives.
Kiesler was explicit about his motivations. Turning to a utopian conception
of language and vision based in primitivist beliefs, he defined and justified the
aims of the Guggenheim installation. It was meant “to break down the physical
and mental barriers which separate people from the art they live with, working
toward a unity of vision and fact as prevailed in primitive times.”21 Kiesler pro-
posed to achieve this unity through the dissolution and aesthetic sublation of the
frame:
Today, the framed painting on the wall has become a decorative cipher
without life and meaning. . . . Its frame is at once symbol and agent of
an artificial duality of “vision” and “reality,” or “image” and “environ-
ment,” a plastic barrier across which man looks from the world he
inhabits to the alien world in which the work of art has its being. That
barrier must be dissolved: the frame, today reduced to an arbitrary
rigidity, must regain its architectural, spatial significance.22

The unity of “vision and reality” that Kiesler sought was nothing less than a magi-
cal return to a prelinguist ic unit y where the difference bet ween sign and
referent—made obvious by the frame—would dissolve. The ultimate goal was that
the reunified plenitude of a totalized aesthetic space would efface the experience
of barriers and dislocations, and this reverberated with the war-torn world of 1942
and Kiesler’s own experience of dislocation. In this regard, his installation designs
concretized Breton’s demand for a myth to restore habitability, and it did so by
constructing a fusional installation design as a response to the anomie of exile.
The continual focus on developing a “livable home,” a “habitable space,” which
one frequently encounters in Kiesler’s writings, exposes the homeless anxiety that
marks his designs. This, too, Kiesler articulated. In “Cultural Nomads,” published

21. Kiesler, “Design Correlation,” p. 76. Also, “Primitive man knew no separate worlds of vision and
of fact. He knew one world in which both were continually present within the pattern of every-day
experience. And when he carved and painted the walls of his cave or the side of a cliff, no frames or
borders cut off his works of art from space or life—the same space, the same life that flowed around
his animals, his demons and himself” (“Notes on Designing the Gallery,” in Selected Writings, p. 42).
22. “Notes on Designing the Gallery,” p. 42.
104 OCTOBER

some years later, he specified the angst of dislocation that informs the regressive
character of his work: “Moving from one apartment to another, from one town to
another, or across borders into different lands. . . . We live an emergency life, a
deadline life. . . . The core of the civilized nomad’s life . . . is hollow, and we gobble
down anything to fill the emptiness.”23
Kiesler’s installation design, more specifically, “filled the emptiness” of
homelessness through the aesthetic construction of a space redolent of a fantasy
of the psychic and maternal home (bringing to mind Breton’s mythical “realm of

the Mothers”). The gallery was ultimately conceived as a canny interior of a body,
with the concave walls suggesting a uterine form. Protruding “arms” would hold
up paintings and the lighting effects of the gallery would “pulsate like your
blood.”24 For Kiesler, this homely architecture was a long-term pursuit, later
exemplified in his spheroid architectural models, such as the one for Endless House of
1950.25 In the installation, the emphasis on biomorphic shapes, the attempt to

23. Frederick Kiesler, “Cultural Nomads” (1960), in Selected Writings, p. 98. Similarly he explained:
“We will create a man-made cosmos around us in which we will not have to depend on decorations to
render our homes livable, but which will give us an awareness of belonging to a space center and of the
ever-present cosmic forces which feed us continuously, nourish us physically, emotionally, and spiritually,
without end” (“Notes on Architecture as Sculpture,” Art in America 54 no. 3 [May–June 1966], p. 68).
24. Kiesler cited in Cynthia Goodman’s “Frederick Kiesler: Designs for Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of
This Century Gallery,” p. 93.
25. This logic extends to Kiesler’s house designs produced after he moved to the United States in
1926 (he gained citizenship in 1936). His Space House, developed in the U.S. in 1933, would be a “one-
space-unit,” employing the spherical shape, free plan, and the elimination of interior walls as structural
supports. His “shell-monolith” or “egg-shell” structure would overcome the divisive partitionings of
“roof, floor, wall or column,” suggesting even then the intrauterine yearnings that would generally
characterize his work.

Kiesler. Endless House. 1950.

Courtesy Kiesler Archive.
Duchamp’s Labyrinth 105

fuse the viewer with an egglike or uterine form, in addition to Kiesler’s own
desires for such a spatial, linguistic, and psychic plenitude, represented one
response to the experience of geopolitical deracination: to regress to a primordial
intrauterine home. A psychoaesthetic homeliness answered a geopolitical home-
lessness, compensating for the contradictions in Surrealism’s identity (politically
antinational, but insufferably geographically displaced; anticapitalist but forced
into the salon).
Kiesler’s rhetoric repeats a Surrealist tradition, at least among its expatriate
members. Matta, a displaced Chilean in Paris, had expressed intrauterine spatial
fantasies for a model apartment just a few years earlier: “Man yearns for the
obscure thrusts of his beginning, which enclosed him in humid walls where the
blood beats near the eye with the sound of the mother. . . . We need walls like
damp sheets which lose their shapes and wed our psychological fears.”26 And the
Romanian Tristan Tzara had made similar appeals in 1933, conspicuously after his
involvement in the expatriate community of Zurich Dada and its vociferous
attacks on nationalism during World War I. Like Matta, he extolled a return to the
“intrauterine life” and “prenatal comfort” of the primordial forms of the house,
like the Eskimo yurt, the grotto, or tent, whose spherical morphology had been
displaced by the “castrative aesthetics” of modern architecture. This had prepared
the ground for the “self-aggressiveness that characterizes modern times.”27
But during the advancing 1930s, homely regression had turned dangerously
problematic; for the regression implied in its spatial model, once merely a utopian
avant-garde aim, now shared its logic with the aspirations of fascism. If the home
as rhetorical figure had already been co-opted by nationalist discourse, then so
had the fantasy of fusion. Problematized at the time by Lacan, this fantasy of an
intrauterine architecture suggested the longing for the spatial resolution of the
anxiety of psychic division and physical fragmentation that characterized fascism.
In a 1938 article on “Family Complexes,” Lacan related the “the desire of the
larva” to fascist attempts to return to an imaginary physical habitat. As a regressive
reaction to a paranoid threat of bodily and psychic fragmentation, the subject
compensates through fantasies of fusion, absorptive architectural spaces, and all-
encompassing spectacles. The “prenatal habitat,” less a literal architecture than a
matrix of regressive desires, held the myth of “the perfect assimilation of every-
thing into a being.” Within this matrix, Lacan notes, “will be recognized the
nostalgias of humanity: the metaphysical mirage of universal harmony; the mysti-

26. “Mathématique sensible—architecture du Temps,” Minotaure 11 (Spring 1938), p. 43; translated

in Lucy Lippard, Surrealists on Art (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1970), p. 168. Matta trained under Le
Corbusier before joining the Surrealists and countering Le Corbusier’s rational architecture, where
the home existed as a “machine for living.”
27. “D’un certain Automatisme du Goût,” Minotaure 3–4 (December 1933). For his condemnation
of nationalism and traditional humanist categories, see “Dada Manifesto 1918,” in Tristan Tzara, Seven
Dada Manifestos, trans. Barbara Wright (New York: Riverrun Press, 1981).
106 OCTOBER

cal abyss of affective fusion; the social utopia of totalitarian tutelage—all resulting
from the fear of a paradise lost before birth and from the most obscure aspira-
tions for death.”28 It would appear that Kiesler’s goal to eliminate the frame, even
though carried out in an avant-garde context antithetical to fascism, shared these
desires, but without redirecting them against fascism. Framelessness did not open
onto the sociopolitical, but disavowed it in order to compensate for, by escaping
from, the loss of dislocation.29

Duchamp’s Labyrinth
Duchamp’s installation for First Papers, needless to say, functioned in an alto-
gether different way than Kiesler’s design. The string, spanning the gallery in all
directions without order or system, produced a space that countered any sense of
homeliness. While Kiesler had facilitated Surrealism’s mythologization through
the fantasy of framelessness and motivated by the experience of dislocation,
Duchamp’s installation forcefully restored the frame, hindering visual access to
the displayed paintings and manifesting a layer of ineluctable mediation between
viewer and art object. Instead of undertaking a facilitating role for the consump-
tion of Surrealist art—the traditional function of exhibition design—and rather
than “correlating” viewer and art object to the ideal point of their mutual fusion,
Duchamp’s string produced a recalcitrant barrier between viewers, objects, and
space. What was behind this insistence on the frame in 1942? If Kiesler’s exhibi-
tion design for the Art of This Century Gallery can be seen as a compensatory
reaction to the historical reality of geopolitical displacement, then how did
Duchamp’s installation function in relation to the conditions of exile? Was it just a
Dada-influenced nihilistic gesture, or did the string installation act against certain
developments in Surrealism, thus complicating the definition of the dislocated
avant-garde at this historical moment?
One answer comes from Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, who has argued that
Duchamp’s installation was a direct challenge to the institutionalization of
Surrealism and the “quasi-religious veneration of [its] acculturation,” as well as a
critical assault on the continued but deeply problematic role of painting within
Surrealist practice.30 This was certainly true. During 1942, when First Papers was on

28. “Le Complexe, Facteur Concret de la Psychologie Familiale,” in L’Encyclopédie française, ed. A. de
Monzie, vol. 8 (Paris, 1938), p. 8. For a discussion of Lacan’s text, see Carolyn Dean, The Self and Its
Pleasures (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992).
29. For an alternative view of Kiesler, see Mark Linder’s “Wild Kingdom: Frederick Kiesler’s Display
of the Avant-Garde,” in Autonomy and Ideology: Positioning an Avant-Garde in America, ed. R. E. Somol
(New York: Monacelli, 1997). Linder treats Kiesler’s designs as productive of a subject construction
continuous with those found in Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage and Caillois’s discussion of mimicry.
Against this view, I find such a complex subjectivity, marked above all by psychic divisions, completely
absent in Kiesler’s rhetoric and display constructions, particularly around 1942.
30. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “The Museum Fictions of Marcel Broodthaers,” in Museums by Artists,
ed. A. A. Bronson and Peggy Gale (Toronto: Art Metropole, 1983), p. 46.
Duchamp’s Labyrinth 107

display, Duchamp spoke more vociferously than ever about his contempt for paint-
ing, criticizing precisely its quasi-religious veneration: “I don’t believe in the
sacred mission of the painter. My attitude toward art is that of an atheist toward
religion. I would rather be shot, kill myself, or kill somebody else, than paint
again.”31 And he is reported to have explained that his string installation was
“intended” to “combat the background,” where “the background”—remaining
unspecified—ambiguously suggests both the opulent architectural interior of the
Ried mansion and the background of Surrealist paint ings that the str ing
obscured.32 Duchamp later recalled that he had to “fight . . . some painters [who]
were actually disgusted with the idea of having their paintings in back of lines like
that, [because they] thought nobody would see their paintings.”33 Others recog-
nized the brutality of this assault as well, with many reviews complaining about the
obscurity of the paintings behind the string.34 Clement Greenberg must have
been thinking of Duchamp’s string installation when he called Surrealism an
“anti-institutional, anti-formal, anti-aesthetic nihilism . . . inherited from Dada
with all the artificial nonsense.”35
However, Buchloh’s reading, more an introduction to an interpretation of
Marcel Broodthaers’s institutional critique than a historicization of Duchamp’s
installation, leaves unexplored how Duchamp’s construction displaced Surrealist
practice from other developments: namely, the “return to a habitable world” con-
currently undertaken in Breton’s myth and in Kiesler’s exhibition design.
Duchamp’s installation offered not just a general de-deification of Surrealism, but
contested Kiesler’s fantasy of framelessness.36 Instead of providing an insulating
mythological womb protecting against displacement, Duchamp’s installation in
fact forced artists to experience their displaced status firsthand in the disorga-
nized and disorganizing space of his installation and in the disorientation of their
objects in that space. This, in effect, introduced a political framework to a display
of art intent on escaping it.
The historically specific political rupture articulated in Duchamp’s installa-
tion resonates with the double critiques of Surrealism and the home forwarded by
Theodor Adorno. Arguing that an aesthetic break in avant-garde practice was nec-
essar y due to the war, Adorno obser ved in 1953 that with “the European

31. “Artist at Ease,” The New Yorker 18 (October 24, 1942), p. 13.
32. “Agonized Humor,” Newsweek 20 (October 26, 1942), p. 76.
33. Harriet and Carroll Janis, interview with Marcel Duchamp, winter 1953, typescript, Philadelphia
Museum of Art Archives, pp. 7–16; cited in Kachur, p. 226.
34. For example, “The Passing Shows,” Art News 41 (November 1, 1942); and Royal Cortissoz,
“George Bellows and Some Others,” New York Herald Tribune (October 25, 1942), section VI, p. 5.
35. “Surrealist Painting,” The Nation 12 and 19 (August 1944); reprinted in Clement Greenberg, The
Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), vol. 1, p. 225.
36. Duchamp later spoke of “de-deifying everything by more materialistic thoughts” in the inter-
view with Francis Roberts, saying “I propose to strain the laws of physics,” Art News 67 (December
1968), p. 47.
108 OCTOBER

catastrophe, the Surrealist shocks lost their force.”37 When he explained that “the
dialectical images of Surrealism are images of a dialectic of subjective freedom in
a situation of objective unfreedom,” this criticism might be redeployed as com-
ment ing on the wart ime condit ions of Surrealism. 38 As we have seen, the
movement’s increasing political impotence was met with the mythologization of
its aesthetics, producing the subjective freedom of a mythical homeliness in a situ-
ation of geopolitical homelessness. Duchamp’s installation indicates a rupture
with this escapist logic and an acknowledgment of displacement, which the
Surrealists seemed intent on obfuscating.
Adorno also directly criticized the desire for homeliness, declaring in 1944
that “the house is past” (Das Haus ist vergangen) because it had been rendered con-
ceptually impossible due to the devastation of war. The house had become
historically unrecognizable after the apocalyptic results of the desperate and
fanatical attempts to reclaim the home during the 1930s and ’40s. For Adorno,
homeliness was rendered impossible not only because of the fascist appropriation
or destruction of houses and the genocidal murder of their inhabitants, but also
because the very desire for the home had been revealed as destructively nostalgic,
irresponsibly regressive, noxiously capitalist and nationalist, and at its worst, fascist
(which certainly complements Lacan’s view of the regressive and fascist desire for
homeliness). Even though the innocently dislocated needed places to live (as
Adorno himself did during the 1930s and ’40s), the desire to be at home, comfort-
able, sheltered, and integrated, was seen as an irresponsible abstraction and an
apolitical impulse that could only represent a “betrayal of knowledge.” This
betrayal refers to the willful ignorance of political consciousness and the disregard
for the reality of displacement that would conflict with homely regression. Thus,
Adorno would claim: “Today we should have to add: it is part of morality not to be at
home in one’s home.”39 It is precisely because the home became overdetermined by
fascism, where nationalism defined itself through psycho-social-architectural
fusion, that the fragmentary space and dislocated status of objects within
Duchamp’s installation become politically meaningful and subversive. And it is
because of this overdetermination of the homely as fascist that any architecture of

37. “Looking Back on Surrealism,” in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 1983), p. 87. This corresponded to Duchamp’s view in 1936 when he understood the exist-
ing political conditions to necessitate an aesthetic withdrawal: “Painting is now dedicated the world
over to propaganda—to subject matter. . . . It is as true in Europe as in America—even more so—that
people’s minds are concentrated on politics, including the artists. Both Fascism and Communism are
bent on regimenting people, robbing them of their individuality. It is no atmosphere in which creative
art can thrive.” Interview with C. J. Bulliet for the Chicago Daily News, cited in Jennifer Gough-Cooper
and Jacques Caumont, “Ephemerides on and about Marcel Duchamp and Rrose Sélavy,” in Marcel
Duchamp: Work and Life, ed. Pontus Hulten (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), under August 25,
1936.
38. Adorno, p. 88.
39. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (1951), trans. E. F. N. Jephcott
(New York: Verso, 1991), no. 18, pp. 38–39 (my emphasis).
 Duchamp’s Labyrinth 109

fusion became suspect as a utopian project and historically displaced as an avant-

garde model of exhibition space.
Duchamp’s installation accomplished the subversion of Surrealist homeli-
ness by constructing a disorienting frame. This frame prohibited any pretensions
regarding an unmediated unity between viewers and art objects. It is important to
recognize, in exploring the installation as a frame, that it shares in the logic of the
readymade.40 We can easily trace the development of string from readymade to
frame in the earlier twentieth century. String had appeared in Duchamp’s work as
a compositional element in Chocolate Grinder (1914), representing the divisions
between the slats of the three barrels. Isolated, it was employed in Three Standard
Stoppages of 1913, where the recordings of three variations of one meter of string
fallen on the ground, attached to Plexiglas supports, were enclosed in a croquet
box. Soon, string moved from compositional element to container in With Hidden
Noise of 1916, where a readymade ball of twine enclosed in two copper plates,
screwed together, concealed a secret object unknown to Duchamp. The use of
string as a frame was also employed by Duchamp’s friend Francis Picabia. In his
1920–21 Dance de Saint-Guy, string was stretched within a readymade frame for an

40. The string was purchased by Duchamp, who explained in the interview with Janis, “I had a
friend, even almost a relative, in Boston who is an accountant in a cordage place for Boston Harbor.
And he sold me that 16 miles of string—it was a regular business.”

Duchamp. With
Hidden Noise. 1916.
© 2001 Artists Rights
Society (ARS), New
York/ADAGP
Paris/Estate of Marcel
Duchamp.
 Francis Picabia. Dance de
Saint-Guy. 1920–21.

easel painting and suspended paper cards with handwritten text.41 Picabia’s con-
struction advanced the readymade toward the internalization of institutional
conventions within its very structure. Just as Dance de Saint-Guy displays its minia-
ture “pictures” within its frame, the construction mimics the common convention
of hanging paintings by string or wire from wall moldings.
These objects clearly participate in the Dada assault on the integrity of the
art object by substituting a frame in its place. By negating the picture’s visual status,
they shift from an artistic model based on artisanal creativity and authorial
expression to one that focuses on its own institutional determination by offering a
frame for analysis rather than an object for aesthetic contemplation. They also
indicate the early avant-garde realization that frames as such exist as an unavoid-
able—even readymade—mediation in the reception and consumption of works of
art.
But Picabia’s Dance also demonstrates a sensitivity to mobility, due to its
transparent form that establishes a contingency on context. Developed in a
period of itinerant travel during the war, Picabia’s work follows on the heels of

41. William Camfield explains that Dance de Saint-Guy was refashioned as Tabac-Rat sometime before
1949. Picabia insisted that this object be suspended away from the wall to stress its transparency.
Camfield also points out that these constructions were related to Picabia’s “stage designs” at the
Manifestation Dada of March 27, 1920, where he stretched cords across the stage in front of the per-
formers. See Camfield’s Francis Picabia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 172.
Marcel Duchamp. Sculpture for Traveling.
1918. © 2001 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New
York/ADAGP Paris/Estate of Marcel Duchamp.

Duchamp’s Sculpture for Traveling of 1918, which Duchamp carried with him to
Buenos Aires dur ing his own flight from the nat ionalism of Europe and
America.42 The Sculpture for Traveling, composed of fragments of readymade rubber
shower caps cut up and glued back together as strands of varied lengths, would
adapt its format to each new installation. “The form was ad libitum,” Duchamp
explained to Cabanne. The readymade, then, was already diversified as an artistic
model during World War I. It became more than the structural critiques of the
author, object, and institution. Stressing collapsibility, portability, and contextual
determination, the readymade established a relationship with geopolitical dis-
placement.43
Similarly, the installation for First Papers—also a readymade string frame—
was not merely an outgrowth of a structural account of the readymade (which
would see in it the critical debunking of the traditional concepts of originality,
authorial agency and intentionality, and the proposal of new framing conventions
and collaborative conditions for the art object). Rather, it developed out of an ear-

42. Duchamp explained to Pierre Cabanne that in 1918 “I left for a neutral country. You know, since
1917 America had been in the war, and I had left France basically for lack of militarism. . . . [But] I had
fallen into American patriotism, which certainly was worse. . . . I left in June–July 1918, to find a neutral
country called Argentina” (Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp [New York: Viking, 1971],
p. 59).
43. This earlier context of dislocation certainly requires further examination, but beyond the scope
of this essay.
112 OCTOBER

lier Dadaist concern for mobility and postnational conditions, but also takes a step
further. The insistent, disorganizing spatial conditions of the string acted on the
space around it, interrupting the contemplation of Surrealist paintings. By the
domination of that space, the installation enforced a set of disorienting condi-
tions on the gallery space that were summarized by the word “labyrinth” in nearly
every review of the exhibition. Through this labyrinthine installation, which
extends out from the readymade’s relation to dislocation, Duchamp constructed a
homeless space sensitive to geopolitical displacement and one that negated
Surrealist homeliness.
It may seem paradoxical to read Duchamp’s installation as simultaneously
labyrinthine and a negation of Surrealism; for if it acted as a labyrinth, then it
drew on a quintessential Surrealist trope. The labyrinth and its counterpart, the
Minotaur, had variously served as subjects of Surrealist work throughout the 1930s
and early ’40s. And Minotaure, of course, was the title of a Surrealist journal from
1933 to 1939. Various covers of the journal, showing minotaurs and labyrinths,
were designed by many artists, including Duchamp. 44 In addition, Georges
Bataille had recently written the essay “The Labyrinth” in 1936. But while the
labyrinth dominated the Surrealist imagination during the 1930s, its meaning or
use was no more fixed than was Surrealism. And nothing suggests that reading
Duchamp’s installation as labyrinthine necessarily entails the affirmation of
Surrealist aesthetics in general or even its specific directions in 1942. Nevertheless,
art historians have consistently read the installation as continuous with Surrealist
art and its common figure of the labyrinth, which discourages the view that the
installation instead challenged Surrealism.45 Such a thesis, however, depends
upon a number of objectionable comparisons and problematic underlying
assumptions.
Some historians, for instance, have gone to extremes in comparing the struc-
ture of the installation to that of painting. William Rubin, for instance, likens the
string installation to a labyrinth and then proceeds to associate it with pictorial
organization. Incredibly, at one point Rubin virtually collapses the string installa-
tion with Matta’s matrix-like paintings, explaining that its “spatial effects . . . were
later explored by Matta in such paintings as Onyx of Electra and Xpace and the Ego . . .
[which create] a vertiginous environment . . . in deep perspective space.”46 In
other words, Rubin dissembles the fact that the string, hung in its haphazard man-

44. Duchamp’s Minotaure guards the back cover of issue no. 6 (December 1934).
45. For example, Marcel Jean reads the installation as “an immense ‘spider’s web’ made of miles of
white twine stretched across the rooms, an aerial labyrinth criss-crossing at every angle” (The History of
Surrealist Painting [New York: Grove, 1960], p. 312). And according to William Rubin, “Duchamp
designed the installation, which consisted of a mile of string, an Ariadne’s thread beyond which the
pictures hung like secrets at the heart of a labyrinth” (Dada and Surrealism and their Heritage [New York:
Museum of Modern Art, 1968], p. 160).
46. Rubin, Dada and Surrealism, composite quotation from pp. 160 and 169. Romy Golan, in “Matta,
Duchamp et le Myth: un Nouveau Paradigm pour la dernière phase du Surréalisme” in Matta (Paris:
Duchamp’s Labyrinth 113

ner, confused spatial relationships, created its own intricate and asystematic pat-
terns without any intelligible plan, and existed beyond pictorial rationalization. As
a physical barrier to depth, Duchamp’s string countered perspective, which orga-
nizes space and renders it perceptual as depth. Its own lack of compositional or
perspectival logic assaulted the visual mastery and centering functions associated
with perspective (as in Matta’s paintings), which is normally facilitated by frames,
whether they be the frames of paintings or the larger architectural frames around
paintings.
Additionally, Duchamp’s installation challenged the psychological depth of
Matta’s expressionist aesthetics built upon that perspective. Matta frequently
explained that his paintings developed “a morphological projection of a psycho-
logical state.” Duchamp’s installation, on the other hand, refused any intentional
psychic content or metaphysics of interiority. Rather, it set up the conditions for a
physical and conceptual experience wholly transpiring during the visitor’s interac-
tion within it. Its logic, instead of being representative or expressive, was
performative, blocking any immersion within the displayed paintings. This perfor-

Pompidou, 1985), also relates the perspectival space of Matta’s The Onyx of Electra of 1944 to
Duchamp’s string. Sabine Eckmann again rehearses this reading: “Duchamp’s labyrinthine twine
installation . . . and the same artist’s ‘Large Glass,’ . . . inspired Matta to use these lines to suggest multi-
perspectival spatial systems.” See her “Surrealism in Exile: Responses to the European Destruction of
Humanism,” in Exiles and Emigrés, pp. 179–80.

Matta. The Onyx of Electra. 1944.

114 OCTOBER

mative aspect no doubt continued the logic of the readymade, necessitating the
viewer’s participation in the creation of meaning.47 By forcing viewers to struggle
to see the work through the string, which physically interfered with their bodily
space, it brought what was the readymade’s collaborative conceptual act in inter-
pretation to a physical level. If, in 1957, Duchamp famously dismissed the creative
model where “. . . the artist acts like a mediumistic being who, from the labyrinth
beyond time and space, seeks his way out to a clearing,” then he appears to have
combated that creative model by inserting the viewer within his own version of a
labyrinthine frame in 1942.48 Not only do these readings of First Papers appear to
contradict the form and function of Duchamp’s installation, but they also plainly
fail to take account of the radicality of the labyrinthine structure that they so
often cite as an explanatory model ( just as they fail to examine the structure of
the redefined readymade). By aestheticizing the labyrinth, comparing it to the
organizing and rationalizing spatial matrix of perspective, and viewing it as a
means for psychological expression and intentional meaning, these readings end up
vulgarizing and even dehistoricizing this potentially powerful conceptual complex.
The fully radicalized elements of the labyrinth were explored by Georges
Bataille in his 1936 essay “The Labyrinth,” to which none of the conventional
views of Duchamp’s installation refer. The labyrinth, in Bataille’s version,
describes a disorienting ontological and epistemological model of identity, struc-
ture, and space, in which all are radically decentered. But the labyrinth also
resonates with the specific historical period of national deracination and foreign
invasion. The period around 1936 coincided with the end of Bataille’s participation
in the politics of Contre-Attaque and with all of the frustrations that accompanied
the ineffectuality of an oppositional, antinational political practice at the time. If
Bataille, in Contre-Attaque, organized under a politics of homelessness, then he also
imagined its theoretical site: the labyrinth. But it wasn’t merely theoretical and it
certainly wasn’t the mythological place to which Breton retreated; rather, the
labyrinth represented a disoriented Europe in the late 1930s and early ’40s. The
labyrinth, then, was both part of a dialectical account of space and identity (along
with its oppositional term, “architecture”—the name for structure, logic, and state
authority)49 as well as a designator for a historically specific set of conditions and
experiences relating to dislocation.50

47. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh has suggested that the readymade is quintessentially a collaborative act
in “Readymade, Objet Trouvé, Idée Reçue,” in Dissent: The Issue of Modern Art (Boston: Institute of
Contemporary Art, 1985), p. 107.
48. Duchamp delivered “The Creative Act” in Houston at the meeting of the American Federation
of the Arts, April 1957. It is reprinted in The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, ed. Michel Sanouillet and
Elmer Peterson (New York: Da Capo, 1973), pp. 139–40.
49. Bataille’s “Critical Dictionary” contains an entry for “Architecture,” which, for its author,
expresses the authority of church and state. Originally published in Documents 2 (May 1929), it is trans-
lated by Dominic Faccini, in October 60 (Spring 1992). On Bataille and architecture, see Denis Hollier,
Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille, trans. Betsy Wing (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1989).
50. Bataille also moved from an action-oriented politics of homelessness, once its impotence
Duchamp’s Labyrinth 115

Bataille’s labyrinth identifies a structure that is against structure itself, an

anti-architecture that counters systematicity. The essay begins with a discussion of
the “negativity” of being, quoting Hegel to this effect in its epigraph: “Negativity,
in other words, the integrity of determination.” This negativity occurs in spatial
terms, or against spatial terms, in that, in the labyrinth, being has no positive
place—it is determined, rather, by its negativity. And it redefines the ontological
status of being as relative, contingent, and without secure location. It exists,
rather, between locations. “Being” thus takes on a “fugitive appearance,” compared
to the disorientation in a “labyrinth where what had suddenly come forward
strangely loses its way.”51 The labyrinth also operates linguistically. The relativity of
being is evidenced by its contingency upon language: “Each person can only rep-
resent his total existence . . . through the medium of words. . . . Being depends on
the mediation of words,” notes Bataille. As a place of radical contingency rather
than a matrix of coherent space, the labyrinth, then, refers to a continually shift-
ing materialization of the nebulous network between the mutually determined
terms of language and identity—in effect, a complex frame in which being is irrev-
ocably situated. Spatial, psychic, and linguistic, the labyrinth names a place of
dislocation where all is submitted to an utter contingency upon its decentering
frame. Being evokes “a kind of nausea” because “being is in fact nowhere”—an apt
characterization for labyrinthine experience.
Bataille’s essay parallels the realizations of contemporaneous philosophical
and theoretical developments. It acknowledges the fundamental tenet of struc-
tural linguistics regarding the absence of the positivity of meaning due to the
differential structure of signs. And it agrees with the subjective impossibility of
total self-consciousness, or the mastery of the visual field, articulated in psychoan-
alytic theory. But the “nausea” of the labyrinth also identifies the experience of
the loss or threatened loss of nation-state identity and consequent dislocation,
described as such by many who encountered it in the late 1930s. 52 As Denis

became evident, toward mysticism and ritual in the later 1930s. This was defined by his shift from
Contre-Attaque to the esoteric and secretive activities of Acéphale in 1936 and then to Le Collège de
Sociologie during 1937–39. However, Bataille’s mysticism, very different than Breton’s, was directed
toward a space of interiority alternating between castration and virility, opening sexuality to politics,
and identity to a splitting violence. See Susan Suleiman, who argues that Bataille repositioned activism
within myth and ritual, both paradoxical and productive, in “Bataille in the Street: The Search for
Virility in the 1930s,” in Bataille: Writing the Sacred, ed. Carolyn Bailey Gill (New York: Routledge, 1995).
For Denis Hollier, Bataille’s was a literary equivocation that was itself deeply political. See “On
Equivocat ion bet ween Literature and Polit ics,” Absent without Leave, trans. Cather ine Porter
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997).
51. Bataille, “The Labyrinth,” in Visions of Excess, p. 173; first published in Recherches philosophiques 5
(1935–36).
52. Walter Benjamin, for example, frequently described his experience of exile in very physical
terms. For instance, by 1938, living in Paris, disaffected from his national home, and suffering from
economic hardship and the anomie of exile, Benjamin characterized his situation “as a man at home
between the jaws of a crocodile which he holds apart with iron struts.” Cited in Susan Buck-Morss,
Origin of Negative Dialectics (Hassocks, Sussex: Harvester, 1977), p. 155.
116 OCTOBER

Hollier observes in his reading of Bataille’s text: “War, a primary form of igno-
rance about the future, entails first of all the suspension of plans. A catalyst of
anguish, war condemns human beings to the irremediable disorientation of the
labyrinth, to a glorious intoxication in the face of life’s incompleteness.”53
Such a logic, simultaneously bearing on structure, identity, and dislocation,
approaches that of Duchamp’s installation, which acted as such a labyrinth, as a
de-structuring anti-architecture producing contingent identity, lost meaning, and
disorienting space. The installation was not a labyrinth merely because it looked
like one; it was labyrinthine because it displaced space, viewers, and objects alike.
Such a displacement occurred when the installation came to frame Surrealist
paintings, including Matta’s Great Transparents, which exemplified the desire to
return to a state of habitability according to Breton’s myth. Radicalizing the ready-
made installation as performative, its significance was located in what it did. By
filling in the negative space between works of art and viewers, causing a rupture in
reception, the string redirected attention toward the frame and away from the
possibilities of a unified aesthetic experience. Forcing viewers to look through
string, or to move it aside in order to see a work of art, it eliminated any possibility
of “fusing” with objects or space in a psychophysiological way, as Kiesler proposed
in his installation. By reasserting the frame, any conception of the art object as
ideal, immanent, or autonomous was negated. Duchamp’s installation would thus
encourage viewers to consider the significance of the physical context and their
own participation in the production or experience of any meaning in the
encounter with art objects. Consequently, the installation would combat the
mythologizing and idealizing impulses within Surrealist aesthetics by rendering
the meaning of its objects contingent upon frames and viewers.
Duchamp’s installation can also be seen to have functioned as a linguistic
frame, occupying the spacing between works, emphasizing their contingency, like
the differential and “related” structure of words. Bataille noted, “One need only
follow, for a short time, the traces of the repeated circuits of words to discover, in
a disconcerting vision, the labyrinthine structure of the human being.”54 The
installation, rather than being literally linguistic, performed this by tracking the
mediating “circuits” between individual objects and viewers, which the string
occupied. This forced a sensitivity to the spaces between artworks and thus obliter-
ated the neutrality or ideality of the art objects, rendering them instead “related
beings.” In other words, the string revealed the “labyrinthine structure” of media-

53. Hollier, “Unsatisfied Desire,” in Absent Without Leave, p. 70.

54. Bataille, “The Labyrinth,” p. 174. Hollier further notes: “The labyrinth does not hold still, but
because of its unbounded nature breaks open lexical prisons, prevents any word from finding a resting
place ever, from resting in some arrested meaning, forces them into metamorphoses where their mean-
ing is lost, or at least put at risk. It reintroduces the action of schizogenesis into lexical space, multiply-
ing meanings by inverting and splitting them: it makes words drunk” (Against Architecture, p. 60).
Duchamp’s Labyrinth 117

tion between objects, spaces, and viewers.55 In so doing, it multiplied meanings

and ruined immanence. In this sense too, Duchamp’s string articulated the ready-
made structure of the labyrinth. As the matrix of language is understood by
Bataille to be a precondition of being, an already existing system of rules, grammar,
and syntax that is constitutive of meaning and subjectivity, then the string instal-
lation spatialized this readymade frame. By enlarging the readymade string to
architectural proportions, this structural determination of meaning, subjectivity,
and space was revealed to be institutional as well as linguistic and phenomenological.
If the installation dislocated objects within its purview, rendering them
“homeless” in a way, then this effect may have been a result of the string’s logic as
a readymade. Rosalind Krauss has explained that the readymade exposes the
“homelessness” of modernism due to its necessary disconnection from its original
context and its consequent mobility. The readymade thus enters what Krauss calls
“the space . . . of sitelessness, or homelessness, an absolute loss of place. Which is to
say one enters modernism. . . .”56 Similarly, the string frame, in becoming ready-
made, produced a kind of homeless space—not only in terms of its own mobility
(moved from store to gallery), but rather that, within it, space and objects were
dislocated, and thus the inevitable condition of exhibition was revealed as displace-
ment. As a readymade frame it extended its homeless status to objects caught in its
web, like a labyrinth. In this respect, we encounter a development from modernist
homelessness to political homelessness in moving from the earlier readymade to
the readymade frame of 1942.57 While earlier readymades revealed the mobility
and exhibition-based identity of the art object in its modern condition, the string
installation became political in that it fought the reactionary mythologization of
objects that wanted to exist in a frameless homeliness—objects which it conse-
quently framed. There, a political event occurred when the installation physically
assaulted other objects and insisted on the condition of “not being at home in
one’s home,” as Adorno’s political homelessness would have it.
The installation, then, operated in a number of interrelated ways. It offered
an ontological critique of its displayed objects, challenging the structural possibili-
ties of a “frameless” aesthetic space or a fusional experience of paintings. Its
stubbornness as a physical barrier refused the Surrealist impulse to suppress the
signs of the gallery. This amounted to a contestation of how an installation (and
Kiesler’s in specific) might otherwise negotiate the avant-garde’s contradictions

55. What Derrida would call the “spacings” between words and pages that are necessary for their
meaningful differentiation. On the structural conditions of the frame, see Jacques Derrida,
“Parergon,” in The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1978).
56. Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other
Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), p. 280.
57. Even though the earlier model of the readymade, like Duchamp’s Sculpture for Traveling, already
proposes such a development in the relation between mobility and postnationalism that it sets up.
118 OCTOBER

(its anti-institutional, anticapitalist ideology versus its acculturation and commod-

ification) by obfuscating them through the construction of a highly artificial
exhibition design. On the contrary, Duchamp’s installation both negated the tra-
ditional gallery’s functions (the neutral exhibition of works of art) and concretized
the institution’s presence as an inevitable readymade frame. Lastly, Duchamp’s
installation operated as part of an insistent homeless aesthetic that negotiated
geopolitical displacement. It combated the movement of Surrealism in exile
toward a compensatory mythologization and search for habitable space. Its
labyrinthine frame challenged the homely developments that occurred in
Surrealist ideology, aesthetics, and installation techniques in 1942.
The installation for First Papers was certainly not a unique example of
Duchamp’s development of a homeless aesthetic. It was instead part of a larger
engagement motivated by antinationalism, and concretized through modernist
strategies. This included his nomadic “portable museum,” La Boîte-en-valise of
1935–41, and his disorienting installation of 1,200 coal sacks for the Surrealist
exhibition in Paris in 1938. Both of these projects evince a pressing concern with
frames and borders, a sensitivity to restricted space and controlled movement,
and an emphasis on the instability of placement and the uprooting effects of
decontextualization.58 Ultimately, such a sensitivity must be seen to reverberate

58. I explore these projects in depth in a book-length study of Duchamp and postnationalism cur-
rently under preparation.

Marcel Duchamp. La Boîte-en-valise. 1935-41. © 2001 Artists Rights

Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP Paris/Estate of Marcel Duchamp.
Duchamp’s Labyrinth 119

with the geopolitical dislocation Duchamp lived, perhaps in the most extreme cir-
cumstances during 1940–42, when he circulated in and out of occupied France
and then to New York. “I left France dur ing the war, in 1942,” Duchamp
explained, “when I would have had to have been part of the Resistance. I don’t
have what is called a strong patriotic sense; I’d rather not even talk about it.”59 Yet
if Duchamp didn’t want to talk about it, his work certainly did, and his lack of
patriotism during these wartime years extended to the artistic refusal of even the
most seemingly innocuous security of space or homely comfort.

59. Cabanne, p. 85.