Given Time (Le Temps donné), 2021
- You’re going to Cadaquès for two months? What will you do there?
- Nothing.
Marcel Duchamp was not a very productive artist. He produced few works, abandoning his career as a painter to dedicate eight years of his life to the Grand Verre (Large Glass), that broke during transport and that he ultimately considered to be definitively unfinished. Gradually abandoning art, he passed his time with friends and playing chess. His first solo exhibition took place in 1937 when he was already 50 years old, the second 26 years later in 1963. Duchamp had a profound lack of interest for work, even artistic work, and claimed the right to be lazy, theorized by Karl Marx’s son-in-law Paul Lafargue in 1880, and reaffirmed by Guy Debord in 1953, when he scrawled Ne travaillez jamais (Never work) on a wall in rue de Seine, in Paris.
Laziness allowed Duchamp to master his time. His peers worked and exchanged their time for money. Then they tried to redeem and make up for this definitively lost time. Duchamp used the time available to him directly and without delay. “My capital is time”, he told a journalist for Time, “and not money”. This rejection of work was a more fruitful exchange, one that converted laziness into wealth, liberating huge reserves of time that the artist flittered away. Writer Henri-Pierre Roché, said that his greatest work was actually his use of time.
Duchamp, who called himself an engineer of lost time, hi-jacked and pirated the administration of time. He joined Thoreau in mocking the pomposity of technology. It is true that it takes a whole day of walking to get to the closest town, a trip that takes only one hour on a train. But, in order to pay for that trip, one must work for a whole day. Not only does the walker enjoy a more pleasant day, they also arrive first. [1]
As a young artist, Duchamp was fascinated by theories about the fourth dimension, and the idea that it might be possible to move through time as one moves through space. The ready-made, that one usually thinks of as an object, could also lend itself to temporal manipulation:
“[…] by planning for a moment to come (on such a day, such a date such a minute), “to inscribe a readymade” – The readymade can later be looked for. - (with all kinds of delays). The important thing then is just this matter of timing, this snapshot effect, like a speech delivered on no matter what occasion but at such and such an hour. It is a kind of rendezvous.”
The readymade can be put off until later, and still be available when the time comes. Throughout his career, the artist engaged in a real bartering of time. To pay his dentist he drew a check, that was not cashed, as it was also a work of art...This Tzanck Check represents an exchange of the time his dentist, Daniel Tzanck, spent working on him, for the time spent creating the piece of art – of time for time. He also gave the Grand Verre to Walter Arensberg, who paid the rent of his studio in New York for many years. Perhaps Duchamp called this work retard en verre (Delay in Glass), because this delay made up for an advance on his rent. Limiting his needs, he also lived a part of his life thanks to an advance on his inheritance – a kind of assurance of death, and one more swindle, because, as his epitaph states: “it is always other people who die”.
[1] “This way of spending the best part of one’s life earning money in order to avail of a problematic freedom during the least precious part, reminds me of the Englishman who went to India to first make his fortune, so as to return to England to live the life of a poet. He should have started by climbing up to the attic!”
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