Walter

Suppose a creative individual intends to make items of pure utility. Can the resulting objects be rightly deemed high art by people of a later generation or another culture?

Museums contain many examples of such objects, says Marcel Duchamp: “African spoons were nothing at the time they were made, they were simply functional; later they become beautiful things, ‘works of art.’”

The transformation of craft into art, says Duchamp, was the work of spectators. And the African spoons share this transformation with all created works: Even objects intended as artistic creations are altered dramatically by their audiences.

By what mechanism does this alteration occur?

Between the artist’s intention and the audience’s perception will always exist a gap. Duchamp refers to this dark bridge as the ‘art coefficient,’ a term which he defined in these words: “An arithmetical relation between the unexpressed but intended and the unintentionally expressed.”

It is this art coefficient, says Duchamp, which is the true object of the sensitive viewer’s identification and interpretation, such acts being a “contribution to the creative act.”

Duchamp’s words encourage us to think of art less as a physical object and more as a mental construct or process, that being our personal revision of the art coefficient. Indeed, the finished work depends upon a partnership of artist and viewer, the individuals whom Duchamp refers to as “the two poles of the creation of art.”

Other artists have also championed the observer. “The material process which we call painting,” wrote Delacroix, “is no more than the pretext, the bridge between the mind of the artist and that of the beholder.” Picasso stated that when a painting is finished “it still goes on changing according to the state of mind of whoever is looking at it. A picture lives a life like a living creature. [. . . ] The picture lives only through the man who is looking at it.”
Some creative individuals, however, might resist Duchamp’s claim that “the creative act is not performed by the artist alone.” Not only does the rise of the spectator moderate the power of the originating artist but the machinations of the art coefficient would seem to deny any claim to the communication of a well-defined intent.

As for that final point, Duchamp believes a creator’s objective intentions cannot prevail in any work. The artist’s actions arise from “pure intuition and cannot be translated into a self-analysis, spoken or written, or even thought out.” Rather than the communicator of propositional meaning the artist performs as a “mediumistic being” transferring meaning to the spectator “in the form of an esthetic osmosis taking place through the inert matter, such as pigment, piano or marble.”

It is the work of the spectator, says Duchamp, which determines “the weight of the work on the esthetic scale.” And what the spectator does for a single work civilization does for a museum when artistic worth is determined “through considerations completely divorced from the rationalized explanations of the artist.” Adds Duchamp: “This becomes even more obvious when posterity gives its final verdict and sometimes rehabilitates forgotten artists.”

Your responses to these ideas are welcomed.

[For Marcel Duchamp’s interpretation of the creative process see his essay “The Creative Act” in the book The Writings of Marcel Duchamp. (Da Capo Press). The example of the African spoons is from Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp. (Da Capo Press, page 70). Other quotations are from The Journal of Eugene Delacroix Phaidon Press; and “Two Statements by Picasso” from Picasso on Art: A Selection of Views. (Da Capo Press).]