X on Broadway by Tim Maul

82 East Broadway is located on a less congested block in lower Manhattan’s Chinese community.
The surrounding environs have long operated as a city-within-a-city with limited interpersonal socialization on streets teeming with commerce offering flowers, exotic fruits, vegetables and inexpensive clothing amid numerous barbershops. This vibrant neighborhood is not absolved from encroaching displacement as evidenced by the sprinkling of earnest storefront gallery’s offering generic art merchandise for either wall or floor. I seek this address in search of a discrete art context hosting a project by Christian Xatrec, artist, curator, and vice president of The Emily Harvey Foundation, a historic space whose continuous program of performances, talks, and installations (including my own) is unmatched for an independent arts organization.

The invitation to Xatrec’s project hosted by doyers, titled ‘Marcel Duchamp, Where Do We Go From Here, (New York City #1) (*1) requests that viewing is by appointment only, that the email is not be shared and that no photography is permitted. Arranging a visit proves complicated and I begin to suspect, incorrectly, that the the announcement itself may constitute the exhibition, a throwback to the early years of hardcore conceptualism when a postcard, a message without a envelope, was a viable and often lone context for an ‘show’ elevating the humble communication to collectable status. (Stanley Brouwn is but one example). Xatrec’s paperless invite is both a missive and filter, announcing an exhibition which can only be shared by natural ‘word of mouth’.

I descend a steep set of steps to a basement passage below the sidewalk until guided into a small room which would otherwise be used for storage. I took notice of a couple further down the low ceilinged passage who were bundling flowers into bouquets and it occurs to me that the protocol may have been out of respect for the privacy of the other renters. I also wonder what they made of these closely supervised visitations. Once located the piece is simultaneously seen and read. A single quote of Marcel Duchamp is projected on a wall (screen?) extracted from a talk given at the Philadelphia Museum College of Art in 1961. It reads ‘THE GREAT ARTIST OF TOMORROW WILL GO UNDERGROUND Marcel Duchamp’ ‘signed’ with the artist’s handwritten signature, black text on a white background in a single uninterrupted projection (the entire text from 1961 is made available). Here is a ‘response’ to the ‘question’ posed by the invite. The capitalized font reinforces the biblical tone of the elder artist’s prediction while the projector, distant cousin of the ‘magic lantern’ (or even more distant cousin of the stained glass window) is visible and several benches are provided giving the enclosure a ‘changing room’ (or confessional?) intimacy. Having grown accustom to spectacular examples of ‘the cinema of exhibition’ this silent work in media conducts an unexpected ecclesiastic vibe emanating from the ‘miraculous’ writing in light suggesting early slide/language works of Anselmo and Robert Barry (both 1971). In all appearances it is a ‘holy place’. Adapting to my surroundings I wryly observe that I was indeed ‘underground’ on East Broadway and beyond (and below) the regulations of the law- the urban myth of tunnels connecting building’s during Chinatown’s Tong wars of the 1890’s-1930’s were amplified by western fantasies of an occult, ’mysterious’ orient.

The word ‘underground’s usage is somewhat stale when regarding subcultures but still can be found in film criticism-a recent digitally restored movie from 2000 (!) was praised for its jittery ‘underground’ aesthetic. 1960’s ‘counter-culture’ movements were first identified as ‘underground’ as in film or comics which refused to ‘sell out’ rejecting absorption into the lucrative commercial mainstream and remaining outside of history. (Duchamp could have easily ‘sold out’ after the splashy success of ‘Nude Descending A Staircase’ 1912 but traded a modernist trajectory for studied absenteeism.) The most familiar employment of the word may be credited to ‘The Velvet Underground’, the revered feel-bad downtown band named after a paperback about S & M and briefly promoted by Andy Warhol. ‘An ‘underground’ is also a clandestine organization; the ‘Underground Railroad’ transported runaway slaves to the relative safety of the pre-Civil War north and resistance movements in World War II were sometimes referred to as the ‘Underground’. (Artists who confronted fascism in Europe included Tristan Tzara and Claude Cahun. Duchamp was playing chess in New York). The term ‘resistance’ could also describe the LES’s Chinese community’s reaction to metastasizing gentrification signaled by the red flag of the art gallery, from which doyers/Xatrec’s liminal contribution is immune.

Duchamp made the ‘TGAOTWGU’ statement on the cusp of a revived appreciation his life’s work from a welcoming art public. Major retrospectives in Stockholm (’61) and Pasadena (’63) were held against a background of a percolating New York art market and a moneyed social scene, developments that Duchamp was keenly aware of. As stated in the longer version his alarmed language around the commodification of the art object may address the buzz forming around Pop Art and contradicts his earlier important tract ‘The Creative Act’ of 1959 which famously proposed that “the creative act is not performed by the artist alone.” The seemingly short distance between the two declarations 1959-61 is historically vast as the later ‘retinal’ dramas of abstract expressionism fell to the vernacular, exciting-to-collect permissions of American Pop. The ‘future’ was on everyone’s mind in 1961 with utopian worlds’ fair’s coexisting with nuclear fallout shelters. Science fiction TV programs featuring dystopias, surreal twists and shocking conclusions found a vast teenage audience that included myself. Duchamp’s Philadelphia lecture expresses anxiety over still debated concerns including the complacency with rewarded art fair/auction house mediocrity along with a more sinister establishment of a totalitarian ‘artists union’. New technology’s and instruments fare better. Yet, was it Samuel Beckett who wrote “….to be is to be seen”? What phantom critical apparatus judges a recessive, apparently ego-free ‘young’ artist as ‘great’ or not? Like the ‘best’ conceptual artist who has the ‘most children’(*2) anyone truly ‘underground’ wouldn't be conscious of the loosely applied title of ‘artist’. In 2007 the discovery of an extensive body of sophisticated, modern photography produced in anonymity by Vivian Maeir (1926-2009) a domestic living in Chicago garnered the deserved attention of the contemporary photography world. Found in a storage space which was bought by 3 competing collectors, an unusual positive ending resulted in the preservation of thousands of negatives along with the establishment of a scholarship fund in her name.

Duchamp’s shadow fell over more Europeans (Klein, Manzoni, Vautier, Tinguely et al) than Americans, except for the often goofy pun-afflicted art of the Bay Area ‘funk’ and assemblage scene that birthed Bruce Nauman. Locally, outside of the Cage/Cunningham/ Rauschenberg/Johns orbit (and Cageian Fluxus) Duchamp’s comeback was not celebrated by all. I believe Robert Morris stated that Duchamp ‘invented fire but didn't know what to do with it’ regarding the presumed casual application of the artist’s signature to random objects. Joseph Beuys, while cultivating his own dubious mythology, proclaimed in 1964 ‘THE SILENCE OF MARCEL DUCHAMP IS OVERRATED’. Critic Lucy Lippard expressed weariness over Duchamp’s veneration. The combative Robert Smithson believed that Duchamp’s passion for chess held ‘aristocratic connotation’s’ further stoking his annoyance with the Frenchmen’s penchant for the word ‘amusing’ as in ‘amusing physics’ leaving the New Jersey native ‘not amused’. Contemplating Xatrec’s closely monitored shrine (my finger itching to sneak an iPhone image) I remembered Smithson’s own proposal for a ‘underground’ cinema (1969) carved from rock accessible only through a cave entrance-a film of the project’s construction would be shown continuously to an audience sitting on stone seats. Perhaps Dan Flavin (an orchestrator of glowing hardware store readymades) best articulates this local skepticism in his statement published in MoMA’s 1973 retrospective catalogue “…I’m unable to accept the myth of Marcel the most profound magician presiding over just about any art possible since New York 1913.”

The luminous prophesy of 82 East Broadway personally resonates throughout an exhibition of my late brother Michael’s (1953-2020) drawing’s at the Kerry Schuss Gallery which briefly overlapped with Xatrec’s nearby project. Michael was one of the first individuals to be categorized as autistic, and although legally blind he drew everyday of his life epic sequences of people, the majority of which were men, painstakingly rendered in precise sartorial detail. Early in 1973 my ears perked up in Kynaston McShine’s criticism class at SVA when he used the word ‘autistic’ in relation to the aura around both Duchamp and Andy Warhol. The following week I brought in a few xeroxes I had made of Michael’s mechanistic drawings and Kynaston, deep into his role as curator of the Duchamp retrospective at MoMA that same year, studied them carefully. (I would soon acquire an intimate knowledge of this exhibition in my role as security guard.) The mechanical and organic merged in many aspects of Michael’s expressed worldview, a feature not only of autism but of several art movement including cubism, futurism and Dada as exemplified by Duchamp’s ‘Large Glass’ (“robots having sex”, to paraphrase Joseph Masheck, no fan of MD) and later in Phillip Glass’s and Robert Wilson’s immersive 1976 opera ‘Einstein on the Beach” with libretto by Neurodivergent artist/performer Christopher Knowles. Michael’s CoVid-related death left me, his only sibling, with the responsibility for hundreds of drawings and notebooks. As an artist I naturally valued this laborious production, a daily activity his life revolved around executed, I believe, as a form of meditation at his kitchen table. (This ‘headspace’ has also been observed in the work regimens of both Agnes Martin and Hanne Darboven). Yet, if for a variety of reasons (utter disinterest or dismissing this material as a pointless occupation that only compounded his isolation etc) this complex saga could have easily ended up in a dumpster, condemning Michael’s hard-won drawings to the forever dormant void of the truly ‘underground’ artist. Michael had all the characteristics of the hoarderindifference and neglect to whatever he produced and sheer panic if that production, even if it threatened the security of his living arrangement, were relocated or interfered with. In choosing to save and later exhibit Michael’s ‘art’ (my description) I entered into an agreement of unspoken co-authorship, a decision I recently shared with Xatrec when I was considering an appropriate context for this collection. Duchamp’s ‘Creative Act’ binary (Art+spectator) applies directly to my relationship with Michael’s pictures-I designated his drawings as ‘art’ the moment I first saw them in our bedroom. In exposing them to the public the term ‘outsider’ had to be avoided at all cost, beyond his daily drawing routine Michael strived to live more fully in the world than many artists I know.

Visits to the apparition on 82 East Broadway can be scheduled throughout the duration of MoMA’s Duchamp show, and will reappear in a form of shadow programing somewhere in Philadelphia (#2), the retrospective’s logical next stop. ‘TGAOTWGU MD’ best performs the role of ‘beneficial parasite’ in either city’s general proximity to the concentrated ‘body’ of all things Duchamp, ‘illuminating’ an eerily pertinent quotation only familiar to researchers and scholars. I have visited MoMA twice and intend to go again. Installed chronologically, the exhibition works fine for me and I was surprisingly moved by this slightly clinical vista of paintings, objects, films, multiples and ephemera. I was particularly overwhelmed by the many editions of valises and portable museums that were painstakingly assembled as Europe lurched towards disaster. I also found the replica of the ‘Large Glass’ strangely muted and less alien compared to its splintered parent in Philadelphia; it looked too fresh, as if assembled from an ‘actual size’ model kit. On my last visit I purposely entered through the exit to be confronted with Denise Brown Hare’s 27 photographs of ‘Etant Donnes’ taken in Duchamp’s ‘secret’ Greenwich Village studio documenting the tableaux’s fragile construction to assist in transport and reassembly. I thought of what my fellow museum visitors might derive from this concluding trickle of snapshot size prints resembling horrific, even kinky crime scene images. ’Etant Donnes’, located like a secret chamber adjacent to a larger ‘tomb’ could be a ghoulish reconstruction of a ‘crime scene’ itself. Strolling ‘against the current’ towards the artist’s first painterly experiments the collection ahead reverses dematerialization in an illustration of historic entropy that Robert Smithson (again) would have hopefully approved. More Duchampania can be found uptown at Gagosian Gallery offering a elegant presentation of readymades on one of the most glittering shopping avenues in the world.

THE FUTURE IS STUPID
Jenny Holzer, Truism, 1977-79

“…and who can bear to be forgotten?”
David Bowie, Ricochet, 1983

The cloistered anonymity of the ‘underground’ may appear preferable to a life of rejection, or worse-demotion. I sometimes peruse the advertising of older art publications (70’s-80’s Flash Art is great for this) taking note of art stars who lost traction beyond their allotted 15 minutes of fame. Did they, like Duchamp, prefer ‘breathing instead of working’, melt into academia or, no longer on the guest list have to be ejected kicking and screaming from the party?. (*3) Purposely withdrawing from, or dropping out of the art world can be an act of self preservation (Lee Lozano) or of martyrdom (Teching Hsieh). Hsieh was rewarded with a retrospective at DIA Beacon and stopped making art in 2000 to administrate his corpus leading an apparently ‘normal’ life-very Duchampian. Many decades ago Christian Xatrec spoke to me about the importance of engaging the art public with ‘precision’-which I didn't fully understand until I made the pilgrimage to 82 East Broadway last month. Marcel Duchamp precisely micromanaged his past and literally gambled (issuing bonds in 1924 for a Monte Carlo roulette scheme) on a ‘future’ he would live to see. He was a flickering presence on the margins of art history until the New York Avant-garde beckoned him back onstage as did Merce Cunningham in 1968 where he, according to dancer Carolyn Brown, acknowledged the applause like a ‘trouper’.

(*1) We may imagine Duchamp’s statement as a reply to Lenin’s 1901 book title ‘What Is To Be Done?’, a demand (‘Che fare?’) that found itself on the wall of Arte Provera figure Mario Merz's 1969 exhibition at L’Attico in Rome. (*2) Avalanche, Spring ’72, p.72, Conversation between Willoughby Sharp and Lawrence Weiner. (*3) In 2021 a faltering New York art world paid an inordinate amount of attention to ‘Make Me Famous’, a documentary by Brian Vincent about Ed Breszinski, a M.I.A. ’East Village artist’ who gained notoriety for the public mismanagement of his non-career.

Tim Maul is an artist and art writer based in New York and Connecticut