Bachelors

by Rosalind E. Krauss.
1999, Cambridge, MIT
ISBN: 0-262-11239-6

Reviewed by Fred Andersson

In some famous essays, most of them collected in The Originality of the Avantgarde (1986) and The Optical Unconscious (1992), Rosalind Krauss has shown how dadaism and surrealism established a tradition of the Horizontal and Low, of Informe (Georges Bataille's concept). She opposes this to the formal, vertical Grid of renaissance perspective, inherited by Gestalt psychology and incorporated into the formalist aesthetics of modernism. The title of Krauss's new book, Bachelors, signifies a continuation of this discussion.

Here, Krauss deals with the art of nine female artists from the 1920s to the 1980s, from Claude Cahun to Louise Lawler. But the really important Bachelors in this book are, at least implicitly, the nine forms attached to the Bachelor Machine in Marcel Duchamp's "La mariòe mise Ì nu par ses còlibataires, m®me" (the Large Glass, 1915-23). In Krauss writings, Duchamp's Bachelor Machine is often linked to Gilles Deleuze's and Felix Guattari's description of the Body as a closed and yet dispersed system of desiring machines.

In Deleuze's and Guattari's theory, the desiring machines produce the desires, and yet they ARE the desires. The machines BELONG to the Body's organs and yet they ARE the organs. The urge for satisfaction of desires are, in the closed system, exactly the energy that make the machines produce desire, "that makes them run". But there is also the concept of the Body Without Organs, being a picture of the Ego or Collective that is supposed to HAVE organs and desires whilst still ITSELF being situated on a HIGHER level. Krauss has described the Body Without Organs as analogous to the idea of the picture-plane as a homogenous Totality, a vertical and abstracted reflection of the spectator's Self. By contrast, the art which she relates to the concept Informe often involves a multitude of dispersed organs, Part-Objects. The Part-Objects, explicitly related to sexual desires, replaces the abstract, homogenous Totality.

In Bachelors, the concepts of Part-Objects and Informe proves to be very helpful as means of defining and analyzing the work of very dissimilar artists like Cindy Sherman, Agnes Martin, Louise Bourgeois and Sherrie Levine. But I think that the problems of Krauss's structuralist (or poststructuralist) approach becomes apparant when she neglects certain topics which, from her point of view, may seem irrelevant. I would argue that her critique of formalism's reductionism involves a certain blindness when it comes to the reductionism of her own textual model. In this context I would like to discuss her text, in Bachelors, about Sherrie Levine's three-dimensional version of the Bachelors in Duchamp's Large Glass.

In Levine's work (from 1989) the nine three-dimensional Bachelors are cast in glass and displayed in nine show-cases. The proportions of the show-cases are similar to those of the Large Glass (base being appr. 3/5 of height), and so the cases could be regarded as three-dimensional versions of the Glass. Now, Krauss readily accepts that the sections of Levine's Bachelors are circular or nearly circular, because she doesn't even mention this fact. But why? Where, in the Large Glass, do we find the visual and geometrical evidence that the Bachelors are representations of three-dimensional forms with circular sections? According to the Swedish curator and essayist Ulf Linde, an analysis of the linear perspective in the lower part of the Large Glass shows that the Bachelor's sections in fact are narrow ellipses (see his "Marcel Duchamp", Stockholm 1986).

One may object that these kind of analyses, necessarily involving the Albertian unity of pictorial space, represents exactly the dominant, symbolic Order which Duchamp apparently sought to subvert in his work. But the crucial point here is the choice between the Circular and the Elliptical. The Circle as a plastic signifier has certain connotations. Let's think about the circle as a symbol of the Self, the Universe, the Totality... Rudolf Arnheim writes about this in chapter 15 of his Visual Thinking, and makes reference to Galileo Galilei's cosmology. Galilei, too stuck with traditional thinking, wasn't able to accept Kepler's finding that the planets move in ellipses. According to everyday visual perception, My Self is always the Center of a circular world. Reductionism is to make things symmetric and easy to grasp, to turn the ellipse into a circle...

In the Large Glass, the structural opposition of Part-Objects (i.e. the Bachelors) versus Picture-Plane (the Glass) implies the plastic opposition of organic roundness (Bachelors) versus in-organic angularity (Glass). In semiotic terms, the general opposition of Roundness versus Angularity is a Form, whilst the various variants of Roundness (interpreted as circles or ellipses) is a Substance. By making the Bachelors circular or nearly circular, Levine emphasizes the generality of the Form. What she really shows in her show-cases is the circular, self-contained autism (and eroticism?) of nine part-objects which are also Bodies Without Organs. But when Krauss writes, in her text about Levine, that "To cast the bachelors in glass, and then to frost the glass, is therefore to add nothing, to create nothing" (p. 182) this is obviously not true. Levine has added and chosen a certain plastic content. By comparision: what would elliptical Bachelors have looked like?

Levine's work surely belongs to the realm of appropriative art - art that negates the modernist notion of creative individuality by being largely confined to the reproduction and re-creation of preexisting images and forms as Readymades. But the example of Levine's Bachelors may demonstrate that an act of appropriation could also be an act of interpretation - to turn something into one's own. By merely confirming Levine's interpretation of Duchamp's work, I think Krauss fails to really discuss the complexity of her art. This example may also illustrate another question worth discussing: to what extent has surface-models and reductive binary schemes limited the scope of visual semiotics?