Why Not Sneeze?
Why Not Sneeze Rose Sélavy? 1921/1964
Readymade: 152 marble cubes in the form of sugar cubes
with thermometer and cuttlefish bone in a birdcage.
12.4 x 22.2 x 16.3 cm
Milan, Collection Arturo Schwarz
Seen from today’s perspective, Marcel Duchamp seems the most influential artist of the twentieth century. His critical examination of the conditions under which art is created and marketed set a trend that has continued into the present. It was Duchamp who responded most radically to the changes brought about in the art world by the industrial age. And yet Duchamp was the least spectacular of artists this century has produced to date. Although his work, due to its artistically provocative nature, received an enormous amount of critical attention, his life was surrounded by the legendary Duchamp “wall of silence.” While his work already presents a kind of nerve-wracking IQ test for artists and art historians, it certainly remains an enigma to the general public. Even Duchamp’s dedicated patrons were sometimes puzzled. When asked by Katherine Dreier to produce an object for her sister, Duchamp agreed, as long as he had complete freedom. Why Not Sneeze? was what resulted—an assemblage of marble cubes that look like sugar lumps, a thermometer and a cuttlebone contained inside a handy old rectangular birdcage. Dorothea Dreier didn’t want Why Not Sneeze? and gave it back to Katherine, who kept it in her collection of Duchamp’s work until 1937, when she sold it without profit to another of Duchamp’s main collectors, Walter Arensberg. Why Not Sneeze? was not a success. Not many people saw it, and those who did found it hard to understand, but too strange to be meaningless. It was the kind of transitional object that channeled the hot air of Dada into the lungs of Surrealism, which was at that time just evolving. Later in 1936, Why Not Sneeze? was even included in a Surrealist exhibition in Paris. It was placed in a showcase alongside fetishes of the Papua, as well as mathematical demonstration models from the Poincaré (scientific) Institute. These neighboring comparisons hinted the viewer was to lift Why Not Sneeze? out of an art context and drop it down into—what? Duchamp himself didn’t help out with explanations: “This little birdcage is filled with sugar lumps . . . but the sugar lumps are made of marble and when you lift it, you are surprised by the unexpected weight./ The thermometer is to register the temperature of the marble.” Why Not Sneeze?, with its suggestions of weight (heavy marble), promised sweetness (fake sugar cubes), missing warmth (thermometer), poetry (birdsong), arrested flight (cuttlebone and birdcage) and art (Cubism, and also the use of marble) seems to have a message for the Dreier sisters. The flippant title is a proposition. Why not do something like sneezing, that cathartic reaction that grows from a tickle to a climactic explosion, leaving only runny traces behind? Duchamp’s signature on the piece, his new pseudonym, “Rose Sélavy,” sometimes also written “Rrose,” pointed in the direction of sex: Eros, C’est la vie. However, another look at Why Not Sneeze? makes the viewer rather guiltily try to repress that association. Could it be that the small banged-up birdcage, the jumble of white cubes, the glass thermometer and the brittle cuttlebone are likely to erupt? How were the serious-minded Dreier sisters supposed to understand the piece? There were not many precedents for this kind of work in the field of visual arts. Duchamp tended to look in other directions for inspiration—to scientific models, industry or to literature. One historian finds convincing parallels between Why Not Sneeze? and a poem by Gertrude Stein. Duchamp was familiar with Stein’s writing, her role as a patron of Cubism and had even visited her with Catherine Dreier in 1916. The poem, called “Lifting Belly” (1915-1917), from which Duchamp may have taken individual elements, does not contain any linear sense, but is a series of images and feelings: “Lifting belly is no joke. Not at all . . . Sneeze. This is the way to say it . . . Arrest. Do you please m…” “I do love roses and carnations . . . A magazine of lifting belly. Excitement sisters . . . You know I prefer a bird. What bird? Why a yellow bird . . . Lifting belly is so kind. And so cold.” “Lifting belly marry . . . We do not encourage a nightingale . . . Can he paint? No after he has driven a car . . . Lifting belly is famous for recipes. You mean Genevieve . . . Lifting belly is sugar. Lifting belly to me . . .” In the poem as in Why Not Sneeze, the audience becomes tangled in a series of ideas that refuse to let themselves be read in a narrative fashion. Duchamp’s possible references to the poem seem to be personal rather than stringent. In a sense, the viewer is lost, or turned loose within an unknown sensibility, namely that of the artist—a shaky start that has one turning about in search of orientation points. — Janis Mink, Marcel Duchamp: Art As Anti-Art. Köln: Taschen, 1995.
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