SHRINK TO EXPAND: THE READYMADES THROUGH THE LARGE GLASS

Departing from Duchamp’s advice in 1961 of finding the “common factor” between the non-representative and the representative, translated here into modernism and avant-garde, this article seeks to understand the readymades as objects that have passed metaphorically through Duchamp’s magnum opus, the unfinished Large Glass (1915-23). More precisely, the readymades are seen as mass-produced utensils that have been stripped bare of their usual function, i.e. their actualization, in order to regain potentiality. Mapping Giorgio Agamben’s interpretation of Herman Melville’s short story Bartleby, the Scrivener (1856) onto the readymades, this shrink-to-expand strategy is understood as a skeptical suspension of judgment, epoché, comparable to Bartleby’s polite refusal to work. Moreover, it is seen as equivalent to the down-scaling of dimensionality observed in the Large Glass, where transparency in one go eliminates the representation of spatial circumstances and opens up the objects toward the ever-changing physical surroundings, thereby exposing more of those 4-dimensional projections, which are normally suppressed in our reduced 3-dimensional perception of the world.

Povera, and Conceptual Art, these were nevertheless deferred actions in Hal Foster's Freudian sense. 2 As Duchamp reaffirmed in 1964, they would only repeat what he had already performed himself half a century earlier through the ascetic underground revolution par excellence: the introduction in the art world of the readymades. 3 Still, in spite of all his anti-retinalism, the Duchamp of 1961 would not accept the dilemma of the last hundred years that forced artists to choose between the "representative" (the antiretinal) and the "non-representative" (the retinal). Instead, all the "isms" should be grouped according to what Duchamp termed "their common factor." Like Alice in Wonderland, the artist of tomorrow "will be led to pass through the looking-glass of the retina, to reach a more profound expression." In this paper, I demonstrate that this Alice in Wonderland gesture had also been performed by the early Duchamp This process of breaking down actualization and upgrading potentiality-a principle I shall call "shrink to expand"-is translated quite explicitly into spatial terms. For the very act of transparency leads to an erasure of all represented particularitiesspatial environments-and therefore also to a down-scaling of dimensionality that in Duchamp's thinking makes the objects more receptive toward the unseen 4-dimensional world. In the Glass, this conversion from higher-dimensional appearance to lowerdimensional apparition, and back to strengthened receptiveness of even higher-dimensional re-inscriptions, becomes apparent, since the Glass's space-reducing act of transparency is the same act that opens the objects toward their actual and ever-changing physical surroundings.
What secures this double movement of reduction of actualization and opening towards a widened scope of actualizations is, in the broadest sense, a framing-a framing which in semiological terms is visualized in the so-called "Top Inscription" or "Milky Way," in whose bulging cinematic frames, the "Draft Pistons," the Bride appears to her Bachelors. These photographic freezings, a conceptually determined epoché, again find an echo in Duchamp's speculations of the readymades as semiologically framed 3-dimensional photographs-just as the readymades are often presented in ways that stress their status as lower-dimensional projections, or apparitions, that mediate between different dimensions like their siblings in the Large Glass.

RETINAL/ANTI-RETINAL
What I see as truly remarkable in Duchamp's late statements of 1961 is his consolatory attitude to his often formulated antagonism of retinal and anti-retinal. While noting that the problematic nineteenth-century liberation of the artist as an individual "gave birth to all the 'isms' which have followed one another during the last century at the rate of one new 'ism' about every fifteen years"-that is, primarily the retinal path-Duchamp nevertheless suggested that "we must group the 'isms' together through their common factor, instead of differentiating them," including Surrealism, which actually "reduced the role of the retina to that of an open window on the phenomena of the brain." It is hereby that we could overcome the divide between the "representative" and the "non-representative" and, like Alice in Wonderland, "pass through the looking-glass of the retina to reach a more profound expression." For a contemporary reader, it could be tempting to collapse the "representative" with representation pure and simple and thereby with just a more figurative version of the retinal sphere. But this would clearly be a misunderstanding. Duchamp's remark on Surrealism shows why. To use a term from Speculative Realism, we could say that for him the "representative" in Surrealism concerns something object oriented that reduces the pleasure, or the sensuous friction of the retinal, to such a degree that it makes sense to link it to the anti-retinal, thus rather turning "representative" into what today is typically termed "presentative." Surrealism's "open windows" hereby become compatible with those conceptual frames or auras with which Duchamp encapsulated or bracketed off outer material objects in his own readymades.
Moreover, I suggest mapping the correlation of the two antagonisms, representative/non-representative and anti-retinal/ An initial key to overcoming these dualisms, once correlated, is to view the left row as particularly opaque variations of the notion of "looking-glass:" a "window" that attracts so much attention to its own retinal friction that it should be considered more a "screen" or even a "mirror." Such a retinal screen is more or less abstract and would therefore peak in modernist movements such as Abstract Expressionism. However, if we lessen the opacity of the screen and direct the attention to the objects mediated through it we move towards the right row of the Avant-garde, converting the lookingglass first to a transparent window (Surrealism) and later to frames or auras of semiological signs (conceptualism). In the right row, more or less material objects are thus presented inside diverging frames, from the ones explicitly mediating representation to the ones implicitly mediating concepts.

EPOCHÉ
But if a "common factor" between retinal modernism and antiretinal avant-garde could be found in the frame, a device that mediates between perceptualist screens and conceptualist auras, it remains, nevertheless, a necessary but not sufficient condition. For a prime characteristic of modernism is the visual indeterminacy of the objects shown: their abstraction. This interpretative indeterminacy should therefore also be transferred to the conceptual register of interpretation when, passing through the looking-glass and ending in the right row of the avant-garde, the objects, processes, or events become more physically present and accordingly more visually accessible. We are thus looking for a notion of indeterminacy that would be a "common factor" between retinal abstraction and anti-retinal conceptual avant-garde.
Appropriating ideas from Giorgio Agamben, I suggest that such a key concept may be provided by the ancient Greek notion of epoché, suspension of judgment (literally "holding back").
Counteracting a civilization that has degenerated into over- Frustrated by his unstable copyists, a Wall Street lawyer employs a new scribe, Bartleby, who initially proves satisfactory but then one day suddenly declines to work, claiming repeatedly but with utmost politeness, "I would prefer not to." Giving up work, Bartleby enters a sort of limbo in which he just exists: first writing a little, then staring at the wall, and, finally, now in prison, giving up eating and dying from starvation. The lawyer who tells the story is mystified by this behavior but sees it as a sort of "passive resistance." This resistance includes giving up particularity, since three times Bartley claims, "I am not particular." It even implies giving up his human feelings: the lawyer notes in Bartleby a striking absence of "uneasiness, anger, impatience or impertinence […] in other words […] any thing ordinarily human." When the last sentence of the story laments, "Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!", it is troublingly indeterminate whether it is specific to this particular loss of humanity or rather to humanity itself with its senseless work addiction. author Enrique Vila-Matas. 19 The common factor of these siblings, real or invented-from Melville himself to Hölderlin, from Balzac's Frenhofer to Musil's Man without Qualities, to Beckett's Watt-is a strange paralysis in relation to artistic creation: a pervasive "I prefer not to."

THE LENS OF THEORY OF TECHNOLOGY
To explore more profoundly what this Bartleby-Duchamp correlation means, we should shift our lens from the theory of art to that of work and technology-or rather overlap these lenses.
As has recently been discussed by the Italian Marxist philosopher Lafargue. 20 From the perspective of work, the readymades as automated products violate that veneration of handicraft that had given artworks a new raison d'être in competition with emerging industrialism. But the readymades also disrupt the utilitarian goals that allegedly made factory work meaningful.
If we bring our lens more specifically toward technology, we can I was interested in introducing the precise and exact aspect of science, which hadn't often been done, or at least hadn't been talked about very much. It wasn't for love of science that I did this; on the contrary, it was rather in order to discredit it, mildly, lightly, unimportantly. But the irony was present. 23 It is hardly a coincidence that Fountain (Fig. 1.8) is an excellent piece of that plumbing which, together with bridges and skyscrapers, were This new thought opens the whole extended sphere of potentiality that may be realized in countless new ways. As Louise Norton further specifies in The Blind Man, with unmistakable reference to Duchampian projects, a key source for the idea of such a new thought is the symbolist writer Remy de Gourmont's essay "La dissociation des idées" (1900). 25 Here, the most intelligent, most difficult creative act is described not as putting ideas together anew, but rather as splitting up old ones; a decreation, mocking, in Norton's words, "how sacred is the marriage of ideas." According to Norton's examples of this marriage between ideas and real life, even a married man is not only a husband bound to one woman and, in his job, a "money-making device;" he may be "some other woman's very personification of her abstract idea." By dissociating the usual marriage of ideas to certain objects, Fountain has thus widened this multivalence, the potentiality of concepts in relation to the entities they designate, and has thereby extended its own functional, perceptual, and conceptual scope. That a urinal should be a fitting object for breaking up traditional marriage bonds was already signaled by one of the notes in the Box of 1914, "-one only has: for female the public urinal and one lives by it-." 26 Isolating a urinal, the signifier for the female organ, from its usual contextand male content-is also loosening it from the marital bonds in accordance with which males allegedly lived. As is emphasized by its outer bulging rim that both connotes the folds of the female organ and an aura of concepts, Fountain exemplifies beautifully If the displacement of the readymades to the exhibition context of the art world contributes significantly to the breaking of marital bonds between ideas and things, conceptual vaginas and material penises, this shaking up of actualization and regaining of potentiality is also assisted through a row of mild sabotage actions: turning around the urinal so it will offer back its waste (stressed in the title Fountain); fastening the bicycle wheel on a stool so you can no longer sit on it-at the same time as the wheel, freed from its tire, rotates eternally to no use, like in a masturbation, according to Duchamp (Fig. 5.4) ; banging the coat hanger into the floor so you will stumble over it (stressed in the title Trébuchet, Trap) (Fig. 5.1) ; hanging the hat rack from the ceiling so you cannot reach it (Fig. 5.5) ; linking the snow shovel to predictions of how it will harm you while in use (stressed in the title In Advance of the Broken Arm) (Fig. 5.2) . The only readymades whose former use are seemingly not physically neutralized are the Bottle Dryer (Fig. 6.2) and the Comb (Fig. 5.3) , both however originally inscribed with cryptic sentences securing the mutation of the context (the authentic one on the Comb being still in place).
One highly likely source for this sabotage is Alfred Jarry's futuristic novel from 1902, Le Surmâle, whose Proto-Surrealist    Even the seemingly neutral Bottle Dryer posits itself in this disruptive genealogy (Fig. 6.2) . Harking back to Jarry's stolen bottles of milk, which here are virtually emptied out over its erectile spikes, the work becomes almost a mirror image of Fountain. 32 The dialectics of milky sperm-like fluidity and dryness that makes The workman, feeling a more or less legitimate hostility for his employer, slights his work. Almost all the men of our day seem to regard work as a frightful necessity, as a cursed drudgery, while it ought to be considered as our happiness and our excuse for living. 34 In order to change work from a means to existence to its end, Rodin suggests that men follow the example of the artist, "the man who takes pleasure in what he does" [Gsell's emphasis]; "or, better yet, become artists themselves," from carpenters, to masons, to carters; "You see, then, that artists set an example to the rest of the world which might be marvelously fruitful.

Nevertheless, Heidegger approaches Duchampian territory in
Being and Time (1927), writing that we only become conscious of technology when it fails. In our everyday use of the hammer, when it is ready-at-hand (zuhanden) and feels like an extension of our bodies, we do not give it any special thought. But when the equipment is missing, exerts friction in its use, or breaks down entirely, its being is revealed in a conscious state that approaches but is not identical with that completely distant state of observation that Heidegger describes with the adjective presentat-hand (vorhanden). 37 The readymades, then, would seem to offer an artificial staging of such a revealing moment of dysfunction.
Indeed, like Duchamp, in The Origin of the Work of Art (1935-36), Heidegger puts forth the idea that art has a special ability to reveal that essence of technology which is hidden in its everyday use. 38 As is famously demonstrated in his reading of Van Gogh's portrait of a pair of old shoes (Fig. 5.6) -what Heidegger, in his eerie adoration of the Germanic soil, takes as peasants' shoesthis revelation of truth, aletheia, is achieved through an uncanny alienation of the equipment from its everyday use. Although the painting still posits the shoes behind a representative retinal screen, Heidegger's lens on it, in its very object orientation, makes almost a pair of readymades out of these shoes.
The difference is, of course, that still being a product of handmade poiesis, these shoes are representatives of an archaic technology, techné, that encompasses both technology and art and whose pre-existing essence can therefore still be revealed in a work of art-in contrast to Duchamp their exhibition in revealing dysfunction would seem to offer an example of that saving power, which Heidegger projects into the potential of art. However, whereas Heidegger is still unable to specify how that saving power should be exposed by art in the midst of technology based on Enframing, Duchamp does offer an answer to that question, battling technology, skepticist-wise, with its own means.

ENTERING THE LARGE GLASS
Having performed this analysis of the readymades as critical interventions in industrial culture, we are better prepared to understand them as entities that have passed through Duchamp's own looking-glass, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even ( Fig. 3.2) . There is certainly a remarkable change of discourse when we move from the readymades to Duchamp's unfinished magnum opus-so much so that Duchamp himself declared in 1966 that "The Readymades are completely different from the Large Glass. I made them without any object in view, with no intention other than unloading ideas." 40 But which ideas? Since the readymades seem to stage a functional epoché, a decreative regaining of potentiality through displacement from their usual actualization, they already border upon that down-scaling of spatial dimensionality-the shift from appearance to so-called apparition-that operates on several levels in the Large Glass. Like many other avant-garde artists of his youth, Duchamp wished for art to participate in the supra-sensuous 4-dimensional reality that was recently proposed by scientists, mathematicians, and occultists, but as a specialty he believed this could only happen through a highly indirect, almost inverse route-the spatial version of the "shrink to expand" principle.
Contrary to the Cubist and Futurist desire of visually upscaling objects to a 4-dimensional space, Duchamp opted for an antiretinal down-scaling from 3 to 2, or perhaps rather 2.5 dimensions.
Hereby, he imagined that objects would be cleansed of their more specific 3-dimensional contexts and thereby become moulds, apparitions, for a larger range of possible 3-dimensional casts, ultimately securing a better access to the desired 4-dimensional universe. Although Duchamp never specifies and apparently was not fully conscious of it, such spatial down-scaling from n to n-1 dimensions, followed by a broader range of spatial up-scalings to something like n+1 dimensions, was structurally equivalent to the functional epoché of the readymades, their semiological freezing, followed by a broader range of possible actualizations.

ALCHEMICAL STRIPPING BARE
A powerful link between Duchamp's interests in epoché and multidimensional mediation is already provided by the alchemical imagery alluded to in the seemingly cryptic title of the Large Glass.
The notion of stripping bare the Bride is undoubtedly a reference to that neo-alchemical universe which was part of speculative science around 1900 and some of whose key figures, including queens, brides, and virgins, find echoes in the proto-surrealist universe of Alfred Jarry. 41 The epoché of the readymades, the business of deactualizing already functional gadgets in order to gain potentiality, is thus equivalent to alchemy's fundamental procedure: first purifying already existing dull materials into a more virginal state, the so-called prima materia, and then, from this re-opened potentiality, proceeding towards the production of gold. What is particular to Duchamp's stripping bare of the Bride, is that it is not performed by a faithful husband but by a whole horde of un-married Bachelors whose goal, as we saw earlier in connection to Fountain, is to deconstruct the locked marriages of ideas to matter.
Moreover, as is indicated by the peculiar "her," these Bachelors are a sort of property of the Bride, and since the title's last enigmatic word, Even, strengthens the autonomy of the Bride-the French "même" a pun on "even," "she loves me" and especially "self"-the stripping is probably ultimately instigated by the Bride as the motor of the whole apparatus. In a similar fashion, it is the naked woman who has taken over the illuminating gas in Duchamp's last work, the peephole installation Étant donnés (1946-66) (Fig. 2.4) .

MEDIATING 4-DIMENSIONAL SPACE
By stripping bare the Bride, then, taking away her actualized particularities, the Bachelors aim to make her like themselves, restoring her status as a free radical. Translated into spatial terms, the reason for this desire is that even the Bride's Cubo-Futurist dynamic space cannot depict 4-dimensional space directly. As

Linda Dalrymple Henderson has amply demonstrated, although
Duchamp was closely involved with that all-pervasive new discovery of the early twentieth century, 4-dimensional space, in contrast to the Cubists and Futurists, he became frustrated with art's inability to portray this space through the direct appeal to sensesthat is, in a retinal way. 44 Rather than fulfilling Henri Bergson's ideal of art as recreating that organic spatio-temporal continuity which Bergson named the durée, the Bride has to approach this space through a montage of fragmented 2-dimensional projections of 3-dimensional space. This is the genealogy from chronophotography and film that the Italian Futurist Umberto Boccioni had to refuse in order to keep his version of Futurist dynamism, unique forms of continuity in space, intact in an allegedly nonmeasured, non-interrupted 4-dimensional space. 45 In contrast, Duchamp insisted on photography as a master metaphor for both the access to the Bride and, as we shall see, the

THE READYMADES THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS
What now prepares the ground for the readymades in this terrain of spatial erasing more specifically, is Duchamp's speculations of spatial down-scaling from n to n-1 dimensions as a movement from appearance to apparition-apparition being a mould, a negative or a cliché, from which new appearances may be cast.
Apparently, his trigger was again Gsell's interviews with Rodin, although this time he adopted a rather more antagonistic approach.
Remember that Duchamp upon his arrival in New York found "the idea of destructing old buildings, old souvenirs […] quite alright." He therefore seemed especially receptive to Rodin Judging from a remark in the Green Box that, "In general, the picture is the apparition of an appearance […]," 58 one might think that the apparition is a simple down-scaling from 3 to 2 dimensions. 59 But the 2 dimensions get into trouble when Duchamp also combines the apparition with the mould for 3-dimensional things and, accordingly, a more spatial preservation. The apparition hereby becomes a more comprehensive photographic mould or negative, not only able to reproduce positive casts, or prints in 2-dimensions, but to re-construct a full 3-dimensional appearance of the object, or rather a set of appearances of the object, of which it is a lower-dimensional image. Since it is not simply flat, I would claim that this lower-dimensional surface appearance, the apparition, must be located somewhere between If the necessary shedding of particularities in order to reach apparition seems to make the readymades less material than their fully fleshed siblings, the actualized appearances, this is confirmed by the strikingly ethereal way the readymades are often presented-as if they mediate across different localities and spaces.
In several photographs from Duchamp's New York studio at 33 West 67th Street, the readymades seem to flicker between a number of realities. Take the post-processed photograph Bicycle Wheel and Trap in Duchamp's portable museum, Box in a Valise (1941) (Fig. 4.4) .
Here, the readymades join other pieces of furniture (two armchairs and some pillows) in being set apart from their purely photographic base through layers of manually highlighted colors. The Trap even appears as an exquisite black and white linear drawing. Through levitating indeterminately in the representation of 3-dimensional space, they enter a translocal multidimensional space in which they mediate between different reality levels. This effect of translocation seems even to affect human beings who enter the swarm of readymades. In what appears as a double exposure, probably made by Duchamp himself, the now substantial yet fleeting appearance of hanging readymades (hat rack, snow shovel, urinal) counteracts that of a sitting but strikingly ghostlike, transparent male (Henri-Pierre Roché) (Fig. 1.1) . Emphasizing that bodies too are becoming trans-spatial assemblages like the machines that surround them, the male figure is divided in two-the crossing legs obviously out of sync with the diminutive upper body. No wonder that, when apologizing for her co-responsibility for refusing a Ready-made when he paints with a manufactured object that is called paints." 71 De-creating a urinal through establishing an apparition with an infrathin layer of expansive possibilities is thus equivalent to viewing a Seurat painting as a readymade-that is, as only one of several possibilities of the infrathin tubes of colour, whose potentiality is exactly re-exposed by terming the finished painting a readymade. Instead of creation ex nihilo, formation of virginal paint, the Seurat is judged as de-creation, removing actualization from tube paint as already produced.
Moreover, the connection between the readymades and Duchamp's speculations on spatial downscaling, including its exploration in the Large Glass, is strengthened by his linking of photography and allegory. Here, photographical downscaling, the freezing of things into lower-than-3-dimensional apparitions, becomes equivalent to their encapsulation in frames or auras of concepts. Take Duchamp's remark in the Green Box: Specifications for "Readymades." 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 Thus, by inscribing the mass-produced gadgets anew, photographically freezing them through lamination in a disruptive semiological aura, Duchamp liberates them from the crippling habits of bourgeois culture, which are themselves no more than a freezing of the accidental, although performed daily as if they were anything but. Moving from Duchamp's programmatic notes to his actual readymades, the inscription could be understood as both the act of withdrawing the utilitarian object from its usual context and the occasional act of inscribing it, as is seen in the case of Fountain, Comb, and, presumably, the snow shovel. As Duchamp explained in his talk "Apropos of 'Readymades'" in 1961, the "sentence" he inscribed, "instead of describing the object like a title was meant to carry the mind of the spectator toward other regions more verbal." 76 That is, again, inserting the object in a semiological frame.
Such an inscriptive frame, mediating between icon and symbol, photographic freezing, and aura of semiological concepts, is actually visualized in the Large Glass itself, namely in what Duchamp, in his notes, terms the "Top Inscription" or "Milky Way." It is in the three versatile window frames of this cloud-like formation, the wind-blown "Draft Pistons," that the Bride would perform her series of so-called "Cinematic Blossomings"-the only way she reveals herself to the Bachelors. To further stress the photographic nature of this "Top Inscription," Duchamp originally wanted to transfer it to glass by photo-mechanical means-a procedure echoed in the way his first box of notes, the Box of 1914, was published in containers for photographic prints manufactured by Kodak. 77 Hitherto, the "Top Inscription" has been seen exclusively as a communicative interface in which the Bachelors get an indirect access to the Bride; however, noticing the similarities between its semiological-photographic function and Duchamp's photographic procedure for inscribing a readymade, it must be viewed as a main instrument in Duchamp's movement into conceptual art. Echoing the strategy for the readymades, this figure converts in one go retinal window to semiological frame, photographic freezing to inscription. In this amorphous cloud penetrated by its three soft-blowing frames of looking-glass, we have an early visualization of that art philosophical dazzle, the aura of concepts, that Arthur C. Danto sees as a fundamental condition for posthistorical art. 78 This allegorical tendency, dissociating the ideas from the things they frame as a looking-glass, is echoed on the very level of the presentation of the Large Glass itself, which thereby becomes an enlargement of the draft pistons. For from early on, Duchamp removed from public eye the concepts explaining the cryptic iconography of the Glass. Their publication in set after set of delayed and isolated notes created a philosophical dazzle around the Glass at the same time as this detachment emphasized their ideologically unmarried state, their freedom from the material core of the work. Instead, the allegorical separation between concepts and things stressed the impact of the art co-efficient, the disjunction between what the artist intended and what could be later perceived by the spectator.
De-multiplication, apparition, ombre portée, infrathin, snapshot, inscription, allegory-all then concern a spatial down-scaling, a stripping bare of 3-dimensional particularities that is compatible with that decreation of fabricated things, epoché, which is going on in the readymades. Shrunk to alchemical prima materia, lowerdimensional moulds, with an accordingly re-gained potentiality, the readymades may, with delay, expand into a myriad of higherdimensional appearances and thereby approach the invisible 4-dimensional world.