1. The public began to believe in a myth that Duchamp was actively promoting

himself in forums, panels, and interviews; see Anne d'Harnoncourt and Walter Hopps, "Etant Donnés," 6-7.

2. Joseph Masheck observes that unlike the Nude and the Bride, Etant Donnés is "totally divorced from modernist abstract tendencies"; see "Introduction," Duchamp in Perspective, 22. His comment reflects the difficulty of understanding this work in relation to Duchamp's previous works.

3. Masheck summarizes this dilemma as follows: "Did Duchamp actually realize an escape from art in the fabrication of this work, did he leave art behind just as we thought he had until we found he hadn't?" He goes on to characterize this work as "startlingly gross and amateurish"; see ibid., 13.

4. Moira and William Roth, "Interview," 155. For other comparisons of Given with the Large Glass, see Octavio Paz, "Water Writes Always in Plural," in Appearance, 91-178; Jean-François Lyotard, "Etant Donnés: Inventaire du dernier nu," Marcel Duchamp: Abécédaire, ed. Jean Clair, 86-110; Alain Jouffroy, "Etant donné Marcel Duchamp 1) individualiste révolutionnaire, 2) respirateur," Opus International, no. 49 (March 1974): 18-23; René Micha, "Etant Donné Etant Donnés,'' Tradition de la rupture, ed. Jean Clair, 157-75.

5. Moira and William Roth, "Interview," 155.

6. See William Camfield's account of Duchamp's exhibit and Walter Hopps's comments, in Fountain, 109.

7. Masheck, Duchamp in Perspective, 155.

8. John Golding, Bride Stripped Bare, 95. My analysis also relies on the facsimile edition of Given by Marcel Duchamp, Manual of Instructions for Marcel Duchamp "Etant Donnes: 1) la chute d'eau, 2) le gaz d'éclairage" (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1987).

9. D'Harnoncourt and Hopps are an exception, since they insist on the fact that the door frustrates the public's visual expectations; see "Etant Donnés," 7-8.

10. Octavio Paz, Appearance, 95.

11. Arturo Schwarz, "List of Illustrations," Marcel Duchamp, no. 130.

12. Paz, Appearance, 95. Taking as a point of departure Paz's emphasis on the "hinge," this essay will explore the impact of this notion on Duchamp's visual and linguistic experiments.

13. For an excellent analysis of Duchamp's challenge of the institutional space of the museum, see Marc Le Bot, "Margelles du Sens; ou, les musées de Marcel Duchamp," L'Arc, no. 59 (1974): 8-15. The museum as site of "immortality" for the work of art will be further elaborated in the conclusion of this essay.

14. Roger Dadoun, "Rrose Sschize: Sschize d'un portrait-théorie de Marcel Duchamp en Jésus sec célibataire," L'Arc, no. 59 (1974): 25.

15. Golding, Bride Stripped Bare, 16.

16. I interpret this exaggerated realism, which for critics such as Joseph Masheck is an indicator of Duchamp's going against the "grain of modern art," as a reflection of Duchamp's postmodernism, insofar as it makes visible his rhetorical display of pictorial and sculptural mimesis as modes of artistic reproduction. For Masheck's comments, see his "Introduction," in Duchamp in Perspective, 23.

17. Paz, Appearance, 96.

18. In the pages that follow, I will demonstrate that Duchamp anticipates the feminist critique of the male gaze by deconstructing both the structure and, therefore, the ideology of male spectatorship. For a critique of vision as a predominantly scopic economy, see Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter and Caroline Burke (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 133-48; see also Jacqueline Rose's critique of sexual difference and the visual image in her Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London: Verso, New Left Books, 1986), 232-33.

19. The coincidence of the point of view and the viewing subject implied in perspective is designated by Jean Pellerin Viator as "subject." For a critique of the notion of pictorial and cinematographic perspective and the subject's point of view, see Jean-Louis Baudry, "The Ideological Effects of the Cinematographic Apparatus," in Apparatus: Selected Writings, ed. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (New York: Tanam Press, 1980), 25-37.

20. Compare Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure," 6—18; and, more recently, Jacqueline Rose, Sexuality, 232-33. See also Mary Ann Doane, "Film and Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator," Screen 23 (September-October 1982): 74-87.

21. For an exploration of vision and its indirect relation to both the body and language, see Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "The Intertwining—The Chiasm," in The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 130-55. See also, Rosalind Krauss's recent examination of the body's relation to the signifier and to vision in "Where's Poppa?," in The Definitively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp, ed. Thierry de Duve (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 433-59.

22. For a comprehensive analysis of Courbet's works and this particular painting,

see Michael Fried's excellent study, Courbet's Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 200-5. Fried also emphasizes the painterliness of the parrot, a detail that may have proven significant to Duchamp's allusion to this work.

23. This reference to Magritte has not yet been elaborated in the critical literature on Duchamp. Alain Robbe-Grillet re-creates this painting in literal terms in his novel Topologie d'une cité fantôme: roman (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1976), under the revised title The Mannequin Assassinated, instead of Magritte's The Threatened Assassin. Robbe-Grillet's literary "translation" of Magritte's image involves puns similar to those that are found in Duchamp's own work.

24. Duchamp himself spells out this pun on the facticity of sex; see his quote in Schwarz, Complete Works, 576. For a general analysis of this lithograph series and its relation to Given, see Hellmut Wohl, "Duchamp's Etchings of the Large Glass and Lovers," Artist of the Century, ed. Rudolf E. Kuenzli and Francis M. Naumann, 172-76.

25. See Clair, Marcel Duchamp: Abécédaire, 158-59.

26. Compare to Jacqueline Chénieux's critique of transgression in "L'Erotisme chez Marcel Duchamp et Georges Bataille," Tradition de la rupture, ed. Jean Clair, 196-218. Although Chénieux alludes to the rhetorical status of eroticism in Duchamp, she does not elaborate it in visual terms, by examining its figurative structure.

27. My interpretation of the nude in relation to the brick wall questions Lyotard's, "Inventaire du dernier nu," 102, and Golding's suggestions that the nude in Given fell from the ceiling, by analogy to its movement in the Large Glass, from the upper to the lower regions, Bride Stripped Bare, 99.

28. For an analysis of the reversible topology of the male and female position, see Jean Clair, "Sexe et topologie," Marcel Duchamp: Abécédaire, 52-59. Such a reversibility of sexual difference in the artistic realm contests but does not annul the conventional opposition of these categories in the social realm.

29. This interpenetration of the male and female shape is yet another allusion to Leonardo's anatomical drawings as discussed by Sigmund Freud in Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood (1910). See Jacqueline Rose, Sexuality, 225-33.

30. D'Harnoncourt and Hopps, "Reflections on a New Work," 37.

31. Clair, "Sexe et topologie," 58. The simulational and rhetorical logic of

Duchamp's operations challenges the priority of the phallus as a privileged signifier; see Stephen Heath, "Difference," Screen 19 (Autumn 1978): 67.

32. Pierre Cabanne, Entretiens avec Marcel Duchamp (Paris: Pierre Belfond, 1967), 165, translation mine.

33. For a detailed exploration of these puns in Anemic Cinema, see Katrina Martin, "Marcel Duchamp's Anemic Cinema," Studio International 189, no. 973 (January-February 1975): 53-6o. As P. Adams Sitney observes, however, "The sexuality is neither in the literal surface of the words, nor in the optical illusion. It is an operation of the viewer's reading of one part of the film into the other," see "Image and Title in Avant-Garde Cinema," October" (Winter 1979): 104.

34. Compare to my discussion of sexual difference and indifference, in "Anemic Vision," 48-56. For an analysis of the emblematic and anagrammatic character of this film, see Annette Michelson, "'Anemic Cinema': Reflections on an Emblematic Work," Artforum (October 1973): 65-69.

35. Craig E. Adcock discusses in detail Duchamp's experiments with the mechanical problem of projecting three and four dimensional figures on a two dimensional surface, which I consider analogous to the punning movement of the male and female positions; see Craig Adcock, Marcel Duchamp's Notes from the Large Glass: An N-Dimensional Analysis (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983), 118-36.

36. Manual of Instructions for Marcel Duchamp "Etant Donnés: 1) la chute d'eau, 2) le gaz d'éclairage" (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1987), 1.

37. D'Harnoncourt and Hopps, "Reflections on a New Work," 25.

38. Lyotard, in "L'Inventaire," considers chocolate as the medium through which the difference between appearance and apparition is thematized, 104.

39. Jackstraws is a game where miniature (often agricultural) tools are flattened out and piled on top of each other. The aim is to extricate each of these elements with a hook (a kind of stylus) without disturbing all the others. This miniaturized assemblage recalls Duchamp's miniature museum, The Box in a Valise.

40. This brush for cleaning bottles anticipates, by its pointed indexical character, the gesture of the nude in Given, which is holding a gas lamp.

41. Schwarz, Marcel Duchamp, xxvi.

42. See Rosalind Krauss, "Notes on the Index: Part I," in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 198-99.

43. See The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even: A Typographic Version by Richard Hamilton of Marcel Duchamp's Green Box, trans. George H. Hamilton (Stuttgart: Hansjörg Mayer, 1976).

44. D'Harnoncourt and Hopps, "Reflections on a New Work," 40.

45. Krauss, Originality of the Avant-Garde, 205.

46. Schwarz, Marcel Duchamp, xxvi.

47. Ibid., xxxiv.

48. It is important to recall that François Villon was so admired in the Duchamp household that his brothers added the name of Villon to their patronymic name.

49. For an analysis of Duchamp's signature, Rrose Sélavy, see Roger Dadoun's article, "Rrose Sschize," 24-28; for his second signature "Belle Haleine," see Arturo Schwarz, "Rrose Sélavy: Alias Marchand de Sel alias Belle Haleine," L'Arc, no. 59 (1974): 29-35.