Die Unsichtbare Farbe

Abstract

This study investigates the function and use of the title in the early work of Marcel Duchamp. It will be concerned with the exploration of a fascinating repertoire of aesthetic instruments that, although largely neglected by art historians, have been ever more widely deployed by artists since Marcel Duchamp first brought them to the fore. In the course of their emancipation, works of art in art history have been endowed to varying degrees with these so-called paratexts. Already in the 19th century, but particularly after the emergence of the avant-garde, the title of a work began to shift from its traditional role as a conveyer of meaning to becoming a signifier in its own right, intimately bound up with the work itself. Duchamp gave his titles a special role whereby they should function as invisible colours. This reference to an intelligible component, accompanying but outside the work, makes it no longer possible to seize the work by an act of visual perception alone. Based on his perceptions of the contiguity or non-contiguity of work and title, Duchamp used the categorical strangeness between work and title as a basis on which to build certain strategies for shaping and the way the viewer achieves coherence and meaning through the act of seeing. Thus the title should be considered as a work-centred parameter within the process of reception whose formal relations and polysemantic superimposed layers of meaning act to refresh the intention of the work in the receptive consciousness of the viewer. Following a subdivision into form, content and function, this study places Duchamp's early work into three groups which are then examined with particular reference to one of these three aspects: his early drawings and paintings up to 1912, his ready-mades, and his main work, The Large Glass, as the final stage. In the course of this study the issue is also addressed as to what happens when titles are written into the picture or onto the object in the manner of Duchamp, thus promoting them to the status of an integral semantic component of the work. Does this transcend the boundaries of paratextuality and generate an 'implicit viewer' within the work? The main focus of the study is to investigate these multiple communicative functions of the title and their complex interaction with the message of the work. The study also provides a theoretical construct that conceptualises the phenomenon of the title as paratext, and lays the groundwork for an understanding of the role and function of the title in the work of Marcel Duchamp.