Modern Glass: How Williams Reframed Duchamp’s Window

Abstract

IN a 1924 letter published transatlantic review, Mina Loy chastises those readers who ignore impact of modernity and modernism: Modernism is a prophet crying wilderness of culture that humanity is wasting its aesthetic time. For there is a considerable extension of time between visits to picture gallery, museum, library. It asks what is happening to your aesthetic consciousness during long long intervals? The of is pouring its aesthetic aspect into your eyes, your ears - and you ignore it because you are looking for your canons of beauty some sort of frame or case of tradition [...]. Would not be lovelier if you were constantly overjoyed by sublimely pure concavity of your wash bowls? (Loy, Gertrude 429-30) Loy reiterates a familiar avant-garde pitch: one must seize present moment, accept impact of modernism and recognize beauty of unexpected, lowly, contemporary objects. Instead of experiencing modern art and literature at particular times, such as when we pick up Ulysses or visit Armory Show, she asks us to acknowledge everyday experience of both modernity (the of life) and modern/sm (its aesthetic aspect) quotidian life. Just as Marinetti's later Futurist Cookbook proposes a constant absorption of art and via your stomach, Loy asks that we accept aesthetic even when it appears as morning bath. Henry Sayre rightly associates Loy's appreciation of sublimely concave wash bowl with her friend Marcel Duchamp's aesthetic defense of his Readymades, particularly urinal titled Fountain (1917) (Sayre, Ready-mades 11). Loy's letter thus reveals influence of both futurism and Dadaism on her thinking. But there are echoes of Duchamp's aesthetics another part of quotation. When Loy writes that we mistakenly look for beauty in some sort of frame or case of tradition, she is not only asking us to recognize shock of art unaccepted ways and places (futurist food for dinner, a urinal turned on its side and placed on a pedestal). She is also making point that picture frames and cases are similarly flawed examples of stabilized culture: both cut off spectator from the of life - living world of art object - thus making art appear sterile and lifeless. Her logic implicitly makes a claim about how frames and cases function. In Loy's formulation, painting frames (by keeping flux of life out of painting) and cases (by preserving art object from corrosive effects of flux of life) do same kind of unnecessary work. That is, effect, work of frames, separating world of one environment from that of another while permitting each environment to be mutually viewable. For if a frame is understood as trapping a painting stifling, airless atmosphere of museum, just as a sealed case removes a precious object from world, then, according to Loy, physical world as we experience it can enter - and should be allowed into - art. We need only eliminate windows: painting frames and cases of tradition. At first, this observation seems unremarkable. By early twentieth century, history of art was also a history of picture frames (if not cases) imagined as windows onto another world. This history begins, at least, with Leon Battista Alberti's fifteenth-century description of picture frame as open through which I see what I want to paint, and Leonardo da Vinci's claim that perspective is nothing else than seeing of an object behind a sheet of glass (Alberti 55; Leonardo 369). By nineteenth century, an expanded window/ painting informed development and theorization of realism such that, 1860s, French art critic Charles Blanc used the metaphor to describe naturalism, while Emile Zola praised Monet's paintings as a window open to nature (Levine 98). …