by Julian White
I had the pleasure to attend nothing less than a panel debate on art this past Sunday in Hollywood and the surprisingly young, articulate, and not-entirely-charmless participants were debating, in this year of our Lord 2025, still, whether art should look good. An answer in the affirmative seemed to be edging ahead and then one of the young writers suddenly spouted “What about Marcel Duchamp’s idea of the antiretinal?” and then they all seemed to take this moment of scholarly inquiry quite seriously indeed.
Duchamp? In this increasingly diverse, anti-patriarchal art world why is Marcel Duchamp the one dead, white, cismale artist who consistently gets a pass? Possibly because without him as justification, none of what we’re looking at makes much sense. Even when not bathing fully in the tepid water of the antiretinal, nearly every show in recent memory from Aitken at Regen Projects to Nauman at LACMA at least leans on the non-visual as a justification for not trying too hard to appeal to people, well, looking at it. We had Joseph Beuys at The Broad, we’ll have Yoko Ono any minute and even the half of the Hammer’s Made In LA that isn’t meaningless without wall text feints so lazily at visual risk that it could have been made at any time since the ‘80s.
Where did all this come from? In Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp (1967), the author—art historian Pierre Cabanne—asks Duchamp about his idea to accompany The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, or The Large Glass, (1915-23) with a text.
DUCHAMP: I wanted that album to go with the “Glass,” and to be consulted when seeing the “Glass” because, as I see it, it must not be “looked at” in the aesthetic sense of the word. One must consult the book, and see the two together. The conjunction of the two things entirely removes the retinal aspect that I don’t like. It was very logical.
CABANNE: Where does your antiretinal attitude come from?
DUCHAMP: From too great an importance given to the retina. Since Courbet, it’s been believed that painting is addressed to the retina. That was everyone’s error. The retinal shudder! Before, painting had other functions: it could be religious, philosophical, moral. If I had the chance to take an antiretinal attitude, it unfortunately hasn’t changed much; our whole century is completely retinal, except for the Surrealists, who tried to go outside it somewhat. And still, they didn’t go so far! In spite of the fact that Breton says he believes in judging from a Surrealist point of view, down deep he’s still really interested in painting in the retinal sense. It’s absolutely ridiculous. It has to change; it hasn’t always been like this.
Leaving aside that Duchamp’s argument here is not terribly robust and the very opposite of avant-garde (“It used to be this way, let’s go backwards because of that”) it occurs to me, not for the first time, that while Marcel Duchamp and the Nazis had very different ideas about art both would still have us all looking at urinals and shovels all day long.
For those that tire of the art world’s increasingly-occasional experiments with looking good—those eager to never have their eyes sullied by another glimpse of Ed Kienholz or Key Hiraga—there is a place one can experience the stimulation of antiretinality in full purity, untainted by the base alloy of beauty or attempts thereat. It’s called prison.
Am I honestly proposing that the fans of high conceptual and minimal artworks go to jail? I am. It would free up a lot of studio space. But moreover I am posing the question: Why wouldn’t they want to? A wonderland of white cubes, polished and rectilinear steel surfaces, humble meals with no egotistical attempt at chefly virtuosity, and all the hash marks on the walls that Sol LeWitt could ever ask for. With the scant materials available and harsh restrictions on gifts, you would see only the the povera-est of arte. Want to look at soup cans? They have them! Did you enjoy watching an audience do whatever they want to Marina Abramović as she stands unresisting? Step into the shower!
Do you like American Artist’s recent Shaper of God: Apple Valley Autonomy show at the California African American Museum? Prison offers even more opportunities to see identity documents on tables, files locked away behind barriers, and, in sufficiently rural areas, even ruined chicken coops. A fan of Ed Ruscha’s views of empty parking lots? Outside your window every day! Into James Turrell? Staring out a rectangle into a featureless blue through a window you cannot touch is free every day in the common room! The wealthiest collector could do no better.
Here there would be plenty of opportunity to ponder the “religious, philosophical, moral”—the first with the prison chaplain, the last by asking all your bunkmates how they got there, and the second with a prison library copy of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, where you can sit—in what surely is the ideal reading room for such a text—and ask why you spent so much time yearning for this.
Image: Staff