Monstrous Reproduction: The Performance of Representation
in Marcel Duchamp and Andy Kaufman

by: Matthew Friday

Intro: Um… Hi. My name is Matthew Friday and the title of my paper is, “The Performance of Representation: Marcel Duchamp and Andy Kaufman.” I should first say that I’m not really a theorist or an English teacher, or Philosophy major, or anything like that. I teach painting and my primary interest is ah… aesthetics and how different things can influence one another.

(First Signal to Audience Plants)

So, I’m going to apologize ahead of time if this doesn’t sound too polished and is a little bit off-the-wall. Basically, I’m, ah… interested in the work of the painter Marcel Duchamp and Andy Kaufman. I really like the way that they incorporate things that are outside of art into their art. And, I think that this, what I would call interdisciplinary approach is shared by the thinkers Jean Baudrillard (mispronounce) and Felix Deleuze (mispronounce).

(Second Signal to Audience Plants)

So, I was trying to think of a way of combining some of their ideas together as the topic of this paper that I am now going to present.

(Thank you very much – spoken in Kaufman’s Foreign man accent)
(Pause, shuffle papers and drink water. Get up and take off jacket)

Body: Now I will continue with the Imitations. What I am really interested in is sodomy, or as Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari would have it: Ass Fucking. I shall concern myself with the project of sodomy as a project of language and the performance of language as monstrous re-production. In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari utilize language to construct a desiring machine. To discuss the process by which text can be said to both desire and impregnate the subject, Deleuze and Guattari utilize the writings of one of Sigmund Freud’s notorious patients, Judge Daniel Schreber. Judge Schreber, who was in the process of becoming both a woman and a god (among many others), was diagnosed as a Schizophrenic and as such provides us with a means by which to enter into a relationship with Deleuze and Guattari. In order to remain unfaithful to Deleuze and Guattari our relationship must be one of monstrosity. For Judge Schreber, the world is a series of attractions and repulsions that locates itself in an undifferentiated body: the body without organs. This is of course, the theory of a schizophrenic, but because of his schizophrenia, Schreber holds a key for escaping any system of formal categories and systemizations of thought, which Deleuze and Guattari would describe as a form of State Philosophy. Schreber’s body contained no organs only membranes and eggs. Judge Schreber, who was in the process of becoming other, of becoming woman, felt himself to be growing breasts. The body without organs is, as Deleuze and Guattari describe it also an egg, “Nothing here is representative; rather, it is all life and lived experience: the actual, lived emotion of having breasts does not resemble breasts, it does not represent them, any more than a predestined zone in the egg resembles the organ that it is going to be stimulated to produce within itself.” (Anti-Oedipus 18) Deleuze and Guattari want to step outside the reproductive logos of writing, to see it other as an attempt to reproduce itself within a subject. The undifferentiated tissue of writing and art is like Schreber’s body, like the Deleuze’s Egg, it may be stimulated to produce organs within itself. If we do away with the distinction between text and context, subject and object, as Anti-Oedipus would have us do, writing as a desiring machine, must always remain fundamentally an un-reproductive machine. Hopefully, the performance of their text, of this text, of any text, contains the possibility to puncture membranes and leave the body filled with eggs. As with the Marquis de Sade’s inhabitants of the Castle Silling, one performs the act of sodomy, knowing that it cannot result in impregnation, but in spite of this one continues, and so shall I. Were there to be a fruit to this union, it could only be described as monstrous and as Mary Shelley has taught us, the first act of monsters is always to consume their own parents.

Marcel Duchamp and Andy Kaufman are both monstrous. They are individuals who, on the stage of power, exert force against the State Philosophy of Representation. Their resistance to representation is not rational, because the rational prescribes the very circuit of representational thought. Their resistance is a matter of desire and force and ultimately a form of becoming that attempts to escape categorical overlay. Let us treat their becoming as a form of performativity, insofar as it acknowledges that representation is a process that always escapes control, and let us concede that on this basis, performativity is a form of philosophical inquiry. However, if we wrestle with the slippery figures of Duchamp and Kaufman according to the laws of philosophy we are doomed to a rather humiliating defeat, because they both are horrible cheaters and the acknowledgement of their cheating must occur at the same time we acknowledge the rules they violate. Should we try these dangerously promiscuous figures with the laws and language of philosophy we run the risk of mis-representing them. One must ask if it is even possible to mis-represent an author or artist whose very task is to disable representational logic? Let us then summon up other voices to enact both the law and the violation of the law. And, let us give voice to Duchamp and Kaufman in accordance with this charade, even while we acknowledge that our ultimate aim will be to mis-represent them in such a way that allows them to be continuously monstrous.

The historical avant-garde has long been plagued with the task of achieving original forms from the perspective of an autonomous subject.

(Slide: Marcel Duchamp, Sculptural Installation of Fountain and Bottle Rack. 1917 Stockholm.

We can view Duchamp’s use of the readymade in his Fountain (1917) and Bottle Rack (1914), seen here on display in Stockholm, as a direct attack upon the bourgeois themes of artistic originality and use value. Duchamp proposed that, “objects of use value be substituted in place of a sculpture” 11 Seen within its historical context this substitution constitutes an adversarial strategy that attempts to both critique the consumption of the art work as a commodity and negate the possibility for art as mimetic representation. To a certain extent, Duchamp’s desire to replace sculpture with an object of use value reflects elements of Jean Baudrillard’s observations concerning the political economy of the sign. The emphasis of Duchamp’s statement is quite clearly on the liquidation of referentially that he sees as symptomatic of the work of art in the capitalist art market. If art is nothing more than a placeholder for exchange value, the reversal of this dialogue would create an object of which, through the primacy of its use value, appears to render exchange value secondary. Duchamp’s ready-mades appear to inscribe this dialogue, although he is known to have acknowledged that their very acceptance as art objects problematizes this relationship. One possibility for understanding this desire for a seemingly irrevocable loss of signification can be found in Baudrillard’s theory of the simulacra. We can begin this discussion with the definition of the work of art in relation to the commodity fetish and then trace its transformation and ultimate disappearance within Baudrillard’s hyperreal world of simulation.

(Slide: Mark Tansey. Chess Game. Oil Painting 1982)

Marcel Duchamp plays a vicious game of chess as depicted in this painting by Mark Tansey. Yet, as with all good players, we must credit some of the eloquence of his moves to his opposition. One could name several of Duchamp’s opponents, but for the sake of this farce, we shall name only the bourgeois notion of authorship, which remains immanent in much of Modernity. Similar to Duchamp, we must credit the theories of representation developed by Baudrillard to the opponent of his particular game. If we are to fully perform the theater of representation in the courts of philosophy we must summon forth the shade of Karl Marx. For Marx the commodity form embodies the whole structure of contradictions in capitalist society. His observations on the commodity hinge upon a distinction between use and exchange value and the environment that gives rise to the domination of exchange over use value. The false totality of exchange relations consumes and supplants the use value of an object. Claiming a system of measurable representation, exchange value upsets the intrinsic utility of an object, replacing it within a network of economic equivalence. Removed from its original context the object now mutates into a commodity, whose core is not based upon innocent primary needs, but rather the alienating networks of production, which lie outside the hands of the autonomous individual. The work of art in the age of the commodity fetish, no matter what its claims to autonomy, relies upon a system of distribution that exists within the cultural infrastructure. The distribution apparatus mediates the reception of the work. The art dealers, museums and galleries are integrated into the system of exchange relations that construct capitalist society and are therefore subject to its structural relations. As the art commodity is further removed from its context its content and original use value accelerates to the point of total irrelevance and its position becomes increasingly dependent upon its exchange value.

(Slide: Marcel Duchamp. The Fountain. 1917. Sculpture.)

As Duchamp once asserted when he said, “I threw a urinal in the face of the critics and now they praise its beauty”, the system of representation in Late Capitalism is capable of absorbing even the most radical gestures and transforming them into symbols of exchange value.

As we take the stage on the theater of representation, it may give us pause and help us learn the extent of our lines, if we assume the guise of actors such as Marcel Duchamp and Andy Kaufman. And, like wise, it may assist our knowledge of the stage, with its indecipherable boundaries and sudden curtain calls, to summon some of the playwrights of Representation, such as Jean Baudrillard and Giles Deleuze.

The foundations of Baudrillard’s simulacral order are found in the questions he poses to Marx’s theory of use value. Arguably this definition is the most controversial concept of Marx’s body of thought and there exists a multitude of interpretations. Marx himself attempts to clarify some of the questions concerning use value in his notes on Adolph Wagner, asserting that, “I do not proceed on the basis of `concepts’, hence also not from the `value concept’ . . . What I proceed from is the simplest social form in which the product of labor in contemporary society manifests itself, and this as `commodity’. That is what I analyze, and first of all to be sure in the form in which it appears. Now I find at this point that it is, on the one hand, in its natural form a thing of use value, blah, blah, blah . . .” 3 By privileging use value as the natural state, a state which is not defined by a `value concept’ but rather is immanent in the world, Marx prescribes utility as an a priori condition.

(Slide: Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation)

In Simulation and Simulacra, Baudrillard argues this claim of use value as originating in the primary needs of the individual obscures the fact that the concept of utility itself in not a property prior to exchange value. Baudrillard’s radicallity is his insistence that the superstructural relations of ideology extend all the way down to the level of the economic infrastructure, and additionally, the realm of the signifier extends and eclipses that of the signified. Thus he views the center of humanism at the core of Marx’s thought as both a form of systematic representation and a source of great mystification, which reinforces the signification of exchange value. Use value itself becomes an abstraction that falsely represents our relations to production. In the viral state of late capitalism, Baudrillard argues, objects are no longer determined by use or exchange value.

Rather than a mirror of the subject, the object becomes a transmitting network into which the decentered subject collapses. In this viral state of obscene communication the valiantly struggling subject becomes nothing more than a receptive screen onto which the flickering phantasms of tainted representation are played out. Symbolic exchange between transmitter and receiver lies outside of exchange value. The reciprocity of this relationship between transmitting network and receiving subject breaks down allowing for only the choice between multiple forms of image consumption, rather than the manipulation of representation. The only potential for resistance that Baudrillard locates within the subject-receiver is that of “a kind of refusal and non-reception”, which enables a “sending back to the system its own logic by reproducing it.”4 This alleged adversarial strategy has been appropriated by the members of the neo-avant-garde, most notably Jeff Koons, who has, without failure, explored all the tedious nuances of this logic.

(Slide of Jeff Koons)

There are many ways to read Baudrillard’s fatal strategy, and he has personally suggested that this might be a means of, “escape from exchange value by radicalizing (exchange value)” (Beyond the Vanishing Point of Art p.3)

For Baudrillard representation is the evil genie, which once freed from its Platonic boundaries by the virtual processes of information technology spins out of control and consumes the distinctions between subject and object. The pure realm of the real, that Platonic land of distinct subjects that are clearly defined from the background noise of circulating objects decays and fragments as the production of objects moves from the direct representation of use value to spectacular value. In Baudrillard’s words the spectacular value of the simulacral order of representation makes, “the real itself as a largely useless body.”8

(Slide of Andy Kaufman performing “Here I come to save the day.”)

Enter Andy Kaufman, stage left. Kaufman, who is perhaps best known for his character Latka in the 1980’s hit television series “Taxi”.

(Slide of Andy Kaufman performing “Taxi.”)

and the more recent biographical film “Man on the Moon.” Can quite literally save the day. Andy Kaufman, who began his career as a failed director of a children’s television program,

(Slide of Andy Kaufman performing “Children’s Television Show.”)

went on to experiment with the portrayal and rupture of various identities throughout his tragically short life. As one of the first participants of the late night comedy show, Saturday Night Live, Kaufman developed a repertoire of several characters, which included his abusive alter-ego, the Las Vegas Lounge singer: Tony Clifton.

(Slide of Andy Kaufman performing “Tony Clifton.”)

Throughout Kaufman’s career he returned to the Clifton character, insisting and often convincing spectators that Clifton was a separate entity.

(Slide of Andy Kaufman performing “Tony Clifton #2.”)

Clifton went on to appear without Kaufman present, as seen here in Jim Henson’s Muppets. And occasionally, Kaufman dressed his collaborator Bill Zmuda up as Clifton and appeared with him on stage

(Slide of Andy Kaufman performing “Tony Clifton #3.”)

Further confusing the line between identity, imitation and representation. Perhaps this best known performance of representation can been seen in a 1981 appearance on Wolfman Jack’s legendary rock and roll show, The Midnight Special.

(Video of Andy Kaufman performing Elvis)

Andy Kaufman performs a mode of becoming that suggests an altogether monstrous form of reproduction. Kaufman moves outside the shallow reflection of Baudrillard’s simulacra, but rather than turning his back to this image, he inverts it and gives it domain over that which it surveys.

Baudrillard’s theory of the simulacra is haunted by other voices that he does not wish to name. It owes a heavy debt to Plato’s dialogues against the Sophists, wherein Plato sets out to impose a moral order on the relationship between semblance and likeness. Plato, speaking through Socrates as usual, relates a debate between Theaeteus and the Stranger over the virtues of visual art that attempts to represent the real. The semblances (“phantasms”) imitate the real, but modify the perspective to accommodate the position of the viewer, “they put into images they make, not the real proportions, but those that appear beautiful.” On the other hand likenesses (“eikons”) have a direct correlation to the real. The semblance is a copy based upon a preconceived notion of aesthetics that has forsaken its ties to representation in favor of the stimulation of the viewer. It is a false claimant to being, a degraded copy, whose model lies outside the natural truth. Plato’s judgment is a fundamentally moral decision that attempts to uphold the embodiment of truth found within the perceived natural order. However, we must remember that Plato’s metaphysics of presence and absence is based upon both a desire to separate philosophy from its elder peers rhetoric and poetry and additionally a desire to get laid. Speaking through Socrates, Plato constructs the Phaedrus as a lesson in both simulation and seduction. Socrates needs to seduce the beautiful Phaedrus, not just to fuck him, but additionally to reproduce his system of representation within him. However, these eggs cannot bear the full weight of the name of the father, as they must always come to a strange and monstrous fruition in the body of the other.

If we are to escape from the acquiescence of Baudrillard’s nihilistic implosion that he declares, “nothing remains but a sense of dizziness, with which you can’t do anything”, we must begin by renegotiating the relation of art to the metaphysics of representation. There are of course multiple Baudrillards but, one way of reading him is to understand the simulacra as reinforcing a rather essentialist mode of understanding representation. The reactionary nostalgia for the real is based upon a fundamentally moral critique of the simulacra, which never moves beyond the square of opposition dictated by Platonic discourse. Up until recently art has functioned under the Vasarian model of mimetic representation. The declared objective of this system was the elimination of difference between the original and the copy. In Deleuze’s Difference et repetition , he sets upon the task of inverting this hierarchy of signification. Within Platonic thought, Deleuze states, we find a paranoid repression of difference that seeks to guard the fragile illusion of authentic identity. Deleuze denies the hierarchical structure of representation and inverts the relationship between original and copy. A metaphysics of representation based upon a Deleuzian model would be like Judge Schreber’s body or like an unhatched egg, a zone of varying intensities of transmission and reception continuous, without end without beginning. Within this world of rhizomatic clusters, identity itself would always already be constituted of the simulacral and therefore lack any position of primacy.22

(Slide of Andy Kaufman performing Elvis)

Andy Kaufman’s performance of representation seems to oppose any structural formulation of semiotics that might insist on dialectic between signifier and signified. If when viewing Kaufman’s performance of Elvis Presley, we assert that the idea of Elvis occupies the primary position of the signified and that the performance is solely an articulation or representation of this idea, then we have done violence to the discursive space that Kaufman’s act of becoming creates and we are prevented from exploring the questions this act raises. Deleuze proposes a more promiscuous and untimely suggestion; all languages take place in the realm of the simulacra, which is always, already both production and product.

As the theorist Michael Camille points out a renegotiation of representation would have to be, “Based upon the premise that images do not so much as replicate the real or substitute for it but rather are encounters with another order of reality entirely, it would be a history of art that could not claim to be about objects at all but about strategies of their simulation. It would have to take seriously Deleuze and Guattari’s startling statement that “no art and no sensation have ever been representational” Fakes and copies would, in this system be as import or crucial to understanding the past as the authenticated `old masters themselves’.”

The Baudrillardian usage of simulacra by contemporary artists would no longer hold its place of signification as the adversarial strategy to the modernist emphasis on authentic artistic objects under a Deleuzian model of representation. Without the binary poles of real and copy to continually recycle much of the work of these artist would fail to signify. A phantasmagoric art would have to assert the construction of situations of sensual experience that “renders the order of participation, the fixity of distribution, the determination of hierarchy impossible. It establishes a world of nomadic distributions and crowned anarchies.”24 This would be an art of illusions distributed by multiple shifting principalities, networks of information that located positionalities of vision. In my opinion the construction of such affiliations cannot solely take place in the artificial autonomous partitions of the art world, but rather must desegregate itself and permeate all levels of culture. Additionally, we must begin to understand the discursive space of our own language games as constituting certain performitive regimes. The mode in which we present our papers, the conferences that we use to legitimize our authority all must come under the greatest of suspicions.

(Slide: Marcel Duchamp’s Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even)

I will end with the image of Duchamp’s Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, or as it is more commonaly known, The Large Glass, begun in 1915 and abandoned in 1923. Duchamp’s work collapses the boundaries between the inhuman, the machine and the human, suggesting an altogether monstrous libidinal economy.

(Slide: Marcel Duchamp’s Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even on the Cover of Vogue Magazine)

Duchamp described the image of what he called the bachelors, seen here at the base of the glass, as engaged in the ceaseless grinding motion of perpetually agonized masturbation. It suggests not a coherent field of representation, but a body of play that precedes meaning. Duchamp had the foresight to declare this desiring machine unfinished only after it was broken, its glassy reflective surface fractured and split. What is representation ultimately, but a broken mirror we set before ourselves in order to rupture the membrane and map the distance between self and other.

There are no points on this map only lines and they have the potential to extend without end through each of us.