La Mort de Marcel Duchamp

In 1950 Gil Joseph Wolman joined the Lettristes, a group of artists led by Isidore Isou who made the smallest unit of language, the single letter, their basic and name-giving element. Wolman then took the next step from the letter to the nonverbal sound—and received much attention in so doing. The dramatic presentation of human breathing in his Megapneumes contradicted every kind of conventional narration. The same can be said of his experimental film L’Anticonception, which was prohibited by the French censors because of its radical separation of a meaningful unity of image and sound. It used noises and sounds, and showed black and white circles projected onto a weather balloon. In 1963 Wolman, who had left the Lettristes, began to define his own forms of art. The two works you can see are what he called “l’art scotch.” Strips of newspaper or magazines are covered with sticky tape, which is then removed and transferred to canvas or wood. The sequences this produces do have linear structures that may recall film strips, but they have no logically decipherable content. They are rather an artistic counter-text to the press and the mass media. Wolman, who once verbally attacked Marcel Duchamp and also criticized Breton and the surrealists, calling them “idiots and forgers,“ probably intended La Mort de André Breton and La Mort de Marcel Duchamp, two equally sized works, to be a critique. Duchamp und the surrealist Breton were connected with each other throughout their careers in joint exhibitions and projects. In his work against them Wolman gave Breton the text and Duchamp the image.