Even the Ghost of the Past
Even the Ghost of the Past, Marcel Dzama, diorama, variable dimensions, 2008
“Even the Ghost of the Past,” Marcel Dzama’s elaborate show of drawings, sketchbook pages, sculpture, dioramas and video with live music accompaniment, (at David Zwirner through April 19), seems to energetically “take on” art history. Invoking the heady atmosphere of the 1920s, when the ideals of Soviet Constructivism bumped against European Dada, even Dzama’s name suggests a collision of Marcel Duchamp and Dziga Vertov.
Marcel Duchamp’s work is referenced throughout the show, but most boldly in the diorama the show is named after, Even the Ghost of the Past, which plays on Duchamp’s final work, Étant donnés, (Given).
Duchamp spent the last twenty years of his life working on Étant donnés, mostly in secrecy, and like many of his ambitious pieces it was inscrutable and largely rebuffed by audiences and critics. While Duchamp was undeniably one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, his career was also pocked by disappointments and rejections, of which Étant donnés is perhaps the most poignant example.
Étant donnés, Marcel Duchamp, Mixed-media assemblage, 7 feet 11 1/2 inches x 70 inches (242.6 x 177.8 cm), 1946-66
Étant donnés positions the viewer as a peeping tom; only one person at a time can view the diorama. The viewer is confronted with a mannequin of a woman’s splayed body, head out of view. Although the body seems lifeless, it holds up a gas light in the center of the tableau, illuminating an idyllic landscape, replete with Renaissance perspective. Duchamp was also one to take on art history.
As the viewer you feel implicated, when you, alone, look through the peephole at Duchamp’s piece – as if you are guilty of a crime, as if the scene is a product of your own uncontrollable imagination. The piece derives much of its power through the one-on-one relationship it sets up between the viewer and the opened-up woman, regardless of how one responds to that image.
Dzama introduces Even the Ghost of the Past as a replica of Étant donnés, with the same kind of wood and brick door, the same peephole. But the vision inside is far more pleasant. In Dzama’s version, a dreamy and de-sexualized scene of a male and female couple replaces the headless woman. The scene in Even the Ghost of the Past is a space in which the participants exist in their own world, unaware of the viewer, who remains psychically outside. The experience as a viewer is not uncomfortable; you are not made aware of your role as voyeur. Instead it is like watching a film, where you can take pleasure in watching, with no fear of being caught, bearing no responsibility for what unfolds before your eyes.
Even the Ghost of the Past is more like a romantic scene from Edward Burne-Jones’ Briar Wood than a response to Duchamp’s work. Dzama’s interpretation of Étant donnés calls to mind the impulse to shun adulthood, and in comparison to the original, seems naive to the point of being reactionary.
Even the Ghost of the Past – Marcel Dzama – March 6 through April 19
525 W 19th St
New York (Chelsea)
Tue-Sat 10-6
An exhibition in the truest sense…