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ON DUCHAMP: INTERVIEW WITH MONIQUE FONG ARTAND
ARTAND: Tell us about your background, and how you came to be involved with Marcel Duchamp. Monique Fong: Duchamp’s fame in 1951 was limited to a small number of people. I was, at the time, a member of the surrealist group in Paris. Even in that group, I imagine that some saw him as a traitor of sorts: he had given up art, whatever one meant by it, for chess, and he had chosen to live in the United States. The French despised the United States and what it stands for. For me, he was something of a legend. I had seen Duchamp’s Green box, I knew about la quincailllerie paresseuse (‘lazy hardware’), Anemic cinema, Rrose Sélavy. Not much more. In the spring of 1951, I was hired as an interpreter for the Marshall Plan in the United States. It went without saying that I would get in touch with Duchamp. I got his address from his brother, Jacques Villon, which gave me the chance to visit the now legendary ‘villa’ where the cubists had gathered before the First World War. At the end of June, during my second stay in New York (I was based in Washington), I left a note for Duchamp at that address. He must have called me at my hotel, probably from a booth at the end of his block since,
as was known at the time, he did not have a telephone. He invited me to dinner the next day. The surrealist group was going through one of its brutal ‘affaires’ and I had been directly involved. Duchamp and I talked about it during this first visit and much more later. Although there was a forty-year age difference between us, I noted how I had found him marvellously intelligent, friendly, available and so FREE – not often the case with artists and writers in Paris. He encouraged me to let him know when next I would be in New York and for the next three years I did. Then I got married, he got married, I came less often to New York, though I almost always saw him and his wife when I did. In 1966, we moved to New York and became his neighbours. We again saw each other more often. He met my husband and both my daughters. AA: You worked as Duchamp’s translator during the 1960s. Can you elaborate on this experience?
long after I had moved to Greenwich Village, within walking distance of the Duchamps, Duchamp told me that he had received an essay on him sent by Paz from Delhi, where he was still ambassador. He had been able to understand it, since he had spent time in Argentina during the First World War, but his wife Teeny had not. Could I help? I did not have the time to do a proper translation but we decided to borrow a tape recorder into which I would record a spoken one. (I was a conference interpreter.) One of us sent the tapes to Paz. Publication was a problem since the piece was too long for an article and too short for a book. With many efforts in Paris, Delhi and New York, it was eventually published as a beautiful livre-objet by the Galerie Claude Givaudan under the title Marcel Duchamp ou le château de la pureté early in 1968. Since Paz and I had been friends since 1949, it is only natural that I should also have translated his second, longer book, Marcel Duchamp: L’Apparence mise à nu, which was published by Gallimard in the 1970s.
MF: I actually was Octavio Paz’s translator, not Duchamp’s. (My little book Entre Octavio Paz et Marcel Duchamp was written on the occasion of Octavio Paz’s centenary.) Not
AA: In 1967, Australia hosted one of the first major presentations of Duchamp’s work – the touring exhibition ‘Marcel Duchamp: The Mary Sisler Collection’ – an event that
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had a colossal impact on our conceptual art scene. In your article in Art and Australia (vol. 5, no. 3, 1967) on the occasion of this show, you mentioned that Duchamp knew very little about Australia. Can you recall some of his thoughts on Australia at the time, and how did these compare to your own experience of the country? MF: The ‘tyranny of distance’ is unfair. Wikipedia mentions the show at the Tate as the first one organised outside the United States. Of course, the one in Australia was not a conventional Duchamp show. Duchamp refers to it as ‘a show of the Mary Sisler Collection with some thirty pieces of mine’. It started in New Zealand, where the catalogue was done. I visited the then director of the museum to ask about the travels of the Sisler Collection and it was noteworthy enough for him to meet someone who was actually a friend of Duchamp’s to suggest I contact Daniel Thomas. Daniel put me in contact with Art and Australia, and I in turn was impressed that such an interesting publication could exist so far away. I recently received a copy of an air letter I sent Duchamp in Cadaquès from the Wentworth Hotel when postage was 9 cents. In it I wrote (in French): ‘To-day we went to
the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Learned there that “your things” were being crated in Auckland after having travelled around New Zealand. They are expected here at the end of the month. They will travel to Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne (certain), Adelaide and Perth (maybe). They will not go to Hobart (the capital of Tasmania) and probably not to Canberra (the capital of the country). . .’ This air letter, dated 1 September 1967, was in reply to his letter of 7 May. We only met a few times the following winter before he left again for Paris. Duchamp had never been a traveller until he married. I don’t think we ever talked about Australia. Australia felt very, very far from New York or Paris in 1967, and Duchamp was not even sure there was a museum in Sydney. AA: What are some of your fondest memories of your time with Duchamp? MF: There seem to be so many, so different . . . overall the feeling that I have been so lucky to have known him at all, and that he should have liked me. Just being with him was receiving his teachings. John Cage said it too and he mostly played chess with him just to be with him. Of course, I remember discovering — 119 —
Kandinsky while waiting at the old Guggenheim when Duchamp was working on the dada show and meeting James Johnson Sweeney and Kurt Schwitters at the Sidney Janis Gallery. I am grateful to have gone to MoMA for the first time with him. This is where, like many others, starting with Beatrice Wood, I told him that I did not understand his work and he answered, ‘It does not matter. What matters is that we are friends’. I remember his greeting my younger daughter, ‘Here comes the very pretty little girl’, and giving her miniature Swiss chocolates. (She was born in 1960 and had a hard time later to reconcile her memories of him with the icy myth she was hearing about. I did too.) And I remember when he read the first piece I had written about him and which, by chance, was published at the time of his eightieth birthday: ‘It does not often happen that one has to wait to be eighty to read something that is a perfect echo of what one feels. Thank you for having succeeded’. It was bliss to read. ABOVE Monique Fong and Marcel Duchamp in his apartment, 28 West 10th Street, New York, 29 March 1968 Photograph Michel Sanouillet; Archives Monique Fong Special thanks to Thomas Picton-Warlow for his contribution