Rrose selavy - Grade: A PDF

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Rachel L Churner
Rrose Selavy ...

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Julia Brunson Dada Art and Anti-Art Rachel Churner 7 May 2018

Rrose Sélavy

She was Man Ray’s muse, a Dada pin-up, and a representation of some of Dada’s most complex art works. Her name was Rrose Sélavy, a name that plays up on the French phrase “Eros, c’est la vie”. She personified everything about Duchamp’s artwork, ranging from it’s wit, to erotic undertones; challenging concepts of identity, gender, and sexuality. Marcel Duchamp created Rrose Sélavy, his feminine alter ego, because he was unsatisfied with one identity and instead desired two. Some question this persona, as she is looked up to heavily in the gay community as an icon when Duchamp was essentially known as a straight man. On the other

hand, Rrose could be seen as an extension of the tradition of androgyny and gender bending in portraiture, and art. Rrose Sélavy first appeared in 1920, but the second ‘r’ in her name wasn’t added until 1921 when she added her signature to Francis Picabia’s collage L’Oeil Cacodylate . Soon after she signed L’Oeil Cacodylate, s he began to appear in photographs by Man Ray in the New York Dada scene. In an interview with Pierre Cabanne, Duchamp expressed interesting remarks on his alter-identity: “I wanted to change my identity and at first I had the idea to take a Hebrew name. I was a Catholic and this step of religion already meant a change. But I found no Hebrew name that I liked, or it hit my imagination, and suddenly I had an idea: why not change sex? From here comes the name of Rrose Sélavy.” Rrose Sélavy, or Eros, c’est la vie is a play on the idea that sex is the undercurrent that runs through human existence, to “Arrose, c’est la vie,” using the French word for “to water” or “to moisten” as a not so subtle sexual reference. The sexual and erotic references are quite popular in Duchamp’s work, especially when they have to do with Rrose. I question whether these sexual and gender bending ideas would be received differently by the public if a woman, or a queer man used them in their oeuvre? Rrose brought to life the artist’s well-marked and symbolic use of language as well as all the playfulness and irony of Dadaism. In Man Ray’s portraits she appears in several guises, at times decidedly masculine, and later, stylish and more fluent in the cues of the feminine allure. By creating for himself this female persona whose attributes are beauty and eroticism, he deliberately and characteristically complicated the understanding of his ideas and motives of dressing up. Initially it’s easy to look at Duchamp, a privileged straight man in drag, as something to be offended or put off about. When we look deeper at this, there is a deeper

complexity to Duchamp’s alter ego. His feminine pseudonym was less about trickery or privilege, as it was just one of his many attempts to tease these ideas about identity and self-representation, particularly in portraits of himself taken by Man Ray. Other works included mugshots that casted him as a criminal and photographs simultaneously depicting him from five different vantage points. Rrose in particular is one of the most enigmatic parts of the Duchamp’s artwork. Duchamp managed to balance the art of contradiction, troubling and underpinning his ideas and intentions all at once. Using one of Man Ray's earliest portraits of his persona Rrose Sélavy, Duchamp made a label that he stuck to an empty perfume bottle to create his 1921 artwork Belle Haleine, Eau de Voilette (Beautiful Breath, Veil Water). T  his image of the perfume bottle appeared on the cover of the sole issue of Man Ray and Duchamp's journal New York Dada, published the winter before Man Ray left for Paris. The creation of this perfume bottle, a mass-produced factory made item, also played up on the idea of ready-mades; a reappearing theme coined in Duchamp’s work. This piece was inspired by a bottle designed by Rigaud for Un air embaumé,  produced in 1915 that became one of the first successful perfumes created by a fashion house. Duchamp took the Rigaud bottle design, inserted an image of himself as Rrose Sélavy, and called it Belle Haleine: Eau de Voilette,  with the French word “voilette” meaning a veil, a pun on “violette” or violet, the flower often used in perfumes at the time. The word “haleine,” meaning breath, conjures the name “Hélène,” more specifically Helen of Troy, “the most beautiful woman in antiquity abducted by the Trojan prince named… Paris.” The idea of the veil that Rrose wears in the photo, that which obscures a woman’s face, is a reference to the obscuration of meaning that is attributed to the object. Duchamp inserts the initials “RS” to the

label, with the letter r reversed against the s, and then inscribes “New York” and “Paris,” the two cities to which he often traveled. L.H.O.O.Q. is one of Duchamp’s most famous works; where he defaced Da Vincis’ Mona Lisa, turning her into the opposite gender by giving her a mustache and a goatee. The most curious thing about that moustache and goatee is that when you look at it, the famous Mona Lisa oficially b ecomes a man. It is not a woman disguised as a man; it is a real genuine man. In 1919, Duchamp performed a seemingly adolescent prank using a postcard that represented the ideal of feminine beauty. The masculinized female introduces the theme of gender reversal, which was popular with Duchamp’s work, who, as mentioned earlier had adopted his own female pseudonym, Rrose Sélavy. L.H.O.O.Q. instantly became his most famous readymade and an important symbol for the international Dada movement, which had rebelled against everything that art represented, particularly the appeal to tradition and beauty. Again, this plays a part in Duchamp gender bending, similar to what he has done with Rrose Sélavy. It’s not a stretch to say that this is Duchamp's most famous ready-made. When read quickly in French, the title L.H.O.O.Q. sounds like a sentence translating to "She has a hot bum/ass." Another play on words just like what he did with his alter-persona. Kuspit see’s

 ith a more sexual interpretation, "It is a multilayered pun: the letters become L.H.O.O.Q. w words which become a devaluing male comment on the beautiful, dignified woman - she's just another slut. She's smiling because she's thinking of being fucked - more probably, of masturbating, that is, fucking herself". Although Duchamp often plays with ideas of sexuality, gender, and identity in his artwork, Kuspits’ description seems vulgar, and takes Duchamp’s

ideas a little too far out of context. Did Duchamp want us to read this far into the piece? I highly doubt it. Rrose Sélavy played an intensely important role in much of Marcel Duchamp’s artwork, and his idea of using puns (L.H.O.O.Q, E  ros c’est la vie), sexuality, and gender play is a theme that will reoccur many times. Duchamp uses androgyney quite often, especially with Rrose Sélavy. I’ve examined Duchamp’s  work as using androgyny from a more metaphysical level rather than viewing it as something that has to do with sexuality in a non-symbolic manner. Duchamp understood the idea of androgyny as a psychological kind of state, a way of being. He allows this to come through by tapping into an alter-persona, by dressing in drag, and making art work as this persona. Rrose Sélavy was another manifestation of the Dadaist’s need for nonconformism and rebellion against societies and the bourgeois norms....