(Figure 7.1). What is truly unorthodox about the book is the way in which Paz extracts Duchamp from the mere discussion of modern and contemporary art, to venture a double analogical and interpretive‐iconographic8‐comparative‐transhistorical‐pluricultural interpretation, elucidated in part by his reading of Lévi‐Strauss, but above all by his intention of showing Duchamp as the point of inflection of modern tradition. If the “artistic thing” was the paradoxical result of the criticism of traditional allegorical and representational art, Paz saw in Duchamp the model of double negation – a “criticism of criticism.” In other words, a return to the analogic tradition, to the work of art with a verbal and poetic correlate, and to the reappearance of a negation of myth and its criticism. No longer a modern work of art, but rather a work of art that signaled a re‐beginning:
As a Myth of Criticism, The Large Glass is a painting of Criticism and a criticism of Painting. It is an artwork turned in on itself, insistent on destroying the very thing that it creates. The function of irony now appears more clearly; negative, it is the critical substance that permeates the artwork. Positive, it criticizes criticism, negates it and in this way inclines the balance more to the side of myth. Irony is the element that transforms criticism into myth … The circle closes; the end of one era and the beginning of a new one. The Large Glass is the boundary between one world and another, between that of a “modernity” that agonizes and a new one that begins but still has no shape (1968, p. 49).
Figure 7.1 Octavio Paz and Vicente Rojo, Marcel Duchamp o el castillo de la pureza (Marcel Duchamp or the Castle of Purity). Mexico City: Editorial Era, 1968.
Source: Photograph, Robin Greeley.
As a new analogic artwork, Duchamp's Glass not only comes with an instruction manual (The Green Box), but also requires yet another “translation.” More important, Paz believes it possible to “read” it as an iconographic apparatus. With the enthusiasm of a Structuralist, Paz sees The Glass as a “version of the venerable myth of the great Goddess, the Virgin, the Mother, the Exterminator and the Giver of Life.” Stressing this idea, he clarifies: “It is not a modern myth; it is the modern version of myth” (1968, p. 36). Indeed, no longer a thing but a vision: “We move from farce to the sacred mystery, from the retablo to religious mural painting, from the tale to the allegory. The Large Glass is a scene from myth, or to be more exact, from the family of myths of the Virgin and the closed society of men.” (1968, p. 38)
Paz is so convinced that The Glass is the starting point of a “new allegory” that he finds it perfectly legitimate to read it parallel to the goddess Kali, depicted in the Bengali tantric imagery: “Kali is the phenomenal world, incessant energy …, butchery, sexuality, propagation, and spiritual contemplation. Obviously, this image, as well as its philosophical explanation, shares more than one similarity with The Large Glass and The Green Box; Kali and the Bride, the Eyewitnesses, and the two companions, male passivity and feminine activity” (1968, p. 40). In fact, concludes Paz, what both myths convey is an explanation for the circularity of time “as a phenomenon of creation, destruction, woman, and reality.” (1968, p. 41)
Paz imagined for a time that contemporary art would abandon the literalism of artwork from the 1960s to reach a new form of art deduced from his reading of The Glass – itself a rewriting of the Kantian aesthetic: “The value of a picture, a poem, or any other artistic creation,” wrote Paz, “is measured by the signs it reveals and by the possible ways of combining them. An artwork is a machine of meaning”(1968, p. 59). This machine was to be the reconciliation of the “universe of symbols” and the “sensorial universe” [universo sensible] that would show us that “we are the transmission channel” where “languages flow and our body translates them into other languages.” (1967, p. 30)
After the rebellions of 1968, Paz came to believe that two cultural tendencies were about to emerge. On the one hand, the romantic realization of surrealist revelry, which would erase the boundaries between life and poetry – an “art of incarnation of images that could satisfy the need for collective rituals in our world.” And on the other, a new kind of artwork that would be neither object nor negation, but instead a new sign – the postmodern equivalent of tantric painting:
How can we not imagine another art, at the opposite end of the pole, designed to satisfy a more imperious need: meditation and solitary contemplation? This art would not be a relapse into the idolatry of the “artistic thing” of the last two hundred years. Nor would it be an art of the destruction of the object. Rather, it would see in the canvas, the sculpture, or the poem, a point of departure … . Not the restoration of the artistic object, but the establishment of the poem or picture as an inaugural sign that opens a new path.” (1967, p. 46–47)
An object/image that would release the power of combinatory association, valued not so much for its intentional meaning as for its productivity. It is within this framework that Paz fashioned an entire program of art criticism that focused no longer on interpreting the codified message of an artwork, but instead on exploring its analogies, correspondences, and parallels throughout the history of thought and images. This is the method of reflection (or, better yet, drifting) used, for example, in Conjunciones y disyunciones (Conjuntions and Disjunctions, 1969), in which Paz explores a print by José Guadalupe Posada of a freak child with the image of a face imprinted on his ass – while employing a poem by Quevedo (“The graces and disgraces of the ass”) that at the same time he dedicates to Velázquez's Venus del espejo (Venus at her Mirror). “Words are no longer things, yet they continue to be signs that come to life, that take shape.” Paz sees a variation of Posada's ass/face metaphor in Velázquez's Venus, but without the “humiliation of either the face or the sex.” For him, this is a moment of “miraculous concordance” (1969, p. 19).
Further research might examine to what degree Paz's obsession for artwork created from the combination of symbols accounts for the abundance of serialized art in late 1960s‐early 1970s Mexico. At one end, the computer‐designed canvases of Manuel Felguérez, the “aesthetic machine” of his “multiple spaces.” And at the other end, the rebirth of an intensified symbolism to be found, for example, in the films of Alejandro Jodorowsky. Unfortunately for Paz, contemporary art in the metropolis never focused on any of these new mannerisms; on the contrary, it probed deeper into the radicalization of literalism and critique.
Perhaps Paz expected that a Rousselian computer would emerge through mixing the enigmas of Joseph Cornell and the mesostic poems of John Cage. What happened instead was that the art world turned toward dematerialization and information‐art. Paz would reject conceptualism as a radical perversion of the Duchampian project:
The work of art is not a thing; it is a hand‐held fan of signs that opens and closes, alternately concealing and revealing their meaning. The work of art is a sign of intelligence in which sense and nonsense constantly switch places. The danger of this posture, a danger that Duchamp (almost) always avoided, is that of falling to one side and winding up with the concept but without the art, with the trouvaille but without the thing. This is what has occurred with his imitators. … They often wind up without the art and without the concept. It is scarcely worth repeating that art is not a concept; art is a thing of the senses (1994c, p. 66).
Naturally, in the 1970s Paz would shift his interest from contemporary art to the baroque of Góngora and Sor Juana. Perhaps it was this mad symbolic deluge that led him to become interested in Athanasius Kircher
