In 1913, Duchamp withdrew from painting circles and began working as a librarian in the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève to be able to earn a living wage while concentrating on scholarly realms and working on his Large Glass.

 

He studied math and physics – areas where exciting new discoveries were taking place. The theoretical writings of Henri Poincaré particularly intrigued and inspired Duchamp. Poincaré postulated that the laws believed to govern matter were created solely by the minds that "understood" them and that no theory could be considered "true". "The things themselves are not what science can reach..., but only the relations between things. Outside of these relations there is no knowable reality", Poincaré wrote in 1902. Reflecting the influence of Poincaré's writings, Duchamp tolerated any interpretation of his art by regarding it as the creation of the person who formulated it, not as truth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcel_Duchamp
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In 1951, William F. Buckley, Jr.—then a newly minted 25-year-old Yale University graduate—published his historic God and Man at Yale, an indispensable founding document of modern American conservatism. In this, his first book, he argued that his long respected alma mater had, unbeknownst to the majority of its alumni, undergone a silent ideological revolution, while still presenting itself as the same institution it had been for generations. Yale performed this legerdemain, Buckley wrote, out of fear of alienating its alumni base, which was largely conservative and religious—an alumni base which had, for so long, been the university’s institutional and economic support.

Yale, he said, had quietly compromised its long-held moral and religious convictions in the pursuit of fashionable, progressive philosophies, and in the process had betrayed its alumni who, per the Yale charter, were the ultimate oversight authorities of the university. The alumni were being surreptitiously duped, Buckley argued, into supporting a liberalized, secularized college administration that did not share their fundamental convictions.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/god-and-man-everywhere/


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Gus:

With these two incompatible ways to look at life we should try to understand better the process of “progressive” philosophies. At no stage are these “new” views “fashionable”. This is a word designed to belittle scientific investigation in order to promote “belief” in fairies. The Game of Throne being the proof of the pudding. The conclusion by Jack H. Burke is wishy-washy… The relative answers have long been provided by sciences, but few conservative minds want to accept the verdict of uncertainty. We rather “believe" in our right to be godly and fuck everyone else with hubris, despite the caveats of the US constitution. For example, today, 25 May 2019, Washington continues to amass forces in the Middle East as the Pentagon accuses Iran of an “ongoing threat” to US allies and interests. Iran has done no such threat, but the USA wants to destroy Iran. End of the fairy story. And we, the plebs, are made to accept this narrative through a compliant media.

So Buckley was upset about Yale buckling at the knee in front of sciences. Jack H. Burke, a former White House intern who served as a US congressional staff member, concludes:



Or is it, as Buckley dramatically said of his beloved Yale University in 1951, being “extraordinarily irresponsible” in doing so?

These questions must be asked, as the troubles that afflicted Yale in Buckley’s day are no longer confined to the realm of Western colleges and universities; they have spread into many of the West’s major and once Christian-minded establishments. We must understand the reality of these changes and begin thinking profoundly about what they mean, for it is now nearly impossible to escape their effects on society. “God and Man at Yale” is, indeed, now “God and Man Everywhere.”  





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Where to from here for "god and man"??? While the others artists were inventing a new style through impressionism and expressionism, Duchamp was inventing a revolution. 

His was that of a moral revolution beyond art by a moral deconstruction of long accepted relative values in our erroneous interpretations of relations. He shook the meaning of life at the core in the same way Einstein did. 

But the "Arts Decoratifs” through other forms of new arts, such as impressionism, expressionism and abstractionism, that became mainstream and modern architecture, held fast to the bourgeois fortress. Cash and comfort reigned — rather than hard question and quest for enlightenment. It is easier to accept a lie rather than not knowing.

Today, most of us are still under the cash and comfortable misunderstanding of the value of life. Piece of cake. This easy route is chosen for us by the system, in which war is our governments' main occupation to provide us with more cash and comfort. We have to breed for "growth of the system", we need to believe in god, use guns and cultivate greed as our supply tools, rather than be enlightened to our origins and possible explore other options of survival in freedom. We are dependant on a certain level of accepted general ignorance and our heroes can dodge bullets without sufferance while "saving the world". It's all illusionary. This is why sciences have difficulty to exist without being applied to this comfort. This is where there is a parallel between Assange and Duchamp. Assange is using communications tools of encryption code-breaking to show how the establishment has been lying to us about its worth. The official narrative has been bunkum for the last 4,000 years.


Till today. Gaudi’s Familia Sagrada in Barcelona is a reminder of such concrete glorious application of the religious hubris. Artful, it is a masterpiece of realisation, but it is not asking questions except that of style rather than that of content and purpose.

Duchamp was a joker, but a serious joker. He was not sarcastic to be condescending. He was sarcastic with a purpose. His statements were to make people realign their accepted concepts of what is and what is not — or may be not. There was a lot of conventional bullshit used to prop up social norms, including the religious BS and the glory of wars. 

Many of Duchamp's contemporaries saw him as a serious genius. Still working as an employee in a public library, with his first five paintings in the style of Monet, Sisley, Pissaro, Duchamp had already solved the “trick of Impressionism" and he turned to sciences to develop his creative motivation — a creativity which was more like a confronting massive complex intellectual message board than a grand emotional output using paints. 

His Nude Descending a Staircase — picture at top — attracted derision and great laughter in New York, yet it is one of the best first abstract “paintings” showing an idea rather than a landscape or a real person. One wonder why this work had been accepted in this weird modernish US exhibition but it had been already exhibited in Switzerland. The naked woman was based on the images of the up and coming new art of cinematography, but Duchamp merged all the frames, removing the linear timeframe or the illusion of history and the body conventional shapes so well used by painters of "kings on horses". Time distortion was also at the core of Einstein revelations.
Despite the strong criticism, Duchamp was offered contracts by most of the major Galleries in New York's 59th Street. He refused any commission to protect “his freedom”. According to some literary journals, Duchamp became more famous than “Napoleon and Marshall Foch” and than the French song stars of the time… His genius was to be taken seriously because he did not take his views seriously, though in reality his stream of consciousness was extremely serious against the seriousness of our bourgeois dead-end in which we still wallow. 

In 1910, when he visited the Salon de l”Aviation with Léger and Brancusi, Duchamp was transfixed by the engines and propellers as primitive as they were then and said to his friends, "Brancu, painting is finished!  Who [which artist] can do better than this prop? No-one! We are ended! Let’s throw ourselves in the River Seine!”

Yet the next day, he started painting his “Petite Soeur”, where the younger sister is decomposed through a prism, the famous Duchamp prism, with an extraordinary sense of composition and colours. He thus became the precise specialist of anachronistic symbols. 

His most anachronistic symbolism is the "Mariée mise a nu par ses Célibataires mêmes”. From left to right, we see the priest, the soldier, the cop, the hunter, the delivery boy, the undertaker, the servant and the stationmaster. The newly wed woman swings in a trapeze above them all and sends them a supreme bolt that start a crowd of interplanetary Opera dancers. It still is one of the most "modern" avant-garde artistic work of art in which the weird subject should make us think away from our petty comforts. Most modern art in 2019 blends in with our blancmange, because of "decorative" value on the wall next to the idiot box. This one Mariée does not. This was Duchamp last “painting”. The rest of his life played tricks with “objects found” that he made the world accept as work of art… and he played chess with his friend Picabia.

The fundamental religiousness of Yale had no choice but to give in to this confusing complex future of ideas, while keeping these ideas under control, like a horse is prevented from bolting — however uncertain as it could be under a non godly dictum, with a greater complexity. But Yale rehashed the new messages as to support its intrinsic capitalistic aims (rather than moral and religious contrary to Buckley's views), in the same manner as the Catholic Church often adopted pagan ideals and rights to prevent these from becoming mainstream competition… Meanwhile, the reality as defined by that giant intellectual man, Poincarré, has far more truth than any priest could muster from the pulpit, but his message was far more complex and precise than that of god creating the universe in six days and then having a nap on the seventh… Here we have to understand our genial animality rather than accept our fake status of sinners.

Mathematics are the tools of knowledge and imagination away from the misunderstandings of the errand people of the bible. And this could be why so many great scientists — at least those we are made to revere — and mathematicians came from a Jewish background, as a counterpoint to the religious bullshit — because despite their facile penetration of minds, religions are bullshit.


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Euler was one of the most eminent mathematicians of the 18th century and is held to be one of the greatest in history. He is also widely considered to be the most prolific mathematician of all time. His collected works fill 60 to 80 quarto volumes,[5] more than anybody in the field. He spent most of his adult life in Saint Petersburg, Russia, and in Berlin, then the capital of Prussia.

A statement attributed to Pierre-Simon Laplace expresses Euler's influence on mathematics: "Read Euler, read Euler, he is the master of us all."[6][7]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonhard_Euler#Personal_philosophy_and_religious_beliefs


Yet Simon de Laplace was an atheist, while Euler was a religious man:

There is a famous legend[64] inspired by Euler's arguments with secular philosophers over religion, which is set during Euler's second stint at the St. Petersburg Academy. The French philosopher Denis Diderot was visiting Russia on Catherine the Great's invitation. However, the Empress was alarmed that the philosopher's arguments for atheism were influencing members of her court, and so Euler was asked to confront the Frenchman. Diderot was informed that a learned mathematician had produced a proof of the existence of God: he agreed to view the proof as it was presented in court. Euler appeared, advanced toward Diderot, and in a tone of perfect conviction announced this non-sequitur: "Sir, a + bn /n = x, hence God exists—reply!" Diderot, to whom (says the story) all mathematics was gibberish, stood dumbstruck as peals of laughter erupted from the court. Embarrassed, he asked to leave Russia, a request that was graciously granted by the Empress. However amusing the anecdote may be, it is apocryphal, given that Diderot himself did research in mathematics.[65] The legend was apparently first told by Dieudonné Thiébault[66] with significant embellishment by Augustus De Morgan.[67][68]


Thiébault was a lawyer who had left the Jesuits to become Frederic II’s right hand man in the king’s dealings with the scientific Academy of Berlin, and came back to France with a more down-to-earth idea of inventing insurance to pay damages in case of fire, which was too great a problem of statistics to make it profitable then. De Morgan was an atheist mathematician as well...


There is a word in our language with which I shall not confuse this subject, both on account of the dishonourable use which is frequently made of it, as an imputation thrown by one sect upon another, and of the variety of significations attached to it. I shall use the word Anti-Deism to signify the opinion that there does not exist a Creator who made and sustains the Universe.

— De Morgan 1838


Of course the "mathematics of god" by Euler were complete bullshit and he defeated his own argument by providing such, but people did not like atheists, because they upset the little religious bourgeois comforts of kings and would have stopped the hypocritical morality from absolving their grand desire to compete around the globe for plunder of richness through wars.

This of course still goes on with the way The Donald behaves (which would have been the same with Hillary) in regard to what the “deep state” has decided long ago — now being sweated through all pores of Bolton and Pompeo.

That Yale has not provided us with far better presidential material than Donald Trump shows a grand failure in the philosophical department in favour of “economics” which to a great degree has become the new religion: the Dollar dollop.



Gus Dollopsky Duchamp