“New York, far ahead in so many ways, yet indifferent to art in the making, is going to learn to think for itself, and no longer accept, mechanically, the art reputations made abroad.” So speaks The Blind Man on April 10, 1917, in the first of its two-issue and two-month lifespan, published just four days after President Woodrow Wilson declared war on Germany with the approval of Congress. Ugly Duckling Presse celebrates this centennial with a new facsimile edition of 1,000 of The Blind Man’s two issues, plus its successor, Rongwrong, along with other alluring ephemera.
This new edition reminds us of the perennial truth that publishing is ultimately a collective effort. The Blind Man and Rongwrong were made as a collaboration between Marcel Duchamp, Henri-Pierre Roché, a French-born writer active in the New York avant-garde, and Beatrice Wood, an actress, artist, and free-spirit born into a wealthy family in San Francisco. Although largely unknown today, Wood had an immense hand in the content, production, and distribution of the issues. Her essence is epitomized in issue one: “To laugh is very serious. Of course, to be able not to laugh is more serious still.” In issue two, “Letter from a Mother,” anonymously written but attributed to Wood, she is as an actress in character, playing sensibility: “It is only by elevating the soul and keeping the eyes of our young ones filled with lovely images that we can expect good results from the generation that will follow.” This parody of artistic sensibility reflects Wood’s cleverness, as she mocks this limited conception of art in its own terms. This self-assured, independent female voice is one of the highlights of this new edition, elsewhere in passages from British-born poet Mina Loy, and manifested in Gabrièle Buffet’s review of works by artist Marie Laurencin. “She does not recognize esthetic conventions,” explains Buffet, “She recreates the world to her image. She does not know but herself, does not represent but herself, and even when she copies she does not express but her own imagination.”
The Blind Man is famously connected to Duchamp in its defense of his 1917 readymade Fountain, which was rejected by the Society of Independent Artists for its inaugural exhibition, a democratic show including over 2,000 works of art by 1,200 artists, the largest of its kind to date. This Society and exhibition itself were a reaction to the Armory Show of 1913, which introduced the people of New York, and later Chicago and Boston, to the myriad schools and theories of modernism active throughout Europe. “I do not suppose the Independents ‘will educate the public,’” Loy argues in The Blind Man’s first issue, “Education is the putting of spectacles on wholesome eyes. The public does not naturally care about these spectacles, the cause of its quarrels with art.” The Society of Independent Artists (shortened as the Indeps throughout) had very simple submission guidelines: any person that paid a $6 fee to enter could submit any work of art, which were all listed and displayed in alphabetical order by the artist’s last name. Succinctly put by Alfred Stieglitz in the second issue of The Blind Man: “NO JURY—NO PRIZES—NO COMMERCIAL TRICKS.”
Duchamp’s literalization of these simplified guidelines in Fountain, and its rejection from the Indeps, provides the content for issue two. “The Richard Mutt Case,” written anonymously but likely by Duchamp and Wood, validates the work, arguing the artist “took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view—created a new thought for the object.” Responding to the criticism of indecency: “Mr. Mutt’s fountain is not immoral, that is absurd, no more than a bathtub is immoral. . . . The only works of art America has given are her plumbing and her bridges.” Despite having only been seen by a handful of people, Fountain’s existence to date can be attributed to the printing and distribution of its now canonical image, photographed by Alfred Stieglitz, found in issue two of The Blind Man.
Issue two also includes a small poem by Charles Demuth, “For Richard Mutt,” in which he writes: “For some there is no stopping. / Most stop or get a style. / When they stop they make / a convention. / That is their end.” It is compelling to read Demuth’s defense of Mutt’s urinal as poem. Demuth’s defiant, homoerotic paintings and watercolors of this time are as radical in their content as Duchamp’s intention was to create a new non-art art object. To view Demuth’s images of sailors and encounters in bathhouses in the face of the homophobia of his day (sodomy was a felony that carried fines and imprisonment of up to 20 years) is to understand how radical these artists were, and how this attitude emboldened others to expect equal rights alongside freedom of expression.
Roché, although one of the co-editors, didn’t write much content for the issues. His main contribution in issue one is a manifesto-cum-constitution, eponymously titled, “The Blind Man.” Split into numbered articles, it contains maxims, questions, and provocations of this exhibition: “The hanging of all works in alphabetical order, for the first time in any exhibition, will result in the most unexpected contacts and will incite every one to understand the others. . . . New York will catch the Indeps’ fever. It will rush to see what its children are painting, to scold them, laugh at them—and laud them.” Roché’s text breaks down the traditional cohesion used to explain an exhibition as a means to envision a new art. “To learn to ‘see’ the new painting is easy. It is even inevitable,” Roché writes, “if you keep in touch with it. It is something like learning a new language, which seems an impossibility at first. Your eye, lazy at the start, gets curious, then interested, and progresses subconsciously.”
After these two issues, The Blind Man’s demise was not due to lack of submissions, but to a chess wager between Francis Picabia and Roché. Picabia, who published the magazine 391 concurrent to The Blind Man, saw his friends’ project as competition, and challenged Roché to a game of chess, with the winner gaining the right to continuing publishing. Consequently, Rongwrong was published in May 1917, mostly in French, with a photo on the cover of a matchbook of two dogs sniffing each other’s behinds like an absurd inversion of an ouroboros.
Between the three booklets, other contributors include artists, writers, and intellects such as Walter Aresnberg, Charles Duncan, Louise Norton, Erik Satie, Frances Simpson Stevens, Joseph Stella, Clara Tice, and others. This avant-garde preceded women’s suffrage, gay rights, and their political weight is mirrored in our own fraught moment. The Sedition Act of 1918 prohibited any to “willfully utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States.” That propensity of censorship, a threat to free speech and expression, was felt by Duchamp and Roché, who refrained from adding their names to either publication for fear they would be deported back to war-torn Europe. (Only Beatrice Wood’s name appeared in print, as publisher.) Yet The Blind Man represents the high-point of short-lived Dada ideals in New York, utilizing an arsenal of wit and the strength of collaboration to reject a passive acceptance of things-as-they-are. This new edition is an apt reminder that influence has an orbit, and The Blind Man has much to demonstrate in vision: defiance and subversion of normativity is the role of art publications.
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