“Perhaps make a hinge picture” -Marcel Duchamp, The Green Box.

 

States of rest and motion are joined with spaces that fold into one another through their simultaneous opening and closing. Duchamp determined that his small apartment in Paris required one door for two passages. Its installation permitted the closing off of one room while permitting access to another. When reversed, the previously closed room became accessible and the other made private. This hinge principle exists throughout his work and signifies a means of accessing what some find difficult while retaining the complexity to encourage ongoing examination of his strategies.

 

Octavio Paz’s, Appearance Stripped Bare, most eloquently permits us to sense the power of this concept when he writes, “The hinge appears frequently in Duchamp. Thanks to the literal and the paradoxical use of the idea of the hinge, Duchamp’s doors and ideas open while remaining closed and vice versa. If we have recourse to the same procedure, the expression “hinge picture,” opening out (closing) on itself, reveals to us another expression that also appears in one of the early notes of the Green Box: “delay in glass” (retard en verre).”

 

This readymade I present here is coupled with the only coordinates we ever need to realize where we have been, where we are and where we are going. The simple phrases, as is and as if, map—like Duchamp’s “hinge”—the multiple states of the conscious and the unconscious. Our fuels of desire and fear open and close the passages we choose.