10. A note from an interview with Philippe Van Snick. 11. The 9 shots (9 tirés) form a major instrument added to the reality of the bride in Duchamp’s Large Glass. It consists of 9 holes drilled through the glass, found in the Large Glass’s upper right corner. 12. Such reference to the fourth dimension via touch is found in one of the notes of the white box (1967). Duchamp calls the effect l’image tactileemprise. Duchamp 1975 : 132.
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The Order of 10
Large Glass put his next-generation colleague on the track of the possibility of an oeuvre, as if involving the development of a new alphabet. Over the years, Van Snick has carefully gathered all elements of this new alphabet and tested quite some possible combinations. From his iron wire connections from 0 to 9 [57, pp. 90-91], to the ‘vapor trails’ left behind by longforgotten airplanes in the blue sky of the 1970s, recorded by Van Snick on photographs [45, p. 78]. From the chance constellations of bird swarms that as signs in the sky acquired meaning to Van Snick [16, pp. 38-39] to the quoted yet as quickly erased sign that could have been by the hand of Hanne Darboven, but which with Van Snick forms the sum total of everything between 0 and infiniteness, in other words : the sum total of the oeuvre. Here we hit again on Duchamp’s odd recipe. The thought to express the abstract concepts in the lists of words as signs in a new, auto-referential form takes away nothing, of course, from the traditional definition of the dictionary, but it does situate that same dictionary in a wholly new context. This context reminds us that where the sum total of the concrete meanings added to a word in the Larousse dictionary stops, another, wondrous world takes off. In this world, it is possible to express higher concepts, such as the clay stone with nine perforations [222, p. 245], to which Van Snick adds that the spectator should enclose it in the palm of his hand, thus hiding the stone from view again.10 Surely, those familiar with Duchamp’s notes will immediately think of The Large Glass, where the nine bullet holes in the zone of the bride look like nine perforations in the glass plate.11 However, direct contact with the spectator’s palm of the hand—grabbing surface in which a clay stone belongs, the direct mirror of the soul—puts us on another track. In my approach of this work, we reach a speculative 4th dimension, which in the early 1910s already preoccupied Duchamp, but which also has clearly appealed to Philippe Van Snick. In a very simple translation : an object finds itself in a four-dimensional projection when we can perceive it simultaneously from all possible directions. Within the restrictions of our three-dimensional reality, such object is only conceivable at a theoretical level. Except when we transfer the experience from visual perception to our sense of touch, for without any effort our hand succeeds in fully enclosing the clay stone. When closing the hand, the fourth dimension becomes operative.12 Various spectators have held that perforated stone in their hand, as I did, without realizing all this, and without seeing the stone at that moment. Here, then, a kind of book becomes operative : a book of images whereby on the basis of the experience of the hand a sign (instead of a meaning) can be added and communicated, the depth of which is hard to fathom. A sign that is composed of nine penetrations ; or, put more correctly : 9 + 0. It seems to me that, having arrived at this level of insight, one best opens the hand again, without wasting too many words, and to pass on the stone of Philippe Van Snick to an unsuspecting hand.