Tiré à quatre épingles / Pulled at Four Pins

Author: Bert Jansen

This etching shows a chimney cowl; a device placed on a chimney that turns in the wind and helps the fire draw. In the notes in La boîte verte a chimney cowl like this is linked to the bride in Marcel Duchamp’s key work Le Grand Verre (1915-23), because she is ‘swinging in relation to the 4 cardinal points’, and gives commands through the ‘draft pistons’. Duchamp had given the original 1915 readymade to his good friend Louise Norton. The object had been lost and because there was no photograph of it Duchamp decided not to make a replica in 1964.^[1] This was also why this work was not included in La boîte-en-valise, the portable museum of reproduced works in miniature. Instead he made this etching as a reminder. He drew a picture of a cowl on a copper plate and printed it in dark brown, pink and black. The etching was produced in a print run of 115 in each colour.

Both the French and the English title, Pulled at Four Pins, appear on the etching, but the English title is an absurd literal translation of the French. The French title means ‘dressed up to the nines’ or ‘well turned out’. A reference to clothes is inherent in the word ‘readymade’, which Duchamp used for the first time at the end of 1915 – when he made the chimney cowl readymade. The term ready-made is used to describe off-the-peg, ready-to-wear clothes – the opposite of made-to-measure.^[2]

The etching is illustrative of the way Duchamp gave his readymades inscriptions. This inscription was not intended as a descriptive title, but more as a play on words or an associative observation. The literal text ‘pulled at four pins’ could also refer to the four wind directions in which a chimney cowl turns, shown on French cowls of that time by the shape of an X which was punched into the material.^[3] Duchamp wanted these titles to point the reader in a different direction by playing with apparent similarities or differences between word and image. This approach can be compared to the way René Magritte separated words and images in his paintings in the 1920s, thus evoking an associative experience of reality. Reality freed from unambiguous interpretation is one of the major themes in the work of the Surrealists.