A l'infinitif (La boîte blanche)

Author: Bert Jansen

In 1964 seventy-nine notes by Marcel Duchamp from the 1912-20 period were discovered in France. They had not been included in La boîte verte, which he made in 1934. Duchamp finally published them in 1967. As most of the notes were written in the infinitive he published them under the title À l’infinitif. Like the notes from La boîte verte, he had them printed in facsimile and then tore them to size around a template with the outline of the original pieces of paper. The portfolio is stored in a white acrylic glass box, hence the unofficial title La boîte blanche. Duchamp placed a screen print of Glissière contenant un moulin à eau from Le Grand Verre (1915-23) on the cover. As a note in La boîte verte states, this ‘glissière’ or ‘glider’ endlessly goes back and forth to the rhythm of the monotonous ‘litany’ of the ‘bachelors’. Duchamp divided the newly-discovered notes into seven categories: Speculations, Dictionaries and Atlases, Color, Further References to the Glass, Appearance and Apparition, Perspective, the Continuüm. The notes in the folder Further References to the Glass and the notes in La boîte verte shed light on the associations and references that played a role in the conception of Le Grand Verre from 1912 onwards and during the process of making it between 1915 and 1923.

The other folders deal with subjects that interested Duchamp and his fellow Cubist artists in the Section d’Or around 1910. They included theories about the fourth dimension that were being advanced at that time in books like Traité élémentaire de géometrie à quatre dimensions (1903) by Elie Jouffret, Voyage au pays de la quatrième dimension (1912) by Gaston de Pawlowski, and ideas about relativity and the importance of the hypothesis in an argument by Henri Poincaré. This awareness of relativity is at the heart of Duchamp’s oeuvre and he explained the fourth dimension with a simile.^[1] In the way a three-dimensional object is visible in the second dimension as a shadow on a surface, so, Duchamp argued, the third dimension can be conceived as a shadow of the fourth dimension. Duchamp regarded the fourth dimension as virtual, as a hypothesis in the domain of art. He maintained that the only sensory experience of the fourth dimension was to be found in eroticism.