On December 25, 1956, Robert Walser died from a heart attack during a walk near the asylum where he had spent the last 23 years of his life. Cezanne is said to have died (1906) in similar fashion, during a walk, but no pictures had been taken, a painter’s ironic affront to photography perhaps. There are various angles from which a handful of pictures of Walser’s death were taken, each version collated into an incident. On December 2, 2010, a girl took a picture of herself as Walser, only the exclamation mark formed by her arm and hat were too close to each other. Things tend to roll farther when they are dropped rather than placed. Walser abruptly gave up writing in 1933, checking himself into a mental asylum, where he remained for the rest of his life. As an extension of his genius, “I am not here to write,” he said, “but to be mad.” Duchamp similarly disowned visual art — degrading it as “retinal,” a glimmer for the mere receiving lens of the eye — to move towards math and chess. These of course, are not suicides, no more than Suicide (2008), which may be read as author Edouard Levé’s (who killed himself in 2007) glorified suicide letter. He was also a painter and photographer, burning all his canvases in his early career to make mental room for photography, a photographer’s non-ironic affront to painting. Here’s the deal though: they are both rectangular windows of conceit, fake life in a box. The second-person “you” in Suicide eerily takes on the semblance of instruction, and you find yourself slowly disappearing with each page, as if the toner was running out of ink.

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To approach. To peek through. To see Marcel Duchamp’s final contribution, “Etant donnés,” is to confront the intersection of art and crime and beauty and murder.

Remember what Poe said in “The Philosophy of Composition“:

I asked myself—“Of all melancholy topics, what, according to the universal understanding of mankind, is the most melancholy?” Death—was the obvious reply. “And when,” I said, “is this most melancholy of topics most poetical?” From what I have already explained at some length, the answer, here also, is obvious—“When it most closely allies itself to Beauty: the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.

Here is the threshold:

Here is the observer:

And here is the observed….

BEWARE…NSFW…GRAPHIC VIOLENCE…enter this post at your own risk:

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