The Twilight Girls
Four years later, following the success of their exhibition in 1938, the Surrealists again called upon Marcel Duchamp to organise their ‘First Papers of Surrealism’ exhibition in New York. In the first exhibition, Duchamp had organised to have a row of mannequins in the lobby which were at turns either decorated or disfigured by the artists involved. From the ceiling of the main hall he suspended more than a thousand coal bags over a coal brazier with only a single light bulb; visitors were given flashlights to negotiate the gloom. The oddity and obscurity of the setting earned its share of bustle and disquiet, and if not all the patrons left satisfied, the Surrealists themselves certainly were. In the 1942 exhibition, in the same spirit of obstruction, Duchamp intervened with over five hundred metres of string which was wound over and around the partitions with such copious fury as to make some of the works next to invisible.
Never quite intended as a work in its own right, Duchamp’s conceit is now the most remembered part of the exhibition and a major marker in the genealogy of installation art, well before this practice earned its name. It is in fact typical of his oeuvre on two counts, first as a derisory gesture that set out to undermine painting, and second as a device that draws attention to the impalpable space of the gallery setting through trying to bring the negative space, the space that surrounds, to life.
World Wide Web by the collaborative team, the Twilight Girls (Helen Hyatt-Johnston and Jane Polkinghorne), called Duchamp’s work inexorably to mind. Yet in this exhibition there was no other work of art either