Artistic Research as a Game of Chance: Marcel Duchamp and Henri Poincaré

Abstract

With a case study on the artist Marcel Duchamp and the polymath Henri Poincaré, this essay presents an early example of artistic research. It investigates the transfer of scientific and philosophical questions into an artistic context and argues that this cross-pollination helped pave the way for the emerging humanities field of artistic research: the Swiss artist and researcher Serge Stauffer is both known for translating Duchamp’s work with language into German and for being one of the early proponents of art as research. Further, in a close reading of Duchamp and Poincaré’s writings on chance, the essay follows the shift from a deterministic worldview to one that acknowledges and integrates uncertainty and the forces of chance. Duchamp’s integration of chance processes into his art brings into focus a twofold promise of exactitude: the productive side of his meticulous work and the menacing quality of the determinism he pits his games of chance against.