Hidden With Hidden Noise: Unraveling Elliott Hundley

Yet in honour of the artist who is the main focus of my post today, here is the list of the materials Duchamp used for the work: 

        Mixed media assemblage: (exterior) wooden door, iron nails, bricks, 

(….iron nails…hair…nails…cookie tin!) Now, in the room that included Duchamp’s Large Glass and the three versions of Nude Descending a Staircase, I encountered a small cabinet that included a curious piece that I had recently seen before in another context. It is called With Hidden Noise (1916): 

If we look at the list of materials Duchamp used for this work, we can begin to unravel the mystery behind its title:

  

What was this ‘unknown object’ and who was Walter Arensberg? To answer the latter, he was an American collector, critic and poet, and a good friend of Duchamp, who you can see in the below photo of 1916, wearing a pointed hat and standing behind the fellow holding (tightly!) onto a cat. He is snugly sandwiched between Duchamp (left) and Man Ray (right): 

This rich tissue of anecdotes surrounding With Hidden Noise seems to have been Duchamp’s way of generating ‘noise’ out of the curiosity of his audience – perhaps including echoes in the work of artists he has inspired. One such echo is found, if purposefully hidden, in the work of the LA based artist Elliott Hundley called the lightning bride (2011), which was part of his exhibition at the Wexner Center of the Arts in Columbus last Fall called Elliott Hundley: The Bacchae.

Once again, let me continue to cite the list of materials as a way of reproducing the work here: 

        Wood, sound board, inkjet print on Kitakata paper, pins, paper, plastic, 
        magnifying lenses, metal, photographs, wire, found paintings.

In the fifth panel, just below the figure of Semele, suffering from the lightning of Zeus, we find a reproduction of the curious work by Duchamp (I have outlined it in a garish white square):

So, what is Duchamp’s work doing in Hundley’s reworking of the Bacchae? It should be noted that Duchamp’s is not the only appropriated modern artwork in Hundley’s collages, you can find others by Henri Matisse, Paul Cézanne, Roy Lichtenstein and (perhaps) Kenneth Noland. Nonetheless, is there anything that specifically ties With Hidden Noise to Hundley’s particular retelling of the Bacchae and the story of Semele’s death? My tentative answer is bound up with the web of anecdotes surrounding Duchamp’s work and the key them of curiosity and transgression in the Semele myth and replayed in the Bacchae in general. Promised anything she wished by her divine lover Zeus, then tricked by a jealous Hera, the Theban princess Semele asked him to appear to her as he did to his immortal wife. Zeus begrudgingly agreed and presently took the form of a lightning bolt, which, resulted in her fiery death. Their son, the god Dionysus, was saved from his dying mother and it is from this moment that the Bacchae begins, as the new god returns to his homeland of Thebes. Semele’s transgression and curiosity is then replayed in the Bacchae in the form of the young king of Thebes, Pentheus, who is persuaded to spy on the secret rites of Dionysus by the god himself, disguised as a stranger. Pentheus is then ripped apart by his own mother, Agave, entranced by the god, believing her son to be a mountain lion. In addition to Semele and Pentheus, another tale of Theban curiosity is constantly evoked in the play in the form of Actaeon, who was turned into a stag and hunted down and killed by his own dogs, for seeing the virgin-huntress goddess Artemis naked. Hundley’s insertion of With Hidden Noise into the lightning bride seems, therefore, to restage these repeated tales of mythic transgression and curiosity in terms of an anecdote in the history of Modern Art. Just as Actaeon, Semele and Pentheus want to see what is hidden, so do we who look at Duchamp’s work, peering out of Hundley’s.

In Pinplay, her brilliant rewriting of Euripides’ Bacchae inspired by Hundley’s work for the exhibition catalogue, the poet and Classicist Anne Carson makes the connection between human curiosity and transgression when faced with the divine and the materials employed in Hundley’s work explicit, especially in the final choral ode:

       Polyurethane foam, bamboo, plastic, pins, wood, glass, ceramic, extruded 
       polystyrene, paper,  wire, metal, string, glue, shell, silicone, rope, foam 
       adhesive, floral foam, spray paint, soap stone, coral, leather, photographs. 

Yet missing from this list is a small metal music box which, and this I overheard from one of the Wexner curators, the playful artist set playing when he walked past the piece at the show opening. Hundley’s hidden noise is, therefore, is not only part of his retelling of the Classical myth, but, as with Duchamp’s work, bound up with issues of curiosity and transgression for those involved in the art gallery context itself.