As we are well aware, toward the middle of the 1960s, Paz began to call attention to the exhaustion of the avant‐garde, both as concept and as practice – a theme to which he dedicated several books of essays including El signo y el garabato (The Sign and the Scrawl, 1973) and Los hijos del limo (Children of the Mire, 1973). Interpreting modernity as the expression of the linear time of Western Christian civilization, itself derived from the enlightened critic of the cyclical time of ancient mythology (1973a, p. 12), Paz denounced the paradoxes that arose from the fact that poetry and modern art conceived themselves as part of a “tradition of rupture” in which each generation inherited the tic of iconoclasm (1993, p. 333). In part, for Paz this meant examining modern culture as a dialectic of two operations: analogy and irony. On the one hand, he argued, ancient civilizations all had a vision of the world organized around the analogy (meaning, the relationships of metonymy and metaphor, correspondence and resonance) between the heavens and earth. This continuity had been broken by the basic critical operation of irony, understood as the discovery of the failure of correspondence. As a result, Paz identified the emergence of the extraordinary, irreplaceable, bizarre, and unique beauty of the moderns, defined by Baudelaire as the logical source of the ironic process (1993b).
This “rupture of analogy” of the first modernity gave rise to subjectivity, but also to the experience of nonsense. Paz attributed the reification of the world, understood as the loss of a symbolic plot, to the effects of criticism. His interpretation of the effects of irony was, in fact, a version of the dialectics of Enlightenment and myth: “Man enters the scene, he evicts divinity, and then faces the nonmeaning of the world. Double imperfection: words have stopped representing the true reality of things; and things have become opaque, mute” (1993b).
This reasoning had a direct effect on the development of Paz's taste. Naturally, for a poet associated with surrealism, who therefore lived until the end of his life with the persuasion that art (visual or verbal) was “essentially metaphorical,” – since “the essential poetic operation” is appearance, in other words, “in this, to see that” (1994, p. 264) – the development of art after the war was nothing but a continuous process of degradation. When in 1980 he composed, somewhat artificially, an outline of North American art, Paz admitted that he did not consider Jackson Pollock a great painter, but rather a “powerful temperament” whose opportunity to develop his extraordinary gifts was cut short” (1994, p. 87). Nothing could have seemed more alien to Paz than the Greenbergian positivism of the intrinsic development of mediums. It is not accidental that the only essay that Paz dedicated to abstraction as such, in 1959, was in fact an invitation to move beyond abstract expressionism toward a hypothetical “Mannerism, the Abstract‐Baroque,” characterized by an “impure pictorial language,” riddled with forms and meanings common to all (1994, p. 283).
Threaded through Paz's writings of the late 1960s is an account of the disenchantment of art. On the one hand, Paz argued that the history of modern painting – its reduction to a visual language without symbolic meaning yet still subject to an analogic poetic interpretation – had reached “the gradual transformation of the work of art into an artistic object” expressed as the “transition from vision to a perceptible thing” (1968, p. 66). Paz interpreted modern art after the impressionists as the abandonment of the “great tradition of Western painting” – in other words, of painting based not on aesthetic sensation as an end in itself, but rather as access to a cosmovision. Even so, Paz wanted to avoid the interpretation of pure modernist painting as a radically antisymbolic endeavor. He insisted that modern painting was not “anti‐literary,” but that it formulated an “artistic” language where “the ideas and myths, the passions and imaginary figures, the shapes that we see and dream, are realities that the painter has found within painting” – something that must emerge from the picture; not something that the artist introduces into the picture (1973a, p. 170). However, he realized that by renouncing representation, painting had become “a beam of signs projected onto a space empty of meanings” (1967, p. 34). Instead of responding to the spectator, it questioned him/her with its language of omissions and allusions, in other words, with “the signs of an absence.” “Sensitive [sensible] or not,” art had become an interchangeable object: “the conception of art as a thing … that we can separated from its vital context and house in museums and other security deposits” (1967, p. 41).
Paz knew, however, that the crisis had not stopped at the mere thingification of the artwork. After World War II, painting and sculpture became merely products of an industrial society. Like many of the old Dadaists and surrealists, pop and neo‐Dada, assemblages and happenings seemed anathema to him. He saw “the constantly expanding body of artwork that was meant to be unique, exceptional” as a mere repetition of the gestures of the first avant‐garde, housed in museums and contemporary collections like “an enormous piling up of heterogeneous objects – the confusion of waste” (1967, p. 41). Once the critical element was removed from modernist artworks (Paz lists “romantic irony, Dada and Surrealist humor”), art became mere merchandise. Even worse, art became an inane object subject to fetishistic worship. It is this extreme thingification, according to Paz, that Duchamp's readymade questioned:
Now we are suspicious of the very idea of the “work of art,” especially after Marcel Duchamp and his “ready‐made” … a critical gesture designed to show the inanity of artworks as objects (1967, p. 16). … The modern beatification that surrounds painting and that sometimes prevents us from seeing it is nothing but the worship of an object, the adoration of a magical thing that we can touch, that like other things can be bought and sold. It is the sublimation of the thing in a civilization dedicated to producing and consuming things (1968, p. 51).
Almost as if he were following early Lukács or Adorno, Paz destroyed the image of the world by negating the function of things as signs, while accelerating historical time: “for technology, the world is neither a perceptible [sensible] image of an idea nor a cosmic model; it is an obstacle that we must overcome and modify” (1967, p. 13).
It is against this background – Paz's disappointment with the neo‐avant‐garde, and his belief that modern art coincided with the reduction of the world to a mere instrumental thing – that we must understand his extraordinary decision to write a monograph on Marcel Duchamp. His first book on Duchamp, Marcel Duchamp o el castillo de la pureza (Marcel Duchamp or the Castle of Purity) from 1968, is not only extraordinary because of the box‐object designed by Vicente Rojo to accompany facsimiles of Duchamp's work – a true “popular” edition of La Boîte‐en‐valise (Box in a Suitcase, 1935–1941) (Figure 7.1). What is truly unorthodox about the book is the way in which Paz extracts Duchamp from the mere discussion of modern and contemporary art, to venture a double analogical and interpretive‐iconographic8‐comparative‐transhistorical‐pluricultural interpretation, elucidated in part by his reading of Lévi‐Strauss, but above all by his intention of showing Duchamp as the point of inflection of modern tradition. If the “artistic thing” was the paradoxical result of the criticism of traditional allegorical and representational art, Paz saw in Duchamp the model of double negation – a “criticism of criticism.” In other words, a return to the analogic tradition, to the work of art with a verbal and poetic correlate, and to the reappearance of a negation of myth and its criticism. No longer a modern work of art, but rather a work of art that signaled a re‐beginning:
As a Myth of Criticism, The Large Glass is a painting of Criticism and a criticism of Painting. It is an artwork turned in on itself, insistent on destroying the very thing that it creates. The function of irony now appears more clearly; negative, it is the critical substance that permeates the artwork. Positive, it criticizes criticism, negates it and in