The Menard Syndrome

(On the occasional resemblance between artworks, or on billions of monkeys randomly typing for trillions of years)

Left: Marcel Duchamp, L.H.O.O.Q., 1919; Right: The Mona Lisa Smoking a Pipe by Sapeck, in Le Rire, 1887.

Several years ago I organized a large  international symposium about institutional critique. I decided it to title it “The Museum as Medium”. It was not until we were well into the preparations of the symposium that I learned that a book with that same exact title and related subject matter that had just come out that same year, a few months prior, written by British Museum curator James Putnam— something that either had escaped me entirely in my research or that truly was too recent for me to have noticed before. The book also offered important perspectives on the topic.  I contacted Putnam immediately. Luckily for me, he was an affable and cordial individual. He agreed to be part of the symposium and he in fact became one of the keynote speakers. I felt I had narrowly averted a PR disaster. Had I seen that title somewhere and forgotten about it? Or had I followed a similar thought process to Putnam while coming up with that title? I might never know for sure.

A few years later, I was doing an art residency at the Banff Centre in Canada, finishing work on my first book—a satirical social etiquette manual for the art world. I gave  a public reading of the soon-to-be published material to my fellow residents. Toward the end of the residency, a Canadian fellow resident artist hastily wrote and published a little hand-made pamphlet that he described as a social etiquette manual for the Canadian art world. I was puzzled and confused by his audacity in basically doing  what I had done and present it to us without even acknowledging my work, as if he had never heard of me. However, he did not appear conflicted or worried at all, but instead seemed to think that his work was totally original.  In retrospect I now suspect that instead of it being a case of deliberate plagiarism he simply had done it unconsciously.

It  is likely we all have found ourselves in situations where we believe we have an original idea —either as artists who are conceiving art works, curators conceiving exhibition ideas, writers on writing topics, and so on— only to later learn that this same idea, or a close version of it, was generated and/or actualized earlier on by someone else. The motto “everything has been done before” is a classic downer mantra in art school hallways. However, another version of that truism also applies: there are plenty of stories of art students who see their professors or visiting artists make works that are suspiciously similar to the ideas, processes or strategies that they were pursuing in their art works. Such was the one of the architect Thomas Shine, who sued David Childs for stealing a design for one of his buildings that Childs had seen, and praised, at a critique while Shine was a student at Yale. The cases of visiting artists “stealing” ideas from art students after critiques can merit a column of its own.

Of course, art students are not the sole purveyors of original ideas.  I have a list of ideas or projects that I remember having mentioned in the presence of fellow artists that shortly after I saw them doing on their own without any acknowledgement. Picasso once famously remarked, “great artists steal,” but he could have added that artists who are not great also steal.

It is easy to interpret evil intent in these situations. But when I go back to my “Museum as Medium” episode, and given that I am certain that being a copycat was the farthest thing from my mind (and it would have been dumb to intentionally try to steal Putnam’s book title anyway, as it would have been immediately obvious to many people in the field) I then realize that things can always be, and usually are, more complicated than outright idea theft, and that the great majority of these instances might not be conscious acts of appropriation or plagiarism, but rather instances where the artist is simply not aware that they are recreating someone else’s idea.

We could call these incidents, if a contradictory term were to be allowed, “unintentional appropriation”. I believe there are at least three different ways to explain these curious instances, some more convincing than others, but all worth articulating.

The first potential explanation is that similar things just happen in the world out of sheer coincidence, and that this applies to art as well. Considering the immense amount of ideas and art production out there, it would appear plausible that similar or even identical art works, poems, memes or melodies would be made in two different, unrelated or unconnected times and places. Artist Alison Smith has explored for example how historical patterns in American crafts resemble and predate American modernism, a phenomenon that she has described as “American Pre-Modern”.

Visual coincidences do happen all the time. However, it is important to keep in mind that decontextualized images can appear more coincidental than they actually are (this is to say that Modern abstract art, for example, is not just about geometric patterns, but about an entire aesthetic that differs greatly from the cultural mindset or traditions behind other historic forms like American folk art or pre-Columbian designs). Furthermore, when coincidences happen in a pattern, they are likely not coincidences, and it is incumbent upon us to instead seek causality. In art, coincidences  between art works mostly work when the context within which each artwork was made is completely erased.

Last but not least, creating an artwork that is accidentally identical to another is nearly impossible. Engaging with a classic example, US programmer Jesse Anderson has actually attempted do play out the thought experiment of how long would it take for an infinite amount of monkeys to randomly type on a keyboard to generate the whole works of Shakespeare. With certain constraints (like asking the computer to only generate series of 9-character strings) the project is doable; without them, it would take an inconceivable amount of time.  Some have made the calculation that for a monkey to randomly type the complete works of Shakespeare, it would take 4.1206 x 10 (raised to the 5660329th power)  years, or the age of our universe multiplied by a number so big it would take nearly 2000 pages to write down the number alone. Other calculations estimate that if each of all the particles of the universe were a microchip and they  all were spinning a million times a second producing random letters, the random trials that you would get since the beginning of time would not even be enough to produce a single Shakespearean sonnet.

And yet this is more or less the feat accomplished by Pierre Menard, the character in Jorge Luis Borges’ story, “Pierre Menard, author of Don Quixote.” Menard is able to write chapters 9 and 38 of Don Quixote, leaving chapter 22 unfinished.

How is Menard more successful than the monkeys working ceaselessly for longer than the entire life of the universe many times over?  According to Borges, Menard sets himself to recreate the work from the vantage point of the 20th century by immersing himself so much in the life of Cervantes that he is able to type, word by word, the aforementioned chapters in 17th century Spanish. The fact that, in contrast to the monkeys, Menard doesn’t take on his task randomly but instead has intentionality that makes his work a more “qualified replica”, if we could call it that.

In a way, some could see Menard’s character as a kind of an Elaine Sturtevant of the early 20th century— only that Sturtevant was methodically creating inexact replicas of other artists works turning the process into a sort of commentary, thus falling more in the appropriationist category, while  Menard tries to go a bit further with his desire to actually “become” Cervantes in the 20th century— to authentically embody that artist worldview and artistic output, to sort of breath 17th century artistic oxygen, but from Menard’s own present.

Which brings me to the second explanation of the unintentional appropriation phenomenon: shared zeitgeist. This notion is often invoked by the common phrase that ideas are “in the air”, which theoretically accounts for artists working in ways that might seem related if not parallel, even if they do not know of each other’s work. In order for this to be completely true one would probably need to subscribe to theories of interconnectedness, such as Gaia theory. But still without necessarily venturing into the new age realm, zeitgeist can be understood as a common set of political, economic and social conditions that can motivate certain attitudes toward art in different places. Take, for instance, Conceptual Art:  during the post-war period artists in Eastern Europe and Latin America were engaging in conceptual practices that predate or parallel what was being produced in the United States and Western Europe, yet those artists have not been given due recognition by the dominant narratives of art. Plenty of writing has been generated on this subject. However this explanation, in it of itself, still does not satisfactorily help address the question of how an artwork ends up being duplicated, primarily because artists in the modern art period worked in less isolation than ever in history: networks in the 20th century have been key to the formation of all the major aesthetic ideas of the avant-garde starting  with abstraction and beyond, including during and after the Cold War.

So it is the third, and most basic, explanation of the duplication phenomenon that in my view might typically apply to most of us: cryptomnesia. This is the term used to describe instances where we have experienced certain information and forgotten about it, only for it to come back to our mind and give us the impression that it is an original idea of ours.

Cryptomnesia is often invoked in cases where an artist has been accused of plagiarism, which tends to be common in music. Cryptomnesia might also account for the Shine/Childs architecture plagiarism case and the Canadian artist that I met at that residency: if they all had experienced cryptomnesia they could not have been aware of their supposed plagiarism. As Théodore Flournoy, the psychiatrist who coined the term described it, this unconscious process takes place when  "latent memories […] come out, sometimes greatly disfigured by a subliminal work of imagination or reasoning, as so often happens in our ordinary dreams."

And cryptomnesia affects everyone, regardless of artistic stature. Umberto Eco himself once wrote that the description of the fictional lost Aristotle manuscript that functions as the central element of The Name of the Rose was exactly the one of a manuscript he owned,  stored away and had forgotten about.

Dannielle Tegeder and I bumped into a case of artwork resemblance a few years ago when we  immersed ourselves in the world of Les Incohérents, a raucous and irreverent group of artists who emerged in Paris in the 1880s. Founded by writer Jules Lévy, Les Arts Incohérents was a short-lived satirical “movement” of the art world of the time.  Ironically, even though they launched this “movement” in jest, the works they produced appear to prefigure what the actual avant-garde would become thirty years later. They staged, for example, an exhibition of monochromatic paintings four decades before Malevich; they published writings that could be seen as proto-surrealist and staged events that today we could well think of as Happenings. But perhaps most importantly, the artist Sapeck (Eugène Bataille), presented an “augmented” version of the Mona Lisa smoking a pipe in the magazine Le Rire in 1887. 1887 was also the year of Duchamp’s birth, and as it is widely known, one of his most famous readymades (or as he called it, a “rectified readymade”), is L.H.O.O.Q., of 1919, the reproduction of Mona Lisa with a mustache added on, also first seen as an entry on an artist publication (Francis Picabia’s 391 magazine).

Certainly a mustache is not a pipe, but the addition of this male-identifying element in a reproduction of the same famous painting  of a woman by a male French artist four decades after another, using the adjective “rectified” instead of “augmented” felt to me just too close for comfort. The question, which as far as I have been able to tell has never been satisfactorily answered, is whether Duchamp was consciously “rectifying” an Incohérent readymade, (i.e. if he pulled a “Pierre Menard” on the Incohérents) that he and his peers were aware about,  whether it was a mere coincidence (which seems rather unlikely), or whether he somehow was exposed to that publication in his youth, forgotten about it,  and authentically thought that his intervention was “original”— that is, that Duchamp was victim of an episode of cryptomnesia?

I brought this inquiry to top art history scholars. Did Duchamp know about the 1887 illustration by Bataille? Thierry de Duve, author of “Kant after Duchamp”, told me: “That's one of the unanswerable questions of Duchamp scholarship. To my knowledge, Duchamp never mentioned the Incohérents, but the connection has been made by several ‘Duchampologists.’”

And Francis Naumann, a world authority on Duchamp and author of multiple works including “Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Making Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” and the essential book “The Recurrent, Haunting Ghost: Essays on the Art, Life and Legacy of Marcel Duchamp”, replied: “Duchamp might have known about the precedence of the Bataille Mona Lisa with a pipe, but remember, the Bataille was presented within the context of illustration.  Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q. was presented within the context of a sophisticated art world.  With Duchamp, context is everything.  A snow shovel in a hardware store is, after all, only a shovel.  The Bataille likely poked at the issue of women smoking, whereas Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q. seriously criticized an entire system of art that shunned the work of women, and, worse yet, homosexuals.” Naumann’s illuminating essay on Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q. (published in this book “The Recurrent, Haunting Ghost...”) also references yet another historical precedent: a drawing made by Lucien Métivet and also published in Le Rire (the previously mentioned magazine where Bataille published his 1887 illustration), in 1909, this time with mustache and goatee, to make fun of the fact that a newly added protective glass that Louvre curators had added for the protection of the painting made the work hard to see.

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Some instances of artwork resemblance bring the fascinating subject of authorship to the foreground. If there was a way to prove that an artist did not mean to imitate, but instead unintentionally adopted the idea thinking of it as their own, how would we account for this fact when noting the authorship of a work? Wouldn’t it be fair in some instances to credit the artist who we know originated the idea? (something like d’après Leonardo?) And, if we were to do a cryptomnesia biennial, how would we list the artists? (e.g. This work is by Paul who unconsciously robbed Peter who unconsciously robbed Mary?) And what if we can’t determine which artwork came before?

The best solution might be found in a very short story by my late brother, the author Luis Ignacio Helguera, who considered the problem from the standpoint of a fable, which I translate for the first time here:

Fable I

On a rainy night, the toad and the frog were showing their poems to each other. As they were mutually celebrating their work, they discovered with extraordinary astonishment, that they had both written a poem, “Ode to the Puddle”, that was literal, identical.

But instead of fighting for the copyright of the work and enter into a dispute enumerating recollections, circumstances and various arguments, and since they were irrational animals, they both agreed, with a unisonous croak,  that the essential objective was to disseminate the work, and thus they declared the poem anonymous.

(with thanks to Jordi Sod and Martin Hadis)