Artist Bob cites, more than analyzes, as shorthand for the maker who steps back and lets the gesture — or the audience — carry the meaning. Across four dialogues Duchamp is a recurring aphorism rather than a subject: named among Malinowski's modernist heirs in Dialogue 5, brandishing "no solution because there's no problem" in Dialogue 18, testifying that after thirty years "the artist is not involved" in Dialogue 35, and defining art as "something you point at" in Dialogue 37. Each citation feeds a different facet of the pair's argument about how art marks, and then abandons, its sites.
Across the dialogues
Name-checked in the modernist lineage — Malinowski's account of phatic communion "a big influence on Joyce, Duchamp"
Raised to a stance — "no solution because there's no problem" set against Cameron's island in peril
Bob wields Duchamp's aphorism against the search for fixes — "no solution because there's no problem," the artist's serene refusal, set in Cameron's gloss against an island in peril.
"look at what Duchamp said. There's no solution because there's no problem."
Enlisted for McLuhan's "putting on" — the artist drops out after thirty years and the audience takes the work over for its own purposes
Duchamp as witness to McLuhan's "putting on" — after thirty years the artist drops out and the audience takes the work over for its own purposes, the audience becoming the art form.
"This is what Duchamp said. After 30 years... The artist is not involved in the art form or the art, the fact that was made. The audience put it to their own purposes."
Reduced to a gesture — art as "something you point at," folded into Bob's archive-as-marker
Duchamp's answer to what art is — "something you point at" — which Bob turns into his figure for the archive: a stopping, a marker, the eye "coming into culture" as people locate meaningful sites.
"it's something you point at."
Turned from an art-historical reference into the session's image for method — his refusal of Warhol's camera is read as the posture the whole New Science requires, and Cameron converts the anecdote into the distinction between media plural and medium singular
The Factory screen test becomes Bob's model for how to stand in an environment — not confronting the medium in the position it assigns, but watching what it is doing while it holds your attention.
"But Marcel Duchamp, he didn't stare at the camera. He kept looking off to the side, making his eyes go back and forth, over to the left, over to the right."
Cameron converts the anecdote into an argument — a device has one perspective by construction, a human has many by constitution, so the refusal was a demonstration rather than an eccentricity.
"He was saying the camera is a point of view, but I, as a pre-tribal awareness individual, have points of view, points plural."
The distinction the session's whole committee argument depends on, delivered in four words — what makes the human irreducible to the device is plurality, which is also why the committee cannot have one member.
"And what I am is a... a way of dealing with media, plural, whereas that camera is medium singular."