Esquivons les Ecchymoses des Esquimaux aux mots Exquis

In Marcel Duchamp’s cover for SMS (Shit Must Stop), no. 2, 1968, he reprised a design that he first realized in 1925, and that was featured as one of nine in his experimental film Anemic Cinema in 1926. This disk, which is in fact a record, expresses Duchamp’s longstanding fascination with optical experiments, as well as puns and word games. The sentence Esquivons les Ecchymoses des Esquimaux aux mots Exquis must be read aloud in French in order to manifest its tongue-twister-like qualities. This type of word game, called a contrepèterie in France, consists of transposing syllables or phonemes of select words so that they form new ones, twisting the meaning of a sentence. Always witty, and often bawdy or raunchy, the genre is known as a “spoonerism” in English. Losing its alliteration in translation, the text roughly translates as: “let’s dodge the bruises of the Eskimos with (our) exquisite words.”

For the SMS issue, the spiraling poem is printed on paper and affixed to a wax record. If played on a record player, we hear a seven-minute recording of Duchamp reading aloud excerpts from his previous works, including Written Wrotten (1939-1940) and the Green Box. The disk is pinned to the front cover of folder that serves as the enclosure for the rest of the works in SMS issue #2. The back of the folder features another Duchamp pun: “A guest + a host = a ghost, Marcel Duchamp 1953.”