From MoMA’s website: The ambiguous title of Suzanne Duchamp’s painting/collage Solitude Entonnoir “suggests a mechanical counterpart to a psychological state.” As if the “funnel” depicted here were a Kantian “phenomenon” (an object or event as it appears to us, shaped by our senses and cognitive structures), while the “noumenon” (the object of reality as it exists independently of our perception, the “thing-in-itself”) is… solitude. An ineffable something.

Here we find something like my G-Schema… but the Dada/Tabu “funnel” depicted by Duchamp is far more haphazard, fluid, internally inconsistent than the G-Schema. Perhaps, for that very reason, it’s a more perfect reflection of the haphazard, fluid, internally inconsistent manner in which culture works than any geometrically rationalized schema can offer. Another way to put this same notion: “A mechanical counterpart to a psychological state.”

A selection from a series of posts — originally published by our sister website, HILOBROW — attempting to depict the intellectual and emotional highs and lows of developing a semiotic schema.