The Boxing Match: Sketches, Shadows, Spectacles

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I wonder why I am up at such a bleak hour 
of the morning to watch two men hurt each other. 
—Donald McRae

The term “Droste effect” comes from an early twentieth century brand of cocoa powder which featured on its box a picture of a woman holding the Droste brand box. And on that smaller box was an even smaller woman, holding an even smaller box of Droste cocoa, and so on and so on. 

It’s the same effect that happens when you place two mirrors in front of one another, and notice in each the reflection of the other repeating, ever smaller and receding into infinity. In more literary sounding terms, the Droste effect can be called mise en abyme, or literally “placed into the abyss,” and can refer to any such repeated image-within-an-image. 

A famous example: In Citizen Kane, Orson Welles as the dejected and rejected Kane walks stiffly and sullenly through a mirrored hall alone, his solitary figure reflected back to himself over and over and over. 

But my favorite example is featured on the cover of The Ring magazine for their 1955 annual TV Fights special. It is a painting featuring a “Leave It to Beaver”-looking white family seated in front of their television, cheering on a televised boxing match. The mother raises a fist enthusiastically. The son is scoring the fight with a notepad and pencil. In the father’s hand is a copy of the very same Ring magazine, complete with a miniature portrait of his family. And in tiny detail, the father on that magazine holds a copy of the magazine, with an even tinier portrait of himself, holding an even tinier magazine, ad infinitum. 

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As a young man, Marcel Duchamp looked like a boxer. 

Not that Duchamp looked like someone who boxed; his visage was anything but the archetypal brute with cauliflower ears. No, Duchamp looked like a specific boxer: French heavyweight Georges Carpentier, also known as the “Orchid Man.” Carpentier was handsome, refined, even regal. His good looks drew women to ringside who would have otherwise avoided the rough and masculine sport. A young Ernest Hemingway observed this attraction firsthand in a column for the Toronto Star, when Carpentier was on a 1920 exhibition tour with boxer Jules Laniers. 

“Carpentier showed the ladies present that he has a nice taste in dressing gowns, two hands that strike as fast as cobras, and a rather good-looking face,” wrote Hemingway. “He got into the ring, stood at attention while the ‘Marseillaise’ was played and then slapped, poked, jabbed, stabbed, jolted, hooked and biffed Lanaers around the ring for four short rounds. Then he left the ring and went home.”

To say Marcel Duchamp looked like a boxer is to say he looked like a boxer who looked like a movie star.

Duchamp was well aware of Carpentier. A year after Hemingway’s assessment, Carpentier faced “the Manassa Mauler,” Jack Dempsey, in a special-built open-air stadium at Boyle’s Thirty Acres in New Jersey on July 2, 1921. It was a huge event, boxing’s first million-dollar gate, and Dempsey scored an emphatic kayo in the fourth round against the “Orchid Man.” In a letter dated July 6, Duchamp wrote that he had lost a sum of money betting on his fellow look-alike Frenchman. Perhaps embarrassed over his mistaken wager, Duchamp called Carpentier a “fool.”

Their resemblance did not go unnoticed at the time. The artist Francis Picabia blurred the two men on a cover for the Dada arts magazine 391. In France, Picabia had hosted Carpentier many times in the summer of 1923. He photographed the heavyweight for portraits. Using a portrait with Carpentier’s signature crossed out, Picabia added the name “Rrose Sélavy,” a pseudonymous and gender-bending persona sometimes adopted by Duchamp. Picabia then used this Janus-faced portrait for a 391 cover in 1924. Speaking on the face swap with Carpentier years later, Duchamp noted, “He and I were as much alike as two drops of water, which is why it was amusing.”

•

I don’t remember when I first heard the name Ernie Schaaf. He was a heavyweight contender in the 1920s and ’30s whose career is usually relegated to a historical footnote in the boxing world due to the tragedy of his death. He died February 14, 1933, after several days in a coma, the apparent result of a thirteenth round kayo delivered by the Italian giant, Primo Carnera, at Madison Square Garden, February 10. 

Before that night, Ernie Schaaf was going places. He was handsome, tall, and shy in a way that people found agreeable in a heavyweight contender. He was a devout Catholic and doted on his mother. He was also building a solid record in the prize ring. He recorded wins over Johnny Risko, Tommy Loughran, Young Stribling, Tony Galento, Jimmy Braddock, and Max Baer. The Ring magazine ranked him in their Top Ten three years running, and featured him on the cover twice. He’d even posed as the model for a boxing tournament trophy. He sometimes spoke about winning the heavyweight championship, but he had his eyes on another dream as well. He often told his admirers that after retiring from the ring, he planned to enter the priesthood. 

The night he fought Carnera, Schaaf didn’t look like himself in the ring. He was sluggish and awkward. Carnera, a product of mob-fixed fights whose ring skills were often in question, was having no trouble breaking Schaaf’s defenses and bludgeoning him at will. 

In the thirteenth round, a stiff jab snapped Schaaf’s head back. He careened backwards, dropping to the floor. Losing consciousness, Schaaf clung to the bottom rope in vain as his body gave out. He went limp and slumped forward, facedown into the canvas.

Schaaf was taken to the nearby Polyclinic Hospital, where surgeons tried to reduce the swelling in his skull. Friends and family held vigil. A concerned Carnera, barred from visiting, called the hospital every few hours for updates.

For four days, Schaaf slipped in and out of consciousness. His last words were reportedly, “I’m OK, Mom.” He was only twenty-four years old.

There was an inquiry and Carnera was brought in for questioning, but the medical findings cleared the Italian of any wrongdoing. Schaaf’s death was attributed to a swelling of the brain caused by a recent bout of meningitis, itself brought on by a lingering case of influenza. Many suspected that previous battles with hard hitters Max Baer, Tony Galento, and Unknown Winston may have factored in as well. 

After his death, there were calls for reform. A brief hue and cry came from the New York State Boxing Commission about pausing heavyweight bouts in the state. The commissioner, William Muldoon, spoke to the papers about potentially creating a new division for big men like Carnera, a super heavyweight or “dreadnought” division. 

I had been reading everything I could find about Schaaf’s life and death. I’d looked into newspaper clippings about his early pro fights in his home state of New Jersey. I read up on his move to Boston. I’d watched every fight film and newsreel clip I could scavenge online, and looked for photographs through Massachusetts historical societies. I’d even visited Schaaf’s grave in Elizabeth, NJ. 

While combing through newspaper archives for articles published in the months after his death, looking for what, if any, impact his death had on the boxing scene, I was not prepared for what I found.

Schaaf’s name came up in advertisements for film houses. In the weeks and months after his death, they began advertising public showings of the Schaaf-Carnera bout. Although each had its own unique phrasing, they all advertised it as a “fatal fight.” Some offered lurid descriptions, promising blows to the head. Some called it “sensational.” For the sake of clarity, it is true that Schaaf did not die in the ring itself, and so the moment of his actual death was not filmed. But the ring is where he fell, and once he fell, he did not rise.

See the FATAL Punch Before Your Very Eyes!

Round by Round, Blow by Blow. Showing the Fatal Punch

The blow that led to the death of Ernie Schaaf is depicted in slow motion in a film of the primo Carnera-Schaaf fight

See The Fatal Blows That Sent Ernie Schaaf To His Grave!

Fatal Pictures of Ernie Schaaf – Primo Carnera Fight; Free Cosmetics To The Ladies

I did not know how to feel about this. I was a little repulsed. I was also a little bit fascinated. It seemed insensitive, to say the least. But then, as one advertisement put it, this was “the fight all America’s talking about.” Why would they not show it? People were interested. People were intrigued. It was prurient and carried the fugitive cultural cachet of a snuff film.

I also could not feign so much outrage or shock because I had already watched the fight myself. I had searched for it online and found the footage and viewed it. I had looked up photographs of the fight, shared them on social media and then gone back and looked for more. 

How could I judge others for looking, when I myself had looked?

I told myself that the ninety years which had passed between Schaaf’s death and my searching for the video online somehow alleviated my guilt. That I was exempt. That my conscience was clear. 

I didn’t really believe that. 

I think back to that line from author Donald McRae. 

I wonder why I am up at such a bleak hour of the morning to watch two men hurt each other. 

The line comes from his book The Last Bell: Life, Death, and Boxing, published by Simon and Schuster last March. McRae is one of boxing’s finest journalists of the twenty-first century. He covers big fights for the Guardian, and is an excellent and empathetic interviewer, a journalist who knows how to listen and a writer who knows how to convey those voices he hears. The Last Bell is McRae’s fifth book on boxing. It weaves together several threads from his personal and professional lives. One of those threads is the death of a fighter, Patrick Day. 

Day went up against Charles Conwell of Cleveland on October 12, 2019. The two men were evenly matched, but Day was dropped multiple times during the fight. In his last knockdown, his head bounced off the canvas, a bad sign, and the referee stopped the bout. It was too late, however. Day went into a coma that persisted for four days. He died on October 16.

He spent four relentless days in a hospital bed, the same despairing length of stay as Ernie Schaaf’s, the events tragically mirroring each other.

As McRae spoke with the Day family and friends, their grief sunk into his soul. He echoed the sentiments of Jean-Paul Sartre. “Death, clean and bare as a bone, is present in the boxing match,” the French philosopher wrote in his last, posthumous book, the Critique of Dialectical Reason Vol. II.

McRae has stated that The Last Bell will be his last book on boxing. He made the announcement on social media. “I will keep reporting about boxing for the Guardian but, when it comes to writing books about the fight business, I think I am done. It’s finally over for me. I hate the business of boxing, but I still love boxing. The Last Bell is about this and much more.”

“Boxing has a perverse way of turning every significant bout I see into something deeply personal,” he wrote in a farewell address in the Guardian. 

“But even zealots grow weary.”

•

The sea is not less beautiful in our eyes because we know that sometimes ships are wrecked by it. 

Simone Weil

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Despite (or perhaps because of) his experience with the French heavyweight Carpentier, Marcel Duchamp never painted any boxing scenes. 

But he considered it. 

His major work, The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even, included space for a planned “Boxing Match.” The Bride is an abstract work, even by the standards of abstract art: schematic and metaphorical and metaphysical. Instead of canvas, the image is suspended between layers of clear glass (the source of the work’s nickname, The Large Glass). Duchamp’s Large Glass involves two panes of glass, “a hinged work” according to Octavio Paz, featuring upper and lower portions. The narrative is one of ascending and descending, with the “Bride’s Domain” on top and the “Bachelors’ Apparatus” down below. The Boxing Match was intended to take place near the “hinge” area along the upper and lower panes. It was to serve as a point of connection or interaction, allowing the two spaces, the Bride and the Bachelors, to work their alchemical processes upon one another.

Although Duchamp made notes describing the planned Boxing Match, it was never included in The Large Glass itself. A blank space remains where the Match would have taken place. 

This lack didn’t seem to phase Duchamp, however. It was the thought—not the final product—that mattered. 

Producing a work of art was less about producing an object than it was about producing a space into which he could project his ideas, in whatever form they eventually took—even if that meant the space was empty. Walter Benjamin recognized this preference within Dadaist work for “contemplative immersion” rather than “the sales value” of an object. 

“The studied degradation of their material was not the least of their means to achieve this uselessness.”

For Duchamp, an invisible Boxing Match is just as useful as a visible one when the entire artwork was theoretical. 

•

I once interviewed writer and professor of architecture Paul Shepheard. I asked him about the potential of seeing the boxing ring as architecture and what, if any, implications might arise from considering that roped-off space. He answered simply, “Prison makes prisoner, dance floor makes dancer, and theatre makes spectator.”

Regardless of how we prefer our canvas—stretched upon a gallery wall or raised from the arena floor—we approach as spectators. (Considering The Large Glass, perhaps we ought to consider how we approach the pane/pain.) 

Walter Benjamin’s landmark essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” concerns itself in large part with how a person becomes a spectator of art—and what this process suggests. “Let us compare the screen on which a film unfolds with the canvas of a painting,” he writes. “The painting invites the spectator to contemplation; before it the spectator can abandon himself to his associations. Before the movie frame he cannot do so. No sooner has his eye grasped a scene than it is already changed.”

Boxing is similar to film in this regard. The action happens quickly, oftentimes too quickly to be fully grasped by the spectator’s eye. In 1822, English author William Hazlitt summed up the experience of watching a prize fight in one of boxing’s earliest classic texts: “After the first blow is struck, there is no opportunity for nervous apprehensions; you are swallowed up in the immediate interest of the scene.” 

Contrast this experience with the invitation of a work of art, like The Large Glass, to contemplation. German philosopher/theorist Hans-Georg Gadamer extends this invitation to consider how we tarry in front of art. He writes, “When we dwell upon the work, there is no tedium involved, for the longer we allow ourselves, the more it displays its manifold riches to us. The essence of our temporal experience of art is in learning how to tarry in this way.”

The spectator, for Gadamer, looks at art in a way not bounded by temporality, as one is in a live boxing match. In the gallery, we take our time. We are rewarded with multiple viewings, repeated viewings, slow, contemplative viewings. In the arena, the situation is quite different. The bell will ring to end the round. A finite number of rounds will end and the fight will be over. There is no tarrying before a live match. 

Today, however, more people watch more fights at home streaming on their laptops than live audiences watch live fights. This trend away from live venues has held for decades—through the cable television pay-per-views of the 1980s–90s, the closed-circuit broadcasts at movie theaters in the 1960s–70s, and “The Gillette Cavalcade of Sports” that aired on NBC throughout the 1940s–50s. 

Televised fight broadcasts offered views you could never get while attending live—the slow motion replay and the close-up. In the 1950s, when this technology was new to television, broadcasts highlighted the spectacle with title cards. “The knockdown as seen through the magic of the slow motion camera,” read one such card, as the announcer dramatized what home viewers were witnessing on their television sets. 

Recall the Droste effect family watching the fight on the The Ring magazine cover, the boxing match glowing on their home television. Through the use of slow motion replays and close-ups, how a spectator views the action is radically altered. We are in fact able to tarry in front of the spectacle. “With the close-up, space expands; with slow motion, movement is extended,” Benjamin writes. These unnatural projections differ from our own everyday perception, so much so that they are capable of introducing us to “unconscious optics.” Benjamin believes the cultural impact of such revelatory optics could parallel that of psychoanalysis’s introduction of the idea of unconscious impulses to the general public. 

Not only is the final product altered, but the relationship to the subject is fundamentally altered as well. The relationship between boxer and spectator is not unlike that of a stage actor and the audience. A theatrical performance is presented live and in person, and as Benjamin notes, the audience and the actors can “adjust” their performance to one another. A boxer may gesture to the live audience by raising a glove or by looking out and smiling, and in return, the crowd may return cheers, applause, boos, etc. 

When I watch the fight film of Schaaf and Carnera, I am not watching as an audience member in Madison Square Garden would have, with an “unarmed eye.” I am watching the fight as the camera did. I recall Magritte’s painting The Treachery of Images and remind myself that I am not watching the fight but a reproduction of the fight, and that reproduction is subject to all of the camera’s resources: “its lowerings and liftings, its interruptions and isolations, its extensions and accelerations, its enlargements and reductions.” 

In front of my laptop, I am mulling over what Benjamin said, that before the camera, one feels a sense of estrangement similar to how one feels before a mirror. “The reflected image has become separable, transportable,” he writes. The relationship between the viewer and the viewed is interrupted, indirect, mediated by the camera. Screened in this manner, it becomes self-apprehending, a layering akin to the Droste effect. Aggregate moving shadows, a Baudrillarian hyperreality, a parallel reflection, a creative nonfiction. 

•

Duchamp’s Large Glass took years to assemble, and the work overlapped with his bet on Carpentier and Picabia’s dueling portrait of the two men. The work became so obscure and confounding that Duchamp began producing and saving hundreds of notes explaining it. His explanations, however, were often just as impenetrable as the work itself. 

The notes have their own unique and convoluted history. Written seemingly at random on scraps of paper, most of the notes were written between 1912–1915, as he was first conceiving of and beginning to assemble The Large Glass. In 1914, Duchamp first “published” these notes by making five handmade copies, given to friends as gifts. These boxes each contained sixteen notes and one drawing. Twenty years later, he produced a much larger collection of notes, commonly referred to as the Green Box. In an edition of 300, Duchamp faithfully reproduced an extensive array of notes, ninety-three in total along with one color image. Duchamp claimed the Green Box was to function “like a Sears Roebuck catalogue to accompany the glass and to be quite as important as the visual material,” although this claim may have been made somewhat tongue-in-cheek. In 1965, Duchamp revealed more notes and published a White Box, containing seventy-six additional notes. After his death, Duchamp’s widow authorized publication of all of his notes, so in 1980 a complete collection encompassing and expanding upon the Green Box and the White Box brought the total count to 289 notes in all. 

While not as user-friendly as a Sears Roebuck catalogue, his notes have provided a means for viewers to engage with the piece. They outline a narrative within the artwork, and define which visual elements correspond to which elements of the narrative, such as the ambiguous shapes that represent the otherwise unrecognizable “Bride” at the top of the glass. Duchamp writes that she has “draft pistons” and a “motor with quite feeble cylinders” that run on a “reservoir of love gasoline.” None of these pistons, motors, or cylinders are actually visible in the painting, however; they exist only in the notes.

More than half of the notes do not relate directly to The Large Glass at all. They represent Duchamp’s broad interest in mathematics, artistic representation, wordplay, and aphorisms. For example, one note simply reads “One can look at seeing/ one can’t hear hearing.” 

As in his earlier Nude Descending a Staircase #2, the human figures in The Large Glass are represented as geometric forms. They are more mechanical and theoretical than biological or sensual. Duchamp’s vision of the boxing ring was similarly schematic, decontextualized, and de-personified. In one note, Duchamp considered a possible way to visualize the Boxing Match: “Get hold of a film of a real boxing match which takes place in white gloves and blacken everything else out so that all that can be seen are the white gloves boxing.” 

In his book Marcel Duchamp: Appearance Stripped Bare, Octavio Paz describes the “rational violence” of the proposed-but-never-included Boxing Match. “This has nothing to do with a fight between two pugilists in a ring, but with the banging of a ‘combat marble’ against three targets mounted on three summits. Every time the marble reaches a summit, its impact releases a clockwork spring that makes two rams fall.” Akin to a pinball game, the Boxing Match as described by Paz is mechanistic rather than agonistic. 

Another description, this one from Juan Antonio Ramírez in his monograph Duchamp: Love and Death, Even envisions the Boxing Match as “a contraption of doubtful technological plausibility, although it fulfils an essential function in the argument of the complete work. It undresses the bride by lowering two levers. It seems obvious that the inspiration here derives from clock mechanisms.”

And then, Richard Hamilton, an artist who translated the Green Box into English and worked closely with Duchamp throughout the 1960s, gives yet another interpretation. In a 1965 interview he stated: “Somewhere in the top part—somewhere around here in the top right hand corner of the lower part of the glass, there would have been an area called The Boxing Match. There was a hand of gravity, a juggler, who would have been standing at the junction between the two planes of glass, but this didn’t actually get onto it.” 

Although these interpretations diverge in the specific, poetic details, there is a commonality in the thematics of its mechanism. The Boxing Match involves a mechanistic tugging or pulling of some kind. 

. . . a clockwork spring that makes two rams fall . . . 

. . . undresses the bride by lowering two levers . . .

. . . a hand of gravity, a juggler . . .

There is also uniformity in the purpose of the Match. It is an intermediate zone, a boundary-breaking space between the two panels. In its “rational violence,” there is a barely sublimated eroticism, as the Boxing Match facilitates the primary interaction between the Bride and Bachelors, referred to in the work’s full title.

In his 1934 edition of the Green Box notes, Duchamp included a page dedicated to the Boxing Match. This page, dated 1913, contains sparsely written notes and a diagrammatic sketch of the Boxing Match. The sketch is mechanical and two-dimensional, much like a schematic. It is neither terribly detailed nor complex. A few circles and several straight, intersecting lines with their angles marked, blueprints for an architecture never to be constructed. 

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What happens when the Droste effect begins its process of reproduction? What if the virtual risks superseding the real? According to Jean Baudrillard, the real becomes “useless” or vestigial, “merely a reference corpse.” 

“Yet all these non-degradable things continue to exist,” he writes in his essay “Useless Functions.” They persist “like the phantom extremities of an amputated limb” or “astronauts, long since dead, but circling the globe in perpetuity.” But this useless real, when properly looked after or thought of, will eventually return to take its “revenge.”

Not only was Ernie Schaaf’s “fatal fight” filmed that night in 1933, but a virtual copy of it was made, and it played out on the big screen. The 1956 movie The Harder They Fall is a fictionalized account of Primo Carnera’s boxing career. It includes a fight in which Carnera’s stand-in, named Toro Moreno, fights Gus Dundee, who dies in the ring. 

As if anticipating Baudrillard, the vengeance of the real appears in the movie in the form of real-life boxer, Max Baer. Baer had in fact been involved in a fatal match in 1930, in which his opponent Frankie Campbell died from injuries sustained in the fight. And although it was Carnera in the ring with Schaaf, many believed it was injuries dealt by Baer in their 1932 match that were responsible for Schaaf’s death. 

In fact, Baer’s character in the movie, the champion Buddy Brennen, believes that he is the one truly responsible for Dundee’s death. What’s more, he is actually angry that Moreno is getting the credit for killing. 

“It’s a question a’ personal pride,” he says. “You know I’m th’ one that nailed Gus; murdered him for fifteen rounds. Dunno what held ’im up.”  

A sly grin cracks across his face. 

“But when Gus left th’ ring that night, he was a dead man. All yer joker did was tap ‘im. I did all th’ work and you give yer guy all th’ glory.”

The film was based on the 1947 novel of the same name by Budd Schulberg, and although the novel does contain the fatal fight, as well as the suggestion that it was damage from a previous match that contributed to the fighter’s death, this scene played by Baer about his personal pride in nailing the fallen fighter is not in the source novel—it was added for the film; for Baer specifically.

“When I butcher a guy, I want th’ whole world t’ know it!”

It’s a chilling moment as the real pierces the virtual and the viewer loses sense of where one ends and the other begins. A Droste effect feedback loop, an elliptical iteration. Like echoes above a calm lake, bending back always towards themselves. 

•

In these notes, sketches, and blank spaces left behind by Duchamp, I am looking at absence just as much as presence. There is what I can see, and then there is what I cannot see. I know I am a spectator when I view the presence of an artwork. What am I when, as is the case of Duchamp’s Boxing Match, I view the absence of work?

Looking where the Boxing Match was to be placed, we find only glass. Clear glass. We look past the space, through it, as one might look through a lens. Recall the note Duchamp made while conceptualizing the work: “One can look at seeing.” 

In fact, the Boxing Match was to be located near what he terms “ophthalmic” or “ocular” witnesses. They are represented as flattened circles, suggesting lenses or the diagrams found on opticians’ charts. If the Boxing Match is a mechanism for stripping the bride, then Duchamp may be suggesting that an act cannot truly be erotic if there is no voyeur. No spectacle without a spectator. The Ocular Witnesses act as eyes, albeit disembodied, that can observe the action. Duchamp described his construction of The Large Glass as being the end of his “retinal” art, which is to say, art defined or constrained by its allegiance to aesthetic pursuits rather than intellectual ones. Duchamp was abandoning whatever was left of his artistic allegiance to the visual object, but ironically, he was adopting the visual as his subject. 

Maybe this is what Duchamp is thinking about when he looks at seeing: the relationship between absence and presence. Trompe l’oeil—fool the eye. The contemplative immersion of unconscious optics. Making something out of nothing.

Thinking on Duchamp and The Large Glass, Octavio Paz writes, “Machines wear out and after a time one model replaces another; bodies grow old and die, but the body has been the same from the appearance of man on the earth until now.” 

He goes on. “The body is immortal because it is mortal; this is the secret of its permanent fascination.”

•

After Ernie Schaaf was knocked out that Friday evening in 1933, the camera kept rolling. I’ve watched those few minutes more times than any round of the fight itself.

I view those moments as if looking through glass. Carnera moves to help Schaaf up, as members of Schaaf’s corner jump into the ring. Realizing that the fallen fighter isn’t getting up, the referee takes Carnera by the hand and discretely pulls him away, raising Carnera’s hand in victory. 

A title card flashes onto the screen: “By this sensational knockout Carnera earns the right to fight Jack Sharkey for the World’s Heavyweight Championship.” This wording suggests the film was produced in the days immediately after the fight but before Schaaf’s death.

Jack Sharkey was not only the reigning heavyweight champion, he was a close friend of Ernie Schaaf. In fact, he was actually there working Schaaf’s corner that night. Sharkey was one of the first in the ring when Schaaf could not be roused. He wrapped his arms around the younger man’s chest, hoisting him from the canvas and dragging his unconscious friend out of the ring. 

The camera recorded all of this, but it recorded it without sound. Those images are chilling enough on their own now, but there is another layer they did not capture: the audible reaction of the audience. Most had favored Schaaf to win that night and they expected him to win by a wide margin. When he was dropped so definitively by a single jab, they believed the fix was in. While Schaaf lay unconscious, the crowd peppered the ring with calls of Fake! and Fix! Sharkey’s effort to remove Schaaf from the ring was assumed by many to be a pantomime. 

It was only news of his coma, and his subsequent death four days later, that fully cleared Schaaf in the minds of his accusing public. 

I keep watching. Off camera, the crowd who had watched the fight live would have begun emptying the stands. The cameraman kept filming, but eventually he would shut off his camera, leave the arena, and take his rolls to be developed. The film would be reproduced and sent to theatres across the country. Three quarters of a century later, someone would digitize that film and upload it to the world wide web where I could enter “Carnera vs Schaaf” into a search bar and find the recording of that fateful, fatal night on YouTube.  

I wonder why I am up at such a bleak hour of the morning to watch two men hurt each other. 

The video plays to its end. The ring empties out. Carnera looks back one last time in Schaaf’s direction before exiting the ring. I can look at him seeing, though I cannot see what he feels in that horrific moment. Perhaps he was searching in vain for a positive sign from Schaaf’s people. They raise his limp body and pass it through the ropes. They carry him down the steps. There is no stretcher, no gurney. The emptying canvas is as still as glass. I look into the blank space where Duchamp’s Boxing Match never happens. I am reminded of something Joyce Carol Oates said about boxing: “Life is like boxing in many unsettling respects. But boxing is only like boxing.”

•

Duchamp spent years creating The Large Glass, and near the end of his process, while the work was being readied for shipping, the glass cracked. It was held together by a spider’s web of fractures now running across its surface, making the invisible glass visible. This gave Duchamp much satisfaction, and he declared the work “finally unfinished.”

What am I looking at when I am looking for answers? Our permanent fascination with our impermanent existence? What manifold riches are on display, immersed within the useless, the bleak hours, the panes of hinged glass? What ships are wrecked upon such seas? And which sail on?

We are outside our selves looking in; inside our selves looking out. Like the Droste effect, we map ourselves onto ourselves, copy and repeat and copy and repeat. 

If you and I go together to see The Large Glass on display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and I stand on one side and you on the other, I become part of the work for you, and you become part of it for me. One could argue we are not even looking at the same work at all.  

We are looking at one another. Seeing each other.