The 33 Strategies of War (67 page)

I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.

M
ARCEL
D
UCHAMP
, 1887-1968

It took great courage for Grant to disobey these conventions and cut himself loose from any base, living instead off the rich lands of the Mississippi Basin. It took great courage for him to move his army without forming a front. (Even his own generals, including William Tecumseh Sherman, thought he had lost his mind.) This strategy was hidden from Pemberton's view because Grant kept up ordinary appearances by establishing a base at Grand Gulf and forming front and rear to march toward the rail line. By the time Pemberton had grasped the extraordinary nature of Grant's free-flowing attack, he had been taken by surprise and the game was over. To our eyes Grant's strategy might seem obvious, but it was completely outside Pemberton's experience.

To follow convention, to give inordinate weight to what has worked in the past, is a natural tendency. We often ignore some simple yet unconventional idea that in every sense would upset our opponents. It is a matter sometimes of cutting ourselves loose from the past and roaming freely. Going without a security blanket is dangerous and uncomfortable, but the power to startle people with the unexpected is more than worth the risk. This is particularly important when we are on the defensive or in a weakened state. Our natural tendency at such times is to be conservative, which only makes it easier for our enemies to anticipate our moves and crush us with their superior strength; we play into their hands. It is when the tide is against us that we must forget the books, the precedents, the conventional wisdom, and risk everything on the untried and unexpected.

4.
The Ojibwa tribe of the North American plains contained a warrior society known as the Windigokan (No-flight Contraries). Only the bravest men, who had demonstrated bravery by their utter disregard for danger on the battlefield, were admitted to the Windigokan. In fact, because they had no fear of death, they were considered no longer among the living: they slept and ate separately and were not held to the usual codes of behavior. As creatures who were alive but among the dead, they spoke and acted contrarily: they called a young person an old man, and when one of them told the others to stand still, he meant charge forward. They were glum in times of prosperity, happy in the depths of winter. Although there was a clownish side to their behavior, the Windigokan could inspire great fear. No one ever knew what they would do next.

The Windigokan were believed to be inhabited by terrifying spirits called Thunderers, which appeared in the form of giant birds. That made them somehow inhuman. On the battlefield they were disruptive and unpredictable, and in raiding parties downright terrifying. In one such raid, witnessed by an outsider, they gathered first in front of the Ojibwa chief's lodge and yelled, "We are not going to war! We shall not kill the Sioux! We shall not scalp four of them and let the rest escape! We shall go in daytime!" They left camp that night, wearing costumes of rags and scraps, their bodies plastered with mud and painted with splotches of weird color, their faces covered by frightening masks with giant, beak-like noses. They made their way through the darkness, stumbling over themselves--it was hard to see through the masks--until they came upon a large Sioux war party. Although outnumbered, they did not flee but danced into the enemy's center. The grotesqueness of their dance made them seem to be possessed by demons. Some of the Sioux backed away; others drew close, curious and confused. The leader of the Windigokan shouted, "Don't shoot!" The Ojibwa warriors then pulled out guns hidden under their rags, killed four Sioux, and scalped them. Then they danced away, the enemy too terrified by this apparition to pursue them.

After such an action, the mere appearance of the Windigokan was enough for the enemy to give them a wide berth and not risk any kind of encounter.

Interpretation

What made the Windigokan so frightening was the fact that, like the forces of nature from which they claimed to derive their powers, they could be destructive for no apparent reason. Their mounting of a raid was not governed by need or ordered by the chief; their appearance bore no relation to anything known, as if they had rolled on the ground or in trays of paint. They might wander in the dark until they chanced on an enemy. Their dancing was like nothing anyone had seen or imagined. They might suddenly start to kill and scalp, then stop at an arbitrary number. In a tribal society governed by the strictest of codes, these were spirits of random destruction and irrationality.

The use of the unconventional can startle and give you an advantage, but it does not often create a sense of terror. What will bring you ultimate power in this strategy is to follow the Windigokan and adapt a kind of randomness that goes beyond rational processes, as if you were possessed by a spirit of nature. Do this all the time and you'll be locked up, but do it right, dropping hints of the irrational and random at the opportune moment, and those around you will always have to wonder what you'll do next. You will inspire a respect and fear that will give you great power. An ordinary appearance spiced by a touch of divine madness is more shocking and alarming than an out-and-out crazy person. Remember: your madness, like Hamlet's, must be strategic. Real madness is all too predictable.

5.
In April 1917, New York's Society of Independent Artists prepared for its first exhibition. This was to be a grand showcase of modern art, the largest in the United States to date. The exhibition was open to any artist who had joined the society (whose dues were minimal), and the response had been overwhelming, with over twelve hundred artists contributing over two thousand pieces.

A similar vision among the Siouan tribes turns the warrior into a Heyoka, who also exhibits the clown-like behavior of the Windigokan, the use of sacking as a war shirt, and plastering the body with mud....... Psychologically the Heyoka was of immense importance, as were similar characters among numerous other tribes. During periods of happiness and plenty he saw only gloom and despair, and could be goaded into providing hours of harmless amusement when he gorged himself on buffalo ribs while complaining there was no food in the camp, or declared he was dirty and proceeded to wash in a bath of mud....... Yet behind this benign face of the Heyoka there lurked the ever-present fear that he was possessed by the spirit of Iktomi, and was therefore unpredictable and potentially dangerous. He, after all, was the only person who dared challenge the super-naturals even if he was in dread of a common camp dog and would run screaming in fright if one approached too close. Thus he made a mockery of the pretensions of some of the warriors, but at the same time emphasized the fact that the powers which guided and protected them in battle were of such strength that only a Heyoka might oppose them.

W
ARRIORS
: W
ARFARE AND THE
N
ATIVE
A
MERICAN
I
NDIAN
, N
ORMAN
B
ANCROFT
H
UNT
, 1995

The society's board of directors included collectors like Walter Arensberg and artists like Man Ray and the twenty-nine-year-old Marcel Duchamp, a Frenchman then living in New York. It was Duchamp, as head of the Hanging Committee, who decided to make the exhibition radically democratic: he hung the works in alphabetical order, beginning with a letter drawn from a hat. The system led to cubist still lifes being hung next to traditional landscapes, amateur photographs, and the occasional lewd work by someone apparently insane. Some of the organizers loved this plan, others were disgusted and quit.

A few days before the exhibition was to open, the society received the strangest work so far: a urinal mounted on its back, with the words
R. MUTT
1917 painted in large black letters on its rim. The work was called
Fountain
, and it was apparently submitted by a Mr. Mutt, along with the requisite membership fee. In viewing the piece for the first time, the painter George Bellows, a member of the society's board, claimed it was indecent and that the society could not exhibit it. Arensberg disagreed: he said he could discern an interesting work of art in its shape and presentation. "This is what the whole exhibit is about," he told Bellows. "An opportunity to allow the artist to send in anything he chooses, for the artist to decide what is art, not someone else."

Bellows was unmoved. Hours before the exhibition opened, the board met and voted by a slim margin not to show the piece. Arensberg and Duchamp immediately resigned. In newspaper articles reporting this controversy, the object was politely referred to as a "bathroom fixture." It piqued a lot of curiosity, and an air of mystery pervaded the entire affair.

At the time of the exhibition, Duchamp was one of a group of artists who published a magazine called
The Blind Man
. The magazine's second issue included a photograph of
Fountain
taken by the great photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who lit the urinal beautifully so that a shadow fell over it like a kind of veil, giving it a slightly religious appearance, along with something vaguely sexual in the arguably vaginal shape of the urinal when laid on its back.
The Blind Man
also ran an editorial, "The Richard Mutt Case," that defended the work and criticized its exclusion from the show: "Mr. Mutt's fountain is not immoral...no more than a bathtub is immoral.... Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He
CHOSE
it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view--created a new thought for that object."

It soon became clear that the "creator" of
Fountain
was none other than Duchamp. And over the years the work began to assume a life of its own, even though it mysteriously disappeared from Stieglitz's studio and was never found again. For some reason the photograph and the story of
Fountain
inspired endless ideas about art and artmaking. The work itself had strange powers to shock and compel. In 1953 the Sidney Janis Gallery, New York, was authorized by Duchamp to exhibit a replica of
Fountain
over its entrance door, a sprig of mistletoe emerging from the bowl. Soon more replicas were appearing in galleries, retrospective exhibitions of Duchamp's work, and museum collections.
Fountain
became a fetish object, something to collect. Replicas of it have sold for over $1 million.

Everyone seems to see what they want to see in the piece. Shown in museums, it often still outrages the public, some disturbed by the urinal itself, others by its presentation as art. Critics have written extended articles on the urinal, with all kinds of interpretations: in staging
Fountain
, Duchamp was urinating on the art world; he was playing with notions of gender; the piece is an elaborate verbal pun; on and on. What some of the organizers of the 1917 show believed to be merely an indecent object unworthy of being considered art has somehow turned into one of the most controversial, scandalous, and analyzed works of the twentieth century.

Interpretation

Throughout the twentieth century, many artists wielded influence by being unconventional: the Dadaists, the surrealists, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali--the list is long. But of all of them, it is Marcel Duchamp who has probably had the greatest impact on modern art, and what he called his "readymades" are perhaps the most influential of all his works. The readymades are everyday objects--sometimes exactly as they were made (a snow shovel, a bottle rack), sometimes slightly altered (the urinal laid on its back, the mustache and goatee drawn on a reproduction of
The Mona Lisa
)--"chosen" by the artist and then placed in a gallery or museum. Duchamp was giving the ideas of art priority over its images. His readymades, banal and uninteresting in themselves, inspired all kinds of associations, questions, and interpretations; a urinal may be a seedy commonplace, but to present it as art was utterly unconventional and stirred up angry, irritating, delirious ideas.

Understand: in war, politics, and culture, what is unconventional, whether it is Hannibal's elephants and oxen or Duchamp's urinal, is never material--or rather it is never
just
material. The unconventional can only arise out of the mind: something surprises, is not what we expected. We usually base our expectations on familiar conventions, cliches, habits of seeing, the ordinary. Many artists, writers, and other producers of culture seem to believe it the height of unconventionality to create images, texts, and other works that are merely weird, startling, or shocking in some way. These works may generate a momentary splash, but they have none of the power of the unconventional and extraordinary because they have no context to rub against; they do not work against our expectations. No more than strange, they quickly fade from memory.

When striving to create the extraordinary, always remember: what is crucial is the mental process, not the image or maneuver itself. What will truly shock and linger long in the mind are those works and ideas that grow out of the soil of the ordinary and banal, that are unexpected, that make us question and contest the very nature of the reality we see around us. Most definitely in art, the unconventional can only be strategic.