Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass)

Możliwe, że znasz pracę pt. Fontanna Marcela Duchampa — pisuar, który podpisał (jako R. Mutt) i zgłosił na wystawę organizowaną przez Stowarzyszenie Niezależnych Artystów w 1917 roku. Ten gotowy przedmiot czyli "ready-made" był kapryśnym i obrazoburczym gestem — zgodnym z duchem nowojorskich dadaistów. Podobnie jak jego przyjaciele tworzący w nurcie DADA: Francis Picabia i Man Ray, Duchamp upajał się humorem, grą słów i radykalną redefinicją sztuki w czasie, w którym Europa pogrążona była w konflikcie I wojny światowej i w latach późniejszych.

Even before Fountain, Duchamp had made a big splash at New York’s 1913 Armory Show with his controversial cubo-futurist painting Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) (1912). But Duchamp said he wanted to get away from painting as a strategy for art-making. This was partly a reaction against the popular French saying, “bête comme un peintre,” which means “stupid as a painter” (a phrase used to describe someone foolish—much like the English “dumb as a box of rocks”). To say someone is “stupid as a painter” is to say that painters only translate what they see and that painting is not an intellectual activity. Duchamp disagreed, and strove to make works, like Fountain, that were driven by intellect (what would come to be known as "conceptual art") and defied standards of beauty and artistic technique. Duchamp called The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even his “hilarious picture” and it, too, engages wit, absurdity, non-traditional materials, and conceptualism to push the boundaries of what was acceptable and possible in the art world of his generation.

Panna młoda rozebrana przez swych kawalerów, jednak jest często nazywana Wielką Szybą, ponieważ dokładnie tym jest: dwoma kawałkami szkła, które są ułożone pionowo i obramowane jak podwójne okno, o długości ponad 2,5m. Chociaż Wielka Szyba jest płaskim, dwuwymiarowym obiektem, zdecydowanie nie jest obrazem. Jest w dużej mierze przezroczysty, a dodatkowo można go oglądać z obu stron. Duchamp unikał używania tradycyjnych materiałów, takich jak płótno i farba olejna. Zamiast tego wymyślił obrazy na szklanej powierzchni z drutu, folii, kleju i lakieru. Pozwolił też, by na szkle, które leżało płasko w jego pracowni, zbierał się kurz, który przykleił klejem. Zdjęcie Man Raya, Hodowla kurzu (1920), pokazuje, jak okurzone jest szkło.

Duchamp zaprzestał pracy nad Wielką Szybą w 1923 r., po ośmiu latach, nie dlatego, że uznał dzieło za skończone lecz, że powinno pozostać „zdecydowanie niedokończone”. Kilka lat później, w 1927 r., kiedy szyba była przenoszona z wystawy na Brooklynie do domu kolekcjonerki Katherine Dreier zachwyciło go, gdy odkrył, że jego praca została uszkodzona. Uznał, że przypadkowe pęknięcie dokończyło proces tworzenia w sposób, w jaki on sam nigdy by tego nie zrobił.

The Large Glass is a curious contraption; it looks a bit like a mechanical diagram and was designed it to function like an allegorical machine. He made preliminary paintings and drawings for components of the Large Glass including Chocolate Grinder (No. 2) (1914). He also amassed an impressive collection of cryptic notes that he brought together in The Green Box (1934), which scholars have used to interpret the work’s many different meanings—from the frustrations of love and sex, to the physics of electromagnetism and the fourth dimension. To understand how the Large Glass works like a machine we must imagine its components in motion.

The action begins in the upper left corner with the “Bride,” the element that resembles a bug or a tree. She flirts by stripping for the “Bachelors” in the lower register. The Bachelors are the nine vaguely anthropomorphic cylinders in the lower left section of the glass, and they think the Bride is very attractive. Each Bachelor is trying to win her affection, but they exist in a completely different zone, and are having a hard time communicating with her.

As the Bachelors become excited their forms fill up with what Duchamp called an “illuminating gas” (invisible). This gas causes an “imaginary waterfall” to turn the water wheel (mill) beneath them. That action makes the rectangular glider slide back and forth, which moves the scissors above, which makes the chocolate grinder churn. All of that motion builds up, as the gas from the Bachelors flows into the cone-shaped sieves. The gas that represents the Bachelors’ desire for the Bride transforms into liquid and flows into the lower right corner. Next, the liquid is propelled through the three circular elements, and through a magnifying glass (Oculist Witnesses), and shoots into the Bride’s realm above. The goal for each Bachelor is to land his shot within one of the three square windows inside of the cloud that hovers at the top of the glass (Draft Piston or Nets). If he can do that, he will win the Bride and they will be able to consummate their love physically. If you look closely, you can see nine small holes on the right side of the Bride’s register, which Duchamp marked by firing matches with paint on the tips through a toy cannon. Unfortunately, only one of those shots even came close to its target. Thus, the Bachelors cannot reach the Bride and their love for her remains unfulfilled.

Duchamp loved science. To create the Large Glass, he experimented not only with new media but also with recent scientific theories as if he were in a laboratory. On top of the tale of amorous attraction and frustration, Duchamp layered ideas about such scientific phenomena as electromagnetism and telegraphy. The way the Bride communicates her erotic feelings from her pane of glass to the Bachelors’ realm below relates to the power of electricity and the vibratory waves in the electromagnetic field mobilized in wireless telegraphy. The Bride’s form actually resembles the telegraphic antenna on the top of the Eiffel Tower that was the source of much popular interest in Duchamp’s day. As an antenna, she can send and receive unseen messages through space, but the Bachelors are not so advanced. They are able to receive her communications, but their only response comes in the form of those failed shots from the toy canon, which are at best a rudimentary and rather pathetic means of winning her love.

Duchamp’s writings reveal that he imagined the Bride’s realm as the mysterious fourth dimension of space, a higher plane from the Bachelors who live in our common three-dimensional world. This accounts for their miscommunications and failed attempts at finding love. In the Large Glass, Duchamp brought art, science, sex, and love together in an absurdly humorous way. Watching machines try to fall in love; imagining the bug-tree-antenna Bride strip for Bachelors who cannot reach her; understanding that the object was made with dust, shattered glass, and marks made randomly by a toy cannon; and tying that drama to the complicated workings and invisible forces of science is surprising, playful, and oddly hilarious.

After this project ended, Duchamp claimed to give up his career as an artist and became a professional chess player. His final joke was the revelation upon his death in 1968 that he had been working secretly on a major installation, Étant donnés (1946-66), for twenty years. This surprised even those who knew him well, and built upon many of the themes of eroticism and physics that he explored in the Large Glass. You can see both, along with Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2), Fountain, and many other works by Duchamp, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Essay by Dr. Lara Kuykendall

Dawn Ades, Neil Cox, and David Hopkins, Marcel Duchamp (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1999).

Linda Dalrymple Henderson, Duchamp in Context: Science and Technology in the Large Glass and Related Works (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).

Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson, eds. Salt Seller: The Writings of Marcel Duchamp (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).