The piece I would like to build up to is Etant Donns (1946-66), by Marcel Duchamp. However but to fully understand this piece, you need to have a understanding of an earlier piece of his.
"The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even" (called The Large Glass for
short) and Etant Donns are opposite views of the same thing. The former
occurs in an unseen, abstract which could be the unconscious; the latter occurs in the visible world that surrounds us.
The Large Glass isn't a painting, not in any normal sense. It is really the
representation of a complex concept. The execution was
completely modern, made of a wide variety of media: paint, lead wire, mirror
plating, foil, dust, two large plates of glass, and one above the other.
DuchampÂ’s notes for The Large Glass are essential to understanding his
intent. He said the notes were meant to complement the visual experience,
and we are extraordinarily lucky to have them so that we can begin to unravel
this massive work.
In this work, Duchamp created a world occupied by enigmatic symbolic
objects. The Large Glass is an analytical diagram of the interactions
between abstract forces, as represented by these objects. This seems to
start in a realm that Freud would be quite comfortable in. We begin with
symbols so abstracted that they no longer appeal to the sense of sight,
Duchamp is working in the realm of the unconscious, and he chooses to break
away from any preconceived notions of representational art, and communicate
in a language of his own.
"[The Nietzschean] search for the undiscovered country, and the movement
towards a realm that is not immediately experienced, but that will
eventually be penetrated, inform Freud's concept of the unconscious..."
(Norman Cantor, the American Century)
Duchamp shares a lot with Freud. There exists a parallel in their essential
duality. The major duality for Freud is the unconscious and the conscious
mind, whereas for Duchamp seems to divide his work between representational
and intellectual, those things presented to the senses and those equated in
the mind.
What is depicted on The Large Glass is a sequence of actions, suspended in
time. ThatÂ’s why Duchamp subtitled it a delay in glass. We can distinguish
two cyclical sequences within the action on the glass. The first sequence
describes the courtship of a bride by her suitors. Lets call it the Amorous
Pursuit. It is an attempt to chart; desire, eroticism, courtship ... This
sequence describes an erotically charged encounter between human beings and
is portrayed as a system of abstract interacting forces.
In this way Duchamp shares ideas of the motivation and driving forces with
Freud. The nature of this encounter is open to interpretation. It could
mean sexual intercourse, or wedding vows, or an exchange of flirtatious
glances. It can mean all of these at once, but according to Freud they are
all motivated by the libido. Freud believed in the primacy of the libido,
the sex drive. The id is the force, which is essentially perpetuating the
Large Glass. The pleasure principle, which encourages the process.
The surrealist horizon divides the image in two halves the bride and her
suitors. He referred to this horizon as, the garment of the Bride, which
could also be the boundary of her fleshly being or the threshold of her
psyche. It is a universe of dualities: airborne femininity versus
earthbound masculinity; fluid, amorphous forms versus dry, rigid, crisply
delineated forms. Most broadly, it is the domain of the creative feminine id
above, and the reactive masculine ego below. Both of these are under siege
by outside forces, chance, fate, and destiny the other sequence describes
these influences, of chance and destiny.
The Fate Machine is an imaginary mechanical contraption, which represents the
interaction of chance and destiny, and for the sake of this discussion it
will represent the super ego, the stifling of outside forces. It consists
of graphic drawings of imaginary mechanical apparatus, each representing an
aspect of fate, chance, the unpredictable, destiny, and the inevitable. A
giant pair of scissors represent the place where the unpredictable
intersects with the inevitable.
Between the blades of the Scissors are what Duchamp called the Eyewitnesses.
This consists of a peephole called the Mandala and three opticians charts.
If you were to peek through the Mandala, you would see none of the Large
Glass. You would look through the glass into the space beyond it, into the
visible world that surrounds you. The Mandala is a peephole, which reveals
nothing because the world of The Large Glass is a realm of unseen, abstract
forces, like the forces at play in the unconscious mind.
The story of the Amorous Pursuit begins in the airborne sphere. The Bride is
an almost insectoid amorphous cluster of semi-visceral, semi-mechanical
forms. She has shed her physical form completely, revealing a naked
instinctual self is stripped bare; she embodies expansive, uninhibited
desire. Specifically think of her as the id, not just the object of desire
but also the desire itself. In the halo above her are broadcast dreams and
desires, in effort to communicate with the lower picture plane. Within the
Halo are unpainted blank sections called the Nets, which function like
openings to the suitors, opportunities.
The Amorous Pursuit begins with the Bride, for as Duchamp puts it she
suffuses the bachelorÂ’s realm with an invisible love gasoline. The Vapors
represent the brideÂ’s erotic impulse. It is free-floating and pervasive.
Below her, nine balloon-like pods called the Malic Molds are stimulated by
the vapors. The Malic Molds are the suitors of this story, the masculine
principle. They are the Brides antithesis, embodying inhibited,
self-centered desire. Alternatively, they could be seen as Freud's Ego. Gas
forms within the bachelor molds, and as they inflate they imbue the gas with
their distinctive characteristics. The gas represents the bachelors' erotic
impulse. Its primary condition is that of constraint. The gas is bottled up
inside the mold, unable to interact directly with the free-floating vapors
of the Bride.
The bachelor gas is siphoned out of the molds into conduits called the
Capillary Tubes, which converge at their tips. Exiting the tubes, the
bachelor gas is captured by a series of Sieves, where its trajectory is
inverted. In the Sieves, the bachelor gas is homogenized and liquefied. The
image that comes to mind is semen building in the glands. What began as nine
distinctive responses to the overtures of the Bride has built up to a single
potential to squirt. The "bachelor fluid" rebounds, splitting into nine
distinct spurts. This has obvious sexual overtones, to orgasm and
ejaculation. (Much of this can be seen as a thinly disguised anatomy
lesson,)
The Splash is the bachelorsÂ’ response, unconstrained at last. It could
represent seminal fluid, or a flirtatious glance, or a marriage proposal. As
they hurtle upward, the Splash trails must pass between the blades of the
Scissors of fate. Their paths may or may not be disrupted, depending on
chance. The intersection of the Fate Machine and the Amorous Pursuit
represents the forces of fate that may disrupt the bachelors.
Crossing the Horizon can mean unveiling the Bride, denuding her figure,
physically penetrating her (the act of coitus,) or breaching her mysterious
psyche, and perhaps having some kind of real contact. In the abstract world
of The Large Glass, it can mean all these things at once.
But, having penetrated the Brides realm, the bachelors' fluid misses the
Nets completely, and they vanish from view, leaving behind nine holes
drilled in the glass.
Which brings me to the piece I originally wanted to discuss. The full title
comes from one of Duchamp's notes for The Large Glass: Etant donns: 1. la
chute deau 2. le gaz dclairage. In English: Given: 1. the waterfall 2.
the lighting gas. Water and gas are the elements animating both The Large
Glass and Etant Donns. But from these common premises the two pieces
proceed to astonishingly different ends.
From an artist who enjoyed contradiction, Etant Donns may be his most
surprising. It is thoroughly unlike anything Duchamp made before. Its high
degree of craft is startling from someone who sought to remove the hand of
the artist from the creation of art with ideas like his ready-mades. Its
visual appeal is surprising coming from an artist who disdained "retinal
art".
The piece presents the viewer with a massive wooden door. On it you find two
peepholes. Behind the door is a three-dimensional construction, a diorama.
There, in midday lighting a naked woman sprawls on a bed of dry twigs, face
turned away, with her legs spread, exposing her vagina. The voyeur strains,
unsuccessfully, to see the "face" of the eerily realistic nude female form
, which lies supine on a bed of twigs. The voyeur is now the suitor, eternally
unsuccessful in his attempt to get through to the bride, the door becomes
the horizon. Included in The Large Glass was a peephole into the visible
world, which revealed nothing. Here, the peephole reveals all.
The mechanisms are still present but now they only exist in the abstract
realm. The two works combine in the mind of the viewer to create an
epiphany, the same idea communicated in opposite means. Taken together
these works speak simultaneously to either part of a person, when inner and
outer worlds merge, the mind and the senses.
It is, in the end, a comical look at the uncertainties of human romantic
aspirations. The absence of any real contact between the bride and her
suitors seems very existentialist, like in Sartre's "No Exit", there is an
attempted communication between the bride and her suitors, but they never
really break across the center horizon line. Each element is essentially
alone in the end.
