| Artist: | Duchamp, Marcel |
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|---|---|---|
| Title of Work: | Etants Donnes (Given: 1. The Waterfall; 2. The Illuminating Gas) | |
| Date of Work: | 1944-1966 | |
| Nationality: | French-American | |
| Context: | last major work; emerged after the artist's death | |
| Movement: | Surrealism | |
| Medium: | mixed media | |
| Subject: the last major work by the artist, completed in secrecy over a 20 year period during which it was assumed he had given up art; it emerged only after his death. What the viewer is confronted by is a heavy wood door from a Spanish mission church; scaled the size of the Large Glass in "The Bride Stripped Bare . . . ," it nonetheless seems the opposite of that early work: where one is painted on glass and is transparent, the other is solid, with only two little peepholes, making it clear that there can be only one viewer at a time. What the viewer/voyeur sees when he/she peeks through those holes is this scene of the bride stripped decidedly bare, laying spread eagle on the ground. There are no notes to explain this work, as there were with "The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even." Even so, there are direct references in the later work that relay back to the earlier Large Glass. In "the Bride Stripped Bare. . ." the bride is never really completely stripped; the sexual union is never fully consummated. Duchamp left the work deliberately unfinished, so that the aroused desire of the bride is never finally satisfied; she is left forever suspended between virgin and bride, in one of those famous conceptual passages between one state and the next that Duchamp so loved. He called the work "a delay in glass," freezing us in that moment of the shift or passage when the mindset becomes unfixed and starts to think other or the opposite of what it had thought previously. Remember, Duchamp wants to dematerialize the art object by shifting us away from its physical, visual appearance in order "to put art in the service of the mind." He wants art to change the way we think, to unfix a mindset, and to get us to think something other. Art becomes less an object than a concept, thus. Here, however, in this last great work, he shifts on us once again: the art becomes very physical here in this mixed media tableau. The bride is not an abstract machine painted on glass, but a mannequin, headless, and stripped bare. She no longer floats on high as she did in the top zone of "The Bride Stripped Bare . . ." Now, ravished, she has fallen to the ground. With one hand raised, she holds up a gas lamp, which is a direct reference to the "illuminating gas" that signified the bride's desire in the earlier work. (Remember, "The Bride Stripped Bare . . ." begins when the aroused bride lets out her "love gasoline," which illuminates her desire and, in turn, wakes up the bachelors down below, thereby starting up the machine, whose sole function, according to Duchamp, is "to make love.") This scene, which is not abstract like the earlier one but more organic and 3-dimensional, has in its background a waterfall, which is also a direct reference back to the Large Glass, which had a sleigh down in the bachelor domain that was pumped and powered to rock back and forth by a waterwheel. Duchamp is clearly making a work that relays back to the Large Glass, as if he were making a chess move in which he counters what he did earlier. It is a kind of checkmate, where you capture the queen to win the game, or it is a stalemate situation in which the two works are diametrically opposed counterparts that cancel each other out; remember, Duchamp wrote a book about chess called "Endgame" in which all possible moves are blocked. He leaves the viewer with no way to resolve the two works; he leaves us suspended inbetween, thinking, which is right where he wants us. Style: scaled similarly to the earlier "Bride Stripped Bare . . .," this mixed media tableau seems to be its visual opposite. Duchamp surprises us here by not working in an abstract style; here he uses physical, material reality in the mannequin, the dry twigs on the ground, and the gas lamp, plus he uses illusionism in the background nature scene, which is a kind of trompe-l'oeil image. Duchamp counters the abstract, bio-mechanical style he used in the Large Glass with this 3-D stage set, setting into play a direct contrast and opposition betwen the two works. Context: worked on in secrecy and released only after his death, this is truly an underground work that subversively counters the earlier Large Glass and makes us reread it in terms of this altered context. Duchamp's work always pointed out how meaning is contextual (consider how the readymades, removed from their normal, functional context, shift the way we look at and think about an object). It is difficult to fix an "ism" onto this work, but it can be considered Surreal on several levels: it is a threshold image that divides an exterior from an interior reality; it plays on oppositions, between the physical world and the abstract idea, between appearance and apparition; it makes us question the reality of the "real"; and it focuses on desire, that of the fallen bride and that of the viewer turned into a voyeur. It is as if we have gone through the looking glass into a surreal wonderland. | ||
