Spectatorship and Duchamp - Coursework Example

VM1101 Spectatorship & Duchamp Semester Thursday 9:00 – 12:00 Module leader: Portia Ungley p.ungley@kingston.ac.uk Seminar Ros McKever r.mckever@kingston.ac.uk Duchamp, Marcel The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass). [French: La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, meme] (1915-23) Mixed media on glass, 109 1/4" x 69 1/4" Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia. Duchamp, Marcel Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2. [French: Nu descendant un escalier n° 2] (1912) oil on canvas, 147 cm × 89.2 cm (57 ft 7/8 in × 35 ft 1/8 in) Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia Assessment 2: Spectatorship & Duchamp In discussing Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even [The Large Glass] (1915-23) and Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912), the viewpoint of the artist is contrasted with the author’s intentionality in order to build a dynamic that becomes fundamental in conceptual art. The way Duchamp transfers the meanings of his own voyeurism to the audience is characteristic of an approach to spectatorship that views art as a communication between subjectivities, with the object as a focal point for the transference to occur. By first deconstructing perception and the perspective of the traditional artist through cubism, Duchamp then deconstructs the fundamentals of the artist-viewer exchange in order to become a master of symbolic communication. Typically, Duchamp posits a duality of perception between the erotic, voyeuristic vision as seen in The Large Glass, and the calculated, analytical perception, such as the manner in which he would study the chessboard, which represents the cubist view in Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2. These two views, the erotic vs. the analytical, are illustrated in the photo below, which was taken with The Large Glass in the background: Wasser, Julian Duchamp and Eve Babitz playing chess. (1963) Photograph, web reprint ChessVibes © 2000 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris Art, in Duchamp’s expression, must first represent the subjectivity inherent in the artists’ vision, which may be done stylistically or conceptually. In representing two types of vision, he also represented two types of thinking, the analytical and the erotic. In this primal duality, he could also posit the masculine and feminine symbolically. Thus, spectatorship is constructed cyclically through the artist’s own motivations to communicate giving cause to subjective style and distinctive articulation. The artistic method was a means to bridge this duality for the artist, but to communicate ideas effectively the audience’s perspective also must enter art in concept. In Duchamp’s opinion, the artist’s relationship to the spectator may have been something like the beautiful woman in The Large Glass, constantly watched and courted through subtle gestures, meetings, and encounters. This is the basis of eroticism in art, and it is represented in the feminine aspects of being and sexuality. This is the feeling of the work, and its emotion, in relation to the logic, or analysis, represented by the masculine. In building cosmologies into his artistic expression, as humans had dome for millennia, Duchamp updates the primordial instincts of art to be contemporaneous with modernism. Calvin Tomkins, Duchamps biographer, in 1996 writes: “Duchamp had always maintained that his Glass was not just something to be looked at but ‘an accumulation of ideas,’ in which verbal elements were at least as important as visual ones, perhaps even more so... As Duchamp would say in a 1959 interview, he had ‘tried in that big Glass to find a completely personal and new means of expression; the final product was to be a wedding of mental and visual reactions; in other words, the ideas in the Glass were more important than the actual visual realization.’” (1) In the context of spectatorship, Duchamp creates the conceptual in art as his message and theme lies inherent in the object, and this drives his experiments with form. From this, and developments in dada, the entire Western art world is transformed. This transformation takes place in Cubism with relation to the artist’s own relation to his own subjectivity. The mind of the artist and his/her perception is most personally shared in cubist painting. Yet, in comparison to dada, Cubism has not fully explored the relationship between the artist and audience inherent in spectatorship. The distinction between the privacy of the artist, and what he or she makes public through the art object also relates to the duality of the analytical and the erotic. The analytical is taken to be objective in expression, where the erotic is inherently personal, as in the relationship between humans sexually. As Andrew Stafford writes in Making Sense of Duchamp: “The Large Glass is a picture of the unseen forces that shape human erotic activity — the realm of ego, desire, and other mysteries. To represent these psychological and existential abstractions, Duchamp created a world occupied by enigmatic but suggestive symbolic objects. The Large Glass is a pictorial diagram of interactions among unseen, abstract forces, as represented by these objects. The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even depicts, in diagrammatic form, a chain of impulses and responses that occur when female desire stimulates male desire.” (2) The way Duchamp considers the variety of artistic perception can be seen in his paintings on The Chess Game at the same time as The Large Glass and Nude Descending a Staircase. Duchamp, Marcel The Chess Game. (1910) Oil on canvas; 114 x 146 cm Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia In the Chess series, Duchamp deconstructs the gaze – or how people look at objects and situations, how humans perceive – by showing four situations. In one example, two men play chess, but by quick glance it also seems they are collectively reading a book. Thus, imagining vision as it is experienced by playing chess or reading is an example of the analytical perception and its relation to mind and ideas. In a second instance, we have a woman who is in a type of waking dream, as if she is remembering her lover, or reflecting on her own erotic nature through fantasy. The erotic gaze, as expressing the mind of passions, lust, and deeper feelings of caring and closeness, is a different situation for mind and awareness. Duchamp shows a third kind of perception where a woman is looking at a porcelain tea set she might have purchased at a department store. This is indicative of the perception of common, everyday objects, how the viewer may or may not see them as art. Duchamp is a master of creating complex symbols in his artworks that express multi-layered concepts that unfold the dualities inherent within them. One frequent theme of the artist is cycles within cycles, as was shown in his paintings on phonograph plates that spun on an early record player, or in his mounting of a wheel on a stool. The cycle within a cycle is also shown in the symbol of the chocolate grinder in The Large Glass and other works on that theme. Duchamp, Marcel Chocolate Grinder No.2. [French: Broyeuse de chocolat no 2.] (1914) Oil and thread on canvas. 65 x 54 cm Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia As Linda Dalrymple Henderson writes in ‘Duchamp in Context: Science and Technology in the Large Glass and Related Works’: “Between 1915 and 1923, Marcel Duchamp created one of the most mystifying art works of the early twentieth century: The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (also known as the Large Glass). The work is over nine feet tall, and on its glass surface Duchamp used such unorthodox materials as lead wire, lead foil, mirror silver, and dust, in addition to more conventional oil paint and varnish. Duchamps declared subject is the relation between the sexes, but his protagonists are biomechanical creatures: a ‘Bride’ in the upper panel hovers over a ‘Bachelor Apparatus’ in the panel below, stimulating the ‘Bachelors’ with ‘love gasoline’ for an ‘electrical stripping.’" (3) In comparing the shape of the cycle, the gear, and the wheel to the angular nature of the cubist vision, one can see in Duchamp how the form is related to the concept. Imagining the Nude Descending a Staircase, one can see the relation of analytical vision to Cubism in Duchamp’s later installation, Mile of String: Duchamp, Marcel Mile of String (1942) Installation: Room/furniture/string. First Papers of Surrealism, New York (Photo: Andre Breton) Mile of String shows the three-dimensional aspects of analytical vision as they are reduced to a two-dimensional plane (the canvas) by the artist. The way Duchamp installs the string makes it clear the way tangents and relations between all dynamic points in an environment combine to fragment the perception as if taken as a snapshot of mind in a fraction of a second. The key aspect of Cubism following this illustration is that it focuses on representing the analytical mind of the artist. This would differentiate Cubism from Surrealism, for example, which focused on representing the subconscious mind in art. In that context, dada is an expression of the irrational, or non-logical in art conceptually as a recognition of and reaction against the analytical as dominating Cubist vision. In doing this, dada also shifts the balance between the artist’s expression of personal subjectivity, and the artist questioning objective reality, as in Fountain, which asks – what is art: Stieglitz, Alfred Fountain, photograph of sculpture by Marcel Duchamp, 1917. (1917) Photograph, web reprint: About Art History © Succession Marcel Duchamp, Villiers-sous-Grez, France The effect of Duchamp’s vision has been to fundamentally radicalize modern art in the way it expresses the duality of subjectivity through the artist and in the way objects are perceived by the viewer simultaneously, crating conceptual art ex nihilo through the eyes of the spectator anywhere and at any time. In placing the mass-produced, ill-regarded and ignored on a pedestal, Duchamp expressed a political view in Fountain. In the context of Western art history governed by the limitations of the frame, Duchamp’s work has opened up important new forms of expression in installation, found-object re-contextualization, and abstract art of the conceptual. “Marcel Duchamps Fountain came top of a poll of 500 art experts in the run-up to this years Turner Prize which takes place on Monday. Picassos Les Demoiselles dAvignon (1907) was second, with Andy Warhols Marilyn Diptych from 1962 coming third. Duchamp shocked the art establishment when he took the urinal, signed it and put it on display in 1917.” "’The choice of Duchamps Fountain as the most influential work of modern art ahead of works by Picasso and Matisse comes as a bit of a shock,’ said art expert Simon Wilson.” (4) By first deconstructing the canvas in Cubism, expressing the unique, analytical subjectivity of the artists own mind in Nude Descending a Staircase, Duchamp approaches spectatorship through the symbol of the woman on display as he enters a crowded room. In The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even [The Large Glass], Duchamp builds upon this theme but reverses the inquiry, as he had first in Fountain, to make communication through symbols fundamental to conceptual art. This opened the artistic horizon for creativity in modern art, reflecting spectatorship in the mutuality of shared subjectivities that was simultaneously intimate and erotic. Duchamp builds personal cosmologies through these symbols that express his fundamental views of primal dualities, and modes of perception. List of figures & illustrations: Duchamp, Marcel Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2. [French: Nu descendant un escalier n° 2] (1912) oil on canvas, 147 cm × 89.2 cm (57 ft 7/8 in × 35 ft 1/8 in) Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia http://courses.nus.edu.sg/course/elljwp/contemporaryfigs2&3_files/image001.jpg Duchamp, Marcel The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass). [French: La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, meme] (1915-23) mixed media on glass, 109 1/4" x 69 1/4" Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia http://www.mnstate.edu/gracyk/images/Duchamp_Bride.jpg Duchamp, Marcel The Chess Game. (1910) Oil on canvas; 114 x 146 cm Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia http://www.flickr.com/photos/32357038@N08/5152104787/ Duchamp, Marcel Chocolate Grinder No.2. [French: Broyeuse de chocolat no 2.] (1914) Oil and thread on canvas. 65 x 54 cm Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia http://www.abcgallery.com/D/duchamp/duchamp17.html Duchamp, Marcel Mile of String (1942) Installation: Room/furniture/string. First Papers of Surrealism, New York (Photo: Andre Breton) http://www.abdn.ac.uk/french/duchamp.shtml Stieglitz, Alfred Fountain, photograph of sculpture by Marcel Duchamp, 1917. (1917) photograph, web reprint: About Art History © Succession Marcel Duchamp, Villiers-sous-Grez, France http://arthistory.about.com/od/dada/ig/DadaatMoMANewYork/dada_newyork_07.htm Wasser, Alfred Duchamp and Eve Babitz playing chess. (1963) photograph, web reprint: Chess Vibes © 2000 Succession Marcel Duchamp, ARS, N.Y./ADAGP, Paris http://www.chessvibes.com/reviews/review-marcel-duchamp-the-art-of-chess/ Footnotes: 1 Steven B. Gerrard, ‘A Pun Among Friends’ Tout-fait, Vol I, Issue 3 (12/2000) 2 Andrew Stafford, ‘Making Sense of Marcel Duchamp’ Understanding Duchamp (2008) 3 Linda Dalrymple Henderson , ‘Duchamp in Context: Science and Technology in the Large Glass and Related Works’ Princeton University Press (2005) 9 BBC, ‘Duchamps urinal tops art survey’ BBC News (1 December, 2004) Bibliography BBC, ‘Duchamps urinal tops art survey’ BBC News (1 December, 2004) [accessed 12/14/10] Gerrard, Steven B., ‘A Pun Among Friends’ Tout-fait, Vol I, Issue 3 (12/2000) Notes [accessed 12/14/10] Henderson, Linda Dalrymple, ‘Duchamp in Context: Science and Technology in the Large Glass and Related Works’ Princeton University Press (2005) < https://pup.princeton.edu/titles/6290.html > [accessed 12/14/10] Moll, Arnie, ‘Review: Marcel Duchamp – The Art of Chess’ Chess Vibes (9 February 2010) [accessed 12/14/10] Nesbit, Molly, ‘Ready-Made Originals: The Duchamp Model’ The MIT Press October Vol. 37, (Summer, 1986), pp. 53-64 [accessed 12/14/10] Stafford, Andrew, ‘Making Sense of Marcel Duchamp’ Understanding Duchamp (2008) [accessed 12/14/10] Wall, Bill, ‘Marcel Duchamp and Chess’ Chess.com (06/14/2007) Articles [accessed 12/14/10] Read More