Notes from 'Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernest: The Bride Shared', David Hopkins
(London: Clarendon Press, 1998)
Marcel Duchamp, 'Etant donnés', 1946-66.Cite ‘technical matters’ as the genesis of his work, not ideas
The ‘sliding scale’ of meanings along the vocational line of artist-artisan-engineer
Industrial aesthetics debate in German- early 1910s.
‘Looking’ in the aesthetic sense, then, meant looking with assistance from literary associations, looking for purely visual pleasure. The addition of ‘the book’, words, text and the process of consulting took the artwork even farther from the beaux-arts realm of the merely ‘retinal’ which Duchamp was in the midst of abandoning
Modern debate concerning the overlapping functions of artist, craftsman and engineer
Conception of his great ‘work’ with its many ‘new technical problems’
In French there is an old expression, la patte, meaning the artist’s touch, his personal style, his ‘paw’.- Calvin Tomkins, ‘The Bride and the Bachelors: Five Masters of the Avant Garde (NY: Penguin Books, 1976) pp. 24
Duchamp equated the artist’s ‘hand’ with the sensual appeal of richly applied paint; and that, in turn, was related to the animal side of human nature and opposed to the artist’s intellectual capacities
Not sought out the mechanical or industrial forms for their intrinsic (i.e. functional) meaning, nor as social commentary on industrialisation, but, rather, for their ruptual value as non-traditional forms within a fine arts context
Incorporated the mechanical into the anthropomorphic for precisely that disruptive (i.e., avant-garde purpose)
Demonstrate the ‘free hand’ or the ‘paw’ of the painter, which Duchamp so abhorred, and the mechanical aspects did not suffice to cover it up- the ‘visceral’ aspect of the bride
Continue to inset machine into flesh at the level of pictorial narrative- ‘mechanically’ painted
‘very precise technique’ of mechanical drawing as ‘a renunciation of all aesthetics’
Art is an outlet towards regions which are not ruled by time and space
Mechanical drawing […- up[held] no taste, since it is outside all pictorial convention
Expressed ‘the most sublime notions of artists- a means of communication and a practical instrument used by the worker-artist and the artisan
Drawing that limited the appearance of things to the naked eye and drawing that revealed the truth of things behind the surfaces of appearance; that is to say, there was perspective drawing and mechanical drawing. Each kept a relation to the object.
The blueprint for production, the working drawing for the commodity. The language base was hardly neutral; it cheerfully ratified the means and ends of industrial production
Striving towards accuracy and precision, no more handwork
Distinct from the mechanical idiom preferred by the avant-garde- new method of mechanical expression
Back to a completely dry drawing, a dry conception of art
The prioritisation of function over appearance- a preference for the language of industry, work and craftsmanship to that of the fine arts
Thus new ‘works’ appeared- all involved with ideas of craftsmanship, new materials, new techniques, new art forms
Moved farther along the line from art to craft
Sewing thread was stitched onto the canvas and a leather label printed with gold letters- ‘Broyeuse de chocolate, 1914’ was glued to the surface
Additions and the matte finish of the paint coupled with the simple design to suggest an object of hand-crafted leather which has somehow been flattened onto the two-dimensional picture place
Several kinds of artisanal endeavours are referenced, particularly those that incorporate sewing and leather working, for example, shoe-making, upholstering and bookbinding.
Sewing thread, paint, canvas, leather labels and gold letters
Chance and measurement became the tools with which the fine artist/craftsman proposed to repair the flawed system of high art
‘cast […] a pataphysical doubt on the concept of a straight line as being the shortest route from one point to another’
Measurement of the boundaries of ‘art’ had as its standard a curved ‘ruler’; one metre was changed from a straight line to a curved line without losing its identity
Alter the fundamental geometry of its definition without entirely disrupting its potential for being recognised as art
Simultaneously were and were not fine art
Materials which had been associated with a modern, industrial aesthetic since the middle of the nineteenth century
Time element- eight years- devoting an extended period to the execution of a work of art, was another technique for shifting the focus away from fine arts towards craft
Large Glass- incorporated most of the handicraft techniques
Painstakingly handcrafted nature and the length of time- on its conception and construction
After Duchamp ‘incompleted’ it
Psychology of the relationships between the viewer, object and environment was paralleled in Duchamp’s interest in exhibition design, window display and the complex viewer/object/environment relationships of Etant Donnes
Frederick Kiesler, ‘Contemporary art applied to the store and its display’ (NY: Bretano’s, 1930) pp. 67-8.- ‘He concerns himself no longer, as did the potter, the goldsmith, the weaver, with the materialisation of his drawing; the machine has freed him from this task and does it more exactly, quickly, cheaply, and as beautifully
-union is far from subversive- Kiesler envisions the artist/ craftsman happily benefiting from machine production
Its technique, its materiality and structural foundation
‘Incompleted’ the Large Glass work- stage set for Capek’s R.U.R, produced in Berlin in 1923- designed a huge montage, compiled from the most diverse apparatuses and machine parts (megaphone, seismograph, tanager device, iris diaphragm, light bulb)- some real, some painted.- could produce light and sound as well as project film and create optical illusions with mirrors
Presented technology as a threat culminating in the ultimately sinister discovery of robots
Representation of the mechanical world was full of admiration for a technology that functioned with precision, fully in agreement with the technical aesthetic subscribed to by almost all avant-garde artists of the twenties
Negative look at the industrial age, particularly at that intersection of the mechanical and the human
Duchamp’s Bride and her Bachelors are gasoline-driven, fully-lubricated, piston-fired motors, but they also are erotically charged, love-torn, questing beings- desires are eternally unfulfilled, that all their sparks and gases and rods and cylinders never ignite a roaring engine is one of the most effective statements of an anti-Positivist, anti-functionalist, anti-machine aesthetic ever conceived.
The anthromorphic and the mechanical merge in ways that hardly provide pictorial reassurance about the future of an industrialised society
Smoothly painted, hard surfaces and tightly-coiled springs suggest mechanical models- shapes and predominantly biomorphic and the allusions noticeable sexual
Unquestioningly the assignment of positive cultural values to mechanical forms and processes
Shun of optimistic faith in modern technological progress […] and their belief that through their purified language they were offering a kind of blueprint for the designed utopia of the future
Primitivist myth (freedom, spontaneity, instinctiveness and ritualistic fantasy) and a sense of responsibility to its own time
Elderfield- Duchamp’s machine work exemplified ‘clothing primitivist obsessions in modern dress’
Centuries-old handicrafts as well as the most modern machine technologies
Relevance for commerce and industry
Not its determination to fuse art and industry- makes the gap more stark
Denunciation of many of the techniques, materials and themes ordinarily associated with ‘fine’ arts constituted an outrageous and powerful gesture of defiance
If Duchamp had wanted to put art ‘once again at the service of the mind’ he also wanted to ‘discredit science’
Deny the value of industrial progress than to depict pure sexuality and passion in mechanical forms that are not capable of consummating their desires
Deconstruction of the modernist myth of the artist as specialist through the enactment of the role of bricoleur
Duchamp forced to admit that he had been an artist all along, felt obliged to paint and sculpt it ‘back into the world’- and into art.
Symbolism persists but in a sense the movement has been from the world of veiled allusions and ‘imaginary solutions’ to a realm that relates, albeit at several removes, to the world of Surrealism
Retains its mystery, perhaps because the symbolism is so blatant that in a sense it cancels itself out
Vestigial yet obsessive presence, half phallus, half machine.
Obviously abstracted and symbolised to a high degree
The bride has been brought down to earth with a band, but the Bachelors have been reduced or compressed into a gas lamp, now truly fired with the bridal gas, symbol of desire and tumescent excitement. The liquid, the water, appears to have symbolic attributes that are both male and female; the pond is deep and still, the waterfall restless and incessantly active in its downward thrust- intense physicality
The strong linear element which results in a greater fluidity of form, the feeling of transparency and the austerity of the colour harmonies in what is basically a range of earth colours, browns and sienas
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