Ghost of Duchamp
Our all time favourite Carlo Bernardini has just published a stunning new sculpture work titled Ghost of Duchamp. A plexi glass prism is traversed by luminous fibre optic wires, whose light interferes with the projection of a schematic of the Large Glass – one of Marcel Duchamp’s major works.
For the exhibition Body Automatons Robots in Art, Science and Technology at the Museo d’Arte Lugano, Bernardini was commissioned to create a piece that relates to the Large Glass.
Originally titled The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even) the Large Glass is a collage made with materials such as lead wire, lead foil, mirror silver, dust, oil paint and varnish between two glass panels. With figures depicting the Bride in the upper panel, the Bachelors in the lower panel, and a complicated “Bachelor Apparatus” between them, it has been interpreted as a “love machine” and a pseydo-scientific exploration of the male and female desire.
Science and Technology in Duchamp’s work
Recent studies regard Duchamp (1887-1968) as one of the first artists inspired by science and technology. He was fascinated by the technological inventions of his time, and processed them in his artistic work: Electric light, Chemistry, Telegraphy, the description of the Electromagnetic Spectrum, including X-Rays, Atomic Theory, etc. Chronophotography, as a predecessor of the motion picture, has apparently influenced Duchamp’s
cubist motion studies like the Nude Descending a Staircase.
Because transferring messages through wires, and seeing through a human body seemed so freakish and supernatural, many of the cutting edge technologies of the late 19th/ early 20th century were perceived (and practiced) in close relation to occultism, spiritualism, or simply wizardry. Probably as ambiguous and fascinating as we today see the Large Hadron Collider or String Theory must these technologies have impressed an artist of the fin de siecle.
A interesting book on this topic is Duchamp in Context by Linda Dalrymple Henderson. The book performs an elaborate reinterpretation of the Large Glass against the backdrop of his interest in technology and science, based on the extensive legacy of notes Duchamp left about the “technical” elements of the piece, partly only published after his death.
A nice flash site called www.understandinduchamp.com tells about Duchamp’s life and work along a timeline, and features a cute animated diagram of the Large Glass.
The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even, Marcel Duchamp 1915-1923
Nude Descending a Staircase No.2, Marcel Duchamp 1912
Ghost of Duchamp, Carlo Bernardini