DuChamp & excellent shenanigans

The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Green Box), September 1934
Marcel Duchamp

DuChamp was a funny guy.  The more I learn about him, the funnier he gets. Fountain may be Duchamp's most widely-known piece, but it is not the one that he considered to be representative of his life's work. That honor goes to his multi-media sculpture, The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelor's, Even (The Large Glass):

The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass),  1915-1923

It is an insanely complex piece of work, both physically and metaphysically. You can read the details at the link provided, but essentially, it's two big sheets of glass (one of which was at one point shattered in transit and then re-assembled) jazzed up with a bunch multi-media funkiness. Apparently all of the strange shapes and holes and designs in the glass are meant to diagram a soapy story about a bride and all her bachelors and some shenanigans they get up to. It's weird. It's pretty cool. I'd like to see it. But it's actually not the focus this post, not exactly.

DuChamp started work on The Bride Stripped Bare in 1916 and in 1923 declared it "definitively unfinished." Perhaps this was partially referring to DuChamp's feeling that the physical realization of the glass was only a part of the whole work. Indeed, in 1934 he published facsimiles of 94 items from the notes he had relating to the piece, which were meant to be its necessary companion. His biographer, Calvin Tomkins, wrote:

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." Since the ideas were contained (more or less) in the notes, their long-delayed publication would become a new chapter in the continuing saga of his unfinished, shattered, but far from defunct masterpiece.

He called the collection of 94 facsimiles The Green Box (pictured above), and published 320 copies.  He made a big deal out of letting every one know that he had been meticulous – obsessive, even – in his efforts to make every copy exactly like the original, down to using exactly the same ink and going on epic searches for exactly the same type of paper. He boasted about how completely and totally identical all 320 copies of 94-piece set were.

Critics have had a lot to say about this. That is, they have had a lot to say about the fact that he tried so hard to make all his copies exactly the same. They've gone nuts analyzing what that meant about The Bride Stripped Bare and about DuChamp. No one ever actually asked if really had done what he said he did (well, eventually some one did). What I mean is, no one ever bothered to look at the copies to see if DuChamp really did reproduce 320 copies that were identical to the original.

Guess what? He didn't. In fact, it seems he when to painstaking efforts to make all 320 copies totally different. Yeah. He repeatedly emphasized all the trouble he had gone through to make them the same... and actually did the exact opposite.

Evidently, he was intentionally playing games with the artistic establishment in his publication of The Green Box. He was trying to get them talking (and talking and talking and feeling very smart) about something that wasn't even true; he was trying to make them think that they had found meaning in something that didn't even exist. He said: here's the key to understanding my Art; I'll publish it in limited edition form, so people scramble to get their hands on it, and spend a lot of time analyzing what it means that I spent so much time reproducing these exact copies.

DuChamp's genius, or insanity, is in how far he went in order to prove that when Art is encrusted with the establishment, it's physical reality ceases to mean anything. What matters then is what people think about it. He makes a big glass full of funny shapes, and tells us it's a weird erotic scene between a lady and her panting suitors. We stop seeing that it's actually just a big glass full of funny shapes (albeit a really interesting and complicated glass full of shapes), and start Talking About What It Means. He publishes 320 completely different versions of his notes on the work and tells us their identical, and we start reading into what it means that they're identical. Never mind that they actually aren't.

(He puts a urinal in a museum and says it's art, and we all start talking about it like it is).

It is easy to be wearied by contemporary art that indulges too heavily in this kind infinite spiral of self-skepticism, self-reference, self-mockery. Sometimes you just want a painting to be an effing painting. But then, art has always been a means of revolt – DuChamp was not the first to take action against the Artistic Authority. But what makes his revolt different that previous ones is that the piece itself – not its technique or subject matter but the physical object itself – was the vehicle for criticism. People's reactions to and thoughts about The Green Box are as much the art piece as is the box itself.

It may relate only tangentially to computing, but I think that DuChamp's interest in the reaction of his audience – his insistence that the response is itself the art, and that the object he creates is merely a vehicle – does lend him a kinship with generative artists.