Arc', 2001 (6. szám)
2001 / 6. szám
Adam H. Omansky: Looking at The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even A Duchampian Directive for Responsive Environments Preface to communicating a critical architectural discourse: The intent of the proceeding article is to establish a critical proposition for the potential direction of responsive environments or ‘smart-spaces, ’ through an analysis of the underlying ideological motivators of The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, commonly referred to as the Large Glass, by Marcel Duchamp. For contort de lecture and greater accessibility to the reader, the article addresses a wider audience by providing an introductory reading to both Large Glass and to responsive environments, the scope of which may act as a teaser for future elaboration. The broader scope of the argument is to affirm the significance in applying ideologies of the past, in this case a work of art during the first half of the last century, to the current progression of architecture, or future housing using responsive environment technology. This argument purports neither to be a nostalgic plea to repeat history nor a visionary manifesto to mandate or predict the future. As progress is always measured by past works, a critical analysis of antecedents always helps in guiding possible future works. It is beneficial to apply the seemingly unrelated ideologies of certain works of art to potential works of architecture; art tends to be free from the bounds that restrict the dependence between architectural thinking and the physical realization of complex architectural works. Given this context of communicating through the genre of the academic journal, the agenda of this article is structured in such a way as to communicate a malleable but clear position of how further elaboration may be possible; of course the active word here is ‘how.' The aim is that this critical proposition will encourage ideas to generate and arguments to ensue, both for and against the presented stance. Always exercised in the academic journal and imperative to the complex professional practice, this critical dialogue is the basis for all acts of architectural discourse. ‘The Large Glass is the most important single work I ever made.’ Marcel Duchamp (1) Duchamp began to think about his seminal work, La Marieé Mise á Nu par ses Célibataires, Merne, [The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even or the Large Glass, 1915-1923), after returning from Neuilly in September of 1912. ‘From Munich on, I had the idea of Large Glass. I was finished with Cubism and with movement - at least movement mixed-up with oil paint. The whole trend of painting was something I didn't care to continue. After ten years of painting, I was bored with it - in fact, i was always bored with it when I did paint, except at the very beginning when there was that feeling of opening the eyes to something new. There was no essential satisfaction for me in painting, ever. And then of course, I just wanted to react against what the others were doing, Matisse and the rest, all that work of the hand. '(2) After the scandalous publicity surrounding Nu Descendant un Escalier or Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 of 1912, Duchamp rejected the traditional form of painting as an art-making process. (3) Twenty-five years after the controversial New York Armory Show, painter Daniel MacMorris asked Duchamp ‘Is the Nude a painting?'; he responded 'No, it is an organization of kinetic elements, an expression of time and space through the abstract expression of motion. '(4) In Nude... No. 2, Duchamp merged his fascination with the developing media of cinema and photochronography, the latter popularized by the works of Marey in France, and Eakins and Muybridge in the United States. Emanating from Nude. ..No. 2 and continuing throughout his body of work, the Duchampian methodology promoted the progression of twentieth century modern art by reappropriating the most advanced manifestations of media and technology of the day. The idea that art and science may co-inhabit the same cultural continuum, in beneficial relation, was not a recent emergence from the Industrial Revolution; it originated during the Renaissance. Always adopting new influences from these extra-art sources, Duchamp never committed to a singular concept but maintained a malleable thinking process throughout the production of his works. During the prolonged and gradual creation of Large Glass, the lack of pressure to finish the work encouraged more of a leisurely and flexible process than a directed and continuous execution; he denounced the practice of selling art to earn a living. Duchamp experimented with Large Glass in the same way that an inventor may tinker about with an invention. Whereas the product of the tinkerer may not always be regarded with certain objectivity, the result of this process is a true magnum opus; it was a great undertaking resulting in a complex work of art layered deep with meaning. Underlying the work, the Duchampian ideology provoked a subversion or perversion of the popular. Influences of science and technology helped enable Duchamp to simultaneously explore beyond and degrade or debase the traditional aesthetics of the art establishment. As Industrialization, including mechanization, mass-production and commodification, was already dislodging traditional social and cultural practices, reappropriating that language and grounding it in a high-modernist irony caused similar repercussions in the art world. And by adopting this ironic position, Duchamp succeeded in producing a paradoxical body of work, contextualized by denying its context. Through varying degrees of satire and perhaps satirical mimicry, Duchamp was able to deride the tum-of-the-century art establishment and alter the trajectory of art for the next century and probably this century, In the following three years from its conception in 1912 to the beginning of its materialization in New York in 1915, Duchamp produced the first studies for the primary elements of Large Glass. Throughout the course of making Large Glass, Duchamp documented his generation of visual, linguistic, and pseudo-scientific and -mathematic concepts with individual and unbound notes, which he amassed in a box. In the same manner as artwork, IV Arturo Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, vol. 1, 3rd rev. & exp. ed. (New York: Delano Green ridge Editions, 1997), p. 141. (2) Ibid., p. 123. (3) However, his very last oil on canvas composition was Tu m\ a generous $1,000 US dollar commission from the artist-collector Katherine Dreier, executed from January 9 to July 9, 1918. As Duchamp commented to Arturo Schwarz in unpublished interviews from 1959 to 1968, 'It is a kind of inventory of all my preceding works, rather than a painting in itself... I have never liked it because it is too decorative: summarizing one's works in a painting is not a very attractive form of activity.' The latter remark may refer to the meaning of the title, an abbreviated form of the French expression tu m'emmerdes, translated as you bore me. Schwarz speculates that this suggests a boredom with the act of painting and perhaps with Dreier herself. Ibid., p. 658. (4) Daniel MacMorris, ‘Marcel Duchamp's 'Frankenstein',' The Art Digest (New York), vol. 12, no. 7 (January 1, 1938), p. 22. ^Cú Oo