Peep Show - Marcel Duchamp

 

"Marcel Duchamp: 'Étant donnés'"

at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Through Nov. 29, 2009.

Peep Show
Marcel Duchamp's “Étant donnés."

By Morgan Meis

There's a place in France where the naked ladies dance. There's a hole in the wall where the men can see it all. Except in this case, the lady isn't dancing. She's lying naked in a park. Her legs are splayed open to reveal a hairless vagina, more of a cleft than anything else. A waterfall glitters in the background. She could be a corpse but for the fact that she is holding a lantern with her left arm. From the peephole in the wooden door we cannot see her head.

This is Marcel Duchamp's last work. It is three-dimensional, something like a diorama. The naked woman is a life-sized model made from a cast of a woman Duchamp was once in love with. The scene is "realistic," if in a wax-museum sort of way. The fact that you view it through a peephole in a door makes it all seem rather naughty. Early reviewers of the work described it as a scene of "sexual invitation, sadism, rape, death." It has always made people uncomfortable. Duchamp produced it in secret over 20 years, having told the world that he had given up art for chess. Called “Étant donnés,” it can be found at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, home of the largest collection of Duchamp's work.

Marcel Duchamp had a long history of making people uncomfortable. He is best known for a urinal, signed R. Mutt, that he displayed as a work of art for an exhibit by the Society of Independent Artists in 1917. The urinal was selected as the most important artwork of the 20th century by a panel of important persons a few years ago. At the time, Duchamp was asked to remove it. He quit the Society instead.

But Duchamp's first real impact on the world of art was with a painting — specifically, a nude. It was called “Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2.” She isn't much to look at. All shapes and lines and movement, she is the abstracted idea of a nude descending a staircase. It upset people. The aggressive abstraction of the painting mixed with the reference to nudity in the title pissed people off.

His next important work, “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass),” seems erotic in its idea and in its title. Composed of two large glass panels, the top is the domain of the bride, the bottom the domain of the bachelors. There's supposed to be a relationship of desire between the two halves of the glass. The female bride is unattainable in her section, the bachelors lurk around in frustration below. But if this is a piece of erotic art it is heavy on the mystery and light on the screwing.

The Smart Set: Peep Show - October 7, 2009