A Marcel Duchamp piece has always been a brain-teaser for me. I confess to carrying a pretty fuzzy notion of the artist in my head.
On display at the exhibition entitled "Ghosts in the Machine" at the New Museum in New York City, is a re-creation of Duchamp's "The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even."
A beginner's exclamation: What a subtitle! (The painting is more popularly named "The Large Glass").
A beginner's question: What does the work represent?
Some help from Art critic Peter Schjeldahl:
[Duchamp] presides as an icon for renegade urge to complicate, if not to destroy, conventional notions of what art is and is not. Duchamp never stops intoxicating young artists with his games of logic, which tantalize by falling just short of making ultimate sense. What the work means, in what way, seems within reach but safely beyond grasp, like a dangled cat toy. Your response depends on how much [...] you like to think. Duchamp is, as well, an avatar of ever-popular sex in the head. The assorted mechanical forms, the bachelors, at the bottom of the "Glass" supposedly yearn toward the more sinuous doodads of the bride, above. This arcane fiction has transfixed generations of followers who glory in feeling libidinous while proving themselves super-smart.
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