“Sublime is unforgettable, irresistible, and most important, thought-provoking: a rhetorical style which could even take on the form of silence, a hidden and unrecognisable form.” -–Longinus

“The imagination is the power or the faculty of presentation. Of presenting not only sensoria, but also, when the imagination works freely (without bending to the conditions required by the understanding, bt the faculty of concepts), with a view to establishing a knowledge of experience.” –Kant

Marcel Duchamp was a pioneer, he represents anti- “realism,” denying everything. The work from him was more about human beings but not about “nature.” Some people think that there is no “self” in his work, or that there is even no art.

“The performer is a complex transformer, a battery of metamorphosis machines. There is no art, because there are no objects. There are only transformations, redistributions of energy.”(1) Lyotard regarded Duchamp as a transformer rather than performer, since it seems that every art work by Duchamp stands out as theory, and could not be appreciated as just an enjoyable piece of art, like a van Gogh’s Starry Night. However, Duchamp never tried to produce art like Van Gogh: “my life is as a work of art.” However, Duchamp never tried to achieve art like Van Gogh, claiming that “my life is as a work of art.” He opened a new era of art, “It is the readymade that turned art into a ploy for the concept.”(2)

Herman Parret has written in the preface of Lyotard’s Duchamp Transformer: “The body according to Duchamp allows no predication by any aesthetic category –the body is neither beautiful, nor sublime, nor gracious, nor even disgusting. No interiority is disclosed there, no phenomenology will ever discover there any significance.”(3) Duchamp was never easy to understand, since there is no philosophy to trace him back to. Kant’s aesthetic theory about the relation between a sublime nature and the constitution of a human subject was for him no longer valid. Rather, Duchamp defined a new type of sublime.

The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) made me also reflect on Barnett Newman’s notion of the sublime, which is not designated to be understood but to be sensed at the moment of standing in front of it. However, the pursuit of sublimity in Duchamp’s work points in a less metaphysical direction, as a key example of conceptual art. “This (The Large Glass) is most certainly an anti-mysticism, a form of anti-realism, also. The time is over when the “real” seemed to enter the text and writing seemed to make love with social violence. Verism was on the side of the simulacrum, a theatre of verisimilitude.”(4)

This artwork is made on a large glass panel, as a “hilarious picture” intended to depict the erotic encounter between the “Bride” in the upper panel, and his nine “Bachelors” gathered timidly below, in the abundance of mysterious mechanical apparatuses that populate the lower panel.(5) The panel of glass introduces a meta-operator which, I assume, refers to putting off balance the spectators. “The two virtual spaces of the top and the bottom are in a relation of incongruence one with the other like gloves. Bride and Bachelors occupy similar and non-super-imposable spaces, unless you bring in a meta-operator (which would be four-dimensional). (6)

The Large Glass is a “bachelor machine.” Duchamp first introduced this term around 1913. In my understanding, a bachelor machine is constituted by two parts: one is love, the other is death.“(7) A bachelor machine is a fantastic image that transforms love into a technique of death.” The bride on the top, hangs in the air and torture is waiting for her. Although she is called the bride, this term refers to a small autonomous engine whose needs are fueled by its own fragrance of love, essence of love, by the spark of its magneto-desire. This dynamic points to love in order to die.

Duchamp’s work does not exist for its physical attributes, as it requires a meta-operator to complete its whole set of operations. “It is a semblance of machinery, of the kind seen in dreams, at the theatre, at the cinema or even in cosmonauts’ training areas. Governed primarily by the mental laws of subjectivity, the bachelor machine merely adopts certain mechanical forms in order to simulate certain mechanical effects. Only when the signs of this subjective determination are gradually revealed does the fog of absurdity lifts, and the dawn of an implacable logic begins to rise.”(8)

Besides the “meta-logic” behind The Large Glass, the “facial-logic” of its subject matter is relatively obvious. Sexuality is one of the very few things Duchamp was serious about. “The celibate of the machine, in effect, returns to the fundamental, structuring form of difference-sexuality and refuses to exercise any masculine power of expressing the feminine in speech.”(9)

The nine bachelors are standing as the masculine elements. The hanging bride is regarded as the single female element. The tension between these two element forms the theme of the large glass. Yet, sex is not the meta-logic of this work. “Sex is not the fourth dimension. It is tridimensional as much as quadri-dimensional. One can of course express a beyond of sex by transferring it into the fourth dimension. But the fourth dimension is not sex as such, Sex is merely an attribute.”(10)

“Laying bare exorcizes the bride, who is transformed into an insect on display behind glass, into the Milky Way, into a nereid illusion in the reflection of an island/aquarium.”(11) The glass allows the bride to float in the air, in the Milky Way as described. It provides a scene with no location, so it would not allow reality to enter into the picture. The context stands as itself, alone. “A wound, no longer hidden behind the painting, but inscribed at its center, breaks the text into two fragments held together with safety pins…”(12) The torture is obvious, but not presented. What is missing in the artwork should be imaged by the spectators. What is missing in the piece allows the artistic message to be accomplished. “The denuded body knows not what it says. It presupposes a reader by whom it allows itself to be read like a hieroglyph that is indecipherable in itself.”(13)

Duchamp created an installation which engage the spectators to be part of the operations, yet remaining opaque to an immediate understanding of its narrative. Newman’s work also could not to be understood, yet the sublime dimension of his art relied on the sensation provoked in a viewer standing in front of his brightly colored and very large surface, which he required to be looked at from very close range, like in his Vir Heroicus Sublimis (1949).

On the other hand, Duchamp lead art from a domain of visual experience to that of mental challenges. For example, his readymade Fountain (1917), asserted that who made the original object does not matter most, since what matters is that someone assigned a new status to a common object. All his readymades originally were part of the flow of life, yet they set up a new angle from which to see life. As Lyotard stated, Duchamp was a transformer. He transferred the role of ideas into the world of art, yet without expressing ideas directly from that operation. There is more inspiration than expression in his work.

What we also could learn from Duchamp is that all man-made things are neither the intention of a higher power nor the product of nature, but the result of establishing a dialogue with the profound impact on human beings by the “mechanical logic" of utilitarian modernity. The notion of apparatus precisely challenges the integration of dualistic logic that informs the conventional notion of the sublime, and its post-war reincarnation in a fascination for terror.

“I like living, breathing better than working… my art is that of living. Each second, each breath is a work which is inscribed nowhere, which is neither visual nor cerebral, it’s a sort of constant euphoria.” –Duchamp

1. Lyotard Jean-Francois, Les Transformateurs Duchamp, Leuven: University Press. p.12
2. Herman Parret, “Preface,” ibidem
3. Herman Parret, “ Preface” in: Les Transformateurs Duchamp, Ivi. p.1
4. Michel de Certeau, “The Art of Dying,” in: Le Macchine Celibi, Venice: Alfieri Edizioni d’Arte, 1975. p.15
5. Cabanne Pierre, “Dialogues With Marcel Duchamp”. P55
6. Lyotard Jean-Francois. Les Transformateurs Duchamp.(Leuven University Press). P2
7. Michel Carrouges. Les Macchine Celibi: Direction of Use. Venice 1975. P22
8. Michel Carrouges. Les Macchine Celibi: Direction of Use. Venice 1975. P24
9. Michel de Certean. Le Macchine Celibi:Art of Dying. Alfieri Edizioni d’Arte, Venice 1975. P16
10. Michel Carrouges. Les Macchine Celibi: Direction of Use. Venice 1975. P22
11. Michel de Certean. Le Macchine Celibi:Art of Dying. Alfieri Edizioni d’Arte, Venice 1975. P16
12. Michel de Certean. Le Macchine Celibi:Art of Dying. Alfieri Edizioni d’Arte, Venice 1975. P158
13. Michel de Certean. Le Macchine Celibi:Art of Dying. Alfieri Edizioni d’Arte, Venice 1975. P162