A Duchampian Technicality: The Bride Is More Than Female, And Less Than Human
Category: Research Poster
Author(s): Tess Baur
Presenter(s): Tess Baur
Mentors(s): Catherine DiCesare
Marcel Duchamp, one of the most influential artists of the 20th century and the father of conceptual art, is as revered by the art world as he is misunderstood. Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, also known as The Large Glass, can’t be deciphered without his notes on the piece, nor intuited from the work itself. In his notes, Duchamp refers to the titular bride as “pendu femelle,” and in English versions this term is often left untranslated, or, worse, translated as a variant of “hanging female.” In this essay, I will argue that “hanging bitch” is a more appropriate, accurate, and authentic translation of pendu femelle, grounded in Duchamp’s philosophies on life, beliefs about art, and remarks on The Large Glass. The piece is meant to be a celibacy machine, a farcical melding of eroticism and industry into an unsatisfying whole. By combining cultural conceptions of machinery with cultural conceptions of sexuality, Duchamp embodies the dehumanizing disconnect between capitalism and human nature. Furthermore, weaponizing obscenities to disrupt social norms was a dominant motif in Duchamp’s work. As a result, the fact that “bitch” is more inflammatory than “female” is not only excusable but entirely the point.