Word: duchamp
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...movement, such as it was, had only one (relatively) heavyweight American in its membership, the painter, photographer and objectmaker Man Ray. Its spirit was best exemplified by two foreign artists who enriched the New York scene by visiting it--the Frenchman Marcel Duchamp and the French-Cuban Francis Picabia. Their impact goes back to the far-famed Armory Show of modern art, held in 1913, which first gave a mass American audience a chance to see modernism...
...fire storm of ridicule and puzzlement set off by the Armory Show, which 300,000 people saw during the course of its run, Duchamp in particular benefited, on the basis of a single picture: Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, 1912. It became the star freak of the show--its bearded lady, its dog-faced boy. People compared it to a Navajo rug, a cyclone in a shingle factory, an earthquake in the subway. A dull brown painting in a Cubist idiom, its overlapping planes were partly derived from the motion-analysis photos of Etienne-Jules Marey. Its very title...
...acquired as a puzzle-picture in 1913. It is lodged in history because it embodied the belief that the new, revolutionary work of art has to be scorned and stoned like a prophet by the uncomprehending crowd. In the cult of the problematic, as distinct from the enjoyable, Duchamp rapidly became a saint, and the Nude is one of his prime relics. So are his "readymades"--a snow shovel or a ceramic urinal designated as works of art, sardonic jokes that have been done seven-eighths to death by decades of critical interpretation, but that nonetheless are the ancestors...
...Nude is not in this show, and neither is Duchamp's even more famous The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (Large Glass), which is too frail to move from its abode in the Philadelphia Museum and is represented by a Swedish-made replica. Begun in 1915, the Large Glass is, as its title suggests, an elaborate sexual metaphor seeded with puns and techno-images. In the lower panel the nine sad little bachelors, mere tin soldiers in the game of sexual strategy, signal their desire through intervening bits of machinery to the floating "bride" above. As Freud said...
...etre, and are valued merely because Johns did them. What is the point of those tracings done from a reproduction of Cezanne's Bathers? As homages they're trivial; as formal studies they're as uninteresting as his tracings done from a motif of his old idol Marcel Duchamp. Perhaps it is true that, as his admirers believe, a sublimely arcane and complex intentionality lies behind the fragmented and mingily internalized imagery of late Johns, tying all its scattered hints together. But one does not have to be altogether a philistine to doubt...