1915-1923

The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass)

Marcel Duchamp, 1887 - 1968

The Bride’s Domain (upper pane):

1 - Bride (Le Pendu-femelle : Hanging-female, Steam Engine, Virgin, Skeleton, Arbor-type) Le Pendu femelle (or “hanging female” with male article) is the form in ordinary perspective of a pendu femelle for which one could perhaps try to discover the true form (Source 6). The Bride is comprised of at least two additional distinct parts which protrude from the primary mass of her body. To her right, the Wasp/Sex Cylinder, which “controls atmospheric pressure, secretes love gasoline from dew (by osmosis), controls spark of desire magento”, and below her, “a motor with quite feeble cylinders” which controls the abor-type body, and apparently draws from a “reservoir of love gasoline” (Source 3). Twenty years later, the poet Andre Breton would continue to question Duchamp on the specific meaning of certain elements within the Large Glass, as when he asked about how the Pendu femelle conjured up the essence of a fourth dimension. “The Bride or the Pendu Femelle is a ‘projection’ comparable to the projection of a four-dimensional ‘imaginary being’ in our three-dimensional world (and also in the case of the flat glass, to a re-projection of these three dimensions onto a two-dimensional surface),” he explained in a letter sent to Breton in 1954 (Letter from Duchamp to Breton, October 4, 1954).

2 - Bride's Garment of which she has been stripped via an event Duchamp calls “cinematic blossoming”. Regarding the glass, he writes: “The whole graphic significance is for this cinematic blossoming…This cinematic blossoming which expresses the moment of the stripping, should be grafted on to an arbor-type of the bride. This arbor type has its roots in the desire-gears. but the cinematic effects of the electrical stripping, transmitted to the motor [her motor] with quite feeble cylinders, leave (plastic necessity) the arbor-type at rest-(graphically, in Munich I had already made 2 studies of this arbor type) and do not touch. the desire gears. which by giving birth to the arbor type, find within this arbor type the transmission of the desire to the blossoming into stripping voluntarily imagined by the bride desiring.” (Source 3)

3 - Region of the Gilled Cooler (isolating plates)

4 - Horizon where the Bride’s Clothes have been shed (Source 3).

5 - Top Inscription (or Milky Way) in which the group of alphabetic units should no longer have a strict order from left to right—each alphabetic unit will be present only once in the group ABC and will be displaced from A to C and back again. Since, from A towards C, the inscription should, according to the need for equilibrium of the plate D, displace a (stabilizer) (a ball or anything). On this plate D. (Source 6)

6 - Draft Pistons (or Nets or Triple Cipher) govern the alphabet and the terms of the Pendu femelle’s commands (Source 3)

7 - Nine Shots constructed literally by shooting a toy canon loaded with paint-tipped matches, aimed at a target, which is the vanishing point in perspective. The shots are constructed figuratively by something Duchamp calls “SKILL”. He writes: “The figure thus obtained will be the projection (through skill) of the principal points of a 3 dim’l body. With maximum skill, this projection would be reduced to a point (the target). With ordinary skill this projection will be a demultiplication of the target. (Each of the new points [images of the target] will have a coefficient of displacement. This coefficient is nothing but a souvenir and can be noted conventionally (The different shots tinted from black to white according to their distance) - In general, the figure obtained is the visible flattening (a stop on the way) of the demultiplied body. Repeat this operation 9 times-3 times by 3 times from the same point. A - 3 shots, B - 3 shots, C - 3 shots. A.B.C. are not in a plane and represent the schema of any object whatever. of the demultiplied body.” (Source 3)

8 - Region of the Picture of Cast Shadows

9 - Region of the Mirror Image of Sculpture of Drops

10 - Juggler of Gravity (also called the Trainer, Handler, or Tender of Gravity) “Suppress the center” (Source 3)

The Bachelor Apparatus (lower pane):

11 - Nine Malic Molds (or Eros Matrix) forming the Cemetary of Uniforms and Liveries: cock-blocked: trapped in a chain of repetitive emotional states that flutter between hope, desire, and fear (Source 9). In the imaginary operation of the bachelor machine, the molds would fill with “illuminating gas,” apparently a mode of male sexual energy; the gas expanded when it heard the “litanies of the chariot,” rising out of the molds and losing the individualized shapes imparted by them, then moving as “spangles” through the rods to the sieves or parasols; here it was converted into liquid form and, Duchamp went on, experienced “dizziness” and spatial disorientation, before falling along a corkscrew-like trajectory into the bottom right of the bachelor space, where it would end in a kind of orgasmic splash.

Above the region of that splash, in the upper right section of the bachelor space, are three circular constructions that seem to float in air, surmounted by a smaller circle. The larger shapes were taken from charts used to test vision and thus bore the name témoins oculistes

11a - Cuirassier

11b - Gendarme

11c - Flunky

11d - Department Store Delivery Boy

11e - Busboy

11f - Priest

11g - Undertaker

11h - Stationmaster

11i - Policeman

12 - Capillary Tubes “From the top of each malic mould, the gas passes along the unit of length in a tube of elemental section and by the phenomenon of stretching in the unit of length the gas finds itself [congealed] solidifed in the form of elemental rods.” (Source 3)

13 - Region of the Waterfall which is not visually represented in the Large Glass, but which one may assume interacts in some way with the Water-Mill and Water-Wheel (Source 3)

14 - The Water-Mill

14a - Water-Wheel enclosed in the center of the Chariot

14b - Chariot (or Sleigh or Glider) The bechelor chariot sings litanies as it moves (SOurce 8). “the litanies of the Chariot: Slow life. Vicious circle. Onanism. Horizontal. round trip for the buffer. Junk of life. Cheap construction. Tin, cords, iron wire. Eccentric wooden pulleys. Monotonous fly wheel. Beer professor. (to be entirely redone). The metal of the chariot is emancipated, meaning it has a weight, but a force acting horizontally on the chariot does not have to support this weight.” (Source 3)

14c - Runners Sliding in a Groove “The chariot is supported by runners which slide (oil etc) in a groove” (Source 3)

15 - Chocolate Grinder “adage of spontaneity: the bachelor grinds his chocolate himself.” (Source 8) Duchamp writes “The Chocolate Grinder is essentially composed . . . The chocolate of the rollers, coming from one knows not where, would deposit itself after grinding, as milk chocolate . . . . The necktie (insert a letter referring to a diagram) with brilliant shimmering would have been of aluminum foil stretched and stuck down, but the 3 rollers always turn beneath the Bayonet-(X) Helps to hold the compression bar and the large scissors and the isolating plates . First-class article . The grinder is mounted on a Louis XV nickeled chassis. Principle of [Spontaneity] (which explains the gyratory mt of the grinder without other help) The bachelor grinds his chocolate himself.” (Source 7)

15a - Louis XV chassis Part of the chocolate grinder, its three circular drums atop a table resting on “Louis XV legs” and attached by a rod to a scissors-like mechanism above.

15b - Rollers

15c - Necktie

15d - Bayonet

15e - Scissors

16 - Sieves (or Parasols, within are the Drainage Slopes) The sieves of the bachelor apparatus are a reversed image of porosity. (Source 3)

17 - Region of the Butterfly Pump

18 - Toboggan (or Cork Screw or Slopes of Flow) A spiraling slope in the form of a toboggan or corkscrew. The splash is an uncorking.

19 - Region of the Three Crashes (or Splashes) “The splash (nothing in common with champagne) ends the series of bachelor operations and transforms the combination of the illuminating gas and the scissors into a single continuous support, support which will be regularized by the 9 holes.” (Source 3)

20 - Weight with Nine Holes “The weight with holes should rise to the same height as the juice descending in an oval – Whence consequences in the splash” (Source 3)

21 - Oculist Witnesses

21a, b, c - Oculist Charts “Sculpture of drops (points) which the splash forms after having been dazzled accross the occultist’s charts, each drop acting as a point and sent back mirrorically to the high part of the glass to meet the 9 shots.” (Source 3)

21d - [Mandala] (should have been a magnifying glass to focus the splashes)

22 - Marble

23 - Boxing Match The boxing match is the trajectory of the combat marble.

23a - First Ram

23b - Second Ram

24 - Region of the Sculpture of Drops “Each drop will pass the 3 planes at the horizon between the perspective and the geometrical drawing of 2 figures which will be indicated on these 3 planes by the Wilson-Lincoln system (i.e. like the portraits which seen from the left show Wilson seen from the right show Lincoln)” (Source 3)

25 - Region of the Wilson-Lincoln Effect

Source Citations

** The elements in red would have been included in The Large Glass had it been completed.