Bride of Duchamp

Just like Alice stepping through the looking glass, The Large Glass lets us reflect on the world around us and on the very nature of art itself…

I was in the Tate Modern bookshop during a recent visit to London and found a book dedicated to this one piece… the book was at least as thick as the London telephone directory...

The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even or The Large Glass (1915–23) is one of the most conceptually advanced pieces of art there is. It brings together quite a few of Marcel Duchamp’s truly innovative approaches and tackles, amongst other things, the meaning of art and our experiences of it.

No, I do not think the viewer needs to be aware of all those theories and ideas behind the work in order to fully appreciate it. And neither did Duchamp! Although he had intended to produce an accompanying book to promote responses beyond the visual and did extend the piece across several other works.

Whenever there is a lot of thought and conceptual depth behind a piece of art — be it music, literature or in visual form — I believe that there is a resonance that enriches the experience of that piece, independently of its ‘meaning’. I enjoy the feeling that I am only getting a part of the whole and there is so much more to come. This is probably why religious art often has grandeur, even when it is from a religion that the viewer does not subscribe to, and why Beethoven, Bach and Scarlatti sound…