THE FIRST TRANSPARENT DRAWING?
Why does everything always lead back to Duschamp? I’ve been pondering this question for quite some time now. Maybe it is just me, but in my continuing quest for new form generation methods, so many forms that I generate have either an overt or subtle Duschampian overtone.
It took me awhile, but it slowly dawned on me that the Large Glass is a Transparent Drawing. It meets most of the criteria of TD; done by hand, two dimensional, you can see thru the forms, etc. Most definitions of the word drawing stipulate that it be done on paper. Which of course the Large Glass is not. It is done on glass.
I remember in school being completely taken with the entire concept of Duschamp. And decades ago, I made the pilgrimage to the Philadelphia Museum of Art to see their collection of Duschamp’s works, including the Large Glass. Actually the proper title of the work is The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. I can’t remember if I was overwhelmed or underwhelmed when I actually saw it. But even that distinction does not matter as I feel that the lasting power of Duschamp is the overarching concept. His level of execution varied whether it was a readymade, a painting, or any mixed media he chose to play in.
But here we have a seminal transparent drawing that you can walk around. You can get the transparent forms to change just by walking around the piece. The transparent forms do not have a static relationship like they do when we draw on a piece of paper. What does that mean for us at Transparent Drawing? I don’t know. Just as I really still don’t know what the Large Glass means.
The drawing at the top of the page is a more feeble attempt to do a Transparent Drawing of the first Transparent Drawing. I used the forms of Brunelleschi’s Drawing of Machines (left, and in the public domain) as substitutes for Duschamp’s forms. And I think that I referenced a head gasket from an internal combustion engine for the form at the very top.
Like I said, I see Duschamp in practically everything.
The head gasket is pretty funny, almost as good as a chocolate grinder. The only problem with The Large Glass is that Duchamp indicated in interviews that the ideas in the project are more important than the actual realization. (This resonates in Carl Andre’s work too. Conceptually all periodic table.) I wonder… Someone suggested that objects are ideas and only the shadow is real. I wonder… Try that with a building or your contractor.