Critics who loved Duchamp’s ‘Large Glass’ laughed and scoffed when they saw ‘Given’ unveiled after his death in 1969. The ‘Large Glass’ was esoteric and encoded while ‘Given’ was like a carny freak show equipped with a peephole, a naked female body and fake edenic backdrop.
Here Paz collects and develops two previously published essays about Duchamp and intriguingly ties together these works into a single vision.
The quest for love is closely intertwined with the quest for knowledge. The pursuit of both is glorious, multifaceted and ridiculous in the best possible way. The ‘Large Glass’ is the artists’ design of this pursuit and the hinge or pivot upon which all Duchamp’s artistic ideas come together. The posthumous work, ‘Given’ takes these ideas and presents the results as a fever dream viewable only by one spectator through the peephole at a time. The spectator gasps at what ‘he’ sees and asks, ‘what am I looking at?’ Duchamp answers by saying that is for the spectator to figure out.
