The Bride Stripped Bare

From Linda Dalryple Henderson's Marcel Duchamp's The King and Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes (1912) and the Invisible World of Electrons. Found here.

In The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, even Duchamp sought to create a humorous "reality which would be possible by slightly distending the laws of physics and chemistry," as he described it in one of his notes (Writings 71). For this elaborate allegory of quest, Duchamp drew on science and technology as well as geometry to create the "collisions" between the incommensurable realms of the three-dimensional, gravity bound Bachelors below and a four-dimensional etherial Bride above. The complex scenario of the Large Glass is filled with ballistic collisions at all scales--from subatomic and molecular to the impact of the Nine Shots aimed at the "target" in the Bride's realm. In contemporary work on the kinetic theory of gases, for example, Duchamp would have found both a scientific analogue for his own growing interest in chance and a model of incessant collision, documented convincingly in this period by the work of Jean Perrin on Brownian motion. Like the molecular drama he enacts in the context of the liquefaction of the Bachelors' semen-like "Illuminating Gas," many of the events of the "Playful Physics" of the Glass are scientific metaphors for the overarching collision between the desire of the Bachelors and the position of the Bride, high above them and forever beyond their reach.