Art Museum's "Dancing Around the Bride' (2nd review)

If you visit the Art Museum's "Dancing Around the Bride" often enough, you're likely to overhear someone say, "I (or my kid) could do that." Or, "That looks like the stuff in my garage."

Usually, I'm polite when I stand by someone who comes up with simplistic observations, but, if I'm in the mood, or don't like the speaker's tone, I might say, "No, you couldn't."

If challenged, I add, "First of all, it has already been done. So you're just following a formula, like making a sandwich. Besides, even if you could think of, say, dropping three pieces of a thread onto the ground, as Duchamp did, what would you do tomorrow? Or, for the rest of your life?"

Duchamp's dropped thread work of 1913, titled 3 Standard Stoppages, is on display as you enter the exhibition. It actually provided him with a conceptual code and a visual image that would appear in his work for the rest of his career.

Simple gestures

As a commentary, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage employ waving lines, pieces of string and other allusions to Duchamp in a number of drawings, paintings and constructions in the show. They understood that while, yes, it might be easy enough to nail two feet of cord onto a canvas, as Johns did, the simplest of gestures may evoke meanings and consequences.

And for that we can thank Duchamp. His ironic, elegant, cryptic, often erotic and, equally, often banal found objects— or "readymades," as he called them— established an entire language and repertoire for the arts forever.

Combs, bicycle wheels, snow shovels (titled In Advance of a Broken Arm) and the notorious moustache inked onto a postcard reproduction of Leonardo's Mona Lisa, called attention to the act of making art and, more crucially, that it's not the work of art but the work of imagination that's essential to creativity.

Between cave and computer

Like Cage, for whom the sounds of everyday life— traffic or the wind in the trees— were to be valued for themselves, Duchamp broke down the boundaries between sanctioned museum art and the objects of cultural production and daily use. He wasn't saying that any particular thing or performance was beautiful, but that art simply involved thought and imagination— to be developed for a lifetime— as much on the part of the artist and for the spectator.

This idea comes home vividly when you experience the entire exhibition, which occupies two different wings on the first floor. The Dorrrance Galleries are devoted to larger works of the principal artists as well as to scheduled dance and music performances by different players and ensembles. In the Modern and Contemporary Galleries, you find the two permanent Duchamp works, The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (also called The Large Glass) and Given: 1. the waterfall 2. the lighting gas, as ever, making the Art Museum a sacred site for art scholars and international visitors to see in person.

(I once wrote a paper about how The Large Glass should be regarded as something between a cave painting and a computer screen, with the Given installation as an occult, holy shrine.)

Great moral quandaries

So it's one of the one of the singular, if inadvertent, pleasures of the Art Museum show that as you walk from one end of it to the other, you pass through a dozen different rooms that pretty much summarize Western Art from the early modern period onward. There are the somber Biblical scenes capturing moments of great moral quandaries and, across the room, wildly romantic canvases of bare-breasted nymphs splayed across rocks in impossible grottoes (which invariably catch the attention of children).

The blushing landscapes and near-neon skies of Pissaro and other early Impressionists give way to the studied beauty and incisive glimpses of Paul Cézanne, who isolates the play of perception on the rooftops of village in southern France. A few feet away you enter the drama of Van Gogh in various moods. The Van Goghs are so damn famous that you almost pass by them, until you stop and look— stunned— because they never cease to be a revelation.

Depending upon which way you walk toward the Duchamp rooms, you can come upon a number of Picassos or Abstract Expressionist statements on giant, imposing canvases, more Johns and Rauschenbergs. In the main hallways, check out the display cases with curious wooden boxes filled in with precious stuffed birds and tiny hour glasses— examples of the work of another direct Duchamp descendent, the architect of mysterious ordinary things, Joseph Cornell.

(And you probably already noted Duchamp's fascination with miniaturization and boxes in the Dorrance Galleries).

Monument to myth

In any case, if by chance you take a left instead of a right turn before you find the rooms with The Large Glass, you will chance upon the extraordinary monument to myth, madness, the threading of fate and the universe represented in tangled scribbles in Cy Twombly's The House of Atreus.

And then when you finally get to the rest of the Duchamp, Cage, Cunningham, Johns and Rauschenberg and you're ready to dance around the bride yourself, you have plenty to think about, because everything you just saw leads up (pun intended) to the delights of Duchamp in situ.

That, in the end, is what Duchamp wanted anyway. As he said, his work was meant to go beyond "retinal art."

And it's well worth the walk— after which, you rarely hear anyone say, "I could do that…"♦


To read another review by Anne R. Fabbri, click here.