The Stepford Wives narrative has had several transformations in its translation to film and TV. In 1975, the book was adapted into a science fiction thriller directed by Bryan Forbes with a screenplay by William Goldman. While the script emphasis is on gender conflict and the sterility of suburban living, and thus the science fiction elements are only lightly explored, the movie still makes it much clearer than the book that the women are being replaced by some form of robot.
The Stepford Wives (1975)
"I thought we were friends"
Another film titled The Stepford Wives was released in 2004, directed by Frank Oz. It was intended to be more comedic than the previous versions. The new script by screenwriter Paul Rudnick has the women being transformed into carefully controlled cyborgs, rather than being murdered and replaced with robots.
The Stepford Wives (2004)
The Stepford Wives (1975)
The Supermarket
Pygmalion (mythology)
In Greco-Roman mythology, the Propoetides are the daughters of Propoetus from the city of Amathus on the island of Cyprus. In Roman literature, they are treated by Ovid in his Metamorphoses (book 10.238 ff.):
Nevertheless, the immoral Propoetides dared to deny that Venus was the goddess. For this, because of her divine anger, they are said to have been the first to prostitute their bodies and their reputations in public, and, losing all sense of shame, they lost the power to blush, as the blood hardened in their cheeks, and only a small change turned them into hard flints.The story of Venus and her vengeance on the Propoetides for failing to worship her properly is a common theme in a number of stories and poems written about the goddess. Although it has be mentioned that there is some historical evidence of sacred prostitution known in the city of Corinth where the Temple of Aphrodite employed a significant number of female servants, hetairai, or courtesans, during classical antiquity. The Greek term hierodoulos or hierodule has sometimes been taken to mean sacred holy woman, but it is more likely to refer to a former slave freed from slavery in order to be dedicated to a god.
Classic "clickbait" up front . . .
Pygmalion and Galatea, Jean-Leon Gerome; 1890
According to Ovid, after seeing the Propoetides prostituting themselves, Pygmalion determined that he was "not interested in women", and consequently became a celibate, a bachelor!
He still wanted married love, though, and carved himself the most perfect and lifelike statue of a woman in ivory. He kissed it lovingly, spoke to it, and dressed it in fine clothing. When the festival of Venus arrived, Pygmalion prayed that he should have a bride who was the living likeness of his statue. Venus heard this, and the sacred flame rose to indicate her response. Pygmalion returned home, rejoicing that his prayer might be answered:
When he returned,
he went directly to his image-maid,
bent over her, and kissed her many times,
while she was on her couch; and as he kissed,
she seemed to gather some warmth from his lips.
Again he kissed her; and he felt her breast;
the ivory seemed to soften at the touch,
and its firm texture yielded to his hand,
as honey-wax of Mount Hymettus turns
to many shapes when handled in the sun,
and surely softens from each gentle touch.
He is amazed; but stands rejoicing in his doubt;
while fearful there is some mistake, again
and yet again, gives trial to his hopes
by touching with his hand. It must be flesh!
The veins pulsate beneath the careful test
of his directed finger. Then, indeed,
the astonished hero poured out lavish thanks
to Venus; pressing with his raptured lips
his statue’s lips.His marriage to the former statue was blessed by Venus, and nine months later they celebrated the birth of their daughter, whom they called Paphos, after whom the island was named.
. . . and back!
Pygmalion and Galatea, Jean-Leon Gerome; 1890
Human-robot interaction and robot personhood?
Solaris - becoming a person looking at art?
"After a fitful sleep, Kelvin is shocked to find Hari (Natalya Bondarchuk), his late wife, in his sleeping quarters. She is unaware of how she got there. Terrified by her presence, Kelvin launches the replica of his wife into outer space. Snaut explains that the "visitors" began appearing after the scientists conducted radiation experiments using X-rays in a desperate attempt to understand the planet's nature."
"That evening, Hari reappears in his quarters. This time Kelvin calmly accepts her and they fall asleep together in an embrace. Hari panics when Kelvin briefly leaves her alone in the room, and injures herself. But before Kelvin can give first aid, her injuries spontaneously heal before his eyes. Sartorius and Snaut explain to Kelvin that Solaris created Hari from his memories of her. The Hari present among them, though not human, thinks and feels as though she were. Sartorius theorizes that the visitors are composed of "neutrino systems" but that it might still be possible to destroy them through use of a device known as "the annihilator". Later, Snaut proposes beaming Kelvin's brainwave patterns at Solaris in hopes that it will understand them and stop the disturbing apparitions."
"In time, Hari becomes independent and is able to exist away from Kelvin's presence. She learns from Sartorius that the original Hari had committed suicide ten years earlier. Sartorius, Snaut, Kelvin and Hari gather together for a birthday party, which evolves into a philosophical argument, during which Sartorius reminds Hari that she is not real. Distressed, Hari kills herself again by drinking liquid oxygen, only to painfully resurrect after a few minutes. On the surface of Solaris, the ocean begins to swirl faster into a funnel."
Blade Runner - like tears in rain . . .
Choosing to save a life!
Roy's body begins to fail as the end of his lifespan nears. He chases Deckard through the building, ending up on the roof. Deckard tries to jump onto another roof, but is left hanging on the edge. Roy makes the jump with ease, and as Deckard's grip loosens, Roy hoists him onto the roof, saving him. The dying replicant Roy Batty delivers a monologue to Rick Deckard, whose life Batty has just saved, despite the fact that Deckard was sent to retire him. The scene occurs during a heavy downpour of rain, moments before Batty's own death. Reflecting on his experiences and imminent mortality he says:
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe.Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate.All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
Time to die.
"Roy's life closes with an act of pity, one that raises him morally over the commercial institutions that would kill him. If Deckard cannot see himself in the other, Roy can. The white dove that implausibly flies up from Roy at the moment of his death perhaps stretches belief with its symbolism; but for me at least the movie has earned that moment, suggesting that in the replicant, as in the replicated technology of film itself, there remains a place for something human."
Michael Newton The Guardian (March 14, 2015)
This image is an advert. It is used by Marshall McLuhan in his ground-breaking Book, The Mechanical Bride, which introduces his take on the transformative power of technology upon the human sensorium. As well as evidencing a new method for the exploration of perception and experiance in the context of the "media" (McLuhan's term) of human communication, it represents a multi-faceted image of the contemporary conditions of modernity in the late 1940's and early 1950's. McLuhan's work anticipates the emergence of Pop art, as for instance the lecture given at the ICA in London by Eduardo Paolozzi of the Independent Group, and called BUNK!
An essay by Greil Marcus for the Artforum, 50th Anniversary Issue, September 2012 is titled:
Twentieth-Century Vox: Marshall McLuhan and The Mechanical Bride
Here are some apposite excerpts:
All of which makes McLuhan’s first book, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man, a study of advertising published by the distinguished independent house Vanguard Press in 1951, so strong a marker in his own story, and so captivating today: hilarious, threatening, inspiring, scary for the world it depicts and the solutions it seems to propose. By more than a decade, it anticipated both the spirit and the content of such media critiques as Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle (1967), and for that matter the Rolling Stones’ 1965 hits “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” and “Get Off of My Cloud”–not to mention Herbert Marcuse’s far less nimble Eros and Civilization (1955) and such works of pop sociology as Vance Packard’s once scandalizing The Hidden Persuaders (1957). For a book by a professor, let alone a first book, it could not be less academic. Even the Roland Barthes of Mythologies (1957), with whom the McLuhan of 1951 shares the most, is hesitant and circumscribed by comparison, and the later Buckminster Fuller, with the likes of Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1969) a by-the-numbers utopian.
In fifty-nine short essays, each one illustrated with a newspaper front page, a movie poster, a comic-strip panel, a lurid paperback cover, or, most often, an advertisement, and most often from a mass-circulation magazine such as Look, Reader’s Digest, or, preeminently, Life, McLuhan unwrites and rewrites what he is certain is the language of a new phase in human history:
No longer is it possible for modern man, individually or collectively, to live in any exclusive segment of human experience or achieved social pattern. The modern mind, whether in its subconscious collective dream or in its intellectual citadel of vivid awareness, is a stage on which is contained and re-enacted the entire experience of the human race. There are no more remote and easy perspectives, either artistic or national. Everything is present in the foreground. That fact is stressed equally in current physics, jazz, newspapers, and psychoanalysis. And it is not a question of preference or taste. This flood has already immersed us. And whether it is to be a benign flood, cleansing the Augean stables of speech and experience, as envisaged in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, or a merely destructive element, may to some extent depend on the degree of exertion and direction which we elicit in ourselves.He is insisting on a great crisis, and insisting that it is new: “Ours is the first age in which many thousands of the best-trained individual minds have made it a full-time business to get inside the collective public mind. To get inside in order to manipulate, exploit, control is the object now. And to generate heat not light is the intention. To keep everybody in the helpless state engendered by prolonged mental rutting is the effect of many ads and much entertainment alike.”
McLuhan creates a sense of high stakes. It is no matter that he writes from Canada, because, really, he doesn’t: The US is his subject, the sea he swims in. Because the American mind is the modern mind, it is that mind that must be read. McLuhan generates such a sense of drama that the reader, or the looker, is pulled through his terrible puns (“from the cradle to the gravy,” “eager to sell their souls for a pot of message”), moments of sourness and fulminating raillery (“Time deals with its readers as a Sultan with his eunuchs”), phrases that sound as if they were clichés even before they were written (“these wondrous totalitarian techniques for mashing the public into processed cheese”), or what feels like irritation parading as judgment (“‘Democratic’ vanity has reached such proportions that it cannot accept as human anything above the level of cretinous confusion of mind of the type popularized by Hemingway’s heroes”). Like any great critic, McLuhan here makes the reader feel as if he or she has embarked with the author on a great adventure.
Never mind the readings of ads for long-defunct products in magazines that no longer exist: Whether merely sententious or as gripping as a thriller, hectoring or satiric, the book never reads as dated. And that’s partly because McLuhan, gearing up to slay the dragon of brainwashing, propaganda, and fascist-capitalist mind control, is having so much fun.
Nature's rival
Four figures - all different but with one common factor . . . the waist line!
From Ivory Flakes . . .
Famous for being famous?
A mannequin, or "an artist's jointed model", of Dianne Brill, clothed and unclothed. Dianne Brill - crowned "Queen of the night" by Andy Warhol in the 1980's, is among a group of celebrities who are famous for being famous.
The "mechanistic" and "human but other" qualities of uncanny valley begin to merge into "fashion", a word that comes from facere, Latin for to do or to make, to Middle English fashion, to make, shape, appearance.
Greil Marcus in the Artforum article on the Mechanical Bride references the Rolling Stones "I Can't Get No . . ." as a media critique, along with the usual suspects, Guy Debord, Herbert Marcuse, and Roland Barthes. What would Barthes say about the Dianne Brill mannequins?
SophiaWorld
From Futurism Studios, "SophiaWorld" stars television's most famous robot, "Westworld" actress Evan Rachel Wood, and the world's most famous real-life humanoid, Sophia the Robot. Here's what happens when they have a chance encounter in a New York City bar.
"clickbait" mannequin - coat stand - porte manteau
I Can't Get No . . .
. . . Satisfaction
Dianne Brill - Queen of the night . . .
. . . as crowned by Andy Warhol!
Duchamp's "The Large Glass"
The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même).
According to the Wikipedia article, this work of Marcel Duchamp is most often called The Large Glass (Le Grand Verre). Duchamp worked on the piece from 1915 to 1923, creating two panes of glass with materials such as lead foil, fuse wire, and dust. It combines chance procedures, plotted perspective studies, and laborious craftsmanship. Duchamp's ideas for the Glass began in 1913, and he made numerous notes and studies, as well as preliminary works for the piece. The notes reflect the creation of unique rules of physics, and myth which describes the work.
It is at first sight baffling in iconography and unclassifiable style. Yet this glass construction is not a discrete whole. The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even is also the title given to The Green Box notes (1934) as Duchamp intended the Large Glass to be accompanied by a book, in order to prevent purely visual responses to it. The notes describe that his "hilarious picture" is intended to depict the erotic encounter between the "Bride", in the upper panel, and her nine "Bachelors" gathered timidly below in an abundance of mysterious mechanical apparatus in the lower panel. The Large Glass was exhibited in 1926 at the Brooklyn Museum before it was broken during transport and carefully repaired by Duchamp. After effecting the repair, Duchamp decided he admired the cracks: an element of chance that enhanced what he had done intentionally, following the flow of energy in the work's composition. The consequence of this event are the series of spider web cracks, running diagonally from the top right to bottom left of the Bride's Domain, and in an almost figure eight from the top left to bottom right of the Bachelors' Domain forming flowery, flowing designs. Neither cracks nor paint disrupt the right, central plane, which is devoid of decoration, and around which the action of the art plays out.
Nine bachelors to one bride?
The situation becomes clearer. In this vaudeville movie clip of JACKIE GATELY - The Blushing Bride, the bride shows off to a group of male onlookers. It is a show! And the show is being captured on film. The Wikipedia article points out that:
Most critics, however, read the piece as an exploration of male and female desire as they complicate each other. One critic, for example, describes the basic layout as follows: "The Large Glass has been called a love machine, but it is actually a machine of suffering. Its upper and lower realms are separated from each other forever by a horizon designated as the 'bride's clothes'. The bride is hanging, perhaps from a rope, in an isolated cage, or crucified. The bachelors remain below, left only with the possibility of churning, agonized masturbation."
The archaeology & arts website has a comment to make on Duchamp's "Bachelor Machine" under the heading, The “Bachelor Machine”, a symbol of modern eroticism:
The rapid mechanization of society, as a result of the industrial revolution, seriously affected the erotic-sexual life of man so that if we had to rewrite the history of sexuality, we would accord a major role to the machine as symbol . The bachelor machine, a term introduced by Duchamp for the lower part of his work “The Big Glass;the Bride is Stripped Naked Even by her Bachelors” is considered to be one of the most representative examples of the “mechanical” representation of eroticism. Duchamp’s work is an imaginary construction that is based on the duality of manlwoman. The concept of the “Bachelor machine” can also be found in literature (Jules Verne, Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka etc.). It expresses two ideas, that of sexual liberation and of isolation, as they materialized in the developed industrial society of the late 19th and early 20th century, an isolation, however that can lead to death, a procedure conceived by the French writer Carrouges, who correctly regarded solitude and isolation as the means to transform sexual love into a death-machine.
Pygmalion's AI
Apart from these literary sources, popular culture produces its own versions on a spectrum that runs from dystopian visions of the future and the role of mechanized sex through to comedy, as a release mechanism to an sexualised information environment shot through with tension and anxiety.
Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs
Michel Carrogues, in his book The Bachelor Machines, has found a parallel between the Duchamp's painting and Kafka's "In the Penal Colony". In the short story, the machine used for punishment acts as a bachelor machine.
In 1976 Editions du Chêne published a new edition, completely revising and augmenting the book with 27 illustrations and four letters of Marcel Duchamp. The illustrations were made by Jean-Louis Couturier, under the name of A. Jihel.
The parallelisms also include Raymond Roussel's literary work and Alfred Jarry's Supermale. Gilles Deleuze expands upon this in Anti-Oedipus and claims it the last one of the Daniel Paul Schreber's stages, as the celibate machine. The celibate machine consists of auto-erotic consummation and it only produces intensive qualities. The desiring machine allies with the body without organs in this process.
When it comes to the contemporary evolution of the technology for auto-eroticism this is where we are right now, and looking to the future realistically and comically.
In a similar vein to this article on "clickbait", Marjorie Perloff interprets the Large Glass as "enigmatic" in her book The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (Princeton UP: 1999). The Wikipedia article says:
She concludes that Duchamp's "Large Glass is also a critique of the very criticism it inspires, mocking the solemnity of the explicator who is determined to find the key". Hence, she follows the school of deconstruction established by the French philosopher Derrida and helps to break down the hegemony of interpretation held by the Enlightenment bourgeoisie. To quote the artist: "I believe that the artist doesn't know what he does. I attach even more importance to the spectator than to the artist."
Étant donnés: 1° la chute d'eau / 2° le gaz d'éclairage ("Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas")
Given that . . . Duchamp kept the fact that he was working on a project very similar in theme to the Large Glass, many in the art world were surprised when the existence of Étant donnés was revealed.
This work is a tableau, visible only through a pair of peepholes (one for each eye) in a wooden door, of a nude woman lying on her back with her face hidden, legs spread, holding a gas lamp in the air in one hand against a landscape backdrop.
"The visitor’s access to Étant donnés contradicts any expectation of being able to examine the work, anonymously, in the way that museums normally allow; (Haladyn, 2010) it leaves the viewer no alternative but to survey the work with the probability of becoming, unintentionally, a prey to the scrutiny of others at the same time. This uncomfortable scenario becomes exacerbated once the sexually explicit nature of the work, behind the door, is determined and with it the realisation of the disadvantage of being the viewer in this compromised position. Behind the viewer, the shadowy space is a sort of darkened vestibule where others will be waiting their turn to look – or more disturbingly – others who may have entered that space will be waiting, more simply, to scrutinise whoever is looking through the door, catching them while transfixed by the illuminated scene beyond it."
Visual Arrangements in Duchamp’s Étant donnés and Warburg’s Mnemosyne by Kieran Lyons.
"clickbait" and the Peep Show experience
Peep shows have been used for erotic and pornographic pictures, such as "What the Butler Saw", since before the turn of the twentieth century.
In contemporary use, a peep show is a piecewise presentation of pornographic films or a live sex show which is viewed through a viewing slot, which shuts after the time paid for has expired. The viewing slots can be operated by a money box device, or paid for at a counter.
Q. A Peep Show?
A. Yes! A Peep Show!
This context would have heightened the experience of "an uncomfortable scenario" for the art audience encountering the subject matter Duchamp was "laying out" for them.
A "Brazilian"?
The Brazilian sculptor Maria Martins, Duchamp's girlfriend from 1946 to 1951, served as the model for the female figure in the piece, and his second wife, Alexina (Teeny), served as the model for the figure's arm.
Maria Martins has recently become the subject of a documentary by filmmaker Elisa Gomes, who discusses her new Maria Martins documentary and the sculptor’s life as a both ambassador’s wife and Duchamp’s mistress with Cynthia Garcia in an interview piece headlined:
Libertine, Liberator
Maria - "Don't Forget I Come from the Tropics."
Fashions come and go when it comes to pubic hair trends over time:
From Tweezer-Happy Ancient Greece To Your Last Painful Wax
The Pubic Wars
The so-called Pubic Wars (the term was coined by Playboy owner Hugh Hefner), a pun on the Punic Wars between Roman and Carthaginian empires, is the name of the war between the pornographic magazines Playboy and Penthouse during the 1960s and 1970s. Each magazine strove to show just a little bit more than the other, without getting too crude. In 1950s and 1960s America, it was generally agreed that nude photographs were not pornographic unless they showed pubic hair or genitals. "Respectable" photography was careful to come close to, but not cross over, this line. Consequently, the depiction of pubic hair was de facto forbidden in U.S. pornographic magazines.
Penthouse originated in 1965 in Britain and was initially distributed in Europe. In September 1969 it was launched in the U.S., bringing new competition to Playboy. Penthouse was already displaying pubic hair at the time of its U.S. launch. According to the magazine's owner Bob Guccione, "We began to show pubic hair, which was a big breakthrough."
In order to retain its market share, Playboy followed suit, risking obscenity charges, and launching the "Pubic Wars". Playboy started showing wisps of pubic hair about nine months after Penthouse (June 1970). As competition between the two magazines escalated, their photo shoots became increasingly explicit.
Playboy's first full frontal
When Halil Şerif Pasha, also know as Khalil Bey, comissioned the French artist Gustave Courbet to produce the painting now known as L’Origine du monde (The Origin of the World), the work was to form part of a private collection that included The Turkish Bath (Le Bain turc) is an oil painting by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres.
As an academic painting the picture conforms to conventions that are far from "realistic". And the women of the harem are depicted without genitalia or pubic hair. Courbet was a realist in his artistic project, and so when undertaking this commission the artist was able to create a work that has been described as the "Mona Lisa of vaginas". Courbet's composition concentrates on the torso, breasts, vagina and the dark pubic hair of a model rendered anonymous by the framing. It reveals more than a glimpse of the pubic region, or the "beaver shot" as it was called in the late 1960's and 70's softcore film industry.
The painting is no longer part of a "personal" collection, or a "private" experience of a wealthy male art collector, it is on public display in the galleries of the Musee d’Orsay in Paris.
So, the question of "Who posed for the 'Mona Lisa of vaginas'?" becomes part of a public discourse, and produces a sheer "clickbait" information environment.
The question of identity "clickbait" scenario?
One of the greatest mysteries in art history appears to have been solved. The identity of the model who posed for the most scandalous painting of the 19th century, Gustave Courbet’s L’Origine du monde (The Origin of the World), has finally been revealed. Experts say they are “99% sure” the painting depicts the Parisian ballet dancer Constance Queniaux. For decades art historians have been convinced that the naked torso and genitalia it depicts belonged to Courbet’s lover, the Irish model Joanna Hiffernan. But doubts persisted – mainly because the dark pubic hair in the painting did not correspond with Hiffernan’s mane of flaming red curls. Now documentary evidence found in the correspondence between the French writers Alexandre Dumas fils and George Sand points directly to a former dancer at the Paris Opera.
Queniaux was a mistress of the Ottoman diplomat Halil Şerif Pasha – aka Khalil Bey – when the picture was painted in the summer of 1866. And it was Halil who commissioned the painting from Courbet for his personal collection of erotica.
Khalil Bey was introduced to the artist Gustave Courbet by the literary critic Sainte-Beuve, and commissioned Coubet's painting Le Sommeil (The Sleepers) as well as L’Origine du monde (The Origin of the World).
Le Sommeil (translated in English variously as The Sleepers and Sleep) is an erotic oil painting on canvas by French artist Gustave Courbet created in 1866. The painting, which depicts lesbianism, is also known as the Two Friends (Les Deux Amies) and Indolence and Lust (Paresse et Luxure). The painting was inspired by Charles Baudelaire's poem "Delphine et Hippolyte", from his collection Les Fleurs du mal. Le Sommeil has been interpreted as a realist painting, detailing the bodies without glossing over their imperfections. One of the models for the painting, the woman with "mane of flaming red curls" was Joanna Hiffernan.
In January 1868 Khalil Bey sold off his art collection just before leaving to become Ottoman ambassador to Vienna, thus leaving of Paris fortuitously only two years before the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, the Siege of Paris 1870-71 and the Paris Commune of 1871.
When Le Sommeil was exhibited by a picture dealer in 1872, it became the subject of a police report. The painting was not permitted to be shown publicly until 1988, like a number of his other works such as L'Origine du monde.
Today the painting is on display in the galleries of the Musee d’Orsay in Paris.
Facebook forced to attend French court over account's deletion
Durand had posted a link to an article exploring the history of the painting, which used the famous image as a thumbnail.
His lawyer Stéphane Cottineau had previously acknowledged that Facebook banned nude content at the time, but argued that the painting was “a major work” which is “part of France’s cultural heritage”.
The closeup of the woman’s crotch and abdomen is a depiction of nudity that has been “glorified, made sublime, through the talent of the artist”, Cottineau had said.
The Musée d’Orsay, which has held the painting since 1995, says on its website that the work “escapes pornographic status” thanks to “Courbet’s great virtuosity and the refinement of his amber colour scheme”.
Facebook fought for five years to avoid being taken to court in France over the case.
Given that . . .
This article is running to its close, it returns to Duchamp's Étant donnés, and the quote from Ducamp that:
"I believe that the artist doesn't know what he does. I attach even more importance to the spectator than to the artist."
If the Étant donnés is to be understood as a tableau, the relationship of the spectator to the tableau is important to consider in the light of Duchamp's statement.
Is the spectator wittingly, or unwittingly, cast in the role of an actor?
A "spectactor"?
Is this the difference between a role of an observant participant and the role of a participant observer?
The tableau, or tableau vivant, has a history that is part of the history of vaudeville, burlesque and other forms of risqué entertainment. And, in this case, with a risqué art installation.
Tableau Vivant ou Mort? Dead or Alive?
The tableau vivant is French for 'living picture', a static scene containing one or more actors or models. Stationary and silent, usually in costume, carefully posed, with props and/or scenery, and, on occasions, theatrically lit, it thus combines aspects of theatre and the visual arts. A tableau may either be 'performed' live, or depicted in painting, photography and sculpture.
Theatrical censorship in Britain and the United States forbade actresses to move when nude or semi-nude on stage, so tableaux vivants had a place in risqué entertainment for many years. In the early 1900s, German dancer Olga Desmond appeared in Schönheitsabende ('Evenings of Beauty') in which she posed nude in "living pictures", imitating classical works of art.
In the nineteenth century, tableaux vivants took such titles as "Nymphs Bathing" and "Diana the Huntress" and were to be found at such places as the Hall of Rome in Great Windmill Street, London.
Nude and semi-nude poses plastiques were also a frequent feature of variety shows in the US: first on Broadway in New York City, then elsewhere in the country. The Ziegfeld Follies featured such tableaux from 1917.
The Windmill Theatre in London (1932–1964) featured nude poses plastiques on stage; it was the first, and for many years the only, venue for them in 20th-century London.
This quote is from the Programme Notes for THE RAFT at the ICA, London 27-28 April 1993, a paraphrase of Roland Barthes Sade II, "Scene, Machine, Writing", by Philip Courtenay:
Tableau Vivant: The tableau vivant is precisely that before which I place myself. It respects the identity of painting and classical writing, which holds that one need only describe what has already been painted and what it calls "reality". Classical writing and figurative picturing can only present essences as objects, and objects as spatially situated. the object of art then becomes the relentless renewal pof the object's relationship in a composition. It cannot describe work; in order to become "modern", it has to invent a language activity completely other than description. However, in a tableau vivant in which something begins to move, the spectator joins in, not by projection but by intrusion. And this mixture of figure and work become very modern. The theatre has tried very hard to bring actors into the audience, but this procedure is ridiculous. Instead, imagine the opposite. Rather than the actors jumping into the auditorium to provoke the spectator, the spectator would go on to the stage to join in the tableau and form one of its episodes. And, at this moment when figuration disappears, work begins to register.
The freedom to offend?
Q. A peep show or projection machine?
A. The "camera" (room) can work both ways!
The "reel" world
The movie camera and the movie projector have an almost identical mechanical signature except in one particular respect - the function of light.
The movie camera captures the light from the world outside its dark interior, or "camera obscura" ("dark room"), on photographic film, with many frames grabbed and held still in the "gate" each second.
The movie projector runs the movie film "print" from reel to reel, grabbing each frame in the "gate" and illuminating the film "screen" through a focussed light source projected through the transparent film, many times per second, in a darkened room.
Duchamp's Étant donnés goes back further in the history of the modern image to the constructed "spectacle", in a hybrid of tableau and the original thrill of the camera obscura experience. People in dark rooms would marvel at the projection of an image on the wall of the animated world outside (it would have been an upside down view until people used a correcting lens).
Camera obscura from j00h on Vimeo.
This spectacle was an entertainment that visual artists had already used as a technique for "capturing" a certain "likeness" of reality. Copying, or repeating, the appearances of the world but not necessarily understanding the appearance of reality (or realities).
Duchamp's Étant donnés as a camera/projector?
Duchamp’s Last Work May Hold One Final Secret
An article by Abigail Cain in ARTSY (Nov 14, 2017) looks at a project by the New York-based artist Serkan Özkaya, who assembled his own painstaking replica of Étant donnés, titled We Will Wait, to conduct an experiment that results in a revelation of a final secret, an image of a face, the artist believes has a striking resemblance to Man Ray’s famous portrait of Rrose Sélavy, Duchamp’s female alter ego.
"Rrose Sélavy", also spelled Rose Sélavy, was one of Duchamp's pseudonyms. The name, a pun, sounds like the French phrase Eros, c'est la vie, which may be translated as "Eros, such is life." It has also been read as arroser la vie ("to make a toast to life").
Sélavy emerged in 1921 in a series of photographs by Man Ray showing Duchamp dressed as a woman. Through the 1920s Man Ray and Duchamp collaborated on more photos of Sélavy. Duchamp later used the name as the byline on written material and signed several creations with it. Sélavy also appears on the label of "Belle Haleine" (not a reference to Helen of Troy but "beautiful breath"), Eau de Voilette ("water of veil") (1921), a readymade perfume bottle in the original box.
The ARTSY piece by Abigail Cain explains how the artist arrived at this discovery:
So he made a 10-to-1 scale model of the work in his Lower East Side studio and switched off the lights. “I was expecting only a picture of what’s inside, just upside down,” Özkaya said, describing the typical result of a camera obscura. “But that’s Duchamp’s genius, that he put two peepholes so you have two pictures superimposed. That creates a whole different composition and, basically, there was a face”—a face, he believed, that bore a striking resemblance to Man Ray’s famous portrait of Rrose Sélavy.
We Will Wait by Serkan Özkaya
Brian Boucher, writing on this work for artnet (October 3, 2017) says:
The original Étant donnés has been on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art since 1969. It consists of a semi-dark room with an ancient wooden door drilled through with two peepholes, through which one views a creepy diorama: behind a hole in a brick wall lies a naked woman on a bed of sticks, her spread legs and crotch facing the viewer. Her head is obscured, so it’s hard to know whether she’s alive or dead. In her left hand she holds aloft a gas lamp.
Özkaya’s theory quite literally upends the way you look at the work. The work, he claims, functions as a camera obscura. Instead of being just a tableaux you are supposed to look in on, it is also meant to project, via its two peepholes, an hidden image of the artist’s face out onto the wall opposite.
Özkaya bases his theory partly on Duchamp’s having said that every one of his works of art is, to some extent, a self-portrait. (The notion came to turning Étant donnés into a projecting device came to him, he explains, after reading Anne Friedberg’s book The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft.)
But open the door to room 403, and you’ll find a dark space, a few feet deep, still floored with the same cheap, checkered black-and-white tiles as in Duchamp’s day. Black trash bags surround a space about 13 feet deep and nine feet high that houses the sculpture. A few leaves and branches litter the floor.
Sawon turned off the lights; my eyes adjusted; the image thrown by the backlighting came, gradually, into view.
It’s an innately intriguing experience—though I have to say that I found the contours of the projected face very, very hard to make out. The eyes, resembling a child’s line drawing, are very clear. It took a lot more convincing, and the consultation of some photographs, to see what is supposed to be the mouth and nose.
Conceptual "clickbait"?
The artist's model in this "art about art" project ends up being a situation where "the artist" becomes "the muse".
This is NOT surprising given the conceptual "play" involved in many of Duchamp and Man Ray's projects, especially with the female alter ego "Rrose Sélavy" where the artist "plays" the role of "muse", a trans-gender La belle Hélène.
Özkaya's project is in some sense wittingly, or unwittingly, making an art work out of the situation of, and role, of the spectator, and by action and agency becoming an actor, or spect-actor.
In Duchamp’s Last Riddle, by Jillian Steinhauer (October 18, 2017) in the PARIS REVIEW she returns to the moment of Özkaya's apparent "discovery".
“I hadn’t even seen the work until I had the idea of it operating as a camera obscura,” he admits. But he was excited by the idea of a camera obscura that uses two holes rather than one—it would be truer to the way we see, with two eyes. He began researching Étant donnés and built a small-scale model of it to test his theory.Jillian Steinhauer then shares with her readers her own experience of immersion in this reversal of the peep show or "tableau mort":
When he turned off the lights, amid the resulting, overlapping projections, he saw a face. His first thought was that the ghostly visage belonged to the woman’s killer, but a friend saw someone else entirely: Rrose Sélavy, Duchamp’s female alter ego. “Once he said it, I couldn’t see it any other way,” Ozkaya explains. It didn’t seem so far-fetched that Duchamp had hidden a self-portrait inside his final, cryptic work—he’d kept secrets about the contents of his art before.
“We have no way of knowing his intentions anymore,” Ozkaya says. “We can only speculate. That’s the fun part. I don’t think these answers need to be correct.”
Left alone with Ozkaya’s reproduction, I struggled in the darkness. My eyes quickly adjusted, and the shadowy white shapes on the wall grew brighter. I searched for images. The largest mass seemed to be a dragon flying through the air; below it, a wide mouth stuck out its tongue. I could not see a face. Instead, I confronted the ghost of Étant donnés’s woman. The longer I stood there, and the harder I tried to find another form, the more prominent she became. Where were the eyes to anchor the artist’s face? All I could see were his protagonist’s naked legs extending toward me, her afterimage burned into my brain.
A small clump of panic rose in my throat. Why couldn’t I find the face? What kind of art critic can only visualize the image of something they’ve already seen? “Projection is a way of perception,” Ozkaya would say to me a few minutes later. He knocked on the door and entered. At my request, he easily outlined the face, which took the place of the mouth I’d seen earlier. More than a full face, it was mostly eyes and nose, but I was struck by how there it was—how seemingly tangible, after fifteen minutes of nothing. Once Ozkaya had showed it to me, I couldn’t see it any other way.
And yet, when the room lights came back on, I found myself struggling to recall the face and doubting its existence. Would I be able to find it again if I were plunged back into darkness? Whose vision was I seeing—Duchamp’s, Ozkaya’s, or my own?
Jillian Steinhauer makes a very important point in the following paragraphs, that steps back from Serkan Özkaya's approach and moves toward an area that some artist's in the modern era have contributed to in a significant way - thinking about perception:
Duchamp studied mathematics, physics, and alchemy and spent much of his life thinking about perception. He built machines and painted and printed disks that could be spun to create optical illusions; he left behind notes filled with theories about the difference between the appearance of an object and what he called its apparition. “From childhood the young Marcel was intrigued by how things are perceived, which is the domain of scientific optics and physics and not of aesthetics,” Barbara Rose wrote in The Brooklyn Rail. “How we see—a mental process—interested him at least as much if not more than what we see.”
On this point, the copy diverges from the original: We Will Wait is more bound up with the what than the how. In the process, it sets its sights on art history: Is this face a clue in an unsolvable mystery? But the question isn’t simply what we see; it’s also what we allow ourselves to see in the darkness. After Ozkaya first saw the projected face, he reached out to the Philadelphia Museum in the hopes that it would let him test his theory with the real Étant donnés. There was initial interest, but someone in the higher echelons of the museum turned down the proposal. “Somebody didn’t like the possibility of the work changing meaning,” Ozkaya speculates.
Jillian Steinhauer concludes the piece:
But of course, the brilliance of Étant donnés is that it was conceived as a puzzle. It will never have a fixed meaning, only an ever-evolving body of interpretations. In one, the work is a deconstructed painting. In another, it’s a riff on the Black Dahlia murder. In yet another, it’s a camera obscura that projects a self-portrait of the artist as Rrose Sélavy. Duchamp himself might note that there’s no single truth to be found, just as there’s no artwork outside of them. We were given the waterfall and the illuminating gas, the naked body and the arm aloft. Without our attempts at making meaning, we’re left only with our projections in the darkness.
THE NUDE SAID "NO"
Jillian Steinhauer's reference, and link, to the Black Dahlia murder reveals another "clickbait" tactic by Duchamp.
$2000 REWARD? "clickbait"?
"And in Wanted, from 1923, the artist fashioned a literal image of himself as a fugitive with multiple aliases (again emphasizing absence), complete with profile photographs like those of an ex-convict with a prior record."
Case Open and/or Unsolved: Étant donnés, the Black Dahlia Murder, and Marcel Duchamp’s Life of Crime by Jonathan Wallis, Published: 2005/12/01
Jonathan Wallis continues:
All of these acts might be described as “petty crimes” when compared to his last work, the installation in the Philadelphia Museum of Art entitled, Étant donnés: 1 la chute d’eau, 2 le gaz d’éclairage – translated as Given: 1. The Waterfall 2. The Illuminating Gas. The title of this piece, taken from the opening lines of an introductory note to Duchamp’s Green Box, signals its association with his earlier work The Large Glass, and suggests its representation as a three-dimensional version of the narrative of the Bride and her Bachelors.
The majority of scholarship that discusses the body in Étant donnés focuses on readings that emphasize violation, murder, rape, or other acts that associate criminal violence, eroticism, and the body. It has been described as a “mutilated woman” and a “seemingly dead female body,” suggesting that some form of criminal activity either already transpired or is about to occur. The erotic nature of these violent interpretations is based largely on the positioning of the body and Duchamp’s choice to explicitly display the female groin region, which is overtly shown to the viewer who peers through the small eyeholes in the door that houses the installation. The body, in its placement before us with legs spread apart, shocks the viewer because of what numerous scholars refer to as its “hypervisibility.”
On the morning of January 15th, 1947, the mutilated body of Elizabeth Short, an aspiring starlet known as the “Black Dahlia” for her stunning beauty and jet black hair, was found purposefully placed on the edge of an open lot on Norton Avenue in Los Angeles, California.
"clickbait"?
For the next few months at first, then years as the case went on, her name littered the headlines of West and East coast newspapers that described in detail both her flamboyant lifestyle and macabre death. To this day, the Black Dahlia murder case remains California’s most notorious unsolved crime. The following discussion suggests that the media presentation and crime photographs of the Black Dahlia murder, contemporaneous to Duchamp’s conception of Étant donnés, may have affected its design and progress.
In a surrealist fantasy become reality, the Black Dahlia represents a real-life example of what was envisioned in the contemporaneous paintings, photographs, and installations of artists such as Hans Bellmer, Rene Magritte, Man Ray, and even Marcel Duchamp. Often times, for example, these surrealist artists would manipulate mannequins in their works for both their uncanny mixture of life-like and lifeless qualities, as well as their constructive and deconstructive potential through detachable anatomical parts.
As the photograph illustrates, Short’s mid-section was not only severed in a manner similar to these detachable dummies, but, coincidentally, her body was actually mistaken for a mannequin by a passer-by who, observing the severed torso and skin that was “white as a lily,” believed it came from a department store.
In mid-January 1947 Duchamp returned from a stay in Europe, arriving in New York at the moment the Dahlia case began to unfold.
The particulars of the murder and its surrounding controversies were appearing daily in newspapers. The New York Daily News ran headlines and follow-up stories about the Dahlia murder for several weeks. More importantly, at the time of the killing Los Angeles was the home of the artist’s close friend Man Ray. The relationship between these two artists is well documented, and Man Ray’s influence on Duchamp’s conception of Étant donnés has already been suggested.
In addition to being engulfed in a sea of newspaper headlines and Hollywood gossip about the killing, Man Ray, like Elizabeth Short, frequented the popular bars and clubs in Hollywood and knew many people in the jet set of the movie community. With his lifelong fascination with sado-masochism, Man Ray would certainly have taken an interest in the particulars of this crime. As a photographer of such repute, Man Ray might have been able to obtain one of the many hundreds of crime scene photographs taken by reporters that circulated through the Hollywood community. These photographs were reproduced and passed from hand-to-hand, and were not censored like the newspaper photographs that displayed the body in situ covered with a sheet, nor were they the “cleaned-up” autopsy photographs that appeared in detective and crime magazines.
On his way back from Paris in 1947, the year of the murder, Man Ray spent a week in New York City. This could have served as an occasion for him to share this information with Duchamp, either simply for its grisly, surrealist nature or for its many similarities with his own and Duchamp’s beliefs and work. If this was not the case, Duchamp may have heard or seen something about the Black Dahlia during his visit to the Arensberg’s home in Los Angeles two years later in April 1949 after his participation in a Round Table discussion in San Francisco. The Black Dahlia case was again making news with new suspects, and moreover Duchamp spent each afternoon secretly meeting with Man Ray by taking “afternoon walks.” In this photograph, the two artists, in a witty false “alibi,” sit on a stage set in Hollywood designed as a Parisian street corner. Why wouldn’t someone with a penchant for criminal tactics, who characterized his interest in eroticism as “Enormous. Visible or not underlying in every case…” be fascinated by this crime? In an interview with Walter Hopps during his stay in Los Angeles, Duchamp declared he was going through his “sex maniac” phase, a phrase which coincidentally appeared in newspaper articles such as the first Los Angeles Times piece on the Dahlia Murder, which opened with the lines, “Butchered by a sex maniac…” It is not surprising then, that upon his return to New York, Duchamp sent the clay model for the body in Étant donnés out for casting in plaster and, as Calvin Tomkins describes in his biography on Duchamp, “by summer he was working on it with great intensity―up to eight hours a day…”
Fluidity of meanings?
“Somebody didn’t like the possibility of the work changing meaning,” Ozkaya speculates. But artworks, like words used in all languages, have the potential to be used in new ways, and therefore the meanings will change. "Don't ask the meaning! Ask the use!" Something Wittegenstein meant, but never said.
How is an artwork being used? This question helps us understand its meaning at different points in time. Language is a diachronic affair, hence only revealing its structure when examined in a moment of relations within the structure - in other words, synchronically.
Les Fleurs du Mal "clickbait"?
Is Serkan Özkaya's speculation in a sense a form of the "clickbait" culture? Les Fleurs du Mal has been referenced in relation to the Courbet painting Le Sommeil which depicts lesbianism, also known as the Two Friends (Les Deux Amies) and Indolence and Lust (Paresse et Luxure). The painting was inspired by Charles Baudelaire's poem "Delphine et Hippolyte", from his collection Les Fleurs du mal. A Google search for "les fleurs du mal" came first with an ad, for an underwear range called Fleur du Mal.
— Hypocrite reader! — My twin! — My brother!
This is a famous line in Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal addressed to the reader: Au Lecteur
The last verse of the poem runs:
C'est l'Ennui! L'oeil chargé d'un pleur involontaire,And translated many times with different emphasis. This is the translation of the last three verses by Eli Siegel.
II rêve d'échafauds en fumant son houka.
Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre délicat,
— Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère!
— Charles Baudelaire
But among the jackals, the panthers, the bitch-hounds,
The apes, the scorpions, the vultures, the serpents,
The monsters screeching, howling, grumbling, creeping,
In the infamous menagerie of our vices,
There is one uglier, wickeder, more shameless!
Although he makes no large gestures nor loud cries
He willingly would make rubbish of the earth
And with a yawn swallow the world;
He is Ennui! — His eye filled with an unwished-for tear,
He dreams of scaffolds while puffing at his hookah.
You know him, reader, this exquisite monster,
— Hypocrite reader, — my likeness, — my brother!
What if . . .
Hypocrite reader, - my likeness, - my sister!
It is safe to assume that Baudelaire's poetic address is one made to a male reader. And his reader knows of the "the infamous menagerie of our vices", but is the "our" the shared gender of reader and writer? A male? Yes, of course it is.
Where is sister in all this? The examples of art and pornography included in this article, and the others linked to "clickbait" Alert, are replete with the characteristics of a rampant misogyny.
Q. Given that . . . misogyny is the hatred of, contempt for, or prejudice against women or girls, why is it that information is still framed by a mindset such as this?
A. Because it works . . . and primarily it works for actually existing capitalism, the system that governs advertising and the value of all exchanges.
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