Technological Stripping and Meaning Production in Duchamp’s The Large Glass
Technological Stripping and Meaning Production in Duchamp’s The Large Glass

Summary/Abstract: The scope of the essay is limited by the ideas behind the mechanisation of desire as conceptualised in The Large Glass by Marcel Duchamp. This glass-based installation depicts a convoluted mechanism, as the full-title of the work suggests, representing The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even. Using tropes and figures from his earlier studies, the artist designed a machine for the production of desire, rendering the unconscious mechanical and dynamic. The paper aims to present selected aspects of the installation, including me-chanical reproduction (1), technological fetishism (2), transparency (3), as well as to discuss its significance with reference to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the Body without Organs (4). The interpretive force of the machine meta-phor in the work of Duchamp is analysed in the context of integrative and non-integrative attitudes to technology.

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