The Bride blog

Marcel Duchamp's "The Bride" is an immensely complex and well thought out work, yet still focused subtly around humor. He even describes it as "hilarious", and as somewhat of a giant farce. He also uses the word "delay" to describe it, to emphasize that it is a not a picture or painting, and instead a work that he created. His stained glass creation also ties to the question if people can make works that aren't works of art. This question relates to the quest of Marcel Duchamp and many of the other surrealists to have complete artistic freedom especially from preconceived set guidelines about what art is and should be. This is demonstrated in the work by the amount of creativity displayed in its construction and the language that goes with the piece. In most traditional art previous leading up to that time period it was simply made to be aesthetically enjoyed, however Duchamp incorporated linguistics (by using his notes) in with the visual part of the work. Other Surrealist artists, such as Man Ray, also believed in combining multiple senses (such as visual, auditory, etc.) into their works, because that allowed the art to become closer to real life.
Even the composition in conceptually fascinating due to his planning of the different forms in the glass and their representative functions. He has the upper half of the window being the bride's half, which is abstract and free flowing. However, the lower half is that of the bachelors' and it is far more rigid and controlled by the laws of perspective and proportions. This represents the control and advantage that the bride has over the bachelors, and Calvin Tomkins puts it, "the bride imagines and commands; the bachelors react and obey." This is only part of the way the composition relates to the plot of the work. There is a complete cycle of events that compare to a machine and relate to the bride's sexual desires, such as her "love gas" and the bachelors' use of the "glider" machine. Overall, Duchamp's work has baffled art historians for years because of its complex and somewhat contradictory messages. However it has become one of the most well known and most debated pieces of art in history, if it can be called art.