EXCERPT

Second act, that of the Large Glass, demonstrating from above and below, through text and image—but ultimately above all through the text which commands the image thus counterfeited—that ‘there is no sexual relation’.

For The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even is Duchamp’s grand narrative, scattered across a thousand loose notes (‘Sometimes they’re on torn pieces of paper’) and then boxed up (the Box of 1914, the Green Box, and the White Box ‘À l’infinitif’). They project onto the Large Glass the effect of the writing or inscription/description (an ‘illuministic scribism in painting’) of a highly technical eroticism-as-an-‘ism’…