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Paz's reading of Duchamp turns on the various traditions of
mystic love in which the ecstatic moment is a vision in which the
essential invisibility of the Real is recognized. Paz calls on Tantric
myth, the Eleusinian mysteries, the erotic traditions of courtly love,
and Neoplatonic treatises to situate the Duchampian themes of nudity,
desire, and chaste-because unconsummated-lubricity. Paz empha–
sizes the viewer's role: love's conceptual consummation through
vision. For example, "ProvenYlI erotica and Duchamp's own rely on
physics. In both cases the operation consists of distilling the erotic
fluid until it is transmuted into a gaze. The contemplation of a naked
body in which alternately nature is revealed and the
other
reality
hidden. The Bride's veil is her nakedness."
Into this realm of revelation as mystery, Paz must admit Du–
champ's irony, his parodic stance. Coruscating, destructive, Du–
champ's initial irony deflates art's innocent pretentions to knowledge.
But then, at a second stage, which Paz calls meta-irony, Duchamp
leaves the realm of negation and emerges at a point beyond it.
Duchamp's work is a variation-yet another one-on a theme that
belongs to the traditional art and thought of our civi lization.
It
is a
twofold theme: love and knowledge.
It
has a single goal: to penetrate
the nature of reality. It is a variation in meta-ironic mode: love leads
us
to
knowledge, but knowledge is barely a reflexion, the shadow of a
transparent veil on the transparency of a glass. . .. We are the eyes
with which the Bride sees herself. Avid eyes by which she is stripped,
eyes that close at the moment her garment falls on the glass horizon.
The Bride Stripped Bare
by
Her Bachelors, Even
is mainly
composed of fastidiously rendered mechanical elements suspended in a
huge free-standing pane of glass. References in Paz's statement to
transparency, glass horizons, etc., obviously apply to this work, but
also to the whole of Duchamp, and thus to the
Etant Donnes
as well.
The
Etant Donnes
is seen through two peepholes drilled in an oaken
door. Further framed by the opening in a brick wall, the focus of one's
manipu lated gaze is squarely on the hairless pudenda of a naked girl
spread-eagled on a pile of branches set in front of an open landscape.
Obviously the product of body-casting, the figure 's hyperrealism is at
home with the rest of the assemblage, in which real substances are used
and the little lamp held by the girl sheds real light. Paz has no
difficu lty moving back and forth between this work and the
Glass.
Duchamp, he says, "was fascinated by a four-dimensional object and
the shadows it throws, those shadows we call realities. The object is an
