Explore the Interpretation of this artwork.
Duchamp's art does not lend itself to simple interpretations, and The Large Glass is no exception; the notes and diagrams he produced in association with the project – ostensibly as a sort of guidebook – complicate the piece by, for example, describing elements that were not included in the final version as though they nevertheless exist, and "explaining" the whole assembly in stream-of-consciousness prose thick with word play and jokes. Dubbed The Green Box, this 'explanatory work' has been described as "No less ambiguously or freely interpretable than [The Large Glass] itself..."Linda Dalrymple Henderson picks up on Duchamp's idea of inventing a "playful physics" and traces a quirky Victorian physics out of the notes and The Large Glass itself; numerous mathematical and philosophical systems have been read out of (or perhaps into) its structures.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."Gilles Deleuze claims in his 1972 book, Anti-Oedipus, 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.
auto-erotic celibate Daniel Paul Schreber Linda Dalrymple Henderson body without organs Anti-Oedipus Gilles Deleuze