Marcel Duchamp's The Large Glass and Gabriel Josipovici's The Big Glass: ‘No answer ... because no question’

Abstract

Like his earlier novels The Air We Breathe and Contre-Jour, Gabriel Josipovici's The Big Glass 1 is an exploration of the nature and rationale of the artistic activity. In all three novels, the fiction has its point of departure in the visual arts: The Air We Breathe originates in the late serial paintings of Claude Monet, Contre-Jour in the work of Pierre Bonnard' and The Big Glass in Marcel Duchamp's Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915-23, Philadelphia Museum of Art), which is also known as The Large Glass. While the artworks chosen as the point of departure for each novel are, on the surface, very different, they are linked by the obsessiveness with which the 'model' pursued his activity: Monet's repeated returns to the depiction of the effects of light on water; Bonnard's record of the mundane objects of his domestic environment and his countless images of the everyday poses, gestures, movements and expressions of his wife Marthe; Duchamp's painstaking planning, revision and composition, over 8 years, of The Large Glass. In the case of The Big Glass, Duchamp's assemblage and the history of its assembly are the visual and biographical stimuli for a fictional meditation on the nature and purpose of artistic production and aesthetic appreciation, which, although drawing extensively on source material, is characterized by a formal and thematic coherence that is independent of that source material. The Big Glass is not an account of Duchamp's life or of the making of The Large Glass; it is Josipovici's distinctive response (though not his answer) to some of the many questions raised by Duchamp's baffiing work and by the extraordinary history of its production. As the following comparative study will reveal, the numerous striking parallels between Duchamp and Josipovici's protagonist and between their respective assemblages which are readily uncovered by archival research are matched by equally telling deviations from the 'model'. These deviations and the fictional inventions of the text have been determined by the rigorous internal logic of]osipovici's narrative and by the uncompromising reasoning of his protagonist, the artist Harsnet, whose cogitations, anxieties and mood swings ultimately reveal much more about]osipovici's thinking on art and the critical activity than about either Duchamp or The Large Glass.