Toward a phenomenology of the self: Marcel Duchamp's "Etant Donnes".
Item
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Title
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Toward a phenomenology of the self: Marcel Duchamp's "Etant Donnes".
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Identifier
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AAI9432348
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identifier
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9432348
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Creator
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Klein, Mason.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Linda Nochlin
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Date
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1994
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Art History
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Abstract
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This dissertation explores Marcel Duchamp's last major work, the tableau-assemblage Etant Donnes: 1. la chute d'eau 2. le gaz d'eclairage ... (Given: 1. the waterfall 2. the illuminating gas ...), 1946-66, as a synthesis of his diverse oeuvre. The author's argument examines the complex relationship that Duchamp established between art object, vision, and the observer, as he integrated the central dialectics of the oeuvre--language, eroticism, gender, optics--within an inquiry into the issue of subjectivity, exploring the tenuousness of perception and identity. The tableau's overt realism and directness stand in contrast to the obscurity of the Large Glass (1915-23)--much of whose stratification of meanings, narratives and allegories require textual elaboration.;Etant Donnes ... is about vision and the variable ways we see and experience visuality--physically and psychologically, consciously and unconsciously. The complex manner in which visuality is dealt in Etant Donnes ... parallels the alienation of being a human subject, first experienced, according to Jacques Lacan, during the "Mirror Stage" of childhood development. The specularity of the voyeur's sense of being observed, for example, is magnified and complicated by the way Duchamp situates and implicates the viewer in the act of observation--producing an active and reciprocal kind of observation, involving the kind of gaze that Lacan has spoken of in terms of an alienating unconscious. By examining vision and representation in terms of their exterior functions--as always involving an external position or skewed relation to the object (or signifier)--Duchamp is able to explain how one's sense of self is often defined through the exteriorizing act of vision.;Etant Donnes ... refigures the art object as a way of examining the qualities that make something a symbol. Such a presentation does not necessarily involve a situation in which something stands for something else in the world. Rather, the installation is a meditation on the symbolic process itself, involving some of the earliest impulses of and for representation, which ultimately bear on the individual's experience of the self, and the psychophysiological aspects of desire that constitute one's sense of wholeness and separateness in the world.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
