denny Architectural Art & Design

In an interview by Dr Victoria Watson, Dr Penelope Haralambidou discusses the devices that structure our experience of Marcel Duchamp's enigmatic assemblage Étant Donnés. DESCRIPTION Desire has no objects, but merely architectures -- organisational devices that structure our experience -- intended to lure into the momentary satisfaction of an idea. If not actually here on show (The Surreal House, Barbican Art Centre), one piece that is vital to the conception of The Surreal House is Duchamp's Étant Donnés: its subject is a fractured body, certainly female and denuded, possibly mutilated. As Jane Alison points out in her introductory text, Étant Donnés is an investigation of the relationship between architecture and desire: "We can say with some certainty... that eroticism and architecture were the mainstays of Duchamp's decidedly non-retinal practice..." Watson and Haralambidou will argue that in order to understand the part played by the fragmented body in the architecture of Étant Donnés it is necessary to define the critical and indeed political nature of Duchamp's non-retinal practice. For Duchamp retinal practice referred to habitual architectures, originating in the Italian Renaissance, which had developed around and out of acts of building, viewing and painting. In constructing Étant Donnés Duchamp aimed to short-circuit these habitual architectures, which still to this day are assumed of visitors to galleries and museums, and to install the act of looking in the ...