This large art piece is very peculiar in style and design. The whole work is devided into two window panels; the top one titled, "The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors" has a simplistic space to it. The only object that exsists are the seemingly resemblant three windows. The "bride" looks thin, mechanical and unnatural- not just because it is not a realistic painting, but how the bride looks cold, hard,eerie, and almost, grotesque. I use this word to describe her, as her features are described in a weird way. Her long pointy face gives off the image of hardness or senseless character,which is more emphasized by not having basic facial features. Her long neck is very uncanny, and how the back is humped to a weird arch while her shoulders and arms are angled outward shows an uneasy body composition. Her hip consists of an unreconizable object of which the long, wire or insect like legs even doubles her weirdness. All these attributes makes her look inhuman, like an alien, like a voodoo doll, which almost might suggest the negative character. I cannot identify the object that's mounted on the bride's back, but it seems to resemble burden, supression, deprived of freedom. Maybe she is worried about the future after marriage, the experiences of love, hate, sex,and children.
The lower panel titled, "Bachelor Apparatus" has more mechanical objects within the space, in contrast to the top panel. The middle object, or as it is the chocolate grinder which looks like three drums attatched together. The pole which connects to it seem to make the watermill function, probably connected to the nine bachelors which every one of them looks like clothes on a hanger. The object in the far right seems like disoriented object which may symbolize seperation, and the desire of unity.
The artwork might suggest that the brides has to deal with the responsibility that follows sex, the baby. I think that is why there is one bride drawn in the whole work while there are nine bachelors in the other, signifying the mentality of two genders, mere idea that every men is simple in terms of craving for sex and getting sex, but women although they want the same, they have to deal with pregnancy which brings up guilt and responsibility- having sex is has more complicated out come to women. Depicting one woman here symbolizes this complexity.
Duchamp describes his work to be one of the major artwork, due to the large scale and the time it took to finnish while it was developing slowly. It is quite big, which is over 9 feet tall. He also created a book to accompany the artwork, in order to let the viewers understand what it is before they even start visual critique.
Image from http://www.beatmuseum.org/duchamp/images/bride.jpg
