“What art is, in reality, is this missing link, not the links which exist. It's not what you see that is art; art is the gap.”
To say Marcel Duchamp’s Étant donnés surprised the art world would be an understatement. After a prolific art career and association with the Surrealists, Duchamp had traded his lengthy art career for competitive chess, which he had (by this time) been playing for almost twenty-five years. However unbeknownst to everybody, Duchamp had spent 1946 to 1966 working privately and secretly on Étant donnés, his last major artwork, in his Greenwich Village Studio.
Étant donnés (1946 - 1966) is a provocatively voyeuristic assemblage, visible via two peepholes on the wooden box concealing the work. The artwork depicts a naked woman lying on her back, her legs apart and her face hidden. She is laying on a grassy, mossy embankment, holding a gas lamp in one raised hand. You could say she appears splayed and abandoned. You may be able to see where I am going here….
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