McLuhan on Marcel Duchamp:
[[ Marcel’s classic “Nude Descending a Staircase” was a major
manifesto of the electric age. The industrial hardware of the assembly-line had been enveloped by the new environment of the magnetic city and the wired planet. As soon as the machine went inside the electric circuit, the mechanical forms of the industrial world that emanated from the Gutenberg technology of uniform, repeatable and movable types became transformed into “art.” New technologies in supplanting their predecessors translate them into “art” forms. The old form is enhanced by obsolescence. Ruins and antiquities nourish the creative imagination of artists and poets. Humanism and ruins are synonymous.
Duchamp’s nude reveals the fragmented, analytic abstractions of the industrial process as a skeletal charade, a retrieval of the ancient rituals of LE DANSE MACABRE. Far beyond any process known to the medieval world, the dance of the machines during the past two centuries represents the most violent and lethal expression of human somnambulism and self-hypnotism. Duchamp’s nude is a comic mime of the descent of a somnambulist robot world, via the stages of a precisely etiolated rational pattern of relentless progress.
Paradoxically, the iconic and abstract form of the robot-nude is multi-sensuous and abstract. The visual sense, with its chiaroscuro and mirror-like power to repeat appearances is the most fragmented and specialist of all human senses. The Duchamp nude, with its appeal to tactile-kinesthetic powers, is enormously more rich and involving than photographic representation. A small child’s drawing is never intended to LOOK like a house or a horse. A child knows its world with ALL its senses and draws integrally and “abstractly.” The civilized adult trained to discard all but his visual power tries to create illusions that MATCH.
The mechanical age of the consumer was unsurpassed by the
power of visual repetition and consumer uniformity of packaging. The electric age of QUANTA and quantum mechanics returns to the un-visualisable universe of instant speeds and sub-visual resonance. The resonant interval supplants the visual continuum as the chemical and physical bond.
Duchamp’s nude is the ghost of the old mechanical world
stripped to its iconic pattern. It is also the preview of the new computer world of “software” program design. ]] – Marshall McLuhan, no date
(File No. at LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA:
41 = NAC MG 31 D156, vol. 128 Duchamp # 34)
