Wednesday 16 April 2008

Boredom, photographs, paintings, art

I remember when in primary I saw for the first time Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase...





We had just got out of impressionism, and hitting abstraction, cubism and futurism. On Duchamp's painting I stopped and said, damn, I see it! Well, it's not as if you couldn't see all the stuff, but most of it was fairly obscure (like music for musicians we do have art for artists, I'd say). But, hey, here you could stop for a moment and actually think that that is, in a sketchy way, what a person looks over time when they walk down a staircase. Everything superimposed. Seeing this so many years later took me to reading the wikipedia entry, and it has this interesting bit...

In the composition, Duchamp depicted motion by successive superimposed images, similar to stroboscopic motion photography. The painting shows elements of both the Cubist and Futurist styles. Duchamp also recognized the influence of the stop-motion photography of Étienne-Jules Marey.


Well, the influence of that was recognized looks like this:



- Man walking down an inclined plane


- Horse walking


- Pelican landing


That makes Duchamp look a lot easier actually. And it somehow brings me full circle to photography and Trenk Parke...





4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase is really good.

You get your film back yet?

J. Karanka said...

Hey Ed, nice to see you around here. Yes, I got the film back... I've been scanning for almost two weeks now! What a major pain in the arse...

Anonymous said...

Oh dear, I hope it is worth it!

Any good shots come through yet?

Anonymous said...

Memories of my mispent youth on acid. It wasn't all bad.