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HANNAH WILKE
Born 1940, New York. Died Houston, 1993
Through the Large Glass, 1976
Colour film, 10’
Copyright Electronic Arts Intermix
Through the Large Glass is a film of a performance given in 1976 in the Museum of Philadelphia for a film by Hans Christof Stenzel (C’est la vie, Rrose, produced for German television). The American artist performed a striptease behind the work by Marcel Duchamp known as Le Grand Verre (The Large Glass), through which one perceives objects greatly magnified. Beyond the direct reference to this mythical work, so fundamental in the history of art in the 20th century and officially entitled La Mariée mise à nue par ces célibataires, même (“the wife denuded by her bachelors, even”), Wilke proposes an ‘incarnate’ contemporization of the erotic tension that Duchamp had revealed in his notes, but which he incorporated in a much more obscure way into the final work. Diverting one’s attention towards her own body, the artist examines in a pragmatic and experimental way a material – glass – which represented for Duchamp a “condensation of masculine desire”.
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