On the Architecture of Looking , 2010 (Part 1 of 3)

In an interview by Dr Victoria Watson, Dr Penelope Haralambidou discusses the devices that structure our experience of Marcel Duchamp’s enigmatic assemblage Étant Donnés. DESCRIPTION Desire has no objects, but merely architectures -- organisational devices that structure our experience -- intended to lure into the momentary satisfaction of an idea. If not actually here on show (The Surreal House, Barbican Art Centre), one piece that is vital to the conception of The Surreal House is Duchamp’s Étant Donnés: its subject is a fractured body, certainly female and denuded, possibly mutilated. As Jane Alison points out in her introductory text, Étant Donnés is an investigation of the relationship between architecture and desire: “We can say with some certainty... that eroticism and architecture were the mainstays of Duchamp’s decidedly non-retinal practice...“ Watson and Haralambidou will argue that in order to understand th