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Fasten your seatbelts
as we prepare for our Nude Descending

As Time Goes By: The Passage from Pendu(lum) to Chronograph

 

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Figure 20

Marcel Duchamp, Coffee Mill, 1911

The first and only other instance in which these chronophotographic cues significantly come into play is Duchamp's pseudo-plan and -elevation of the Coffee Mill (1911) (Fig. 20), where, as in the second Nude, they again plot a specifically "circular" movement. This is the same (meta)physical trajectory--which, of course, is not one⁽³³⁾--that Duchamp's two versions of the Chocolate Grinder (1913; 1914) (Fig. 21a, b) and, more famously, his Bicycle Wheel (1913) (Fig. 22) also share. In addition to their common trajectory, however, the Coffee Mill and Chocolate Grinder also share a common morphology: from the knobbed handle of the Coffee Mill, which traces a circle about its stationary rod; to the three cylinders of the Chocolate Grinder, which also rotate about a stationary rod--a rod which is, itself, capped with a circular head, and not so enigmatically called the "bayonet" (DDS 96; WMD 68), if we again think of Marey's fencers' foils; finally, to a bicycle wheel which, in the title work, is mounted to another stationery rod--this one (like "Le Pendu Femelle" in the second Nude, Passage and Bride), by contrast, forked. If we add, as post-scripts, Duchamp's experiments with the Rotary Glass Plates (1920) (Fig. 23) and Rotary Demisphere (1925) (Fig. 24), which figure the same sort of rod-and-demisphere apparatus spinning on axis, the fact of a common morphology to all these variegated objects becomes evident, as does its formal prototype in the work which Naumann suggests might be Duchamp's first Ready-made: Bilboquet (1910) (Fig. 25), a variation on the traditional cup and ball game, which if correctly manipulated, exactly consists of a ball perched upon a rod. Indeed, the vicious circles all these rods variously describe, or are otherwise inserted into, like the sexual coupling Bilboquet assumes in particular,⁽³⁴⁾ even anticipate Giacometti's own "pendu"(lum) of sexual frustration, Suspended Ball (1930-31) (Fig. 26).

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Figure 21a	Figure 21b	Figure 22
Marcel Duchamp, Chocolate Grinder, No. 1, 1913	Marcel Duchamp, Chocolate Grinder, No. 2, 1914	Marcel Duchamp, Bicycle Wheel, 1913

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Figure 23	Figure 24	Figure 25	Figure 26
Marcel Duchamp, Rotary Glass Plates, 1920	Marcel Duchamp, Rotary Demisphere, 1925	Marcel Duchamp, Bilboquet, 1910	Alberto Giacometti, Suspended Ball ,1930-31

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Figure 27

Marcel Duchamp, The Chocolate Grinder's Leg, 1914, from the Green Box (1934)

In addition to their circular trajectory, however, the Coffee Mill and Chocolate Grinder are also productive of the same scatological-type comestibles, and in this sense participate in the same bodily metaphor: "Slow life--Vicious circle--Onanism..." (DDS 82; WMD 56), as Duchamp laments in his Large Glass dirge. Even without the dirge, however, the embodied onanism of Duchamp's "circular" imagery is not exactly subtle. "Always there has been a necessity for circles in my life", he explains, for "rotation. It is a kind of narcissism, this self-sufficiency, a kind of onanism".⁽³⁵⁾ In exactly these terms, indeed, Bruno Bettelheim describes how one of his similarly circle-obsessed patients, "Joey", "moved his penis as if it were the handle of a machine and called it 'cranking up the penis'".⁽³⁶⁾ (Like the crankshaft of the Model-T Duchamp could neither drive nor marry and, faute de mieux, the automobile heiress whom he did marry,⁽³⁷⁾ but soon only drove on Sundays?) Yet what the Coffee Mill and Chocolate Grinder add to the morphological mix is exactly this--an explicitly phallic "crankshaft": self-evident in the alternately detumescent, tumescent and outright saluting sweep which the Coffee Mill's knobbed "handle" traces; no less evident, however, in the "nickel-plated Louis XV chassis" on which Duchamp "mounts" his beloved-of-youth (if, perhaps, then G-Rated) Chocolate Grinder (DDS 97; WMD 68). For "she"--"[La] Broyeuse de chocolat" [The Chocolate Grinderess], as Duchamp calls her, already a very strangely marked type of what would simply appear to be "un broyeur"--ain't no lady. Not only is she "montée" [mounted] to her chassis, but how she is "montée" [hung]. Indeed, that Louis XV decor should ever have such Size-Queen-Anne "legs" (Fig. 27)--formidable! The only difference, then, between the Coffee Mill's knobbed "handle" and the Chocolate Grinder's cabriole "legs" is whether the body of the mechanomorphic apparatus prefers to crown itself at top with a time-lapse whirligig of lesser phalli, or to ride them instead like so many carousel horses: the casters with which, in a sheerly gratuitous gesture even for Duchamp, he supplies the second Chocolate Grinder's "legs".

But for all her great good luck, just like the modus (non) operandi of the Large Glass "Bride", the Chocolate Grinder's is also the tale of an affection she simply does not requite, as Duchamp describes:

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Figure 28

Salvador Dali, Persistence of Memory, 1931

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Figure 29

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