Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2, 1912

"And Billy traveled in time to the zoo on Tralfamadore. He was forty-four years old, on display under a geodesic dome. He was reclining  on the lounge chair which had been his cradle during his trip through space. He was naked. The Tralfamadorians were interested in his body- all of it." - Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

The gears turned, thoughts formed, and inspiration took hold. I looked at the Duchamp, then at the bookshelf, then at the Duchamp, then back at the bookshelf. To my surprise neither was on a horse. Pop-culture references aside, I felt sincerely relieved as I walked to the shelf and picked up a favorite: Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five. After weeks of procrastination and second guesses, I had found a connection that I wished to explore. Now I just had to write about it...

Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2  captures in one image a concept that Vonnegut spends an entire novel exploring: The perception of time. Duchamp carefully illustrates the nude figure at each point in its stroll downstairs, allowing the viewer a perspective impossible to the naked eye. This investigation of the subject's mechanics, form, and the "fourth dimension" is similar to Vonnegut's use of the Tralfamadorian's ability to see time as a narrative technique. Just as the aliens study Billy Pilgrim and Montana Wildhack in the zoo on Tralfamadore, Duchamp's work explores the human body at several points in time in a single work, obscuring the figure to barely identifiable abstraction. While the painting shocked the public when shown at the Armory Show in 1913, Trafalmadorians would likely note that the figure had always descended the stairs, would always descend the stairs, and descends the stairs even as I type these words. While staggering, concepts such as these defined the early Cubist movement.