Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 and Slaughterhouse-Five

Aaron Dupuis

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.


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Siegfried Forgets Brunhilde and Cat's Cradle

Anslem Kiefer
Anslem Kiefer, Untitled (Siegfried Forgets Brunhilde), 1975-80
Depicting a pitch black, dystopian world, Anslem Kiefer's Untitled gelatin silver print captures a hauntingly eerie scene. Illuminated by a harsh spotlight, the mushrooms stand as testament to nature's tenacity, while the glass bottle is a stand-in for man's presence. Reminiscent of photographs taken after the dropping of the atom bomb, the contrast in this photograph makes the white snow taken on an ashy quality. The singed nature of this photograph is further explained by the text written in with pen, reading after translation, "Seigfried Forgets Brunhilde." 

Alluding to Richard Wagner's epic opera in four parts, "The Ring of the Nibelung," Untitled documents the devastation Valhalla after, according to Norse mythology, all of the gods and demons have an epic battle that engulfs the entire world in flame. 

But what drew me to this photograph wasn't its mythological content. I found this world to be more like Vonnegut's Snowball Earth from his 1963 novel Cat's Cradle.

"There were no smells. There was no movement. Every step I took made a gravelly squeak in blue-white frost. And every squeak was echoed loudly. The season of locking was over. The Earth was locked up tight." 

Slashing through the photograph is what seems to be a valley formerly filled with water. Now it gleams metallic. The long shadows cast by the light source have more substance than shapes casting them. Only the glass bottle seems held firmly in place. I imagine it was this uncapped bottle that housed the shard of Ice-Nine before it was released. 

Drawing on ancient and modern influences, Anslem Kiefer captures with his camera what writers aspire to describe in hundreds of pages of text. This photograph serves as commentary on past destruction as well as a warning against future devastation. 

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