MASTURBATION IN ART: Marcel Duchamp’s Enigmatic Chocolate Grinder

In 1917 French artist Marcel Duchamp became infamous for submitting Fountain, an upside-down porcelain urinal signed R. Mutt, to an exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New York. The work was rejected.

This was not his first brush with infamy. Previously, the paintings Nude Descending A Staircase and Chocolate Grinder had scandalized the art world. Each of these paintings is completely different in artistic style and substance, yet equally provocative. For Nude, the provocation came through its futuristic composition. But Grinder was an unsavory visual joke. Grinding chocolate is a French euphemism for masturbation.

Masturbation became a recurring theme in Duchamp’s work, and he produced several versions of the grinder image. Duchamp wasn’t just a provocateur, though. There was a keen intellectual satirist at work describing the new cultural landscape, defining the early Twentieth Century as an ironic paradox of machine interactions.

Masturbation is not just a joke in Duchamp’s imagery, it’s a central theme about mortality, morality and sexual energy, and about the wielding of sexual power. In The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (aka the Large Glass), the chocolate grinder appears as part of a generator within a symbolic context of either rape or amoral sexual congress. All of this is described in diagrammatic fashion, painted onto two large transparent glass panels. It’s clear in the diagram that there’s a machine-like contraption, and that masturbation is part of the engine that drives it.

Duchamp’s work presents mortal human inter-relationships (sexual, psychological, metaphysical, logistical, etc.) as machine imagery. The works defy concrete explanation, and his career is among the most enigmatic of the 20th Century. Even to label him an artist, or try to describe his work as art, is to create a complicated exercise in defining the limits of what art is. These are meta-dimensional constructions that create leaps in logic and philosophy that reach into the realms of physics.

I admire the boldness, scope and comic wit that Duchamp brought to his scandalous and enigmatic constructions. He pushed boundaries and defied shame, not to cause a sensation, but to dismiss boundaries. By introducing the subject of masturbation into the stuffy world of art, Duchamp became a pioneer of sexual mores that would take another century for the culture to catch up with.

Check out Artsy’s Marcel Duchamp page.