Please enjoy this week’s dramatic reading of Monday’s post: “What do you look like when you’re nude?”👇
Enjoy!
Notes from the Captain
I’m sure spam filters grabbed hold of the word nude in the subject line of Monday’s post and stopped it from going to a lot of inboxes this week. But oh, well. I strive on. I am nude, I am on the staircase! (If you missed it, my dramatic audio reading above will bring you up to speed on the post).
A reminder that I am not French, so my constant back and forth on attempting and not attempting some rough approximation of Duchamp’s name with any accuracy is intentional actually. Roast me. I will consider that a win.
Speaking of which…
I didn’t really get into the idea of “win in failure” in this Behind the Streams video, so I’ll say something briefly about it now.
Failing is demoralizing, but I don’t think Duchamp paid it any mind. Ever. He just kept chugging along with belief in his work (I’m projecting. Probably). He ultimately won after the rejection of his Paris show submission in 1912 (explained in the video) by going on and having it fail AGAIN (people not liking his painting) at the Bowery show in New York in 1913.
“Nude Descending a Staircase, No.2” is now regarded as great. He won after the art establishment rejected it. He won after the public dissed it. Even cubists rejected it as too futuristic, and he won in the end there too. Sure, it’s a slow-burn win, but I say take ‘em where you can.
People are not dumb, but they do get stuck in how things are. They don’t like change—they have to be dragged along to get it—and Duchamp presented a common subject in a very different way which confused or irritated them. Nudes don’t move, they recline. They stand still.
Not for Marcel. Which is just to say…
Be brave in your work, be courageous in your belief in it, and until the next time we meet, love what you love and I’ll see you out there, making stuff.
Your Captain, Janeen 🫡
Thangs from this video episode…
👩✈️ Nude descending a staircase backgrounders
Here’s a link to the article that inspired the post: “Why there’s always a win in failure” You can subscribe to The Groove newsletter “A weekly email that unlocks your creative potential in 5 minutes or less” here.
I did a very 10,000 ft view of the drama of the painting in the video above, which missed a lot of why the painting was really scandalous at the time, so here are some things to bring you further up to speed.
15 Scandalous Facts about Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (Mental Floss)
Another (shorter video).
It’s in this video, but if you want to hear Duchamp talking art and his influences (and finding his style), this is nice. At about the 5:20 mark “I decided no more obvious influences.”
Fun easter egg in the header image of the Monday post. As some of you may know, people have called me Noodle for going on 30 years now. Sometimes very old friends who were around when it came about shorten it to “Nood”, and my user name on most socials since day dot (since Noodle was never available) is @thenoodlator. My license plate NOODL8R is short for thenoodleator of course, but also delightfully can be read as “Nude Later” if your brain is wired in a certain way.
The little squiggle of text in the header image from Monday’s post has a little nod to the nude/Nood play with “Nood descending a staircase” running down… well, me. It me. I descending.
👩✈️ Picasso’s Weeping Woman
We made our own version of Weeping Woman in art class when I was in high school, to better understand cubism I guess. The funny thing is, I know this drawing of mine is still in my stuff at home in Australia. My mum kept everything.
Weeping Woman is based on an image of a woman holding her dead child. It is taken from Picasso’s anti-war mural, Guernica.
There are a few Weeping Woman paintings. The one at the end is not the one that we had to replicate. She was holding just a hankie in the one we did in art class (and it’s the one shown in the video below).
Why was it a big deal at the time? Well, it’s either because it was in the news in 1985 when the National Gallery of Victoria bought it for a shed-load of dough, OR it was because the painting was stolen just a year later by a group called “The Australian Cultural Terrorists.”
If you want some background on this story and enjoy classic 80s footage and some glorious Australian ABC (like the BBC) accents, watch this 20-minute video about the greatest heist in Australian art history. The painting was not insured! Also a weird tangent in that video about taking away the security attendants’ chairs. The artists making the 19 fake ones. It’s funny. Also serious. (And yeah, spoiler alert: they got her back. Recovered her from a locker at Spencer Street train station.)
Here is another (different) Weeping Woman
👩✈️ Nude
Yes, I know I put the OKNOTOK cassette version in Monday’s post, but this is just a context repost for you to show you a few different versions.
This is a song, evolved. Still evolving. Always nude. And yes, I will go to hell for what my dirty mind is thinking, thank you very much!
From the Basement version of Nude (my fav I think)
The OKNOTOK cassette's early version with nude lyrics
The official version (which I’m only including because the slo-mo is funny to me. What do you look like when you move around/are hit with feathers? perhaps?)
Thanks for listening/watching and sharing creative nudity (metaphorical or otherwise) with the world in whatever form. If I missed anything you were curious about from the post—or just in general—leave a comment.
Do something great this weekend. Do something great your whole life if you can.
Do. Make. Be.
🫡
Behind the Streams, Ep 20: "Nude"