Bachelor Machines: Duchamp or Da Vinci?

Marcel Duchamp, among many other playful artistic endeavors, invented machines that did nothing. He called them "Bachelor Machines." These machines were not functional or practical. When he wrote about them he connected them to the technology in the modern world. One such "machine" was "The Large Glass." It's hard to comprehend exactly what it "did."

Bachelor machines seem to me to be the opposite of readymades like the snow shovel or the bicycle wheel. A readymade originated as something with a purpose, but Marcel Duchamp would select it for some other inner quality that he would intuit or notice -- this was not a physical resemblance, but something more essential. Contrariwise, a bachelor machine looks like a machine but it has no purpose.

I realize that I have a paradigm in my own mind of a bachelor machine. It's what we made as children by setting a tricycle on its seat, and turning the pedals by hand, pretending it was a machine, grinding out some invisible product or substance. My friend Marcel Duchamp would surely have played this game with us.

Leonardo da Vinci also invented machines. They relate to technology in both his world and in ours -- people interpret his never-built, and in some cases technologically fanciful, machines as visionary -- he wanted to invent flying machines centuries before even the first hot-air balloon flight, for example. I have a deep feeling that these too were bachelor machines. In the last 20 or 30 years, I've seen are heard about a number of efforts to manufacture working models: but in fact, they can only sometimes work, and often require modern high-tech materials. His flying machines were mostly unworkable, and totally impractical if made of wood or the heavy metal available in his time. His pulleys may have worked sometimes, especially if they were sketches of working equipment that he observed -- but sometimes he seems to have ignored the weight of the rope that would be needed for a very tall working pulley. Leonardo seems to have been ok at inventing weapons, but I'm not even sure about that.

A Dada moment: Leonardo's famous plan for a bicycle was way ahead of its time but had a rigid frame which thus prevented any means of steering. Many models of it have been displayed in exhibits about his technology sketches. SURPRISE: it turns out the bicycle sketch, "discovered" in 1974, was a 20th century fake. Delicious!

I wonder if people are over-interpreting Leonardo's engineering commitment and expertise. Marcel Duchamp helps me to this thought.

"Duchamp was one of the most Leonardesque of artists," says A. Richard Turner in his book Inventing Leonardo. "Both men held mathematics to be fundamentally important, and both supplemented their art by purely intellectual investigations. Both were vitally interested in process as opposed to product, and took care to record their intellectual processes in annotated form . . .. Finally both were secretive and enigmatic by temperament." (p. 146-7)