Duchamp's Network of Stoppages

The 1914 painting titled Network of Stoppages, by Marcel Duchamp is an image that depicts nine unique lines that all originate from the same point, with all but two ending up in different locations. The top and the bottom thirds of the painting are painted black, while the main section is a mix of a few different colors, mostly yellow and green. The lines are black lines that have a white surrounding, with red writing on the lines as well.

My initial thought was that these were train tracks, or some sort of mapped out route that the artist had either known about, or previously traveled. The black lines look sort of like a map of railroads, with the white outline drawing your eyes to the lines immediately. The mix of colors behind these lines can easily be viewed as some sort of terrain, as the strokes used seem to even make the background look like there are mountains, as well as plains on this terrain. The red circles and notes on the piece made me think that these could have been places that the artist may have previously stopped, or was wanting to stop, combined with the word "stoppages" in the title of the piece. You could even look at this painting as a type of planning chart for future pathways.

What the piece actually is, is three different pieces of art superimposed on one another. It was not until I was doing further research on this piece that I had come across this information. The three images used by Duchamp to make up this piece are, The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelor, Young Man and Girl In Spring, and Three Standard Stoppages. The first two paintings that I mentioned were rotated to some degree as a way to alter the new image.

By using this additional technique, you can make the argument that Duchamp used a type of delayed decoding in this artwork. At first glance, you will most likely think of this painting in relation to some sort of tracks, but it is not until further exploration that you will notice that these are actually three paintings to make up an entirely new painting. An easy comparison to this painting and its use of delayed decoding would be the scene in Heart of Darkness, by Conrad, where the main character was unable to tell that what was on top of the posts on the island were actually human heads until his boat came closer. This would be the same type of strategy as we saw in the film clip from Apocalypse Now