Art: 'Dancing Around the Bride' with Duchamp's modern guests

An exhibition like the current "Dancing Around the Bride" had to happen eventually at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which holds the largest and most important collection anywhere of art by Marcel Duchamp.

Its premise is simple, and hardly a surprise encounter, given that its essential truth has been known for decades. Duchamp was one of the most influential artists of the last 100 years. Among those he influenced directly were two important visual artists, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg; a dancer and choreographer, Merce Cunningham; and a composer, John Cage.

All five knew one another and some worked together. Duchamp died in 1968, Cage in 1992 (this year marks the centennial of his birth), Rauschenberg in 2008, and Cunningham in 2009. Only Johns, now 82, the youngest, survives.

Each is a cultural celebrity, but Duchamp is the paterfamilias, the center of attention in "Bride," whose title refers to his most famous creation, the persistently enigmatic construction known as The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even - or The Large Glass for short.

In the early part of the last century, when modernism was picking up steam, the French-born Duchamp startled and outraged the art world with a series of aesthetic provocations.

First was his painting Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2), the sensation of the famous 1913 Armory Show in New York. A journalist described it as "an explosion in a shingle factory," but in retrospect its amalgam of cubist and futurist devices didn't, and still doesn't, represent a pure leap into the void.

The first of the pieces he called "readymades" did. One was a galvanized-iron rack for drying bottles, which the artist bought in a department store and presented to the public as art.

Another was a bicycle wheel mounted upside down on a wooden stool. When Rauschenberg first saw it, he proclaimed Bicycle Wheel "the most fantastic piece of sculpture I'd ever seen." In 1985, he made his own version, with three wheels stacked atop each other. Both (Duchamp's is a 1964 replica) are in "Bride," along with a replica of a urinal Duchamp put into a 1917 exhibition as Fountain.

Finally, over an eight-year period, Duchamp assembled The Large Glass, which art historians and critics have been analyzing for 90 years. It's usually interpreted as a schematic diagram of erotic desire or, alternatively, as a humorous critique of the plethora of pretentious musings it spawned.

The Large Glass is quintessential Duchamp; the Art Museum, which owns it, makes it the centerpiece of a permanent gallery devoted to the artist. This room and two adjacent have been reinstalled as part of "Bride" to include works by Cage, Johns, and Rauschenberg.

Duchamp's impact on modern art isn't so much these iconic works for themselves as for the philosophy they represent - that art is an elusive and possibly indefinable concept, that art is what someone who proclaims himself an artist says it is, and that art can exist just as an idea, which led in the 1960s to the emergence of conceptual art.

Besides using ordinary materials in his art, Duchamp introduced chance as a compositional tactic - Cage and Cunningham in particular would profit considerably from this innovation.

All of this has been known for years; "Bride" attempts to animate the history by bringing together the artists who carried Duchamp's beliefs into the cultural mainstream.

Curator Carlos Basualdo and project assistant Erica F. Battle have brought together more than 100 objects to re-create the spirit of a seminal period of cross-fertilization that began in the early 1950s.

This isn't easily accomplished - because the links to Duchamp aren't always self-evident, because both visual and performing media are involved, and because the visual artists, Johns and Rauschenberg, worked in distinctly different ways.

How to blend these coherently, in a way that makes the exhibition exciting and revelatory as well as historically resonant? This, after all, was a time when real life intruded on the cloistered world of high art, when objects that most people would consider junk became valorized, particularly by Rauschenberg in mixed-media paintings he called "combines."

One way is to play Cage's music on programmed pianos that activate themselves. There are two, one in the Great Stair Hall near the show's entrance and one in the large exhibition space where former members of Cunningham's now-disbanded dance company will perform from time to time throughout the show's run (Sunday at 1 and 3 p.m. and again from Jan. 1 to 21).

French artist Philippe Parreno organized the installation visually and spatially by establishing a sequence of sounds, including Cage's music, and lighting that guides visitors through the show.

It opens with works by Duchamp, particularly the 1912 painting Bride, that prefigure The Large Glass. The next section explores how the artists used chance in their work; Cage, for example, dropped inked strings from a height onto paper, then pressed them onto the surface to create abstract images.

These two sections are like a textbook, a bit academic and not always stimulating visually. Some excitement arrives in the third section, "The Main Stage," where Cage music plays, dancers bounce and glide around the platform, and some lesser-known works from the 1950s and '60s by Rauschenberg and Johns hang.

The Rauschenberg combine Minutiae shows how he incorporated ordinary objects such as mirrors and cutlery into paintings that seem more impulsive than composed, while Johns' 1964 picture According to What features his use of words projecting from the surface.

The last gallery is devoted to chess (a major preoccupation for Duchamp for most of his life), Cage scores, and a print Rauschenberg made by running an inked automobile tire across paper. After the big room, it's a bit of a letdown.

The exhibition does its best to braid these four threads, but it leaves unanswered the question of how well avant-garde works that were executed in the heat of discovery and rule-breaking have held up over half a century.

Based on this sample, I would say not all that well, because innovation often has a brief lifespan. The historical narrative hangs together, but objects alone, especially mundane ones, can't recapture the spirit of the time, or re-create the cultural context that gives these things meaning.

Except for a few major paintings by Johns and Rauschenberg and the Cunningham dancers, "Bride" doesn't quite rise to the level of an experience that stirs the blood as well as the brain. Too often it's a bit like reading a doctoral thesis in art history.