Life is amazing, all of God’s creatures have beauty.
She
was born without front paws and an ear, but it didn’t stop her from
walking, playing in boxes, climbing on furniture, using her litter box
all by herself and being very happy.
Esperança - Hope, in English -
lives in Brazil with her family. She has a Facebook Group called
“Esperança: a gatinha mais que feliz” (Hope: the kitty more than
happy”).
When Marcel Duchamp’s 1912 painting Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 debuted, it sparked one of the greatest uproars the art world has ever known. But after facing scads of rejection, mockery, and even a presidential put-down, this provocative piece rose to the ranks of masterpiece.
1. Duchamp's Cubist contemporaries rejected the Cubist piece. Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 re-imagines the human form through a mechanized and monochromatic lens in keeping with Cubism, and in the century since its completion, it has repeatedly been displayed in Cubist art exhibits. However, Duchamp's use of 20 different static positions created a sense of motion and visual violence that Cubists claimed made this piece more Futurist than a true example of their avant-garde art movement.
2. Duchamp's brothers tried to censor the piece. The French artist had hoped to debut the painting in the Salon des Indépendants's spring exhibition of Cubist works. However, the tantalizing title Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 was roundly rejected by the hanging committee, which included Duchamp's brothers Jacques Villon and Raymond Duchamp-Villon. The pair visited the painter in his Neuilly-sur-Seine studio, where they entreated him to either withdraw the work, or change/paint over its title. The Salon committee agreed with Duchamp's brothers, insisting, "A nude never descends the stairs—a nude reclines." 3. Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 sparked a family rift. Despite his brothers’s reservations, Marcel Duchamp flat out refused to change his piece. He later recounted, "I said nothing to my brothers. But I went immediately to the show and took my painting home in a taxi. It was really a turning point in my life, I can assure you. I saw that I would not be very much interested in groups after that." Nonetheless, the Salon d’Or (a group of Cubist artists which included Duchamp’s brothers) accepted the unchanged Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 for its fall exhibition. But the Duchamp brothers' bond was forever fractured.
4. Its original title can be spotted on the canvas. In the lower left hand corner, you'll find "NU DESCENDANT UN ESCALIER," painted in all caps. The name Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 came later.
5. Timelapse photography was an inspiration. Photographers were studying the motion of man and beast using this photographic technique, and art historians draw a direct connection between Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 and the photo series Woman Walking Downstairs, which can be found in Eadweard Muybridge's 1887 book Animal Locomotion.
6. The painting earned scathing reviews at its American premiere. In 1913, a massive exhibit of avant-garde pieces, the International Exhibition of Modern Art (known today as The Armory Show), was held at the National Guard 69th Regiment Armory in New York. The show included Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 in its stateside debut, and critics and crowds accustomed to more realistic and naturalistic forms were quick to mock it as a symbol of all that was ridiculous about modern European art. The New York Times wryly re-named it "Explosion in a Shingle Factory." A cartoonist famously parodied it with "The Rude Descending the Staircase (Rush Hour at the Subway)." American Art News even made a contest out of “the conundrum of the season,” promising a $10 prize to whoever could find the nude in Duchamp's unusual work.
7. Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 defied the tradition of nude studies. Duchamp's brothers weren't the only ones riled by the artist's take on the nude tradition. Looking back on the Armory Show's impact on its 100th anniversary, curator Marilyn Kushner explained, "If you saw a female nude, in art, in sculpture or painting, it was very classical. And it was the idea of this perfect, classical beauty." To see a nude woman fractured and in motion in such a way was beyond jarring to the 1913 crowds who flocked to gawk at the exhibition.
8. Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 stole the spotlight from Cézanne's and Gauguin's works. Artist Walt Kuhn had predicted the Armory Show would make waves by challenging Americans's perception of art with the groundbreakers of the European scene. But no one predicted that out of 1400 pieces on display, Duchamp's would be the most talked about. The scandal over Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 helped attract 87,000 visitors to the show.
9. Teddy Roosevelt was not a fan. For the March 29, 1913 issue of Outlook, the former president wrote a piece about the Armory Show called “A Layman’s View of an Art Exhibition.” In it, he described Cubists as the "lunatic fringe" of the latest art movements, and mocked Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2. while misidentifying it: "Take the picture which for some reason is called 'A naked man going down stairs.' There is in my bathroom a really good Navajo rug which, on any proper interpretation of the Cubist theory, is a far more satisfactory and decorative picture. Now if, for some inscrutable reason, it suited somebody to call this rug a picture of, say, 'A well-dressed man going up a ladder,' the name would fit the facts just about as well as in the case of the Cubist picture of the 'Naked man going down stairs.' From the standpoint of terminology, each name would have whatever merit inheres in a rather cheap straining after effect; and from the standpoint of decorative value, of sincerity, and of artistic merit, the Navajo rug is infinitely ahead of the picture." 10. The uproar thrilled Duchamp. Far from deterred by the negative press, Duchamp was delighted by the American response to his work. It inspired him to move to New York soon after the show. Fifty years after the painting’s American debut, Duchamp looked back on the Armory Show, wistfully saying, "There's a public to receive [Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2] today that did not exist then. Cubism was sort of forced upon the public to reject it ... Instead, today, any new movement is almost accepted before it started. See, there's no more element of shock anymore.”
11. Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 didn't make Duchamp famous. While Americans didn't know what to make of the mind-bending image paired with a provocative title, they weren't paying much attention to the man who made it. Or, as Duchamp put in an interview later in life, "The painting was known, but I wasn’t." His anonymity was hammered home years later when Duchamp visited the Cleveland Museum of Art to see Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 on display. The proud painter was stunned to find its caption card claimed he had died three years before.
12. Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 sold for a shockingly low price. Records show the piece was acquired for $324, of which Duchamp received $240. Today this price would translate to about $7800, with the artist’s cut coming in at $5777. But it was still a steal for San Francisco dealer Frederic C. Torrey, whose thirst to own the talk of the art world drove him to buy the Armory Show's most controversial work. Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 was prominently displayed in Torrey's Berkeley, California home for six years, at which point he wrote to art critic Walter Pach asking, “Counting the present high price of gasoline do you think that any one would pay a thousand dollars for the Nu Descendant?" He found a willing buyer in American art collector and Duchamp friend Walter Conrad Arensberg (but made sure to have a full-sized photographic copy made for himself first).
13. The polarizing piece earned prestige through public display. In 1950, Louise and Walter Arensberg bequeathed their art collection to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Among the pieces were several works by Duchamp, including Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, The, Fania (Profile), and With Hidden Noise. Since then, the painting has gained esteem for its genre-blending and a place in history for the passionate reactions it has provoked.
14. It inspired many other nudes-on-staircase works. Homages to Duchamp's pioneering piece include Gerard Richter's Ema (Nude on a Staircase), Joan Miró's Naked Woman Climbing a Staircase, Chuck Jones's Nude Duck Descending A Staircase, and even a Calvin and Hobbes strip where the last panel has the rebellious young hero lamenting, "Nobody understands art."
15. Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 was the first of many times Duchamp's work caused a controversy. The Armory Show hubbub fueled Duchamp's rebellion against established art standards. Within a few years, he embraced Dadaism and began presenting his "readymades," found objects like a bicycle wheel, a bottle rack, and a urinal. The last of these he exhibited as "Fountain," causing another outrage in 1917. Again, history was kinder to Duchamp than his peers had been. In 2004, that readymade was dubbed the "most influential modern art work of all time" by a poll of 500 art experts. September 29, 2015 - 2:00am 800 Share submit to reddit
Kristy Puchko Kristy is a New York-based entertainment journalist whose work has appeared on Vanity Fair, Time Out New York, Vulture, Pajiba, Spinoff Online, and Cinema Blend. She's also a co-host of the movie review video podcast Popcorn and Prosecco. When she's not falling down rabbit holes of research, she's playing board games, jamming out karaoke style, or advocating the glories of some cartoon show you aren't watching but should be.
~ ~ ~
Addressing what he later called “the problem of motion in painting,”
Marcel Duchamp here repeats elements of the nude’s body in her final
steps down a precipitous spiral staircase. This evocation of elapsed
time in a static composition resonates with the Futurist works of
Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini, and others. However, by 1911 Duchamp was
closely involved with the circle of artists gathering regularly in the
Paris suburb of Puteaux. Other artists who belonged to the Puteaux Group
included Fernand Léger, Robert Delaunay, and Josef Csaky.
The first "Nude Descending A Staircase" No.1 by Marcel Duchamp 1911.
A year later came the second "Nude Descending A Staircase" No.2 by Marcel Duchamp 1912. The Cubist work is widely regarded as a Modernist classic and has become one of the most famous of its time.
Later John Mattos took on Marcel Duchamp’s "Nude Descending A Staircase"when he mechanically abstracted the original and in a'Star Wars' theme brilliantly reset it with C3PO.
Good bye Vasectomy. Hello sperm switch: Men can turn fertility on and of with new ‘Sperm Switch’.
German carpenter invents contraception switch that turns off flow of sperm.
Soon, you might be able to say goodbye to vasectomies and hello to a tiny device that seems straight out of the pages of a sci-fi novel.
A German carpenter named Clemens Bimek has invented a form of male contraception meant to let men control their sperm flow with the flip of a switch.
The device, called the Bimek SLV, is “as small as a gummy bear,” according to its site, and is surgically implanted and attached to the vas deferens, or spermatic ducts. It has a valve that can be opened and closed with a switch that can be accessed through the scrotum’s skin:
The Bimek SLV, a device for reversible male contraception, is supposed to work through a switch that can be flipped through the skin of the scrotum.
When the valve is closed, it diverts sperm cells by pushing them sideward, which prevents them from reaching the seminal fluid. This makes a man sterile upon ejaculation. The procedure works similarly to a vasectomy, except a vasectomy can only be reversed occasionally and through complicated surgery. But with this device, which is 100 percent vegan, the procedure could be reversed with just another flip of the switch.
According to German magazine Spiegel, Bimek got the idea 20 years ago while watching a documentary about contraception. In 2000, he filed a patent.
“Many doctors that I have consulted, have not taken me seriously,” Bimek told Spiegel. “But there were also some who have encouraged me to continue to tinker and who have supported me with knowledge.”
Wolfgang Bühmann, spokesman for the Professional Association of German Urologists, told Spiegel that he think this procedure will cause scarring, which can prevent sperm from flowing even when the valve is open. Bühmann also warned that if the valve is closed for too long a time, it could get clogged.
But it's not yet clear whether this will be the case: Thus far only Bimek himself has had the 30-minute implant procedure -- and Philipp Renger, who is in charge of marketing the Bimek SLV, told CBC Radio it didn’t go that well.
"When it was implanted he found that it was difficult to open and close it," Renger said.
Bimek had to redesign the device and have follow-up surgeries, according to CBC.
"It sounds terrible ... but it worked really well," Renger said.
The company is looking to implant the device on 25 men this year, and wants a final product by 2018.
Any volunteers?
From Mashable.com:
Do you have a condom? No, but I have a sperm switch on my balls.IMAGE: BIMEK SLV
BY ALICIA MARIE TAN
When we think about birth control, we tend to think of women. But a German inventor wants to flip the switch on that discussion with his latest creation.
Introducing the “sperm switch,” named the Bimek SLV, which is the brainchild of Clemens Bimek. The device claims to allow men to block sperm from mixing with semen before ejaculation.
It’s Bimek’s answer to male contraception and an alternative to a vasectomy.
During a vasectomy, the tubes that carry sperm are closed or blocked, and sperm can no longer enter the seminal fluid. Instead, the body absorbs the sperm.
While it’s one of the few options men have to prevent pregnancy, the procedure is meant to be permanent. If a man changes his mind later and wants to have a child, many vasectomies can be reversed up to a certain point, but there are different factors involved so restoring fertility successfully isn't guaranteed.
Bimek wants the Bimek SLV to give men the freedom to decide whether to have a child with the push of a button, without having to opt into something permanent.
But how exactly would it work?
The SLV consists of a valve that is mounted on each spermatic duct, according to Bimek's company. When the switch is closed, it disrupts the flow of sperm cells, and allows the sperm to be absorbed into the body.
When it’s open, it allows sperm cells to pass through the ducts. The valve switch can be felt and toggled with your fingers through the scrotum skin. There’s also a safety pin as an added security so the switch doesn’t turn on accidentally.
IMAGE: BIMEK SLV
The switch — which is 7 x 11 x 18 mm — is primarily made of PEEK Optima, a biomaterial used for medical implants like cranial and dental implants. Other parts like screws and springs are made of a non-magnetic metal alloy, according to the company.
The device is designed to be inserted under local anesthesia in a half-hour long procedure, according to the company’s website:
Each spermatic duct is transected, then the newly cut ends are connected to the valve casing using specially developed instruments. The spermatic ducts are then put back into the scrotum and the inner and outer dermal layers are sealed – then you can head home.
Sounds quick and painless, but there are caveats.
The biggest one is that the SLV is not yet officially approved. Before the device can be sold in the U.S., it has to face stringent procedures for approval from the Food and Drug Administration. Clemens Bimek had the SLV implanted in himself in 2009, but the device still has to undergo clinical trials where volunteers are tested to make sure it’s safe and effective.
Bimek hopes to fund the device through 5 million euro (about $5.5 million) of investment, including crowdfunding, according to the Daily Mail.
The first tests of the SLV will happen with 25 men this year, according to a report. There are other technical checks, like manufacturing certification, packaging and sterilization.
Another thing to keep in mind is that the SLV is implanted in its open state. Once the valve is closed, there will still be sperm cells present in ejaculatory fluids for up to three months, or about 30 ejaculations. So it’s recommended that men who get an SLV undergo a sperm analysis with a urologist before they let loose and assume they're good to go.
That's unlike an IUD, or "intrauterine device," a form of birth control women insert to prevent sperm from joining with an egg. Some women can have sex as soon as an IUD is inserted, although that depends on exactly when in a woman's menstrual cycle the IUD is inserted.
And like many medical inventions, not all experts are sold on the idea. According to the Daily Mail, Wolfgang Buhmann, a spokesman for the Society of German Urologists, said the valve could have negative side effects.
For example, the valve could lead to scar tissue building up in the seminal ducts, which could stop sperm from traveling through the tubes and cause long-term infertility issues. Another concern is that sperm could stick to the valve and clog up the switch over time.
And if there is one thing that guys really hate, it's a clogged sperm switch.
IMAGE: MASHABLE SCREENSHOT.BIMEK SLV
If the device works safely and effectively during and after clinical trials, Bimek could have a success on its hands. And while it could be useful, it shouldn’t be the end-all be-all, although the company sometimes markets it as that. Here’s one instance on the company’s website:
Half way through and searching for condoms? Need to insert your diaphragm? Forget to take the pill? Is your fertility window really over? What if you could simply forget about contraception? We want you to be able to concentrate on what's important, spending time together without having to worry about contraception. To simply let go and enjoy.
While simply letting go and enjoying sex would be nice, it’s not realistic.
For one, condoms prevent more than just pregnancies. They also help guard against sexually-transmitted infections and diseases.
So the SLV might best suit those who are already married, have families or are in long-term committed relationships. Not to mention, if you have to wait a few months to make sure all the sperm is gone, it’s not the sort of device you quickly flip on and off in the heat of the moment. It really is something you have to remember is there and requires some advanced planning.
The calculated cost of the surgery and SLV is about $5,460. If trials and federal certifications check out, the company hopes to have the product to be available on the market in 2018.
And From The manufacturer:
WE MAKE CONTRACEPTION A MAN’S BUSINESS
with the Bimek SLV, the spermatic duct valve from Clemens Bimek
One valve is mounted on each spermatic duct and disrupts the flow of sperm cells when closed. The user is then sterile, can wear the Bimek SLV for a life time and regulate it himself with just a flip of a switch. Taking any hormones or medication is unnecessary, for both men and women.
Before you can benefit from the fully-developed, internationally-patented spermatic duct valve, we need to show the Bimek SLV’s capabilities in a medical approval procedure. To do this we run technical tests with volunteer subjects. Since its invention and in moving forward we engage in absolutely no animal testing, making the Bimek SLV 100% vegan.
Kristy Puchko Kristy is a New York-based entertainment journalist whose work has appeared on Vanity Fair, Time Out New York, Vulture, Pajiba, Spinoff Online, and Cinema Blend. She's also a co-host of the movie review video podcast Popcorn and Prosecco. When she's not falling down rabbit holes of research, she's playing board games, jamming out karaoke style, or advocating the glories of some cartoon show you aren't watching but should be.
IMAGE: BIMEK SLV
