Marcel Duchamp's Le Grand Verre (The Large Glass) is quoted in the cloud-like shape with its three skewed squares. Duchamp's work pictures a cycle of eternal self-generation between the Bachelor below and the Bride above, although frustrated (or at least complicated) by a membranous barrier between them. The Bride Stripped Bare is Duchamp's figuration of the feminine aspect of the bachelor machine: although she is ethereal like a halo and is a motor with "feeble cylinders" (from Duchamp's notes), she is nonetheless a working engine running on self-secreted "love gasoline."
She is also a portrait of pure chance, through the three "draft pistons" that Duchamp derived from squares of net curtain he had hung above a radiator and photographed. The Duchampian reference is an elusive one, but along with the drawing in the two works Orphaned Life-Form and Apparatus for Self-Organization, it binds cognition, fantasy and identity to biological morphogenesis and the secret "mechanics" of life.
