The Chocolate Bar

Bethan Huws’ oeuvre ranges from discreet interventions in existing spaces to watercolours, and from small sculptures and readymades to all sorts of textual works and 35-mm films. Her work focuses on making us aware of how we look at the world and how strongly we ourselves construct reality as we know it, with the aid of language, among other things.

Huws’ ideas can be traced back to the groundbreaking work of Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), the patriarch of conceptual art. That is seen clearly in The Chocolate Bar, 2003. The film is brimming with allusions to specific works by the inventor of the readymade, such as the famous bottle rack, or the painting Nu descendant un escalier from 1912. Duchamp’s sexual ambiguity (he also went through his artistic life as Rrose Selavy) is echoed in the background of the opening scene where a man dressed as a woman (in Welsh national costume) descends the stairs. In this film, Huws interweaves Duchamp’s artistic legacy with the genre of the screwball comedy and creates comic misunderstandings and a real tower of Babel around the ambiguous terms ‘bar’ and ‘mars’.