Fountain (Duchamp)
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Fountain is a 1917 work by Marcel Duchamp. It is one of the pieces which he called readymades (also known as found art), because he made use of an already existing object—in this case a urinal, which he titled Fountain and signed R. Mutt.
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[edit] Origin
Marcel Duchamp had arrived in the United States less than two years previous to the "creation" of Fountain, and had become involved with Dada, an anti-rational, anti-art cultural movement, in New York City. Creation of Fountain began when, accompanied by the artist Joseph Stella and art collector Walter Arensberg, he purchased a standard Bedfordshire model urinal from the J.L. Mott Iron Works, 118 Fifth Avenue. When the urinal was in his studio at 33 West 67th Street, he turned it 90 degrees from its normal position, and wrote on it "R. Mutt 1917". This was not to create an aesthetic experience but to make a conceptual statement.[1][2]
Duchamp was a board member of the Society of Independent Artists and submitted the piece to their "unjuried" 1917 exhibition, which, it had been proclaimed, would exhibit all work submitted. After much debate, Duchamp's entry was rejected as "not being art" (and he resigned from the board shortly thereafter). Duchamp then took Fountain to Alfred Stieglitz's gallery, 291 Fifth Avenue, which was about to show the work of the then-unknown Georgia O'Keefe. Stieglitz used a backdrop of The Warriors by Marsden Hartley to photograph the urinal. The exhibition entry tag can be clearly seen.[1]
Shortly thereafter the original Fountain was lost, and years later Duchamp commissioned reproductions to be made of the piece. Duchamp-authorized recreations are displayed at the Indiana University Art Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Tate Modern.
[edit] Interpretations
Like the use of the word "Dada" for the art movement, the meaning (if any) and intention of the signature "R. Mutt" is difficult to pin down precisely. "Mutt" is a close reference to the vendor "Mott". Mutt and Jeff was a popular contemporary comic strip. It is not clear whether Duchamp had in mind the German "armut" (meaning poverty), but he did state that the initial "R" stood for "Richard", which is slang in French for "moneybags". It is also suggested that R. Mutt is a play off R. Mott, the company that produced the Paris sewer pipes.
Aside from the interpretive understandings of Marcel Duchamp's Fountain, there are purely formal qualities inextricably associated with the work. The urinal is curvilinear and symmetrical. It has a bright white, smooth, vitreous, and partially reflective surface. It was a manufactured object, and it was clean.
[edit] Criticism
In defense of the work being art, in 1917 Beatrice Wood wrote "The only works of art America has given are her plumbing and her bridges."[3] Duchamp described his purpose with the piece as shifting the focus of art from physical craft to intellectual interpretation.
In December 2004, Duchamp's Fountain was voted the most influential artwork of the 20th century by 500 selected British artworld professionals. [4]
Jerry Saltz wrote in The Village Voice in 2006:
Duchamp adamantly asserted that he wanted to "de-deify" the artist. The readymades provide a way around inflexible either-or aesthetic propositions. They represent a Copernican shift in art. Fountain is what's called an "acheropoietoi," [sic] an image not shaped by the hands of an artist. Fountain brings us into contact with an original that is still an original but that also exists in an altered philosophical and metaphysical state. It is a manifestation of the Kantian sublime: A work of art that transcends a form but that is also intelligible, an object that strikes down an idea while allowing it to spring up stronger.[2]
[edit] Interventions
In spring 2000, Yuan Chai and Jian Jun Xi, two performance artists, who in 1999 had jumped on Tracey Emin's My Bed in the Turner Prize, returned to the Tate, this time to Tate Modern, in an attempt to urinate into the Fountain on display there. The Tate denies that they managed to do this. [5] The sculpture is now enclosed in a transparent box (see photo).
On January 4, 2006, while on display in the Dada show in the Pompidou Centre in Paris, Fountain was attacked by Pierre Pinoncelli, a 69 year old French performance artist, with a hammer causing a slight chip. Pinoncelli, who was arrested, said the attack was a work of performance art that Marcel Duchamp himself would have appreciated.[6] Previously in 1993 Pinoncelli urinated into the piece while it was on display in Nimes, in southern France. Both of Pinoncelli's performances derive from neo-Dadaists' and Viennese Actionists' intervention or manoeuvre.[citation needed]
[edit] Afterword
Duchamp is often mis-quoted as saying,
This Neo-Dada, which they call New Realism, Pop Art, Assemblage, etc., is an easy way out, and lives on what Dada did. When I discovered the ready-mades I sought to discourage aesthetics. In Neo-Dada they have taken my readymades and found aesthetic beauty in them, I threw the bottle-rack and the urinal into their faces as a challenge and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty.
However, fellow Dadaist Hans Richter explained years later that it was in a letter he had written to Duchamp in 1961, except in the second person not the first, i.e. "You threw... etc". Duchamp had written, "Ok, ça va très bien" ("that's fine") in the margin beside it.[7]
[edit] Notes and references
- ^ a b Tomkins, Calvin: Duchamp: A Biography, Henry Holt and Company, Inc., 1996. ISBN 0-8050-5789-7
- ^ a b The Village Voice "Idol Thoughts The glory of Fountain, Marcel Duchamp's ground-breaking 'moneybags piss pot' ", Jerry Saltz, February 24, 2006.
- ^ The Blind Man, Vol. 2, 1917, page 5.
- ^ "Duchamp's urinal tops art survey", BBC News, December 1, 2004.
- ^ Reference on Emin's website to "Tate Focus for Artistic Debate", The Press Association, May 21, 2000.
- ^ "Man held for hitting urinal work". BBC news.
- ^ Thomas Girst on the urinal quote and Hans Richter"
