Fountain (Duchamp)

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Fountain by Marcel Duchamp, 1917, photographed by Alfred Stieglitz at his 291 gallery after the 1917 Society of Independent Artists exhibit. Stieglitz used a backdrop of The Warriors by Marsden Hartley to photograph the urinal. The exhibition entry tag can be clearly seen.^[1]

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". It was submitted to an art show as an act of provocation, but was lost shortly after this. It is a major landmark in 20th century art. Replicas commissioned by Duchamp in the 1960s are now on display in museums.

[edit] Origin

Marcel Duchamp had arrived in the United States less than two years prior 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".^[2][3]

Duchamp was a board member of the Society of Independent Artists and submitted the piece under the name R. Mutt, presumably to hide his involvement with the piece, to their 1917 exhibition, which, it had been proclaimed, would exhibit all work submitted. After much debate by the board members (most of whom did not know Duchamp had submitted it) about whether the piece was or was not art, Fountain was hidden from view during the show.^[4] Duchamp and Arensberg resigned from the board after the exhibition.

The New York Dadaists stirred controversy about Fountain and its being hidden from view in the second issue of The Blind Man which included a photo of the piece and a letter by Alfred Stieglitz, and writings by Beatrice Wood and Arensberg. The text accompanying the photograph made a claim crucial to much later modern art:

Whether Mr Mutt made the fountain with his own hands or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view – created a new thought for that object.^[5]

In defense of the work being art, Wood also wrote: "The only works of art America has given are her plumbing and her bridges."^[6] Duchamp described his purpose with the piece as shifting the focus of art from physical craft to intellectual interpretation.

Shortly after its initial exhibition, Fountain was lost. According to Duchamp's biographer Calvin Tompkins, the best guess is that it was thrown out as rubbish by Stieglitz, a common fate of Duchamp's early readymades.^[7]In the 1960s, 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, Philadelphia Museum of Art and Tate Modern.

[edit] Interpretations

Of all the works in this series of readymades, Fountain is the most famous because the symbolic meaning of the toilet takes the conceptual challenge posed by the readymades to their most visceral extreme.^[8]

[edit] The artist's name

Like the use of the word "Dada" for the art movement, the meaning (if any) and intention of both the piece and the signature "R. Mutt" are difficult to pin down precisely. It is not clear whether Duchamp had in mind the German "Armut" (meaning "poverty"). Later in his life Duchamp himself commented on the name of the alter ego he created for this work: "Mutt comes from Mott Works, the name of a large sanitary equipment manufacturer. But Mott was too close so I altered it to Mutt, after the daily cartoon strip Mutt and Jeff which appeared at the time, and with which everyone was familiar. Thus, from the start, there was an interplay of Mutt: a fat little funny man, and Jeff: a tall thin man ... I wanted any old name, And I added Richard [French slang for moneybags]. That's not a bad name for a pissotière. Get it? The opposite of poverty. But not even that much, just R. MUTT."^[9] If we separate the capital and lowercase letters we get "R.M" and "utt", "R.M" would stand for "Readymade" which is the fountain itself and "utt" when read out loud sounds like "eut été" in French (much like Duchamp's L.H.O.O.Q.) together it means "Readymade once was, 1917", word games like this are common in Marcel Duchamp's work.

[edit] Legacy

In December 2004, Duchamp's Fountain was voted the most influential artwork of the 20th century by 500 selected British artworld professionals.^[10] The Independent noted in a February 2008 article that with this single work, Duchamp invented conceptual art and "severed forever the traditional link between... art... and... merit".^[11]

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.^[3]

[edit] Interventions

Fountain 1917; 1964 artist-authorized replica made by the artist's dealer, Arturo Schwarz, based on a photograph by Alfred Stieglitz. Porcelain, 360 x 480 x 610 mm. Tate Modern, London.

In spring 2000, Yuan Chai and Jian Jun Xi, two performance artists, who in 1999 had jumped on Tracey Emin's installation-sculpture My Bed in the Turner Prize exhibition at Tate Britain, went to the newly opened Tate Modern and urinated on the Fountain on display there. However, they were prevented from soiling the sculpture directly by its Perspex case. The Tate, which denied that the duo had succeeded in urinating into the sculpture itself,^[12] banned them from the premises, stating that they were threatening "works of art and our staff". When asked why they felt they had to "add" to Duchamp's work, Chai said: "The urinal is there – it's an invitation. As Duchamp said himself, it's the artist's choice. He chooses what is art. We just added to it."^[11]

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.^[13] 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 misquoted 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.^[14]

[edit] See also

• Readymades of Marcel Duchamp
• Found art
• Art intervention
• Conceptual art
• Pierre Pinoncelli

[edit] Notes

[edit] References

• The Blind Man, Vol. 2, May 1917, New York City.
• Cabanne, Pierre (1979 (1969 in French)). Dialogs with Marcel Duchamp. [S.l.]: Da Capo Press. ISBN 0-306-80303-8. 
• Kleiner, Fred S. (2006). Gardner's Art Through the Ages: The Western Perspective. Belmont, Calif.: Thomson Wadsworth. ISBN 0-534-63640-3. 
• Tomkins, Calvin (1996). Duchamp: A Biography. New York, N.Y.: Henry Holt and Company. ISBN 0-8050-5789-7. 

[edit] Further reading

• Betacourt, Michael (2003). The Richard Mutt case: Looking for Marcel Duchamp's Fountain. Art Science Research Laboratory.
• West, Patrick. "He was just taking the piss: Observations on Duchamp and his urinal", New Statesman, 2004-12-13. 
• Duchamp and the Ready-Made [video podcast]. smARThistory (2006-11-26). Retrieved on 2008-02-17.