Fountain
Marcel Duchamp. 1950 C.E. (original 1917). New York. Readymade glazed sanitary china with black paint
It was unexpectedly a rather beautiful object in its own right and a blindingly brilliant logical move, check-mating all conventional ideas about art. But it was also a highly successful practical joke.Form
Dada, a nonsense word that literally means “hobby horse”, is a term directed at a movement in Zurich, Cologne, Berlin, Paris and New York from 1916-1925. Disillusioned by the useless slaughter of WWI, the Dadaists rejected conventional methods of representation and the conventional manner in which they were exhibited. Oil and canvas were abandoned. Dada accepts the dominance of the artistic concept over the execution.
Function
Originally this piece functioned as a urinal. The Dadaists believed that Enlightenment reasoning had been responsible for the insane spectacle of collective homicide and global devastation that was WWI., and they concluded that the only route to salvation was through political anarchy, the irrational, and the intuitive. Thus an element of absurdity is a cornerstone of Dada, and this piece functioned as a challenge to the Art world. The function of Dada work was to reject all norms and conventions, including the very notion of art. To violate aesthetics, offend audiences, and destroy values.
Content
A readymade porcelain urinal presented on it’s back, signed “R.Mutt” and dated 1917. This is a found object, a urinal, that Duchamp deemed to be a work of art. This readymade was free from any consideration of either good or bad taste., qualities shaped by society that Duchamp and the other Dada artists found aesthetically bankrupt. Duchamp took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that it’s useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view. His idea was to get away from the visual, or as he called them “retinal”. considerations to achieve purely intellectual, or “cerebral” considerations. The point was not to see a urinal in a new way but to think of a urinal in a new way.
Context
Duchamp submitted the artwork to an exhibition staged by the Independent Society of Artists (ISA) in New York City, but the work didn’t pass muster because it flew in the face of any and all art conventions, primarily the idea that the artist was a creator. The ISA also had no idea Duchamp was behind the work, which of course took them by surprise since he was on the organization’s board. The newly established ISA claimed to promote art that was non-traditional and non-academic, two aspects of which Duchamp was a big fan. He was even part of the Dada movement, which championed non-traditional forms of art that didn’t readily make sense. Despite the fact that it communicated the anti-establishment values that the ISA championed, Fountain was just too much for ISA to stomach, and it was outright rejected. Duchamp resigned from the board in protest and the sculpture was instead exhibited at the gallery of Alfred Stieglitz, famed photographer and husband to Georgia O’Keeffe.
Innovation
The “art” of this “artwork” lay in the artist’s choice of object, which had the effect of conferring the status of art on it and forcing viewers to see the object in new light. “Dada knows everything, Dada spits on everything. Dada says “knowthing”, Dada has no fixed ideas. Dada does not catch flies. Dada is bitterness laughing at everything that has been accomplished...sanctified...Dada is never right...No more painters, no more writers, no more religions no more royalists, no more airplanes, no more urinary passages...like everything in life, Dada is useless, everything happens in a completely idiotic way..we are incapable of treating seriously any subject whatsoever, let alone this subject; ourselves.”
Artistic Decision
Duchamp entered this “fountain”to a 1917 exhibition at the Society of Independent Artists, New York, under the name of a fictitious artist called Richard Mutt. If the Fountain was Baroness Elsa’s work, then the pseudonym it used proves to be a pun. America had just entered the First World War, and Elsa was angry about both the rise in anti-German sentiment and the paucity of the New York art world’s response to the conflict. The urinal was signed “R. Mutt 1917”, and to a German eye “R. Mutt” suggests armut, meaning poverty or, in the context of the exhibition, intellectual poverty. Duchamp claimed it was a pun on the Mutt and Jeff comic and the R Mott Iron works. The exhibition aimed to display every work of art that was submitted, so by sending them the urinal Duchamp was challenging them to agree that it was a work of art. This they declined to do. What happened to it is unclear but it seems likely that it was thrown away. Duchamp resigned from the board in protest, and Fountain’s rejection overshadowed the rest of the exhibition.
Interpretation
Baroness Elsa von Freytag- Loringhoven “One of my female friends who had adopted the pseudonym Richard Mutt sent me a porcelain urinal as a sculpture; since there was nothing indecent about it, there was no reason to reject it.” As he was already submit- ting the urinal under an assumed name, there does not seem to be a reason why he would lie to his sister about a “female friend”. The strongest candidate to be this friend was Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. She was in Philadelphia at the time, and contemporary newspaper reports claimed that “Richard Mutt” was from Philadelphia.
Details
Seventeen copies of Fountain were made. In 2004, a poll of 500 art experts voted Duchamp’s Fountain the most influential modern artwork of the 20th century. Two performance artists have peed in it since 1993. Louise Norton, who contributed an essay to (the art and Dada journal) The Blind Man discussing Fountain may have been the young woman and collaborator that originally submitted the “Fountain” to the Independents. Duchamp dressed in drag and called himself Rrose Selavy. He gave up art to become a chess master. He later married Matisses’ daughter, “Teeny”.
