Fountain (Duchamp)
Fountain is a readymade sculpture by Marcel Duchamp in 1917, consisting of a porcelain urinal signed "R.Mutt". In April 1917, an ordinary piece of plumbing chosen by Duchamp was submitted for an exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists, the inaugural exhibition by the Society to be staged at The Grand Central Palace in New York. In Duchamp's presentation, the urinal's orientation was altered from its usual positioning. Fountain was not rejected by the committee, since Society rules stated that all works would be accepted from artists who paid the fee, but the work was never placed in the show area. Following that removal, Fountain was photographed at Alfred Stieglitz's studio, and the photo published in The Blind Man. The original has been lost.
The work is regarded by art historians and theorists of the avant-garde as a major landmark in 20th-century art. Sixteen replicas were commissioned from Duchamp in the 1950s and 1960s and made to his approval. Some scholars have suggested that the original work was by an unidentified female artist who had submitted it to her friend Duchamp, but historians generally believe that Duchamp was solely responsible for Fountain's presentation.
Origin
Marcel Duchamp arrived in the United States less than two years prior to the creation of Fountain and had become involved with Francis Picabia, Man Ray, Beatrice Wood amongst others in the creation of an anti-rational, anti-art, proto-Dada cultural movement in New York City.In early 1917, rumors spread that Duchamp was working on a Cubist painting titled Tulip Hysteria Co-ordinating, in preparation for the largest exhibition of modern art ever to take place in the United States. When Tulip Hysteria Co-ordinating did not appear at the show, those who had expected to see it were disappointed. But the painting likely never existed.
, No. 2, New York, 1917, p. 5, by Louise Norton. The article included a photo of the piece and a letter by Alfred Stieglitz, and writings by Louise Norton, Beatrice Wood and Walter Arensberg
According to one version, the creation of Fountain began when, accompanied by artist Joseph Stella and art collector Walter Arensberg, Duchamp purchased a standard Bedfordshire model urinal from the J. L. Mott Iron Works, 118 Fifth Avenue. The artist brought the urinal to his studio at 33 West 67th Street, reoriented it 90 degrees from its originally intended position of use, and wrote on it, "R. Mutt 1917". Duchamp elaborated:
pissotière. Get it? The opposite of poverty. But not even that much, just R. MUTT.
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 . That's not a bad name for a
At the time Duchamp was a board member of the Society of Independent Artists. After much debate by the board members about whether the piece was or was not art, Fountain was hidden from view during the show. Duchamp resigned from the Board, and "withdrew" Tulip Hysteria Co-ordinating in protest. "Fountain", wrote the committee, "may be a very useful object in its place, but its place is not an art exhibition, and it is by no definition, a work of art." For this reason the work was "suppressed".
No, not rejected. A work can’t be rejected by the Independents. It was simply suppressed. I was on the jury, but I wasn’t consulted, because the officials didn't know that it was I who had sent it in; I had written the name "Mutt" on it to avoid connection with the personal. The "Fountain" was simply placed behind a partition and, for the duration of the exhibition, I didn’t know where it was. I couldn't say that I had sent the thing, but I think the organizers knew it through gossip. No one dared mention it. I had a falling out with them, and retired from the organization. After the exhibition, we found the "Fountain" again, behind a partition, and I retrieved it!
The New York Dadaists stirred controversy about Fountain and its being rejected in the second issue of The Blind Man which included a photo of the piece and a letter by Alfred Stieglitz, and writings by Louise Norton, Beatrice Wood and Arensberg. The editorial, written by Louise Norton, accompanying the photograph, entitled "The Richard Mutt Case", made a claim that would prove to be important concerning certain works of art that would come after it:
In defense of the work being art, Norton also wrote, "The only works of art America has given are her plumbing and her bridges." Duchamp described his intent with the piece was to shift the focus of art from physical craft to intellectual interpretation.
In a letter dated 23 April 1917, Stieglitz wrote of the photograph he took of Fountain: "The "Urinal" photograph is really quite a wonder—Everyone who has seen it thinks it beautiful—And it's true—it is. It has an oriental look about it—a cross between a Buddha and a Veiled Woman."
In 1918, Mercure de France published an article attributed to Guillaume Apollinaire stating Fountain, originally titled "le Bouddha de la salle de bain", represented a sitting Buddha. The motive invoked for its refusal at the Independents were that the entry was immoral and vulgar, it was plagiarism, a commercial piece of plumbing. R. Mutt responded, according to Apollinaire, that the work was not immoral since similar pieces could be seen every day exposed in plumbing and bath supply stores. On the second point, R. Mutt pointed out that the fact Fountain was not made by the hand of the artist was unimportant. The importance was in the choice made by the artist. The artist chose an object of every-day life, erased its usual significance by giving it a new title, and from this point of view, gave a new purely esthetic meaning to the object.
Menno Hubregtse argues that Duchamp may have chosen Fountain as a readymade because it parodied Robert J. Coady's exaltation of industrial machines as pure forms of American art. Coady, who championed his call for American art in his publication The Soil, printed a scathing review of Jean Crotti's Portrait of Marcel Duchamp in the December 1916 issue. Hubregtse notes that Duchamp's urinal may have been a clever response to Coady's comparison of Crotti's sculpture with "the absolute expression of a—plumber."
Some have contested that Duchamp created Fountain, but rather assisted in submitting the piece to the Society of Independent Artists for a female friend. In a letter dated 11 April 1917 Duchamp wrote to his sister Suzanne: "Une de mes amies sous un pseudonyme masculin, Richard Mutt, avait envoyé une pissotière en porcelaine comme sculpture" Duchamp never identified his female friend, but three candidates have been proposed: an early appearance of Duchamp's female alter ego Rrose Sélavy; the Dadaist Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven; or Louise Norton, who contributed an essay to The Blind Man discussing Fountain, and whose address is partially discernible on the paper entry ticket in the Stieglitz photograph. On one hand, the fact that Duchamp wrote 'sent' not 'made', does not indicate that someone else created the work. Furthermore, there is no documentary or testimonial evidence that suggests von Freytag created Fountain.
Shortly after its initial exhibition, Fountain was lost. According to Duchamp biographer Calvin Tomkins, the best guess is that it was thrown out as rubbish by Stieglitz, a common fate of Duchamp's early readymades.
The reaction engendered by Fountain continued for weeks following the exhibition submission. An article was published in Boston on 25 April 1917:
The first reproduction of Fountain'' was authorized by Duchamp in 1950 for an exhibition in New York; two more individual pieces followed in 1953 and 1963, and then an artist's multiple was manufactured in an edition of eight in 1964. These editions ended up in a number of important public collections; Indiana University Art Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Canada, Centre Georges Pompidou and Tate Modern. The edition of eight was manufactured from glazed earthenware painted to resemble the original porcelain, with a signature, reproduced in black paint.
Interpretations
Of all the artworks in this series of readymades, Fountain is perhaps the best known because the symbolic meaning of the toilet takes the conceptual challenge posed by the readymades to their most visceral extreme. Similarly, philosopher Stephen Hicks argued that Duchamp, who was quite familiar with the history of European art, was obviously making a provocative statement with Fountain:Since the photograph taken by Stieglitz is the only image of the original sculpture, there are some interpretations of Fountain by looking not only at reproductions but this particular photograph. Tomkins notes:
The meaning 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", or possibly "Urmutter". The name R. Mutt could also be a play on its commercial origins or on the famous comic strip of the time, Mutt and Jeff. Duchamp said the R stood for Richard, French slang for "moneybags", which makes Fountain a kind of scatological golden calf.
Rhonda Roland Shearer in the online journal Tout-Fait suspects that the Stieglitz photograph is a composite of different photos, while other scholars such as William Camfield have never been able to match the urinal shown in the photo to any urinals found in the catalogues of the time period.
In a 1964 interview with Otto Hahn, Duchamp suggested he purposefully selected a urinal because it was disagreeable. The choice of a urinal, according to Duchamp, "sprang from the idea of making an experiment concerned with taste: choose the object which has the least chance of being liked. A urinal-very few people think there is anything wonderful about a urinal."
Rudolf E. Kuenzli states, in Dada and Surrealist Film, after describing how various readymades are presented or displayed: "This decontextualization of the object's functional place draws attention to the creation of its artistic meaning by the choice of the setting and positioning ascribed to the object." He goes on to explain the importance of naming the object. At least three factors came into play: the choice of object, the title, and how it was modified, if at all, from its 'normal' position or location. By virtue of placing a urinal on a pedestal in an art exhibition, the illusion of an artwork was created.
Duchamp drew an ink copy of the 1917 Stieglitz photograph in 1964 for the cover of an exhibition catalogue, Marcel Duchamp: Ready-mades, etc., 1913–1964. The illustration appeared as a photographic negative. Later, Duchamp made a positive version, titled Mirrorical Return. Dalia Judovitz writes:
Structured as an emblem, the visual and linguistic elements set up a punning interplay that helps us to explore further the mechanisms that Fountain actively stages. On the one hand, there is the mirror-effect of the drawing and the etching, which although they are almost identical visually, involve an active switch from one artistic medium to the other. On the other hand, there is the internal mirrorical return of the image itself, since this urinal, like the one in 1917, has been rotated ninety degrees. This internal rotation disqualifies the object from its common use as a receptacle, and reactivates its poetic potential as a fountain; that is, as a machine for waterworks. The "splash" generated by Fountain is thus tied to its "mirrorical return," like the faucet in the title.
During the 1950s and 1960s, as Fountain and other readymades were rediscovered, Duchamp became a cultural icon in the world of art, exemplified by a "deluge of publications", as Camfield noted, "an unparalleled example of timing in which the burgeoning interest in Duchamp coincided with exhilarating developments in avant-garde art, virtually all of which exhibited links of some sort to Duchamp." His art was transformed from "a minor, aberrant phenomenon in the history of modern art to the most dynamic force in contemporary art."
Legacy
In December 2004, Duchamp's Fountain was voted the most influential artwork of the 20th century by 500 selected British art world professionals. Second place was afforded to Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and third to Andy Warhol's Marilyn Diptych. The Independent noted in a February 2008 article that with this single work, Duchamp invented conceptual art and "severed forever the traditional link between the artist's labour and the merit of the work".Jerry Saltz wrote in The Village Voice in 2006:
Interventions
Several performance artists have attempted to "contribute" to the piece by urinating in it.South African born artist Kendell Geers rose to international notoriety in 1993 when, at a show in Venice, he urinated into Fountain. Artist / musician Brian Eno declared successfully urinating in Fountain while exhibited in the MoMA in 1993. He admitted that it was only a technical triumph because he needed to urinate in a tube in advance so he could convey the fluid through a gap between the protective glass. Swedish artist Björn Kjelltoft urinated in Fountain at Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 1999.
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 tried to urinate on the Fountain which was on display. 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, 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."
On January 4, 2006, while on display in the Dada show in the Pompidou Centre in Paris, Fountain was attacked by Pierre Pinoncelli, a 76-year-old French performance artist, most noted for damaging two of the eight copies of Fountain. The hammer he used during the assault on the artwork caused a slight chip. Pinoncelli, who was arrested, said the attack was a work of performance art that Marcel Duchamp himself would have appreciated. 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.
Afterword
From the 1950s, Duchamp's influence on American artists had grown exponentially. Life magazine referred to him as "perhaps the world's most eminent Dadaist", Dada's "spiritual leader", "Dada's Daddy" in a lengthy article published 28 April 1952. By the mid-50s his readymades were present in permanent collections of American museums.In 1961, Duchamp wrote a letter to fellow Dadaist Hans Richter in which he supposedly said:
Richter, however, years later claimed those words were not by Duchamp. Richter had sent Duchamp this paragraph for comment, writing: "You threw the bottle rack and the urinal into their face…," etc. Duchamp simply wrote: "Ok, ça va très bien" in the margins.
Contrary to Richter's quote, Duchamp wrote favorably of Pop art in 1964, though indifferent to the humor or materials of Pop artists: