Fountain (Duchamp)

Fountain is a 1917 work of art 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.

Origin

Marcel Duchamp had arrived in the US less than two years previously and was teaching French to earn a living. 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.

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 and seems playfully intended to be ambivalent and multi-faceted. "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".

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. Duchamp's entry was immediately rejected as "not being art" (and he resigned from the board shortly afterwards). 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 (it also has "R.Mutt" written on it). Shortly thereafter the original Fountain was lost, and years later Duchamp commissioned reproductions to be made of the piece.

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 deny that they managed to do this."The Turner Prize", University of Glasgow Retrieved March 22 2006 The sculpture is now enclosed in a transparent box.

On January 4, 2006, while on display in the Dada show in the Pompidou Centre in Paris, Fountain was attacked by Pierre Pinoncelli, a 77 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. ^* 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.

The Fountain attacked by Pinoncelli was actually number 5 of eight recreated by Duchamp. Another is on display in the Indiana University Art Museum, and there is one also in Tate Modern.

Criticism

In defense of the work being art, Beatrice Wood wrote "The only works of art America has given are her plumbing and her bridges." Duchamp described his purpose with the piece as shifting the focus of art from physical craft to intellectual interpretation. For example, Fountain can be seen as a commentary on the Venus of Willendorf's exhibition as art: the purpose of the Venus is unknown and could also have been an everyday object.

In December 2004, Duchamp's Fountain was voted the most influential artwork of the 20th century by 500 selected British artworld professionals. ^*

Jerry Saltz wrote in 2006:

Afterword

There is a famous quote usually attributed to Duchamp:

The whole paragraph runs:

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.

Notes and references

External links

BBC news story about the lasting influence of Fountain.
Patrick West, New Statesman, December 13, 2004, "Duchamp and his urinal: he was just taking the piss"
Scans of The Blind Man (1917) in which Duchamp, Steiglitz and others discuss Fountain
Thomas Girst on the "urinal" quote and Hans Richter"

Works of art | Marcel Duchamp | מזרקה (דושאן) | L'Urinoir de Marcel Duchamp | Fonte (Duchamp)