Fountain is a 1917 work widely attributed to Marcel Duchamp. The scandalous work was
a porcelain urinal, which was signed "R.Mutt" and titled Fountain. Submitted for the exhibition
of the Society of Independent Artists in 1917, Fountain was rejected by the committee, even
though the rules stated that all works would be accepted from artists who paid the fee.
Fountain was displayed and photographed at Alfred Stieglitz's studio, and the photo published
in The Blind Man, but the original has been lost. The work is regarded by some art historians
and theorists of the avant-garde, such as Peter Bürger, as a major landmark in 20th-century
art. 17 replicas commissioned by Duchamp in the 1960s now exist.
Origin Marcel Duchamp 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. According to one version,
the creation of Fountain began when, accompanied by 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. The artist brought the urinal to his studio at 33 West 67th Street,
reoriented it to a position 90 degrees from its normal position of use, and wrote on it,
"R. Mutt 1917". According to another version, Fountain is the result of a collaboration.
In a 1917 letter to his sister, Duchamp himself credits a female friend with the idea, as
he writes to Suzanne Duchamp: "One of my female friends who had adopted the pseudonym Richard
Mutt sent me a porcelain urinal as a sculpture." Duchamp never identified his collaborator,
but two candidates have been proposed as collaborators. First, the Dadaist Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven,
whose scatological aesthetics are more in line with the choice of a urinal as art than
Duchamp's; and second, Louise Norton, who contributed an essay to The Blind Man discussing
Fountain. Since 'Dada' did not start until 1916 in Zurich,
it is hard to believe that Duchamp became involved with Dada two years prior to Fountain,
1915. Rhonda Roland Shearer in the online journal Tout-Fait has concluded that the 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. 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 in protest. 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 Beatrice Wood and
Arensberg. The anonymous editorial 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:
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.
In defense of the work being art, Wood 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.
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."
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 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, Philadelphia Museum of 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: The artist is a not great creator—Duchamp
went shopping at a plumbing store. The artwork is not a special object—it was mass-produced
in a factory. The experience of art is not exciting and ennobling—at best it is puzzling
and mostly leaves one with a sense of distaste. But over and above that, Duchamp did not select
just any ready-made object to display. In selecting the urinal, his message was clear:
Art is something you piss on. 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 that
"it does not take much stretching of the imagination to see in the upside-down urinal's gently
flowing curves the veiled head of a classic Renaissance madonna or a seated Buddha or,
perhaps more to the point, one of Brâncuși's polished erotic forms."
The title of the work The use of the word "Dada" for the art movement,
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 or Freytag-Lorinhoven had in mind
the German "Armut", or possibly "Urmutter". 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.
The name R. Mutt is a play on its commercial origins and also on the famous comic strip
of the time, Mutt and Jeff. In German, Armut means poverty, although Duchamp said the R
stood for Richard, French slang for "moneybags", which makes Fountain, or "moneybags piss pot,"
a kind of scatological golden calf. Legacy
In December 2004, Duchamp's Fountain was voted the most influential artwork of the 20th century
by 500 selected British art world professionals. 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:
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.
The prices for replicas, editions, or works that have some ephemeral trace of Duchamp
reached its peak with the purchase of one of the eight 1964 replicas of "Fountain" for
$1.7 million at Sotheby's in November 1999. 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 the Fountain.
Artist / musician Brian Eno declared successfully urinating in the 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 get the fluid through a gap between the protective
glass. Swedish artist Björn Kjelltoft urinated in the 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 urinated 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, 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. 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.
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 in French, "Ok, ça va très bien" in the margin beside it.
See also Readymades of Marcel Duchamp
Society of Independent Artists Found object
Art intervention Conceptual art
Transgressive art Notes
References The Blind Man, Vol. 2, May 1917, New York
City. Cabanne, Pierre). Dialogs with Marcel Duchamp.
[S.l.]: Da Capo Press. ISBN 0-306-80303-8. Gammel, Irene. Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada
and Everyday Modernity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002.
Hubregtse, Menno. "Robert J. Coady's The Soil and Marcel Duchamp's Fountain: Taste, Nationalism,
Capitalism, and New York Dada". Revue d'art canadienne/Canadian Art Review 34: 28–42.
Kleiner, Fred S.. Gardner's Art Through the Ages: The Western Perspective. Belmont, Calif.:
Thomson Wadsworth. ISBN 0-534-63640-3. Marquis, Alice Goldfarb. Marcel Duchamp: The
Bachelor Stripped Bare A Biography. Minneapolis: MFA Publications: MFA Publications. ISBN 0-87846-644-4.
Tomkins, Calvin. Duchamp: A Biography. New York, N.Y.: Henry Holt and Company. ISBN 0-8050-5789-7.
Further reading Betacourt, Michael. "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. External links
Duchamp's Fountain, Smarthistory at Khan Academy Duchamp and the Ready-Mades, Smarthistory
at Khan Academy