Marcel Duchamp, Fountain 

Although not formally a member of the movement, Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) created some of Dada’s most complex and challenging works. He also took Dada to New York when he moved there to escape the war in Europe. He devised the Dada concept that he termed the “readymade,” in which he transformed ordinary, often manufactured objects into works of art. On arrival in New York in 1915, Duchamp was warmly welcomed by the American art world. He was invited to become a founding member of the American Society of Independent Artists, and was appointed chair of the hanging committee for its first annual “Forum” exhibition in 1917. The show was advertised as unjuried: Any work of art submitted (for the fee of $6) would be hung. Yet, in Dada fashion, Duchamp spent almost two years devising a work of art that would be so shocking and offensive that it would have to be rejected, thus commenting on the contemporary process of art making and its exhibition. The piece that he created was a common porcelain urinal that he purchased from a plumber, which he turned on one side so that it was no longer functional and signed it “R. Mutt” in a play on the name of the urinal manufacturer, L.L. Mott Iron Works. He submitted it anonymously to the exhibition and it was indeed rejected.

Fountain of 1917 was, and still is, one of the most controversial works of art of the modern age. In it Duchamp asks: What is the essence of a work of art? How much can be stripped away before the essence of art disappears. Most avant-garde artists would have responded that a work of art need be neither descriptive nor well-crafted but, before 1917, none would have argued, as Duchamp does in this piece, that “art” might be primarily conceptual. For centuries artists regularly employed studio assistants to craft parts, if not all, of the art objects that they designed. In some ways Duchamp translated that practice into modern terms by arguing that art objects might not only be crafted (in part) by others, but that the objects of art could actually be manufactured for the artist in the mass-produced world.

Fountain is one of the most transgressive works of art in Western history. It is still funny, mad, and obscene; it refers openly to bathroom functions, to humanity’s most degraded functions and vulnerable states, and it challenges every assumption made about the nature of art. When Fountain was rejected, as Duchamp anticipated it would be, the artist resigned from the Society in mock horror, and published an unsigned editorial in a Dada journal detailing what he described as the scandal of the R. Mutt case. He wrote: “The only works of art America has given are her plumbing and bridges. . . . Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary 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.”^[1]

Watch this video and consider how you respond to contemporary reactions to an installation of a replica of Duchamp’s Fountain.