Fountain (Duchamp)

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Fountain , photo by Alfred Stieglitz (1917)

Fountain (Engl. Well, spring ) is a ready-made from the year 1917 , which generally Marcel Duchamp attributed. The object, one with "R. Mutt ”signed commercially available urinal from a plumbing shop , is one of the key works of modern art . His "non-exhibition" at the large exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New York's Grand Central Palace in April 1917 led to a controversy over the concept of art . The original from 1917, of which only a photo document exists, has been lost. Later Duchamp claimed the authorship for himself and replicas authorized by him in different versions can be found in the collections of well-known museums around the world. Few art historians doubt the authorship of Duchamp and argue that the work came from the artist Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven .

description

The original was a commercially available white urinal made of porcelain or ceramic sanitary ware , standard model "Bedfordshire" from J. L. Mott Iron Works from New York City , with the name written in capital letters in black lacquer on the upper right edge when viewed from the front next to the wall outlet "R. MUTT ”and the date“ 1917 ”. Duchamp presented the urinal tilted by 90 degrees, i.e. deprived of its actual function, whereby the lettering becomes clear as a signature. The dimensions are unknown, the original is lost. The only authentic evidence is a photograph that Alfred Stieglitz took in his New York gallery 291 in the year of its creation and exhibition in 1917 . Arturo Schwarz used the photo as a template for later replicas authorized by Duchamp.

history

For the symbolic admission fee of just one dollar, Marcel Duchamp became the only European founding member of the new New York Society of Independent Artists (SIA) in December 1916 . The Society should be an American equivalent of the French Société des Artistes Indépendants ; However, planned exhibitions should not be subject to censorship or pre-selection by a jury or being awarded a prize. The chairman of the SIA was the painter William Glackens , another member of the board of directors was the art collector Walter Conrad Arensberg , who was a friend of Duchamp and who also acted as managing director of the artists' association. Arensberg and Duchamp had known each other since the Armory Show of 1913, at which Duchamp suddenly became known in the United States with the exhibition of his painting Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 , which was perceived as scandalous .

For the contribution of six dollars, a maximum of two works could be shown in the Society's annual exhibition. For the association's first and largest exhibition, the Big Show in New York's Grand Central Palace in April 1917, Duchamp submitted the urinal under the pseudonym R. Mutt in order to conceal his authorship of the precarious work. With the provocative act, the artist refuted the previously proclaimed "free uncensored" participation: The urinal sparked a heated discussion among the Society members, of whom, with the exception of Walter Arensberg, who was inaugurated in the plan, none of them said anything about the obscure Mr. Mutt knew. After the Society had agreed that this machine-made everyday object was by no means art, Fountain was excluded from the exhibition. Duchamp and Arensberg drew their conclusions and resigned from the Society under protest, but without revealing their perpetrators. Despite the considerable number of participants in the Big Show - around 2,500 works by 1,200 artists, including Constantin Brâncuși and Pablo Picasso - were shown, the exhibition remained under discussion mainly because of the only art object not shown: Marcel Duchamp's Fountain .

Just a week later, Alfred Stieglitz , who had followed the uproar with interest, exhibited Fountain in his gallery 291, where he photographed the object as an exhibit in front of Marsden Hartley's painting The Warriors .

Soon afterwards, the New York Dadaists began to lead a controversy about the Richard Mutt case and his supposed art object, especially since Fountain presented in the second (and last) issue of the Dada magazine The Blind Man with the photograph of Stieglitz in his gallery as an art object and was legitimized as such in an accompanying text by Arensberg and co-editor Beatrice Wood . They stated that the artist could raise any object to the status of a work of art solely through his selection, adding a conceptual aspect to the "found (art) object" (objet trouvé) . The incident, which was presumably launched as a scandal by Duchamp's circle of friends , went down in art history as the "Richard Mutt Case":

"The Richard Mutt Case" in The Blind Man No. 2
The Richard Mutt Case:
They say any artist who pays six dollars may exhibit.
Mr. Richard Mutt sent in a fountain. Without discussion, this object disappeared and was never exhibited.
What were the grounds for refusing Mr Mutt's fountain:
  1. Some contended it was immoral, vulgar.
  2. Others that is was plagiarism, a plain piece of plumbing.
Now Mr Mutt's fountain is not immoral, that is absurd, no more than a bathtub is immoral. It is a fixture which you see every day in plumbers' show windows.
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. As for plumbing, that is absurd. The only works of art America has produced are her plumbing and her bridges.
- published in: The Blind Man . New York, 1917, No. 2, p. 4
Replica of Duchamp's Fountain in the Maillol Museum , Paris

Fountain was lost shortly after the exhibition at Galerie 291 . According to Duchamp biographer Calvin Tomkins , von Stieglitz threw it in the trash when he gave up Galerie 291 that same year, "a fate that befell most of Marcel Duchamp's early ready-mades."

For a long time it has been discussed whether Fountain was created by Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven instead of Duchamp , the assumption was confirmed again in 2018. In March 2019, the American author Siri Hustvedt investigated the question of when the art world will finally accept this fact in The Guardian . She had in her latest novel, Memories of the Future (dt. At that time ) engaged in the work of art and its creation. After a personal reading of the novel Back then in April 2019 at the Frankfurter Schauspielhaus , the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung wrote : “Most will still ascribe the work to Duchamp, but Hustvedt is doing everything possible to change this and to the eccentric artist of whom Duchamp said, she is not futuristic, but the future itself, as the creator of "Fountain" to do justice. "In science, this thesis found little support. Bradley M. Bailey, among others, has pointed out the main weaknesses of this thesis.

Interpretations

"The curious thing about the Readymade is that I've never been able to arrive at a definition or explanation that fully satisfies me."

- Marcel Duchamp

For the title of the object Fountain , in German "Fountain", "Drinking fountain", "Water container", but also "Origin", "Origin" or "Urquelle", as well as the name "R. Mutt ”, different interpretations. Duchamp chose the English word for “fountain” instead of “urinal” or “urinoir” in order to elevate the urinal to a work of art by renaming and alienating it. There are various speculations about the pseudonym and the signature, writes Rosalind Krauss that “R. Mutt ”emphasized differently, roughly how the German-speaking“ poverty ”sounds. Duchamp was approached in a 1966 interview, his answer:

"Mott was too close so I altered it to Mutt, after the daily strip cartoon '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… And I added Richard. That's not a bad name for a piss. Get it? The opposite of poverty. But not even that much, just R. Mutt. "

He refers to the then very popular comic strip Mutt and Jeff and to the plumbing company JL Mott, from which he bought the urinal. The "R." was identified in the second issue of the Dada magazine The Blind Man as "Richard Mutt", whereby in French Richard denotes a very rich person and can be broken down into syllables to read "rich" and "art" "Rich art". The abbreviation "R. M. ”can also be understood as“ ready-made ”. “Mutt”, on the other hand, is seen as an allusion to the manufacturing company Mott Iron Works, but also as the English word for “Dussel”, “Idiot” or “Mutt”. The puzzling play on words and the ambiguity of the names certainly had a meaning for the bilingual Duchamp that was certainly not accidental. Over time, various Freudian - psychological and sexual interpretations were added: The shape of the urinal was interpreted as " phallic " or " vaginal ", which led to the idea that it could be a feminine or bisexual object, with a further reference to the Name Mutt to the German "mother" was strained.

Replicas

A 1964 replica in the Tate Gallery of Modern Art , London

Duchamp added a miniature by Fountain to his “box in a suitcase”, the “summing up” Boite-en-Valise work box , which he published limited to 300 copies from 1941 onwards . The second Duchamp-authorized replica was made or purchased for an exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York in 1950. It measures 30.4 × 38.2 × 45.9 cm, but differs in shape from the original. Another replica that Duchamp had made for a friend is dated 1953; Another replica with the dimensions 33 × 42 × 52 cm was commissioned by Ulf Linde in 1963 for the Moderna Museet in Stockholm , on the replica is written in capital letters "R. MUTT / 1917 ". However, the signature does not come from Duchamp.

Furthermore, in October 1964, a multiple of eight exhibits was made for the Galleria Arturo Schwarz in Milan plus one copy each for the artist and the manufacturer and two exhibits for museums. The exhibits also have the characteristic “R. MUTT / 1917 ”and are also signed by Duchamp with“ Marcel Duchamp 1964 ”in black. On the back there is a copper plate with the inscription “Marcel Duchamp 1964 X / 8, FOUNTAIN / 1917 / EDITION GALERIE SCHWARZ, MILAN”, where X stands as a placeholder for a number from 1 to 8. The pieces each measure 36 × 48 × 61 cm. The Milan replicas from 1964 are mostly shown in museums today. The replicas are in the collections of the Indiana University Art Museum , the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art , the Center Georges Pompidou , Paris, and the Tate Modern in London , as well as the Philadelphia Museum of Art , which has Duchamp's largest coherent collection of works .

Although all replicas were made or bought based on the original documented in the photo from 1917, the exhibits differ in shape, signature and dimensions. It is very likely that Duchamp was not concerned with the exact replica, but rather with the idea that a misappropriated urinal would find its way into museums as an (anti) art object.

reception

The artist Mike Bidlo (* 1953), a representative of Appropriation Art , deals with Duchamp's Fountain in drawings and models .

In 1991 Sherrie Levine created a gilded bronze sculpture entitled Fountain (after Marcel Duchamp) , which is on display at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Unlike Duchamp's Fountain, this sculpture is not a piece from industrial mass production, but was made as a single piece in the noble materials bronze and gold - albeit in the position intended for its original use. This sculpture cannot be perceived as ready-made .

The French conceptual artist Saâdane Afif , who received the Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2009 , began his work Fountain Archive that same year . Continued to this day, it currently consists of around 400 pictures of Marcel Duchamp's urinal . Each of these images was taken from all kinds of publications - from books, through newspapers, magazines and encyclopedias to pornographic magazines. Saâdane integrates the individual cut-out pages into picture frames adapted for this purpose, some with colored back walls, making the frame an integral part of the overall picture. The installation then takes place in accordance with the architectural ambience. However, there is one exception to this process, which always results in only one Fountain work from a publication: If the publication contains an image of one or more works from the Fountain Archive project, two copies and two editions will be included in the archive of the work made. These works thus represent a mise en abyme .

Others

During a Dada retrospective at the Center Pompidou in Paris , the then 77-year-old Pierre Pinoncelli damaged a replica of Fountain with hammer blows on January 4, 2006 . Pinoncelli, who sees himself as an action artist , had already returned a Duchamp's urinal to its original purpose at an exhibition in Nîmes in 1993 by urinating in the basin. He was then sentenced to a fine. Pinoncelli explained his renewed attack on the work as a "literal answer" to Duchamp's intention to destroy the understanding of art. The damaged exhibit is one of twelve replicas that the Milan-based gallery owner Arturo Schwarz had made based on Stieglitz's photograph in 1964 with Duchamp's consent. The replica was bought in 1986 by the Musée National d'Art Moderne , part of the Center Pompidou.

literature

  • Calvin Tomkins: Marcel Duchamp. A biography . Hanser, Munich a. a. 1999, ISBN 3-446-19669-2 . (German translation from the American by Jörg Trobitius; original title: Duchamp )
  • Francis M. Naumann: Marcel Duchamp - The Art of Making Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction . Harry N Abrams, New York 1999, ISBN 0-8109-6334-5 . (English)
  • Heinz Herbert Mann: Marcel Duchamp: 1917 , Silke Schreiber, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-88960-043-3 .
  • William A. Camfield: Marcel Duchamp. Fountain . The Menil Collection, Houston Fine Art Press, Houston 1989, ISBN 978-0-939594-10-8 .
  • Beatrice Wood: I Shock Myself. The Autobiography of Beatrice Wood. Dillingham Press 1985, ISBN 978-0-9616071-0-4 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b 'Famous urinal' Fountain 'is not by Marcel Duchamp' . In: NRC . ( nrc.nl [accessed June 17, 2018]).
  2. ^ A b Bradley Michael Bailey: Duchamp's "Fountain": the Baroness theory debunked . In: The Burlington magazine . tape 161 , no. 1399 , October 2019, p. 804-810 .
  3. ↑ a b c d e Fountain. Binghamton University Department of Art History, archived from the original October 12, 2004 ; accessed on October 28, 2012 (English).
  4. ↑ Ian Chilvers, John Glaves-Smith (ed.): A Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Art (=  Oxford paperback reference ). Oxford University Press, 2009, ISBN 978-0-19-923965-8 , pp. 667 f . (English, limited preview in Google Book Search; online at encyclopedia.com ( Memento from July 29, 2012 in the web archive archive.today )).
  5. ↑ Photo in The Blind Man
  6. ↑ Max Podstolski: The Elegant Pisser: Fountain by "R. Mutt ". Retrieved April 6, 2009 .
  7. ^ Martin Gayford: Duchamp's Fountain: The practical joke that launched an artistic revolution. The Daily Telegraph, February 22, 2008, accessed April 6, 2009 .
  8. ↑ A woman in the men's room: when will the art world recognize the real artist behind Duchamp's Fountain? , theguardian.com, March 29, 2019
  9. ↑ Michael Hierholzer: Back then in New York , faz.net, April 11, 2019, accessed on May 8, 2019
  10. ↑ Calvin Tomkins: Duchamp , p. 159
  11. ^ Otto Hahn: Passport No. G2255300 . In: Art and Artists . tape 1 , No.4. London 1966, p. 10 .
  12. ^ Fountain (after Marcel Duchamp: AP) ( Memento of November 10, 2012 in the Internet Archive )
  13. ^ Audio guide from the Whitney Museum to Levine's "Fountain" .
  14. ↑ Elena Filipovic, Xavier Hufkens: Sâadane Afif. Fontaines . Triangle Books, 2014, ISBN 978-2-930777-05-4 , pp. 63–71
  15. ↑ Valentina Vlasic : Saâdane Afif , in: The Present Order is the Disorder of the Future , Series Museum Kurhaus Kleve - Ewald Mataré Collection No. 62, Freundeskreis Museum Kurhaus and Koekkoek-Haus Kleve eV (ed.), July 14 to September 15, 2013, p. 47
  16. ↑ Elena Filipovic, Xavier Hufkens:  Sâadane Afif. Fontaines . Triangle Books, p. 21
  17. ↑ Johannes Willms: How to make art with a hammer. (No longer available online.) Sueddeutsche.de, January 27, 2007, archived from the original on August 8, 2009 ; Retrieved April 6, 2009 .

Illustrations

  1. ↑ Marcel Duchamp: Boite-en-Valise (box in case) , 1941, edition 1968, LWL-Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte , Münster . → Photo of the work ( Memento from April 15, 2013 in the web archive archive.today )