Fountain, Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp was a French-American artist, sculptor, chess player, and writer. He is considered one of the most influential figures in the art of the XX century mostly because of his radical ideas.
He was born in 1887 in Blainville-Crevon, France. Duchamp’s grandfather was an artist, so love and interest in the art in the family were the merit of the grandfather. In school, Marcel Duchamp was good at math and art. In the age of fourteen, he began to seriously get involved in drawing.
Marcel Duchamp pointedly avoided the role of the artist and painting in the traditional sense of the word. Instead of this, he practiced a method of shocking the audience with ready-made things which are become an art object by the will and the signature of the author, the context of an exhibition or a museum.
His the most famous work is ‘Fountain’. Duchamp bought a urinal in an ordinary plumbing shop in New York. Then he signed it “R. Mutt 1917” and gave it a title ‘Fountain’. In a few hours, an ordinary urinal was transformed into a piece of art. Duchamp called his new invention the ready-made art. The meaning of this art is when you take an ordinary object, deprive it its functions, give it a title, and then show it in an exhibition.
Duchamp wanted to show his new art in the exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists. According to the rules of this Society, any artist who wanted to show his art needed to pay 1$ to become a member of the Society and pay 5$ for each of two pieces of art he wanted to show in an exhibition of the Society. Duchamp was the head of the Society and a member of the organizing committee of the exhibition. It is the reason why he didn’t want to use his real name and used the alias ‘R.Mutt’.
The offer of this urinal for the exhibition was kind of his joke on the art society. The inscription ‘R.Mutt’ has its own explanation. By one version, Mutt is the name of the character of the comic ‘Mutt and Jeff’. Mutt in this comic is a fraudster with a passion for adventure and the development of idiotic solutions for rapid enrichment. ‘R’ stands for Richard, French slang for ‘moneybags’. Using ‘Fountain’, Duchamp wanted to make a prank for greedy collectors and ignorant, but pathos gallery owners.
There was another purpose of this piece of art. Duchamp wanted to change the meaning of ‘piece of art’. He wanted to prove that only an artist can decide if something is a piece of art or not. Before Duchamp, there was a conception that a material is primary, and an artist has only an opportunity to embody his ideas using brushes, sculpt, or something else. Duchamp idea was to prove that idea is primary and a material is secondary. He believed that anything can be a piece of art if an artist wants it to be.
‘Fountain’ by R.Mutt wasn’t shown in the exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists. Conservative members of the Society found this exhibit too offensive and vulgar. After this incident, Duchamp left the leadership of the Society. The main purpose of the Society was to give an opportunity to every artist express themselves. They broke their own rule when they rejected R.Mutt’s work.
A few days later, Duchamp’s friend, Alfred Stieglitz, took a photo of this ‘Fountain’ in his gallery “291”. Actually, it could be already another urinal but after the photo, this object disappeared. The fact that this photo was taken by a respected photographer in the art world who owned a famous gallery in Manhattan was important for two reasons. Firstly, it certified the status of ‘Faountain’ as a piece of art. Secondly, there was a proof of its existence.
One small object made a real revolution in the art world. Duchamp offered a new understanding of art. By his opinion, the role of an artist is similar the role of a philosopher, and it doesn’t matter if an artist can draw or not. The artist’s task is to try to understand the world and express it using ideas the only purpose of which is to be ideas.
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