The Board of Directors, who were bound by the constitution of the Society to accept all members' submissions, took exception to the Fountain and refused to exhibit it. Duchamp and Arensburg, who were both on the Board, resigned immediately in protest. An article published at the time, which is thought to have been written by Duchamp, claimed, 'Mr Mutt's fountain is not immoral, that is absurd, no more than a bathtub is immoral. It is a fixture that you see every day in plumbers' shop windows.
Whether Mr Mutt with his own hands made the fountain has no importance. 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. Later in life Duchamp commented on the name of the alter ego he created for this work: 'Mutt comes from Mott Works, the name of a large sanitary equipment manufacturer.
But Mott was too close so I altered it to Mutt, after the daily cartoon strip '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 I wanted any old name, And I added Richard [French slang for moneybags].
After photographing the piece in his studio, Alfred Stieglitz disposed of the urinal, meaning that what you will gaze upon in any gallery or museum now will be one of 17 replicas commissioned by Marcel Duchamp in the s. It has been mooted that in putting the urinal forward as a work of art Duchamp, who came from a small town near Rouen, close to the battlefields of World War One, was discrediting the power and standing of the virtuoso artist and the critics who sat in admiration and judgment in the same way that the awful atrocities of the war had discredited the powers of authority.
And what is art? Of all Duchamp's readymades, Fountain is the best known perhaps because its symbolic meaning takes the conceptual challenge posed by the readymade to its most visceral extreme. Mutt a possible reference to the gambler Mutt in Bud Fisher's Mutt and Jeff cartoon and it was submitted for the exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in , the first annual exhibition by the Society - of which Duchamp was a board member - to be staged at The Grand Central Palace in New York.
However, Duchamp was not known as its creator though most suspected him to be. Norton meanwhile, was living at the time in an apartment owned by her parents at West 88th Street in New York City, and this address is partially discernible along with "Richard Mutt" on the paper entry ticket attached to the object in Stieglitz's photograph.
But Fountain was rejected by the committee, even though the rules stated that all works would be accepted from artists who paid the fee. He turned the object on its side and placed it on a pedestal, undermining its utilitarian associations. He then signed it "R. Mutt " and named it Fountain. Fountain is one of a group of objects that Duchamp called "readymades," works with which he challenged traditional notions of making and exhibiting art. In literary historian Irene Gammel claimed that, if a woman was involved in the submission of Fountain , that woman might have Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven — , an eccentric German poet and artist who loved Duchamp and was in turn jealous of him and mildly contemptuous of what she saw as his absorption in fashionable circles see Irene Gammel, Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity.
A Cultural Biography , Cambridge, Massachusetts This unsigned work, now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, was originally thought to be by the painter Morton Schamberg on the basis of his photograph of it, but was reattributed by the scholar Francis M.
As Gammel acknowledged, however, there is no contemporary documentary evidence or testimony that points to the involvement of von Freytag-Loringhoven in Fountain. It perhaps should be noted that Duchamp spent much of his life quietly helping many other artists, and any suggestion that he would claim the work of another as his own runs completely counter to the high esteem in which he was held by artist friends.
When he discussed his work with Breton in , it seems improbable that he would have risked claiming Fountain to be part of his oeuvre at a time when so many who had been in New York in and who also knew von Freytag-Loringhoven would have been able to contradict him, had his authorship been in doubt in any way.
One such person was Man Ray, who had been on the organising committee of the Society of Independent Artists in and knew von Freytag-Loringhoven. In , however, Man Ray referred in print to the story of Fountain without any qualification in an article he published in View magazine about his long friendship with Duchamp.
To reflect the playful, transatlantic nature of their friendship, Man Ray used enigmatic phrasing that mixed French and English throughout the text.
Having found where the piece was hidden, Duchamp had presumably been able to walk out of the Grand Central Palace with Fountain because none of the guards thought it an artwork. Mutt since a plumber made it? Is it not possible? The telephone number given for the misspelt Richard Mutt was again that of Louise Norton. Fountain tested beliefs about art and the role of taste in the art world.
Interviewed in , Duchamp said he had chosen a urinal in part because he thought it had the least chance of being liked although many at the time did find it aesthetically pleasing. A mirage, exactly like an oasis appears in the desert.
It is very beautiful until, of course, you are dying of thirst. The mirage is solid. Extensively studied and the subject of various interpretations, Fountain has continued to exert an extraordinary power over narratives of twentieth-century art in large part because of its piercing — if also humorous — questioning of the structures of belief and value associated with the concept of art.
Francis M. Does this text contain inaccurate information or language that you feel we should improve or change? We would like to hear from you. Read more. These were made from ordinary manufactured objects. He then presented them as artworks. The original version of this work has been lost. This is one of a small number of copies that Duchamp allowed to be made in The prototype for the replica was developed from technical drawings and modelled in clay drawings and model are owned by the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
0コメント