Importance and impact of Duchamp’s Fountain

[!info] Blog post introduction

This one’s an essay I wrote for an art appreciation course I’m taking, but I thought the subject matter was interesting and relevant enough to the usual content of this blog to include. Here I present my case for considering Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, pictured above, a work of art.

In 1916, during the height of World War I, a group of revolutionary emerging artists gathered in Zürich, Switzerland to discuss their new movement. Legend has it that, when challenged by onlookers to give their collection a name, they hurled a French telephone book against a wall and christened themselves with the first four letters on the exposed pages: d-a-d-a. As their cultural movement began to take root and form, art experts the world around began to realize that Dada was something unlike anything they’d seen before. This movement, epitomized by Marcel Duchamp’s 1917 work Fountain, has had a profound and lasting impact upon our culture’s understanding of art. Not only is Fountain a work of art, but it has also helped redefine what experts consider art, making it infinitely more significant in art history.

Duchamp’s work was oftentimes in direct opposition to traditionally-conceived understandings of what qualifies as art. Throughout his career, Duchamp indulged in a form of “anti-art” called “readymades,” where he’d discover an ordinary preexisting object—such as a bicycle wheel or, in the case of Fountain, a urinal—and present it as art with a minimal degree of modification. This practice represented the least interaction possible between an artist and his creation, and was a violent departure from any other pieces of art ever created. Duchamp himself tackles naysayers in the Dictionnaire abrégé du Surréalisme, arguing that “ordinary object[s are] elevated to the dignity of a work of art by the mere choice of an artist.”

But how can a mere urinal, plucked from location on an artist’s whim, possibly stand proudly in museums beside works like the Mona Lisa? Duchamp’s contemporaries raised similar questions, some outraged by the lack of effort involved in creating—or, perhaps more appropriately, re-representing—Fountain. The most curious aspect of Fountain is that in 1917, the year it was created, it didn’t fall cleanly into nearly anyone’s definition of art. In 1918, many of those people had to adapt their definitions to include it.

Like most works of art, Fountain and its aftermath are impossible to appreciate without first understanding the historical context within which it made its debut. Countercultural sentiments were rampant following the advent of the first World War, and the Dada movement was precisely what the populace was looking for in art. Irreverent and reactionary against a system of institutions that had led Europe to ruin, Dada had found its niche in a disillusioned culture itching for change. This isn’t to say Duchamp’s timing was perfect by any means—his radical take on artistic expression surely made him a fair amount of enemies. But the Dada movement and specifically Fountain were indeed timely in that they revolutionized art and scoffed at tradition during a time of reactionary cultural upheaval.

Perhaps the best reasoning behind considering Fountain a true work of art comes from editorial author Beatrice Wood. She argues that “[w]hether Mr Mutt [the pseudonym under which Duchamp signed the piece] 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.” This is the most compelling justification for considering Fountain a work of art: in selecting the object from many, and presenting it in a different context, the artist assigns significance to it—a significance reserved for works of art.

Quite simply, Duchamp’s Fountain is art on its own terms; it’s art because it says so. Nothing created before or since has been as instrumental in changing our culture’s understanding of artistic expression as was this piece of “readymade” art. Duchamp’s creation helped transform perceptions of what qualified as artistic expression, and itself was art because of the significance assigned it by Duchamp’s modified context. While he may not have altered anything physically about the urinal itself, the altered environment—from the bathroom to the museum floor—is what makes Fountain particularly unique and thought-provoking.