Why is marcel duchamp fountain important

I t is also important to deal with the opposite claim: that Fountain is simply not art at all. Now, it was, indeed, not art; but to say that it was simply not art is to miss the point. True, the urinal does indeed have very low aesthetic value, as defined by the philosopher Monroe Beardsley. But this does not mean that Fountain is simply not art.

But this judgment is possible only because it is art; because it is part of the artworld, and able to be evaluated for, among other things, its aesthetic value. What makes this evaluation philosophically interesting is that Fountain , as an artwork, has a message: that it is not art.

This is a vital point, and often missed by traditional accounts of the work. It carries its message by rejecting implicitly all the traditional markers for the category of art: beauty, craftsmanship, uniqueness, artistic personality, along with the standard ideals of edification, expression or aesthetic pleasure.

What gives the work its power is that it is not art; but that, at the same time, it is art. The urinal, as we have seen, was chosen by Duchamp precisely because it was antithetical to the basic ideas of art in the early 20th century. Put simply: it is because the urinal is not art that it has its particular artistic message; and it is only because it is art that it has a message at all. Of course, it can carry other messages as well, for example, that contemporary ideas of art are misguided, that craft is not essential to art, that beauty in art is optional.

But it can carry such messages only because, in the artworld of its time, it was not art. Yet for many in the artworld, this proposition was — implicitly or explicitly — true.

In the past 30 years, we have seen new advocates of dialetheism appear. The advocacy has its home in modern formal logic as we shall see in a moment , and is supported by all of its tools. Perhaps surprisingly, there is now a lively debate in the area, because the principle of non-contradiction seems so firmly based in common sense. But beware, as Ludwig Wittgenstein said, of an inadequate diet of examples!

In this case, the dialetheism works like this. And as art, it has a message. The dialetheia arises because the message requires the very category it rejects, art; and because this rejection is its message within this category. The rejection of its status as an artwork is the very thing that makes it an artwork, which it rejects — and so on. It just carries the message that it is not. But Fountain can carry the message that it is not art only because it is not art — because its very entry into the artworld is defined by its rejection of art.

Had it simply been art in an unproblematic sense — if, for example, Duchamp had chosen to paint an oil painting of a urinal — it could not have carried this message. This contrasts with the sign that is what it is because it has a message inscribed on it. By contrast, Fountain bears no explicit message. It conveys its message by being what it is.

It is not art, and that is how it conveys its message. That is precisely why it is art. Put another way: contradiction is essential to Fountain as art.

I t might seem that the paradox of the urinal is a cultural oddity: something that could happen only in the strange world of contemporary art; but, actually, it fits a much larger pattern of something being the case because it is not the case: p because it is not the case that p. These are apparently genuine arguments that end in contradictions, with this logical form: p and it is not the case that p.

The paradoxical arguments that deliver these contradictions can be of different kinds, but one of these is of the form with which we are now concerned. This concerns ordinals. Ordinals are numbers that extend the familiar counting numbers 0, 1, 2, … beyond the finite.

The creation and submission of Fountain can thus be seen as in part as an experiment by Duchamp to replay this event, testing the commitment of the new American Society to freedom of expression and its tolerance of new conceptions of art. Within a day or so of the exhibition opening, Duchamp located the work, which had been stored in the exhibition space behind a partition, and took it to be photographed by the leading photographer and gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz — See Naumann , p.

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. Duchamp later said that he shared and approved of the views expressed in the article, which Beatrice Wood claimed in her autobiography to have written. Importantly, Duchamp was not publicly known as the creator of Fountain at the time, although some of his closest friends such as Walter Arensberg must have known of, and many others suspected, his involvement.

On other occasions Duchamp recalled that he bought the urinal at J. Mott Iron Works Company. Surviving records for the sanitary ware firm are incomplete but show models similar, if not entirely identical, to Fountain see Camfield , p. Duchamp was fascinated by the problems of representing spatially a fourth dimension, often demonstrated in mathematical texts through diagrams showing the rotation of solids.

It is possible that the rotation of the urinal was linked to his broader interest in seeing things quite literally in a new perspective. The intimate nature of the function of the urinal, and its highly gendered character, also resonated strongly with the complex psycho-physical themes of the masterpiece he was working on at the time, The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even —23 also known as The Large Glass ; see Tate T , although relatively few at the time knew of the unfinished work and, therefore, were able to make this association.

It was possibly thrown out when Duchamp went to Buenos Aires in , the year that the poet Guillaume Apollinaire wrote an article on the Richard Mutt affair for the Mercure de France. In the early s Duchamp travelled frequently between America and France. He was thought to have abandoned making art, focusing instead on playing chess competitively even while remaining part of artistic circles.

Since so little was published on Duchamp, the article seems to have been based on in-depth conversations with the artist. It was in this period that Duchamp felt the need to consolidate and make more accessible his otherwise dispersed and already partly lost oeuvre.

Addressing the growing number of requests from gallerists and museums for works to show, Duchamp authorised a number of replicas of his original readymades, many of which had been lost. He authorised replicas of Fountain in and In the Galleria Schwarz reproduced Fountain , along with other dada-period works by Duchamp, in an edition of eight, fabricating the objects on the basis on the Stieglitz photograph and working closely with Duchamp.

Four further examples were also made at this time, one each for Duchamp and Arturo Schwarz, and two for museum exhibition. For some, such replicas seemed to undermine cardinal qualities of readymades, namely, that they should be mass-produced items and ones chosen by an artist at a particular moment and time.

Duchamp, however, was happy to remove the aura of uniqueness surrounding the original readymades, while the production of replicas ensured that more people would see the works and increased the likelihood that the ideas they represented would survive.

Simple in form but rich in metaphor, the work has generated many interpretations over the years, and continues to be seen as a work that challenges — or, at the least, complicates — conventional definitions of art. The committee has decided to refuse to show this thing. I have handed in my resignation and it will be a bit of gossip of some value in New York. Camfield commented on this reference to a woman:. Unfortunately, the records of the Society of Independent Artists are of no help here, as most were lost in a fire.

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. Other highlights are Nude Descending the Staircase No.

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