In 1917, Duchamp was on the jury
For the Independents Exhibition in New York
which was intended to be a great celebration
of modern art, when New York would finally wake up
to the fact that there was an awful lot happening
both in New York and Paris, all very exciting.
Duchamp was on the jury
being a very famous young artist.
Just before the exhibition opened
this porcelain urinal arrived at the gallery
signed by 'R. Mutt', and with a label with
the name and address of a female friend
of Marcel Duchamp's.
There was a tremendous row about it
and it was decided that they wouldn't
show this object, that it was hidden
behind a curtain.
Duchamp, who had not said he had
anything to do with it at the time
immediately resigned from the commitee
and there was a lot of publicity about it
in the newspapers.
But the most interesting thing, of course
was the second issue of the little journal
that Duchamp edited, with his friends
Henri-Pierre Roche and Beatrice Wood,
called The Blind Man.
And this second issue of The Blind Man
was sort of focused on this question
the exhibit that was refused by the Independents.
It was given the title 'Fountain'
and it was reproduced with
a wonderful photograph by Alfred Stieglitz
in the magazine.
It lists the reasons for rejecting Fountain.
It says: some contended it was immoral, vulgar
others, it 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 picture that you see every day
in plumbers' show windows.
Whether – and this is the key paragraph –
whether Mr Mutt, with his own hands
made the Fountain, or not, has no importance.
He chose it.
He took an ordinary article of life
placed it so that its useful significance
disappeared, and under the new title
and point of view, created a new thought
for that object.
The was a very new idea
and that's probably been one of the most
influential moments or gestures
in the whole history of 20th century art.
Not that Duchamp intended it that way, neccesarily
because I think that he devised this incident
he devised the Fountain episode
as a way of short-circuiting the ambitions
of the Independents Exhibition
to establish modern art.
He took a very sceptical attitude
towards modern art.
And this was one of the key moments
in which he challenged it.
There are really several different ways
of taking the gesture of removing
a urinal from its normal position
and turning it upside down
and presenting it in a different way.
Either you see it as
a fundamentally iconoclastic gesture
or you see it as a rather new take
on the machine aesthetic.
and I think both of those positions
are perfectly plausible.
To my mind, the readymades
still exist in a kind of no man's land
between the utilitarian and the work of art
I don't see them as straightforwardly elevated
to the rank of work of art
because then you would lose that frisson
of something not from that world
that appears to be elbowing its way into it.
And also of course, they trail the domestic
they trail the fact they were ordinary objects.
And it was an important aspect of them
when they influenced the Surrealist object.
The Surrealist object is also always made
from readymade things.
From things that are bought
from the shops if you like,
but also whose original function is diverted
and their utilitarian character
is changed completely
and they have another character.
