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Prints and Editions. Design Objects. Magazine Architecture. Join Us. Marcel Duchamp and Bicycle Wheel For almost a century, it has remained a difficult artwork. No doubt there was some tomfoolery involved — Duchamp did not choose a urinal randomly.
Yet there is more to Fountain than nose-thumbing. What makes this artwork so striking is its philosophical contribution. In , it was voted the most important 20th-century work by hundreds of art experts.
Instead of paintings and sculptures, art was suddenly Brillo boxes, an unmade bed, or a light-bulb plugged into a lemon: ordinary objects, some readymade, removed from their original contexts and placed on display in art galleries.
Since then, scholars have discussed Fountain to demonstrate a shift away from aesthetics to thought. These traditional ideas, as we will see, are all important to Fountain. But they do not go far enough. They treat Fountain as art, but of a mocking sort: a kind of intellectual heckling that nudged artists to taunt and scoff more academically at their own field. It is what it is not — and this is why it is what it is. H ow is this possible? Not a painting or sculpture of a urinoir — though the latter might raise interesting philosophical questions — but the real thing, a token of a particular type — there were many visually indistinguishable urinals that came off the same production line.
And just as importantly, Duchamp had no involvement whatsoever in designing or making the urinal that was the raw material for his artwork. His contribution was to sign the urinal, and exhibit it as art. It was no longer primarily a useful object — it was primarily a meaningful object.
The artworld is, simply put, a milieu in which objects can gain a new power: to express something beyond their ordinary utility. So, within the artworld, objects express ideas and feelings — sometimes by resemblance, sometimes not.
The point is that, once they are within the artworld, objects can gain a new significance over and above their common use. They do not simply name an object or show its function: they make a statement of some sort.
This, as we will see, is why it is dialetheic. In the early 20th century, visual art was still chiefly associated with craft: the physical transformation of paint, clay and so on. But it was often seen to have more value than simple craft: some intimation, through beauty, of spiritual or philosophical truths.
There was no obvious craft — and certainly no fine artistry. The urinal was designed and manufactured to some standard, but one of utility, not aesthetics. Duchamp was overt about this, mocking critics who later tried to find the beauty in the urinal.
In other words, the message of Fountain was one of mockery: of modern ideals of art. It mocked, not by parodying fine art, but by being its stark opposite: uncrafted by the author, ugly, utilitarian, vulgar, ubiquitous, and so on.
This specific message is important, as it provides an argument against the thought that art is simply anything we call by that name. And this was achieved at a very specific historical era. Too early, and Fountain would have been incomprehensible as art, even for the avant-garde. In this light, it cannot be argued that something is art simply because it is called so by members of the artworld.
Rather, they call it so because it is the right kind of thing, in the right time and place — and exhibited by the right kind of artist. So we might say that any object can potentially be art, but never actually: the artworld is always a specific milieu that authorises some artists, messages and objects and not others.
It is art because Duchamp deemed it so with his signature and exhibition, and the message of this deeming was recognised and, over time, accepted by members of the artworld. I t is also important to deal with the opposite claim: that Fountain is simply not art at all. Remes says Duchamp submitted the piece to the exhibit because organizers promised to accept anything, as long as the artist was willing to pay a fee.
Remes, who specializes in film studies, says that influence is not limited to works of art. Justin Remes. Emily Morgan, an assistant professor of art and visual culture , agrees. However, Duchamp argued that art does not have to be beautiful; that an object can be ugly and still be an influential work of art. Morgan says they made art that was intentionally hard to understand or find meaning in, and had little value so it could not be sold in an art gallery.
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