The Fountain that Divided the World

• and Now for Something Completely Different hi welcome to stories of art my name is today I want to tell you the story of one of the controversies in art it is the story about this the fountain it was signed by R Mutt and I'm sure you've seen it or think you've seen it because very few people have ever seen the original but I'll get to that in a minute it's an object that has divided opinion for over a century now and whether you like it or not it became quite influential in the development of modern art in the mid 20th century in fact it's one of those Works where you can say it is truly iconic everybody seems to know it and still today many people have strong opinions about it some see it as part of the movements that freed art from its former constraints that is to say it made much of what later became conceptual art possible and others maintain that this is nonsense that a five-year-old could make and frankly both of these can be seen as valid points so I thought it would be a good idea to tell you the story behind it and go over the many controversies about it and there are many of those in fact in the last few years a new one has emerged but I'll get to that later in the video but hopefully by the end of this video you will have gained an understanding of this work of the opinions about it and maybe an appreciation for those who hold the opposite view of yours in this debate let's start at the beginning though this object work of art its story starts outside of itself it starts with an exhibition in New York in 1917 there was to be an exhibition it was organized by the Society of Independent Artists that had been formed about a year earlier now they in turn had been inspired by an earlier French group called The Societe de artiste independent and they had been formed in 1884. now they had been formed as a reaction to the official Salon in Paris those had been those large exhibitions where you could enter works of art but only if you were an artist and only if you were a member of the Art Academy the academic de bozar and then only if you pass the selection committee that determined whether or not the quality of your work was satisfactory and the purpose of these exhibitions to many people was that there will be prizes given out by a jury now the associative artist independent tried a different approach they held exhibitions where anyone could enter a work if they paid an entry fee and in New York they wanted to copy this process and so they founded the Society of Independent Artists to have an exhibition on those very same principles the idea was that it was more democratic the audience was to decide whether or not something was suitable or was good art not some panel of so-called experts and then a jury the Americans even went so far as to decide that they would not place the artwork in any sort of categories or any sort of order artwork wouldn't even be sorted by type like sculpture or painting instead they would be presented simply placed in an exhibition Hall in alphabetical order based on the name of the artist the the last name so there was a group of people involved in this society and many of the names are no longer that well known but maybe you've heard of people like Man Ray and Joseph Stella and most importantly for this story Marcel Duchamp you see many years later 45 years to be exact in 1962 Marcel Duchamp claimed that he submitted the fountain to the exhibition in 1917 and ever since he has been credited with it but as we shall see in this video that may not be as straightforward as all that nevertheless he plays a central role in the story so let's have a look at him Marcel Duchamp was French he had come to the United States about five years earlier now Duchamp had mainly been known as a painter in Europe he was associated with the Cubist and was fascinated by movement I suppose now his most famous painting would be nude descending a staircase number two which is this one it had not been received well in 1912 in Paris though according to Duchamp it had been rejected from the exhibition of the independence in Paris which of course would have been impossible because anyone could submit anything but according to him he had been pressured to remove it from the exhibition before the exhibition opened and that contributed to him becoming disillusioned with a Paris art scene and afterwards he moved to New York there he became involved in the local avant-garde movement he had befriended Walter Conrad arensberg who was to become his main benefactor ironsberg came from an industrialist family and he had plenty of money and he gave dushan a place to live and a studio to work in in New York deschamp for his part kept painting and exhibited his new and existing Works in various exhibitions most notably the Armory show in 1913 where his nude descending a staircase was exhibited and was actually admired many of the works that he produced in those days he sold to arensberg although the new descending in staircase was first sold to Frederick C Tori and ahrensburg later bought it from him but only after Duchamp had made a copy of it to replace the original which I suppose is then new descending staircase number two number two but never mind the point is Aaron spare collected almost everything that Duchamp made now in 1916 both aaronsberg and Duchamp were part of the group that started the Society of Independent Artists and helped organized the 1917 exhibition Duchamp had announced that he would submit a painting titled Chula pisteria coordinated but he never did apparently he never even made the painting or maybe he did and then rejected it but no one has ever seen it instead thousands of other artists mostly from the east coast of the United States but also from other parts of the world submitted Works to the exhibition one of those was a woman who submitted the fountain she paid the entry fee and she left and no one has ever heard of her after that but then the organizing Committee of the exhibition saw the fountain and decided that it was not suitable for the exhibition and they rejected it which according to their own founding principles was impossible but they had a vote on it and the majority said that it was a joke and not suitable this led to conflict within the organizing committee which in the end meant that Marcel Duchamp and arensberg resigned and Duchamp claimed that he withdrew his painting tulip Mania except that he had never entered it the resignation of ducha and arnswear came at just the right moment just when the Press was there to cover the opening of the exhibition that is why it made the papers the remaining board issued a statement saying and I quote the fountain may be a very useful object in its place but its place is not an art exhibition and it is by no definition a work of art end quote and that would have been that except that Duchamp and Man Ray and a few others retrieved The Fountain and brought it to the studio of Alfred stieglitz who made this famous photograph of it this is the last known image of the fountain actually it's the only image of it that we can be certain of they then published it in a magazine of sorts called the blind man that magazine was founded by a group of like-minded avant-garde artist in the wake of this exhibition of the independence and in it they wrote about ideas of Art and it contained an article with this photograph of the fountain now the blind man was not what you'd call a successful magazine there are only two issues that were ever made before the makers decided to call it quits and of those only a few hundred were printed originally I mentioned this because I think it's important to understand that this was a very small group of people that were mostly ignored by the public at large it was much later that these Works would gain prominence and actually only because they had written about it and made some photographs because none of the early ready-mates of this era actually survive they were all just thrown away because that is what this is it is a ready-made the idea that you can take an object place it outside of its normal use and then look at it with new eyes and the idea is actually not that it's art it's supposed to be anti-art it's something that is not to be looked at for its beauty but something that should provoke thought Duchamp for instance talked about retinal art which is art that you look at and he wanted to leave that behind he wanted to make art that you would think about instead because in the period 1913-1917 Duchamp had started making ready-mades and it's possible that he even coined a term for it he was in contact with some other artists who were doing this as well and that often became associated with the Dada movement which was an anti-establishment anti-art movement that often treated tradition with disdain and was very often meant to be funny they are often satirical comments on Art they often wanted to ridicule traditional art and the establishment now one of duchamp's now famous ready Mage is this stool and a bicycle wheel known as the bicycle wheel from 1913. this is a photograph of it from her studio in the 1910s today there's one in the Philadelphia Museum of Art and if memory serves I've seen one in the Valley freshart Museum in Cologne but crucially these are not the original ones these were recreated in the late 1950s and 1960s none of these original ready-mades by Duchamp survived to this day and he didn't exhibit them anywhere either it seems that at first they were just mental exercises ways of looking at the world differently for him and his artistic friends not even aaronsberg who bought nearly everything that Duchamp made had any of these Originals in his collections no instead most of what we know about this Fountain and the other ready maze is from the writings of Duchamp and others about art and this tells us something about how he felt about these objects he didn't care about them they were statements but not objects to be looked at and admired let alone to be conserved because if we just look at it there really isn't much to see it's a urinal or do you say urinal I'm never sure I'm going to go with urinal it was produced by some company someone bought it placed it at an unconventional and useless angle that is in this position it cannot be used and just signed it with the name r mutt 1917. so is this art well according to an article in the blind man it is because and I quote 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 under the new title and point of view he created a new thought for that object end quote and in its defense that is what happens in art all the time people take ordinary objects and then transform them into art that is they take paint brushes and a canvas and somehow transform that into art or a block of marble and a chisel and somehow it gets elevated to art but of course crucially that is because they have done something to it they haven't just placed some tubes of paint and brushes in an art gallery but still looking at something in a different way is one of the things that art does that is it makes us look at the world in a different way this isn't just true for visual arts but for all art it's in poetry and literature so interesting because it makes us reflect on things that we might have never thought about or at least not in the way it is presented to us and visual arts can do the same thing and often do they make us think about relationships religion stories history you name it and in this case it challenges us to think of is This art and by extension what is art I mean if this is not art then what is or if this is Art then what is not and these questions in and of themselves I think are interesting but then if you ask me if I like it well frankly no I think it's a slap in the face of all art history and old tradition but then again history art history and especially tradition can sometimes really use a few slaps in the face I mean it's good to shake things up and try something new in my also humble opinion now this Photograph that I've been showing you is a photograph by Alfred stiglitz and it marks the last time that anyone saw the fountain for real as far as We Know because there's no record of it after that there is this photograph of the studio of Marcel Duchamp where you can see a urinal hanging in the doorway is this it honestly we can't tell because the picture is too grainy and we can't see the signature but then again how many urinals would he have in his possession by the way if this is the fountain we can see that he didn't treat it with a lot of reverence so he may have just seen it as a joke and a provocation but even though it has become a very famous object now it wasn't immediately after the exhibition in 1917 that is it was mentioned in a few newspaper articles especially because Duchamp tried actively to keep it in the news saying that probably Richard mutt was going to sue the Society of Independent Artists for damages but he never did probably because Mr mud never existed by the way Richard mutt is the name on the tag attached to the fountain on the photograph by stiglitz that's how we know what the r stands for but my point is that the fountain was likely to have been forgotten about and really ready Maids were seldom if ever seen in art galleries at the time now the only reason we know about them is because the artists themselves wrote about them in Publications like the blind man and later in Europe the magazine called dada but they didn't have large circulations these were not widely read things and I don't think that the fountain was mentioned anywhere after say 1918 up until 1934 when Andre Breton wrote about it in an article Andre Brito had been one of the members of the Dada movement and one of the founding members of the surrealist movement and as an art theorist he was read by academics and by artists but it wasn't until the late 1950s and early 1960s that the Dada movement became popular with modern artists particularly with the people who were starting the pop art movement people like Jasper Jones for instance they started to cite dada and ready mates as sources of inspiration and that is why these ready Maids of the 1910s were often recreated in the 1960s which brings us back to the story of Marcel Duchamp he had been an artist making art mainly paintings and also ready-made but he ceased his artistic production more or less in 1923 at the time he changed professions and he became a professional chess player he moved to Brazil for a while but returned to the U.S and traveled extensively through Europe as a chess player but he was always active within the art World albeit mostly on the sidelines he would contribute to film projects or collaborate with other artists on their projects he would make exhibition designs and sets for plays but he rarely produced stand-alone works of art anymore but then in the 1960s these early works that he had made became popular with a young audience so this reconstruction or actually construction of the bicycle wheel was made for several different museums and in an interview in 1962 Marcel Duchamp claimed for the first time that he had made the fountain and he had come up with the name r mutt now up until now you may have noticed that I haven't actually said that he was the author of this work and that's because I'm not so sure that he is you see the story that he started telling in the 1960s is this in 1917 he was walking in New York with Walter arensberg and Joseph Stella when they came across a shop of JL mod Ironworks on 118th Street and he went in and bought a urinal he took it home laid it on his back and signed it our mutt the name he said came from the moth Ironworks but because that name was too familiar he changed it to mutt which just happened to be the name of a popular comic strip character from the then popular comic strip Mutt and Jeff and in his words he said that he liked the idea of the fat little funny man from the comic strip and he gave him the first name Richard which in French sounds like Richard which was slang for someone with too much money and that would be funny to be the name for a urinal and of course the reason that he had it entered into the exhibition was to test if they were really true to their principles which as it turned out they were not and from that interview which he repeated several times until shortly before his death in 1968 it was simply believed that he was the original or Mutt and he then had a series of new fountains made the trouble was that they couldn't find the original urinal so they had to use the photograph by a sticklitz to reconstruct them in clay and then they fired them simply to make them look like the originals so the ones that you now see in museums are actually not made as journals at all they are reconstructions of the one of the photograph of stiglitz so they are not so much ready-made as they are maids and they were all made in the 1960s but now comes the slight controversy you see the story that he told that reporter isn't true it is factually inaccurate on several points one is that the shop that he says he visited wasn't actually a shop not the type where you buy something and take it home it was the kind of place that showcases the Wares of a company that you can then order and they will deliver it to your house and install it which means that he couldn't have gone in and walked out with a urinal another problem is that The Malt Iron Works didn't make this exact type of urinal and they only sold their own products so I'm afraid that we can be certain that he was wrong about this also the name that he used mutt he claimed that it came from The Malt Ironworks and the comic strip Matt and Jeff where he said that it was the short fat guy but mutt is the tall thin guy in the strip but that may just be a simple oversight he may have remembered wrong or he may never have gotten the names of the characters right but also with this in mind it becomes kind of convenient that the two people that he named that were with him at the time Walter arensberg and Joseph Stella had both died years before he told his story and it's also kind of surprising that neither of them ever spoke up about it during their lifetimes but maybe that's only because the object itself wasn't important to them that for instance may explain why arensberg didn't keep it with all the other works in memorabilia he had collected of Marcel Duchamp now as I said before duchenne died in 1968. 14 years later in 1982 A letter came to light that Duchamp had written to his sister in 1917. it was actually written two days after the fountain had been rejected and in it he wrote that he did not enter the fountain into the exhibition instead it was a female friend of his now this is where the plot thickens who would this female friend be some have suggested that it was Rose celavi or Eros celavi which was a feminine Alter Ego that Duchamp used in the 1920s men Ray photographed him as such and the trouble is that he started using the rose Celebi image years later he didn't do it yet in 1917 as far as We Know and if he really dressed up as a woman to enter the fountain anonymously he would have taken a huge risk of being recognized another possibility is Louise Norton she was also an avant-garde artist a friend of Duchamp but mostly a poet and writer she's the one that wrote the article in the blind man that defended the fountain but I seriously doubt that she was involved because when Duchamp made his claims in the 1960s she was still alive and she never made it known that he was lying but there is another friend of his a female friend that really fits the bill her name was Elsa baroness from Freitag laurenhofe and she's quite the character herself she was born in Germany at some point got married but then fell in love with someone else so she divorced her first husband and married a second now at the time divorce was much more difficult process than it is now so that in and of itself would be remarkable but the story gets better when her second husband got in too much financial trouble because they then faked his death and they moved to the U.S where they started working on a farm but after some time he left her there are records of him living in the U.S after that and no record of them ever being divorced but she had to fend for herself and started modeling and got involved in the art movement first in Cincinnati later in Philadelphia and eventually in New York she did performance art she wrote poetry and made ready-made sculptures although she called them sculptures of found objects she also married for a third time and this time to Leopold Von freitak lawn hover who happened to be a baron which is where she got her name and the title that she used amongst the things that she made were these costumes out of found objects which were usually things not generally associated with clothing such as spoons curtain rings tin cans often things that others would see as trash and the fact that she made something out of that that could be elegant or worn by someone that called herself a baroness challenged ideas about wealth and beauty she also liked to make sculptures out of things that were deemed unsuitable for art and she particularly likes to use Plumbing fixtures like in this work known as gold made in 1917 that she made with Morton Livingston Schaumburg making it clear that she liked to provoke she liked to shake things up and apparently sometimes also used pseudonyms now Elsa had died in 1927 so in 1962 could no longer refute duchamp's story so could she be the one the trouble is that we have no direct evidence for it just circumstantial evidence and conjecture but then again with Duchamp we only have his word in a story that doesn't really pan out so perhaps this is just one more example of a man taking credit for a Woman's Work but then again maybe it's not now you may think who cares it's just a urinal placed on its side who cares who placed it there it was a provocation that was bound to be made by someone at some point in some way maybe someone else would not have used a urinal but some other object but ready-mades were at some point going to be shocking to the audiences at large and you may still think that this is nonsense why devote an entire video and quite a long one at that to this subject well a while ago I made an Instagram post about it and I was surprised at the reactions that I got so many people responded to it with emotion sometimes saying that it's what made them hate Modern Art others say that it was such a lovely and thought-provoking piece but what stands up mostly is the people that actually hated it and I rarely get angry reactions to my post and I must say even in this case they were always very civilized but often very clear in their hatred nonetheless and that surprised me I mean sure it's a weird piece and it was made to provoke a reaction but that was over a century ago how can we still get emotional about something like this I mean we have seen so much more since then and I have to say that I kind of like that I like the fact that it still provokes a response even if it's a negative one because it means that people still care because if you say that this is not art doesn't that make you think about what is art to you what does constitute a work of art and the simple fact that it still makes us ask these questions after all this time surely means that it was extremely effective and doesn't that fact by itself make this a work of art anyway a little bit of food for thought which I hope you have enjoyed please let me know in the comments what you think about these things and of course as always you could like And subscribe and I'd like to thank you very much for watching and I hope to see you again very soon bye