To Understand Contemporary Art, You Need to Know this Artwork
Why Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain continues to provoke and inspire
To my mind, there are few works of art that have had such an emphatic influence on the course of modern art than Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain.
It is a provocative, daring, and in some respects absurd work of art. As such, it has become one of the most influential works of art of the last 150 years — for better or for worse.
Made in 1917, Fountain is a porcelain urinal. On the surface, there is little else to say about it: it’s a urinal acquired from a factory that made thousands of identical ceramic objects. The difference with this particular urinal was that, in April 1917, Marcel Duchamp had the temerity to submit it to the exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists as an authentic and serious work of art.
Fountain is a so-called “readymade” sculpture, meaning that it is an ordinary, manufactured object that the artist has simply selected and perhaps modified in some way. Duchamp made very few modifications to the object, except turn it on its side and sign it with the pseudonym “R. Mutt”.
Many words have been expended on this strange and beguiling artwork, as if its very presence in our cultural landscape needs more justification…
