Don’t Piss in My Porcelain Vagina!
Duchamp’s Fountain is a puzzle that has bewildered artists and critics alike for over one hundred years. Sunday Times Art Critic Waldemar Januszczak’s revelatory analysis may have solved that puzzle, but that doesn’t mean we should care.
New York, 1917. Marcel Duchamp resigns from his membership of the Society of Independent Artists after they reject his anonymous submission for their inaugural exhibition, a porcelain urinal signed “R.Mutt” that he had bought from a sanitary ware supplier. The board of the society claimed it could not be considered art: ‘Its place is not in an art exhibition and it is, by no definition, a work of art.’
Duchamp, along with fellow artist Man Ray, was instrumental in bringing Dadaism to America in the latter half of the 1910s. Founded by Tristian Tzara in Zurich in 1916, Dada manifested itself as a deeply cynical rejection of pre-war enlightenment ideals.
In his 1918 Dada Manifesto, Tzara would write:
“Dada; knowledge of all the means rejected up until now by the shamefaced sex of comfortable compromise and good manners: Dada; abolition of all logic, which is the dance of those impotent to create.”
Early Dadaists lavished in offending bourgeois art critics and audiences: Francis Picabia’s Tableau Dada, an image of a masturbating naked monkey labelled as a portrait of celebrated European artists like Renoir and Rembrandt is a prime example of this, an artwork created as a symbolic middle finger to all expectations of what art should be. Duchamp’s 1919 work L.H.O.O.Q is another good example of early Dada, efficiently manifesting the ideology of the movement. The piece consists of a poster of the Mona Lisa with a small moustache crudely pasted on by the artist, clearly poking fun at what still is the world’s most famous and revered painting as well as the art establishment.
The artwork is also an example of a “ready-made,” a work of art consisting of an everyday object transformed by the artist into something artistic. Other examples of this are his 1915 Prelude to a Broken Arm which consists of nothing more than a spade and of the Fountain itself.
Waldemar Januszczak’s recent analysis of the Fountain provides an intriguing answer to the question of the real meaning behind the work. His answer? It’s a giant porcelain vagina.
And so, the case is closed.
Hoorah.
But should we really care?
American essayist Susan Sontag and indeed Duchamp himself would probably say no.
In her 1964 essay Against Interpretation, Sontag laments the oversaturation of interpretation in western intellectualism. To Sontag, critics that seek to understand art objects through different lenses, implicitly express an inherent dissatisfaction with the work, or as she writes “a wish to replace it by something else.” Sontag highlights Pop Art as a rejection of the ceaseless Freudian and Marxist desire to “see beyond” the art in that content is “so blatant” that it cannot be interpreted by way of metatheory.
So what of Duchamp’s urinal?
There are two things to be said here. Firstly, it fulfils Sontag’s criteria of an object, the content of which is so blatant that any sort of interpretation would come across as navel gazing self-indulgence. It is literally a toilet. There is, in a sense, nothing beyond the urinal. This means that any sort of interpretations become superfluous.
Secondly, Duchamp’s intentions as a Dadaist artist cannot be ignored. Dadaists wanted to find a way to offend, provoke, and challenge the cultural hegemony, specifically the practice of rigorous interpretation, analysis and evaluation. After all, Tzara did claim that Dada was “beyond logic” and therefore beyond rationality and intelligibility. Any sort of claims about the meaning of Duchamp’s work are rendered redundant by Duchamp himself. That isn’t to say we should abandon interpretation, but rather be cautious of it.
Shining a light on the rest of the Fountain’s history supports this. The object’s rejection from the Society of Independent Artists in 1917 is nothing when compared with the rest of the artwork’s history: Dada inspired artists have urinated on replicas of the Fountain, in doing so picking up Duchamp’s proverbial gauntlet: the challenge of how to respond when presented with the a urinal under the guise of “art.”
Brian Eno, musician and producer, let his answer be publicly known by urinating on it to ironically “bring it back where it belonged.” In a 1993 interview he commented that:
“I thought, how absolutely stupid, the whole message of this work is, “You can take any object and put it in a gallery.” It doesn’t have to be that one, that’s losing the point completely…so I thought, somebody should piss in that thing, to sort of bring it back to where it belonged. So, I decided it had to be me.”
He isn’t the only person to question the Fountain’s status as an artwork. French artist Pierre Pinoncelli did the same in 1993, as did Chinese performance artists Yuan Chai and Jian Jun Xi in 2000.
People like Brian Eno honour Duchamp by metaphorically sticking up the middle finger to the art world just as Duchamp did in 1917 and in doing so warning us against the perils of intellectualism. Whilst interpretation of meaning can provide an interesting way to look at an object, the process of doing so will always lose sight of the original force of the Fountain as an object that turns its back on the very bourgeois analyses that we seek to subject it to.
But here lies the wonderful irony of Dada. As an Anti-art movement seeking to break from academic traditions, it formed a new and unique path in art history, only for that path to be swallowed by the great capitalist behemoth of art galleries, dealers, and multi-million-pound exhibitions. Take, for example, the 2017 Dali/Duchamp exhibition at the Royal Academy in London which charged £16.50 for tickets. Despite its best efforts to dissent, Dada is, like every other art movement, studied and analysed by the same academics and intellectuals it once sought to offend.
Perhaps this is what Man Ray meant when he wrote that “the only good Dadaist is a dead Dadaist.”