Marcel Duchamp, Fountain by Marcel Duchamp, Dadaism, Conceptualisation, Chance, society, Globalization, post-war, Alfred Stieglitz, Henri-Pierre Roché, Beatrice Wood, machine culture, modern media, traditional power, values
How does one define art? Is it the feelings a piece of art gives you, or perhaps the awe of the artist's skill? But feelings of admiration are subjective and cannot be used alone to assume what constitutes art. To try and define art, one must not only look at traditional paintings and sculptures but also examine non-traditional works, such as those of French artist Marcel Duchamp and his 'ready-mades.' 1917 was the unforgettable turning point of Marcel Duchamp's outstanding, rather absurd career. It was a time post-war when the birth of globalization and the shifting cultural and political landscape brought about what Chris Barker termed a "complex, overlapping, disjunctive order" of culture (Barker 2012:163). This essay aims to discuss Marcel Duchamp's piece of work he called Fountain (Figure 1), a 'ready-made,' which is an everyday usable household object that has either been attached to other objects or picked independently by itself and uniquely displayed by the artist as art. By placing these ordinary articles of life under the spotlight of a gallery, Duchamp shattered the traditional process of producing art that had existed for centuries and subsequently triggered thinking about what constitutes art.
[...] Fiske, J Understanding Popular Culture. London: Routledge. Roché, H. & Wood, B The Richard Mutt case. The Blind Man, :5-6. Rosenthal, Nan Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968). In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, 1-20. The New York Herald His Art is too Crude for Independents. New York: James Gordon Bennett. [...]
[...] By its nature it entails an element of protest. By submitting Fountain to the Society of Independent Artists and then staging a public debate over it's merits, Duchamp was effective in challenging the authority of art institutions and the power structures that governed the art world at the time. One technique that Duchamp used from Dada is the element of chance. Duchamp used chance to guide his choices and to depend on chance to determine how his piece would be interpreted by the audience. [...]
[...] Duchamp and his friends, Henri-Pierre Roché and Beatrice Wood, went a step further and edited a second issue of the little journal called The Blind Man(Figure "The Richard Mutt Case." It concentrated on Fountain and it recorded the purpose and motive for denying it. What is said is, "some contended it was immoral, vulgar, others, it was plagiarism, a plain piece of plumbing" (Roché & Wood, 1917:5). Viewers were open to familiarise the conception of modern art but were not satisfied to some degree to introduce a readymade such as Fountain. [...]
[...] Dadaists use humour and silliness to uplift humanity during dark times and Marcel Duchamp was heavily influenced by Dada leading him to produce Fountain. "His use of irony, puns, alliteration, and paradox layered the works with humor while still enabling him to comment on the dominant political and economic systems of his time" (Rosenthal, 2004). Dada's underlying message of aesthetic anarchy highlighted concepts that have been beneficial in the field of aesthetics, such as the social role of art, chance and contradiction. [...]
[...] This raises a valid point, bathtubs are not considered immoral and Duchamp was very clever in flipping the urinal onto it's back and removing it's original functional context and allows it to be divorced from the whole bathroom scene. This was a deliberate act of subversion and recontextualization. His 'ready-mades' were not created through traditional artistic techniques but rather through the act of selection and presentation. "Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. [...]
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