Marcel Duchamp, Fountain

183 Pages·1989·47.57 MB·English

by  William A. Camfield , Walter Hopps

M A R C E L D U C H A M P
F O N T A I N
M A R C E L D U C H A M P
F O U N T A I N
William A. Camfield
Introduction by
Walter Hopps
THE MENIL COLLECTION
HOUSTON FINE ART PRESS
1 9 8 9
This publication has been produced to accompany an exhibition
organized by The Menil Collection on the occasion of the
centennial of Marcel Duchamp’s birth in 1887.
Exhibition dates: December 23, 1987 - October 2, 1988
Front cover: Marcel Duchamp, Fountain. 1917. Photograph by Alfred Stieglitz.
Back cover: Marcel Duchamp. Fountain. 1964 (fourth version) (back view).
Ex coll. Andy Warhol.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Camfield, William A.
Marcel Duchamp/ Fountain/ William A. Camfield: introduction by Walter Hopps.
p. cm.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Duchamp, Marcel, 1887-1968. Fountain-Exhibitions.
2. Dadaism-France-Exhibitions.
3. Found objects (Art)-France-Exhibitions.
4. Crinals (Plumbing fixtures) in art-Exhibitions.
5. Sculpture, Modern-20th Century-France-Exhibitions.
6. Duchamp, Marcel, 1887-1968 -Criticism and interpretation.
I. Duchamp, Marcel, 1887-1968.
II. Title.
NB553.D76A64 1988 730'.92'4-dcl9 87-28248 CIP
ISBN 0-939S94-10-2
ISBN 0-940619-05-9 (trade)
Copyright © 1989 by Menil Foundation, Inc.
1511 Branard, Houston, Texas 77006
Houston Fine Art Press
7336 Rampart, Houston,Texas 77081
C ertain illustrations are covered by claims to copyright cited in Credits, p. 183.
All rights reserved under the International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
No part of the contents of this book may be reproduced without the express written
permission of the publisher.
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
Introduction by Walter Hopps 7
Marcel Duchamp/ Fountain by William A. Camfield
History and Aesthetics of Fountain
in the Context of 1917 13
History and Criticism of Fountain
1917-1968 62
Criticism Concerning Fountain
in the 1970s and 1980s 116
Bibliography 144
Selected Readings 156
Chronology - Marcel Duchamp 157
Typology - Fountain 162
Works in the Exhibition 167
Views of the Exhibition 176
Acknowledgements 178
Index 1^0
Credits 183
Marcel Duchamp, Broadway Photo Shop, New York, October 10, 1917. ( cat. no. 1 )
Introduction
eflecting upon Marcel Duchamp’s considerable achievements,
R
we have decided to celebrate the centennial of his birth in
a particular way—with an exhibition and publication which
focus on one work, Fountain. In 1917 Fountain became the most
controversial work of Duchamp’s career up to that time. Fountain
remains controversial in the context of a career in which many works
have engendered consternation. Nonetheless, Fountain maintains a
mysterious power and appeal for many; it has influenced later art as
well as provoking thousands of words of analysis and conjecture.
A lavatory urinal chosen by Duchamp and left unembellished
except for the famous “r. mutt” signature, Fountain had virtually no
public exposure for approximately thirty years after its conception.
Reproduced in the avant-garde journal The Blind Man and discussed in
the popular press of its time, Fountain was known without being widely
seen. Its initial audience, almost exclusively Duchamp’s vanguard
peers, rejected its inclusion in an exhibition where no works were to be
rejected. This was the second and last time Duchamp allowed himself
to be subjected to professional rejection. In 1912 Duchamp had been
asked to withdraw Nude Descending a Staircase from the Salon des
Indépendants in Paris; the following year this work was celebrated at
the Armory Show in New York. Duchamp himself became a celebrated
and curious figure to American artists and the American public, even
before he first arrived in this country in 1915.
We have chosen to feature Fountain for several reasons. First,
Fountain is perhaps the first important work conceived by Duchamp
in America. Second, as a readymade it is at the center of Duchamp’s
7
MARCEL DUCHAMP
American concerns (“her bridges and her plumbing”) and as such
is especially appropriate to an American celebration of Duchamp s
achievement. Third, Fountain remains one of the most problematic
works in Duchamp’s oeuvre. Its problematic nature has led William
Camfield to become concerned with, and to meticulously reconstruct,
its history from conception through the various deployments and
reactions to it over the course of Duchamp’s life and beyond.
Marcel Duchamp stands as a unique and powerful figure within
the modern movement. From 1903 onward Duchamp demonstrated
precocious skill and daring in the development of his art. His
rapid assimilation of post-impressionism, Symbolism, Fauvism, and
Cubist painting, which by 1912 had resolved into a new synthesis of
mechanomorphological imagery, would assure Duchamp a place in the
history of art. Overriding these early achievements in the conventional
media of painting and drawing was Duchamp’s professed concern to
place art “at the service of the mind,” rather than relying on a purely
sensuous manipulation of its materials.
Duchamp’s work after 1912 was extremely diversified in technique,
materials, and choice of images; its influence is found in widely
diverse examples of subsequent art. Duchamp was a proto-Dadaist
who provocatively deployed the seemingly trivial or the disreputable.
Subsequently, his explorations beyond the rational were essential to
the Surrealists and their activities. A major work, Large Glass (1915—
23), opened vast areas of formal and conceptual concerns that have
been unfolding over the past forty years. Duchamp’s experiments
with optical phenomena pioneered more recent work with non­
objective structures of light and space. With his meticulously factured
facsimiles and miniature reproductions, Duchamp virtually invented
the contemporary multiple, the complexity of which surpassed the
prior tradition of printed graphics or sculptural editions. Beyond
his achievements in art per se, Duchamp mastered performance and
installation and developed keen insight in exploiting public media for
private ends.
For many years, the myth that Duchamp had come to abandon art has
erroneously persisted. Duchamp’s activities in the art world of his time
were as extensive as they were varied. His production of art, if spare,
was sustained from 1903 onward. Around 1924 the misconception
8
FOUNTAIN
began that Duchamp had abandoned art for chess; however, he
reminded his more engaged interviewers that he hadn’t abandoned art
but merely the public’s notion of what art was. Moreover, Duchamp
was not purely a thinker who was unconcerned with what he made.
An accomplished craftsman from the start, Duchamp demonstrated his
serious concern for the physical nature, finish, and permanence of all
his artworks.
Duchamp’s notoriety, coupled with the inaccessibility of his work
during most of his lifetime, conspired to make him the best-known
artist whose work was the least available. It was through arcane art
publications and the popular media that Duchamp was best known, a
consequence that he accepted and often furthered. His artwork was
not collected by public institutions; almost all his important works
were privately held by two American patrons, Walter Arensberg and
Katherine Dreier.
The few ways in which Duchamp’s art became familiar to an
interested audience prior to 1960 are worth noting. In 1935 André
Breton’s “Phare de la Mariée [The Lighthouse of the Bride],” published
in the Surrealist journal Minotaure in Paris, was internationally
distributed. The following year Duchamp was prominently featured
in Alfred Barr’s “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism” at The Museum
of Modern Art. When Duchamp settled in New York in 1942, his
comprehensive collection of miniature works Box-in-a-Valise was
featured in Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery. A special
issue of the widely distributed magazine View (vol. 5, 1945) afforded
more reproductions of Duchamp’s artwork than had been previously
available.
It is remarkable that it was not until Duchamp was nearly
seventy years of age that much of his art was directly accessible.
In 1954 the Philadelphia Museum of Art received and installed the
Arensberg Collection with its great concentration of Duchamp. In
1959 Duchamp’s friend Robert Lebel published a landmark monograph
about the artist in French and English editions, with reproductions
of almost all of his work. The Pasadena Art Museum retrospec­
tive of 1963 brought together the largest number of Duchamp’s art­
works ever assembled up to that time. The accessibility of Duchamp’s
work during these years had a major impact, both affirming and
9
MARCEL DUCHAMP
influencing an extraordinary number of artists who had emerged since
WWII throughout the world. In Duchamp’s early years, one thinks of
a small number of colleagues directly influenced or interacting with
his art: Joseph Cornell, Jean Crotti, Man Ray, and Francis Picabia.
When one considers the number of important artists directly addressing
Duchamp in the postwar years, more than two dozen names easily come
to mind. In America such diverse artists affected by Duchamp would
include John Cage, CPLY, Jasper Johns, Edward Kienholz, Robert
Morris, Bruce Nauman, Robert Rauschenberg, Hannah Wilke, and
Andy Warhol; those from Europe would include Arman, Joseph Beuys,
Marcel Broodthaers, Richard Hamilton, Yves Klein, Gerard Richter,
Daniel Spoerri, Takis, and Jean Tinguely; and emerging from the Far
East there are Arakawa, Nam June Paik, and Takako Saito.
A decade after Duchamp’s death in 1968 members of a vast new
generation of artists in their early professional years have posited
various challenges to modernism. These postmodern positions in art,
ranging from neo-Expressionist painting to mixed-media object making
to directly appropriated images of prior art, have encompassed the
widest possible range and recapitulations of stylistic and material
unions, junctures, and overlays. Many of the issues raised by
Duchamp’s readymades, of which Fountain is a prime example, are
congruent with key issues of postmodernist art. By 1913, at the
very time when the canons of modernism were being established,
Duchamp’s “illegitimate children” (the readymades) were working
against the modernist grain. While conventionally seen as an historical
part of the modernist project, the readymades nonetheless may also be
seen as a subversive activity, prefiguring postmodernism.
Tracing certain intellectual and philosophical roots to Walter
Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction” (1936) and to the recent literature of structural
and semiotic analysis, from Roland Barthes to Jean Baudrillard,
postmodern artists and writers have shown special regard for the
work of Duchamp, reflecting upon the relevance of his readymades
in particular. Most recently, Dan Cameron has cited Duchamp’s
readymades {Art andlts Double [Madrid, 1987]) for crucially addressing
“the unresolved issues of representation and originality.”
The readymade, by incorporating the common object into the
1 0