ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Was Marcel Duchamp’s notorious ‘Fountain’ even his own work?
Collectors clamored for more paintings, but he was obsessed with his “readymades,” of which the most celebrated remains “Fountain.” It was a urinal he reputedly bought from a plumbing suppliers and signed “R. Mutt 1917.” He submitted it to the Society of Independent Artists, which was supposed to show any artist who paid $5 in annual dues and a $1 entry fee. So “Fountain” was duly entered – and rejected. Duchamp had it photographed by Alfred Stieglitz and that was the last anyone saw of it. The original no longer exists. Nevertheless, it has often been recreated for Duchamp exhibitions.
John Strausbaugh floats the interesting theory that “Fountain” was not actually the work of Duchamp at all but of Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. She was a well known German eccentric, “unhampered by sanity,” who turned up in New York in 1913, aged 39. She worked as a life model at the Art Students League and looked extraordinary: “Her lips were painted black, her face powder was yellow. She wore the top of a coal scuttle for a hat.” She lusted after Duchamp and wrote him a poem – “Marcel, Marcel, I love you like hell, Marcel” – but he would have none of her because she stank like a skunk. But they were good friends, so it is significant that Duchamp wrote to his sister the day after the Independent Artists’ exhibition opened: “One of my female friends under a masculine pseudonym, Richard Mutt, sent in a porcelain urinal as a sculpture.” And also that he did not claim “Fountain” as his own until 1934, after the Baroness died.
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[Duchamp died of a heart attack in 1969.] The Village Voice obituary pronounced him “the most influential artist of our time… A mainspring, a wellspring, a genius.” And his importance has, if anything, increased since. Last year Jeff Koons declared that “Duchamp is as relevant today as in his own time” and Ai Weiwei said: “Marcel Duchamp’s influence remains profound – not only today but well into the future.”
Though there are certainly limits to his influence: Money Down The Toilet In Afghanistan. That time when progressive US colonialists tried to enlighten Afghans by teaching them about the glories of Dadaist art. “Cockburn dredges up something so horrible and hilarious that it’s straight out of a Monty Python sketch. In it, the American occupiers attempt to enlighten a group of Afghan women by showing them Marcel Duchamp’s famous urinal-as-museum-piece, and telling them that it’s important art. Cockburn says watch to the 31-second point and see the moment when America failed in Afghanistan:”