MARCEL DUCHAMP'S "FOUNTAIN."   Term Paper ID:30680 Click to get this paper

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Paper Abstract: Discusses the artwork and its impact. The historical and cultural context of the time it was exhibited. How it was received by critics and the public. How the piece affected and transformed art. The aesthetic significance of the sculpture. Aesthetic example of modern art. Overview of Duchamp's life and avant-garde art. Paper Introduction: This research examines Marcel Duchamp's artwork Fountain. The research will set forth the historical and cultural context in which the work first presented and then discuss how it was received, its impact on the history of art, and how it affected and transformed art, including the relevance of art criticism of the work to its aesthetic significance. No discussion of Duchamp's art would be complete without reference to the sundry trends and styles of modernism and postmodernism. And no account of Duchamp's Fountain can be considered complete that does not include reference to the manner in which his output as a whole both proceeds and departs from various trends. Indeed, the cultural context for the creation of Fountain as a work of modern art is as important to an understanding of it as is the fact of context as an aesthetic featu Text of the Paper: The entire text of the paper is shown below. However, the text is somewhat scrambled. We want to give you as much information as we possibly can about our papers and essays, but we cannot give them away for free. In the text below you will find that while disordered, many of the phrases are essentially intact. From this text you will be able to get a solid sense of the writing style, the concepts addressed, and the sources used in the research paper. The Writings of Marcel Duchamp. Rather, says Naumann, Duchamphimself later said he used the pseudonym of Mutt because to have signed itwith his name "might appear to be a conflict of interest" of a foundingmember of the Society. Fountain "literally [though alsofiguratively] flushed the notion of artistic value down the drain"(Judovitz 194). Duchamp was associated with Dadaist and Surrealistpainters in the 192 s and 193 s, though later in life the most he wouldadmit to was that some of his work emerged "in the same spirit" as Dadaism(Cabanne 56). Rev. of Duchamp, by Calvin Tomkins. Ed. 2 ed.Molesworth, Helen. Fountain, long considered the most"notorious" of the readymades (Scammell 46), appears to have been bound upwith the very idea of artistic presentation, including not only the objetd'art but also the context in which an object arises to assert an aestheticstatement. He appears to have quickly become a major focus of avant-garde art inNew York, becoming a founding member of the Society of Independent Artists,Inc., in 1916. New York: Da Capo/Oxford UP, 1973.Judovitz, Dalia. A widely held belief is that Duchamp introduced in [Nude] a dimension of irony, almost a mockery of painting itself, that was more than anyone could bear and that undermined his own belief in painting. In the Marxist formulation, the capitalist owns and exploits the meansof production, exploiting workers who are just one more instrument ofexploitation. The case ismade via context, original intent, and performance or exhibition. Areadymade might be said to fuse the material, formal, and efficient causesto arrive at a purposeful presentation. . 522) as well as the Requiem (K. But this did not prevent readymades in general and Fountain inparticular from exerting enormous influence on the course of the art thatfollowed over the course of the 2 th century. The evidence of criticism ofDuchamp's readymades is that, by and large, they are viewed not only as artbut as important aesthetic statements. Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Making Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. The Society did not mean to hang it at all. He CHOSE [inscribed!] it. Output factors, or theresulting artifacts, were varied according as they were perceived andanalyzed nontrivially, i.e., more as art than as prank, but not lacking inhumor either. Within limits set by technological processes (orthe artist's conceptual reach), the factors of artistic input will alwaysvary. . Duchamp's reputation as an established, daring, and respected artist,as well as the emerging environment of experimental, modernist art, can beseen as a core contextual element for any art that he might have producedin his New York Period. .innumerable affairs and friendships." Naumann (72) explains that Duchampenlisted the assistance of Louise Norton to submit Fountain to protect theartist's identity. . Duchamp: A Biography. Taken as awhole, Duchamp's output was consistent in its resistance to stylisticaffiliation and categorization. Alright [sic], can we try to define art? Duchamp and his patron Walter Arensberg resignedfrom the Society in protest (Ades, Cox, and Hopkins 127), in the process defacto revealing the true name of the artist. The signature ofMutt eerily and ironically prefigures and provides prescient commentary onthe very lack of irony with which commodification of other instrumentalartifacts of existence occurred over the course of the 2 th century;witness Calvin Klein underwear and the fad of wearing all manner of labelson the outside. Works CitedCabanne, Pierre. Even the Cubists did their best to flatter the eye, but Duchamp's only motive seemed to be provocation ("Duchamp"). Ann d'Harnoncourt and Kynaston McShine. Duchamp's ability to find myriadsubstitutes for traditional expressions of artistic sensibility obliged theviewer and critic of his art not so much to discard traditional art as tolook at the given/presented object and the artistic subject alike in newways. Ades, Cox, and Hopkins cite a 1959 interview with the BBCon point, when he was asked whether a readymade was truly art: That is the very difficult point, because art first has to be defined. Mutt,and titled Fountain, he was making a project of anonymity, asserting theworthiness of the work in its own right and not as an attribute of his fameand respect. What it had been made ready for wasurination, specifically male urination in a public place. . But whereas artistic currents such as Fauvism, Cubism, abstractexpressionism, and the like attracted critical attention and the work ofmany artists in their own right, Duchamp as an individual artist very muchmoved beyond movements, currents, categories. Indeed, the cultural context for the creationof Fountain as a work of modern art is as important to an understanding ofit as is the fact of context as an aesthetic feature of the artifact. D'Harnoncourt and McShine. . Ed. Duchamp's readymades have been seen as humorous comments on everydayexperience. . But humor in art need not be trivial; one has Mozart's Musical Joke(K. According to Tancock, this was not because of the intrinsic quality,shape, or other accidental attribute of the work but rather because of theconceptualization informing the assertion of the work as art: "His careeroffered to younger artists not a model to be followed, but an example ofperfect freedom from which to develop their own particular form ofexpression" (Tancock 165). Abrams, 1999.Scammell, William. The objectliteralizes the exercise of art critique and in the process creates a newimage for both art and its criticism. [T]he theme ofcombatant soldiers clearly echoed the democratic goals of the Independents"(Naumann 75). Mott Iron Works Company)." Duchamp painted the text R. Indeed, early in the history of Fountain it acquired championsamong the community of New York artists. It is at this point that the content of Fountain becomes relevant. Hence the emergence of the media of the readymade, the nameDuchamp gave to everyday objects that were designated as art. In May 1917, Fountain was the main subject of a short-livedmagazine started by Duchamp titled The Blind Man. Duchamp's lifelong idiosyncratic experimentation andpresentation in plastic and linguistic art--whether in media, subjectmatter, or affiliation with artistic "movements"--can be formulated ascapitalism vis-а-vis the means of reproduction. The role of the artist as inscriber must be seen as decisive, for itis the self-conscious (possibly self-absorbed, to be sure) artist whoasserts the legitimacy of his art. His painting Nude Descending a Staircase, famously rejectedby a famously avant-garde Paris art salon in 1912 and subsequently,controversially valorized by the New York Armory Show in 1913, was widelyconsidered decisively representative of Cubism, if not foundational for thewhole of 2 th-century modern art. A week after the opening of theSociety show, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz appears to have takenFountain to his studio, displayed it, and photographed it. What is relevant about Nude for this research is that its creation,presentation, and reception marked the beginning of a pattern to Duchamp'scareer that was nothing so much as a departure from pattern. To put it another way, having conquered oneartistic convention, Duchamp would move on to another. Identifyingand defining art, indeed, appears to have been part of his mission asartist; identifying the impossibility of defining art was equally ofconcern to him. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view--created a new thought for that object (in d'Harnoncourt and McShine 283). So if we accept the idea of trying not to define art, which is a very legitimate conception, then the readymade can be seen as a sort of irony, because it says here it is, a thing that I call art, I didn't even make it myself. "Work Avoidance: The Everyday Life of Marcel Duchamp's Readymades." Art Journal 57 (Winter 1998): 5 -61.Naumann, Francis W. Ed. New York: Henry Holt, 1996. It is a commonplace that modernism as an aesthetic category was aresponse to the representational conventions of Romanticism and classicism.Duchamp, born in 1887, was a youthful artistic contemporary of the lateimpressionists and postimpressionists, who were moving beyondrepresentation and toward abstraction, beyond impression and towardexpression. Mutt1917 on the front of the urinal; it was meant (by Duchamp) to be hung fromthe ceiling. Molesworth comments that Duchamp's readymades, as everydayobjects, are "bound together by the processes of maintenance" and have astheir purpose "to aid in self-presentation." They are the unsung aids that allow us to do the work of maintaining house and body, so that we are better prepared to do our other work, like making art, for instance (Molesworth 51).The element of humor emerges because Duchamp presents the object out ofcontext. Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. 159-178.Tomkins, Calvin. It is inconceivable that Duchamp presented Fountain forexhibition out of modesty or diffidence. Naumann (72) says that the work was "a simple, unaltered whiteporcelain urinal that Duchamp purchased from a plumbing supply store inManhattan (J.L. But why it was foundational isinstructive as well: He was merely experimenting, seeing no virtue in making a habit of any one style. New York: Museum of Modern Art/New York Graphic Society Ltd., 1973. To the degree it was suppressed, it wasreceived initially not as art but as something of an insult to art. From The BlindMan: Mr. Mutt's fountain is not immoral, that is absurd, no more than a bathtub is immoral. New York: Harry N. But that presentation itself,particularly if it is offered with ironic intent, interrogates the veryconcept of what constitutes art; Ades, Cox, and Hopkins (152) say that thereadymades were conceived as a "challenge by example [to] contemporaryassumptions about the nature of artistic creation," as well as an exercisein "expos[ing] the role of institutions and social groups in defining whatcounts as art." Along the same lines, Molesworth sees the influence of thereadymade in general as having "done more to reorganize aestheticcategories than any other twentieth-century art practice." The manufacturedobjects "made it clear that he idea of 'Art' was produced contextually"(Molesworth 51). The paradox of the readymade, which Duchamp formulates as irony, isthat it is art to the degree the artist can make a case for it. As Scammel points out (46), following Tomkins, Duchamp wasmarked by an "'indelible grace' which followed him in and out of . It is a fixture that you see every day in plumbers' show windows. By no means, however, was the response of the artistic communityuniform. And the evidence of Duchamp's owncomments on his work is that readymades, which may have been deliberatelyconceived of as an attempt to shock and astound, were neverthelessnontrivial from the beginning. In a volume of Duchamp's somewhat scattered and ellipticalwritings, a passage on specifications for readymades includes the following(capitalization convention in original): by planning for a moment to come (on such a day, such a date such a minute), "to inscribe a readymade"--The readymade can later be looked for.--(with all kinds of delays) The important thing then is just this matter of timing, this snapshot effect, like a speech delivered on no matter what occasion but at such and such an hour. But in the very process oftaking as his starting point an object endlessly reproduced, Duchampresisted hierarchies and categorization and identification with what couldbe called the (any) Thing Given, just as he resisted being stamped apainter or a sculptor. That same year he styled himself an iconoclast whoasserted "a complete reversal of art opinions" (d'Harnoncourt and McShine15). Another view of readymades as irony is offered by Judovitz, who citesOctavio Paz to the effect that they are the "plastic equivalent of a pun"or "criticism in action." On this view, Fountain can be interpreted as aninstance of "a mechanism that stages the gratuitous conversion of anordinary object into a work of art, while undermining through this gesturethe notion of an art object . In a broad sense, Duchamp's conceptual inventiveness operated in thevein of the economic principle of the substitutability of factors, at bothinput and output levels. Thus it is possible to speculate that when in 1917he submitted to a Society exhibition a readymade under the name of R. We have tried, everybody has tied and in every century there is a new definition of art. Scammell (48) cites Tomkins's view that AndyWarhol, who valorized such commonplace branded artifacts as Campbell's soupand Brillo pads, was Duchamp's truest heir and that pop art, op art,minimalism, and "the dreadful posturings of Yoko Ono and Fluxus" had theirprovenance with Duchamp. In that magazine, saysNaumann, Fountain "was given its first full-scale public defense." This wasconfirmed by Duchamp himself, who explained that the raison d'кtre of TheBlind Man was above all a matter of justifying the 'Fountain-Urinal'"(Cabanne/Duchamp 56). Indeed,the tendency of artistic culture to commodify art suggests another possiblepun, with the urinal/commode being blatantly commodified. This research examines Marcel Duchamp's artwork Fountain. New Statesman 126 (18 April 1997): 46-51.Tancock, John. "Chronology." Marcel Duchamp. And no accountof Duchamp's Fountain can be considered complete that does not includereference to the manner in which his output as a whole both proceeds anddeparts from various trends. The fate of the original Fountain is unknown; it seems to havedisappeared from Stieglitz's studio not long after it was photographedthere, thus making Stieglitz's photograph the main tangible record of theoriginal. According to Naumann, the Society then proceeded not to withdrawFountain altogether but rather to display it more or less out of sight.Naumann explains: Apparently, rather than reject the entry outright, the board decided to place the urinal behind a partition, where it remained for a few days until found by one of Duchamp's friends, who brought it to his studio (where it was recorded in at least one photograph, shown hanging from the lintel of a doorway) (Naumann 75).The practical effect of the Society's decision was that Fountain wasinitially suppressed (Molesworth 51), ironically by an avowedly avant-gardegroup of artists and art lovers. In the case of Fountain that fact is particularly apt. So [the readymade] was a form o denying the possibility of defining art (Ades, Cox, and Hopkins 151; emphasis in original). . . The title alone was a joke that was resented. radically disrupt[ing] the valuativejudgment of a work, as a work of art" (Judovitz 194). In the case of Duchamp's readymades, these factors were variedwithout reduced production, or anyway without reduced innovation, for aslong as Duchamp's aesthetic attention was engaged. That year, Duchamp's readymade, eponymouslynamed Bicycle Wheel, became the first of his "infrequent special selectionand mounting of commonplace objects" (Cabanne 115). It is a kind of rendezvous (Duchamp 32). It has been noted that hisearly paintings reflect influence from Cйzanne for form and Fauvism forpalette (Naumann 41). London: Da Capo/Hudson and Thames, 1971.D'Harnoncourt, Anne, and Kynaston McShine. Thus, says Camfield (1 6), if a man pees in the suspended-from-the-lintel-or-ceiling Fountain, his urine will drip on him. . . In later years, Duchamp would inscribe replicas, not all of whichwere authorized, though he was strongly discouraged from doing so by hisagent in order to protect the commercial value of his works (Naumann 245).Duchamp claimed to have no particular interest in the commercial aspects ofart, claiming that he never knew the price of any of his works (Cabanne257). The traditional entrepreneur/capitalist who can find substitutes forworkers' labor makes it less valuable. It was in 1913, the year of the Armory Show, the year, one could say,that Duchamp was valorized as perhaps the leading painter of the Euro-American avant-garde, that he abandoned "all conventional forms of paintingand drawing" (Cabanne 114). Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp. His pattern was to repudiate artistic movements,more or less informally, as aesthetically inconclusive, while he behaved asan artistic entrepreneur, bringing the artistic capital to the project ofoperationalizing the means of production of an artistic idea, and in thereadymades, notably Fountain, exploiting the means of reproduction in waysthat have the effect of constructing an aesthetic telos--a telos that,however, is rife with an ambiguity that declares telos, aesthetic orotherwise, to be ephemeral and elusive. The mostfamiliar photograph of the piece is the one taken by Stieglitz, who shotthe piece "on its back, positioned against the surface of a painting byMarsden Hartley depicting soldiers climbing a hill. Meaning that there is no essential, no one essential, that is good for all centuries. Indeed, havingconquered one artistic medium, such as painting, Duchamp would move on toanother. As an artist, Duchamp was not only interested in pushing the limits ofreadymades toward the aesthetic contexts or in experimenting with variousmedia, but he was also interested in the pursuit of art per se. The fact that the readymade is mass-produced is alsoinstructive. No discussion of Duchamp's art would be complete without reference tothe sundry trends and styles of modernism and postmodernism. New York: Museum of Modern Art/New York Graphic Society Ltd., 1973.Duchamp, Marcel. In 1915, Duchamprelocated from France to the US, declaring that he had not come to New Yorkbut had come from Paris. Thework was not a painting but a sculpture on a black pedestal, though thatdid not necessarily disqualify it from the Society's show. 626). . Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson. This wasspecifically and programmatically the theme of the defense of Fountain putforward in The Blind Man, which gives an account of the object as acommonplace of ordinary experience while also explaining why, in thecontext of an art exhibition and in the created presentational context forthe object itself, the object becomes transformed into art. . From the perspective of Duchamp's work as a whole, Fountain can beseen as representative of the artist's approach to art in general, whichwas organized around the notion of pushing artistic statements inperennially new directions, via persistently new media, to arrive at newartistic insight, to force new perspectives on the world. In what has beendescribed as an emergency meeting of the board of the Society, theorganization showed its institutional rather than avant-garde color byrejecting "Mutt's" work. "Art and Economics: Duchamp's Postmodern Returns." Criticism 35 (Spring 1993): 193-219."Marcel Duchamp." Britannica 2 1 Deluxe Edition CD-ROM. But again, itwas not a sculpture but a readymade. The rendezvous concept is equallyimportant as a statement of context, suggesting the confluence of art,presentation modality, and receiver/viewer (or perhaps critic) of the art. The researchwill set forth the historical and cultural context in which the work firstpresented and then discuss how it was received, its impact on the historyof art, and how it affected and transformed art, including the relevance ofart criticism of the work to its aesthetic significance. He was outside artistic tradition not only in shunning repetition but also in not attempting a prolific output or frequent exhibition of his work. "The Influence of Marcel Duchamp." Marcel Duchamp. If this paper is not what you are looking for, you can search again: Search for: or Click here to request an essay written just for you.