Mutt, and submitted it to the Independents exhibition, calling it Fountain. Mott Iron Works in New York, signed it with the pseudonym R. Nevertheless, Duchamp’s late, fictional story is still taught in every class and recited in every book.ĭuchamp maintained that he bought the urinal from the J. Irene Gammel and Glyn Thompson have revealed the truth of his much earlier private account that he did not submit the urinal to the Society of Independent Artists exhibition in New York in 1917. The extraordinary fact that has emerged from the painstaking studies of William Camfield, Kirk Varnedoe and Hector Obalk is that Duchamp could not have done what he said he did late in life. The Moderna Museet, Stockholm, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern, the National Gallery of Canada, the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, Indiana University Art Museum, Bloomington, the Centre Pompidou, Paris and the Israel Museum should all re-label their copies of Fountain as “a replica, appropriated by Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), of an original by Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874-1927)”. The public has a right to believe what it reads on a museum label. But Tomkins avoids addressing the implications of the question marks over the origins of the work that Duchamp himself raised in 1917. Ann Temkin, MoMA’s chief curator of painting and sculpture, praises Tomkins in her introduction for his “thorough research”. It has just published a new edition of Calvin Tomkins’s 1996 life of Duchamp, updated by its author. The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York is the latest eminent body to bury its head in the sand. But the art world as a whole-museums, academia and the market-has persistently refused to acknowledge this fact. King Abdullah’s aim seems to deify the man on the commode, turning every person who excretes or urinates into the bowl into an artist.įour people, the South African artist Kendell Geers, the musician Brian Eno, and the Chinese performance artists Yuan Chai and Jian Jun Xi, have claimed to urinate in the Fountain.Evidence that Marcel Duchamp may have stolen his most famous work, Fountain, from a woman poet has been in the public domain for many years. The Golden Toilet is art compelled into use. ‘Fountain’ was an object of use turned into art.
The Golden Toilet reiterates the belief that all men might be created equal but some men’s faeces are more equal than others. If there ever was a gross corruption of ‘retinal art’, this is it, for the butt (rhymes with ‘Mutt’, remember) is indifferent to the stock exchange value of metals, gold or iron. All this is at complete odds with the modernist impulse of Duchamp’s work. If anyone ever spoke back to the Empire, this is it: the audacity of abundance, challenging the entire notion of the readymade and industrial production that birthed that aesthetic, bringing into its fold the hierarchy among men. Nearly a hundred years later, King Abdullah turns Duchamp’s Fountain on its head. Mutt could be ‘armut’, meaning ‘poverty’ in German, and ‘R’ could mean ‘Richard’, a French slang for ‘moneybags’. Mutt? Among the many interpretations of ‘Fountain’ over nearly a century, I find two to be useful in my understanding of King Abdullah’s ‘The Golden Toilet’: R.
All that Duchamp did was to reorient the urinal to a position that was 90 degrees from its normal position of use. The porcelain urinal had arrived as a piece of sculpture from a female friend whose signature on it is a pseudonym: ‘R. The ‘first’ definition of ‘readymade’ is commonly thought to be made by Duchamp though Andre Breton and Paul Eluard, who compiled the Dictionnaire abrege du Surrealisme later denied it: ‘an ordinary object elevated to the dignity of a work of art by the mere choice of an artist …’.
His work was founded on ‘visual indifference’ and much of his work hinges on how ‘found objects’ are turned into works of art. “The Golden Toilet” (2014) as a name or title for the toilet is a bit of tautology: it is like a last minute reminder of wealth and opulence, just in case anyone forgot or doubted that the intestines of this toilet was made of gold, a bit like being told that one would be surrounded by made-to-order bodies in a beauty contest.ĭuchamp, in case it needs reminding, was working on the aesthetic of the readymade, by positing it against what he called ‘retinal art’, art that appealed to the eye alone.
Mutt” and turned it into art, calling it “Fountain” (1917), Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah has gifted his daughter a toilet made entirely of gold as a wedding gift. Nearly a hundred years after Marcel Duchamp took a porcelain urinal signed “R.
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