What Artists Do. Leonard Koren
mounted the
largest exhibition of modern art ever seen in the United
States until then. However, when the hanging commit-
tee reviewed “Fountain”—submitted by an unknown
artist named R. Mutt—the piece was determined to be
not really a work of art but merely a “functional object.”
Duchamp, not coincidentally, was a member of the
hanging committee. Without giving himself away, he
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vigorously defended “Fountain” as an artwork, but the
other members wouldn’t budge. Duchamp understood
that institutions, even well-meaning arts institutions,
tend to be conservative no matter how liberal their
founding ideals. Duchamp kept at it, but when he
realized the futility of his protestations, he quit the
committee.
The rejection of “Fountain” undoubtedly triggered a
sense of déjà vu. Five years prior, in Paris, Duchamp
had tried to enter a painting titled “Nude Descending a
Staircase, No. 2” in an exhibition organized by the
Société des Artistes Indépendants. This salon exhibi-
tion was established in direct response to the rigid
traditionalism of the official government-sponsored
salon (an annual art exhibition). It was supposed to
embrace an artistically more enlightened point of view.
(At the time, getting one’s work accepted in a salon
show was the primary way French artists established
themselves as art-making professionals.) To
Duchamp’s dismay, the “progressive” organizers of this
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“I have forced myself to contradict myself in order
to avoid conforming to my own taste.”
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“. . . as soon as you get to the why, you deal with
‘Why not?’”
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exhibition bristled at the title “Nude Descending. . . .”
They were also taken aback by the painting’s subject
matter. (Up until then nudes either sat or reclined, they
didn’t walk in Cubist stop-motion fashion down flights
of stairs!) The show’s organizers appealed to
Duchamp’s two older brothers, both established artists,
to “manage” their younger sibling. For the sake of
family harmony, Duchamp withdrew his artwork from
consideration. But it must have rankled.
This time around in New York, Duchamp took another
tack. He and a companion retrieved “Fountain” from the
Society of Independent Artists’ storage area and
brought it to Alfred Stieglitz, an eminent American
photographer. They asked Stieglitz to photograph it.
They then reproduced the photograph in an avant-garde
journal titled The Blind Man published, not coincidental-
ly, by Duchamp and some friends. Accompanying the
photograph was an anonymous defense of the work
that read:
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“They say any artist paying six dollars may exhibit [in the
show]. Mr. Mutt sent in a fountain. Without discussion
this article disappeared and never was exhibited. What
were the grounds for refusing Mr. Mutt’s fountain?
1. Some contended it was immoral, vulgar. 2. Others, it
was plagiarism, a plain piece of plumbing. . . .
“Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the foun-
tain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an
ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful signifi-
cance disappeared under a new title and point of view—
creating a new thought for that object.”
Through the force of a well-thought-out idea and
dogged persistence, Duchamp was eventually able to
surmount skepticism, derision—and even hostility—to
see his concept of art fully sink into the art-world
mindset. But it took almost thirty years to do so. By the
1950s, and even more emphatically in the 1960s, it
would not be an exaggeration to say that Duchamp’s
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contribution to the modern art canon was tantamount
to Albert Einstein’s E = mc2 formulation in physics. Einstein posited that a small amount of mass is convertible into an enormous amount of energy. Duchamp posited that any ordinary object can be converted into that special something called art— assuming that an artist can effectively convince others it is so. To this day, countless artists have based at least part of their artistic practice on this revolutionary principle.
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“The world is full of objects more or less interesting;
I do not wish to add any more. . . .”
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2. Make something from nothing
If, following from Duchamp, art can be created out of
anything, then why can’t it be made out of “nothing”?
Indeed, many artists literally make art out of nothing,
or what at first seems like nothing. (Or make art that
seems to come from “nowhere.”) A quintessential
example of this is an artwork created by John Cage