Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917/1964, porcelain urinal, paint (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art)
[0:00] [music]
Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:05] We’re at SFMOMA, and we’re looking at a Marcel Duchamp. This is “Fountain,” which he originally made in 1917, but which he remade in 1964. It first got…
Dr. Beth Harris: [0:16] The original was gone.
Dr. Zucker: [0:17] Thrown away, or who knows what.
Dr. Harris: [0:19] So this is a small series that was made in 1964 after that original work of 1917. He oversaw the making of this series.
Dr. Zucker: [0:29] I think we need to be really careful with the word “making.”
[0:31] [laughter]
Dr. Harris: [0:31] I’m not going to go there.
Dr. Zucker: [0:34] What Duchamp did, of course, is he went to a plumbing supply house, it was called “Mott,” and purchased this and…
Dr. Harris: [0:40] Okay, so he didn’t make it.
Dr. Zucker: [0:42] Right. He made it as a work of art through the alchemy of the artist. He transformed this.
Dr. Harris: [0:47] He turned the urinal on its side, signed it “R. Mutt,” and dated it…
Dr. Zucker: [0:51] And submitted it to an art exhibition for a new group that he was a founding member of, the American Society for Independent Artists.
[0:59] Their notion was that the juried exhibition that was prevalent in the United States, in New York at this time — and remember, Duchamp had just come over from Paris — was in fact a real problem, because the jury always selected the traditional work that they were associated with. This new group wanted to bring in new possibilities.
Dr. Harris: [1:19] They were supposed to accept every work that was submitted, but they rejected this one.
Dr. Zucker: [1:24] I think he was really pushing the boundary there.
Dr. Harris: [1:26] He submitted it as sculpture, which to me is even more remarkable, because when you think about sculpture, it has an even more monumental…
Dr. Zucker: [1:36] Grand tradition, yes.
Dr. Harris: [1:36] …heroic tradition even than painting, to take this urinal and turn it on its side.
Dr. Zucker: [1:42] Some art historians have dealt with this in the most absurd way, talking about its formal qualities with its shiny…
Dr. Harris: [1:48] Its curves.
Dr. Zucker: [1:50] …porcelain surface, but it’s a urinal, although it is transformed. This is, of course, what Duchamp called a “ready-made.”
Dr. Harris: [1:56] You used the word “alchemy” before. That’s an interesting word, because one of the ways we can think about what art is is a kind of transformation of ordinary materials into something really wonderful that transports us, and that makes us see things in a new way.
[2:12] Though he didn’t make anything, he is asking us to see the urinal in a new way, not necessarily as an aesthetic object but to make us ask those philosophical questions about what art is, and what the artist does.
Dr. Zucker: [2:29] He separates craftsmanship and its relationship to the aesthetic enjoyment and to the profundity of a work of art, absolutely throwing that out the window.
Dr. Harris: [2:38] Right, that’s the philosophical question he wants to open up — does art have to be made by the hand of the artist?
Dr. Zucker: [2:44] And of course, he’s doing it in the most absurd way by putting a urinal forward, calling it, “Fountain.”
Dr. Harris: [2:49] So, what is art, is it the idea? Is it the concept? Can an artist just have the idea and not make the object?
Dr. Zucker: [2:56] Can art be pure philosophy, pure theory?
Dr. Harris: [2:59] Exactly.
[2:59] [music]
