The most influential artwork of the 20th century is a urinal nobody can find.
In 1917 a shop-bought urinal signed 'R. Mutt' was submitted to a New York art show and quietly hidden behind a partition. The original was soon lost, probably thrown out. In 2004, 500 art-world professionals voted it the most influential artwork of the century. Who made it is now disputed.
The Society of Independent Artists promised to show any work by anyone who paid the fee. In April 1917 someone tested that promise with a porcelain urinal, turned on its back and signed 'R. Mutt 1917'. Marcel Duchamp, who sat on the Society's board, later said he had submitted it under a pseudonym. The board argued over whether it was art, then hid it from view for the whole exhibition. Duchamp resigned in protest.
The object survives only in a photograph taken by Alfred Stieglitz and published in the Dada magazine The Blind Man, whose editorial made the key argument: it did not matter whether Mr Mutt made the fountain with his own hands; he chose it. Duchamp called these works 'readymades', everyday objects raised to art by the artist's act of choice. His biographer thinks Stieglitz probably threw the original away. The versions in museums today are replicas Duchamp authorised in the 1950s and 60s.
Authorship has become a real debate. In a letter to his sister in April 1917, Duchamp wrote that 'one of my female friends', using a male pseudonym, had sent in a porcelain urinal. Some researchers argue that friend was the Dada artist Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, who lived in Philadelphia, and one scholar claims the urinal model was only sold there. Others point out that 'sent' is not 'made' and that there is no documentary evidence she created it.
Whoever chose it, its effect is hard to overstate. Duchamp said he wanted to move art away from the purely 'retinal' towards ideas, and to pick the object least likely to be liked. In December 2004, a poll of 500 British art professionals named Fountain the most influential artwork of the 20th century, ahead of Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. In 2006 a French performance artist even took a hammer to one of the replicas: a provocation that keeps provoking.
Source: Wikipedia — Fountain (Duchamp) · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
