After "this" … is just delicious to listen at the “smart”
conversation in the VIDEO below …
JEEVES
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The original Fountain by Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven
photographed by Alfred Stieglitz at the 291 (Art Gallery) after the 1917
Society of Independent Artists exhibit. Stieglitz used a backdrop of The
Warriors by Marsden Hartley to photograph the urinal. The entry tag is clearly
visible.
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‘Famous urinal ‘Fountain’ is not by Marcel Duchamp’
Art history Art experts claim ‘Fountain’, the world famous
piece of art, was created by German Dada artist Elsa von Freytag, not by Marcel
Duchamp.
Sandra Smallenburg
14 juni 2018
Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Dada artist and Marcel
Duchamp’s friend, seen here posing as a model at the New York academy of art.
Foto Bettmann/Getty Images
Fountain, the famous urinal credited to Marcel Duchamp, is
not by the famous French artist, according to four academics and historians in
the latest edition of Dutch art magazine See All This.
Instead, the urinal, which dates from 1917, should be
credited to German Dada artist, Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, the
experts say.
The theory that a female artist rather than Duchamp is
hiding behind the name R. Mutt – the signature on the urinal – has been doing
the rounds in the art world for a longer period. And various academics have
been trying to determine who is the real maker since 1982, when a letter by
Duchamp popped up in which he denies any involvement. In 2002, academic Irene
Gammel wrote in her biography of Baroness Elsa that Von Freytag-Loringhoven was
at least partly responsible for the work.
In 2004, Fountain was described in the British press as „the
most influential modern work of art ever”. The original urinal was probably
lost in 1917 and is only known from a photograph. Replicas, authorized by
Duchamp, can be found in some of the world’s most prominent museums, including
the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Tate Modern in London and the San Francisco
MoMA.
Last year, however, new evidence emerged that indicates Von
Freytag-Loringhoven rather than Duchamp dreamt up the urinal. Towards the end
of his life, Duchamp circulated a story in which he claimed to have bought it
in a sanitary fittings shop on Fifth Avenue in New York. That story turned out
not to be true. In 1917, the address he gave was actually occupied by JL Mott
Iron Works, which did not sell products.
British art historian Glyn Thompson was the first to track
down a similar urinal to the original, in an old factory in St Louis. It had
been made by Trenton Potteries Company in New Jersey. And according to the Mott
company inventory, that particular type had never been sold in New York.
There is more indirect evidence which points to Baroness
Elsa. When Fountain was submitted to an exhibition in New York, the label
carried an address in Philadelphia, the city where Von Freytag-Loringhoven
lived in spring 1917. Later that same year, the artist made another sculpture
from a waste water pipe called God, which would appear to seamlessly fit the
urinal.
Theo Paijmans, the author of the article in See All This,
says all this evidence is overwhelming. „The letter, Duchamp’s weak arguments,
the finding of a second urinal, the fact the original was sent from
Philadelphia not New York – when I put everything together, I knew it. Elsa
made Fountain.”
Paijmans says the myth Duchamp created is a „one big cover
up” and „an old scandal that has to be revisited.” Now, with the #MeToo
movement, the time is right for change, he says. „There is real momentum to put
works by women in the spotlight again. It is high time that art history is
rewritten and this mother of modern art is given the place in it that she
deserves.”
Fountain (Duchamp)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The original Fountain by Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven
photographed by Alfred Stieglitz at the 291 (Art Gallery) after the 1917
Society of Independent Artists exhibit. Stieglitz used a backdrop of The
Warriors by Marsden Hartley to photograph the urinal. The entry tag is clearly
visible.
Fountain is a 1917 work produced by Elsa von
Freytag-Loringhoven. The piece was a porcelain urinal, which was signed
"R.Mutt" and titled Fountain. Submitted for the exhibition of the
Society of Independent Artists, in 1917, the first annual exhibition by the
Society to be staged at The Grand Central Palace in New York, Fountain was
rejected by the committee, even though the rules stated that all works would be
accepted from artists who paid the fee. Fountain was displayed and photographed
at Alfred Stieglitz's studio, and the photo published in The Blind Man, but the
original has been lost. The work is regarded by art historians and theorists of
the avant-garde, such as Peter Bürger, as a major landmark in 20th-century art.
Seventeen replicas commissioned from Duchamp in the 1960s now exist.
Origin
Marcel Duchamp arrived in the United States less than two
years prior to the creation of Fountain and had become involved with Dada, an
anti-rational, anti-art cultural movement, in New York City. According to one
version, the creation of Fountain began when, accompanied by artist Joseph
Stella and art collector Walter Arensberg, he purchased a standard Bedfordshire
model urinal from the J. L. Mott Iron Works, 118 Fifth Avenue. The artist
brought the urinal to his studio at 33 West 67th Street, reoriented it to a
position 90 degrees from its normal position of use, and wrote on it, "R.
Mutt 1917".
According to another version, Duchamp did not create
Fountain, but rather assisted in submitting the piece to the Society of
Independent Artists for a female friend. In a letter dated 11 April 1917
Duchamp wrote to his sister Suzanne telling her about the circumstances around
Fountain's submission: "Une de mes amies sous un pseudonyme masculin,
Richard Mutt, avait envoyé une pissotière en porcelaine comme sculpture"
("One of my female friends, who had adopted the male pseudonym, Richard
Mutt, sent me a porcelain urinal as a sculpture.") Duchamp never
identified his female friend, but two candidates have been proposed: the
Dadaist Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, whose scatological aesthetic
echoed that of Duchamp, or Louise Norton, who contributed an essay to The Blind
Man discussing Fountain. Norton, who recently had separated from her husband,
was living at the time in an apartment owned by her parents at 110 West 88th
Street in New York City, and this address is partially discernible (along with
"Richard Mutt") on the paper entry ticket attached to the object, as
seen in Stieglitz's photograph.
Rhonda Roland Shearer in the online journal Tout-Fait (2000)
has concluded that the photograph is a composite of different photos, while
other scholars such as William Camfield have never been able to match the
urinal shown in the photo to any urinals found in the catalogues of the time
period.
At the time Duchamp was a board member of the Society of
Independent Artists. After much debate by the board members (most of whom did
not know Duchamp had submitted it) about whether the piece was or was not art,
Fountain was hidden from view during the show. Duchamp resigned from the Board
in protest.
The New York Dadaists stirred controversy about Fountain and
its being rejected in the second issue of The Blind Man which included a photo
of the piece and a letter by Alfred Stieglitz, and writings by Beatrice Wood
and Arensberg. The anonymous editorial (which is assumed to be written by Wood)
accompanying the photograph, entitled "The Richard Mutt Case,"[14]
made a claim that would prove to be important concerning certain works of art
that would come after it:
Whether Mr Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not
has no importance. He CHOSE it. 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 defense of the work being art, Wood also wrote, "The
only works of art America has given are her plumbing and her bridges."
Duchamp described his intent with the piece was to shift the focus of art from
physical craft to intellectual interpretation.
Menno Hubregtse argues that Duchamp may have chosen Fountain
as a readymade because it parodied Robert J. Coady's exaltation of industrial
machines as pure forms of American art. Coady, who championed his call for
American art in his publication The Soil, printed a scathing review of Jean
Crotti's Portrait of Marcel Duchamp (Sculpture Made to Measure) in the December
1916 issue. Hubregtse notes that Duchamp's urinal may have been a clever
response to Coady's comparison of Crotti's sculpture with "the absolute
expression of a—plumber."
Shortly after its initial exhibition, Fountain was lost.
According to Duchamp biographer Calvin Tomkins, the best guess is that it was
thrown out as rubbish by Stieglitz, a common fate of Duchamp's early
readymades.
The first reproduction of Fountain was authorized by Duchamp
in 1950 for an exhibition in New York; two more individual pieces followed in
1953 and 1963, and then an artist's multiple was manufactured in an edition of
eight in 1964. These editions ended up in a number of important public
collections; Indiana University Art Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,
the National Gallery of Canada, Centre Georges Pompidou and Tate Modern. The
edition of eight was manufactured from glazed earthenware painted to resemble
the original porcelain, with a signature reproduced in black paint.
Interpretations
Of all the artworks in this series of readymades, Fountain
is perhaps the best known because the symbolic meaning of the toilet takes the
conceptual challenge posed by the readymades to their most visceral extreme.
Similarly, philosopher Stephen Hicks argued that Duchamp, who was quite
familiar with the history of European art, was obviously making a provocative
statement with Fountain:
The artist is a not great creator—Duchamp went shopping at a
plumbing store. The artwork is not a special object—it was mass-produced in a
factory. The experience of art is not exciting and ennobling—at best it is
puzzling and mostly leaves one with a sense of distaste. But over and above
that, Duchamp did not select just any ready-made object to display. In
selecting the urinal, his message was clear: Art is something you piss on.
Since the photograph taken by Stieglitz is the only image of
the original sculpture, there are some interpretations of Fountain by looking
not only at reproductions but this particular photograph. Tomkins notes that
"it does not take much stretching of the imagination to see in the
upside-down urinal's gently flowing curves the veiled head of a classic
Renaissance madonna or a seated Buddha or, perhaps more to the point, one of
Brâncuși's polished erotic forms."
Title of the work
The use of the word "Dada" for the art movement,
the meaning (if any) and intention of both the piece and the signature "R.
Mutt", are difficult to pin down precisely. It is not clear whether
Duchamp or Freytag-Lorinhoven had in mind the German "Armut" (meaning
"poverty"), or possibly "Urmutter" (meaning “great mother”).
The name R. Mutt could also be a play on its commercial origins or on the
famous comic strip of the time, Mutt and Jeff (making the urinal perhaps the
first work of art based on a comic). In German, Armut means poverty, although
Duchamp said the R stood for Richard, French slang for "moneybags",
which makes Fountain a kind of scatological golden calf.
Legacy
In December 2004, Duchamp's Fountain was voted the most
influential artwork of the 20th century by 500 selected British art world
professionals. The Independent noted in a February 2008 article that with this
single work, Duchamp invented conceptual art and "severed forever the
traditional link between the artist's labour and the merit of the work".
Jerry Saltz wrote in The Village Voice in 2006:
Duchamp adamantly asserted that he wanted to
"de-deify" the artist. The readymades provide a way around inflexible
either-or aesthetic propositions. They represent a Copernican shift in art.
Fountain is what's called an "acheropoietoi," [sic] an image not
shaped by the hands of an artist. Fountain brings us into contact with an
original that is still an original but that also exists in an altered
philosophical and metaphysical state. It is a manifestation of the Kantian
sublime: A work of art that transcends a form but that is also intelligible, an
object that strikes down an idea while allowing it to spring up stronger.
The prices for replicas, editions, or works that have some
ephemeral trace of Duchamp reached its peak with the purchase of one of the
eight 1964 replicas of Fountain for $1.7 million at Sotheby's in November 1999.
Several performance artists have attempted to
"contribute" to the piece by urinating in it. South African born
artist Kendell Geers rose to international notoriety in 1993 when, at a show in
Venice, he urinated into Fountain. Artist / musician Brian Eno declared
successfully urinating in Fountain while exhibited in the MoMA in 1993. He
admitted that it was only a technical triumph because he needed to urinate in a
tube in advance so he could get the fluid through a gap between the protective
glass. Swedish artist Björn Kjelltoft urinated in Fountain at Moderna Museet in
Stockholm in 1999.
In spring 2000, Yuan Chai and Jian Jun Xi, two performance
artists, who in 1999 had jumped on Tracey Emin's installation-sculpture My Bed
in the Turner Prize exhibition at Tate Britain, went to the newly opened Tate
Modern and tried to urinate on the Fountain which was on display. However, they
were prevented from soiling the sculpture directly by its Perspex case. The
Tate, which denied that the duo had succeeded in urinating into the sculpture
itself, banned them from the premises stating that they were threatening
"works of art and our staff." When asked why they felt they had to
add to Duchamp's work, Chai said, "The urinal is there – it's an
invitation. As Duchamp said himself, it's the artist's choice. He chooses what
is art. We just added to it."
On January 4, 2006, while on display in the Dada show in the
Pompidou Centre in Paris, Fountain was attacked by Pierre Pinoncelli, a
76-year-old French performance artist,
with a hammer causing a slight chip. Pinoncelli, who was arrested, said the
attack was a work of performance art that Marcel Duchamp himself would have
appreciated. In 1993 Pinoncelli urinated into the piece while it was on display
in Nimes, in southern France. Both of Pinoncelli's performances derive from
neo-Dadaists' and Viennese Actionists' intervention or manoeuvre.
Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917/1964, porcelain urinal,
paint, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Speakers: Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker.
Created by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker.
Created by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker.
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed reading!!!XD