We all remember Duchamp for his iconic work “Fountain”. A story of artistic and social transgression that begins in 1917, during the First World War, when Marcel creates one of the most brilliant provocations in the history of art. Under the pseudonym of "R. Mutt “, presents his fundamental work, Fountain, at the Salone della Society of Independent Artists. For the uninitiated: Fountain was a signed and dated upside-down urinal.
Although the Society of Independent Artists salon lacked a judging panel, the council rejected the artwork, arguing that “The Fountain may be a very useful object in its place, but its place and not in an art exhibition and it is, by no definition a work of art.” Some even went so far as to call the object immoral.
In an anonymous editorial – later determined to be written by the artist Beatrice Wood – he articulated the importance of Duchamp's so-called “readymade”. She wrote: “Mr. Mutt's fountain is not immoral, this is absurd, no more than a bathtub is immoral… That Mr. Mutt made the fountain with his own hands doesn't matter. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful meaning disappeared under the new title and point of view – he created a new thought for that object”.
Though the Fountain incident occurred more than a century ago, debates about Duchamp's approach to artistic creation remain relevant, both in the context of his oeuvre and the artists who have taken on his idiom.
Marcel Duchamp, LHOOQ., 1964. Estimate £200,000 – 300,000. 20th Century & Contemporary Art London
We continue with another important example of Duchamp, LHOOQ, the artist's embellishment of the Mona Lisa. A celebrity in its own right, Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece represents not only a Renaissance treasure, but the culture that underpins it as such. In the Dada tableau of him, as inscribed under one version of the portrait, he added a moustache, goatee, and the salacious tag LHOOQ (in French, the letters read phonetically as “Elle a chaud au cul” or, as Duchamp put it, “There's a fire over there”).
Duchamp's "embellishments", it is worth adding, are not particularly new: they are the acts of vandalism to which so many children resort when they make fun of a magazine cover or a historical figure. Their power, as with Fountain, lies in the choice of him, who evocatively projects the sixteenth-century painting as an emblem of a sort of secular mob saint. The work, of course, also questions representations of gender, undermining another convention that is often unquestioned in its familiarity.
But to fire Duchamp is to seriously miss the point. Each artist has led/leads into the institutional critiques of their own eras, using found objects to articulate and undermine greed, rigidity and inauthenticity masquerading as opposites.
