The Urinal That Broke Art in Two
In 1917 a man bought a plain porcelain urinal from a plumbing supply shop, signed it with a fake name, and asked the world to call it art. It worked.
In the spring of 1917, Marcel Duchamp walked into the J. L. Mott Iron Works at 118 Fifth Avenue in New York with the painter Joseph Stella and the collector Walter Arensberg. What he bought there was nothing special: a standard Bedfordshire model urinal, the kind found in any plumbing catalogue of the era. He carried it back to his studio at 33 West 67th Street, reoriented it from the position it was meant to be used in — turning it upside down from its usual stance — and signed it 'R. Mutt 1917.'
The name was a small joke wrapped in misdirection. 'Mutt comes from Mott Works,' Duchamp later explained, 'but Mott was too close so I altered it to Mutt, after the daily cartoon strip Mutt and Jeff.' He added 'Richard' — French slang for moneybags — because, he said, it was 'not a bad name for a pissotière... the opposite of poverty.' The result was a title that sounded like an artist's name but concealed the real one entirely.
Duchamp submitted the piece, titled Fountain, to the inaugural exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists at the Grand Central Palace. He was, at the time, a board member of the Society — though he sent the work in under the Mutt pseudonym, so most of his colleagues had no idea it was his. The Society's own rules stated that any artist who paid the entry fee would be exhibited, so Fountain could not technically be rejected. It was instead simply hidden. As Duchamp put it decades later: 'It was simply suppressed... placed behind a partition and, for the duration of the exhibition, I didn't know where it was.'
Duchamp resigned from the board in protest and withdrew another work of his, a painting rumored to be titled Tulip Hysteria Co-ordinating, which — pointedly — may never have actually existed. After the show closed, Fountain resurfaced from behind its partition, and Duchamp retrieved it. Before it vanished for good, it was photographed at Alfred Stieglitz's studio, with Marsden Hartley's painting The Warriors visible in the background.
That photograph became the object's afterlife. It ran in the second issue of the Dada journal The Blind Man, alongside an editorial — possibly written by artist Beatrice Wood — titled 'The Richard Mutt Case.' Its argument would echo through the rest of the century: '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.' The essay went further, insisting that plumbing and bridges were among the only art America had produced.
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