The Art Historian (original) (raw)
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Marcel Duchamp's Fountain: One Hundred Years Later. London: Palgrave Macmillan, December 12th, 2017.
2017 marks the centenary of an artwork judged to be the single most influential of the twentieth century: Marcel Duchamp’s famous “readymade” entitled Fountain. The final verdict on Fountain has been widely accepted, despite the fact that the circumstances surrounding “Mr. Richard Mutt” have never resembled an open-and-shut case. On the contrary, since Fountain’s appearance in 1917, when it was rejected as “a plain piece of plumbing” only to be subsequently celebrated as a work of conceptual art, numerous questions remain unanswered, several facts remain unexplained. Now, one hundred years later, Robert Kilroy attempts to answer these questions by examining the evidence with fresh eyes. Central to the investigation is the primary witness – Duchamp himself – whose statements are forensically analyzed. The facts themselves are interrogated using the methodology of a detective: precisely speaking, an art historical approach with a critical edge sharpened by a new interpretation of psychoanalytic theory. In weaving an alternative narrative, Kilroy shows us that, not only has Fountain been fundamentally misunderstood, this very misunderstanding is central to the work’s significance. The final verdict, he argues, was strategically stage-managed by Duchamp in order to expose the apparatus underpinning Fountain’s reception, what he terms “The Creative Act.” By suggesting that a specific aesthetic “crime” has gone unnoticed, Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain: One Hundred Years Later asks the reader to radically reassess his/her precise contribution to “the creation of art.” This urgent, if somewhat troubling question, could have far-reaching implications for the field of scholarship, the course of contemporary art and the discipline of Art history.
Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain: Is it Art?
Given that Marcel Duchamp’s readymades mock and repudiate artistic conventions, the claim to aesthetic merit for such works seems contradictory. Yet their conception is today generally considered one of the most influential ideas of Modern Art. Qualifying readymades as art seems paradoxical: is an artwork not supposed to be a beautiful object created by the hands of an artist? The fact that they are mass-manufactured objects that anyone could purchase further insults aesthetic sensibilities. Such questions and contradictions about what ‘Art’ is or should be form the basis of this essay, which seeks to clarify its constructs. As ambiguous artworks, Duchamp’s readymades serve as the ideal focal point to interrogate the definitions of art and to problematise its discourse. This discussion will firstly, introduce and contextualise Duchamp’s Fountain (1917); secondly, question conventional definitions and assumptions of art by exploring how Fountain ruptures these criteria; and lastly, reconsider if Fountain is art and the implications of Duchamp’s gesture.
1992
In “Defining Art Historically” (BJA, 1979, pp.232-250), Jerrold Levinson defends the following definition: (R) X is a work of art at time t iff X is an object of which it is true at t that some person or persons having the appropriate proprietary right over X, nonpassingly intends (or intended) X for regard-as-a-work-of-art, i.e. regard in any way (or ways) in which objects in the extension of “art work” prior to t are or were correctly (or standardly) regarded. (p.240) Moreover, he suggests that this definition can form the generative component of a recursive definition of art, in harness with the initial condition: (I) Objects of the ur-arts are art works at t0 (and thereafter). It seems to me that there are numerous difficulties which confront this definition. In particular, there are difficulties involving: (1) the inclusion of a condition involving “appropriate proprietary rights”; (2) the reliance upon the intentions of independent individuals; (3) Levinson’s account of the notion of “regard-as-a-work-of-art”; and (4) the implicit insistence that art is necessarily backward-looking. Since Levinson’s paper has recently received some favourable press (e.g. see Noel Carroll, “Art, Practice, And Narrative”, Monist, pp.140-156, at p.155n.9), I think that some discussion of these problems is in order. I shall consider them in turn.