Abstract
The newly developed psychoanalytical approach to art historical investigation is used to interpret Duchamp’s Fountain. This involves a fundamental shift in perspective whereby the gaps in our knowledge of the work are seen to indicate the strategic logic underpinning Duchamp’s actions and output: a conscious effort to both engage in and disengage from the workings of the aesthetic field in order to avoid its debilitating effects while exposing its internal dynamics. To identify this strategy, the author retraces Fountain’s reception, focusing on how a repeated inconsistency connects the dominant and most influential responses to the work into a single thread. What becomes apparent is that, at different levels of the aesthetic field, Duchamp was both controlling and exposing the logic of his own work’s reception.
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Notes
- 1.
As Jean-Jacques Lebel notes, the 2014 exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Marcel Duchamp : la peinture, même, should be added to the list of important one-man shows that helped establish the dominant reception of Duchamp: that is, the 2009 exhibition in the Philadelphia Museum of Art devoted to Given; the 2005–2006 show at the Pompidou and the National Gallery in Washington DC; the 1977 retrospective again at the Pompidou , then the Musée National d’Art Moderne, held nearly nine years after the artist’s death (Lebel in Franklin, 2016, p. 8).
- 2.
This “astonishing silence” (Camfield, 1989, p. 86) echoes the initial reaction to Étant donnés and, indeed, today’s curious lack of critical engagement with Fountain .
- 3.
“Money passed over my head,” he explains to Cabanne , “I wasn’t the kind of painter who sells” (Duchamp, 1979, p. 57). “I never touched money,” he declares elsewhere, “money was always over my head” (Duchamp, 1979, pp. 60–63). “I could have very well accepted ten thousand dollars, but no, I sensed the danger right away” (Duchamp, 1979, p. 106). Cabanne was therefore justified in asking the obvious question: “Wasn’t your commercial activity in contradiction to your attitude?” (Duchamp, 1979, p. 74).
- 4.
Duchamp suggests as much when questioned about his contradictory activity: “The idea of collecting art works for a museum was rather anti-Duchamp. Didn’t you feel you were repudiating your own opinions?—I was doing it for friendship. It wasn’t my idea. The fact that I agreed to be a member of a jury which determined what works were chosen didn’t involve my opinions at all on the question […] it was more camaraderie than anything else” (Duchamp, 1979, p. 58).
- 5.
Lebel appears particularly perturbed when Duchamp made his feelings clear to a third party: “just what kind of man is that Robert Lebel ? I cannot really figure him out.” Significantly, the third party in question was none other than Jacques Lacan, Lebel’s psychoanalyst at the time: “He did not ask me, but asked Lacan, who repeated it to me. While we were good friends, we somehow held back” (Lebel in Franklin, 2016, p. 48 ).
- 6.
It was this time, 1947 to be precise, that Duchamp started working in secret on Étant donnés: 1 ° the waterfall /2° le gaz d’éclairage. These words (EAU & GAZ À TOUS LES ÉTAGES [WATER & GAS ON ALL FLOORS]) would later appear on the cover of a box containing the grand-deluxe edition of Lebel’s book (Franklin, 2016, pp. 40–41).
- 7.
“His fountain was not immoral since one could see it every day exposed in all the bathroom and plumbing show rooms […] the fact that he modeled it with his own hands or not is unimportant, what’s important is the choice that he made. He took an article of everyday life and made its normal significance disappear under the new title and, from this point of view, gave a new, purely aesthetic, meaning to this object” (my translation).
- 8.
This fact is brought to our attention by Michael Betancourt in The Richard Mutt Case : Looking for Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain”.
- 9.
As Tomkins notes, the play opened at the Femina Theater in Paris in February 1911 before closing after three performances and then being re-staged in 1912 for four weeks.
- 10.
A thorough analysis of this short text (but one, I would argue, that retains the established interpretation) was recently offered by Julian Jason Haladyn (2015).
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Kilroy, R. (2018). The Facts and Curious Features of the Case. In: Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69158-9_5
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