Marcel Duchamp - Only When We Laugh

Nowadays you might go to an art museum intent on seeing the great works of Rembrandt, Da Vinci, or Michelangelo. Then when you get there you find yourself walking through galleries lined with blank canvases, styrofoam peanuts, urethane foam, mason jars, computer printouts, piled-up cowpies, and used handkerchiefs (or worse). "And from this," you ask, "they make a living?

Indignant at paying $25 for a ticket to see such dreck and incensed when you read that the exhibit was funded in part by a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts, you write a spittle flinging diatribe to your congressman. He, to show his fiscal responsibility and because he's never set foot in an art museum in his life, votes to cut funding from the NEA and so leaving more of taxpayer's dollars to go for congressional pay raises and pensions to supplement their already bloated incomes from their tax exempt off shore bank accounts and hedge funds.

For all this hooplah we can thank - or blame - Marcel Duchamp. Marcel was born in France in 1887 and showed early talent both in mathematics and in art. His brother was a respected sculptor and helped get Marcel into some exhibitions while the fledgling artist attended the Academy Julian.

Paris in the early 20th century was a great place for young artists. You met people like Jean Metzinger and Juan Gris (whoever they were). But Marcel found making a living at art was not easy, and so he went into art dealing. Unlike today where art dealers expect to take a 50 % cut on the work and 100 % on resales (artists get nothing when their art is sold more than once), Marcel hoped to recover costs plus 10 %. He managed OK, entered into a 7 month marriage, and in 1915, pulled up stakes and moved to New York. Although he traveled around a lot, his home base was always America although it wasn't until 1955 - when he was nearly 70 - that he became a US citizen.

Marcel also began to devote more and more of his time to chess. He had always been an expert player but soon he became ranked as a master. He could easily hold own with national and international champions and even placed in the top 10 in national and international tournaments. There is also the famous photo of him playing chess with a nude model, Eva Babitz. Marcel and Eva weren't just posing for the photos. They were really playing chess, and Marcel won the first game with Fool's mate - that is, in three moves.

Despite what some people thought, Marcel had not given up on art. Much his early work was pretty typical for the time. He experimented with cubism and created his now iconic Nude Descending a Staircase. Only the most naive can look at it and say "Why, I could do that!". If Marcel heard comments like that, he suggested they should try.

On the other hand, there are some kinds of Marcel's art anyone could do - that is, if they got the idea. This was his Dada art, for which, for better or worse, he is most famous. Originally arising in Europe, largely in Germany after World War I, Dada spread through the world, and Marcel and his friends brought it to New York. Attempts to define the movement usually involve rather vague sociological and psychoanalytic references to the era and the circumstances of post-WWI Europe. But Dada Art can only really be characterized by the individual works and the artists themselves. Often called a short-lived movement, it never really died out - as a trip to virtually any museum with modern art will prove.

One of Marcel's Dadist - quote - "works of art" - unquote - was something he called "L. H. O. O. Q.", which is pronounced in French "El Aeesh Oh Oh Que". The title is a pun on the French "Elle a chaud au cul". Loosely translated (very loosely translated) this means "She's a hot babe". It was not a painting per se, but was a cheap reproduction of the Mona Lisa on which Marcel drawn a mustache and wrote the title underneath. What is this, people asked. A joke?

Marcel knew that much of the art he and his friends was funny. Sure, "L. H. O. O. Q." looked crazy and people laughed at it. But that was all right. It was supposed to be funny.

Of course, intentional humor in art is nothing new. See Joachim Wtewael's early 17th century painting "Mars and Venus Surprised by the Gods" for an early example. Of course, today William Wegman's photographs of his dog, Man Ray, are supposed to make you smile, and Duane Hanson's ultra realistic lifecast sculptures of ordinary people, like "Museum Guard", often create humor by the gallery visitor's response.

But perhaps the most notorious - er, that's "famous" - work Marcel foisted - sorry, we mean created - was titled Fountain. The work was submitted as a sculpture to the exhibit run by the Society of Independent Artists in 1917. The jury said they would accept whatever anyone entered. Marcel decided to put the judges to the test. He submitted Fountain using the pseudonym, "R. Mutt". Fountain was an simply an old urinal, turned on its back with the "artist's" signature and the year, "R. Mutt 1917", written in black paint.

The committee was divided. Some said it was an indeed an example of art using "found" objects to create new compositions. Others said that in no way could it be considered art. The latter opinion carried the day, although just barely. Fountain was rejected. Marcel then resigned from the committee although he had not really been all that involved in the Society of Independent Artists.

What happened to Fountain is unknown. It was probably scrapped after Alfred Steiglitz took a photograph of it. The supreme irony is that a work that was a nose tweak to an artistic jury and created from "found" objects is now only seen in reproductions which are carefully crafted. There are also variants of the art - derivative works you might say - in the art museums throughout the world, either in the galleries to look at or in other locations for functional use.

Another first for Fountain was that this was the first example of that art thrown away because you couldn't distinguish it - literally - from garbage. Since then there have been several cases where - quote - "works of art" - unquote - have accidentally been thrown out by maintenance personnel in major museums. Maybe art museums need to post signs like "This is a $2,000,000 work of art, not a bag of trash.

Finally an important characteristic of Marcel's sculpture is it was probably the first work of art that was a work of art - not by what it was - but by who created it. After all, the Pièta would have been a masterpiece regardless whether it had been created by Michelangelo or Luigi down at the butcher's shop. But a pile of dust from a vacuum cleaner is not art if the cleaning lady dumps it on the living room floor. But if a famous artist dumps it on a museum floor and sticks a label on the wall, hey presto!, you have a modern sculpture.

So was Fountain a joke or a work of art? Well, it was a joke, but at the time, the idea of taking old ordinary objects and creating them into something new was original. But more importantly, by submitting it as a challenge, Marcel created the first satire on modern art which was doing double duty as art itself. The point is Marcel knew that's what he was doing.

Today it's very trendy to take young kids to an art museum to get them - quote - "exposed to culture" - unquote. But as like as not, the kids look will a blank canvas titled "Man's Inhumanity to Man", a pile of cinder blocks labeled "Chaos of the Modern World", computer collages called "Is God a Penguin?", or a cube of plastic called "Bullshitting Museum Curators #2", and ask "What's so great about this?" Although the parents may struggle to answer, artists who - quote - "create art" - unquote - by wrapping toilet paper around a cast of Michelangelo's David will say they are "exploring new possibilities", "breaking new grounds", or "pushing back the boundaries".

Well, maybe. But perhaps all they're doing is just telling Marcel's joke all over again and have forgotten it was a joke. And we've heard it before.

All right. Are Marcel's works like L. H. O. O. Q. or Fountain great art?

Yes, but only when we laugh.

References

Duchamp: A Biography, Calvin Tomkins, Henry Holt and Company (1996)

"Duchamp's Fountain: The practical joke that launched an artistic revolution", Martin Gayford, The Telegraph, 2008