 | In 1915, Marcel Duchamp emigrated to the United States where he, Man Ray, and Francis Picabia comprised the New York wing of the Dada movement. By the 1920s all three of them were in Paris; by 1924, André Breton had broken with Dada and published the first Surrealist manifesto. Though Duchamp remained a Dadaist, he was greatly respected by the Surrealists and always hovered on the edge of the movement. Roughly speaking, the Dadaists were relentlessly negative, while Surrealism emphasized building a future rather than destroying the past. The Dadaists used all manner of creative chaos to try to sweep away old artistic standards and conventions. Surrealism, on the other hand, drew heavily from Freud and sought to make the unconscious conscious in order to liberate the sexual instincts. Breton's "pure psychic automatism"—automatic writing, painting, etc.—was an aesthetic: It was an idea of beauty. Dada hated the concept of beauty. Duchamp's Fountain is the Dada creation par excellence. Though Duchamp called it a "readymade," implying randomness, it's anything but. The white porcelain mocks the white marble of ancient Greek architecture and sculpture, while the allusion to a "fountain" travesties the great fountains of Renaissance palazzi. And the urinal is exhibited upside-down, just as the reference to human waste inverts the value Western civilization places on Western art. At the same time, Duchamp submitted Fountain to a nonjuried exhibition of avant-garde art in New York to test his comrades' attitudes. As such, the work was as much an outrage to avant-garde values as to conventional ones—and it was duly rejected. Disorderly, inconsistent, indiscriminate subversion was the essence of Dada. |  |
Marcel Duchamp, Fontaine (Fountain), 1964 (fifth version, after lost original of 1917). Image courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. |
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