What I love about people who claim that “Fountain” isn’t art is that they’re never the kind of people who are actually into art so they’ll just start whining about a urinal and you can come back with, like, 30 pieces that have been made as a reaction to “Fountain,” everything from Brian Eno recontextualizing it by pissing in it to Zhou Wendou conceptually unmaking it and remaking it as something that is more unquestionably art and these “BUT MODERN ART DOESN’T MEAN ANYTHING” jerk are just over there feeling wanky don’t have any idea about any of it. They’re trying to yell about a hundred-year-old statement, the opening thesis of a discussion about art, and they haven’t bothered to look at the last hundred years of art nerds arguing and debating and doing fucking art about it.

“Fountain” is genuinely one of my favorite pieces of art because of how much more art it has provoked and how compelling the conversations about its status as art can be (if Duchamp’s goal was to make people question what art is does that mean that all the reactions and remixes and arguments about the original piece are actually an extension of Duchamp’s work? Is this a communal art project we’ve all been participating in for a hundred years and can you be a part of it too? I would say extremely fuck yes.)

@spycrabsunited said:

Y’all really gonna just be vague about modern art and how “fantastic” it is or are any of you going to explain how pissing into the glued together pieces of restroom equipment is art? 

Brian Eno didn’t piss into Zhou Wendou’s 2006 Untitled piece (which is the glued-together broken urinal); he emptied a vial of urine into a replica of Duchamp’s 1917 piece “Fountain,” which was a mass-produced urinal laid on its side and signed “R. Mutt.”

Duchamp had a series of what he called “readymades” - mass-produced objects that he presented as art - and “Fountain” is the most famous of these readymade sculptures.

Plenty of people will look at a urinal in an art show and go “this isn’t art!” but in the early Dada movement nobody had thought to question whether a mass-manufactured urinal might be art. It’s a man-made object. What separates industrial craft from individual art? Is it the presentation? The context? The original intended purpose? Again, in 1917 this was a question that not a lot of people had asked before so in very general terms Duchamp put a pissoir on a pedestal and said “This is Art; Prove me Wrong.”

And then 102 years of arguing about art happened.

In 1993 Brian Eno (ambient musician and all-around weird guy) went to an exhibit that included “Fountain” and poured some urine into it. Several other people had done the same thing over the years, which is why Eno couldn’t piss directly in it and had to carry around a jar of his own waste in order to make a point.

So Eno’s point was “you’re glorifying this one particular bit of ceramic and it’s against the spirit of the original piece, this needs to be a pisspot again” and other people have peed in it to make the point that it has a broad context - it is both high art and a low urinal.

These are people who were publicly performing an action in order to make a statement about art - these were people doing performance art.

SO.

Back to 2006.

The Zhou Wendou piece takes a readymade urinal, breaks it down to ceramic, and then remakes it into a vase. It’s being very playful - conceptually remaking Duchamp’s piece into a piece of intentional art again instead of found art is clever and funny, especially when the intentional art it makes mimics something else that could easily be mass produced - it reminds me of Ai Weiwei’s 1995 work “Breaking a Han Dynasty Urn,” which also references Duchamp (it was part of Weiwei’s series about repurposing “cultural readymades”) and that’s likely intentional; I’d be surprised if Wendou wasn’t commenting on this:

“It’s powerful only because someone thinks it’s powerful and invests value in the object.” - Ai Weiwei

So that loops back around to the original piece in 1917.

Is putting a signature on a urinal art?

Is pissing in a piece of conceptual art performance art?

Is breaking an old piece of art art?

Is breaking a urinal and shaping it into a vase art?

And the reason I think all of these questions are so cool is because they boil down to this:

Is making people question the definition of art in itself art?

And I say yes.