When Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) submitted a readymade porcelain urinal for an art exhibition, he couldn't have anticipated that his gesture would revolutionize the art world, for better or worse.
There’s something authentic about anything that is done for the first time. Your first sip of coffee, your first day at the job, the first time you visit your favorite football team’s stadium, and so on. It gives your life a different perspective. You start viewing things with an added layer of awareness and sophistication.
We can waste endless hours debating and analyzing Duchamp’s work “The Fountain.” However, I am more interested in exploring one important aspect of one of his artworks that disrupted the system – irrespective of my personal opinion on the matter.
The artwork was a urinal he had sent under the pseudonym R. Mutt to the committee of the Independent Society of Artists who had vouched to accept all works submitted for the planned exhibition.
Duchamp was on the committee himself. A debate took place, and the vote count was in favor of rejecting the urinal because it was “not a work of art” and was not an appropriate piece to showcase.
Understandably, Duchamp did not like that. They eventually agreed to display the work behind a partition to limit its exposure. If you want to read more about the story, here’s a link. You might be in for a treat.
Duchamp put the committee’s claims to respect the artist’s freedom of expression to the test. In a way, he was an unexpected troll, who, with a simple act, triggered a significant debate about the nature of artwork and what could be considered a work of art.
Subsequently, several other artistic movements branched out, including Dadaism, Surrealism, and many other "isms."
I don’t know much about the life of Duchamp, but it is curious how Duchamp posed a self-reflective question to the art world. Could any object be considered artwork if the artist says so? What is the set of criteria that helps a committee decide to accept or reject a work of art? Is it based on the quality of the work? Are the criteria objective? Or is the decision a combination of networking and recommendations?
Duchamp’s work challenged the tenets of the establishment; he trolled them too, in a way.
Socrates would have done something similar, but without actually sending a concrete work of art. In all fairness, Socrates wouldn’t have mingled with artists to begin with. He was the one who dissuaded his student Plato from pursuing poetry in favor of philosophy. But you get the point.
Now back to the Duchamp’s stealthy maneuver. There’s definitely something authentic about what Duchamp did. It disrupted the system and got artists to reexamine their trade.
However, it feels like such innovative stunts end up being incorporated into the system, thus becoming the new norm.
I made a pseudo-Hegelian scheme below. That’s what’s called the Hegelian dialectic (named after the German philosopher Georg Hegel [1770-1831]); it comprises a thesis, an antithesis, and a synthesis. The synthesis becomes a new antithesis.
That’s how the entire history unfolds according to him.
Maybe Hegel is partially right, after all?
Someone trolls the system => pushes the boundaries => the trolling is incorporated into the system and becomes the norm => someone else trolls the system.
But let's understand the irony. Who in the world would consider a ready-made urinal a piece of art? Duchamp, like the good troll that he was, got away with it. He could’ve sent something else, a bottle of water or a bag of coffee. But the fact that he sent a urinal indicates that he was trolling. The jury was cornered; they were in quite a predicament.
Some decades later, Andy Warhol would film himself eating a hamburger from Burger King. He was an artist influencer way before influencers were cool, a hipster influencer. Just saying!
A takeaway from this article could be the following: life is in constant flux. It takes effort to maintain a balanced approach between a conservative tradition and a more liberal one. The best attitude to avoid falling into the trap of extremes is to invoke a trickster spirit every once in a while. Especially now, in a time of heightened polarization, even the most neutral and seemingly inoffensive joke can upset someone. We all should take a moment to relax, share a drink, and savor a laugh.