Fountain

Having seen Marcel Duchamp's Fountain twice recently, once at the Tate in Liverpool and then at the Barbican and having just finished an essay on Sherrie Levine, I thought it was appropriate to do a post on the Fountain.

Fountain, Marcel Duchamp, 1917 (photographed by Alfred Stieglitz)

Fountain, a porcelain urinal which Duchamp signed R. Mutt, was submitted for the exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in 1917. It was rejected by the committee. Duchamp described his intent with the piece was to shift the focus of art from physical craft to intellectual interpretation. Tomkins notes that 'it does not take much stretching of the imagination to see in the upside-down urinal's gently flowing curves the veiled head of a classic Renaissance madonna or a seated Buddha...'

In 2004 Fountain was voted the most influential artwork of the 20th century by 500 British art world professionals. This single work invented conceptual art and it has been seen as severing forever the traditional link between the artist's labour and the merit of the work.

Furthermore, Jerry Saltz noted:

'Duchamp adamantly asserted that he wanted to 'de-deify' the artist. The readymades provide a way around inflexible either-or aesthetic propositions. They represent a Copernican shift in art. Fountain is what's called an 'acheropoeitoi', an image not shaped by the hands of an artist. Fountain brings us into contact with an original that is still an original but that also exists in an altered philosophical and metaphysical state. It is a manifestation of the Kantian sublime: a work of art that transcends a form but that is also intelligible, an object that strikes down an idea while allowing it to spring up stronger'.

Fountain forced questions of what is and isn't art and what we consider to be art was never the same again.

Fountain (After Marcel Duchamp), 1991, Installation, (cast bronze)

In 1991 Sherrie Levine cast a urinal in bronze and called it Fountain (After Marcel Duchamp). By appropriating and reproducing Duchamp's work in a novel way, Levine added a new perspective and new layers of meaning. As in all of her work, the emphasis was on the vissitudes of authorship rather than aesthetics. The question that is posed concerns copies and originals. Her logic could be seen as opposite to Duchamp's: whereas he pointed at this and that, and in so doing, imported objects into the framework of art, thereby disrupting art's very parameters, Levine's object is released back into the world to circulate anew as both what it might signify and what it has accrued via this movement in and through time.

Known for addressing questions of authorship and authenticity in her work, by taking famous works of art, often making new versions of them and placing them in different contexts, Levine's take on Fountain takes the form of a replica cast in bronze and highly polished so that in some ways it formally resembles a gold buddha statue. Her copy is exact in size and shape, but what was originally a bought object is copied using a traditional approach to making sculpture, so that the object is no longer a common, store-bought object but something unique and in the process opening up more questions about the nature of art. Jerry Saltz, again: 'Her shiny urinal turns an idol of high modernism into an obviously false, self-reflecting, degraded golden calf'.

Throughout her career, Levine has created art based on works by prominent male artists from the early 20th century in order to underscore the relative absence of women in the art world, as well as  the lack of representation of women artists in art history.

Fountain (Buddha), 1996 (cast bronze).




The following links are also relevant and related to this post:
http://a-place-called-space.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/the-bride-and-bachelors.html
http://a-place-called-space.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/sherrie-levine-after-walker-evans.html


Sources:
Johanna Burton: Sherrie Levine, Beside Herself
Craig Owens: The Discourse of Others, Feminists and Postmodernism.

 

Sherrie Levine - After Walker Evans

Sherrie Levine, the appropriation artist par excellence, shocked the art world in 1979 with her After Walker Evans photographs. Walker Evans photographed the Burroughs, a family of sharecroppers in the Depression era and his photographs were published in a book that became the quintessential record of the rural American poor. In 1979 Levine re-photographed Evans' photographs and without any manipulation of the images she presented them in an exhibition of her work.

In representing these canonical images of the rural poor - the expropriated, those existing outside the dominant culture, the Others - Levine was calling attention to the original act of appropriation when Evans first took these photographs as if to illustrate Walter Benjamin's observation that  'photography has succeeded in making even abject poverty, by recording it in a fashionably perfected manner, into an object of enjoyment'.

But she was doing a lot more. Levine effectively re-writes history, taking up images and objects from earlier times and other places and placing them before contemporary audiences to be experienced anew in which they can obtain different meanings over time. By reintroducing these artworks to the public realm she puts into question how and under what conditions that realm exists and might be engendered. Her work is within the tradition of deconstruction, in revealing power structures and ideological imperatives in any given cultural situation, and more specifically, questioning traditional ideas of originality and authorship. She challenges our notions of originality - originality in the sense that traditionally, the artwork was seen as the creation of the 'genius artist', rather than a re-working, re-interpretation of previous work which is what the history of art is: each artist building on what has been done before, or as Douglas Crimp put it, 'underneath each picture there is always another picture'.  And more specifically, she draws attention to the diminished possibilities for originality in our image-saturated world.
    
'Originality was always something I was thinking about, but there's also the idea of ownership and property... It's not that I'm trying to deny that people own things. That isn't even the point. The point is that people want to own things, which is more interesting to me. What does it mean to own something, and stranger still, what does it mean to own an image?'

She also challenges our notions of authorship, of the paternal rights assigned to the author by law and because she has appropriated the work of only male artists,  she is also seen as a feminist hijacking patriarchal authority. As Craig Owens has stated, Levine's disrespect for paternal authority suggests that her activity is less one of appropriation and more one of expropriation: she expropriates the appropriators.

C. Carr described Levine's art as conceptually driven but materially manifested: 'This is work that questions the very idea of being owned. Conceptual art did that 15 years ago by dematerializing the object into pure idea. Her work does it by rematerializing'.

'I try to make art which celebrates doubt and uncertainty. Which provokes answers but doesn't give them. Which withholds absolute meaning by incorporating parasite meanings. Which suspends meaning while perpetually dispatching you toward interpretation, urging you beyond dogmatism, beyond doctrine, beyond ideology, beyond authority'. 

Sources: 

• Craig Owens:  Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power and Culture.
• Johanna Burton: Sherrie Levine, Beside Herself.