Modern Plumbing (short animated tribute to Marcel Duchamp and his infamous "Fountain")

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• published: 01 Nov 2014
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This is a short animated film celebrating the saga of Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain." According to the standard story (told here), Fountain is a urinal purchased by Duchamp at Mott plumbing supply in downtown Manhattan, which he signed under a pseudonym and submitted to the Society of Independent Artists--a group to which he belonged, who promised to exhibit work by anyone who paid a membership fee. The work was rejected on the grounds that it wasn't made by the artist (a complaint attributed to Katherine Dreier) and that it was vulgar (attributed to George Bellows). Apologias were published in a short-lived artist magazine. One defense of the work (sometimes credited to Beatrice Wood) emphasized the creative act of choosing as opposed to making--choice was central to Duchamp's concept of readymades, though he might have resisted the suggestion that choice is an expression of creativity. Another defense (credited to Louise Norton) compared Fountain's form to statues of Buddha, and, by extension, to other sculptures in the history of art. Duchamp resisted such comparisons, insisting that his object lacked aesthetic qualities. What mattered was not appearance, but idea. Though the original urinal was lost (perhaps discarded by Alfred Stieglitz), numerous copies were later fabricated by the artist and are now prized possessions in museum collections. Duchamp spent many years making replicas of his readymades and other works rather than adding new objects and images to what he regarded as the bloated inventories of art. His final two decades, however, were spent secretly creating a large tableau, Étant Donnés. Seen through a crack in a door, it slyly compares the visual preoccupation of fine art to macabre and lascivious voyeurism. The animated short ends with a fast-forward allusion to this final work. Along the way, homage is also paid to Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase no. 2, made when the artist was still working within the tradition of modernist painting (albeit with a hat tip to mechanism), and his Network of Stoppages, which is a painting that relies on chance, thus transitioning from modernist ideals to a post-modern practice that delimits the role of the artist. The title, "Modern Plumping" is a pun, of course, as befits a Duchamp tribute. (Images and sounds assembled by Jesse Prinz.)