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A full century has now passed since Marcel Duchamp, concealing his identity as “R. Mutt,” submitted a commercially manufactured urinal to an open exhibition of art in New York City. It was an inside job from the start: Duchamp himself sat on the board of the Society of Independent Artists, the organization sponsoring the exhibition. His porcelain offering, entitled Fountain, succeeded in shocking not merely the bourgeoisie but even the progressives of New York’s art scene, including the hoodwinked board, a plurality of which voted to reject the piece on the grounds of its purported unoriginality and vulgarity. Playing the second act as if from a script, Duchamp resigned in indignant protest on behalf of the mysterious Mr. Mutt, surreptitiously arranged for the urinal to be photographed by Alfred Stieglitz, and waged an anonymous defense of his readymade sculpture in the avant-garde magazine The Blind Man. From the start, Fountain was both artifact and act—not just a thing, but a ruse. For a work whose life as objet d’art began with the indignity of expulsion from a purportedly unjuried exhibition, and for one thought to have been unceremoniously discarded thereafter, Fountain has had a remarkable third act. Judged by one panel of twenty-first-century authorities to be the single most significant artwork of the last century, it is frequently cited as a harbinger of artistic movements that arose a half century after its scandalous appearance. Easily overlooked today is the effect of those movements—junk art to conceptualism, Fluxus to minimalism—on Duchamp’s then-flagging reputation: it was only in the 1960s that his critical status as a lion of the avant-garde was secured, a status buoyed in no small part by the advocacy of a generation of younger artists sympathetic to his mission and to varying degrees indebted to him, the composer John Cage chief among them.
