In 1917, Marcel Duchamp bought a urinal. He titled it Fountain and signed it as R. Mutt. True, the piece is controversial in all its splendour. Infamous?—very much so. And yet undeniably relevant. What is surprising is that, even after a century, there is still confusion about its meaning. Sure, there are some answers out there. The Tate, for instance, suggests that Fountain “invites us to question what makes an object art,” while Artsy describes it as “art primarily as a concept rather than an object.” But are these explanations good enough? I want to say no. Why? Because they are far too ambiguous. We need a reason of much importance to tolerate a urinal in a museum.

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Of course, we will never know precisely what Duchamp attempted, and we need to live with that. Still, if one correctly evaluates the piece, its context, and the artist, the resulting interpretation will be enthralling and intellectually satisfying. I will present a new one that falls within those terms. And perhaps, at last, we can make peace with the work. But in order for that to happen, we have to accept the following premise: The art world is not limited to artworks. There are also ideas, movements, experiments, history, and countless contextual elements embedded in art-related objects that are not art per se. Once that’s accepted, you’ll see that it doesn’t make much sense to spend time wondering what makes Fountain an artwork—because it’s not. Instead, we ought to delve into the subjective phenomenon that Duchamp was after, which eventually resulted in the piece, the ready-mades, and one of the most influential ideas in the art scene of the twentieth century. 

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I’ll put into a sentence what Fountain is, but, a warning, you’ll need to keep reading to fully grasp it. Here it goes: Fountain is an alteration of experience. It might sound too philosophical; bear with me. If you’ve ever seen Fountain, you’ll agree that making a traditional aesthetic evaluation of it is useless. The work deliberately lacks the qualities that typically help us interpret a work’s meaning—say, technical skill, stylistic innovation, or sensory beauty. Instead, we are confronted with a straightforward, crude, everyday object: a urinal. How, then, should we proceed from there? What do we need to analyse to understand it? In what should we focus? Luckily, Duchamp gave us a clue. Before becoming a Dada icon, he was a painter. When asked why he abandoned it, he explained, “I was interested in ideas—not merely in visual products.” If we follow him on this, then we ought to shift away from the art realm and onto a different field of inquiry, one that deals with the nature of ideas. That field, of course, is philosophy. 

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Martin Heidegger, who is as relevant and famous in philosophy as Duchamp in art, wrote The Origin of the Work of Art (1935), an essay that influenced Western aesthetics. In it, he presents the essential yet simple idea that art is, first and foremost, an object. Yes, it might be that Beethoven’s music is intangible, but ultimately, his “quartets lie in the publisher’s storeroom like potatoes in a cellar.” It follows that whenever we encounter an artwork, there is a subject, an object, and a relationship born from the subject analysing the object, which we call ‘experience’ as in ‘our experience of the object.’ Clearly, our experience of art differs from our experience of ordinary things, and there is a reason for that. 

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In what would become his most renowned book, Being and Time (1927), Heidegger categorises our experience of all objects we encounter in the world in two different ways. The first one is concerned with the ones we use in our everyday lives; we can think of them as ‘tools,’ like a hammer, a pen, or a toothbrush. Our relationship with these objects is often unconscious, as we freely manipulate them and even forget about their existence while in use. For example, an experienced carpenter can hammer without thinking about the hammer in his hand. Similarly, we lose awareness of the pen while absorbed in writing, as we are not particularly interested in how the pen works but in what we are trying to write with it. The same goes for the toothbrush when toothbrushing. Heidegger calls this type of object ready-to-hand—which, curiously, sounds a lot like ready-made.

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The second mode of encounter with things in the world is very different. It involves objects that don’t blend into our activities but stand out as independent entities. Take the example of the hammer; if its head flies off, the carpenter’s experience of it immediately changes—it is no longer an extension of his hand but a broken hammer that needs fixing. The same happens when a pen stops writing and no longer serves its original function—it may now be an object decorating our desk because it was grandma’s gift, but our experience of it has changed. Heidegger refers to this type of object as present-at-hand because our awareness of it is heightened when it loses its practical function; we encounter it via its presence rather than its utility—just like works of art.  

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For the ladies reading this article, the way men relate to a urinal is very straightforward: we stand in front of it and shoot. We aren’t intrigued by its existence; we value it solely for its function, to the point that it becomes invisible while in use. In other words, it’s a ready-to-hand object you can find in a pub, an airport or the gym. But Fountain is different. It’s no longer a functional urinal but a present-at-hand object that we oddly find ourselves contemplating in museums. How can this transformation happen? What makes Duchamp’s urinal different from all the others? Look at the following comment published in the Dada magazine, The Blind Man (1917): 

 

“Whether Mr Mutt with his own hands made the Fountain or not has no importance. He chose it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view—he created a new thought for that object.”  (emphasis mine) 

 

Aha! Duchamp, alias Mr. Mutt, took a ready-made—or in Heideggerian terms, a ready-to-hand object—and, by placing it on the exhibition floor, transformed it into a present-at-hand museum piece. His brilliance was to recognise and make evident that by disrupting the context, the way we encounter an object also changes.  He altered our experience of a urinal. Returning to our initial question about the subjective phenomenon Duchamp was exploring, and after seeking the aid of philosophy through Heidegger, it makes much sense to think of Fountain as an art-related object with a phenomenological experiment embedded in it. Duchamp, being Duchamp, took a dense philosophical phenomenon and smoothly played with it. And that is what makes the piece unique; that is its meaning. Think of it this way: every time someone sees Fountain, they go through an alteration of experience. 

 

Note: Diminishing the importance of the object per se and granting protagonism to the idea paired with it might sound familiar, and rightly so, for it is—literally—the basis on which conceptual art stands. In fact, claiming Duchamp as its founding father is not crazy at all.