This is a really classic example of Dada;
anti-art, attacking the art establishment.
Substituting an object bought in a plumber's shop for sculpture.
So, an object that was bound to cause offence!
He was testing censorship and testing what people thought of as art.
So the traditional idea of getting a lump of clay,
fashioning it into something that resembles a human face,
was anathema to him and I think it was just old-fashioned,
it wasn't right for the machine age.
So he bought these machine-made things and decided to stick them into exhibitions,
but not thinking they were art,
always just to test what people would think of them.
What strikes me about 'The Fountain' is that
although it's a male object, in the sense that it's used by men,
it's not, of course, in the position it would normally be - in a lavatory.
And placed as it is, it's got a feminine form,
a sort of hip-like shape.
And I can't help seeing the elements of it - the plumbing elements - as female.
The signature, of course, is also a bit of a provocation
'Mutt' - apparently, this is a sort of pun or a
kind of derivation from the Mott Works Company which made urinals.
But of course it's Duchamp signing the object but not with his own name.
So again an attack on the idea of the artist,
the authenticity of the artist, the price of the artist's signature.
The magazine or the journal was very much the vehicle,
or the most radical vehicle,
for the Dada movement and, in fact because a lot of the things
they made were very ephemeral, it's often the only evidence
that we have of what they were doing.
This edition - there were two editions of The Blind Man made
it was really to shake America out of its apathy
and its very conventional attitudes to art.
The front cover here shows a photograph of Marcel Duchamp's 'Broyeuse de Chocolat', 'Chocolate Grinder'
and then inside you have a wonderful photograph by Alfred Stieglitz of 'The Fountain'
and the final paragraphs Duchamp says
"Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not,
has no importance: he CHOSE it!"
and chose is in capital letters
"He took an ordinary article of life; placed it so that its useful significance disappeared
under the new title and point of view.
This created a new thought for that object."
So this is really a statement of the whole sort of rationale behind 'The Fountain'.
And that's the big thing about 'The Fountain'; what is art?
It's the basic thing that every schoolboy starts with around sixteen.
You wonder why's this art, why's that not art - and it starts with Duchamp.
But it took some years; at that point it didn't create a huge furore.
He wrote this little pamphlet,
there are a few bits and bobs in a few magazines at the time,
but not an enormous amount.
When this object was actually exhibited in New York,
its implications for contemporary sculpture I don't think were understood,
because people hadn't seen Picasso's cubist works
which were made a few years earlier, which incorporated real objects in them.
And they hadn't seen either, Duchamp's other ready-mades which he was,
in effect, displaying in his own studio.
So they didn't know how 20th century sculpture was going to be viewed.
With hindsight, we can see this as an absolute turning point
and having an enormous impact on the development of 20th century sculpture,
from really the post-First World War period onwards,
right through up to the present day, with artists using objects from real life.
But I think that in 1917 it was really the gesture itself,
the provocation - a kind of 'up-yours' gesture,
which is what this represented.
