Duchamp, Fountain: The Anti-art Nature Of Dada
Dada was a movement in art, literature, music, performance and film that was invoked by the advent of World War I. Switzerland, a neutral country, became the refuge of many who objected to the war. In Zurich, 1916, Dada emerged distinctly as an active refusal of and attempt to subvert the prevailing values of the bourgeois society that supported and protected itself with the war. Dada sought to refuse these values in every guise they took, to disrupt them with its violence and rhetoric, to destroy and heal simultaneously. Language was targeted through poetry, periodicals and manifestos, because it was being used to present the unjust as just, illogic as logic. Logic itself was denounced in the contradictory statements and actions of Dadaists, because logic turned young men to cannon fodder. So chance, the logic of nature, was granted equal importance to the cerebral process and played an important role in many manifestations of Dada. Considered a culture’s finest and most distilled product, art was to Dada the greatest illustration and support of the social sickness. Art became the bull’s eye over the bourgeois heart and anti-art, a term said to be coined by Marcel Duchamp in 1914, was the weapon. By disrupting artistic and c
Marcel Duchamp. “Apropos of ‘Readymades’”, 1961 The work most closely associated with anti-art is Duchamp’s Fountain; a urinal signed R. Mutt and positioned so the surface normally mounted on a wall, became its base. Fountain belongs to a broad category of objects called “ready mades”. The ready-mades were mass-produced objects; the selection of which Duchamp claimed in his 1961 “Apropros of ‘Readymades’” was based on a reaction of visual indifference with at the same time a total lack of good or bad taste. Duchamp made clear his intention of the ready-mades when he stated in Apropos his idea of a ‘reciprocal ready-made’: to use a Rembrandt as an ironing board. Fountain was a powerful affront to the art world and an inimitable success of anti-art. It violated and reset art boundaries, separating it from other anti-art product which tended to reinterpret existing art forms, relying on the work of past modern art schools such as the Futurists, Cubists and Expressionists. Duchamp invited the public to distinguish between Fountain and the art that Dada saw as drained of energy and imaginative power in service to the bourgeois agenda. Before Dada, Western art was dedicated to the ideal of beauty, the mystique of form and the depiction of the good life. Illusionist and decorative, this art wrapped its audience in a cocoon of passive and thoughtless consumption. Dada was in opposition to this, abandoning aesthetics and refusing to comfort the audience. Duchamp’s iconoclastic vision demanded participation and uphill moral consideration from the viewer. Dada perceived society as using taste and form to create a wall of mirrors to keep the reality of the world out and sought to undo the perversion of art to support this self-occlusion. By choosing mass consumer products arbitrarily, with determination to select objects devoid of taste, Duchamp was attempting to separate art from aesthetics. By extension he was attempting to pry society from its gluttonous and desperate desire to see the surface, rather
Some topics in this essay:
Dada Western,
George Bellows,
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Dada Considered,
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Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)
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