Posted by Bill Wilson on July 17, 19101 at 17:37:12:
In Reply to: fountain posted by stephanie baquet on July 09, 19101 at 04:05:43:
Expect an image to be overdetermined, which means that one image can be used to point with toward any number of other images and ideas. The sources may be multiple, and anyway are irretrievable, as the initial conditions of a project are probably not recognized or recorded as such at the time. Look for multiple meanings and ambiguities, not for univocal meanings. As critics have noted, the signature “Mutt” may be cross-referenced with the beginning of a word in a painting by Duchamp, “Tu’m,” but the only way to demonstrate a connection is with an interpretation that illuminates both works. One rule can be to interpret an image on at least two levels: 1) the meanings that the image needs in order to be significant; 2) the meanings that the image can use to fill itself to overflowing. A question to ask of any image, and of any idea an image seems to carry, is what else does that image combine with, both inside the work of art, and outside it? What are the parts of this work of art, and how do those parts combine? When the title is a verifiable part, as with “Fountain,” the implications of the title-word “Fountain” might reach the implications of shape, of color, or any other quality. Since a urinal usually is approached by a male for a practical function, what are the implications of turning a functional object of plumbing upside down? An aesthetic context ordinarily is supposed to set in motion outpourings of feeling. What happens to the ideas a work of art might set in motion when it is an overturned urinal? Anyway, what did Duchamp think about rarified aesthetic experiences in which emotions freely flow? What are the effects of reversing practical judgments of an object to aesthetic judgments? Allow that in Duchamp’s life-world aesthetic judgments might be the problem, not the solution. Yes, a urinal is a solution to a practical problem, but turn it upside down and it becomes a problem for feeling and thinking toward a judgment. You will have to think for yourself about attitudes toward bodily functions, some of which are used in expressions of contempt, as when Celine writes, “I piss on it all from a considerable height.” Could Duchamp have been contemptuously teasing a jury of his peers? The Stendhal effect of exhaustion in museums, rendered by Henry James in his novel, The American, is of being drained emotionally and physically. Well, if an aesthete can be emotionally drained, then a comedian like Duchamp, proprietor of his vaudeville flotant, might thoughtfully remind the art-lover of a place appropriate for draining. Perhaps aesthetes need urinals as much as they need art, so one might do well to analyse the different needs. Those aesthetes might well be reminded of their needs (as Pablo Picasso truncated the word “journal” to get “urnal,” a word that contributes tone and meaning to some of his collages). What would Charlie Chaplin have done? Wonder with questions: does Duchamp work with other reversals, or scrambled reversals, as with ANEMIC CINEMA? On the image you suggest, a vagina, one method would be to look at visual appearances of vaginas in Duchamp’s other work (perhaps a book would help more than the Net). Certainly his photographs in travesty, reversing male to female, raise questions about genitals, therefore about plumbing. The urinal emerges from plumbing, hence as an image carrying an idea it combines with his lead drain-stopper, a lowly practical object which serves a function. However Duchamp converts (reverses perhaps) the drain-stopper into a medal or badge which may carry meanings, but which has no practical purpose. Surely he is thinking about honor and fame as he allows his mock badge to be distributed commercially. The wide history of the arts includes many episodes that entail plumbing: 1) the critic and artist Eric Gill insists that a drain-pipe is a work of art, that is, of aesthetic beauty; 2) Morton Schamberg, perhaps collaborating with others, isolates an undersink drainpipe as a sculpture which he entitles “God;” the composer Philip Glass supported himself in his early days as a plumber (Jeanne-Claude & Christo tell about “Phil the Plumber”); Ray Johnson, arriving at Black Mountain College where students volunteered for committees which maintained the College, elected to serve on the Plumbing Committee. In case plumbing seems inherently lowly, listen to Soren Kierkegaard, in his book, Fear and Trembling: “During the past months I had been indolently pumping up a thorough shower-bath, now I have pulled the cord, and the ideas stream down upon me --- healthy, joyful, thriving, merry, blessed children, easily brought to birth, yet all of them bearing the birthmarks of my personality." The showerhead as an image suggests the birthplace of his ideas, a rather self-cleansing inspiration, but actually birth entails both amniotic fluid, which is largely urine, and the vagina. Kierkegaard’s evasions of the facts look rather pale and thin after Duchamp has broken into airy ideas about inspiration with his image of a fountain from which aesthetic blessings might flow.