Fountain
‘Fountain’, photographed by Alfred Stieglitz
In 1917 Marcel Duchamp submitted ‘Fountain’, a urinal signed ‘R Mutt’, to the American Society of Independent Artists. It was rejected, and Duchamp, a member of the board, resigned; the piece disappeared, but not before Alfred Stieglitz had photographed it. Since then, its significance has grown exponentially; some years ago ‘Fountain’ was voted the most influential of all modern artworks. An intriguing offshoot of its history appears from time to time and has recently resurfaced in ‘The Guardian’: it has been suggested, quite plausibly, that the originator of the piece was not Duchamp but the poet and artist Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, and that she was the one who found the object, inscribed it, and was the ‘creator’ of the artwork. Not everyone agrees, however, and the Tate, which owns one of the reproductions that Duchamp made in 1964, has stated that: ‘It seems improbable that (von Freytag-Loringhoven) would have not have vaunted her creation of a work that had caused such a flurry of press interest’. Three years ago, Siri Hustvedt, also in ‘The Guardian’, took a more confrontational approach to the topic. ‘The standard ‘Fountain’ narrative with Duchamp as hero goes on’, she wrote. ‘I am convinced that if the urinal had been attributed to the baroness from the beginning, it would never have soared into the stratosphere as a work of consummate genius. Women are rarely granted such status, but the present reputation of ‘Fountain’, one that was hardly instantaneous but grew slowly over the course of many decades, has made the truth embarrassing’.
Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven was born Elsa Hildegard Plötz in the city of Świnoujście, now part of Poland, in 1874; her title, the consequence of a brief marriage and adopted in 1913 in New York, was not just her name but part of her persona, which was that of an avant-garde artist who challenged bourgeois complacency. She described herself as ‘art aggressive’ and rather enjoyed the disapproval and aversion that she worked hard to incite. Duchamp had a similar, but more subtle, approach to the art world, which the Baroness seems to have found irritating; she criticized him for his ‘cheap, bluff, giggle frivolity’. It is true that he very much liked showing up the inconsistencies and absurdities of common sense with varying degrees of seriousness, but unless she was angry about Duchamp’s ‘theft’ of ‘Fountain’, she was perhaps being a little ungenerous. ‘I force myself to contradict myself’, he said, ‘so as to avoid conforming to my own taste’, and this contrarianism provided him with detached amusement. He was unconcerned about its effects; both he and his art were inseparable from a kind of slippery freedom. In that light, it is quite possible that had Duchamp been confronted with the accusation that he ‘stole’ ‘Fountain’, he would have made little of it. He was, after all, a trickster, and this is what tricksters do.
Duchamp is one of the artists whom Lewis Hyde included in the classic Trickster Makes This World, its starting point being a motif from the author’s earlier The Gift, in which the god Hermes, or Mercury, is described as being the part of the human psyche that governs swift movement and quick exchanges, has no moral strings attached, and provides no guarantees. Hermes is the patron of thieves, liars, and wanderers, as well as a guide for souls on their way to the underworld. Hyde explains that the archetypal trickster has many incarnations; among them are Coyote, Raven, and Brer Rabbit in North America, Eshu and Legba in Africa, the Monkey King in China, Saci-pererê in Brazil, and even Krishna in India. And as Margaret Atwood pointed out in a book review, the trickster is a cunning cheat and incorrigible prankster, yet because of his cocky curiosity and tendency to meddle in things about which he knows little, he often makes a fool of himself. ‘He steals fire and burns his fingers. He lives by his wits, yet he falls into traps’, she wrote. ‘He’s subversive in that he disrupts conventions and transgressive because he crosses forbidden boundaries, yet he displays no overtly high and solemn purpose in these activities. He’s a god, but a god of dirt and mixture and of shameless, unsanctioned sex. He’s a teller of lies, but of lies without malice’.
Hyde reminds us, Atwood goes on, that the ‘confidence artist’ is more ubiquitous than you might suppose, that ‘craft’ and ‘crafty’ are closer than you think, and that the words ‘artifice’ and ‘art’ come from the same root: ‘If it’s a seamless whole you want, pray to Apollo, who sets the limits within which such a work can exist. Tricksters, however, stand where the door swings open on its hinges and the horizon expands; they operate where things are joined together and, thus, can also come apart’. Tricksters are common enough in the art world, albeit often unrecognised, and although they can be tiresome, they are valuable catalysts when traditions and systems have become too orderly and set in their ways. Furthermore, Atwood adds, all artists need the trickster’s help every now and again; he’s the begetter of dreams, the revealer of possibilities.
Despite the example of Baroness Elsa, most tricksters are male, although many are shapeshifters; male figures can sometimes become female, but only briefly. A recent book, The Female Trickster: The Mask That Reveals, Post-Jungian and Postmodern Psychological Perspectives on Women in Contemporary Culture, is an attempt to redress the balance, but its title alone suggests that it may have been difficult to find many representatives of the genre. In any event, while trickster art, regardless of the gender of its originators, may be necessary, provocative, disruptive, and entertaining, it demands a stable cultural context in order to be most effective, and this is something that is singularly lacking in our times. Similarly, although Duchamp is an extremely significant artist, it might be said that his work has had excessive influence on contemporary practice. At its best when opening out cultural fissures and fractures, subversive and ‘challenging’ art loses much of its force when the breaches are already open and wide. Besides, it is when ideas, themes, and attitudes become more important than imagination, skill, craft, and making, that art, at least as traditionally defined, is in decline.
For further exploration:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/mar/29/marcel-duchamp-fountain-women-art-history
https://atlaspress.co.uk/marcel-duchamp-was-not-a-thief/
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-jan-25-bk-11790-story.html
https://www.thecollector.com/who-was-elsa-von-freytag-loringhoven/
Current listening: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiP7jKdAhD0
Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven