What Artists Do. Leonard Koren

mounted the

       largest exhibition of modern art ever seen in the United

       States until then. However, when the hanging commit-

       tee reviewed “Fountain”—submitted by an unknown

       artist named R. Mutt—the piece was determined to be

       not really a work of art but merely a “functional object.”

       Duchamp, not coincidentally, was a member of the

       hanging committee. Without giving himself away, he

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      vigorously defended “Fountain” as an artwork, but the

       other members wouldn’t budge. Duchamp understood

       that institutions, even well-meaning arts institutions,

       tend to be conservative no matter how liberal their

       founding ideals. Duchamp kept at it, but when he

       realized the futility of his protestations, he quit the

       committee.

      The rejection of “Fountain” undoubtedly triggered a

       sense of déjà vu. Five years prior, in Paris, Duchamp

       had tried to enter a painting titled “Nude Descending a

       Staircase, No. 2” in an exhibition organized by the

       Société des Artistes Indépendants. This salon exhibi-

       tion was established in direct response to the rigid

       traditionalism of the official government-sponsored

       salon (an annual art exhibition). It was supposed to

       embrace an artistically more enlightened point of view.

       (At the time, getting one’s work accepted in a salon

       show was the primary way French artists established

       themselves as art-making professionals.) To

       Duchamp’s dismay, the “progressive” organizers of this

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      “I have forced myself to contradict myself in order

       to avoid conforming to my own taste.”

       —Marcel Duchamp, artist

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      “. . . as soon as you get to the why, you deal with

       ‘Why not?’”

       —Ross Bleckner, artist

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      exhibition bristled at the title “Nude Descending. . . .”

       They were also taken aback by the painting’s subject

       matter. (Up until then nudes either sat or reclined, they

       didn’t walk in Cubist stop-motion fashion down flights

       of stairs!) The show’s organizers appealed to

       Duchamp’s two older brothers, both established artists,

       to “manage” their younger sibling. For the sake of

       family harmony, Duchamp withdrew his artwork from

       consideration. But it must have rankled.

      This time around in New York, Duchamp took another

       tack. He and a companion retrieved “Fountain” from the

       Society of Independent Artists’ storage area and

       brought it to Alfred Stieglitz, an eminent American

       photographer. They asked Stieglitz to photograph it.

       They then reproduced the photograph in an avant-garde

       journal titled The Blind Man published, not coincidental-

       ly, by Duchamp and some friends. Accompanying the

       photograph was an anonymous defense of the work

       that read:

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      “They say any artist paying six dollars may exhibit [in the

       show]. Mr. Mutt sent in a fountain. Without discussion

       this article disappeared and never was exhibited. What

       were the grounds for refusing Mr. Mutt’s fountain?

       1. Some contended it was immoral, vulgar. 2. Others, it

       was plagiarism, a plain piece of plumbing. . . .

      “Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the foun-

       tain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an

       ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful signifi-

       cance disappeared under a new title and point of view—

       creating a new thought for that object.”

      Through the force of a well-thought-out idea and

       dogged persistence, Duchamp was eventually able to

       surmount skepticism, derision—and even hostility—to

       see his concept of art fully sink into the art-world

       mindset. But it took almost thirty years to do so. By the

       1950s, and even more emphatically in the 1960s, it

       would not be an exaggeration to say that Duchamp’s

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      contribution to the modern art canon was tantamount

       to Albert Einstein’s E = mc² formulation in physics. Einstein posited that a small amount of mass is convertible into an enormous amount of energy. Duchamp posited that any ordinary object can be converted into that special something called art— assuming that an artist can effectively convince others it is so. To this day, countless artists have based at least part of their artistic practice on this revolutionary principle.

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      “The world is full of objects more or less interesting;

       I do not wish to add any more. . . .”

       —Douglas Huebler, artist

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      2. Make something from nothing

      If, following from Duchamp, art can be created out of

       anything, then why can’t it be made out of “nothing”?

       Indeed, many artists literally make art out of nothing,

       or what at first seems like nothing. (Or make art that

       seems to come from “nowhere.”) A quintessential

       example of this is an artwork created by John Cage