Who goes there? R. Mutt
by rebecca ~ May 24th, 2005. Filed under: New Media Musings, Poems & art.R. Mutt was the pseudonym Marcel Duchamp used when
exhibiting a porcelain toilet in NY in 1917…unleashing
an uproar in the art world with his later written
protest to the Society that rejected “R.Mutt”‘s work.
This link shows you a picture by Alfred Steiglitz of R.
Mutt’s “Fountain.” I like the detail provided here that
if a man were to urinate in it as it was to be
displayed, he would urinate on himself.
http://arthist.binghamton.edu/duchamp/fountain.html
What does it have to do with technology and art?
Duchamp was the best known modern artist to take a found
object (machine crafted in a factory by unknown
hands&machines) and place it a ‘sacred’ space reserved
for ‘art’. He boldly challenged the idea that art needed
to be of a certain genre and technique and by a certain
persona; he erased the idea of there needing to be an
artist by inventing one. Or, maybe Duchamp teaches us
that the artist is one who has the power to
elevate/highlight an object that others see as mundane
or vulgar to ‘art.’ Shock value seems always to be a
part of any new art movement, though…