Smash hit

If you sent Jacques Chirac over to work as a waiter in Balthazar’s on Spring Street in New York, would he ever learn successfully to fawn and scrape before Americans? Of course not. If you imprisoned Gérard Depardieu in Alcatraz for a decade and schooled him relentlessly in the American way, would he ever lose his Burgundian accent or give up smoking? Not a chance.

The wonderful thing about Duchamp’s stay in Manhattan is his refusal to sit there quietly and be a good Froggy. The secret pleasure he took in mocking the pretensions and shallowness he found in Manhattan was one of the urinal’s chief conceptual components.

In 1917 he was elected to the board of a huge exhibition of progressive art that was being organised for and by all Manhattan’s independent artists. The massive show was intended to be a bigger and better American equivalent of the notorious impressionist shows in Paris that took on the system and won.

It was to be the largest exhibition of new art ever held in America.

A week before the show opened, Duchamp and a couple of his American art world buddies popped into a shop on 5th Avenue, called J L Mott Iron Works, which sold bathroom appliances. On a whim he bought the nifty little pissoir and took it home. He had been experimenting with ready-mades: ordinary objects found in the outside world that caught his eye such as a bottle rack or a bicycle wheel.

The urinal was signed ostentatiously R Mutt, a crude distortion of the shop-owner’s name. Duchamp wasn’t very good at American spellings but he knew the slang for a dog. Then, at the last minute, he entered it in the Independents exhibition, where the jury turned it down.

Since the show was intended to show the kind of art the Establishment would not tolerate, being turned down was proof of an astonishing hard-coreness. The most enormous fuss ensued with both camps arguing this way and that. The usual squabbles ensued about it being art, according to some, and most definitely not art, according to others.

Duchamp, who seemed never to take anything seriously, issued a serious-sounding defence insisting that what counted here was his decision to call the urinal an artwork. He had chosen the urinal and when he chose it he redirected its meaning.

His point was certainly not that the urinal was beautiful, a fine fusion of floating forms, aesthetically perfect or anything stupid like that. The point was it was a strange-looking thing with lots of natural surrealism to it. When you took it out of its usual context and signed it, it looked most peculiar. Hilariously, for many days after the scandal broke the press was searching hither and thither for the outrageous mystery artist, R Mutt.

Also, and this must not be underestimated, putting Fountain into the show was an act of deliberate cruelty on Duchamp’s part. It was a calculated gesture designed to taunt and annoy the American art world and puncture some of its pretension.

As a Frenchman he enjoyed micturating on the Yanks. Whenever the history of the great urinal is spouted the excellent fact that it was never shown in the Independents exhibition tends also to get overlooked. It’s the original example of the unmissable artwork that wasn’t there.

Where did it go? Some say it was smashed to pieces by the Independents’ organisers. Others insist Duchamp smuggled it away and included it covertly in other shows. Nobody is quite sure.

Duchamp went on to make various copies of it. But its most powerful impact was in a moody, tongue-in-cheek photograph of the pissoir, melodramatically lit, taken by the great Alfred Stieglitz, who was in on the joke.

Thus the urinal has only ever existed in our imagination. That’s why it’s the most influential artwork of the modern age. Perhaps even of all time.