The Society’s decision, he claims, runs counter to its all-inclusive, open-minded policy. At the last minute, though, it is rejected, for reason of obscenity. It appears in the catalogue under the title, Fountain. The “readymade,” as he will later call his store-bought, mass-produced bathroom fixture, is submitted to be part of the exhibition. The trail left by the elusive smell of urine begins in April 1917, before the opening of the first annual group show of the Society of Independent Artists, of which Duchamp was a founding member and a director. Today it stretches over an entire century. It got larger and larger with each passing decade. And what a territory: Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Conceptual Art, Minimalism, Pop Art, Fluxus, Arte Povera, and Performance Art, to name just a few. However, one thing is sure: Duchamp used his urinal to scent-mark his territory. Was the inversion of the urinal an inspired anti-art prank in the Dada tradition, or was it a premeditated stunt, carefully engineered to disrupt artistic conventions? Duchamp, an accomplished chess player, never revealed the strategy behind any of his enigmatic moves.

Today, he is credited with changing the course of art history with iconoclastic “readymade” conceptual sculptures.ĭuchamp himself peddled and embellished his legend, presenting different and sometimes contradictory versions of the same events. Mutt”-leaving everyone to speculate about the reason for this peculiar choice. Back in his studio, he flipped the thing upside down, propped it on a pedestal, and signed it as if it were a legitimate work of art. King Abdullah’s aim seems to deify the man on the commode, turning every person who excretes or urinates into the bowl into an artist.įour people, the South African artist Kendell Geers, the musician Brian Eno, and the Chinese performance artists Yuan Chai and Jian Jun Xi, have claimed to urinate in the Fountain.One hundred years ago in New York, an artist walked into a store selling bathroom fixtures and bought a porcelain urinal.

The Golden Toilet is art compelled into use. ‘Fountain’ was an object of use turned into art. The Golden Toilet reiterates the belief that all men might be created equal but some men’s faeces are more equal than others. If there ever was a gross corruption of ‘retinal art’, this is it, for the butt (rhymes with ‘Mutt’, remember) is indifferent to the stock exchange value of metals, gold or iron. All this is at complete odds with the modernist impulse of Duchamp’s work. If anyone ever spoke back to the Empire, this is it: the audacity of abundance, challenging the entire notion of the readymade and industrial production that birthed that aesthetic, bringing into its fold the hierarchy among men. Nearly a hundred years later, King Abdullah turns Duchamp’s Fountain on its head. Mutt could be ‘armut’, meaning ‘poverty’ in German, and ‘R’ could mean ‘Richard’, a French slang for ‘moneybags’. Mutt? Among the many interpretations of ‘Fountain’ over nearly a century, I find two to be useful in my understanding of King Abdullah’s ‘The Golden Toilet’: R. All that Duchamp did was to reorient the urinal to a position that was 90 degrees from its normal position of use. The porcelain urinal had arrived as a piece of sculpture from a female friend whose signature on it is a pseudonym: ‘R. The ‘first’ definition of ‘readymade’ is commonly thought to be made by Duchamp though Andre Breton and Paul Eluard, who compiled the Dictionnaire abrege du Surrealisme later denied it: ‘an ordinary object elevated to the dignity of a work of art by the mere choice of an artist …’. His work was founded on ‘visual indifference’ and much of his work hinges on how ‘found objects’ are turned into works of art. “The Golden Toilet” (2014) as a name or title for the toilet is a bit of tautology: it is like a last minute reminder of wealth and opulence, just in case anyone forgot or doubted that the intestines of this toilet was made of gold, a bit like being told that one would be surrounded by made-to-order bodies in a beauty contest.ĭuchamp, in case it needs reminding, was working on the aesthetic of the readymade, by positing it against what he called ‘retinal art’, art that appealed to the eye alone. Mutt” and turned it into art, calling it “Fountain” (1917), Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah has gifted his daughter a toilet made entirely of gold as a wedding gift. Nearly a hundred years after Marcel Duchamp took a porcelain urinal signed “R.

R mutt 1917