The Renaissance idea of the artist as a genius is specified in Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, especially when he writes about Michelangelo Buonarroti: “So he decided to send into the world an artist who would be skilled in each and every craft, whose work alone would teach us how to attain perfection in design [...].”1 How would we describe Marcel Duchamp’s read-ymades, particularly Fountain from 1917? One may think that it is a long distance from the 1560’s to Duchamp’s innovation of 1917, but sometimes art needs time – change and revision require room to take place. It took over 40 years for Duchamp to become “Duchamp”. As Hall Foster points out: “The status of Duchamp […] is a retroactive effect of countless artistic re-sponses and critical readings, and so it goes across the dialogical space-time of avant-garde practice and institutional reception.” 2

After the 1917 exhibition, Duchamps Fountain was photo-graphed by Alfred Steiglitz. Since the original was lost, this photo became the origin for the later replicas. There are fifteen authorized replicas of Fountain: one in 1951, 1953 and 1963 (including the one in Moderna Museet in Stockholm) respectively and a further twelve in 1964 (including the one in the Tate Collection). The piece in the Tate Collection is made from glazed earth-enware painted to resemble the original porcelain. The signature is reproduced in black paint.3

The history of art presents two different authors for Fountain: Duchamp and Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. Ac-cording to Amelia Jones, Duchamp himself mentions in a letter to his sister that “one of my women friends, using a masculine pseudonym, Richard Mutt, submitted a porcelain urinal as a sculpture”.4 Jones suggests that considering the origin, the ten-dency among newspapers at the time was to attribute the piece to a Philadelphian (the Baroness was then living in Philadel-phia) and that Fountain should be viewed as a companion piece to the Baroness’s readymade sculpture God. In this discussion Jones uses Irene Gammel´s argument that Fountain, based on the Baroness’s scatological aesthetic, is most likely her work. But on the other hand, Arthur Danto writes in the essay Marcel Duchamp and the End of Taste: “It is, however, Marcel Duch-amp whom Jean Clair regards as ’primus inter pares.’ Duch-amp, more than anyone else, insinuated the disgusting into the contemporary artistic repertoire when he attempted to enter a urinal as a work of art into the Exhibition of Independent Artists in New York, in 1917.”5 So even in this context it is difficult to

find “evidence”. Why was R. Mutt disqualified from tak-ing part in the exhibition? This ques-tion contains the answer to the question what is art? Today’s institutional speci-fication of art was formulated by Arthur Danto in The Artworld from 1964 and

that led to George Dickie’s later formu-lations. The origin of the idea came from Duchamp’s alleged pronunciation: The object became a work of art because the artist had decided it would be designat-ed as such. That was Duchamp´s reality around 1917 and art world took over his specification in the 1960s as mentioned above.

The art world in 1917 was far from understanding Duchamp’s idea about readymade. With this idea he took a step away from the period in art that we call Modernism to something else, to Postmodernism? Could Duchamp see into the future? He was an artist who was ahead of his time, he left (what we call today) Modernism before the term was even invented (in the 1960’s) and Postmodernism was further away in the future to be defined. It is perhaps easier to think of Duchamp’s art, and especially his readymades, as floating between paradigms rather than to set focus on a paradigm shift. It is obvious that certain works or theories appear to be vastly more radical than they are, if one focuses on diffractions in art. During these years, from the ear-ly 1900’s (Picasso) and up to the end of the 1960’s, when Post-modernism begins to take over, Paramodernism fluctuates in the increasingly diminishing influence of Modernism to the in-

creasingly growing Postmodernism. In the Paramodernism, dichotomies would instead be perceived parallel, concur-rent with each other; not against each other, but as a co-existence.6

As Tom Sandqvist in the introduction to the book At the border (Vid gränsen) writes about the Postmodern avant-

garde in 1910’s New York: “But would it not be a reason to - that of Lyotard - pointing out precisely the ambivalence as inscribed in the very modern, the paradoxical intertwining be-tween criticism and non-criticism, rebellion and distance [...] in the wickerwork, as well in the modern as in the postmodern con- cepts.”7

Why not propose both Duchamp and Baroness as the inven-tors of Fountain. Simultaneously co-inventing is unlikely, but one could have been using the other’s idea of how to create a readymade, to create his/her own; one man’s idea is the oth-er’s readymade. Who ever invented Fountain doesn´t really matter, because what is the most interesting and what changed the definition of art was the readymades, not only Fountain.

W h o d i d F o u n t a i n , a n d w h a t d o e s i t m a t t e r a n y w a y ?S ö d e r t ö r n U n i v e r s i t y - I l k k a T i m o n e n - i l k k a @ t i m o n e n . s e

1. Giorgio Vasari, the Lives of the Artists, Penguin, 1977.2. Hal Foster, “What’s Neo about the Neo-Avant-Garde?”, Martha Buskirk, & Mignon Nixon, (red.), The Duchamp effect: [essays, interviews, round table], MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1996. S.11.3. Tate Britain, “Marcel Duchamp Fountain 1917, replica 1964”, www.tate.org.uk <http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/duchamp-fountain-t07573/text-summary>, 201502104. Amelia Jones, Irrational Modernism: A Neurasthenic History of New York Dada [Elektronisk resurs], 2004, s. 42.5. Arthur c. Danto, “Marcel Duchamp and the End of Taste: A Defense of Contemporary Art”, tout-fait, <http://www.toutfait.com/issues/issue_3/News/Danto/danto.html>, 2015-02-10.6. Lecture, Malin Hedlin Hayden, Associate Professor, The Department of Art History, Stockholm University, “Institutionell kritik och feministisk konst: post vs para”, Stockholm, 2014-04-29.7. Tom Sandqvist, Vid gränsen: en essä kring det postmoderna avantgardet i 10-talets New York, Carlsson, Stockholm, 1990, s. 9.

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