Name: watch video discussion on Duchamp’s “Fountain”
Uploaded: 2016-09-10T13:04:23.481Z
Duration: 10 min 31 s

So now, we're going to spend just a few minutes talking about Marcel Duchamp and

his Fountain.

And it is not our goal.

This is not a course in art history and

it's not our goal to say anything that art historians and others,

scholars of modernism can be left to say and have already said about this.

But I wanted to present this wonderful piece that's somewhat in the spirit

of what Williams and others are doing in this early modernist phase.

And I want to ask you whether you think that what Duchamp does with Fountain has

anything to do with, for instance, the Wheelbarrow poem.

So I guess I'll start there.

Is there any relationship between them?

>> Well, Duchamp is taking an everyday item that we wouldn't normally

consider art.

>> What is the item?

>> A urinal.

>> The fountain is a urinal.

But by repositioning it and recontextualizing it in a museum,

he's now calling upon spectators to reconsider it.

And so Williams is doing the same thing in his poems that privilege everyday objects.

He's saying, no, these too can be looked upon with aesthetic

appreciation for what they are and poems can be made out of them.

>> Good, great start, just a footnote.

At first, it was submitted for a show.

I mean, now, you see it in the museum, so

it's got the grandest kind of art historical context.

But nonetheless, he wanted, there are some things he did to make it art.

What did he do besides submit it for the great show?

Controversially, as it turns out.

But what else did he do to make it art?

>> Signed it.

>> He signed it.

Did he sign it with his name?

>> No.

>> No. >> Signed it-

>> R Mutt.

>> With a pseudonym or it's, a lot of this is unclear.

It's not clear whether this is a person that he knew or

a reference to the manufacturer of the urinal.

What else did he do?

>> He turned it upside down.

When you turn an urinal upside down, not that Emily is an expert on these things,

but when you turn a urinal- >> Or am I?

>> What? >> Or am I?

>> Or am I?

>> [LAUGH] >> You know what,

I think I don't even want to go there.

>> [LAUGH] >> I think I want to go to Max with this.

Tell me, when you turn a urinal upside down, what are you doing to its utility?

Well, if it were to remain connected to the plumbing, then when you flushed it,

the water would come out.

>> [LAUGH] >> What would it be?

It would be a fountain.

>> Yeah, like a water fountain.

>> Not recommend that you do this at home [LAUGH].

Okay, so he does three things at least to turn it into art.

Now, the point of this conversation is to go back to poetry and

go back to Williams, okay?

They're working in different media.

Can there be such a thing as a ready-made in writing?

First of all, that's the first question.

The ready-made is the thing that Marcel, and possibly Walter Arensberg,

and possibly someone else or maybe Marcel by himself, it's not really clear.

They went to a plumbing supply place for the snow shovel he got,

and then he went to a hardware store, they bought it.

He brings it back, he makes art out of it, by doing not that much to it.

Okay, let's talk about Williams, what does Williams do?

>> I'm kind of addressing your first question, if that's okay?

>> What was the first question?

>> Is there such a thing as a ready-made in writing.

>> Good, that's a good one.

>> I don't think there is actually,

because the first thing that came to my mind.

>> There is no ready-made.

>> The first thing that, right.

And the first thing that came to my mind was taking, or an image and

taking a picture of it.

But that would be visual.

And then just typing, retyping or rewriting words as, whether you want to

call that plagiarism or whatever, would be almost a performance.

>> Are we looking forward to Kenny Goldsmith already,

this early in the course?

Sorry, go ahead.

>> I don't know.

I just, I'm not sure that there's such thing as ready-made-

>> What else do you think?

I mean, can we, is it categorically at least germane

to talk about a poem that's a ready-made?

You can't buy a poem from a hardware store.

>> I mean, yes.

I mean, I wouldn't term it a ready made.

I would call it perhaps appropriation.

What is this, what is the ready-madeishness of the wheelbarrow,

that's the question.

>> That he didn't set it- >> Feeling of it, that he's just come

upon this scene and there it is >> He found it!

Let's use the word found.

>> Sure.

>> He found the wheelbarrow and the chickens.

He didn't say to chickens, come over here for

this scene, like maybe a photographer would.

>> Sure. >> Maybe he imagined it.

Or maybe he came out into the yard after the rain to stretch after

he's been doctoring someone or writing.

Or he's remembering a childhood scene of running outside after the rain.

And he sees this, ready-made,

nature creating juxtaposition that's good with color and it's photographic.

Ready-made.

>> But he didn't find the language in the same way, if we think of poems with

found language, I would say that that's more like the Duchamp being ready-made.

Where you take some lines,

sort of arrange them a little bit, you put your name on them, and that's your poem.

>> Okay. >> But with Williams he's, as far as we

know, this isn't found language, although it's an object that he comes upon.

>> He didn't find the word chickens in the yard, lying on the ground.

No language in that yard, and

chickens don't speak language and a wheelbarrow, yep.

>> Yeah, they're all mute [LAUGH].

He's still making choices with how he's representing those things,

or how he's trying to make things with language.

>> So I think the key is the form to it, right?

It's how we repositioned the urinal,

is how Williams formed the line breaks in the poem, and how he labeled it.

It's no longer a urinal, he'd called it Fountain.

And some people would say that now that it's turned on it's side,

it more resembles female genitalia, then it becomes a masculine symbol.

>> He's messing with the gendering of the made object.

>> So it becomes ambiguous, right.

>> Okay, so Max has led us to conclude, I think we have a consensus on this,

that the language itself,

the words can't, it doesn't have a cognate in what Duchamp is doing.

But there are some things that Duchamp does that do have a correspondence.

One is the writing of a word or words, R Mutt, on the piece, right?

So the application of something of the world of language, the world of naming,

to an object that we don't think of as participating in the world of language.

>> That's one thing.

>> And the other is Submitting it to a show as an artwork.

What are the correspondences of those two things?

Especially the second of them to what Williams is doing.

Putting it in a show or seeing it at the Philadelphia Museum of Art or

in the video that we've made available at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

So what's the cognate there?

>> I think the cognate would be, I mean, if you think about the Between Walls poem,

finding beauty in something that is not typically thought of as beautiful.

Most people will not look at a urinal and say that is a gorgeous urinal.

>> Finding something from the built environment, from the made world.

Chickens aren't made, but the wheelbarrow certainly is.

>> That can be aesthetic or pleasing and beautiful, and

worthy of becoming either an artistic object in case of Duchamp,

or a literary object in the case of Williams.

>> So one more consideration for us.

The Fountain and poems like this is just to say, and

The Wheelbarrow poem all cause people to say doubters, and skeptics, and grumps.

Fewer in the museum than readers of the anthologies because the museum,

there'a is a certain amount of self-selection.

You are going to go see The Fountain and, unless you're coarse Uncle Joe,

who hates this visit to the museum.

You're not likely to shout out that this isn't art.

But in both situations, in the museum looking at the fountain, the urinal.

How dare they!

Or in the anthology, this is a poem, this is a refrigerator note, okay?

So what is the significance of our being forced by these two artists to ask whether

this is art?

Asking the question you would never ask about the Charge of the Light Brigade.

That you would never ask, even as it was being performed of Hamlet, I don't think.

Hamlet doesn't say, am I art?

It really doesn't, I don't think.

Why is this different and what's the consequence?

>> I think on the way it elevates a urinal into art,

it knocks all previous art off its pedestal.

And so that way democratizes,

because then all these materials are available to anyone at anytime.

As long as they're willing to give appropriate attention and vision.

And that's what Williams' goal is in his modern measured poem,

is to endow something with a new vision and a new consciousness.

>> So what, Molly, do you say to Uncle Joe who's grumpy?

Why did you drag me here, this is not art.

If I wanted a urinal, I could go to the bathroom.

>> The whole purpose of art is to think about what art is, and

make a new definition of it.

>> Can you say that again?

>> The purpose of art is to- [LAUGH] >> [LAUGH]

>> The purpose of art is to think about

what art is.

>> These people that we're encountering in this course,

almost all of them have that in common.

They believe that it's possible to make art that doesn't

force you to ask whether it, the object of art is art.

But they will be much prefer creating something that challenges you both

at the level of content, at the level of forum.

But also forces you to ask basic questions of aesthetics.

Is this art, can it be art?

So, it's a poem, it's a meta poem, and in

the sense that it causes you to ask about its very existence, it's a meta meta poem.

We're constantly involuting one more term,

thinking about what are the terms in which art can be said to be art.

That's really the essence of make it new,

and the Fountain really challenges us, obviously.

I believe we that should think of so

much depends upon a Red Wheelbarrow as equally challenging.

watch video discussion on Duchamp’s “Fountain”

Modern & Contemporary American Poetry (“ModPo”)

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