What is a readymade? Duchamp’s Fountain and the object as art

A readymade is a mass-produced everyday object that an artist selects, sometimes turns over or signs, and exhibits as art without having made it himself. The concept comes from Marcel Duchamp, who in 1913 mounted a bicycle wheel on a stool and in 1917 submitted a urinal entitled Fountain to an exhibition in New York. The point is that the artist’s choice and idea can matter more than craftsmanship.

Facts

The bicycle wheel, the bottle rack and the snow shovel

Marcel Duchamp began as a painter in Paris and tried Impressionism, Fauvism and Cubism in rapid succession. Around 1913 he grew tired of what he called “retinal” art, that is, art that appeals only to the eye. That same year he mounted a bicycle wheel upside down on a kitchen stool. The following year he bought a galvanised iron bottle rack in a Paris department store and left it standing in his studio.

When he arrived in New York in 1915 he bought a snow shovel, hung it up and gave it the title In Advance of the Broken Arm. Around that time he began to call such objects readymades. He later said that he chose them on the basis of visual indifference: they were to be neither beautiful nor ugly, just objects that nobody cared about. Most of the originals were thrown away or disappeared, and what is in museums today is mostly later replicas.

Fountain, 1917

In April 1917 the Society of Independent Artists in New York organised its first exhibition. The society had promised to show all works from members who paid the fee, and Duchamp himself sat on the board. Under a pseudonym he submitted an ordinary urinal in white porcelain. He had turned it ninety degrees, so that it lay on its back, and painted “R. Mutt 1917” on the rim. The title was Fountain.

The board refused to show the object, and it was hidden away during the exhibition. Duchamp resigned from the board in protest. The photographer Alfred Stieglitz photographed the urinal, and the picture was printed in the small magazine The Blind Man together with a text defending the work: it does not matter whether the artist made the object with his own hands; what matters is that he chose it and created a new thought around it.

The original disappeared soon afterwards, and Stieglitz’s photograph is the only evidence of what it looked like. From the 1950s replicas were made with Duchamp’s approval. One of them was made in Stockholm in 1963 on the initiative of the art critic Ulf Linde and is in the Moderna Museet, and an edition of eight from 1964 is in museums such as Tate in London. That the work functions even though the original is gone says something about what a readymade is.

Why is it art?

A readymade shifts the question from what a work looks like to what makes it art. The urinal in a shop and the urinal on the plinth look identical. The difference lies in the choice, the title, the signature and the context. That is why Fountain has become a starting point for philosophers as much as for artists.

When the philosopher Arthur Danto saw Andy Warhol’s Brillo boxes in New York in 1964, he realised that no visible property distinguished them from the boxes in a warehouse. What made them art was something the eye cannot see: theories, art history and a context that he called the artworld. George Dickie turned this into an institutional theory, in which art is whatever the institutions of the artworld confer the status of art on. Read more in the aesthetics chapter on the postwar period, and in the glossary, where the readymade is called Duchamp’s invention.

Pure and modified readymades

Duchamp distinguished between different kinds. A pure readymade is left as it is. An “assisted” readymade has been altered or combined with something else. The best-known example is L.H.O.O.Q. of 1919, a cheap postcard of the Mona Lisa on which he drew a moustache and goatee. Spoken aloud in French, the letters form a crude pun about the woman in the picture.

Closely related are the Surrealists’ objects, in which everyday things are put together to make something new. Man Ray glued a row of small nails to the underside of a flat iron and called it Gift, and Meret Oppenheim covered a cup, saucer and spoon with fur in 1936. Such works are often called assemblage. The difference from a readymade is that the object is transformed, whereas the readymade is in principle allowed to remain itself. More about the context can be found in the guides to Dada and Dada and Surrealism.

The legacy: from Pop Art to today

Duchamp’s ideas made their great impact only after 1950, when he was already an old man. Pop Art brought the wares of everyday life into the gallery, but Warhol’s Brillo boxes and soup cans were in fact made by hand or by screen printing and are therefore not readymades in Duchamp’s sense. Read more in the guide to Pop Art.

Conceptual art, in which the idea matters more than the object, and installation art both build further on the readymade. In the 1980s Jeff Koons exhibited new vacuum cleaners in Plexiglas cases, and in 1999 Tracey Emin showed her own unmade bed at Tate. Such works still raise the same question as in 1917: is this really art?

Try it yourself

Choose an object at home, for example a washing-up brush or a clothes peg. What would it take for it to be perceived as art? Think about the placement, the lighting, a title and a signature. Turn it over, as Duchamp turned the urinal, and see whether it suddenly looks different. The exercise shows how much context matters for how we see an object.

How to recognise a readymade

Exercise

What did Duchamp do to the urinal before submitting it in 1917?