The year is 1917 and the French artist Marcel Duchamp ………is walking through New Your with some friends enjoying the architecture when he decides to go into a plumbers merchants and buy a stand alone urinal.
Once at home in his studio he places the new purchased urinal on its back and turns it to be upside-down, he then signs and dates it in black paint on the side using the pseudonym ‘R. Mutt’, he names it The Fountain.
Clearly a joke to upset the ‘stuffy’ art world, he was convinced it was going to ruffle some feathers.
Minutes before, the urinal was just an item for sale in a bathroom store….and now it was a ‘work of art’.
He believed that by changing angle that a normal everyday item was seen and by giving it a name, he had invented a new form of art, he called it ‘A Ready Made’, a sculpture that had already been made.
He had previously attached a bicycle wheel to his stool, eventually thinking of it as art, and hung a snow shovel with writing on it, from his ceiling, he signed the shovel with “From Marcel Duchamp” instead of by…making it an idea from at artist instead of a work of art by an artist.
