artintelligence

Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917

It would not be exaggerated to assert that Marcel Duchamp’s, Fountain, 1917 is the most influential work of art of the twentieth century. The fact that a male urinal of the kind found in public conveniences could aspire to such heights seems absurd, but that is precisely the anti-aesthetic point, or part of the point.

An examination of the evolution of aesthetic anarchism into institutionalised transgression begins with Duchamp’s Fountain, 1917. This work is critical because it has become an icon of deconstructive art—and, more particularly, deconstructive sculpture. It is also particularly relevant to the growth of installation art as a major movement in the 1990s, not least because installation art is intimately connected with the role of the gallery/museum. It was the Readymade, encompassed by the discourses of Dada and Surrealism, which revealed the gallery/museum as an aesthetic regime that determines what is and what is not art via processes of inclusion and exclusion. For Peter Bürger Fountain becomes an anti-institutional gesture, this is evident when he proposes:

Dadaism, the most radical movement within the European avant-garde, no longer criticizes schools that preceded it, but criticizes art as an institution, and the course its development took in bourgeois society. (Bürger 1984: 22)

Under the guise of an assumed name Duchamp submitted a male public convenience-type urinal as an entry for a putatively open exhibition in New York in 1917. With this work Duchamp metaphorically urinated on the bourgeois art institution and its adoration of what he referred to disparagingly as ‘retinal art’. Duchamp deliberately picked the most antiaesthetic object he could find in order to attack traditional concepts of beauty. A newspaper article—probably authored, or informed by, Duchamp—argued that Fountain was art because its maker, the fictitious R. Mutt, had declared that it was art (Camfield 1989). What is remarkable about Fountain is that what appears to have started out as a provocation became transformed into one of the most significant works of art of the twentieth century.

Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau project began in 1923 and lasted until his death in 1948. He constructed it three times as he was forced to change his geographical location due to the vicissitudes of the Second World War.

The reason for this transformation, however, lies less in the intention of the artist than in subsequent interpretation. During the 1960s artists and theorists began to realise that Fountain was something of a founding gesture that pointed to the fact that just about anything could be defined as a work of art so long as it was framed by the institutional apparatus of an art gallery.[1] It is also possible, however, to cite Kurt Schwitters’ groundbreaking Merzbau, 1933, in which the artist transformed his Hanover house into a sculptural installation. Schwitters’ Merzbau is, indeed, in some ways more revolutionary than Fountain because it was able to attain the status of work of art without an initial association with a gallery, which gives some hope for the future of radical art. Evidently, the influence of the fine art system does not end at the walls of the gallery/museum and the associated army of directors, curators and administrators but extends further into the more abstract, discursive and democratic sphere represented by the ‘museum without walls’ that includes art history and theory, and now the Internet.

One of the main outcomes of Duchamp’s provocative Fountain was that it foregrounded the notion that it was not so much the artist as the art institution that ultimately framed a particular object as a ‘work of art’. By the 1960s the ramifications of the Readymade were better understood and deconstructive artists were not involved in simply regurgitating Readymades they were, instead, interrogating the network of power that is the gallery system.

During the 1960s and 1970s we find artists attempting to defy the power of the art museum by making art that could function outside its framework. Salient instances include happenings, land art, body art, performance art, mail art and out-of-gallery situational art such as the work of Alan Kaprow, which Claire Bishop points to as one of the precursors of contemporary installation art. The pioneering work of Kaprow, Dan Graham and Hélio Oiticica in the 1960s and 1970s represent installation art before it became congealed into an institutional form. From the 1990s onwards installation art became fine art, ensconced and applauded in an established gallery environment—literally, and willingly, institutionalised.

Donald Judd, Untitled, 1966. Stainless steel and yellow Plexiglas. Six 34 inch cubes.

The beginnings of the institutionalisation of installation art can be traced back to the strategy of taking over or gaining ‘ownership’ of gallery spaces evident in the 1960s. Take the example of Donald Judd’s box sculptures, such as Untitled, 1966, which literally capture the gallery environment. By bolting his boxes onto the gallery wall Judd forces the exhibition space to become part of his work and thereby takes possession of that space, perhaps without realising that the thing being sequestered (the art institution) is more powerful than the individual artist. Carl Andre’s rug-like floor sculptures, in contrast, create a much more intimate relationship between the sculptural object and the gallery environment.

Jannis Kounellis, exhibition of twelve horses in the Galleria L’Attico, Rome in 1969.

Judd’s aggressive invasion of the art gallery is echoed in works by other artists of the time. One can point, for example, to Jannis Kounellis exhibiting twelve live horses in the Galleria L’Attico, Rome in 1969; and Walter de Maria’s Earth Room, first executed in the Galerie Heiner Friedrich, Munich, 1968. For Earth Room De Maria filled the gallery with soil to a depth of 56 cm (22 inches). The collusion of the Galerie Heiner Friedrich with de Maria’s action effectively broadcast the fact that this art gallery was working at the cutting edge of art practice. All that was required was that the new generation of curators and critics could grasp the concept that transgressive deconstruction was a fully-fledged aesthetic discourse with roots in earlier movements, most notably: Duchamp, Dada and Surrealism.

RIGHT Walter de Maria, Earth Room, first executed in the Galerie Heiner Friedrich, Munich, 1968. De Maria filled the gallery with soil to a depth of 56cm (22 inches)

By the 1990s the dominance of deconstructive art was thoroughly accepted across the world of art, enabling artists to do pretty much what they liked with most art galleries. Thus in 1994 Matt’s Gallery, London, were quite happy for Richard Wilson to jackhammer a large hole through the foundations into the clay water table on which London is built, in order to insert a full-sized billiard table flush with the gallery floor. Or, in 1999 the Portikus gallery in Frankfurt were comfortable with the fact that Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset wanted to remove large sections of the gallery’s walls. Since the 1990s such radical interventions into the fabric of the art gallery are no longer shocking, or transgressive, they are what is expected.