Curator, Michelle Kuo: Duchamp created Fountain in April 1917. It was a store-bought porcelain urinal, and it was signed "R. MUTT," as a kind of pseudonym. When it was submitted for the first exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New York, which was supposed to be open to anything and everyone, this was simply suppressed. It just didn’t make it to exhibition. And this created a scandal. So Fountain is pointing to the ways in which taste is something that people with power put into place in order to maintain systems of convention and culture.
Artist, Marcel Duchamp: That was the difficulty—to find an object that I had no attraction [to] whatsoever from the aesthetic angle. Choosing the object you want to make should be completely impersonal, because if you introduce the idea of choice, it means that you introduce your taste. And taste is the great enemy of art, A-R-T.
Artist, Liz Deschenes: Taste is problematic for so many reasons, but probably the predominant one is: it creates hierarchies, that one thing is superior to another thing. It’s exclusive, and it’s purposely so.
Michelle Kuo: And so Fountain is a kind of test. Duchamp finds the one thing that’s gonna make this group, the Society of Independent Artists, say, “Oh, actually we’re not that committed to freedom or upending conventional hierarchies of taste.” They do actually have standards that they just don’t necessarily want to admit to.
Archival audio from: Richard Hamilton in the Reflection of Marcel Duchamp. 2014. Paris. Directed by Pascal Goblot. © 2014 Le Miroir / Vosges Télévisions