Interviews with Sherrie Levine, Louise Lawler, and Fred Wilson

2017 marks the centenary of an artwork judged to be the single most influential of the twentieth century: Marcel Duchamp’s famous “readymade” entitled Fountain. The final verdict on Fountain has been widely accepted, despite the fact that the circumstances surrounding “Mr. Richard Mutt” have never resembled an open-and-shut case. On the contrary, since Fountain’s appearance in 1917, when it was rejected as “a plain piece of plumbing” only to be subsequently celebrated as a work of conceptual art, numerous questions remain unanswered, several facts remain unexplained. Now, one hundred years later, Robert Kilroy attempts to answer these questions by examining the evidence with fresh eyes. Central to the investigation is the primary witness – Duchamp himself – whose statements are forensically analyzed. The facts themselves are interrogated using the methodology of a detective: precisely speaking, an art historical approach with a critical edge sharpened by a new interpretation of psychoanalytic theory. In weaving an alternative narrative, Kilroy shows us that, not only has Fountain been fundamentally misunderstood, this very misunderstanding is central to the work’s significance. The final verdict, he argues, was strategically stage-managed by Duchamp in order to expose the apparatus underpinning Fountain’s reception, what he terms “The Creative Act.” By suggesting that a specific aesthetic “crime” has gone unnoticed, Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain: One Hundred Years Later asks the reader to radically reassess his/her precise contribution to “the creation of art.” This urgent, if somewhat troubling question, could have far-reaching implications for the field of scholarship, the course of contemporary art and the discipline of Art history.

Given that Marcel Duchamp’s readymades mock and repudiate artistic conventions, the claim to aesthetic merit for such works seems contradictory. Yet their conception is today generally considered one of the most influential ideas of Modern Art. Qualifying readymades as art seems paradoxical: is an artwork not supposed to be a beautiful object created by the hands of an artist? The fact that they are mass-manufactured objects that anyone could purchase further insults aesthetic sensibilities. Such questions and contradictions about what ‘Art’ is or should be form the basis of this essay, which seeks to clarify its constructs. As ambiguous artworks, Duchamp’s readymades serve as the ideal focal point to interrogate the definitions of art and to problematise its discourse. This discussion will firstly, introduce and contextualise Duchamp’s Fountain (1917); secondly, question conventional definitions and assumptions of art by exploring how Fountain ruptures these criteria; and lastly, reconsider if Fountain is art and the implications of Duchamp’s gesture.

Springer eBooks, 2018

The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.

2003

This is my MA dissertation completed at the University of Essex in 2003. When I begun researching just after Easter of that year, I was still unsure whether I was an art historian or not. My undergraduate studies was within Fine Art and I thought that doing an MA in Art Theory and Art History would help develop my diminishing art practice. The experience of writing the dissertation helped me decide that I was more art historian than artist. I share it here out of nostalgia (I'm writing these lines pretty much twenty years after the research begun!) and because some people might find it useful or interesting. Essentially, the dissertation is a close examination of Marcel Duchamp's Fountain, arguing that this a temporally extended work (definitively unfinished, one might say) in which notions of authorship, dating, even its own status as a readymade are continuously undone and displaced. Hardly anyone saw Duchamp's readymade in 1917 and everybody since has only seen it at a remove. Indeed, the replicas seen in various museums are sculptural reproductions made to resemble the lost readymade exactly based on a photograph. In a way, this dissertation seeks to justify those replicas against the negative reception they (and Duchamp, too) garnered in the 1960s amongst artists you might imagine to be sympathetic towards Duchamp's practice.

Aisthesis. Pratiche, linguaggi e saperi dell’estetico, 2021

It is a commonplace in certain areas of art theory and contemporary art practices to consider Marcel Duchamp's ready-mades as ordinary objects, which have an artistic value that depends more on a theoretical or institutional framework than on an aesthetic experience. The aim of this paper is, on the one hand, to show the historical emergence of these artifacts on the light of the impact of the industrial production in avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century. Discussing Walter Benjamin' s and Jean Brun's insights, it argues that Duchamp's practice has an explanatory principle, both in the mechanical reproduction of the work of art and in the aestheticization of the machine. On the other hand, it brings forward some observations regarding Duchamp's insight on the "total lack of good or bad taste" and the perceptual dimension of a sculptural object as the Large Glass, coming back to Arthur Danto's interpretation of ready-mades and to the notion of "implementation" introduced by Nelson Goodman to define "the process of bringing about the aesthetic functioning that provides the basis for the notion of a work of art".

Writings on Andy Warhol usually assume – although never argue – that the aesthetic and ethical rights that he exercised in his Brillo Box (1964) – i.e., to designate an apparently un-transmogrified, mass-produced, commercial object as 'art' – were derived from Duchamp's 1917 Fountain . The contention of this paper is that this assumption is insupportable because – in fact – there are significant differences in the way the two artists operated, in what they intended, and in the outcomes. It is a matter of extreme disappointment that – nearly a century after Fountain and half a century after Brillo Box – this has rarely, if ever, been discussed.

Geraldine A. Johnson, "'All concrete shapes dissolve in light': Photographing sculpture from Rodin to Brancusi," Sculpture Journal, vol. 15 (2006): 199-222, 2006

1999