Marcel Duchamp’s urinal: The birth of modern art explained in brief
In April 1917, Marcel Duchamp’s latest long-awaited piece was set to be unveiled. The art elite gathered at the inaugural Society of Independent Artists exhibition. The hubbub drew to a hush as everyone flocked to a plinth in the centre of New York’s Grand Central Palace where a covering cloth was slowly slid aside to reveal… a bog-standard urinal simply signed ‘R. Mutt 1917’.
Many asked themselves, ‘is this what art has come to?’ Many vacationers continue to pop into exhibitions and utter that same sentence to this day. When Duchamp was called upon to explain his public defecation, he justified it by arguing, in short, that if the purpose of art is to express the ways of the world, then what more fitting means is there to capture the sheer absurdity of millions of boys choking to death on mustard gas on World War I battlefields than a urinal in an art gallery?
Duchamp argued that if you think it’s stupid and offensive, then good, you should be appalled, you should recognise the meshuga en masse befalling the world outside the gallery let alone inside it. In essence, he almost put forth the argument, what good is art in the face of this madness? Well, marvelling at its majesty might’ve seemed pointless at the time, but at least it could generate some interesting discussion.
In truth, the urinal had been coming for some time. It wasn’t just the war that forced artists to think differently, it was the development of new technologies. For the likes of Duchamp, this mainly pertained to the camera. If you could now capture the likeness of a scene with true fidelity, then there was no longer much use in trying to paint it. With that, realism largely went out the window.
While hundreds of denominations of modern art followed, from expressionism to cubism and everything in between, the focus for artists was now to somehow abstract the essence of a scene and present it in an act of brutal affrontery. To put it simply, the new aim was to deduce the entire notion of World War I’s brutal psychosis down to one single expressive allegory. While cameras were capturing the real thing, artists had to go beyond what an image could offer and get to the abstract heart of it. Hence, the world going down the toilet (even though Duchamp didn’t even take his metaphor that far).
Thereafter, the floodgates were open for all kinds of expressive ways to capture the modern world with a hundred odd shoes, a single ant in a giant jar, or some other strange and almost incendiary avenue. From the urinal onwards, it became the case that the message was now more important that the quality of the means. While this might have been amplified by apparent CIA involvement, the notion of elitism, and a simple need for art to change and roll with the times, it was indeed true that most things had been done and camera were capturing the rest, so abstraction seemed like the best vehicle to advance art into the technological age.
With was furthered by a rapid increase in the pace of discussion. Duchamp could unveil a toilet on one side of the world on Tuesday, and by Wednesday scholars in Australia would be mulling over it too. This continues to this day. There were many examples of modern art before Duchamp’s toilet, but its bluntness made it the pivotal icon of the movement. Now, not only its abstraction, but also its controversial antagonism, and discussion-driving ways are a central part of art. As iArt founder Alejandro Vigilante recently told us, Aristotle’s mantra still stands: “The purpose of art is to represent the meaning of things. This represents true reality, not external aspects.”
