The Fine Art of Vandalism

Vanitas with Framed Portrait, by Neal Auch

Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain is one of the most controversial sculptures in art history. For many, the piece is a perfect encapsulation of everything wrong with contemporary art. As recently as 2016, the perpetually angry right-wing commentator Paul Joseph Watson took to YouTube to shout about Fountain, complaining that this type of art “degrades and cheapens society.” Other conservative media figures, including Joe Rogan and Prager U, have voiced similar opinions about the supposed degeneracy of modern art in general, if not Duchamp in particular.

In many ways, Fountain’s capacity to shock and offend feels surprising. For one thing, it’s more than a century old. Moreover, the piece does not involve sex, nudity, violence, bodily fluids,  or the desecration of religious iconography. Instead, Fountain is controversial because it tiggers a cultural anxiety even more deeply rooted than our hang-ups about sex and death. Fountain is upsetting because the very existence of the piece implies that someone, somewhere, might have gotten a reward they didn’t deserve.

Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, photographed by Alfred Stieglitz

For the uninitiated, the piece in question consists entirely of an ordinary porcelain urinal, tipped on its side, signed “R Mutt” and dated to 1917. The piece is an example of a “readymade” sculpture. These are ordinary everyday objects which, in Duchamp’s view, are elevated to art by virtue of their having been selected and exhibited by the artist. If this is the first time you’re hearing about this idea, I imagine you might be skeptical of whether it’s fair to claim that a urinal becomes high art simply because someone declares it to be so. And, yes, that’s more or less the whole point of the piece. Like so much conceptual art, Fountain seeks to provoke conversations about the boundaries of art itself. After all, any painting in a gallery is just a clever arrangement of store-bought items (paint, canvas, etc). Michelangelo’s David is, at its core, just a chunk of marble. At what point in the sculpting process did David stop being a rock and start being high art? These are precisely the kind of questions Duchamp wanted us to think about.

Duchamp’s Fountain has been on my mind a lot recently. Not because yet another right-wing commentator has been yelling about it online but, rather, because of an article I stumbled across recently. The story is this: an employee of Munich’s Pinakothek der Moderne covertly hung one of his own paintings on the gallery walls, temporarily allowing his work to join one of Europe’s largest collections of modern art. According to a spokesperson for the gallery, the man responsible for this prank “considers himself as an artist and most likely saw his role in the museum’s installation team as a day-job to support his true calling.” In the wake of this incident, the employee was fired and given a 3 year ban from the gallery. According to at least one article on the subject, police were brought in to investigate a complaint of “wilful damage of property,” which is perhaps a slightly overzealous way to describe the act of drilling a couple of holes in a wall in order to hang a painting.

What I find fascinating about the Pinakothek stunt is that it provokes basically the same question as Duchamp’s Fountain: does a work become “high art” simply by virtue of it being displayed in a prestigious gallery? Why is it that we celebrate Duchamp for trolling the art world, but treat this unnamed Pinakothek technician as a vandal? What is the difference between a juvenile prank and a legitimate artistic statement?

The difference, of course, comes down to status. In spite of his reputation as a provocateur, Duchamp was recognized as a serious artist. Famously, Duchamp submitted the original version of Fountain to the Society of Independent Artists under a pseudonym; when the work was rejected, Duchamp quit his position as a board member in protest. While Duchamp’s work has certainly been controversial, he was clearly enough of an art-world insider to have held a position as a board member of an artists’ society in the first place. The Pinakothek prankster, on the other hand, seems to be an actual outsider—someone who has never been recognized as a “real” artist by the gatekeepers of the art world. The Pinakothek prank is viewed as illegitimate because it cuts too close to the bone by challenging the authority of gallery curators to decide what is and is not great art.

Andy Warhol famously said that “art is what you can get away with.” At its core, the Pinakothek story is a stark reminder of something a lot of art outsiders already know all too well: certain kinds of people have an easier time getting away with it than others. The blurred boundaries of what counts as art are not only influenced by the act of curating and displaying a piece, as Duchamp’s Fountain implies, but also by a host of complex societal and political factors. Status and capital (both literal and social) certainly matter a great deal. And these are, of course, intertwined with gender identity, sexual orientation, race, disability, language, age, etc, etc, etc.

We can already see all this complexity surrounding identity and status at play in the legacy of Fountain. When I told the story above, I glossed over the long-running controversy surrounding that piece’s authorship. Many have suggested that the infamous urinal was actually stolen from a lesser-known female artist: Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. (For example: see this article, this article, and this article for discussion surrounding this controversy.) Conclusively determining the true authorship of Fountain is obviously beyond the scope of this essay. Regardless of who made the work, this much is clear: Duchamp’s name is known to almost anyone with even a passing interest in art. Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, on the other hand, is virtually unknown, in spite of the fact that her work was no less interesting or groundbreaking than that of Duchamp. It’s difficult to imagine that gender identity didn’t play a role in determining the difference between these two artist’s legacies.

We can also see how the gatekeeping of what is or isn’t taken seriously as art plays out by looking at another story which is remarkably similar to the Pinakothek prank. In 1999, Canadian comedian Tom Green pulled basically the same stunt for a sketch on his cable access TV show. I actually lived in Green’s hometown at the time that video aired; I can say with absolute confidence that his antics were widely considered to be childish and annoying. However, now that Green has achieved mainstream success, the conversation surrounding his work has taken on a very different character. Nowadays, Green is often seen as an innovative performance artist. While Green’s output isn’t necessarily my cup of tea, I do think there’s an interesting conversation here about the difference between performance art and vandalism and, crucially, about who gets to decide which is which.

The series of image which accompany this essay represent my own efforts to grapple with the questions at hand. Each composition is based around the idea of presenting another photographer’s work in a new context. For me, these still life arrangements suggest a similar question to Fountain, in the sense that they draw attention to the fact that how an artwork is displayed can have a significant impact on its deeper meaning. As in all still life, the bones and dead flowers in these images remind us of mortality and, by extension, of the limited time any artist has to leave their mark on the art world. The photographers who created these portraits are unknown. So, too, have the names of the people in these antique photographs been lost to history. And that anonymity, that namelessness, is very much the point. For every artist like Duchamp—whose work is celebrated by the art establishment and remembered long after his death—there are hundreds more who will fade into obscurity. The difference between one fate and the other might be considerably more arbitrary than we’d like to believe.

Vanitas with Framed Portrait, by Neal Auch