Fountain

A factory-made urinal laid on its back, signed with a fake name, and entered as sculpture into a show that had promised to refuse nothing, which then hid it. The whole work of art is the choosing.

1. 1
   The inverted urinal

   The whole object, laid on its back rather than mounted on a wall

   The fixture has been rotated about ninety degrees from the way it normally hangs and set down on its back, so the flat back and the row of drain holes face you. Tipped out of its usual position, the everyday plumbing job is hard to read at a glance, and the smooth white shape starts to look like sculpture rather than hardware. That single turn, with no carving and no paint beyond a signature, is most of what Duchamp actually did to the thing.
2. 2
   The “R. Mutt 1917” signature

   Brushed in black paint on the outer rim of the form, toward the lower left as photographed

   The only authorial mark on a factory object is a fake name. Duchamp said “Mutt” came from the J. L. Mott Iron Works, a well-known New York plumbing manufacturer, which he altered to “Mutt” with a nod to the popular comic strip Mutt and Jeff, and that “R.” stood for Richard, French slang for a moneybags. Whether the urinal really came from Mott is itself disputed, a point that feeds the rival authorship claim (Mott may not have stocked this model). The signature is the entire claim of authorship, painted onto something the artist did not make.
3. 3
   The seated-figure silhouette

   The smooth, rounded, symmetrical outline of the upturned bowl

   Read the curved white shape on its own and it stops being plumbing. Stieglitz himself saw “an oriental look about it, a cross between a Buddha and a Veiled Woman,” and critics have echoed the seated-Buddha or Madonna reading ever since. The resemblance is an accident of an industrial mold, but it is a large part of why the photograph, and not only the idea, became iconic.
4. 4
   The pedestal

   The plinth or base Stieglitz stood the object on

   Stieglitz set the urinal on a pedestal, the standard furniture of sculpture display. It is a quiet, deliberate argument made by staging alone: put a thing on a plinth, light it, and frame it, and you are insisting it be treated as sculpture. The presentation does part of the persuading that the object cannot do for itself.
5. 5
   The painting behind it

   On the wall in the background of the photograph, the angular abstract composition

   The dark, jagged abstract picture hanging behind the urinal is Marsden Hartley’s The Warriors (1913). Its presence places the photograph at Stieglitz’s 291 gallery and surrounds the fixture with real avant-garde company, so the urinal is photographed not as a joke object but as one art work among others.
6. 6
   The glaze and the light

   Across the white porcelain, glowing against the dark wall

   Stieglitz lit the white surface so that it glows out of a dark ground, smoothing the hard industrial object into something almost reverent. The framing does real work: the photographer’s soft, careful light is a large part of why a urinal can look, in this single image, like a thing worth looking at.