A urinal that has stopped looking like one
The first thing that registers in the photograph is the turn. The urinal is not mounted on a wall the way you have seen one a thousand times. It has been rotated about ninety degrees and laid on its back, so the flat rear and the row of drain holes face you. That single rotation does a surprising amount of work. Tipped out of its everyday position, the object is hard to read at a glance; the function drains out of it, and the smooth white shape starts to register as form rather than fixture. Duchamp did almost nothing to the thing, and yet by simply turning it he made it strange.
The only mark of a human hand anywhere on it is easy to miss. On the outer rim, toward the lower left as the photograph is framed, the signature “R. Mutt 1917”is brushed in black paint. It is worth sitting with how little that is. On a mass-produced factory object, the entire claim of authorship is a fake name in paint, the one gesture that is not the manufacturer’s. The signature is the whole argument, and it is a lie about who made it, signed onto a thing nobody made by hand at all.
A cross between a Buddha and a Veiled Woman
Allowed to settle as pure shape, the white form quietly stops being plumbing. The rounded, symmetrical curve of the upturned bowl reads, to a lot of viewers, as a seated figure. Stieglitz himself caught it, writing that the urinal had “an oriental look about it, a cross between a Buddha and a Veiled Woman,” and critics have seen a seated Buddha or a robed Madonna in it ever since. The resemblance is an accident of an industrial mold, nobody designed it, but it is a real part of why the photograph became iconic and not just the idea behind it. The object got lucky in its own shape.
The pedestal, the painting, and the light
Stieglitz set the urinal on a pedestal, the plinth that sculpture stands on. That is an argument made entirely by staging: put a thing on a base, light it, and frame it, and you are insisting it be treated as sculpture before a single word is said. Behind it, on the gallery wall, hangs an angular abstract painting, Marsden Hartley’s The Warriors of 1913, which places the photograph at the 291 gallery and surrounds the urinal with genuine avant-garde company. And the light itself persuades: Stieglitz lit the white porcelain so it glows out of a dark ground, smoothing the hard industrial object into something almost reverent. The framing is doing a great deal of the convincing the object cannot do for itself, which is precisely the point about where art-status actually comes from.