Dada before Dada
While Zurich was inventing the cabaret, a parallel version of the same revolt was already running in New York, and it had started even earlier. Two French artists, Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia, had crossed the Atlantic to escape the war, and in New York they found a small avant-gardescene (the avant-garde being art’s experimental front edge) with two hubs: the gallery “291” run by the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, and the apartment of the collectors Walter and Louise Arensberg, where artists argued, drank and played chess most nights. With the American photographer Man Ray and the painter Beatrice Wood, they made a New York Dada every bit as anti-everything as Zurich’s but cooler in temperature, drier, the quiet sabotage of a single well-placed object.
Picabia’s specialty was machines. He drew people as deadpan mechanical diagrams, a portrait of Stieglitz as a broken bellows camera, the “mechanomorphic” (man-as-machine) style. The joke was bleak and exact: in the age that had just industrialized killing, maybe a person really was just a machine, and a badly made one. He poured his energy into a magazine, 391, which he kept publishing across four cities from 1917 to 1924. Dada’s journals were artworks in their own right, and they are how the scattered cities stayed one movement.
Choosing instead of making
Duchamp’s specialty was the single well-placed object, and it is the most consequential idea in modern art, so it is worth slowing down. In 1913 he bolted a bicycle wheel upside-down onto a kitchen stool. The next year he bought a galvanized iron bottle rack from a department store and declared that, untouched, exactly as the shop sold it, to be art. He coined the actual word readymade around 1915. (So the dates need honesty: the first readymade object is usually dated to the 1913 wheel, but Duchamp did not yet have the concept or the word when he made it. He arrived at the idea by doing it, then named what he had done.)
Here is the idea, stated plainly. A readymade is an ordinary, mass-produced object that an artist declares to be a work of art simply by choosing it and presenting it as one. No carving, no painting, no skill, no making. The whole artistic act is the choice. That sounds like a shrug, and it nearly is, but follow it through: if choosing is enough, then art is not a craft you practice with your hands. It is a decision you make with your mind, and anything at all can be art the moment an artist points at it. Nearly every Conceptual artist and most of what came after is downstream of that sentence.
A urinal called sculpture
In 1917 a new exhibiting society started up in New York, the Society of Independent Artists, on the radical principle of “no jury, no prizes”: anyone who paid the fee could exhibit anything. Duchamp was on the board. To test whether they meant it, someone in his circle submitted a work, a standard porcelain urinal, laid on its back, signed “R. Mutt 1917,” and titled Fountain. The “no jury, no prizes” society panicked and hid it. Duchamp and Arensberg resigned the board in protest. And an anonymous defense ran in the little magazine The Blind Man, laying out the whole philosophy of the readymade in two sentences: whether Mr. Mutt made the fountain with his own hands or not has no importance, the writer said; he chose it. That is the argument in full. The skill is irrelevant. The choice is the art.
Who really sent it?
Now the part most books skip. We do not actually know for certain who sent Fountainin. In a letter to his sister dated 11 April 1917 Duchamp wrote that “one of my female friends under a masculine pseudonym, Richard Mutt, sent in a porcelain urinal as a sculpture.” A female friend. A vocal scholarly minority reads that letter to mean the work was the idea of the German-born artist-poet Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, a wild performance artist before the term existed, who was central to the New York circle and entirely capable of the gesture. The counter-case reads the same letter the other way: Duchamp openly told his own sister a woman had fronted the entry, which is hardly what a man covering up a stolen idea would do, and identifies the friend as another associate, Louise Norton. Mainstream museums still credit Duchamp; the Baroness case rests on stylistic affinity and circumstantial ties. The honest position is that the debate is real and unresolved, and it may never be settled. What the episode does cleanly is puncture the myth of the lone male genius: the most famous artwork of the century may not even have a single sure author.
A moustache on the Mona Lisa
If the urinal asked “what counts as art,” Duchamp’s next provocation asked “what do we worship, and why.” In 1919 he took a cheap printed postcard of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, the most revered painting in the world, and drew a moustache and a goatee on her in pencil, captioned with five letters, L.H.O.O.Q., that sound out a rude French pun when read aloud. He called it a “rectified readymade,” a found object the artist has altered. With a pencil and a dirty joke he had defaced the most worshipped image in Western art, and the target was not Leonardo but the worship itself: the museum cult, the idea that a painting becomes holy because enough people agree to genuflect.
