Latest / Privycast / Ep. 15 Is "Fountain" Art?

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Ep. 15 Is "Fountain" Art? · Privycast

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  The questioning of the norms of what art was and challenging people's adoration of art was important.
• 1:24
  Why do people care so much about what art is?
• 1:28
  Duchamp wanted to kind of like ask that question and stick it in front of people's face and say, look at it.
• 1:34
  Why do you love it?
• 1:48
  Welcome back to Privy, potty friends.
• 1:51
  Privy is a podcast about toilets recorded on a toilet.
• 1:55
  I'm your bathroom enthusiast, host from the hot seat, Hunter Hoover.
• 2:00
  Yeah, toilets are great.
• 2:03
  They're very wonderful and they do a task that we all need done in our lives.
• 2:08
  So, for a lot of you, if you know the show, and I think you do, when you think of Privy,
• 2:16
  You probably think of how artistic and high brow it is.
• 2:21
  And if that's you, I applaud you.
• 2:26
  And you are going to feel right at home this week because I've never made a claim on this little podcast being artistic in any way.
• 2:36
  It is not.
• 2:38
  I just like toilets.
• 2:41
  I think they're pretty neat.
• 2:42
  you hit the little flusher and the little brr brr brr goes down and if you're in the other part of the hemisphere it goes the other way and we're gonna talk about that sometime but
• 2:48
  whatever.
• 2:50
  I just like toilets and I'm thankful every day that I live in a time in history where I can use them in my home in a clean environment.
• 2:59
  But another interesting aspect about our time in society and history is people seem to have moved past art as an expression to art as commentary.
• 3:13
  Moreover, people seem to have moved past art as something you do, to art as something you just call art.
• 3:23
  What a time to be alive.
• 3:25
  Hello, floss container.
• 3:29
  What can I do to make you art?
• 3:31
  Today's piece of art is titled The Fountain.
• 3:34
  And if you heard we're talking about art today, you could approach that with concern.
• 3:39
  Hunter wants to talk about art on the show about bathrooms and things you make in the bathroom.
• 3:43
  And I assure you, we will only briefly mention art made in the bathroom.
• 3:48
  Rather, today we are looking at a famous piece of art and how we got to the place where it's art.
• 3:55
  Today's piece of art, as I said,
• 3:57
  is titled The Fountain or Fountain and it was produced by Marcel Duchamp.
• 4:02
  It's a sculpture, sort of, and as we will discuss, that's really not a good description for what this is because yes, it is a it's a sculpture in the sense that it is like 3D and
• 4:15
  physical and not a painting.
• 4:19
  And I can touch it, but like, well, I can't.
• 4:21
  But yeah, I don't think that's a good description.
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  So I will not describe to you.
• 4:26
  So on this in audio format, I am now going to describe to you the piece of work Duchamp quote produced.
• 4:35
  So to get fountain, what Duchamp did, he took a urinal from the late 1800s, early 1900s, took it off the wall, remove the water pipes that run to and from it, and then laid it
• 4:53
  flat so it is resting on its back.
• 4:56
  and you can peer into the urinal.
• 4:59
  Now, you flip it around and you write on the edge of the urinal, R-MUT, and the year, and that's it.
• 5:07
  You have made art.
• 5:10
  And in doing so, you would have recreated the art piece titled Fountain.
• 5:15
  So, if you're like me and you hear that and you don't necessarily think that that is art, that's okay, because art's subjective.
• 5:26
  How did Marcel Duchamp come to create his infamous piece in which he really just staged the elements in the appropriate positions?
• 5:36
  Like, he just arranged it.
• 5:39
  So, before we write this guy off, he actually is an artist and he is known for being a painter and a sculptor outside of these worlds of art and stuff.
• 5:51
  He was also a writer and a passionate chess player, so, you know.
• 5:55
  Queen's Gambit and all that.
• 5:57
  Pretty cool.
• 5:59
  Marcel was born in France in 1887 to a family who was known for prolific artists, including his grandfather was an artist and three of his surviving siblings also artists.
• 6:13
  He was experimenting and producing art of various styles, whether painting or comic drawings or writing.
• 6:22
  And later he entered the military service in 1905.
• 6:25
  where he learned a skill called typography and the arrangement of letters to produce a thought.
• 6:33
  Much of his early work is considered what they call post-impressionistic.
• 6:37
  And what that means to those who have spent fewer than five hours in an art museum, like myself, is he came after post the impressionistic, impressionistic, movement and moved
• 6:49
  beyond it without leaving it completely behind.
• 6:54
  So to understand post-impressionism, we have to understand impressionism.
• 6:59
  And again, I am not an artist.
• 7:01
  I don't have an art degree.
• 7:02
  I don't have anything in art history.
• 7:04
  I don't make art.
• 7:05
  I don't do art.
• 7:07
  Arts is scary to me, generally speaking.
• 7:10
  Like I work at a high school and I see some of the art that these high schoolers are doing and I'm sitting here, I'm like, these kids are so much more artistically talented and
• 7:21
  gifted than I even.
• 7:23
  This was not on my horizon when I was in high school.
• 7:25
  That's all I'm saying.
• 7:27
  So, impressionism, you have to figure out what post-impressionism is, you have to know what impressionism is.
• 7:33
  as far as I can tell, as a non-artist and a humble potty enthusiast, and with zero info gleaned from the internet, impressionism is trying to make things look actual or give the
• 7:47
  impression that they are alive.
• 7:48
  They're concerned with capturing the movement and the flow and often
• 7:53
  do not contain a lot of bright colors because I don't know if you looked around but like the world ain't that bright sometimes, you know what saying?
• 7:59
  So post-impressionism goes past this to say what if we added crazy colors and maybe more geometric shapes and style to our work while still trying to capture the impression and
• 8:10
  feel of the movement?
• 8:12
  And as such Marcel, Marcel was fascinated with playing in that weird new space.
• 8:21
  And as he did so, in capturing this and movement, Duchamp began to brush up against what is called Dada or Dada style.
• 8:33
  And that is not, yes, that is what small children call their dad.
• 8:37
  But Dada is simply, and that is a sweet dad joke you've ever won, but Dada is simply art.
• 8:43
  That is nonsensical.
• 8:45
  And I hear that and I go, SpongeBob SquarePants.
• 8:49
  But not really.
• 8:50
  That's not where we're getting at.
• 8:51
  So.
• 8:52
  It is satirical and it's just unnatural in its nature.
• 8:56
  It serves to comment on the norms of capitalist society, bourgeoisie, and other societal norms and power structures.
• 9:05
  And it is probable that Marcel Duchamp began experimenting in Dada after much of his former pieces received criticism and in seeing others who had derived from the norm.
• 9:19
  And just, I didn't, and I assume he saw it and went, man, that's cool.
• 9:23
  I want in on that.
• 9:25
  It is probable that he began experimenting in Dada after much of his former pieces received criticism and Duchamp began to react against some of the art community that had
• 9:39
  criticized his work.
• 9:41
  These are his footsteps into Dada.
• 9:46
  But our specimen of concern, Fountain,
• 9:50
  is not just a member of Dada art.
• 9:52
  It is, but it is more than that.
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  It is of the classification or type of Dada art called found art or ready-made.
• 10:01
  And this is an art style, and again, art style, sort of, that seeks to repurpose a standing piece of material or device and reimagine it or modify it.
• 10:16
  And they're called ready-mades because the material
• 10:19
  being modified is already made.
• 10:23
  It's usually a thing that already exists and has a purpose and is going to be used for something else elsewhere.
• 10:31
  And you take that and you drag it over here and you reorganize it and you reshape it and you relook at how it is laid out.
• 10:39
  And thus you have Dada.
• 10:40
  So Marcel's fountain is a ready made.
• 10:45
  It is a urinal whose function is
• 10:49
  receiving pee from the human body and it is then removed from its place usually on the wall and positioned and modified and written on to where it no longer functions as a
• 11:02
  urinal but you can look at it and tell that it is a urinal.
• 11:06
  This was not like Marcel Duchamp just got mad one day and just yanked the urinal off the wall and tossed it down and wrote something on it and said hey that's all right that's not
• 11:14
  what happened.
• 11:16
  This is not Duchamp's
• 11:18
  first ready made.
• 11:19
  Duchamp thought that the questioning of the norms of what art was and challenging people's adoration of art was important.
• 11:27
  Why do people care so much about what art is?
• 11:30
  Duchamp wanted to kind of like ask that question and stick it in front of people's faces and say, look at it.
• 11:37
  Why do you love it?
• 11:38
  So in 1913, he took a bike tire and installed it on the top of a stool in his studio.
• 11:47
  This was likely one of his first ready-mades.
• 11:51
  And Marcel had a number of ready-mades, including bottle rack, which was a bottle rack, and a piece called Prelude to a Broken Arm, which was a snow shovel hanging on a hook.
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  But in 1917, Marcel turned his urinal on its back, slapped an inscription on it, and called it art.
• 12:13
  Ladies and gentlemen, The Fountain.
• 12:16
  And he submitted
• 12:17
  the fountain or just fountain, to an exhibition for the Society of Independent Artists in New York.
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  And though his piece was accepted, and they had to accept it because Marcel paid the fee to have art submitted.
• 12:31
  Like if you roll in there with a bag of Cheeto puffs, half eaten, slap down your X amount of dollars and say, hello, I have made art for this that you're doing today.
• 12:42
  They have to accept the half eaten Cheeto puffs as art.
• 12:47
  But what they don't have to do is display it at the time.
• 12:53
  Because once the exhibition ended, the art piece Marcel's Fountain was photographed and published and the urinal was lost and never found.
• 13:04
  And artists have recreated Duchamp's work.
• 13:08
  But the original fountain was probably destroyed or broken somewhere.
• 13:15
  It's gone.
• 13:15
  They haven't found it.
• 13:16
  They don't know where it's at.
• 13:18
  And this is the crux.
• 13:21
  And the question that Dada ReadyMades are trying to get us to ask.
• 13:26
  And as I sit on my home privy today, I think I know how I answer this question.
• 13:36
  Aren't all urinals and toilets art if you look at them right or position them appropriately or care enough about them?
• 13:45
  Duchamp later proved this to be the case, because he was commissioned to produce 16 replicas of Fountain.
• 13:54
  To the hardware store Duchamp strolled to get himself some more art.
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  Flip it on its side, get me 16 urinals sir and a expo marker.
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  I've got art to make.
• 14:07
  Hurry up.
• 14:09
  A brief note about the inscription before we move on.
• 14:11
  So Marcel wrote R.
• 14:12
  Mutt on his Fountain.
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  Duchamp explained in an editorial that Mutt was a purposeful mixpelling of Mott, which was a plumbing company.
• 14:21
  Maybe the company that made the urinal.
• 14:23
  I don't know.
• 14:24
  And R stands in for Richard.
• 14:27
  So putting this rich person's initial and a big business on a urinal and calling it art was just the commentary he was looking for.
• 14:34
  And there's others who have said like, it's a nod to the Mutt and Jeff cartoons.
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  Maybe.
• 14:39
  I don't know.
• 14:40
  Possibly.
• 14:41
  I'm not a scientist.
• 14:42
  I'm not a historian.
• 14:44
  I was actually telling a homie the other day, I'm like, hey, you know what's weird?
• 14:47
  Like, if you ask me history about like the last three, 400 years, I'm lost.
• 14:52
  And then I know a little bit about like 1500 and then I'm lost until you get back to like 180 and before, and then I can clown.
• 15:00
  But that's part of the adventure of privy is to learn more about this stuff, I guess.
• 15:05
  But Fountain was probably Duchamp's most famous ready-made, possibly even his most famous piece of work.
• 15:14
  piece of work.
• 15:16
  And it lives on not in its appearance, it's a urinal for God's sake, but in our response to its claims to be art.
• 15:26
  Marcel Duchamp sticks a urinal in an art museum and says, voila, it is art.
• 15:33
  How do you feel that you pee on art when you go to the bathroom?
• 15:37
  And that is what Dada is trying to get us to do and think about.
• 15:41
  What makes art art?
• 15:43
  Maybe this podcast is art after all.
• 15:45
  No, it's not.
• 15:48
  But his piece is considered one of the most influential pieces of art in the 20th century.
• 15:54
  Not because of its beauty, its urinal.
• 15:56
  Not because of its craftsmanship.
• 15:58
  He flipped it on its side.
• 16:00
  But in how it made its viewers think about and interpret art when they walked away from it, it paved the way.
• 16:10
  for the postmodern views in art evident today where if every splash of paint is art and there are no mistakes.
• 16:18
  Do Champ gets a nod from us here at Privy?
• 16:22
  Not for his art.
• 16:24
  But because Fountain reminds us that toilets and urinals and the places we drop our brown are beautiful.
• 16:34
  We should slow down and appreciate them.
• 16:37
  They catch our leavings!
• 16:39
  They-
• 16:40
  remove them from our presence.
• 16:43
  We don't have to call them art.
• 16:46
  But they're worth greater consideration until they're filled with matter and then the consideration can just stop for a bit I guess.
• 16:53
  That's fair.
• 16:54
  Yeah.
• 16:56
  Well, thanks for taking this small dive into a weird piece of art.
• 17:01
  Like I said, I will be putting out on social to see this piece and other things about it if you're interested.
• 17:07
  Real quick, I told you we would only talk
• 17:10
  briefly about art in the bathroom.
• 17:13
  So last year, I received an anonymous, and they shall rename anonymous, uh message saying that this person has a friend who has been working on an art project is how we will say
• 17:32
  this.
• 17:33
  And yeah, so the claim is, and I've looked at them and I have them,
• 17:39
  We'll not be sharing them to honor the artist's wishes.
• 17:45
  But...
• 17:47
  And I'm pretty sure they're unedited.
• 17:50
  But some of them are uncanny because he claims to be able to poop English letters.
• 17:56
  Some of them are uncanny.
• 17:58
  Some of them, I think, are happenstance.
• 18:01
  But they're nonetheless very cool.
• 18:04
  And this artist should continue to hone their craft.
• 18:08
  and aim their bee to produce.
• 18:11
  I would love personally, you know, if the person who heard this is still listening now and they want to get a hold of their homie and say, hey, like Privy would love to see like
• 18:23
  smiley face.
• 18:24
  That would be wild if you could like make smiley face happen.
• 18:27
  I would think that would be hilarious.
• 18:30
  yeah.
• 18:31
  And so he shouted out to me last year and said, hey, like my buddy want to know if you want to talk about his podcast.
• 18:35
  I said, yeah.
• 18:37
  I actually would be interested.
• 18:39
  he sent me a few of them and this is not all of them and we might even touch on them more.
• 18:45
  They are the English letters.
• 18:48
  Looks like a D.
• 18:50
  That's Defo a V.
• 18:51
  That's Poopy V.
• 18:53
  That's either an L or a J.
• 18:54
  Uncanny.
• 18:56
  And the homie made an S with his poop.
• 18:58
  It's wild.
• 18:58
  And I'll message this guy to see about like posting them.
• 19:03
  But yeah, it's cool.
• 19:06
  Art.
• 19:07
  ah And if you want to remain anonymous and you have the ability to, this might be dangerous, but if you have the ability to produce art like this, like shout at me.
• 19:18
  ah Anonymous poop letters.
• 19:21
  It's a dope thing and the S one is uncanny and it's very cool to look at.
• 19:25
  But as always, if you have bathroom related art, if you can do something of similar nature and it is, remember the things you put online,
• 19:36
  are things you put online.
• 19:37
  But if you have a comment or you want to do any of that stuff, share it, whatever.
• 19:42
  I don't know how to say that.
• 19:43
  Hit us up.
• 19:44
  We'll read an email.
• 19:45
  If you want to stay anonymous, say, hey, I want to be anonymous.
• 19:48
  But we're privycast at gmail.com or you can find us on social at privycast.
• 19:53
  Leave us a rating or review.
• 19:54
  Thank you for leaving ratings and reviews and sharing the show.
• 19:58
  It helps the word get out.
• 19:59
  I appreciate you guys.
• 20:01
  Five star is our preferred option.
• 20:02
  And as always,
• 20:04
  We will try to read some of those reviews on the podcast and I can easily change the names into Dougieboy911.
• 20:09
  So, totally fine.
• 20:12
  As always, we want to thank Kevin McLeod for Barroom Ballet and as always, don't forget to flush.
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  By talking or texting with a supportive, licensed therapist at Talkspace, you can face whatever is holding you back, whether it's mental health symptoms, relationship drama,
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  past trauma, bad habits, or another challenge that you need support to work through.
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  It's easy to sign up.
• 21:35
  Just go to Talkspace.com and you'll be paired with a provider typically within 48 hours.
• 21:40
  And because you'll meet your therapist online, you don't have to take time off work or arrange childcare.
• 21:45
  You'll meet on your schedule.
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  Plus, Talkspace is in network with most major insurers and most insured members have a zero dollar copay.
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• 22:05
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