Art is full of secrets. It’s one of the best things about it. However well you know a work of art, something in its story will always remain hidden. It doesn’t matter how famous you are — the Mona Lisa, the Sistine Chapel ceiling — it doesn’t matter what you are — Leonardo’s The Last Supper, Van Gogh’s Sunflowers — lurking at the centre will always be a truth, a reason, a motivation, that is whispery and private.
Strange things happen in the studios of artists — transformations, shifts in meaning, descents into darkness. Art often looks like one thing on the outside, but turns out to be something else on the inside. Without understanding those shifts and descents we end up misunderstanding the whole caboodle.
It’s important as well to recognise that this has always gone on. Ever since the first caveman left his spooky handprints on the walls of a cavern, human beings have communicated with the future in the mysterious Esperanto of art. We can’t help it. We’re hardwired to scratch, smudge and scribble.
Take Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, the upturned urinal, created in 1917, which many argue is the most influential artwork of the 20th century because it invented conceptual art. Fountain changed everything. And it’s still changing it today.
On the outside it looks like some plumbing from a men’s public lavatory that has been turned on its side and lifted on to a pedestal. To make it even more complex — even worse! — the artist has signed it and dated it. But he hasn’t signed it “Marcel Duchamp”. That would be too easy, no. Duchamp has signed his urinal “R. Mutt”, causing an entire century of art critics and historians to scratch their skulls to the bone wondering why he did it. Who was R. Mutt? Why take his name? Questions, questions, questions. But no answers, answers, answers.
I can vouch for the continuing impact of this enigma wrapped in a conundrum because I recently reviewed the Michael Craig-Martin retrospective at the Royal Academy in which the opening work — the tone setter for the whole event — was a glass of water on a shelf that the artist insisted was really an oak tree. When you looked at it, you saw a glass of water. But conceptual art is an art of ideas and propositions, so here was Craig-Martin, a knight of the realm, a CBE, insisting at the Royal Academy that his glass of water was an oak tree. The reason he was doing it, the direct ancestor of this kind of thinking, was Duchamp’s Fountain.
We are talking, therefore, not just about an artwork that is mysterious, but about one that has led — or perhaps misled — an entire century of artists. Fountain started a revolution, a craze, that continues to have a powerful impact on art. But just like the spooky handprints from the beginning of human time there is still so much we don’t know about it. Or rather, we didn’t know about it. Until Sherlock Januszczak got on the case, in a new series I’ve made called The Art Mysteries. Art is full of secrets, yes. But secrets are there to be uncovered.
I started my voyage to the heart of Duchamp’s darkness in the village where he was born, Blainville-Crevon, as typical a French village in Normandy as you can imagine — tidy houses, a river, a few shops, a church. It’s the kind of place where everyone you pass in the street says “bonjour”, although they’ve never seen you before. Not that you pass many people. They’re there somewhere, lurking in their neat interiors, but only venture out rarely. In Normandy there’s a lot to bottle up.
Amazingly Duchamp lived next door to the church, so close to its porch he can never have missed a single whiff of its incense or a choral note of its liturgy. The church was so near it was practically on top of him. His mother, who was fiercely religious, made him turn up at every Mass, where he was joined by five siblings, four of whom went on to become artists. Here, therefore, is a question: when four out of six kids are subjected to a fierce religious childhood, what happens to the religion? Does it evaporate? Is the fact that Duchamp’s upturned urinal shares its outline with the outlines of the Virgin Mary in prayer a complete coincidence?
Man Ray, the American surrealist who was with Duchamp the day he happened on the urinal for sale in a hardware shop in New York, described Fountain once as “the Buddha of the bathroom”. Was it just a joke? And that’s it?
Duchamp’s religion is also there to be delved into. But not much. Because it soon became apparent that something even bigger than religion was niggling at him when he made Fountain: something creepy and unsettling. I won’t reveal it all here. You need to watch the film. But I can spell out this key motivational force. It’s just three letters: S.E.X.
