VISITING THE URINAL

Chatting over a glass of wine with a younger member of Edinburgh Printmakers after a meeting there, I asked if he would make an effort to go to see Marcel Duchamp’s ready-made, the urinal signed R. Mutt 1917. The point I was trying to make was that we all get the idea behind it, understand the concept, so that the actual seeing of the object itself is somewhat redundant. ‘YesI would,’ he replied, ‘it’s iconic.’

Well, my interlocutor will have the chance to go to see one of the edition of fifty, assembled and sold after the original was destroyed, in an exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. I too will see it, even if my visit will not be specifically to view that exhibit.

The younger member, I am sure, had me pigeon-holed as a reactionary old fart, but I had myself exhibited at least a partial ready-made, at the annual exhibition of the Society of Scottish Artists in 1973. I don’t think I had Duchamp in mind at the time, though the license to do such a thing, and the fact that the selection committee accepted it, depended on his example fifty-six years before. My work, Green Fish Rack, was a partial ready-made because the upper section was made from sewn canvas and buckled to a car roof rack with leather straps. It was very easy to transport to and from the RSA galleries atop my 2CV. I still have the canvas construction but I didn’t have space to store the roof-rack. Sometimes I think I should seek out a similar rack and re-unite the parts.

I very much admire Duchamp’s work, if not particularly the ready-mades metamorphosed by presentation in an art context, the mounted bicycle wheel of 1913, the bottle rack of 1914 and urinal of 1917. Yet it seems that it was the appreciation of the lines of manufactured things that led to the brilliant imagery of the Large Glass, his finest work. When the sheets of glass were accidentally shattered, Duchamp said it improved the work and stabilised the network of cracks. I agree. The lines orchestrate wonderfully with the imagery. It was one of these happy mishaps, which should be seized.

Another inspired idea of Duchamp’s, was to create a box containing his complete works in miniature, making a portable museum. Originally there were twenty copies but the artist promised to produce more on demand. This was made easier for Duchamp because, unlike most artists who produce compulsively, he created very few pieces and devoted most of his time to chess. The only similar enterprise I can think of in the whole of Western art is Claude Lorraine’s Liber Veritatis, in which he made meticulous copies of all his paintings to eliminate the possibility of forgeries.

A version of either of these procedures would have solved my problem with the storage of the roof-rack part of my sculpture. Alternately, like Duchamp, I might have formed a relationship with a couple of millionaire collectors.