Fountain by Sherrie Levine

This sculpture, Fountain 1991, by American artist Sherrie Levine appears to be a to-scale replica in bronze of Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain which was a men’s urinal that he signed with the alias R. Mutt and dated, then submitted as an artwork at the 1917 Exhibition of Independent Artists at Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 Gallery in NYC. As radical artistic gestures go, Levine’s recreation of Duchamp’s urinal, like much of her artwork, takes highly recognizable artworks that are ubiquitous in the public realm as images in art books (for example) and does not deign to transform the image or object into something substantively different. Through this gesture she brings into question (and controversy) issues of copyright, ownership, what can be considered raw materials for art making, and just what validates an artwork as original, or even as an artwork. Conceptually, her gesture is similar to Duchamp’s though, in that he was taking a seemingly ordinary mass-produced object (that was originally designed by someone, but not meant to function as an artwork) and presenting it as his own artwork just by signing it with his name and placing it in a gallery.

Photograph by Alfred Stieglitz 1917 CC Public Domain through the generosity of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC