Neo Dada humour: Duchamp Fountain with Added Spider
Digital image. April 2023.
A joke based on Marcel Duchamp’s Dada artwork, Fountain. Fountain is a ready-made in the form of a urinal or pissoir. The version of Fountain in the image is in Tate Modern in London (Duchamp created several versions of the work using different pissoirs. The original version no longer exists).
In my version a spider is trapped in the urinal in the same way that spiders are trapped in baths.
The spider adds an extra touch of humour to a work that is already humourous. The humour partly resides in the fact that it’s unusual to see a spider where you don’t expect to see one (trapped in a piece of artwork), but at the same time the spider is exactly where you’d expect to see one (trapped in a piece of bathroom sanitary ware). It’s all about dissonance.
I’m a frequent visitor to Tate Modern, and whenever I look at Duchamp’s Fountain I’m struck by how esthetically pleasing the form of Fountain is. I’m not sure whether or not Duchamp thought this himself or whether he chose the pissoir with no esthetic considerations involved.