The Golden Bowl
Nearly a hundred years after Marcel Duchamp took a porcelain urinal signed “R. Mutt” and turned it into art, calling it “Fountain” (1917), Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah has gifted his daughter a toilet made entirely of gold as a wedding gift.
“The Golden Toilet” (2014) as a name or title for the toilet is a bit of tautology: it is like a last minute reminder of wealth and opulence, just in case anyone forgot or doubted that the intestines of this toilet was made of gold, a bit like being told that one would be surrounded by made-to-order bodies in a beauty contest.
Duchamp, in case it needs reminding, was working on the aesthetic of the readymade, by positing it against what he called ‘retinal art’, art that appealed to the eye alone. His work was founded on ‘visual indifference’ and much of his work hinges on how ‘found objects’ are turned into works of art. The ‘first’ definition of ‘readymade’ is commonly thought to be made by Duchamp though Andre Breton and Paul Eluard, who compiled the Dictionnaire abrege du Surrealisme later denied it: ‘an ordinary object elevated to the dignity of a work of art by the mere choice of an artist …’.
The porcelain urinal had arrived as a piece of sculpture from a female friend whose signature on it is a pseudonym: ‘R. Mutt’; Richard Mutt. All that Duchamp did was to reorient the urinal to a position that was 90 degrees from its normal position of use. He then wrote ‘R. Mutt 1917’ on it. Why R. Mutt? Among the many interpretations of ‘Fountain’ over nearly a century, I find two to be useful in my understanding of King Abdullah’s ‘The Golden Toilet’: R. Mutt could be ‘armut’, meaning ‘poverty’ in German, and ‘R’ could mean ‘Richard’, a French slang for ‘moneybags’.
Nearly a hundred years later, King Abdullah turns Duchamp’s Fountain on its head. If anyone ever spoke back to the Empire, this is it: the audacity of abundance, challenging the entire notion of the readymade and industrial production that birthed that aesthetic, bringing into its fold the hierarchy among men. All this is at complete odds with the modernist impulse of Duchamp’s work. If there ever was a gross corruption of ‘retinal art’, this is it, for the butt (rhymes with ‘Mutt’, remember) is indifferent to the stock exchange value of metals, gold or iron.
The Golden Toilet reiterates the belief that all men might be created equal but some men’s faeces are more equal than others. ‘Fountain’ was an object of use turned into art. The Golden Toilet is art compelled into use. Duchamp wanted to de-deify the artist. King Abdullah’s aim seems to deify the man on the commode, turning every person who excretes or urinates into the bowl into an artist.
Four people, the South African artist Kendell Geers, the musician Brian Eno, and the Chinese performance artists Yuan Chai and Jian Jun Xi, have claimed to urinate in the Fountain. How many people will ever urinate in The Golden Toilet? And will that excrement be a work of art?
Who is the artist in the Age of Abundance then? And what is art? Golden Shit?