An Interview with Marcel Duchamp
JT: In 2006, Pierre Pinoncelli attacked your Fountain [a replica of the 1917 urinal readymade signed R. Mutt] with a hammer, at the Pompidou Center in Paris. I was wondering if you had any comments on this?
MD: Ah, no, not really. I believe this person was a performance artist?
JT: Yes, he claims to be. Pinoncelli was the same man who urinated on Fountain in 1993.
MD: How apropos. Was it broken this time?
JT: No, just chipped in a few places. What kind of statement do you think this was on your work?
MD: Well, Fountain doesn’t mean anything, at least not in a retinal sense. Obviously I was hoping it was without sense, but deep down everything ends up by having some. I think it’s fantastic that it’s now broken. Now it’s nearly perfect.
JT: You’re glad that he defaced it?
MD: It’s all part of Fountain’s life. I’ve always been interested in chance. I spent over eight years [1915–1923] making The Large Glass [The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even]. When we [Duchamp’s patron, Walter Arensberg] shipped it from France to New York and it was shattered, I had no feeling. That is contingency, that is part of the design. You can of course see this in Network of Stoppages [1914]; all of the wires were applied at random. Yet, by giving each of these a name, whether it is an inside joke or a simple vulgar pun, they take on a life of their own, completely divorced from my feelings for them.
JT: Then you’re not disturbed that he’s making his own statement about you?
MD: Why would I be?
JT: You have never been one to consciously seek attention, and you’ve gone out of your way to disassociate yourself with any explanation of your work.
MD: That is not true! I talk about all of them quite regularly, but there’s only a handful. This young man, whether with malicious intent or not, was just playing into chance. I do not see a painting or a sculpture as ever being finished. When that lunatic broke the left toe off of Michelangelo’s David in 1991, all he did was add to how perfect it was in people’s thoughts. If anything, David is now even more sanctimonious. Many of the things I have made have vanished or been deserted, but they are still somewhere, and they are still talking to people.
JT: What satisfies you most?
MD: Basically, that I’ve never worked for a living. The artist should be alone…Everyone for himself, as in a shipwreck. But you know, I really devote very few of my thoughts to these things.