When I am empty please dispose of me properly

In 1917 Marcel Duchamp, under the pseudonym of R. Mutt, submitted a signed and dated urinal entitled Fountain to an exhibition organized by the Society of Independent Artist. The name Mutt is a play on the name of the company, J.L. Mott Iron Works, from where he bought the urinal and was additionally meant to hide his own identity since he was also a board member of the Society. They refused to show the piece despite their policy to exhibit all work.

The conflict that the trickster Duchamp’s submission provoked changed a simple urinal into the sculpture Fountain. When Alfred Stieglitz photographed it in a sincere attempt to salvage respectability–so that we, too, could contemplate this urinal–he actually, as Thierry de Duve has suggested, served to infect the history of art with this aesthetic conflict.

What does a urinal have in common with the Kizaemon Ido Chawan, the embodiment of the mono no aware or the more commonly discussed wabi-sabi aesthetic? Quite a lot to be frank even if the formal properties and aesthetic ideals of the two pieces are rather different. With it we have the prototypical Duchampian found object in the sixteenth century. And even this was not the first instance of the readymade. Similar events have happened throughout history. The Mexica undertook excavations in Teotihuacan to find objects to emulate in their own art and on occasions re-inter them in Temple Mayor caches. The logic and purpose of the readymade or found object has been nearly the same throughout the history of art. Essentially, an object becomes art through a kind of conceptual alchemy. A change of context or the act of appreciation itself often makes an object “art.” Above all this is what the creative collector does; she or he assembles objects that say more about her- or himself than about the objects collected.

The chanoyu, tea ceremony, created the conceptual frame through which the Kizaemon Ido Chawan could come to be a Japanese national treasure. Examining the aesthetics of the Tea Ceremony might lead us back to Yanagi’s beauty of the, “plain and unagitated, the uncalculated, the harmless, the straightforward, the natural, the innocent, the humble, the modest…,” but this would be at risk of missing the entire context of what established these features as beautiful. The tea ceremony turns this simple bowl, and other utilitarian objects, into points of meditation that materialize entire philosophies into a single object and experiential moment. The aesthetic reassignment of such objects in turn creates a value for the form separate from the original social context that initially selected that form. The object once selected and anointed comes to inform an entire sequence of objects. There is an attempt to consciously reproduce the form that the prime object, to use George Kubler’s term, embodies. Self-consciousness is born at such moments. The dictates of the tea ceremony might have lead to the selection of the Kizaemon Ido Chawan, but the form of this chawan became a model to be emulated and thus the bowl became a marked form within the history of Japanese art–how could it not become so under such pressure?

So if we return to the question of folk art or readymade and aesthetic value how can we establish value when things are always in flux? How does one select from amongst the innumerable objects of this world? And what makes one person’s selection a readymade or found art and another’s merely kitsch? Why is the disposable Whataburger cup from which the title image of this page comes also not art? Could it be?