Brian Eno is MORE DARK THAN SHARK

INTERVIEWS, REVIEWS & RELATED ARTICLES

Dangerous Minds OCTOBER 17, 2025 - by Will Howard

UTILITARIAN ART: DID BRIAN ENO REALLY PISS IN MARCEL DUCHAMP'S URINAL?

I wonder if Marcel Duchamp had any idea what a commotion he was going to start?

I mean, he knew that Fountain was going to annoy people. That was arguably the intention of the whole piece. To drag a literal urinal into the inaugural exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists, in the middle of the Grand Central Palace in New York City, slap his autograph on it, date it and then announce to the world that yes, it's art. Because he says so. You don't do a thing like that without knowing that you are going to spark some discourse with it.

However, only in his wildest fantasies must Marcel Duchamp have ever imagined that, with that fateful piss-pot, he would start a conversation about what constitutes art that would still be raging a century afterwards. Among those fantasies was probably another outcome of exhibiting a urinal as a piece of art. One quite a bit more imaginable than it still being argued about in the twenty-first century. We may think that acts of radical performance art are a modern-day phenomenon, but that's far from the case.

In a way, Fountain is living proof of that. This was a dangerous, radical work of conceptual art that was being exhibited when there were still more than a few veterans of the American Civil War running around. People were creating works of art like that at the time and then reacting to them in kind. It can't have been a complete shock to Duchamp that eventually, someone would use that urinal in its intended manner.

WHO HAS URINATED ON 'FOUNTAIN' BY MARCEL DUCHAMP?

Yes, more than a few people have taken it upon themselves to piss on this undeniable cornerstone of modern art, and not only for the reasons that one would normally piss on a work of art. Or on a urinal, for that matter. Kendall Greers did it first in 1993. Cai Yuan and Jian Jun Xi, performance artists who form a duo known as Mad For Real, tried in 2000, when the work was exhibited in London's Tate Modern, but were defeated by the Perspex case in which the work was displayed. Talk about messy.

However, the most famous person to take this very specific umbrage with Duchamp's masterpiece was the legendary Brian Eno. In 1993, the day after giving a lecture at the Museum Of Modern Art in New York City about, hilariously, the topic of high art versus low art, he went back after purchasing a length of clear plastic tubing. Fountain was being exhibited there and, making use of said tubing, he deposited a small amount of his urine onto said piece of art.

The basic reasoning behind this act was the same as everyone else who'd done the same. It was arrogant of Duchamp to declare that this urinal was a piece of art when it was no different to any other urinal in the world, and thus needed to be treated as such. For all this bitching and moaning about arrogance, I think it's important to point out that at no point did these fuckwits consider that someone far less rich than them would have to clear up their piss for them.

I'm sure they thought that was OK, though. After all, it was an artistic statement.