ABSTRACT
In the twentieth century, objects found a place in modern art. Marcel Duchamp (1887—1968) transformed modern art by choosing manufactured objects from the everyday world, which he altered only slightly and exhibited as art: the idea was to liberate art from representation, from media and convention, and insist upon the conceptual plane of the artistic gesture, not on reproduction of the world. The most infamous 'ready-made'(the term that was coined after 1914 to define his gesture) was a commercial urinal, signed R Mutt and titled Fountain (1917), in which the recipient of male urination was inverted so as to reveal its unexpectedly vulval and hence feminine genital form, which sported, none the less, hermaphroditically, a prominent phallic extension. Commenting playfully on ambiguities of sexual morphologies while also acknowledging the erotics of manufactured commodities, Duchamp participated with his contemporaries in allowing objects from the world to take their place in art and not merely to become art, dumbly, but to become eloquent in themselves by being removed from daily use. Between breaching the borderline between art and commodity production, and between material things and their potentially psychic significance, the object is now ensconced as a multidimensional resource in contemporary, post-conceptual and post-medium forms of art such as performance and notably installation.
