DUCHAMP, THE SOURCE IS NOT YOURS

"One of my women friends under a male pseudonym, R. Mutt, has sent [to the exhibition] a porcelain urinal as if it were a sculpture. It is not indecent at all. There was no reason to reject it. But the jury has decided not to exhibit such a thing. I have submitted my resignation and I am sure it will be discussed in New York. "

In the 1980s some American historians found a letter from Marcel Duchamp with this handwritten text. The justification of patriarchy for not assuming that the author was a woman is one of the worst: They have said it was a joke. The fact is that the author of the source is a woman and this newspaper is here to give voice to these women, living or dead.

Why is the authorship of a work that looks like a joke so important? Because possibly since the Greeks there has not been a more influential work in art in the history of art. Formally it is an uninteresting object. Nobody is interested in a low-key urinal, but the consequences of its provocation are radical .: From the source, no one has the right to say that it is art and that it is not art, except the author. And nobody has the right to say that art works for one thing or another. It is a red line in time that once crossed nor had a turn back and that opened the door to the freedom of absolute creation.

From the beginning of 1917 the artists of the Arensberg circle founded the Society of Independent Artists, imitating the Salon des Indépendants with the intention of organizing exhibitions without a prize or jury. Duchamp was part of the selection committee and it was decided that the works would be exhibited in alphabetical order according to the author's last name. Duchamp did not present any work with his name, but he did so under the pseudonym R. MUTT.

The work in question was a urinal that Duchamp had bought with Arensberg ( official version). He knocked it down and painted the name R. MUTT on it. R. Mutt referred to Mott and the comic strip Mutt and Jeff on the one hand, and on the other, R. referred to Richard, "purse" in French slang.22 He sent it to the organization with the two dollars of registration and the title: Source. The object caused quite a stir among some organizers, who considered it to be a joke or indecency. A vote was held to determine whether the urinal should be admitted to the exhibition, which its defenders lost. Duchamp and Arensberg resigned from the board. The urinal was exhibited in gallery 291 where Stieglitz photographed it. After voting for its withdrawal, Arensberg picked it up and walked with it in hand through the entire exhibition. This is the last time the original object was seen.

In the following years, Duchampo bought several urinals in the same place, which were validated by Duchamp as original and are distributed by various museums.

But whose idea was it? Who created the source so that Duchamp could appear as the created one? A woman. A woman would not be able to generate this controversy because she was simply ignored. The actual author, who was a friend, very close friend of Duchamp was Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, The Queen of Daddaism. This work was part of a set of objects and it is known from other documents that she made it and sent it to Duchamp. This text serves to recognize her merit and to remember the place where women have been kept for so many centuries and in the one that we cannot accept to be again.