The 2020 Fountain
It’s hard to come up with a fountain.
Duchamp took the fountain past water.
It was the race to the last full stop and Duchamp seemed to have won. But could water find scope in a new sentence?
Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’ describes the absent urine, the water going in, rather than coming out. You could only imagine it though. There was room for just the one stream, It’s the idea of water, yellow. Romanesque. Bigger suddenly with the imagined participant standing nearby. You almost have to stand back, avert your eyes.
Not trying to make a fountain helps. Drilling into a steel plate seems innocuous, while installing a shelf in the tool shed. When the drill breaks through into the ground though, and finds the water pipe with twenty acres available, that’s something to which one takes notice.
That water should be now coming out of the ground, someone pissing from the grave, seemingly, it can’t be ignored, dismissed as merely astonishing or funny.
This happened today, immediately after watching a documentary on the Louis 14th’s fountains at Versailles.
The above photo shows a moment in the life of the fountain. A video may have brought more of the liveliness of the fountain, but video is not available in this blog format.