7. “ Whether Mr. Mutt made the fountain with his own hands or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view – created a new thought for that object .”
When you look at this piece, consisting of three images side by side, what is your mind doing? You are looking back and forth between the 3 images, searching for similarities and connections. You are wondering, what do these three images have in common? What is the MEANING behind this pairing? Does it have to do with the latest celebrity obsession frenzy around Tiger Woods’ personal life? How is his personal life like an orange or money? Perhaps this grouping says that the personal life of celebrities is just an object of human consumption…like food and money. Right? Maybe, but honestly I just threw three random images together, no concept involved at all, to show you the POWER of context.
There is extreme power in the arrangement of images, and postmodern art uses recontextualization as a tool all the time to construct new meanings.
Here we have an image of fireworks. Depending on your cultural background, this image may have different associations for you. However, most Americans would see this image and think of celebration and national pride. It is an explosion that is an exciting spectacle for us.
However, when I pair that same image with this photograph of the American dropped nuclear bomb on Hiroshima, the context changes drastically. Visually, they go together. They are even both explosions, which ties them together. Having this in common makes them visually coherent, as well as making sense on a surface level. However, placing the fireworks image next to Hiroshima causes us to consider what the celebration is of. Your personal political beliefs will determine how you interpret this pairing, but there is no doubt that the changed context raises questioning and contemplation, a key quality in conceptual, postmodern art.
Recontextualization can refer to an image’s context in relation to images around it, or an object’s context in relation to its setting. Looking at the roots of this postmodernist idea of recontextualization, we can go all the way back to 1917, when Marcel Duchamp submitted his artwork called “Fountain.” The piece is an already existing object, in this case a urinal, to which the only addition made was writing the name R. Mutt 1917 (to hide his identity) on the bottom. The art show to which Duchamp submitted the piece said that all artworks would be accepted, but this one was denied and not shown.
The anonymous editorial, entitled "The Richard Mutt Case,“ made a claim that would prove to be important concerning certain works of art that would come after it: Whether Mr Mutt made the fountain with his own hands or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view – created a new thought for that object.
Duchamp described his intent with the piece was to shift the focus of art from physical craft to intellectual interpretation, a statement which embodies the essence of postmodern art, which wouldn’t come to full realization in the American art scene until around 60 years later. We can see here just how shockingly ahead of his time Duchamp was.
