The Fountain, Marcel Duchamp On the 9th of April, 1917, a urinal presented itself to the Society of Independent Artists. It was not warmly received - in fact, when the Society came to display all their artwork, they hid this piece behind a partition. And yet, almost a hundred years later, 500 artists would vote this boisterous urinal the most influential artwork of the twentieth century. Most people know this work, for better or for worse, as Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain . Yes, I said the urinal ‘presented itself.’ It did. Marcel Duchamp may have carried it, or had someone carry it, but the urinal entered the Society of Independent Artists entirely of its own volition. It possessed Duchamp; much like the hairworm insect, that uses mind-control chemicals to direct crickets towards light, the urinal’s chemicals compelled Marcel, and through him the world, towards modernist artistic enlightenment. So the urinal would have placed itself on a pedestal in a gallery whether Duchamp put it there