Poor Raoul [Haussman]… he needed constant encouragement to carry out his ideas and achieve anything at all lasting. If I hadn’t devoted so much of my time to looking after him I might have achieved more myself.
– Hannah Höch, the only female member of the Berlin Dadaists
fountain is a reimagining of Marcel Duchamp’s 1917 Fountain in light of accounts that Duchamp did not actually create Fountain, but submitted it on behalf of a female friend (possibly Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven or Louise Norton). This version features a GoGirl™ female urination device, which allows a woman to urinate standing up, much as a man does at a urinal. It also features as a backdrop Series 1, No. 8 by Georgia O’Keefe, a female contemporary of Mardsen Hartley, whose extremely masculine 1913 painting The Warriors provided the backdrop for Fountain when it was originally photographed by Alfred Stieglitz. Like Fountain, fountain recontextualizes an industrially-produced, gendered urination device that seems not to belong the in gallery. Unlike Fountain, this piece places the device into a context that recognizes the underplayed role of gender, even within a movement as liberatory as Dada.
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