Slitting Open the Kantian Eye

Abstract

In the second (and final) edition of the short-lived journal The Blind Man, an anonymous author, possibly Beatrice Wood, wrote about ‘The Richard Mutt Case’, accompanied by Alfred Stieglitz’s famous photograph of the urinal, ‘Fountain’, which Richard Mutt had submitted to the Society of Independent Artists, for an exhibition which would supposedly exhibit any work of art on the payment of six dollars. Mutt was, of course, the pseudonym adopted by Marcel Duchamp in order to sign and submit the urinal, and the controversy over Fountain is now regarded as one of the most important events in the history of avant-garde art. The author of the article pointed out that

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.¹

Much has been, and will no doubt continue to be, written about Duchamp’s gesture and its meaning and implications for art. In his essay ‘From Blindness to blindness: Museums, Heterogeneity and the Subject’, the sociologist Kevin Hetherington discusses this gesture in relation to what he calls the ‘Kantian gaze of the connoisseur’. For Hetherington the emergence of this way of looking involves a disavowal of the heterogeneity of the world of things.