An Original Revolutionary Faucet: “Mirrorical Return”?

Author: Bert Jansen

This etching shows the same image as the imitation leather binding in the publication Marcel Duchamp, Ready-Mades Etc. (1913-1964). The only difference is that an ‘i’ and an ‘o’ have been reversed (miriorique) in renvoi miroirique (mirrorical return) and that some letters have been printed in red. These red letters, which were added by using a separate etching plate, together form the words ‘urinoir’ and ‘urine’.

According to Duchamp’s gallerist, Arturo Schwarz, the etching referred to a shop window the artist had fitted out in 1945 at André Breton’s invitation for the presentation of his book Arcane 17 in Brentano’s bookshop on Fifth Avenue in New York.^[1] Duchamp put a headless mannequin in an apron in the shop window. In her hands she had an open book and a tap stuck out from her leg. The title was Lazy Hardware, possibly a play on words of ‘lady hardware’ given that the shop window mannequin represented a woman. The window display was on view for a mere twenty minutes because of a protest by the League of Women, which found the figure offensive. Duchamp then fitted out a similar shop window at the Gotham Book Mart on West 47th Street which – despite fierce protests – remained in place for a week.

Lazy Hardware should be understood in the light of a sentence on one of the revolving discs in Duchamp’s film Anémic Cinéma made in 1926: ‘Among our lazy domestic articles we recommend the faucet that stops dripping when nobody is listening to it’. The last part of this sentence also appears on the etching. In conjunction with the image of a urinal the inscription takes on an indecent meaning, reminiscent of the exhibition staged in 1917 by the Society of Independent Artists in New York, where Duchamp tried in vain to exhibit the readymade of a urinal under the title Fountain. In an interview in 1964 Duchamp remarked that he had always opposed good taste and that was why he had chosen a urinal.^[2] But he also wanted to demonstrate that as an artist you could make people accept anything and that art was a dream world, a mirage of an oasis like those that appear in the desert when you are almost dying of thirst. But in art you don’t die of thirst, he would continue, there the mirage endures.