Duchamp the Talking Urinal
Once the bar was fitted out and a coolroom added in the loamy old space between the side wall of the house and the Dray Road hedge, it was time for Veronica and me to instigate our first creative flourish: Duchamp the Talking Urinal.
All those years ago when we were studying in Melbourne, Marcel Duchamp and the rest of the Dada gang had represented a creative spark that could defy the fads and fashions and never fade. Their attitude to making art had been so free and radical, so anti-everything and yet at the same time so inspired and full of life, that it remained fresh nearly a hundred years later. Despite their signature air of abundance and colour their great trick was actually one of renunciation and as such had something in common with the sages and hermits of old. By renouncing not only the world of capitalism but also the world of ‘Art’, the Dadaists had refreshed all the channels by which creative inspiration could come to them. They had made their spirits receptive again by casting all outmoded categories to the wind. In the end, rather than dusting off the furniture in the galleries and parlours of Europe they actually set fire to it and kept themselves warm by the blaze.
Relishing our time in the college studios as much as we did, like a lot of art students Veronica and I shared a particular dread of the written component of our course. Apart from anything else it seemed like such a waste of time to be writing cold sentences when we could be getting down to tin tacks with our own tactile inspirations in the studio itself.
So one day, near the end of our second year, when a deadline was looming for an essay concerning twentieth-century art movements, we had the brainwave to combine the writing of a piece on Dada with the creation of an actual readymade work of art. On an old chest of drawers we found abandoned in the back lane behind a Collingwood terrace house, we applied a thick layer of cadmium-red paint and then proceeded to write a joint essay all over it, about the different ways Dada had evolved in the various cities of Europe, and New York, during the years of the First World War and immediately afterwards. We covered the top, back, sides, and even the underneath of this chest of drawers with our colourful script, inserting tiny portraits of some of our favourite Dada artists in among the text, as well as miniature renditions of some of the most famous Dada readymades, including the most notorious of them all, Duchamp’s Fountain, which famously consisted of a toilet bowl turned on its end, exhibited in the 1917 Society of Independent Artists show in New York under the name R. Mutt.
In the centre of each of the five drawers of the chest, between the simple art-deco steel handles, we constructed the name of five different Dada cities of significance from a mixture of rusty garden-rake teeth, old paint-brush handles, broken-up scissors, bird feathers and pipe cleaners. The cities we selected were Zurich, Hanover, Cologne, New York and Paris.
When you opened the drawers (being extra careful not to cut your hands on the dangerous names of the Dada cities), you would find a vivid riot of information about the exponents in each city, written and drawn onto the original flypaper inside.
The top drawer was of course the Zurich drawer, the birthplace of Dada, and its contents focused on Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, Hans Arp and Tristan Tzara, and the amazing groundbreaking performances that took place in the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916. The Hanover drawer was next, consisting largely of a loving and appropriately nonsensical ode to the greatest collage artist who ever lived, Kurt Schwitters. The Cologne drawer underneath that explored the connections between Dada and Surrealism through the junk-work of artists such as Max Ernst and Johannes Baargeld. The New York drawer was all about Duchamp’s Fountainand the paintings of that relentless Italian, Francis Picabia, while the Paris drawer, which was at the bottom of the chest, told the obscure and extraordinary story of my personal favourite of the Dada artists, Arthur Cravan.
As much as I’d been enthralled by the goings on at the Cabaret Voltaire, the po-faced ironies of Duchamp and the joyous assemblages of Schwitters, the story of Arthur Cravan’s freakish life had a physical reality to it that connected with me beyond the world of ideas and art. Cravan was not only a major Dada artist but amazingly he was also the heavyweight boxing champion of France and had actually fought against the great American Jack Johnson! Added to that he was Oscar Wilde’s nephew. Cravan’s crowning glory, however, was his death, which in all probability was by his own hand given that he sailed off the Mexican coast in a tiny boat, into waters known to be thoroughly shark infested, and was never seen again.
As a country boy studying in the city, I related to the contrast between Cravan’s artistic creativity and his intensely physical life. The boxing, the sailing, even just the enormous size of the man seemed to set him apart as someone from outside the square. He was raw, unavoidably physical, and unlike his famous uncle was only ever urbane when he chose to be. I remember spending hours lovingly attending to the drawer in his honour, writing out long enthusiastic quotes from his magazine Maintenant, which ran off the flypaper and up the sides of the bottom drawer, interspersed with small portraits of the bare-chested Cravan shaping up to the great Jack Johnson in his baggy boxing shorts and sailing off into the Pacific Ocean with sharks snapping at his boat’s timbers. I spent hours making a large heading in Lissitzky-style block type, announcing that the great Arthur Cravan was in fact still alive and living in Australia. Rumours had abounded in Dada circles ever since he disappeared that he was still alive and kicking, and living under pseudonyms in New York or Berlin. Some had even gone so far as to claim that his enigmatic life continued even now, and was some miraculously defiant triumph of art over life, the ultimate rule-breaker, the greatest living Dada readymade of them all.
As late as 1987, a full seventy years after the Dada freedom virus was first unleashed in Zurich, the chest of drawers Veronica and I made caused quite a ruckus in the supposedly progressive art school on St Kilda Road in Melbourne. Of course all our friends thought our ‘readymade essay’ was inspired, but our immediate supervisor made the strange decision to refrain from marking it, thereby disqualifying us from that aspect of the course and jeopardising our results overall. In her typical style Veronica complained loudly about this and eventually our teacher was overruled by none other than the director of the college. We were given top marks for our ‘thorough and felt understanding of the spirit of the Dada movement’. I’ll never forget those words.
Not surprisingly this tiny scandal, and our ultimate victory, put a hot blast of wind in our sails, and for a time we felt self-initiated as members of the international Dada clan. We believed that we’d experienced our very own bonafide Dada moment, not just as voyeurs or mere students but as actual exponents, and looking back, in a small way, I suppose we had.
But now, after all those years, we were about to experience another Dada moment, and this time on a larger scale, outside the protection of an art institution, and supposedly as mature, fully grown adults. We were not in Paris or New York, or in Zurich, Hanover or Cologne, or even Sydney or Melbourne, but down south in the salty sticks. Understandably we were both incredibly excited and a little nervous about what was ahead.
Our idea for ‘Duchamp’ was that the urinal would talk when the piss hit the tin. And the words it would say would let it be known that, among other things, this was a hotel that did not suffer fools. In time out between drinks, between ravings and games, between drowning sorrows or arguments, the male patrons of The Grand Hotel would stand side by side to relieve their bladders to a soundtrack of the follies of the human world around them. There would be a talking-urinal audio archive, which anyone could contribute to, the only proviso being that the contribution had to in some way embody the effervescence of the Dada spirit. I’d already assembled a few samples to give everyone the idea and get the ball rolling, and on the day that Veronica’s friend Seb from Bells & Whistles came to install the sensors and wire the room, I used one of my favourite items, ‘The Irridex’, for the demonstration.
‘The Irridex’ was a verbatim extract from the two-inchthick annual Tourism Management Manual, and I’d had Kooka read it aloud into his old Grundig recorder. In a chapter of the manual dedicated to ‘local disenchantment with tourism operations’ and ‘backstage lifestyles’, a five-stage graph called ‘The Irridex’ is shown, to illustrate the process by which aspiring tourism operators could overcome local obstacles. It was explained in the manual that the word ‘Irridex’ was simply shorthand for ‘Index of Local Irritation By Tourism’.
In his newsreely reading voice, Kooka had recited ‘The Irridex’ into the Grundig, which Seb from Bells & Whistles then transferred onto a digital loop that was hooked up to the sensors behind the urinal surface and could conceivably run for days on end. As Seb knelt by his equipment and gave the thumbs up, myself and Gene pulled out our willies and began to piss.
Voila!There it was:
I’ve got to admit that right there and then you could’ve read the phone book onto the loop and it would’ve been funny, just from the crazy buzz of getting Duchamp to work. Big Gene’s eyes were popping as he pissed, and he kept shaking his head in wonder. Eventually, when we zipped up, Seb himself couldn’t resist having a go just so we could hear it again. He kept nodding and smiling as his bright-yellow stream re-triggered ‘The Irridex’. As he stepped down, he said he was quite happy with the technical quality but thought the volume of the loop could be raised. He pointed out that, given it was a unisex toilet, the loop had to be loud enough for the women to hear it clearly from the cubicles. ‘Otherwise,’ he said, with an effeminate flourish, ‘all that eloquence will just be wasted on the men.’
That night, when the usual visitors came round to continue sampling the beers, Duchamp the Talking Urinal was a big hit. Everyone kept heading off through the sunroom to try it again, and at one stage Oscar, Nan, Veronica, Darren, Ash and his wife, Vita, were all in there drinking in the toilet, while Gene and I were alone with Frankie in the new bar, giggling and dipping our fingers into the peanuts.