Marcel Duchamp was the French Dada artist who invented conceptual art. He rejected art which pleased the eye in favour of art which stimulated the mind. In 1914 he moved to New York where he spent nights chatting about readymade art with Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, a German-born avant-garde artist and poet who emigrated to the USA in 1910 and whose studios were in the same building in New York.
 
Before leaving for the USA Duchamp created his first readymade, a galvanized steel bottle drying rack from a hardware shop which he had intended to submit to a gallery entitled 'Bottle Rack'. Apparently this appealed to his humour and bachelor status. Its empty phallic spikes represented his bachelor status, and were available for wet bottles to be hung on it. It never reached a gallery and the original Bottle Rack was thrown away by his sister in 1914, although Duchamps eventually created replicas afterwards.
 
In 1917 Duchamp submitted the now infamous porcelain urinal 'Fountain' where it was rejected by the Society of Independent Artists for its exhibition in New York. A new book by Calvin Tomkins and published by MoMA suggests as fact that Duchamp stole his seminal piece from the Baroness and robbed it of its original Feminist meaning, instead imbuing it as a pun on art generally.
 
A review in the Scottish Review of Books by Julian Spalding mentions a letter from Duchamp to his sister:On April 11, 1917, just two days after the directors of the Society of Independent Artists had rejected a urinal as a submission for their exhibition, Duchamp wrote to his sister telling her that, 'One of my female friends under a masculine pseudonym, Richard Mutt, sent in a porcelain urinal as a sculpture' … The board of the Society of Independents … had decided that they would hang every work of art submitted. Duchamp wasn't present when the urinal, a late entry, was considered. Arensberg argued that it was art because an artist had chosen it. Mere choice, he claimed, could be transposed to an object and turn it into a work of art. The board, however, voted to reject the item on the grounds that it wasn't art. Arensberg, and then Duchamp, resigned in protest. The submission and rejection of Duchamp's urinal is now regarded as one of the key, early turning points in the history of modern art, on a par with the revolutions of Fauvism and Cubism, De Stijl and Der Blaue Reiter. Fountain is always cited as the source of Conceptualism, the modern art movement that America, rather than Europe, gave the world. In Conceptual Art the idea behind the work is more important than its visual appearance or any aesthetic considerations.
 
The urinal which the Baroness sent to the all-male Society of Independent Artists was part of a pair of readymade sculptures, the other entitled 'God' was an S bend waste trap.
 
Spalding writes America's declaration of war on Elsa's beloved Germany on Good Friday 6th April 1917 could have been the trigger that made the spontaneous Elsa submit the urinal, as a late entry, to the Independents exhibition in New York. It would normally have taken three hours to send by train from Philadelphia, where she was living at that time, but the Easter weekend meant that the urinal didn't arrive at the Independents until Monday, 12 days after submissions had closed.
 
Elsa didn't title the urinal but signed it R. Mutt in a script close to the one she sometimes used for her poems, but which is unrelated to Duchamp's handwriting. R. Mutt, Gammel explains, is a pun on Urmutter, the German Earth Mother whom Elsa's symbolist friends had adulated in Munich in 1900. R. Mutt could also have been a pun on armut, meaning poverty, Elsa's own material poverty and the poverty of American culture, which she frequently railed against. And Elsa's favourite expletive was shitmutt. Everything fitted. The urinal was Elsa's declaration of war against war, praise for her motherland, and her challenge to the privileged, aloof, sexually ambivalent Duchamp.
 
Duchamp's urinals need to be relabeled Elsa's. This could have a profound impact on the future of art. Duchamp's pinched urinal is nasty, empty and spiteful. His belated explanation of 'R. Mutt' as a reference to the J.L. Mott Iron Works (where no-one could have bought this particular urinal) and to the popular newspaper comic strip Mutt and Jeff is a meaningless obfuscation. Elsa's original urinal is fulsome, loving and furious. Its form is disquietingly beautiful and its punning signature painfully profound.
 
God looks like another readymade, but strangely all the descriptions of God state that it is cast iron, including the description by the Philadelphia museum of art which states it is a 'cast iron plumbing trap'. It looks as if the wiped lead joint joins the trap to a lead pipe, and there could be more than one piece of brass or copper. If the whole of it is indeed cast iron, then it must have been modelled and cast from a mixed metal original, and so it cannot be a readymade.
 
Spalding thinks that God could be a portrait of Duchamp:God in one of Elsa's poems is described as being 'densely slow - He has eternity backing him'. If god is everywhere, as many believers maintain, he has to be in the most despised corners - in a U-bend to catch blocking waste that could have once been plumbed into a urinal.
 
Elsa's sculpture God, however, could also be a portrait of Duchamp. She wrote 'm'ars [Duchamp] came to this country - protected - by fame - to use his plumbing features - mechanical comforts - He merely amused himself. But I am m'ars tuetonic... I have not yet attained his heights. I have to fight.' If God is Duchamp, a bent pipe, then the urinal could be a self-portrait. Laid on its back, it takes the form of a womb cradled in a pelvic girdle that could have received Duchamp's sperm.
 
Incidentally, Grayson Perry is not the only famous artist to habitually dress as a woman - Marcel Duchamp did too.
 
Duchamp - A Biography by Calvin Tompkins. New and Revised Edition. MoMA 2014. 539 pp. £16.95
 
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Next Wednesday 19 November 2014 is World Toilet Day whose theme is Equality and Dignity. Two and a half billion people do not have access to proper sanitation, including toilets or latrines, with dramatic consequences on human health, dignity and security, the environment, and social and economic development.