In 1990, musician-artist Brian Eno went to a plumbing store in New York and walked out with a couple of feet of clear plastic tubing. Back in his hotel room, he reinforced the tubing with galvanized wire. After “testing” the setup by using it to urinate in the sink, he went to the Museum of Modern Art, where he had just delivered a lecture on the topic of “High Art/Low Art,” and used his invention to pee in Fountain, the infamous urinal that French artist Marcel Duchamp unveiled to a shocked public in 1917.
Eno is often described as eccentric, and for good reason. Despite his successes in the music industry, he often refers to himself as a “non-musician.” In interviews, he called his work with Roxy Music, the band that garnered him that entrée into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, as an “aberration,” and famously refrains from listening to his favorite album, the Velvet Underground’s self-titled 1969 LP, for fear of tiring of it.
But of all the crazy things Eno has said—and is said to have done—none surpasses his story of allegedly peeing in Duchamp’s iconoclastic masterpiece. Eno had been fascinated with the ready-made, quizzically signed R. Mutt, ever since he laid eyes on it.
“How ridiculous that this particular pisspot gets carried around the world—it costs about thirty or forty thousand dollars to insure it every time it travels,” he once said. “How absolutely stupid, the whole message of this work is, ‘You can make any object and put it in a gallery.’”
Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, (1917). Courtesy of Tate.
His reaction wasn’t dissimilar from that of Duchamp’s contemporaries. The board of the Society of Independent Artists, to which Fountain was anonymously submitted for exhibition, rejected the submission as a joke. While this may sound harsh, the board wasn’t exactly wrong. A leading member of the early 20th-century Dada movement, Duchamp intended for Fountain to question the idea of art and originality, criticizing—as Eno put it—what we deem worthy of placing in museums and galleries.
While the original Fountain is lost, Duchamp signed 17 versions of the urinal over the course of his life, one of which the Greek entrepreneur Dimitri Daskalapoulos bought at Sotheby’s for $1.8 million.
Although no one has been able to verify whether Eno “used” Duchamp’s urinal, he often goes into tremendous detail when telling the story to the press. Having arrived at MoMA, he apparently stepped in front of the work’s display case and waited until he was out of view of a guard. He then took out his clear plastic tube, slipped it through a hole in the display case (“It was a perfect fit”), and began to use the urinal in the way the object was originally intended.
He later referred to this questionable act of vandalism as “an example of the art world once again covering itself by drawing a fence around that thing, saying, ‘This isn’t just any ordinary piss pot, this is THE one, the special one, the one that is worth all this money’… So I thought, somebody should piss in that thing, to sort of bring it back to where it belonged. So I decided it had to be me.”
Speaking to the New York Times in 2022, he added that the stunt was “symbolic in a way because it was a tiny amount of pee.” When asked if he thought he damaged the artwork, Eno said he didn’t think his “urine was that acidic.”
If Eno really did pee on the urinal, it’s hard to imagine that Duchamp—a rebel in his own right—would have disapproved.
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