In 1990, musician and artist Brian Eno went to a plumbing store in New York and came out with half a meter of clear plastic tubing. Back in his hotel room, he reinforced the tubing with galvanized wire. After “testing” the construction by using it to urinate into the sink, he went to the Museum of Modern Art, where he had just given a lecture on “High Art/Low Art,” and used his invention to Springthe infamous urinal that the French artist Marcel Duchamp presented to a shocked public in 1917.
Eno is often described as eccentric, and for good reason. Despite his success in the music industry, he often describes himself as a “non-musician.” In interviews, he has referred to his work with Roxy Music, the band that earned him entry into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, as an “aberration” and famously doesn’t listen to his favorite album, the Velvet Underground’s 1969 LP of the same name, for fear of getting too tired of it.
But of all the crazy things Eno said—and is said to have done it—none tops his story of peeing in Duchamp’s iconoclastic masterpiece. Eno was fascinated by the readymade, with the quizzical signature “R. Mutt,” ever since he first saw it.
“How ridiculous that this particular pisspot is carried around the world – it costs about thirty or forty thousand dollars to insure it every time it goes,” he once said. “How absolutely stupid, the whole message of this work is: ‘You can make any object you want and put it in a gallery.'”
Marcel Duchamp, Spring, (1917). Courtesy of Tate.
His reaction was not unlike that of Duchamp’s contemporaries. The board of the Society of Independent Artists, the Spring submitted anonymously to the exhibition, rejected the submission as a joke. This may sound harsh, but the committee was not entirely wrong. Duchamp, a leading member of the Dada movement of the early 20th century, intended for Spring to question and criticize the idea of art and originality—as Eno put it—what we consider worthy of being exhibited in museums and galleries.
While the original Spring has been lost, Duchamp signed 17 versions of the urinal during his lifetime, one of which was bought by the Greek entrepreneur Dimitri Daskalapoulos at Sotheby’s for 1.8 million dollars.
Although no one has been able to verify whether Eno “used” Duchamp’s urinal, he often goes into detail to the press. Once at MoMA, he apparently stepped in front of the work’s display case and waited until he was out of sight of a security guard. Then he took out his clear plastic tube, pushed it through a hole in the display case (“It fit perfectly”), and began using the urinal as it was originally intended.
He later described this questionable act of vandalism as “an example of the art world once again covering itself by putting a fence around the thing and saying, ‘This is not just any ordinary pee pot, this is THE one, the special one, the one that’s worth all this money’… So I thought someone should pee in the thing to put it back where it belongs, so to speak. So I decided it had to be me.”
In conversation with the New York Times In 2022, he added that the stunt was “symbolic in a way because it was a tiny amount of urine.” When asked if he thought he had damaged the artwork, Eno said he did not think his “urine was that acidic.”
If Eno really peed on the urinal, it is hard to imagine that Duchamp—a rebel in his own right—would have disapproved of it.
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