«Something that I'd like to make very clear is that my choice of these readymades was never dictated by some aesthetic delectation. The choice was based on a reaction of visual indifference, coupled at the same time with a total absence of taste, good or bad... in fact, it was in complete anaesthesia.¹»

Since 2008, Saâdane Afif has been collecting photographic reproductions of Duchamp's Fountain urinal issues various books and magazines.

An almost Sisyphean undertaking, given that the work appears to be fundamental to the history of art, the artist has attempted to circumscribe his gesture since the beginning of the project by envisaging closing his series at the thousand and first reference. The project has now come to an end with the upcoming publication of The Fountain Archives (INDEX) published by mfc-michèle didier^2. The artist has collected a number of works in which Marcel Duchamp's famous urinal appears, whether it be it a magazine, an encyclopaedia, an art book or even a brochure.

In this way he has built up a library of references, with the condition of a reproduction of Duchamp's work determining the action of collecting. The references are arranged in chronological order of discovery, without any other classification filter. He then tore out each of the pages reproducing the work, taking care to index it and precisely source it.

After this gesture, the medium is immediately transformed into a mould and joins the library of The Fountain Archives.³ Each torn page was scanned and inventoried. The original, framed pages were dispersed on the art market, integrating various public and private collections. They have been presented in several exhibitions: at the Museo Jumex (Mexico City, 2019), at the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco (Monaco, 2017), at the Centre Pompidou (Paris, 2017), at the West in Huis Huguetan (The Hague, 2017) and at the Taipei Biennial (Taipei, 2016), among others.

Now closed, the project has resulted in the production of a work in the form of an Index, restoring the entirety of the pages taken from the various references in the archive-collection. 

Fountain, Duchamp's work, however, only existed for a very short time. Rejected at the Independent Artists' Salon in 1917, it was photographed the same day in Alfred Stieglitz's studio, then disappeared.

The original work thus became famous through its reproduction made before its disappearance. It was also this photograph that enabled the reproduction of the various series of replicas made in 1950, 1953, 1963 and 1964 under the supervision of Marcel Duchamp.

«One of the most beautiful and perverse twists in history is that, although Duchamp's fountain exists in many replicas, a surviving example of the original type of urinal has proved impossible to locate. If it should exist, it is now an exquisitely rare item.⁴»

Saâdane Afif began this project by calling it a hobby, initially taking the fountain as a simple «motif», but the project nevertheless takes on a particular dimension in the very nature of the work described as «the most controversial of the twentieth century».⁵ 

Fountain is probably, along with da Vinci's Mona Lisa or Warhol's Marilyn, one of the most reproduced and commented works, inscribed in the collective unconscious as a veritable artefact, a collective mental construction, an icon of modernity, a narrative fantasy.

The flow of images generated by the very existence of this «mythical» work - relating facts or mentioning characters with a historical reality - is here again corrupted by Saâdane Afif's gesture, inserting himself, through this act of appropriation, into the filiation of Duchamp, Mutt, Stieglitz or even Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven...

The process of re-appropriating images and reiterating the ready-made gesture adds a new historical dissonance, in a form of feedback, where Afif's works featuring the fountain will themselves end up in The Fountain Archives under the name of «Augmented».

Michel Gauthier wrote in Saturnes et les remakes⁶ that Afif's work raises the question of the mediation of the work, but also of its transformation and status.

Saâdane Afif's gesture is twofold, replaying at the same time the issues of the original work and its aura, by its multiplication in a number tending towards the infinite, while appropriating it in the manner of a cover or a remake.

The artist's removal of the page from a volume often printed in several thousand copies is singular, elevating it to the status of a unique work of art. The gesture of tearing out the pages could bring him closer to a «vandal» amputating the volumes of their polemical, almost iconoclastic content, close to a censorious gesture, but the re-circulation of the images in the Index could just as well place him on the side of a peddler, circulating proscribed, political or pornographic images. 

The Fountain Archives (INDEX) restores the entirety of this collection carried out over more than 10 years. 1524 pages reproduce at a scale of 1:1 the pages torn from works published between 1917 and 2020 and belonging to all types of disciplinary fields.

Although the project's protocol is irremediably fragmentary and piecemeal, The Fountain Archives (INDEX) restores the entire project. A veritable «hollow archive», the INDEX is presented as the keystone, the key to reading The Fountain Archives, by bringing together in a final work the missing pages of all the volumes in the collection. 

1. Marcel Duchamp in 1961, answering a question about the choice of the Readymade, at the symposium «Art of Assemblage» at MoMA, New York, 19 October 1961. Published in Art and Artists, (July 1966) # 47.

2. The Fountain Archives (INDEX). Three volumes, 47.5 x 34 cm, 1524 pages Edition of 24 numbered and signed copies and 2 artist's proofs. Produced and published by mfc-michèle didier in 2021.

3. Work presented from January 30 tu April 30, 2017 at the Centre Pompidou at the occasion of the centenary of the Fountain by Duchamp.

4. Kirk Varnedoe, Adam Gopnik. High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture, 1990, catalog, pp. 276-277.

5. Didier Ottinger, Françoise Le Penven, Marcel Duchamp dans les collections du Musée national d'art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, 2001, pp. 62-65.

6. Michel Gauthier, Saâdane Afif - Saturne et les remakes, Edition M19 Paris, 2010.