There is something particularly funereal in looking, as I am now, at Marcel Duchamp’s urinal, or rather – since the original is lost – a 1964 replica placed reverently under a box of museum glass. This major landmark of 20^th-century art, an icon of the avant-garde, the ‘anti-art’ movement, today lies like a dead pope whose death mask hints, not unhappily, at the self-knowledge that his time and now his religion might just be up. If, like Brian Eno or South African artist Kendell Geers, you were to be caught actually urinating into Duchamp’s Fountain, there are an unusually large number of gallery ushers (heavies) who would make you feel that your ‘chance’ response to the artwork was definitely not the right one. And anyway, it’s already been done.

It is spring 2013, and I am at the Barbican. The catalogue tells me that I am ‘exploring one of the most important chapters in the history of contemporary art. The Bride and the Bachelors: Duchamp with Cage, Cunningham, Rauschenberg and Johns focuses on Marcel Duchamp’s American legacy, tracing his relationship to four great modern masters – composer, John Cage, choreographer, Merce Cunningham, and visual artists Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.’ I am a theatre-maker and have become increasingly interested in the history of visual art’s relationship to performance. I am more than usually excited to have winged my way into town for an afternoon of culture-vulturing.

More than any other piece of art I’ve seen, Duchamp’s Fountain is a bulky piece of cultural history. There it is. He chose it. He authored it ‘R. Mutt’ and he made it art. He saw its humour and beauty and irreverence. It is heralded as enabling minimalism, conceptualism, performance art and just about every other significant artistic development of the past half-century. I get ready to say hello and pay my dues. Yet here it sits as musty and retro as an aardvark’s head amongst the taxidermied spoils of the Natural History Museum, while all around the glass-boxed mausoleum the rest of the exhibition tries desperately hard to be ‘alive’. Standing there with catalogue in hand, being scored around the space by a constant soundtrack of Cage and Philippe Parreno, all I want is for Duchamp’s drag persona, Rrose Sélavy, to appear behind a door and ask to share a cigarette with me – but she’s gone and so is he.

This feeling of glum isolation continues as I tramp my way around the rest of the exhibition. I have the sensation I sometimes feel in galleries ­– a sort of storing up of action, like a child at the dinner table waiting to be told they can get down. In this instance it is more like being at a wake for a ‘hilarious’ uncle you never met. How funny can second-hand tales ever actually be, even if remaining relatives (curators/dancers/well-wishers) are here acting them out with such rigour? In the best instance you come away feeling inspired, wishing you’d known Uncle Noddy better; in the worst you feel inspired, yes, but also a little embarrassed on his behalf that his escapades are being so loudly retold. The Langston Hughes poem is in my head: ‘Life is for the living. / Death is for the dead. / Let life be like music. / And death a note unsaid.’

In a BBC interview in 1968, Duchamp was asked by a Twiggy look-alike to unpick his relationship with art: you dislike commodification and yet your work is commodified; you don’t believe in the singularisation of art, as separate from the rest of society, and yet you are a professional artist who exhibits in galleries. Duchamp in no way attempted to squirm out of her suggested contradictions. He named what he disliked while also accepting his fated position within it. Repetition for Duchamp was the death of art, as it could too easily translate into commodity. If something is too easily repeated it can be too greedily consumed ­– hung on walls and gawped at. Out of his dislike of repetition came the inclusion in his work of concepts that can not be owned: ideas, mathematics, chance. Duchamp argued that the invisible processes at work in the act of making therefore become more important than the piece of work itself. Ideas are more important than what you see: what your retina can possess. When defending his dislike of art, Duchamp points out that etymologically the word art means to do, not even to make but to do. Art is action and activity.

I think about the fact that performers sculpt their work from the stuff of human life ­– the body and all that it contains. It is directly connected to the artist and can therefore not be removed nor sold as a separate entity. It is a pure act of ‘doing’. Performance comes alive in the moment of its action, and implicit in any performance is the mutual consent between audience and performer that it only fully exists in that relationship: Laurence Olivier’s stage performances are gone now that the man is gone.  Performance exists within life and so ascribes to the absolutes of that mortal coil­ – it is part of time’s detritus. There is an existential thrill that co-exists between a performer and the audience. Duchamp, famous for his enjoyment of alternative personas, consistently experimenting with variants in clothing, haircut or sex, seems to me to follow the same set of rules. The gallery is surely not the place for him. I go one more time to look at Fountain and try to make up my mind. It is  remarkable in its inertness, stubbornly immobile, heavy and corpse-like. Therefore how extraordinary, that as I make my way out of the gallery and into the street, this heavy lump of porcelain does begin ever so slowly to sway. Buoyed by its conceptual provocations the white lump steps out a mocking dance just as vital and alive as the heaving veins of the dancers who I’d previously watched strain in the adjacent room. That smug white block, appropriated from a public toilet, is going to outlive us all. Ah Rrose Sélavy, you clever little devil you.