Alreadymade

“The ideal of truth is the deepest fiction.”
(F. Nietzsche)

Visser doesn’t merely point to the alternative theory — she excavates it, blurs its contours, lets it emerge among half-truths, archival silences, and speculation. The film plays with what we know, what we think we know, and what we may never fully know.

One of its strengths lies in Visser’s ability to give body and voice to Elsa — an artist partly erased from official history — using what remains: photographs, scant archival fragments, digital reconstructions. Yet she avoids sanctifying her. Visser’s Elsa is no vindictive saint, but a controversial, complex, fascinating, and contradictory figure.

The film doesn’t merely tell a story; it questions what it means to attribute, to sign, to authenticate. What value does an original hold if the original perhaps no longer exists? And how much does the storyteller’s voice shape what the audience believes? Visser reveals this with transparency: every zoom, every aesthetic choice, every font becomes a decision that alters our perception of “truth.”

The inclusion of modern elements — digital animations, avatars, metahumans, reconstructions — doesn’t come across as a gimmick, but as a necessity: to fill voids, stage absence, and suggest possibilities. This makes Alreadymade more than an academic essay; it becomes an art-historical thriller, tinged with subtle irony.

The director never mocks, yet she wears a sly smile toward the notion that the myth of art might rest on a yearning for clarity — even when the facts remain cloudy. The viewer is drawn into the suspense: “What if everything I believed was wrong?” Not with melodrama, but with the quiet astonishment of discovering that art, like history, is built on gaps, noisy omissions, and narratives that prevail simply because they were told first.

Hypotheses take shape. Visser knows this, and shows it; yet inevitably the viewer is left suspended between the desire for historical truth and the awareness that perhaps there is no final proof. And perhaps that is precisely the point.

To make Elsa “come alive,” to construct an inquiry that is more than a scholarly essay, the film must at times rely on interpretation, reconstruction, and partial fiction. But the idea that Elsa may have conceived Fountain — or co-created it — is compelling and worth exploring. The film never presents it as absolute truth — wisely so. If the thesis were asserted as fact, it would lose some of its critical allure while remaining controversial for lack of evidence.

Alreadymade is not a dogmatic work; it doesn’t aim to rewrite history with a clean stroke. Rather, it weaves together myth, research, memory, reality, and fiction. It invites us to look beneath the surface (or behind the urinal), to question who decides what counts as art, who defines what is true, and under what privileges.

If art is meant to unsettle — to expose the cracks in accepted truths — Alreadymade does so with elegance. It doesn’t shout, doesn’t claim the final word, but leaves you thinking that perhaps the final word doesn’t exist. And perhaps that’s for the best.

“Truth is an illusion whose illusory nature has been forgotten.”
(F. Nietzsche)