[CPProt.net] Conceptual Artist as Vandal: Walk Tall and Carry a Little Hammer (or Ax)

Sat Jan 7 08:54:01 CET 2006

January 7, 2006
Conceptual Artist as Vandal: Walk Tall and Carry a Little Hammer (or Ax) 
By ALAN RIDING

PARIS, Jan. 6 - The Dada movement made its name in the early 20th century by
trying to destroy the conventional notion of art. Taking literal inspiration
from their exploits this week, a latter-day neo-Dadaist took a small hammer
to Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain," the factory-made urinal that is considered
the cornerstone of Conceptual Art.

The assailant, a French performance artist named Pierre Pinoncelli, was
immediately arrested after his act of vandalism, which took place on
Wednesday, during the final days of the "Dada" exhibition at the Pompidou
Center. The porcelain urinal was slightly chipped in the attack and was
withdrawn to be restored. (The exhibition runs through Monday.)

Mr. Pinoncelli, 77, who urinated into the same urinal and struck it with a
hammer in a show in Nîmes in 1993, has a long record of organizing bizarre
happenings. Police officials said he again called his action a work of art,
a tribute to Duchamp and other Dada artists.

Indeed, "Fountain" itself was rejected for being neither original nor art
when Duchamp offered it for the first exhibition of the Society of
Independent Artists in New York in 1917. That version of the urinal,
displayed upside down and signed "R. Mutt," was subsequently lost. The
Pompidou's "Fountain" is one of eight signed replicas made by Duchamp in
1964.

After the attack on Wednesday, Mr. Pinoncelli was held by the police
overnight. He was released on Thursday and ordered to appear in court here
on Jan. 24 to answer charges of damaging the property of others. As in 1993,
he could face a prison term or a fine. (After the first urinal attack, he
was jailed for a month and fined the equivalent of $37,500.) 

The Pompidou Center said it was too early to know the cost of restoring the
work. (Curators said a different Duchamp urinal was already scheduled for
inclusion in the version of the show traveling to the National of Gallery of
Art in Washington, Feb. 19 through May 14, and to the Museum of Modern Art
in New York, June 18 through Sept. 11.) The vandalism raises the persistent
question of how valuable works of art can be protected in museums that log
millions of visitors each year. Many paintings on display today are shielded
by glass. At the Louvre, the "Mona Lisa," which was stolen in 1911 and
struck by a stone in 1956, is now in a sealed enclosure behind
1.52-inch-thick glass.

Mr. Pinoncelli's attack also refocuses attention on the perennial question
of what defines art. The question, playfully yet provocatively raised by the
Dada movement nearly a century ago, has been refreshed since the 1980's by
succeeding waves of Conceptual, installation and performance art. Like this
week's case, such protests are often waged by artists themselves.

In 1999, for example, two Chinese artists, Yuan Cai and Jian Jun Xi Ianjun,
jumped on "My Bed," a work by the British artist Tracey Emin comprising an
unmade bed accompanied by empty bottles, dirty underwear and used condoms,
that was on view at Tate Britain. The following year, the same two artists
urinated on the Tate Modern's version of "Fountain," noting that Duchamp
himself said artists defined art.

A British artist, Michael Landy, held what he called "Break Down" in an
empty department store in London in 2001: in this happening, he destroyed
all his possessions, including art donated by friends. Two other British
artists, the Chapman brothers, were accused of vandalism in 2003 when they
added the faces of clowns and puppets to the 80 etchings in an edition of
Goya's "Disasters of War" that they had purchased.

In 1991, an artist generally described as unbalanced attacked Michelangelo's
"David" statue in Florence, Italy, and damaged a foot.

Among numerous other protests, blue dye was sprayed over Carl Andre's
display of bricks at the Tate Gallery in London in 1976, and black ink was
squirted into a transparent container displaying Damien Hirst's dead sheep
preserved in formaldehyde at the Serpentine Gallery in London. 

Still, not all vandalism is intended: another work by Mr. Hirst on display
in a Mayfair gallery in 2001 - half-full coffee cups, dirty ashtrays, beer
bottles and the like - was thrown away by cleaners who mistook it for
refuse. The same thing happened at Tate Britain in 2004 to a work by Gustav
Metzger, a bag of trash titled "Recreation of First Public Demonstration of
Auto-Destructive Art."

In the case of Mr. Pinoncelli, who could not be reached on Friday, nothing
is accidental. After he urinated in and damaged "Fountain" in the Carré
d'Art in Nîmes, he said he wanted to rescue the work from its inflated
status and restore it to its original use as a urinal. 

Since the early 1960's, Mr. Pinoncelli, based in Nice, has been busy with
what he calls "les happenings de rue," or "street happenings." In 1969, he
used a water pistol to spray red paint on André Malraux, who was then the
French culture minister. In 1975, he "held up" a bank in Nice with a fake
gun to protest Nice's decision to become Cape Town's twin city while South
Africa was still under apartheid rule. The same year, he paraded outside
Nice's courts, covered in large yellow stars, in what he called a homage to
deported Jews.

Perhaps his most striking act unfolded in 2002 at a festival of performance
art in the Colombian city of Cali. There, he protested the kidnapping of a
Colombian politician, Ingrid Betancourt, by the country's leftist guerrillas
by chopping off half of the smallest finger of his left hand. He then used
his blood to write "FARC," the acronym of the guerrilla group (the
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), on a white wall.

"The idea was to share in Colombia's violence," he told reporters at the
time. But it apparently did not impress the guerrillas: Ms. Betancourt is
still being held.

http://www.nytimes.com/