New Dada alive and chipping

International Herald Tribune.
Sat/Sun Jan 7/8 2006

Front cover headline
If the urinal is art,
is hammering it, too?
Duchamp piece damaged in attack
by Alan Riding

PARIS; ” A French performance artist was arrested for taking a small hammer to Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain”, the factory-made urinal that is considered the cornerstone of conceptual art.

The porcelain urinal was slightly chipped in the hammering, which took place Wednesday during the final days of a Dada exhibition at the Pompidou Centre.

The artist, Pierre Pinoncelli, 77, who urinated into the same urinal and also struck it with a hammer at a show in Nimes, France in 1993, has a long record of organizing bizarre “happenings”.

Police officials say that he once again claimed that his action was also a work of art, a tribute to Duchamp and the other Dada artists who had made their name by challenging the very definition of art.

“Fountain” itself was rejected for being neither original nor art when Duchamp offered it for the first exhibition of the Society of Independant 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. A spokeswoman for the Pompidou Centre said it was too early to estimate the cost of restoring the work, which has been withdrawn from the Dada show.

The vandalism again raised questions of how valuble works of art can be protected in museums that have millions of visitors each year. . . . .”

Quite. :>

MSM
Fountain
c. Marcel Duchamp, 1917

See London Dada’s follow-up to this work @
http://londondada.blog.co.uk/2005/10/22/work~253669/
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Earlier Dada antics of PP
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24 August, 1993

Before the more publicised and better known attack on Duchamp’s urinal by Chinese artists Yuan Cai and Jian Jun Xi ianjun, there was another by the 69 year old Frenchman Pierre Pinoncelli. During an exhibition at the Carré des Arts in Nimes, southern France Pinoncelli, a performance artist pissed in the fountain and then hit it with a hammer. He claimed that the pissing was “to restore to it its real value” and the hammer blow was to protest “the art market going to the dogs.”1.

He was imprisoned two days later after being found guilty of willfully damaging a monument or an object of public utility 2. Five years later he was ordered by the court to pay 250,000 francs to an insurance company, 20,000 francs to the state (in the person of Culture Minister Catherine Trautmann), 16,336 francs for repairs and 10,000 francs in costs. Many viewed this amount to be quite excessive and a thinly veiled retaliation for his attack in 1969 on the then Cultural Minister André Malraux. During a Chagall exhibition opening in Nice, Pinoncelli, armed with a water pistol squirted the Cultural Minister with red paint.

Pinoncelli, whose other performances include setting fire to his own clothes during a street action, attempting to hold up a bank with a sawn off rifle loaded with blanks and being thrown into the port of Nice in a tied bag laden with weights in homage to Monte Cristo was later to come to international attention via one of his performances.

At an arts festival in the Colombian town of Cali, Pinoncelli lopped off his little finger. The action was a show of solidarity with the kidnapped Colombian presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt. Pinoncelli then wielded his damaged hand like a paint brush splattering blood across a poster with the letters FARC (The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia who kidnapped Betancourt – an outspoken critic of the group).

Pinoncelli told the press that “The idea was to share in Colombia’s violence. Ingrid Betancourt symbolises the courage of all those fighting against corruption, and that is why I am rendering her homage”.
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21 May, 2000

Yuan Cai, and Jian Jun Xi ianjun, two artists previously arrested for “attacking” Tracy Emin’s My Bed in the Tate Gallery returned, this time to the Tate Modern to piss on Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain one of the urinals he signed “R.Mutt in 1917.
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MSM Comment
All this is well and good and the New Dadaists will doubtless be making waves themselves relating to gallery “happenings” this year, but these two should also be creating their own vision outwith such publicity stunts, or they risk being seen as mere opportunists in the guise of artists.