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Pierre Pinoncelli, 77, a French
performance artist was arrested for striking Marcel Duchamp's
"Fountain," with a hammer, Wednesday at a Dada exhibition at the
Pompidou Center in Paris.
The porcelain urinal was only slightly
damaged. The artist, who back in 1993 also
urinated into the same urinal and also struck it with a hammer at a
show in Nîmes, France, has a long history of organizing destructivist
"happenings.
He has claimed that his action was also
a work of art, and in fact a tribute to Duchamp and other Dada
artists who had made their name by challenging the very definition
of art.
- The Pompidou's "Fountain" is one of
eight signed replicas made by Duchamp in 1964. The original
fountain, a conceptual gesture, made in 1917, when first
exhibited at the Society of Independent Artists in New York was
rejected for being neither original nor art.
- That version of the
factory cast urinal, displayed by being flipped upside-down and
signed R. Mutt, was subsequently lost. This recent attack by
Pinoncelli
will ignite more debate around the question as to "What is art?"
-
In 1993 Pinoncelli was jailed for
one month and fined approximately $37,500 for urinating in
Duchamp's "Fountain" in the Carré des Arts in Nîmes. He
later said he wanted "to rescue the work from its inflated
iconic status and return it to its original function as a
urinal".
-
-
1966- Gustav Metzger throws acid on several of his nylon
“paintings” which disintegrate within minutes.
- Breakdown by Michael
Landy
In February 2001, British artist Michael Landy
created Breakdown, an installation/event in
which he destroyed everything he owned: clothes, family photographs,
books and records, white goods, a meat-grinder inherited from his
mother, his car. In the disused former premises of C&A on Oxford Street,
London, his possessions were catalogued, bagged up, and pulverised by a
team of demolition 'operatives'. A particular ethical puzzle was
raised by the fact that among his possessions were some original
artworks by his contemporary - Chris Ofili, Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin,
Gary Hume and others. When his plan was announced, some of those artists
protested.
It might have seemed that Landy was pushing the limits
of YBAs conceptualism; what, were the inventors of the unmade bed
and a fly infested cow's head, the creators of this aggressively
ephemeral work, getting pernickety about their work's permanence?
Maybe, but they may have a point.
- Richard Serra Tilted Arc was
dismantled and removed from the Federal Plaza in NY.
When two self-proclaimed
performance artists sauntered into the Tate Modern gallery and relieved
themselves on Marcel Duchamp's urinal exhibit, they argued they were
paying homage to the French master.
Duchamp's "ready-made"
sculpture ridiculed traditional concepts of art and caused a sensation
when it first was exhibited in 1917. But rather than drawing accolades
and applause, the pair of performance artists were widely dismissed as
pranksters.
"In art there are
expressionists, cubists and opportunists -- that's the new movement and
that's what they are," said David Lee, editor of the art magazine The
Jackaw.
The Guardian newspaper
branded the pair "guerrilla artists," while the gallery issued a terse
statement acknowledging "an incident" but refused further comment.
All of which has thrilled Yuan Cai, 43, and
Jian Jun Xi, 37, who argued their goal was to fuel artistic debate
and "celebrate the spirit of modern art."
"Duchamp changed art.
He gave people a different way of looking at it by putting art in a
social context. What we're doing is also revolutionary," said Xi,
who, like Cai, grew up in China during Mao's cultural revolution.
References, The Hindu International.
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Welcome to the jungle
We've got fun 'n' games
We got everything you want
Honey, we know the names
We are the people that can find
Whatever you may need
If you got the money, honey
We got your disease
From Appetite For
Destruction. Guns and Roses
There is a long history of this sort
of
activism in art. The debate around post modernism has been ignited by new groups
of painters, installation and conceptual artists.
1872 - John Ruskin and his bookseller Ellis burn, “with all due
ceremony”, a set of Goya’s CAPRICHOS.
1909 - Courbet’s painting THE RETURN FROM THE CONFERENCE (1863)
is bought and destroyed by an “exalted Catholic” for being
anti-clerical.
1912 - A young woman adds rouge to the forehead and nose of a
portrait by Francois Boucher at the Louvre. “She was lacking color,”
she explains.
1914 - Mary Richardson, a suffragette, repeatedly hacks at
Velasquez’s nude, THE ROKEBY VENUS (1640-48), at the National
Gallery in London. “I don’t like the way men visitors gape at her
all day.”
1934 - Diego Rivera’s mural MAN AT THE CROSSROADS in the
Rockefeller Center, New York, is destroyed by the Rockefellers for portraying Lenin
among its figures.
1935 -Jacob Epstein’s sculptures (1907-1908) on the British
Medical Association Building are destroyed when the Southern
Rhodesian Government purchases the building in London.
1946 - Alfred D. Crimi’s fresco (1938) on the rear wall of
Rutger’s Presbyterian Church is painted over because it “puts too
much emphasis on Christ’s bare chest.”
1950 - Austrian artist Arnolf Rainer begins to paint over, not only
his own pictures, but those by others as well.
1953 - Robert Rauschenberg produced a work entitled “Erased de
Kooning Drawing”. This was made by using rubber erasers to literally
rub-out a drawing that he had persuaded de Kooning to give him
specifically for that purpose. It took a month and about forty
erasers to erase/make.
1959 - Acid is thrown on Ruben’s FALL OF THE DAMNED at Munich’s
Alte Pinakothek. The assailant says that he did not directly destroy
the work, that the acid “relieves one from the work of destruction.”
1960s - The destructivist artist Gustav Metzger is a huge
influence on Pete Townsend, his ideology becomes the driving force
behind the Who guitarist's legendary guitar-smashing exploits.
1960 - David Smith’s 17h’s, a sculpture created 10 years
earlier, is stripped of its coat of red paint to increase its value
during the process of sale and resale.
1961 - Arnolf Rainer is
arrested for painting over a prized print in Wolfsburg Austria. The
print is later sold at an increased value to the Stadtische Galerie.
1966- Gustav Metzger throws acid on several of his nylon
“paintings” which disintegrate within minutes.
1961 - The over-sized testicles on Jacob Epstein’s angel
sculpture for Oscar Wilde’s tomb (1914, Paris) are hacked off by two
indignant English ladies. They are recovered by the cemetery keeper,
who uses them for paper weights.
1962 - A night guard at the Louvre scratches x-shapes into nine
paintings with his museum keys.
1965 - The executors of David Smith’s estate, with the support of
Clement Greenberg, order the removal of white paint from a number of
Smith’s open-air works.
1966 - Using her nail file, a woman damages a picture by Hobbema
in the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
1971 - Hans Haacke’s one-man exhibition is cancelled by the
Guggenheim Museum, because it was thought that it might offend some
important New York landowners. Thomas Messer, the director, is
criticized for censorship and made to leave the museum.
1972 - Lazlo Toth attacks Michelangelo’s PIETA with a hammer in St.
Peter’s in Rome, shouting the whole time: I am Jesus Christ, Christ
is risen from the dead."
Giacomo Manzu calls for the death penalty. At the other extreme,
artists in Residence at the Swiss Institute send a telegram to the
Pope suggesting Toth get an award.
1973 - Jasper Johns crosses out his signature in the silk-screen
print Untitled (Skull) from the portfolio Reality and Paradoxes.
1974 - “KILL LIES ALL” is written on Picasso’s GUERNICA in the
Museum of Modern Art (New York) by Tony Shafrazi, who considers
himself an artist and describes his Guernica “action” as innovative
art. Tony goes on to run a successful New York gallery.
1975 - Robert Smithson creates organic sculptures from materials of
the earth that are later destroyed by natural causes. He recognizes
that we are physically and culturally bound to the earth and that
the classic metaphor of nature as a primordial garden was obsolete
for a landscape that bore so many scars of disruption.
1975 - Renault junks the half-completed environmental sculpture
commissioned from Jean Dubuffet.
1975 - A psychiatric patient slashes Rembrandt’s NIGHTWATCH in
the Netherlands.
1976 - In Omaha’s Joslyn Museum, a bronze statue is taken off its
pedestal and thrown at the Bouguereau painting, THE SPRING (1886),
by a 37-year-old window-cleaner who finds it filthy.
1976. Blue dye
is sprayed over Carl André's display of bricks at the Tate Gallery in
London.1977 - A 43-year-old woman, Ruth van Herpen, plants a heavy
lipstick kiss on a white monochrome canvas by the American painter
Jo Baer, at the Oxford Museum of Modern Art. At her trial, she said
that she had found the painting cold and had wanted to “cheer it
up”.
1981 - David Hammons creates his piece "Pissed Off" by urinating on
a steel sculpture by Richard Serra.
1981 - Ernst Volland’s open-air exhibition in East Berlin is
vandalized by police and painted over with white paint.
1982 - Josef Kleer attacks Barnett Newman’s WHO’S AFRAID OF RED,
YELLOW AND BLUE IV (1969-70) with one of the very bars meant to keep
museum visitors from getting too close to the work.
1988 - Richard Serra’s work, BERLIN JUNCTION, is vandalized by
the inscription: 560,000 marks for this shit!
1988 - Hans Haacke’s wooden monument in the city of Graz Austria,
Mariensaule, is set on fire by a former Nazi.
1989 - Three men receive life imprisonment for splashing paint on
a portrait of Mao in Tiananmen Square.
1989 - Richard Serra’s TILTED ARC (1981) is dismantled and
removed from the Federal Plaza in New York.
1991, it was
another artist - generally described as unbalanced - who attacked Michelangelo's
statue "David" and damaged a foot
1994 - Joseph Kosuth wrote of Ad Reinhardt’s work: “Painting
itself had to be erased, eclipsed, painted out in order to make
art.”
1994 - Twenty-five of Rainer’s own works are
discovered painted over
in his school studio at the Vienna Academy. Police are called by an
angry Rainer, but do not crack the case. Without proof, Rainer
blames another member of the staff saying he acted out of jealousy.
1994. Red dye is put into a transparent container displaying Damien Hirst's dead sheep
preserved in formalin. Still, not all vandalism is intended: Another
work by 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.
1995 - The heads of Henry Moore’s bronze King and Queen (1954)
are sawn off on a remote hillside in Scotland.
1997 - Jake Platt's used a big red, felt-tipped pen to write over
Yoko Ono’s $240,000 painting at Cincinnati's Contemporary Arts
Center. He took Ono's words - "No one can tell you not to touch the
art" - literally.
1997 - Alexander Brener, a Russian artist living in Amsterdam,
spray-painting a huge green dollar sign over Kasimir Malevich's
white-on-white Suprematism (1921- 27).
- I defend the gesture of Alexander Brener because it pulsates with
energy, because it administers mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a
work of art that is dead, just as any work of art or culture buried
in our memory, our conscience, our books, is dead . Giancarlo Politi,
Flash Art, May / June 1997.
1999 - Retired English teacher Dennis Heiner smears white paint
all over Chris Ofili's controversial Holy Virgin Mary at the
Brooklyn Museum.
In 1999, two
Chinese artists, Yuan Cai and Jian Jun Ianjun, jumped on "My Bed," a
work by the British artist Tracey Emin that comprised an unmade bed
accompanied by empty bottles, dirty underwear and used condoms and
was on show at Tate Britain.
The following year, the two artists
urinated on Tate Modern's version of "Fountain," noting that Duchamp
himself had said that artists defined art.
2000 - Two self-proclaimed performance artists, Yuan Cai and Jian
Jun Xi, relieved themselves on Marcel Duchamp's urinal exhibit,
arguing their goal was to fuel artistic debate and "celebrate the
spirit of modern art."
2001 - British artist, Michael Landy, held what
he called "Break Down" in an empty department store in London: In this happening, he destroyed all his possessions, including
art donated by friends.. 2001 - The Taliban government destroys the statues of Buddha...
Excerpts and Timeline dates from
A night of creative destruction in Detroit
by
Jef Bourgeau
www.detroitmona.com/jef_bourgeau_kaBOOM!.htm
Jef Bourgeau is the director of the Museum of New Art Detroit
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