A urinal rechristened by late Dada practioner Marcel Duchamp as "Fountain," and currently on display in Paris, has been attacked with a hammer by an old nemisis named Pierre Pinoncelli, who previously employed it for its best and highest use. Turns out (see below) this isn't the only piece of conceptual art to invite problematic participation. You could say that Duchamp was merely re-packaging original content, like bloggers do these days. Perhaps the tangible, physical responses to a provocative "work" of art should be seen as similar to passionate comments appended to a particular post on a blog. More from the New York Times:

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.

...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."

I hope someone gave those cleaners a bonus.

The urinal vandal-artiste Pinoncelli, by the way, previously gained notoriety for cutting off one of his fingers in a political protest. Here's his official Web site. (Viewed in my browser it had a very annoying pop-up ad up top that wasn't easy to click off, maybe you'll have better luck. It appears commerce is not beneath him, at least).

All told, however, conceptual and performance art both are inherently fatuous, reinforcing my appreciation for the timeless works - actual paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures, carvings, photos, and theatre that evince actual, um, talent - rather than a snootful of brandy, a desire to transgress, and a press agent. Is it not time for a retrospective somewhere on Paulo Ucello (just above, right)?

Everything you'll want to know about performance art is in this Rosenblog post, titled, "A
Dead Hare, Crotchless Pants, And Shamanistic Transgression". Note the links at the end.

TECHNORATI TAGS: MARCEL DUCHAMP, FOUNTAIN, URINAL, CONCEPTUAL ART, PERFORMANCE ART, PAULO UCELLO

Posted by Matt Rosenberg at January 8, 2006 06:25 PM