January 11, 2006--Gotta Pee
When you are of a certain age, and I am, it is important to be able to have ready access to the “facilities.” So when I read about all those artists putting urinals in art galleries (in the gallery spaces themselves, not in the back behind closed doors) it made me a little nervous. And then to say they are ART, well you can only imagine.
I’m being a little tongue in cheek here. I of course know that in 1917 in New York, Dadaist Marcel Duchamp famously exhibited a urinal at the Society of Independent Artists show, titling it “Fountain.” It created quiet a sensation, challenging traditional ideas about what constitutes ART. Claiming, by its placement, that ART is whatever artists say it is.
That urinal still exists and gets around (actually it doesn’t, but Duchamp signed eight others and sold them). It was most recently displayed in Paris at the Dada exhibit at the Pompidou Center. Where it was attacked. I mean physically attacked by a hammer-wielding artist, Pierre Pinoncelli (see NY Times article linked below). He managed to chip it and was therefore removed so it could be restored.
Some of my best friends are art restorers and I wonder what they must have thought when while laboring over a Rembrandt it was pushed aside so they could get to work on this piece of porcelain.
We have heard from Mr. Pinoncelli before—in fact he urinated in this very urinal in 1993, making an artistic statement of his own, saying he wanted to return it to its original use by deflating its status as ART. For his efforts, he was put in jail for a month and fined $37,500. But he is a considerable artist in his own right, not just an art vandal. He is a Conceptual Artist, one whose work is more about the ideas that infuse it than the work itself—the urinal, for example, qualifies since Duchamp didn’t fabricate it; but by merely placing it in a gallery he was conceptually “elevating” it to the status of ART—it was no longer not just something in which to, well, pee.
Pinoncelli is well-known for les happenings de rue, "street happenings," such as using a water pistol to spray red paint on the French Minister of Culture, to presumably lower his status and return him to his original use, whatever that might have been. Also, as “a homage to deported Jews,” he covered himself in yellow Jewish stars of the type the Nazi forced Jews to wear. As a Jew myself I found that to be very moving.
But most striking, if I can use that word, was his “performance piece” during which he chopped off half of the pinky on his left hand, using the blood to write a protest against the kidnapping of a Colombian politician. He said at the time, “The idea was to share in Colombia’s violence.”
I know this is marking me as a Philistine. So be it. In the meantime I wish my art restorer friends would finish up with the Rembrandt already and get it back into the museum.
I’m being a little tongue in cheek here. I of course know that in 1917 in New York, Dadaist Marcel Duchamp famously exhibited a urinal at the Society of Independent Artists show, titling it “Fountain.” It created quiet a sensation, challenging traditional ideas about what constitutes ART. Claiming, by its placement, that ART is whatever artists say it is.
That urinal still exists and gets around (actually it doesn’t, but Duchamp signed eight others and sold them). It was most recently displayed in Paris at the Dada exhibit at the Pompidou Center. Where it was attacked. I mean physically attacked by a hammer-wielding artist, Pierre Pinoncelli (see NY Times article linked below). He managed to chip it and was therefore removed so it could be restored.
Some of my best friends are art restorers and I wonder what they must have thought when while laboring over a Rembrandt it was pushed aside so they could get to work on this piece of porcelain.
We have heard from Mr. Pinoncelli before—in fact he urinated in this very urinal in 1993, making an artistic statement of his own, saying he wanted to return it to its original use by deflating its status as ART. For his efforts, he was put in jail for a month and fined $37,500. But he is a considerable artist in his own right, not just an art vandal. He is a Conceptual Artist, one whose work is more about the ideas that infuse it than the work itself—the urinal, for example, qualifies since Duchamp didn’t fabricate it; but by merely placing it in a gallery he was conceptually “elevating” it to the status of ART—it was no longer not just something in which to, well, pee.
Pinoncelli is well-known for les happenings de rue, "street happenings," such as using a water pistol to spray red paint on the French Minister of Culture, to presumably lower his status and return him to his original use, whatever that might have been. Also, as “a homage to deported Jews,” he covered himself in yellow Jewish stars of the type the Nazi forced Jews to wear. As a Jew myself I found that to be very moving.
But most striking, if I can use that word, was his “performance piece” during which he chopped off half of the pinky on his left hand, using the blood to write a protest against the kidnapping of a Colombian politician. He said at the time, “The idea was to share in Colombia’s violence.”
I know this is marking me as a Philistine. So be it. In the meantime I wish my art restorer friends would finish up with the Rembrandt already and get it back into the museum.
posted by Steven Zwerling at
4:10 PM
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