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Urinal survives art attack

Jon Henley

An artist against Duchamp's porcelain work

Paris: An unrepentant 77-year-old French artist, Pierre Pinoncelli, was in custody on Friday after taking a hammer to Marcel Duchamp's celebrated porcelain urinal at an avant-garde art exhibition in the Pompidou Centre here. The 1917 work, a bog-standard white urinal mounted upside down, was "not irreparably damaged," said a spokesman for the museum, which is hosting an exhibition of the Dada movement, a precursor of surrealism.

It is not the first time Mr. Pinoncelli has attacked the piece, titled `Fountain' and valued at more than 3 million euros (about Rs. 16.45 crores). During a 1993 exhibition in Nimes, he relieved himself in it and then belaboured it with a blunt instrument.

Defending the urinal's status as art in 1961, Duchamp said he had "taken an everyday article, made its usual significance disappear with a new name, and — from that point of view — created a new and entirely aesthetic meaning for this object." A poll of leading art world figures in 2004 apparently agreed: it ranked `Fountain' as the most influential work of modern art, ahead of Picasso's `Les Demoiselles d'Avignon' and `Guernica,' and Andy Warhol's screen prints of Marilyn Monroe.

Mr. Pinoncelli, however, is unimpressed. During his earlier trial, he declared he was "restoring dignity to this object, victim of an abuse of purpose if not of personality." On that occasion a judge decided that Mr. Pinoncelli had wanted only to "hijack the fame of the original artist" and fined him 45,000 euros .

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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