art by Jenny Holzer

this , this and http://www.goyatobeijing.org/gallery/images/Holzer_01.jpg

dada or it's not over until it's over

High price of French artist Duchamp's toilet humour

Tuesday November 28, 2006
By Catherine Field

PARIS - Somewhere in surrealists' heaven - where clocks melt like Camembert cheese, telephones are made out of lobsters and bowler-hatted men walk around with apples in front of their faces - the soul of Marcel Duchamp is having a belly laugh.

Duchamp, whose madcap capers led to the surrealist movement, would have hooted at the wrangle besetting a French court, which must decide whether his most famous contribution to human culture is art, an idea - or just a urinal.

The pissoir in question, Fontaine (Fountain), was Duchamp's tongue-in-cheek contribution to an exhibition in 1917, intended as a provocation towards bourgeois art.

Over the decades, though, it became accepted as the leading emblem of dadaism, the anarchist forerunner of surrealism. It is now the most cherished possession of the Pompidou Centre in Paris.

Imagine, then, the distress of the museum's bosses in January when a 77-year-old performance artist, Pierre Pinoncelli, took a small hammer to Fontaine, dealing the urinal several damaging blows and writing "Dada" next to Duchamp's pseudonymous signature, R. Mutt, on its side.

Bald and white-bearded, Pinoncelli has a long list of anarchistic happenings to his credit. He once squirted red ink over Andre Malraux, held up a bank with a water pistol, bicycled to China to deliver a message of world peace, and amputated one of his fingers in a show of support for a Frenchwoman, Ingrid Betancourt, who is being held by a Colombian group.

In 1993, he damaged Fontaine for the first time when it was on show in Nimes, whacking it with a hammer before urinating in it.

Pinoncelli has been sentenced to a three-month suspended jail term, and the Pompidou Centre has secured a judgement against him of €14,000 ($27,400) in restoration costs and €200,000 for loss of value to the urinal. Pinoncelli, facing ruin, has appealed.

His case, which opened last week in the Paris Appeal Court, where the dock is usually filled by convicted mobsters, fraudsters and cut-throats, was crammed as he argued that his act was one of art, not vandalism.

"I wanted to pay tribute to Duchamp, to make a post-Dada gesture, to give back to his work its provocative qualities," he said.

Pinoncelli added that he even had the approval of Duchamp.

"I went to see him in New York in 1967 and told him what I wanted to do. He said, 'That's marvellous, you have my full blessing'."

The Fontaine in question is in fact not the original. That was purchased by a rich American couple, but was then lost. Duchamp made eight duplicates in 1964.

The Pompidou bought its copy in 1986 for €35,000. In 1999, another was sold for €1.6 million, and today they are valued at an astonishing €2.8 million. It was on this basis that the Pompidou demanded initial damages of €427,000, saying that the piece had lost 15 per cent of its value from the attack - a figure that the first trial cut to €200,000.

Pinoncelli's retort was to deliver a replacement urinal which he bought for €83 at a hardware shop, but the Pompidou Centre refused to accept it.

"Pierre Pinoncelli's repeat offence will have serious consequences for community," said the museum's lawyer, Marie Delion. "Duchamp's work has been damaged and weakened twice, it can no longer be transported in France or abroad and is now unsuited for any cultural exchange."

Pinoncelli's attorney, Ambroise Arnaud, contended that Fontaine was not damaged, it had only been modified, which thus was a creative stroke.

"Leonardo da Vinci painted over canvases that had been painted by someone else," he said. "With a bit of skilful marketing, it's even possible that you could turn this urinal into a unique object, different from the seven other copies.

"In any case, the object in itself is nothing. What counts is Duchamp's idea, and the idea is still intact. My client did not damage it."

A ruling is expected on January 26.

inchoate (teddybears in blancmange).....complete

whats going on here?
the picture below is the enhanced version of the one above.
the computer tries to make sense or improve on the original. The reality when viewing the original is that all the colours are present and affecting yet there is white light reflecting off the surface ( which is very very smooth, being thick with talcuum dust, scrapped back)
subverting the obvious functional engagement
creating transparency/opacity ( obscurity of meaning)
undermining the easy relationship between viewer/object

I spend time experimening with the camera photographing surfaces.

inchoate (nemesis) complete

100cm x 100cm. Coal dust, acrylic housepaint, india ink.
I said it would be difficult to photograph. Very difficult. I will keep trying ( learning).
This atempt is enhanced by digitally sharpening the image, a lot. Does give an impression of the surface quality of the painting. The coal dust in the paint is very very absorbant of light, but it's in there.
Fantastic process. 4 pieces in this series, all working with black and white, hard to say which I like the most. The white has so much soft quality..the black is harder but deeper....
the learning is to do with colour, reflection/reflective quality, light being absorbed and the problems for the viewer. I was pleased to be able to stick it out and do these pictures, figuring it has all been done before, yet I enjoyed my own journey there. I can see that I learnt a lot about colour and contrast and all this going on without figure and ground. It was particularily interesting/pleasing/rewarding the space the paintings physically opened up just being painted/exisiting. Viewing each piece is a deepening moment, looking into the space created.
I remain drawn to that process. Stripping down what is superflous to the process of engagement.
How little is essential, what is essential....what happens....?

inchoates (teddybears in blancmange) and nemesis talking

inchoate (nemesis) incomplete

1000mm x 1000mm
coal dust, black acrylic house paint on stretched canvas


The definition of black in the Oxford English Dictionary is as follows: 'Black; The proper word for a certain quality practically classed among colours, but consisting optically in the total absence of colour due to the absence or total absorption of light as its opposite white, arises from the reflection of all the rays of light' . Colour as a thing in itself, as a certain wavelength is without much meaning. When one considers that everyone perceives colour in a similar way, nonetheless culturally everyone is different and how they respond to colour intellectually can vary greatly.

what's going on here?
black in black on black. 4 layers of black with coal dust and still it reflects light where ever it gets onto the surface but I think the billions of particles of coal crystal are doing something to the surface. Photographing this phenomena is going to be a challenge.

coal dust drawings-primal dust

coal dust and newsprint 300mm x 300mm
whats going on here? photography.
Today I set out to make some coal dust, very fine dust, sieved many times to add to my black paint for the final of the 'inchoate' series, called nemesis. The ust itself is a fascinating and mysterious force. I played around with it and photographed the results.
What struck me about this operation was how tone, figure, ground, shadow/ light and ultimately metaphor all emerged quite spontaneously from the process.

and metaphor

and dust bug

inchoate (teddybears in blancmange).....incomplete

this is the underpainting process, photographed and digitalized ( saturated)
1000x1000mm
india ink, talcum and acrylic.
what colour is white and so on. I'm mixing white with a drop of india ink, blue, yellow, red and painting on in thin glazes/films creating transparencies


this is the same support with another layerof paint applied.

and the final coat

inchoate (teddybears on the moon)

1000 x 1000mm acrylic, indian ink, talcum
Two of four planned.
Scary business but now it is done, drying and on the vertical plane. What did I learn?
Use more talcum, cut down on the number of strokes, economize.

talking

paper cuts

where it all started really, the Liz Robinson exercise of light on dark, dark on light, all carried on without figure and ground.

verb list

U B U W E B :: Richard SerraSERRA: When I first started, what was very, very important to me was dealing with the nature of process. So what I had done is I'd written a verb list: to roll, to fold, to cut, to dangle, to twist...and I really just worked out pieces in relation to the verb list physically in a space. Now, what happens when you do that is you don't become involved with the psychology of what you're making, nor do you become involved with the after image of what it's going to look like. So, basically it gives you a way of proceeding with material in relation to body movement, in relation to making, that divorces from any notion of metaphor, any notion of easy imagery.

small scorched angel

carbonized hair 40mm x40mm
I'm trying to make plaster moulds of impossible objects...ha.

clay, rolled golf ball print-out and hot dipped in wax

todays inspiration was a golf ball ( one of two) I found this morning while out walking with Audrey. This image, and tile, illustrate the intention of the project. Working intensly with surface and objects, how they interact, subverting figure and in this case form.

moulding and waxing

100 tiles of 100m x 100mm under way. 2 done.
here is a list of operations ( verbs)
rolling/casting/moulding/waxing/dipping/stamping/printing...... more as they emerge.
It seems to be tempting or testing fate to talk about the end when I have just begun. Many hours thinking and staring off into space and talking to Audrey about the idea.
The whole process is experimental, never done this before. However I have a clear idea of what could 'be there' when it is finished. Each step, each operation is a work in itself.
Today I finalized the ultimate process for each individual tile by diping the final piece in hot wax and hermetically sealing it off. This will stabilize the collection as it grows to it's full number, no shrinkage. I see now that I can control that process by perforating the wax barrier.....
eventually 100 tiles will have plaster poured over them to a depth of 20mm.
And on it goes.
Have to make one first.