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.