The New York Times

January 7, 2006

Conceptual Artist as Vandal: Walk Tall and Carry a Little Hammer (or Ax)

By ALAN RIDING

PARIS, Jan. 6 - The Dada movement made its name in the early 20th century by trying to destroy the conventional notion of art. Taking literal inspiration from their exploits this week, a latter-day neo-Dadaist took a small hammer to Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain," the factory-made urinal that is considered the cornerstone of Conceptual Art.

The assailant, a French performance artist named Pierre Pinoncelli, was immediately arrested after his act of vandalism, which took place on Wednesday, during the final days of the "Dada" exhibition at the Pompidou Center. The porcelain urinal was slightly chipped in the attack and was withdrawn to be restored. (The exhibition runs through Monday.)

Mr. Pinoncelli, 77, who urinated into the same urinal and struck it with a hammer in a show in Nîmes in 1993, has a long record of organizing bizarre happenings. Police officials said he again called his action a work of art, a tribute to Duchamp and other Dada artists.

Indeed, "Fountain" itself was rejected for being neither original nor art when Duchamp offered it for the first exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New York in 1917. That version of the urinal, displayed upside down and signed "R. Mutt," was subsequently lost. The Pompidou's "Fountain" is one of eight signed replicas made by Duchamp in 1964.

After the attack on Wednesday, Mr. Pinoncelli was held by the police overnight. He was released on Thursday and ordered to appear in court here on Jan. 24 to answer charges of damaging the property of others. As in 1993, he could face a prison term or a fine. (After the first urinal attack, he was jailed for a month and fined the equivalent of $37,500.)

The Pompidou Center said it was too early to know the cost of restoring the work. (Curators said a different Duchamp urinal was already scheduled for inclusion in the version of the show traveling to the National of Gallery of Art in Washington, Feb. 19 through May 14, and to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, June 18 through Sept. 11.) The vandalism raises the persistent question of how valuable works of art can be protected in museums that log millions of visitors each year. Many paintings on display today are shielded by glass. At the Louvre, the "Mona Lisa," which was stolen in 1911 and struck by a stone in 1956, is now in a sealed enclosure behind 1.52-inch-thick glass.

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.

A British artist, Michael Landy, held what he called "Break Down" in an empty department store in London in 2001: in this happening, he destroyed all his possessions, including art donated by friends. Two other British artists, the Chapman brothers, were accused of vandalism in 2003 when they added the faces of clowns and puppets to the 80 etchings in an edition of Goya's "Disasters of War" that they had purchased.

In 1991, an artist generally described as unbalanced attacked Michelangelo's "David" statue in Florence, Italy, and damaged a foot.

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."

In the case of Mr. Pinoncelli, who could not be reached on Friday, nothing is accidental. After he urinated in and damaged "Fountain" in the Carré d'Art in Nîmes, he said he wanted to rescue the work from its inflated status and restore it to its original use as a urinal.

Since the early 1960's, Mr. Pinoncelli, based in Nice, has been busy with what he calls "les happenings de rue," or "street happenings." In 1969, he used a water pistol to spray red paint on André Malraux, who was then the French culture minister. In 1975, he "held up" a bank in Nice with a fake gun to protest Nice's decision to become Cape Town's twin city while South Africa was still under apartheid rule. The same year, he paraded outside Nice's courts, covered in large yellow stars, in what he called a homage to deported Jews.

Perhaps his most striking act unfolded in 2002 at a festival of performance art in the Colombian city of Cali. There, he protested the kidnapping of a Colombian politician, Ingrid Betancourt, by the country's leftist guerrillas by chopping off half of the smallest finger of his left hand. He then used his blood to write "FARC," the acronym of the guerrilla group (the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), on a white wall.

"The idea was to share in Colombia's violence," he told reporters at the time. But it apparently did not impress the guerrillas: Ms. Betancourt is still being held.

Gay City News (New York, NY) Volume 75, Number 43 | October 27 - November 2, 2005

Fresh From Seattle

Amy O’Neal’s "convenience" offers humor, originality, and surprise

By GUS SOLOMONS, JR.

A troupe of young collaborators from Seattle calling itself "locust" performed at Joyce SoHo for only two days, October 14 and 15. More’s the pity, because they crammed so much inventiveness, wittiness, and youthful energy into their hour-long dance-music-video show, "convenience," that we can’t wait to see them back in New York soon.

The company’s founders, performer and composer Zeke Keeble and dancer and choreographer Amy O’Neal, who conceived and directed "convenience," are joined by performing collaborators Ellie Sandstrom, also a dancer, and Troy Miszklevitz and Gabriel Baron, both trained as actors. The piece is a continuous array of short, whimsical, and revelatory movement episodes, infused with humor, freshness, and surprise, deftly performed with unmannered grace and gutsy abandon.

The dancing climaxes in a brisk unison duet for the women, which features powerful, low-to-the-ground moves, like break dancers doing Pilates. Throughout, the dance structure recapitulates themes while adding new material. Then, like a magician revealing his tricks, the performers disassemble the video sitting room, which turns out to have been a live shot of the setup backstage. They array the carpet squares along the onstage walls, and do a final movement canon, each framed by a luminous rectangle courtesy of imaginative lighting designer Julie Keenan. As each one finishes moving, his or her light fades in turn, and the wonderful "locust" community dissolves.

Check out the following letter from the Artistic Director of NEEDCOMPANY (Belgium). I think it does an excellent job describing the plight of artists in the early 21st century as they find themselves beyond post modern radicalism, trying to make art that registers during troubling times.

Brussels September 2005

Dear Reader,

In the summer just past we were guests at festivals in Avignon, Marseille and Vienna and after that we visited the Venice Biennale. I often had to think of what Michel Houellebecq wrote in De koude revolutie: ‘that atmosphere of decomposition, of cheerless failure that hangs around contemporary art, in the end grabs you by the throat; at that moment you may magnanimously long for Joseph Beuys and his ideas. Which does not alter the fact that his art gives us a mercilessly precise picture of the age [...] Contemporary art depresses me but I realise there is no better comment on the present state of affairs.’

I believe that the depression aroused by contemporary art is not particularly interesting. I am convinced that these depressions only occur in overindulged western middle-class art. One ought not to forget that almost all the artists who in the late 60s and early 70s destroyed themselves with conviction by swallowing pills, cutting themselves with knives and drinking ammonia have either committed suicide or gone mad. Most of them worked in silence, almost underground and out of sight. Now Vandekeybus has a dancer cut himself in the biggest theatres and censors himself. Just as Fabre did not ‘allow’ any pissing in the Palais des Papes in Avignon. It’s not the censor that alarms me but the outcry that follows. This outcry is an indication of short-sightedness. As if the subversiveness of art had now actually occupied a central position in our society. Nothing could be further from the truth. Radical art is dark and full of energy and takes place in the very smallest corners of our soul. Not in a packed theatre where convention is the standard. Shakespeare already understood this. When he decided to withdraw from the theatre it was not because of censorship or depression, but for socio-economic reasons: the queen had decreed that the theatre should no longer be free. Now we consider it normal that the price of tickets for a play about fourth-world issues should double because it costs too much (see Wolf, the super production by Mortier, the man with sixteen hundred staff).

I am convinced that the rapid changes in our moral codes have overtaken the artistic avant-garde. There is a great urge for security. The success of Isabella’s room is mainly because of that: the accessible openness of the performers, the music and the linear story give the audience a ‘false’ sense of security. And yet I know that this play is necessary. I am more than ever aware that it is becoming increasingly difficult for art to find the right function or redefinition. For me the keyword is ‘humanity’. And this humanity is too often confused with accessibility.

Regards,

Jan Lauwers

Last week's program letter for Maureen Whiting Dance Company (see below) garnered some interesting responses. Check them out at the following link:

Next week, Laurie Anderson will be presented by Seattle Theater Group at the Moore Theater (Nov. 8 & 9) and in conjunction with this event, I will be interviewing Laurie on Nov. 9th at 2 p.m. at the Center of Contemporary Art (COCA). While I'm certain that she will not recall meeting me, our paths have crossed many times. In fact, and this might seem a little grand, but in the same way Harold Bloom places Shakespeare at the center of his take on the Western canon, my life watching performance has been defined through a strange series of watching, meeting and being in close proximity to Laurie.

I first saw her in 1989 when a young coed at the University of Kansas offered me an extra ticket to see "Strange Angels." I had little idea what a performance artist was at the time, but after seeing Laurie, I began telling people that I wanted to be one.

A couple of years after college, I began working as an arts admistrator and since that time, I have never worked for an organization that has not presented Laurie Anderson.

In 1996, I helped co-produce the "Nova Convention: Revisited, " a performance tribute to Lawrence, KS resident William S. Burroughs that featured Laurie, Patti Smith, Michael Stipe, Philip Glass, Debbie Harry, John Giorno and Ed Sanders. This ended up being the last public appearance by Burroughs, some one I've found strangely influential in my own life, and some one Laurie apparently considered to be her artistic mentor.

I moved to New York in 1999 and began working at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which is one of the main institutions to have championed Laurie's work. This fact was evidenced by BAM's commissioning of her "Songs and Stories from Moby Dick," probably her largest undertaking ever, and one that is inspired by a novel that was something of a centerpiece for me during my english major in college.

And now, I find myself working at On the Boards, which was one of the first organizations in the US outside of NYC to present Laurie. I believe the first year she performed in Seattle was 1981. Touring experimental performance art is still a relatively young phenonmenon--one could argue that contemporary art didn't really start to move around the US until the late 1970's. If that's the case, it's certainly easy to see how influential of a figure Laurie's been in bringing attention to a certain kind of performative raison d'être that is at the heart of our mission. While she'll have no idea who I am next Tuesday even though we've met several times, she continues to loom large in what I do.

It is a normal sleepy Saturday morning in Seattle. Overcast. Yet, this has turned out to be a pretty monumental day at OtB. Downstairs in the Studio Space, Judson Church choreographer Deborah Hay began a two day workshop while upstairs on the Mainstage, butoh master Akira Kasai held an informal conversation for close to thirty participants. As I sat listening to Akira talk, still with visions of Deborah’s performance last week in Portland in my head, I couldn’t help thinking about the similarities between these two artists.

Clearly, both artists are regarded as legends, having helped influence significant change in their respective corners of the world and for all of contemporary performance in general. That said, their particular styles of dance are particularly challenging for audiences, seemingly emanating from deep internal territory and manifesting outwards through the entire body in unexpected and even quirky ways. At times it feels as though both artists are performing dance at its purest, most unadorned form; at other times it doesn’t feel like they are dancing at all. This combination can make viewers anxious as it confounds expectations and plays with assumptions about the very nature of performance. Another confusing factor seems to be their mutual relationship to improvisation as a source for making dance. It is easy, I think, to confuse both of their dancing as improvisation when in fact it is much more specific and considered. And while both artists seem to freely incorporate improvisation into their performances, they then rely on repetition in rehearsal and choreography during performances to give their art structure. One only has to spend a little bit of time with each to glean the density of information that informs both of their approaches.

It is interesting that both artists have arrived at the solo as their chosen form of investigation. At this mature stage in both of their careers, it feels as though they are painting waterlillies and channeling expression from deep within the cosmos. This makes it particularly heartwarming to witness the way they freely dispense information to younger artists. We talk a lot here at OtB about newness and innovation, and yet, it isn’t lost on me the role experienced artists continue to play in shaping how the next generation of artists thinks of their work. I often hear while expounding the virtues of some new artistic talent something along the lines of "oh, people were doing that 30 years ago." Often, it is assumed that experimentation that occurred in the past, is therefore, completed or obsolete, when in fact, current generations may need to continue certain paths of inquiry and artmaking such as Akira’s take on butoh and Deborah’s unique memory/concept mode of choreography. I wish the kind of transference of information that has taken place here today at OtB could happen more.