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Pierre Pinoncelli, a French performance artist was arrested for striking Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain," with a hammer, at a Dada exhibition at the Pompidou Center in Paris.
The porcelain urinal was only slightly damaged. The artist, who back in 1993 also urinated into the same urinal and also struck it with a hammer at a show in Nîmes, France, has a long history of organizing destructivist "happenings"
He has claimed that his action was also a work of art, and in fact a tribute to Duchamp and other Dada artists who had made their name by challenging the very definition of art.
The Pompidou's "Fountain" is one of eight signed replicas made by Duchamp in 1964. The original fountain, a conceptual gesture, made in 1917, when first exhibited at the Society of Independent Artists in New York was rejected for being neither original nor art.
That version of the factory cast urinal, displayed by being flipped upside-down and signed R. Mutt, was subsequently lost. This recent attack by Pinoncelli will ignite more debate around the question as to "What is art?"
In 1993 Pinoncelli was jailed for one month and fined approximately $37,500 for urinating in Duchamp's "Fountain" in the Carré des Arts in Nîmes. He later said he wanted "to rescue the work from its inflated iconic status and return it to its original function as a urinal"
-Alfred Stieglitz, Photograph of Duchamp's Fountain (1917)-