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 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 Pinoncelli, who could not be reached last week, nothing is accidental.
After Pinoncelli urinated in and damaged Fountain in the Carre d'Art in Nimes, 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 1960s, 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 Andre 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: Betancourt is still being held.
RSS