Art N' About

Author: Lauren Smith

On Tuesday, a 77-year-old Frenchman was sentenced to three months in prison and ordered to pay a fine of nearly $300,000. The charge? He attacked the infamous urinal created by Marcel Duchamp during the 1920s Dada art movement with a hammer at an exhibit in Paris, France.

This is not the first time Pierre Pinoncelli has gotten in trouble for his "performance art." In 1993, at an exhibit in Nimes, France, he urinated on the same piece. In a more recent performance, he cut off his own finger as an expression of solidarity with Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt, held hostage by leftist guerrillas since 2002.

Pinoncelli argued at his sentencing that Duchamp would "have had a good laugh" at his attack. He called the attack, which caused minimal damage to the piece, "a 'wink' at Dadaism." I happen to agree with him, but perhaps he should consider winking at Dadaism when 3.4 million (the estimated worth of the urinal) isn't at stake. He said the piece, which is one of eight versions, is "now an original. " Perhaps Duchamp, who once said he doesn't "believe in art," would have heralded Pinoncelli's actions.

Dadaism emerged in Zurich after World War 1, when artists became disillusioned with a society that could allow the terrors of war. The derivation of the term "dada" is debatable, but one humorous, if questionable, explanation concerns a meeting held in 1916 at Hugo Ball's (an artist and the creator of the Dada manifesto) CabaretVoltaire in Zürich, during which a paper knife inserted into a French-German dictionary pointed to the word "dada"- a child's word for a toy horse. The absurdity of that situation lends itself particularly well to the artwork created by Dada artists, which often was quite absurd.

According to its proponents, Dada was not art - it was "anti-art". For everything that art stood for, Dada was to represent the opposite. Dada ignored aesthetics. Dada strove to have no meaning- hence, the interpretation of Dada is dependent entirely on the viewer. And Dadaism also strove to offend. This is something that Pinoncelli perhaps took too far, at least in the eyes of the French judicial system.

Dadaism seems to be making a big splash this year in the art world, first with Pinoncelli's much-publicized hammer attack and next with possibly the most comprehensive exhibition of Dada art in the United States organized by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and the Museum of Modern Art in Paris in collaboration with the Museum of Modern Art (MoMa) in New York.

This exhibit, which is being touted as "a landmark exhibition" by the National Gallery, will focus on the movement in its six most important city centers -- Zurich, Berlin, Cologne, Hannover, New York and Paris. Over 400 works from between 1916 and 1924 will be featured, including the restored "Fountain" by Duchamp.

The Dada movement came to New York in 1916 and was centered in the gallery of photographer Alfred Stieglitz. Duchamp, Man Ray and painter and poet Francis Picabia were the key players in the American movement.

The exhibit will run from Feburary 19 - May 14 at the National Gallery, and then will travel to MoMa to be exhibited from June 18 - September 11.