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Smashing the Image
By Samuel Wells
In 1993 a Frenchman
by the name of Pierre Pinoncelli calmly approached one of the most
important works of Art produced in the 20th Century, unzipped his
fly and let loose with a stream of piss that spattered the
million-dollar commodity and created an international outcry. He was
arrested and charged by the French authorities but has since become
an underground folk hero. Recently, Pinoncelli attacked the same
work of Art with a small hammer while it was on display in Nice, and
again was arrested. In the Spring of 2007, the 78-year-old vandal
was convicted, fined $186,000 and given a three-month suspended
sentence.
His defense? The urinal has been "trapped" and should be released
back into the wild of its original purpose and function; its utility
as a tool to explode the possibilities of perception through Art has
degenerated into cliché and meaninglessness. It is after all,
Pinoncelli argues, only a place to piss.
Marcel Duchamp's signed and pseudonymous "readymade" pissoir invites
such attacks, of course: if, as Duchamp meant to imply, all physical
objects can be viewed as magnificent and capable of providing
insight into human consciousness and perception1 then the
act of "freeing" those objects through destruction of their
commodity-value is just another form of liberation through a
destruction of officially sanctioned “meaning”.
Another modern
conceptual artist who understood this concept quite well was Gordon
Matta-Clark, who founded the movement still known as "Anarchitecture",
based on the simple pleasures of destruction and the concomitant
“fuck off” to authority that hides just beneath its surface. Matta-Clark
once attacked an abandoned suburban home in the middle of the night
with a chainsaw, splitting it down the middle. The result, a "house
divided" along an arbitrary axis, is still featured in
graduate-level texts for architecture students as an example of how
Art can transform the commonplace into Joyce's "aesthetic arrest".
One of Matta-Clark’s favorite distractions was the simple pleasure
of using a slingshot to fire ball bearings through the windows of
deserted buildings; as any juvenile delinquent can tell you,
vandalism is one of the most enjoyable forms of instant art
available.
Poet-composer John Cage spent his life creating concerts where the
only sound arose from the audience, poetry that explored the
generation of random acrostics and other formations; he has
posthumously had a musical performance piece begun in Germany in
2002, the entirety of which is scheduled to last 639 years.
Other artists have answered Duchamp's challenge in similarly
outrageous fashion: one British bloke once destroyed everything he
owned in a public ceremony, others have encased dissected animals in
plastic, and in 2002 Pierre Pinoncelli, the man who would free the
pissoir, amputated the top half of his little finger in protest
against a political kidnapping in Columbia.
If the crisis of representation that stimulated the explosion into
Expressionism, Surrealism and Dada at the beginning of the 20th
Century has any meaning left for us poor wretches at the dawn of
this next, blood-filled epoch, it is that hope lies in our ability
to shatter the monopoly of representation through radical action and
artistic creation. William Blake spoke of exactly this course of
action against "single vision and Newton's sleep". He stood in sharp
opposition to the "Enlightenment" ideals of the possibility of
righteous control and the glorification of the domination of the
natural and imaginal worlds. Blake, as did the latter-day
Situationists, embraced the concept of Radical Subjectivity and its
power to explode the control of the human psyche. Like Milton’s
fallen Angel, Blake knew quite well it is better to rule in hell
than serve in a second-rate industrial Heaven.
The museum-fetish
readymade has failed to reach its revolutionary potential for the
same reasons that its musical descendant, the art-brut of punk, has
degenerated into stale cliché and commercialized drivel – a
willingness to allow it to become petrified, categorized and raped
of authentic meaning. Duchamp’s urinal is now as safe and
unthreatening as commercial radio, and has just as much potential to
stifle discourse. Pinoncelli, like these other saboteurs,
anarchitects and propagandists of the deed2 are the true
children of the revolutionary readymade: they have confronted the
ennui and rapacity of hyper-capitalist spectacle with a violent,
obsessive presence.
WB Yeats, stunned by the crudity of Alfred Jarry's groundbreaking
play Ubu Roi (or King Turd), which is about an idiotic
dictator who rises to power by poisoning any who stand in his way
with a used toilet brush, spoke with disturbing foresight about the
rise and dominance of fascism when he proclaimed "After us, the
Savage God". Yeats had little idea how disgustingly accurate his
prediction would come to be, but artists like Duchamp, Cage,
Pinoncelli, Matta-Clark and others have shown us the road to
liberation and continue to reveal its path every time we study their
work or dare to create and destroy our own meaning systems-- shatter
the image, destroy it utterly, rebuild it, and shatter it to dust
once more. Shatter, rebuild, and repeat. Again and again, until we
bring the Savage God to his knees once and forever.
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