Departures of note

Pierre Pinoncelli, a French performance artist, is best remembered for twice attacking Marcel Duchamp's iconic readymade sculpture Fountain with a hammer. His first act occurred on 25 August 1993 at an exhibition in Nîmes, where he urinated into the urinal before striking it. He repeated the hammer attack on 4 January 2006 at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, explaining that he wanted to protest the work's loss of its original provocative power. Each time, he was arrested and later ordered to pay for the damage.

Born in Saint-Étienne, Loire, in April 1929, Pinoncelli built a career as a provocateur. In 1969, he threw a bottle of red ink over André Malraux, then France's minister of culture, in a symbolic gesture. He also robbed a bank in Nice of 10 francs using a sawn-off shotgun, an act he framed as an artistic statement. In a later performance at the V Festival de Performance de Cali in Colombia, he cut off the tip of one of his own fingers to protest the FARC guerrillas' hostage-taking of French-Colombian politician Íngrid Betancourt.

Pinoncelli died on 9 October 2021, at the age of 92. His actions, though controversial, were consistently aimed at challenging the commodification and institutionalization of art, using his own body and everyday objects as his medium.