Artist cuts finger off during performance piece!

He Can Only Do This Show Nine More Times...
Wed Jun 12,10:32 AM ET

BOGOTA, Colombia (Reuters) - Wielding an ax before a bewildered audience, a French
performance artist chopped off his pinky finger in a gory show meant to symbolize the loss
suffered by the kidnapping of a Colombian politician.

Pierre Pinoncelli, whose previous stunts include urinating on Marcel Duchamp's work "The
Urinal," shocked an art festival audience in the provincial city of Cali with his weekend self
mutilation to protest the kidnapping of Colombian presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt.

Images of the act later reached the capital Bogota, unsettling both the nation and Betancourt's
mother.

Yolanda Pulecio, Betancourt's mother, who helped campaign for her daughter, a
French-educated mother of two, said she had "mixed emotions" over Pinoncelli's act of
solidarity.

"It stunned me. I have mixed feelings, because sometimes I think that it was a beautiful gesture
of sacrifice, and other times, a barbarity," Pulecio told Reuters.

His forehead daubed with a pale cross, the frowning, bearded Pinoncelli used the bloodied
stump of his finger as a paint brush and shook his mauled hand at a wall bearing the initials of
Latin America's largest rebel force, the FARC.

The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, kidnapped Betancourt in February.

The end product of his work was black graffiti FARC lettering, peppered with his blood.

"The idea was to share in Colombia's violence," Pinoncelli, his hand bound in bandages, told the
local press.

Betancourt was educated in Paris, and had been running in absentia as a fringe candidate in
Colombia's May presidential elections. Although she won less than one percent of the vote, her
abduction by the rebels has attracted wide attention in Europe.