Iconoclasm is a fascinating, often depressing, sometimes quite entertaining, and seemingly omnipresent phenomenon in the history of art. There are countless examples of it.  And though most intentional “image-breaking” has probably occurred either in the name religion and religious reformation, or as a necessity in the case of bronze sculptures being melted down for the purposes of warfare (to which the paucity of existing ancient Greek sculpture is attributed), the particular form of (mostly) modern iconoclasm in which art is destroyed with some kind of artistic intention, is the most interesting to me.  Within that category, numerous strategies have been taken, from institutional critique, to appropriation, to forgery, to vandalism.  One of the most famous stories is of art dealer Tony Shafrazi’s 1974 spray-painting of Picasso’s Guernica at the MoMA in New York.  “KILL LIES ALL,” he scrawled, with the purported intention of retrieving the work from the cobwebs of the museum-as-mausoleum, and bringing it up to date.  The artistic avant-garde has frequently used iconoclasm as a strategy to demand a radical break from the past — it was the Italian Futurists who proposed the demolishing of Italy’s museums and libraries, and Malevich who implored that we ‘let all periods burn, as one dead body.’

There is a subcategory of artistically motivated iconoclasm, which is ironically not typically the destruction, but the use or reintegration of readymades.

Let’s look at Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, perhaps the most pivotal work in the trajectory of modern art, akin in a certain sense to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity or Leibniz’s calculus.  Certainly it was easier to conceive and execute than those examples, and perhaps the stakes of modern art are lower than the stakes of cosmic reality (perhaps not…), but its influence was game changing in the same ontological way.

Artists who have urinated in/on Duchamp’s Fountain:

Note: There are eight copies of Fountain.  I don’t know to which ones these recorded acts happened.

• Pierre Pinoncelli – 1993 – Dada show at the Centre Pompidou (in 2006, Pinocelli also attacked with a hammer and slightly chipped Fountain, while on display in Nimes)

• Bjorn Kjelltoft – 1999 – Moderna Museet in Stockholm

• Yuan Chai and Jian Jun Xi – 2000 – Tate Modern in London (the artists were prevented from urinating into Fountain directly by its Perspex case;  the artist duo had also frolicked in Tracy Emin’s Unmade Bed the year before)

Any others?  Obviously, certain artists have taken into question the limits and teleology of readymades.  Readymades strafe around the traditional notions of artist as producer, and so at what point does it become fair game to directly engage these objects in order to transfigure the gesture once more?  These artists have all stated that Duchamp would have approved of their additions to the work.

Similarly, when, in 1994, Mark Bridger spilled black ink into Damien Hirst’s Away From The Flock at Serptenine Gallery in London, he claimed to have hoped that Hirst would accept his gesture as a form of dialogue.  The observation has been made that since Hirst’s work often possesses parasitic qualities, this adds to the justifiability of Bridger’s addition; readymades, in comparison, could be argued as even more parasitic than some of Hirst’s work — should this logic actually encourage their re-appropriation, as in the case of urinating into an appropriated urinal?

Many would say absolutely not and are appalled by people like Pinoncelli, and while it is true that the irrevocable demolition of an object that is a historical artifact is usually going to be a negative thing, under circumstances of thoughtfulness and a nuanced understanding of what works might be most interesting and not just affective as broken objects, I consider these acts daring at the least, and, at the most … democratic in the antagonistic sense that the debate over relational aesthetics in the last fifteen years has revolved around (a la Guattari, Deleuze, Laca, Mouffe, and others).  Daniel Birnbaum, in an essay for Frieze magazine (June-August 1997), discusses the distinctions that have been made among artists between the metaphorical proposition of a work’s destruction and the actual execution. Birnbaum gives the examples of Duchamp’s Green Box (1934) (the positively fascinating collection of notes by Duchamp chronicling the creative process behind The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1923)), in which he talked of using ‘a Rembrandt as an ironing board,’ and Antonia Saura, who dreamed of knifing the vaginas in Guernica.  Perhaps the discussion of the desire to destroy a work can be an equally potent gesture intellectually speaking, but it does not physically write history as Shafrazi did.  As a clever and old fox twist, Shafrazi Gallery in New York hosted an excellent exhibition in 2008, conceived by Gavin Brown and Urs Fischer, called Who’s Afraid of Jasper Johns?, in which the works were hung over and in relation to wallpaper reproductions of other works that had previously displayed at the gallery, or that served as influences.

Picasso was the very same one who said in 1954, “For me, an image is the sum of its destructions.”  An intriguing implication of this statement – although I am willfully misreading Picasso’s words in this case – is that it intersects with what Dario Gamboni writes in The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism (1997), which is that an act of iconoclasm, even when performed by a non-artist, perhaps motivated by religion, politics, feminism, or pathology, always has artistic meaning, even if unconscious.  This is interesting with regard to readymades, since they are often objects originally intended for non-artistic use.  Suddenly, using Gamboni’s logic, all use of objects, even in the most quotidien way, is in some sense art, and all destruction somehow iconoclasm.

One of the more recent developments in what is by now the very broadly defined iconoclasm, is that, in the thoroughly post-modern era (assuming the usefulness of such a designation for a moment) of at least the last fifty years or so, institutional critique of all stripes has become increasingly institutionalized; provocation, as Birnbaum puts it, is expected in the modern house of worship.  Ideas vary about the potency of most contemporary art that aims to provoke; activism is surely still alive, and the borders between art and other communication media have been corroding perhaps since those borders were first consciously erected when “high art” was invented, but much contemporary art that talks to other contemporary art seems sportive. A sport. ” Guaranteed sanity,” as Louise Bourgeoise defines art.  So, when Russian artist Alexandr Brener goes to the Stedelijk Museum and sprays a green dollar sign over Malevich’s White Cross on Gray (1927), I find the gesture refreshingly dangerous.  I’ll save the rant about the hyper-abundance of art images today that casts a pall on all traditional image and object making’s.  I will say, though, that a truly radical art critic would be one who would, if she felt it necessary, destroy or physically alter a work in the name of art.  It might follow from that logic that curators, too, should play a more antagonistic role in the exhibiting of art and the shaping of artistic practice and reception.  It seems appropriate to return to Duchamp, as we often find ourselves doing, for it was he who taught the great Walter Hopps the “cardinal curatorial rule: in the organization of exhibitions, the work must not stand in the way.”

Alexandr Brener's vandalism/critique on capitalism, over Malevich

a reproduction of Pinoncelli's defiling of the French state's copy Fountain

Mark Bridger's addition or ruination of Damien Hirst's Away From The Flock

Lazlo Toth being carried away after attacking Michelangelo's Pieta, and claiming that he was Jesus Christ, at the Vatican

Felix Gmelin's re-painting of Picasso's Guernica after Shafrazi's intervention; part of a series where he further modified vandalized images

Marcel Duchamp's Green Box contents displayed

Martijn Hendriks - xxxxx In The Expanded Field, a redacted version of Rosalind Krauss' key text, with all references to 'art' removed

Martijn Hendrik's Healed Britney, part of a series in which he "healed" images of celebrities that had been defiled in public spaces

Wall view of Who's Afraid of Jasper Johns (2008) at Shafrazi Gallery