Feature

Representing Destruction

Matthew Bowman considers the role of archives in recording and representing the destruction of art by artists and by others

Sam Durant, Paris 1871, 2018

Matthew Bowman considers the role of archives in recording and representing the destruction in and of art, whether by artists themselves or, more often, at the hands of others, and how such destruction affects our perceptions of the past, present and future.

A confluence of events this summer has drawn renewed attention towards the question of destruction and art. Collaborating with Flat Time House, curator Jes Fernie has established an online platform, Archive of Destruction, bringing together ‘narratives around destruction and public art’. Very much a work, or conversation, in progress, the archive contains famous cases, such as the 1989 dismantling of Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc, 1981, and the auto-destruction of Jean Tinguely’s Homage to New York, 1960, alongside perhaps lesser-known projects such as Maja Bekan’s A Series of Unexpected Events, 2014–17, which investigates the mysterious disappearance of Alfons Karny’s 1928 neoclassical sculpture Nude Boy from a Polish housing estate in 1992. In June, meanwhile, the Glasgow International festival featured 13 of Sam Durant’s Iconoclasm drawings, 2018, each of which depicts the felling or destruction of a monument, such as the statue of Joseph Stalin in Budapest during October 1956. Each monument was envisaged by their commissioners as a permanent object of display erected for the benefit of future generations, yet the fragility of their conjoint materiality and universalising claims is made plain as those generations increasingly refuse to accept certain monuments as their civic representation. Then there is the current display of the Edward Colston statue at M Shed in Bristol. Placed in a reclining position, with the spray paint now preserved upon its surface, the statue has finally attained the status that its makers dreamt of: namely, to be a testament to living history, albeit not the history that the original Colston admirers envisaged.

Taking all these instances together, we can perceive the diverse ways in which destruction is figured. In some cases, destruction is a matter of contingency, an unfortunate event that happens to befall an artwork; in others, it is a theme, a subject that artists may take up; on occasion, destruction is simultaneously form and content insofar as an artwork may be intentionally submitted to a process of self-degradation as a metaphor or metonym for any number of contextual frameworks (the fragility of human life, war, environmental destruction at the hands of the ‘capitalocene’ etc); and, finally, there are moments when destruction is neither form nor content as such, but instead is comprehended as art’s – and not just art’s – essence, what an artist such as Robert Smithson addressed when he posited that entropy was central to his practice. This rough typology, summarising the case studies included in Fernie’s Archive of Destruction, runs the gamut from destruction of art to destruction in art and ultimately concludes in destruction as art. The first of these categories probably has the longest history inasmuch as hundreds of years of cases can be attributed to it. Think, for instance, of the pervasive iconoclasm of the Reformation. But historically the iconoclasm of the Reformation crosses over into destruction in art in the variegated body of practices that we call Romanticism. Yet despite numerous commonalities – the interweaving between becoming and unbecoming, for instance – destruction in art largely diverges from the Romantic allegorisation of the ruin, in which agency frequently tends towards vagueness, as if the ruin is just the manifestation of time’s incessant march, or nature’s power to supplant culture, rather than the consequence of human action. To some degree, Romanticism naturalised destruction in the figure of the ruin, even assigning the notion of the picturesque to it, perhaps as a means of managing its complex Reformation inheritance as well as the excesses of the French Revolution. In the long run, though, we might suspect that destruction in art only became visible in the second half of the 20th century, in a distinctly postwar context, finding its proper articulation in the so-called dematerialisation of Conceptual Art or in ground-breaking events such as Gustav Metzger’s Destruction in Art Symposium.

It is not difficult to construe why destruction has lately become of interest once again. At the forefront has been fierce debates, fought with renewed vigour in recent years, over celebratory monuments dedicated to those who marshalled and/or benefited from colonialism. The apparent obduracy and permanency of monuments ostensibly permits them to transcend historicity and decay, yet such transcendence has become all the more patently illusionary. Generally camouflaged in plain sight, and predominantly unnoticed by the public, monuments have recently accrued a heightened visibility, revealing the mismatch between past values and today’s stances. Because it is normally the spectator in front of the artwork who is the transient being (artworks often have more past and future than their beholders), destruction in and of art acknowledges the artwork’s unsurmountable fragility. Going further, destruction in art operates as a cultural template imparting a lesson that monument-makers would typically prefer to deny: namely that their products, too, can be destroyed, and that the material and historical permanency they crave is an Ozymandian fantasy. Denis Diderot once wrote: ‘If we love truth more than the fine arts, let us pray to God for some iconoclasts.’ Today there is no need for prayers – the responsibility falls upon us alone – and where Diderot references the ‘fine arts’, we might substitute ‘monuments’. Diderot’s mention of ‘iconoclasts’ calls to mind the distinction Dario Gamboni made between iconoclasm and vandalism in his 1997 classic The Destruction of Art. For Gamboni, the former expresses political motivations whereas the latter does not. While it is imperative to apply the distinction on a case-by-case basis, iconoclasm can possess moral import, indicating that destruction need not be comprehended as wholly negative. How, though, can a more positive account of destruction be derived?

In the later phase of his career, Michel Foucault exhorted his readers to consider that the instrumentalised deployment of power should be construed as a productive force rather than as a merely oppressive apparatus, otherwise the widespread acceptance of its coercive mechanisms and effects would prove unexplainable. By the same token, it is likewise imperative to grasp that destruction is a mode of production. There are, to be sure, plenty of cases of destruction through mindless vandalism or simple negligence, through intention or by accident, that would not equate destruction with production, the two understood as intertwined processes, but there are equally plentiful instances in which that intertwinement is in place, whereby destruction participates and circulates within the economy of representation as symbolic action. As such, destruction as both production and representation is surely irreducible to – though it may partake in – any logic premised upon ‘destroying representations’ or even the wholesale metaphysical ‘destruction of representation’.

Musing on the paintings on the walls of the caves of Lascaux, Georges Bataille daringly proposed that the prehistoric origins of art stemmed not from some inner necessity defined by creativity, but rather evinced man’s drive towards destruction and disfiguration. Such a drive, for Bataille, was articulated most forcefully in humanity’s self-image: while animals are depicted with mimetic plausibility, painted images of humans are characterised by the violent deformation of their defining physical attributes as if those attributes, perhaps even the whole ideal of humanity itself, compelled such self-laceration. Bataille’s claim is undoubtedly tendentious from an archaeological standpoint, speaking more to the intellectual needs of his present than to the weight of accumulated material evidence, yet its virtue is its suggestiveness, the way it proffers a counterweight to aggrandising humanist cliches about art. It has the benefit, moreover, of imagining alternative histories in which art and representation have destruction not only at but as their origin too. A further advantage of Bataille’s analysis is that it highlights a ground for which destruction in art, rather than of it, can be critically adduced in artists such as Metzger, Alberto Burri, Lucy Skaer and many others.

Because destruction possesses a representational dimension – it is a mode of symbolic communication with origins in primordial (self-)representation and mimesis – we can begin to comprehend the public and performative elements undergirding acts of destruction, whether they be in or of art. The public aspect is an explicit focus of Fernie’s Archive of Destruction; by this she means not that the work is simply placed ‘outdoors’ away from the white cube space but that it exists in relation to the public, and hence is ultimately subject to judgement by the public. That is to say, the work participates in the public sphere, and takes upon itself the risk of its undoing. In 1959 Metzger similarly wrote – anticipating JG Ballard’s fictions – that ‘auto-destructive art is primarily a form of public art for industrial societies’. Notions of the public sphere, of course, demand theorising in order to account for a multitude of circumstances; there is no unitary, unchanging public sphere, no undifferentiated public. Fernie acknowledges that multivalency, through a certain ambiguity, allows for a work like Smithson’s Partially Buried Woodshed, 1970, to exist in the archive alongside Alison Wilding’s Ambit, 1999–2002. With the former installed on the grounds of Kent State University and the latter on the River Wear in Sunderland, their publics differ as much as their conceptions of the public sphere. Although installed at the university, Smithson most likely did not imagine his work having an immediate public or audience as such – his general tendency is to complicate beholdership by displacing it – but within months the student body nonetheless ‘activated’ its public function by daubing ‘May 4 Kent 70’ on the structure in the immediate aftermath of the massacre of students by the Ohio National Guard during a protest against the Vietnam War, apprehending a commonality joining the entropic attributes of Smithson’s work to the murder of four students.

Durant’s work likewise takes the public sphere as one of its cornerstones. This is widespread throughout his practice and is amplified here by the decision to position the drawings in various street locations around Glasgow. Threaded into the urban fabric, the drawings produce images of various other urban spaces, examining how those spaces have been utilised for ideological purposes, made to represent specific political imaginaries through the installations of monuments. Toppling those monuments, then, is an effort to re-establish representational frameworks better suited to the self-understanding of a given public. As such, Durant’s works generate recursive effects, encouraging those traversing Glasgow’s streets to muse on both the use-value and representation-value of their own civic locales. It is noteworthy, too, that those drawings are copied from photographs documenting the moments in which the monuments were destroyed. Durant’s two-channel film Trope, 2020, reinforces this public aspect by appropriating televisual footage of monuments being toppled. Not only is the publicness of destruction underscored by the camera being in place to document the event for posterity, but in several of the scenes a throng of people are standing there as witnesses, as if their presence is necessarily required, as if the performativity of destruction could not be secured in the absence of a crowd. In this respect, destruction unfolds itself as spectacle, or rather as a counter-spectacle, a quasi-Situationist reassertion of the publicness of civic space against the alienation it is made to foster. It also recalls the gruelling public execution, forensically described at length by Foucault, of Robert-François Damiens; a masterclass in the cruel theatricality of absolute power wielded in response to attempted regicide.

Of course, not all events of destruction are like this. The overnight removal of Serra’s Tilted Arc in 1989, literally under the cover of darkness, was in great measure to circumvent such witnessing and therefore also the public. Indeed, because the legal process upon which the fate of Tilted Arc was to be resolved in public, and because that process overall broadly decided in Serra’s favour, such circumvention became ‘necessary’. Any distinction between iconoclasm and vandalism, to that degree, is perhaps less dependent on a difference between political and apolitical motivations than it is between public and private, open and secretive, types of destruction; dismantling Tilted Arc is possibly less iconoclasm than vandalism on that score. Obviously not all acts of vandalism disclose ideological convictions, but it is often fundamental to such acts that intentions are occluded insofar as the agent carries out their actions away from view.

Witnessing, therefore, has a major role to play in acts of destruction. Putting matters more forcibly, we might conceive that the actual purpose of an archive in this situation, such as Archive of Destruction, is less to document, taxonomise, regulate and preserve a fragmentary collection of ephemera than to develop the opportunity to bear witness; in this context it should be noted, too, that Durant has amassed an archive that subtends his Iconoclasm works. However, witnessing is doubly complicated here when it comes to Archive of Destruction since we are not in a position to watch the process of destruction itself (we are too late to the scene, so to speak, and standing in the wrong place anyway) and because this archive manifests itself as an online, more-or-less dematerialised platform relating, and perhaps displacing, past material events. Hence it is with necessity that Fernie’s archive utilises a discursive element in the form of commissioned essays that meditate on these destroyed artworks.

As is so often the case, our witnessing takes the form of an attempt to recuperate an object already irrevocably lost. This, to be sure, brings us back to questions concerning the ruin, allegory, the relation of past to present. It was with that framework in mind that, at least according to one translation, in 1940 Walter Benjamin wrote: ‘Every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its own threatens to disappear irretrievably.’ But here it is crucial to add a necessary qualification: precisely because the object is lost, any recuperation of it cannot make it reappear from who knows where; instead, it falls upon the witness to mark the object’s indelible absence, to mentally trace the chalk outline of where it used to exist, cognise its significance through noting its after-effects. As such, witnessing dovetails with the ethics of repair, recently discussed by Kader Attia with considerable eloquence (Interview AM448), in which evidence of damage is maintained rather than hidden.

However, it is hard to subdue the thought that all these destructions pale in the face of the latest round of culture wars desperately promoted by the right. While an act of destruction is symbolic, its political effects can be either deleterious or beneficial and, because destruction participates in the economy of representation, any destructive act potentially can be appropriated by the opposing side and given a different significance. This is hardly a new strategy, of course: the US culture wars fought at the conclusions of the 1980s were arguably waged by the resurgent Republicans as a final Cold War proxy conflict, converting their socio-medical failure to deal with the AIDS crisis into a crisis of so-called traditional family values threatened by artists caricatured as ‘communist’. Correspondingly, seeking to diminish public questioning, or the imagined threat of it, by counteracting the consequences of pandemic mismanagement and apparently unexpected results of Brexit, the Tories are counterfeiting the distracting spectacle of supposedly ‘loony lefties’ and their abhorrent disrespect for the essential gloriousness of the UK. Thus they attempt to subvert continuing debates, like those emblematised by the toppling of the Colston statue, rendering them profoundly ambivalent. At its worst, the right might actually desire the left’s assault on monuments valorising historical slave traders, enjoying it as an opportunity to rally its own base. In another respect, as Durant has argued in a short text published in October, the real purpose of many monuments is not to promote memory but rather engender amnesia. The right-wing defence of monuments is to maintain continued forgetting, lest the histories of how the subjects accumulated their wealth and power enters the full light of day, thereby threatening their current putative legitimacy. When a ‘monument’ endangers that ‘legitimacy’, such as Gabriella Hirst’s anti-nuclear An English Garden, 2021, in Southend, the right’s response is to demand the artwork’s removal or, even, destruction.

The right-wing’s exceptionally punitive response to those who demystify and challenge monuments has little to do with heritage or tradition at all, but rather seeks to advantage their present. Closely allied with these legal measures has been an endeavour to hamstring cultural institutions as well as to damage art education at all pedagogical levels by asserting a hierarchal binary between so-called STEM subjects and the arts. Destruction normally entails a physical action, but it need not have that physicality or material basis, as right-wing subversion of destruction’s capacity for representation evidences. These immaterial right-wing destructions are, actually, all the more pernicious: they seek to abolish opportunities and restrict horizons for present and future generations. Ultimately, it might be suggested that what matters is not destruction in the public sphere or by the public, but the destruction of the public sphere itself and the social bonds that it can foster.

All this serves, then, to demonstrate that in acts of destruction the future is at stake, thereby disclosing why it is important that archives bear witness to myriad objects recuperable only as always lost. Benjamin’s ‘On the Concept of History’ imagined history as a vast accumulation of debris overwatched by Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus – an image that summoned the book burnings, Kristallnacht, and the ruination of human life through mass genocide wrought by the Nazis on the one hand, and veritably foretold the postwar emergence of Trümmerliteratur, ‘rubble literature’, on the other. Earlier I quoted a passage from that essay taken from its original translation in Illuminations. The revised translation, included in the final volume of Benjamin’s Selected Writings, is interestingly different and worth including in this context: ‘For it is an irretrievable image of the past which threatens to disappear in any present that does not recognise itself as intended in that image.’ Here the temporal entanglements between past, present, and future emerge in their fullest complexity. The job of the Benjaminian archive, we might suggest, is – paraphrasing Jules Michelet – to discover how past generations dreamt of, and sought to make contact with, the ones that would later follow. And in terms of Fernie’s Archive of Destruction and Durant’s Iconoclasm, we might contend that their archival impulse is to ensure that destruction, as a mode of representation and production, has a future. More fundamentally, they demonstrate that, in destruction, the future is at stake.

Matthew Bowman is a lecturer at the University of Suffolk and Bath Spa University.

First published in Art Monthly 449: September 2021.