Bachelors in the crowd at MONA attacked artist Dana Smith.

Art damage

A night of creative destruction in Detroit

by Jef Bourgeau
10/19/2005

 

 
During its three years in Detroit, the Museum of New Art mounted a show titled kaBOOM! in March 2002. It was after 9-11, so the climate was ripe for a show about iconoclasm. Plus, the whole notion of vandalizing work in the name of art had become a movement as such stretching back into the 19th century, and, at last, deserved a museum survey of its own.

It was assumed that within a controlled situation, actions could be controlled. Included in the show’s 100 works to be destroyed was a reproduction of Man Ray’s “Object to Be Destroyed” and Duchamp’s “Fountain.” The opening began well enough, with Ray’s piece being violently undone per instructions provided by the artist himself, hammer included. By the end of the night, though, someone had not only urinated in Duchamp’s fountain but also into his “Why not Sneeze, Rrose Sélavy?” — a birdcage with sugar cubes — irreparably discoloring the sugar cubes. Then someone else stomped the cage to pieces. Another visitor took both his museum handouts on the history of art vandalism and a reproduction of Duchamp’s “LHOOQ” (Mona Lisa with a moustache), and set fire to it all in the recently drained fountain. The fire in turn was put out using the nearby bottle of fluid excreta from Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ” (reconstituted).

And what was to have been an orderly performance combining Yoko Ono’s “Cut” with Duchamp’s “The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even” quickly descended into a chaotic attack on the performance artist in her bridal gown, leaving her in tears and running naked for the safety of a locked room.

A scaled reconstruction of Tyree Guyton’s Heidelberg Project, a polka-dotted house with a wrecking ball, was destroyed as hoped. Fine. But then the wrecking ball was turned on the museum’s own walls, creating huge holes in the drywall before that could be stopped.

By the end of the night, in all the pandemonium of freedom, someone had the nerve to write on a wall with their own feces: “Fuck Art Rules!” Someone actually complained, because the museum staff was actively trying to control the audience from burning the place down. That’s a pile of irony, considering how the show had operated without many rules at all — except, perhaps, don’t burn us down.

The best moment of the night, though, was when a young boy, about 6 or 7, turned to me as he was leaving the museum with his dad and said: “I’ve never had more fun anywhere in my life.” This was shortly after the Metro Times art critic, along with a nearby-museum curator, had run scared for the doors.

 

Jef Bourgeau is the director of the Museum of New Art.

 

A BRIEF HISTORY OF ART TAGGING:

1916 - Marcel Duchamp tags another artist’s work with his own signature at the Cafe des Artistes in New York. And declares it "now mine!"

1896 - An artist in the Paris group called "The Incoherents" adds a beard to the Venus of Milo, calling it "Husband of the Venus of Milo."

1919 - Marcel Duchamp draws a moustache and goatee on the Mona Lisa.

1981 - David Hammons creates his piece "Pissed Off" by urinating on a steel sculpture by Richard Serra.

1953 - Robert Rauscheburg acquires a Willem de Kooning drawing, and erases it entirely "to make art...by erasing art."

1974 - "KILL LIES ALL" is written onto Picasso’s GUERNICA in the Museum of Modern Art (New York) by Tony Shafrazi, who considers himself an artist and describes his Guernica "action" as innovative art. Tony goes on to start a successful New York gallery.

The Penalty phase:
1989 - Three men receive life imprisonment for splashing paint on a portrait of Mao in Tiananmen Square.

1972 - Lazlo Toth attacks Michelangelo’s PIETA with a hammer in St. Peter’s in Rome, shouting the whole time: I am Jesus Christ, Christ is risen from the dead."
Giacomo Manzu calls for the death penalty. At the other extreme, artists in Residence at the Swiss Institute send a telegram to the Pope suggesting Toth get an award.

1993 - At the Carre d’Art in Nimes Pierre Pinoncelli urinates in Duchamp’s "Fountain" (1917-1964). He is charged and sentenced to one month imprisonment for "voluntary degradation of an object of public utility." In his defense at the trial, Pinoncelli claims that "Duchamp would have understood. I gave back to the "Fountain" its original function."

These following three incidents are revealing over  time and success:
1950 - Austrian artist Arnulf Rainer begins to paint over, not only his own pictures, but those by others as well.
1961 - He is arrested for painting over a prized print in Wolfsburg Austria. The print is later sold at an increased value to the Stadtische Galerie.
1994 - Twenty-five of Rainer’s own works are discoverd painted over in his school studio at the Vienna Academy. Police are called by an angry Rainer, but do not crack the case. Without proof, Rainer blames another member of the staff saying he acted out of jealousy.

 

A list of some related events

Set to Auto Destruct:

1925 - French artist Charles Camoin successfully applies to French court to have destroyed those canvases he had torn and thrown away in 1914, which have been recovered by a rag-gatherer, restored and put on sale by a Paris art dealer.

1990- Donald Judd oversees the destruction of a metal wall constructed under his name in an unauthorized exhibition from the collection of Count Panza in the Musee d’Art Moderne (Paris).

The art of vandalism:

1872 - John Ruskin and his bookseller Ellis burn, “with all due ceremony”, a set of Goya’s CAPRICHOS.

1909 - Courbet’s painting THE RETURN FROM THE CONFERENCE (1863) is bought and destroyed by an “exalted Catholic” for being anti-clerical.

1912 - A young woman adds rouge to the forehead and nose of a portrait by Francois Boucher at the Louvre. “She was lacking color,” she explains.

1914 - Mary Richardson, a suffragette, repeatedly hacks at Velasquez’s nude, THE ROKEBY VENUS (1640-48), at the National Gallery in London. “I don’t like the way men visitors gape at her all day.”

1934 - Diego Rivera’s mural MAN AT THE CROSSROADS in the Rockefeller Center, New York, is destroyed for portraying Lenin among its figures.

1935 -Jacob Epstein’s sculptures (1907-1908) on the British Medical Association Building are destroyed when the Southern Rhodesian Government purchases the building in London.

1946 - Alfred D. Crimi’s fresco (1938) on the rear wall of Rutger’s Presbyterian Church is painted over because it “puts too much emphasis on Christ’s bare chest.”

1959 - Acid is thrown on Ruben’s FALL OF THE DAMNED at Munich’s Alte Pinakothek. The assailant says that he did not directly destroy the work, that the acid “relieves one from the work of destruction.”

1966- Gustav Metzger throws acid on several of his nylon “paintings” which disintegrate within minutes.

1960 - David Smith’s 17h’s, a sculpture created 10 years earlier, is stripped of its coat of red paint to increase its value during the process of sale and resale.

1961 - The over-sized testicles on Jacob Epstein’s angel sculpture for Oscar Wilde’s tomb (1914, Paris) are hacked off by two indignant English ladies. They are recovered by the cemetery keeper, who uses them for paper weights.

1962 - A night guard at the Louvre scratches x-shapes into nine paintings with his museum keys.

1965 - The executors of David Smith’s estate, with the support of Clement Greenberg, order the removal of white paint from a number of Smith’s open-air works.

1966 - Using her nail file, a woman damages a picture by Hobbema in the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

1971 - Hans Haacke’s one-man exhibition is cancelled by the Guggenheim Museum, because it was thought that it might offend some important New York landowners. Thomas Messer, the director, is criticized for censorship and made to leave the museum.

1989 - As director of the Corcoran Gallery in Washington D.C., Christina Orr Cahall cancels the touring Mapplethorpe exhibition and is forced to leave the museum for her actions.

1974 - “KILL LIES ALL” is written on Picasso’s GUERNICA in the Museum of Modern Art (New York) by Tony Shafrazi, who considers himself an artist and describes his Guernica “action” as innovative art. Tony goes on to run a successful New York gallery.

1975 - Renault junks the half-completed environmental sculpture commissioned from Jean Dubuffet.

1975 - A psychiatric patient slashes Rembrandt’s NIGHTWATCH in the Netherlands.

1976 - In Omaha’s Joslyn Museum, a bronze statue is taken off its pedestal and thrown at the Bouguereau painting, THE SPRING (1886), by a 37-year-old window-cleaner who finds it filthy.

1977 - A 43-year-old woman, Ruth van Herpen, plants a heavy lipstick kiss on a white monochrome canvas by the American painter Jo Baer, at the Oxford Museum of Modern Art. At her trial, she said that she had found the painting cold and had wanted to “cheer it up”.

1982 - Josef Kleer attacks Barnett Newman’s WHO’S AFRAID OF RED, YELLOW AND BLUE IV (1969-70) with one of the very bars meant to keep museum visitors from getting too close to the work.

1988 - Richard Serra’s work, BERLIN JUNCTION, is vandalized by the inscription: 560,000 marks for this shit!

1988 - Hans Haacke’s wooden monument in the city of Graz Austria, Mariensaule, is set on fire by a former Nazi.

1989 - Three men receive life imprisonment for splashing paint on a portrait of Mao in Tiananmen Square.

1989 - Richard Serra’s TILTED ARC (1981) is dismantled and removed from the Federal Plaza in New York.

1995 - The heads of Henry Moore’s bronze King and Queen (1954) are sawn off on a remote hillside in Scotland.

2 ART EXHIBITIONS

1917 - Assassinated Art Exhibition is mounted, displaying art mutilated by war at the Petit Palais, Paris.

1937 - Nazis mount the exhibition ENTARTETE KUNST (DEGENERATE ART) in Munich. Over 100,000 visitors.

Related events:

1953 - Richard Nixon: “There is a need to investigate ‘objectionable art’ in governmental buildings with the view to obtaining removal of all that is found to be inconsistent with American ideals and principles.”

1981 - Ernst Volland’s open-air exhibition in East Berlin is vandalized by police and painted over with white paint.

2001 - The Taliban government destroys the statues of Buddha...

2002 - The partially nude statue at the Justice Department Building, the Spirit of Justice (1934), will now be covered with a blue drape “for aesthetic reasons.”

Hans Haacke: Art remains art.

Daniel Buren: Art remains politics.

1994 - Joseph Kosuth wrote of Ad Reinhardt’s work: “Painting itself had to be erased, eclipsed, painted out in order to make art.”

1953 - Robert Rauschenberg produced a work entitled “Erased de Kooning Drawing”. This was made by using rubber erasers to literally rub-out a drawing that he had persuaded de Kooning to give him specifically for that purpose. It took a month and about forty erasers to erase/make.

1973 - Jasper Johns crosses out his signature in the silk-screen print Untitled (Skull) from the portfolio Reality and Paradoxes.

1966 - Conrad Atkinson host the first Destruction of Art Symposium

1970 - The American West Coast artist Chris Burden investigates the psychological experience of personal danger and physical risk. In Shoot, Burden allows himself to be shot in the arm.

1973 - ‘Through the Night Softly‘, Burden ties his arms behind his naked torso, dragging himself over shards of broken glass.

1975 - In Conical Intersect, Gordon Matta-Clark documents the tearing down of a building in sections. To him the deconstruction of a building is similar to the construction of a piece of art.

- Robert Smithson creates organic sculptures from materials of the earth that are later destroyed by natural causes. He recognizes that we are physically and culturally bound to the earth and that the classic metaphor of nature as a primordial garden was obsolete for a landscape that bore so many scars of disruption.

1999 - Retired English teacher Dennis Heiner smears white paint all over Chris Ofili's controversial Holy Virgin Mary at the Brooklyn Museum.

2000 - Two self-proclaimed performance artists, Yuan Cai and Jian Jun Xi, relieved themselves on Marcel Duchamp's urinal exhibit, arguing their goal was to fuel artistic debate and "celebrate the spirit of modern art."

1997 - Jake Platt's used a big red, felt-tipped pen to write over Yoko Ono’s $240,000 painting at Cincinnati's Contemporary Arts Center. He took Ono's words - "No one can tell you not to touch the art" - literally.

1997 - Alexander Brener, a Russian artist living in Amsterdam, spray-painting a huge green dollar sign over Kasimir Malevich's white-on-white Suprematism (1921- 27).

I defend the gesture of Alexander Brener because it pulsates with energy, because it administers mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a work of art that is dead, just as any work of art or culture buried in our memory, our conscience, our books, is dead . Giancarlo Politi, Flash Art, May / June 1997.

1960s - The destructivist artist Gustav Metzger is a huge influence on Pete Townsend, his ideology becomes the driving force behind the Who guitarist's legendary guitar-smashing exploits.

1960 - Destructivist - an artist who attempts to transport the violent anquish at the heart of human life into the realm of art.

1958 - Raphael Montanez Ortiz uses a tomahawk to chop a print of an Anthony Mann’s classical Western film into pieces, which were then placed in a medicine bag and shaken in conjunction with a Native American chant (Ortiz is part Yaqui), then reassembled at random.

1963 - Raphael Montanez Ortiz destroys pianos, big or small, with an ax and manages to do it with a level of dynamism, expressionistic precision and pure over-the-top theatrical appeal.

1970 - Vito Acconci invades people’s “private” space by laying under a wooden ramp in a gallery masturbating. Through electronic equipment, Acconci was able to talk to the people above him, saying things such as "I'm touching your ass."

The artist is the pioneer, but sometimes also the sacrifice of our society...So in self-damaging body art performance perhaps the romantic idea of the suffering artist has found a renaissance?

1991 - In Felix Gonzalez-Torres Untitled (Placebo), a pile of candy sits in the corner of the room and you are invited to take and or eat them, entitling you to have a piece of the art and be involved.