Iconoclasm

[A seminar at University of Rochester]

What does it mean to destroy an image? What politics and ideas are behind such “iconoclastic” acts & representations throughout the history of art? The course resources here explore various episodes in the ongoing war of and against images, at times when critics called for the destruction of works of art deemed oppressive or offensive, as well as when individuals or groups committed actual violence against the work of art. Beginning with an analysis of the state-sanctioned iconoclasm in the eighth- and ninth-century Byzantine Empire, the course picks up again in the modern era, exploring the ways in which the public desecration of objects and images have always exposed complex political issues, whether the acts are conducted in service to explicit oppression against a cultural group, or as a symbolic protest against powerful institutions. Each week the course will cover events in which iconoclasm proved highly contentious and expressive, from the desecration of Christian art by the French Revolutionaries in the 1790s, to the telecast of the dynamiting of ancient Buddhist sculptures in Bamiyan by the Taliban in 2001. Additionally, the course examines how acts of iconoclasm also evidence an eternally renewed faith in the power and terror of images in the world today.

Course readings

1. THE IMAGE WORLD: THEORY & ANXIETY 

W. J. T. Mitchell, “What Is an Image?” in Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1986), 7–46.

Bruno Latour, “What Is Iconoclash? Or Is There a World beyond the Image Wars?” in Iconoclash, eds. Latour and Weibel (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 16–38.

Jacques Rancière, “Do Pictures Really Want to Live?” Culture, Theory and Critique 50, nos. 2–3 (2009): 123–132.  

W. J. T. Mitchell, “The Rhetoric of Iconoclasm: Marxism, Ideology, and Fetishism,” in Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (University of Chicago Press, 1986), 160–208.   

2. IMAGE BREAKING: A GENEALOGY

“The Ten Commandments,” Exodus 20: 4–6; and “The Golden Calf,” Exodus 32: 1–6, New King James Version.

“Extracts from the Iconoclast Horos of Hieria,” and “Extracts from the Antirrhetics, by Nikephoros, Patriarch of Constantinople,” in Marie José Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy: The Byzantine Origins of the Contemporary Imaginary (Stanford University Press, 2005), 227–245.

F. T. Marinetti, “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism (1909)” in Futurism: An Anthology, ed. Rainey, et al. (Yale University Press, 2009), 49–53.

Hannah Black, “Open Letter to the Curators and Staff of the Whitney Biennial,” e-flux conversations (March 1, 2017).

Coco Fusco, “Censorship, Not the Painting, Must Go: On Dana Schutz’s Image of Emmett Till,” Hyperallergic (March 27, 2017).

3. ICONOCLASTS & ICONOPHILES IN BYZANTIUM

Hans Belting, “Introduction,” in Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image Before the Era of Art, trans. Jephcott (University of Chicago Press, 1997), 1–16.

Marie-José Mondzain, “Introduction,” and “The Doctrine of the Image and Icon,” in Image, Icon, Economy: The Byzantine Origins of the Contemporary Imaginary (Stanford University Press, 2005), 1–10, 69–117.

Jas Elsner, “Iconoclasm as Discourse: From Antiquity to Byzantium,” The Art Bulletin 94, no. 3 (2012): 368–94.

Emmanuel Alloa, “Visual Studies in Byzantium: A Pictorial Turn avant la lettre,” Journal of Visual Culture 12, no. 1 (2013): 3–29.  

4. REFORMATIONS & REVOLUTIONS OF THE IMAGE

Stanley J. Idzerda, “Iconoclasm during the French Revolution,” The American Historical Review 60, no. 1 (1954): 13–26.

Joseph Leo Koerner, “The Icon as Iconoclash,” in Iconoclash, eds. Latour and Weibel (MIT Press, 2002), 164–213.

Keith Moxey, “Mimesis and Iconoclasm,” Art History 32, no. 1 (February 2009): 52–77.

Richard Clay, Iconoclasm in Revolutionary Paris: The Transformation of Signs (Oxford University Press, 2012).

5. IMAGE & URBAN CATASTROPHE

Gay Gullickson, “La Pétroleuse: Representing Revolution,” Feminist Studies 17, no. 2 (1991): 241–265.

Tom McDonough, “The Decline of the Empire of the Visible Or, The Burning of Los Angeles,” AA Files, no. 62 (2011): 40–46.

Thomas Stubblefield, “Lights, Camera, Iconoclasm: How Do Monuments Die and Live to Tell about It?” in 9/11 and the Visual Culture of Disaster (Indiana University Press, 2014), 125–151.

Anne Monahan, “Faith Ringold’s Die: The Riot and Its Reception,” NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art 36 (2015): 28–38.

6. ART VANDALS

Alfred Gell, “The Involution of the Index in the Art Nexus,” in Art and Agency: An Anthropological Study (Clarendon Press, 1998), 51–65, esp. 61–65.

Dario Gamboni, “Museums and Pathology,” in The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism since the French Revolution (Yale University Press, 1997), 190– 211.

Helen Scott, “Wholly Uninteresting? The Motives Behind Acts of Iconoclasm,” in Perspectives on Power: An Interdisciplinary Approach, eds. Morgan, et al. (Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2010), 21–40.

Lynda Nead, “The Damaged Venus,” in The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity, and Sexuality (Routledge, 1992), 34–43.

“Art attack: defaced artworks from Rothko to Leonardo in pictures,” The Guardian (October 8, 2012).  

7. AMBIGUOUS ICONS: THE HISTORICAL AVANT-GARDE

Dario Gamboni, “Modern Art and Iconoclasm,” in The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism since the French Revolution (Yale University Press, 1997), 255–286.

Alain Besançon, “The Russian Revolution,” in The Forbidden Image: An Intellectual History of Iconoclasm (University of Chicago Press, 2000), 319–377 (esp. 357–372).

Caroline Jones, “Making Abstraction,” in Iconoclash, eds. Latour and Weibel (MIT Press, 2002), 412–416.  

Debbie Lewer, “Hugo Ball, Iconoclasm, and the Origins of Dada in Zurich,” Oxford Art Journal 32, no. 1 (2009): 19–35.

8. ICONOCLASH FROM BAMIYAN TO TIMBUKTU

Finbarr Barry Flood, “Between Cult and Culture: Bamiyan, Islamic Iconoclasm, and the Museum,” The Art Bulletin 84, no. 4 (2002): 641–59.

Mika Natif, “The Painter’s Breath and Concepts of Idol Anxiety in Islamic Art,” in Idol Anxiety, eds. Ellenbogen and Tugendhaft (Stanford University Press, 2011), 41–55.

Ömür Harmanşah, “ISIS, Heritage, and the Spectacles of Destruction in the Global Media,” Near Eastern Archaeology 78, no. 3 (2015): 170–77.

Michelle Moore Apotsos, “Timbuktu in Terror: Architecture and Iconoclasm in Contemporary Africa,” International Journal of Islamic Architecture 6, no. 1 (2017): 97– 120.

9. ICONS OF THE NEOCON AGE 

Donald J. Cosentino, “Hip-Hop Assemblage: The Chris Ofili Affair,” African Arts 33, no. 1 (2000): 40–51, 95–96.

Richard Meyer, “The Jesse Helms Theory of Art,” October 104 (2003): 131–148.

Elizabeth Mansfield, “The New Iconoclasm,” Art Journal 64, no. 1 (2005): 20–31.

Sven Lütticken, Idols of the Market: Modern Iconoclasm and the Fundamentalist Spectacle (Sternberg Press, 2009).

10. DAMNATIO MEMORAIE: ALL STATUES MUST FALL

Disgraced Monuments, dir. Mark Lewis and Laura Mulvey (48 min., 1993).

Sarah Beetham, “From Spray Cans to Minivans: Contesting the Legacy of Confederate Soldier Monuments in the Era of Black Lives Matter,” Public Art Dialogue 6, no. 1 (2016): 9–33.

Bree Newsome, “Go ahead, topple the monuments to the confederacy. All of them,” Washington Post (August 18, 2017). 

Rebecca Solnit, “The Monument Wars,” Harper’s Magazine (January 2017).

11. KINOCLASM

Zabriskie Point, dir. Michelangelo Antonioni (113 min., 1970).

Do the Right Thing, dir. Spike Lee (120 min., 1989).

Nocturama, dir. Bertrand Bonello (130 min., 2016).

W. J. T. Mitchell, “The Violence of Public Art: ‘Do the Right Thing’,” Critical Inquiry 16, no. 4 (1990): 880–899.

Boris Groys, “Iconoclasm as an Artistic Device / Iconoclastic Strategies in Film,” in Iconoclash, eds. Latour and Weibel (MIT Press, 2002), 282–295.

J. Hoberman, “The Terrorists Go Shopping,” The New York Review of Books (August 9, 2017).

Jeff Reichert, “Can’t Resist,” Reverse Shot (August 21, 2017).