Destruction by The Edgar Wind Society

EDGAR WIND JOURNAL DESTRUCTION

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The Edgar Wind Journal is produced termly by the Edgar Wind Society for Art History. The journal aspires to provide a platform for lively discussion around a broad and stimulating theme, and welcomes contributions from writers with backgrounds in a wide variety of disciplines to offer a fresh take on art historical issues. Editors: Saskia Taylor and Sophia Martin-Pavlou Layout: Emma McKinlay President of the Edgar Wind Society: Chloe Gilbert Journal sponsor: Meller Merceux Gallery

We are grateful for the support of LBC WiseCounsel. http:// www.lbcwisecounsel.com

EDGAR WIND

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CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS Destruction- a word burdened by negative connotations. Invested with a sense of finality, it is surely antithetical to the creative process inherent to art. Yet it is a phenomenon which has sadly featured heavily in the past of art. Both natural and human destruction of art has led to fragmentation in our knowledge of certain works, a frustrating incompletion that is the direct result of time’s passing and man’s careless actions. History has set a strong precedent for this; the Great Sphinx of Giza has fallen victim to the results of acid rain, just as Florence’s floods of 1966 have deprived generations of their cultural heritage. Arguably though it is the art of the Ancient World that has seen the most tangible consequences of natural destruction. Restorers are faced with the monumental task of trying to piece together the fragments left behind, seeking to undo the crimes of time. Yet often, despite their best efforts, marks and cracks persist, hidden from the fleeting eye perhaps but not from the more fastidious observer. Married to this is the unshakeable sense of futility; the literary descriptions provided by writers such as Pliny the Elder will never fully capture or recreate the visual. Over time, art has sown the seeds of its own destruction, victim to its own materiality. Yet the blame cannot be attributed solely to the natural world. History has consistently shown man’s conscious attempt to damage, deface or entirely destroy art. This iconoclasm can be traced back to Antiquity and dramatically resurfaced during the 16th Century with the stripping of church imagery throughout Europe as part of the Protestant Reformation. And since history has a tendency to repeat itself, the past century has witnessed Nazism’s rejection of Modernist ‘degenerate’ art whilst a different type of radical ideology led to the Taliban’s military style demolition of the Buddhas of Bamiyan. And whilst feminist outrage saw the slashing of Velazquez’s Rokeby Venus, often the defacement of art is seemingly without political agenda. Just this month the subjection of a Rothko to an artist’s outburst made headline news. It would, however, be unjust to solely classify these ‘interferences’ as crimes. Must they always be approached with disdain and contempt? Are there key issues hiding under the veneer of such acts? Is there not the element of renewal, of a ‘work in progress’, as each culture adds their layer to the rich historical tapestry of art? Is, in fact, destruction itself a form of art? Gustav Metzger’s Acid on Nylon paintings certainly indicate so, the acid theatrically corroding the nylon as it hangs from a gallery wall. Was Emin’s bed ‘destroyed’ when Yuan Cai and Jian Jun Xi decided to jump up and down on it? Arguably, the work was transformed from a static, passive object to a ‘living’ piece of performance art. Are artists offering a cynical perspective, a wry commentary on today’s societal self-destruction? Or is it with a heavy heart that we must accept the futility of the creation of art? If not destroyed by its very creators-man, nature will eventually reclaim its own materials. It is nature, after all, that has an indestructible power to enforce itself.

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CONTENTS 5

In memory of Michael Stanley

Lizzie Brown

Destroying the artist: Marina Ambramovicâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Rhythm 0 Albert Bates

Art theft as sacrilege: The museum as a ritual precinct

Brianna McGuire

Destruction of the traditional mode of viewing

Dylan Holmes Williams

Reproduction as destruction

Emma McKinlay

Beauty and its destruction

Nik Prassas

Bringing down the mighty from their seat

Fergus Butler-Gallie

Cornelia Parker: Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View, 1991 Juliet Bailey

The dichotomy of destructive art

Graham Whitham

Cut and Paste

Contrary to conservation

Alice Stevenson

Defacement: E.J. Bellocq and the Storyville prostitutes

Chelsea Nichols

Hannah Ryley

What dust will rise?

Helen Olley

Destruction and recreation

Sussie Moran

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CONTRIBUTORS Lizzie Brown is a second year B.A. Art History student at Christ Church College. She is treasurer of the Edgar Wind society.

Emma McKinlay is a second year B.A. Art History student at Wadham College. Albert Bates is a first year studying Classics at St. Hilda’s College. He is a regular gallery-goer. Nik Prassas is a third year B.A. English student at Lady Margaret Hall. Brianna McGuire is a visiting student reading political theory and 18th century history. She attends Wheaton College outside of Chicago, Illinois where she is majoring in History and Philosophy.

Fergus Butler-Gallie is a 3rd year student studying History and Czech at St John’s College. He is currently on a year abroad, split between compiling a thesis on the Bohemian Reformation at Masaryk University, Brno and part time work in Prague.

Dylan Holmes Williams is a second year B.A. Art History student at St Peter’s College. Juliet Bailey is a recent graduate of the Masters programme with the Oxford University Art

History department, specialising in modern and contemporary art with Dr Alistair Wright. She is currently working in London as a freelance art researcher and curator.

Graham Whitham is a part-time lecturer at the University of Kent, having been a lecturer with

the Open University and the University of Sussex, and lectured at the Royal Academy, Tate Gallery and museums in the United States and Italy.

Hannah Ryley is a Warden at Worcester College and is starting her D.Phil this year. Her current research focusses on the recycling of physical and literary material in a selection of late medieval manuscripts.

Alice Stevenson is a Post-doctoral Researcher in World Archaeology at the Pitt Rivers Museum Helen Olley is in her final year studying English Language and Literature at Lady Margaret Hall.

She has been involved with the ISIS, The Oxford Handbook and Endymion magazine and writes creatively in her free time.

Chelsea Nichols is a third year DPhil student at the Ruskin School of Drawing & Fine Art,

where she is writing a theory-based thesis on representations of human curiosities in contemporary art and their relationship to the history of exhibiting monstrous bodies.

Sussie Moran is a post-graduate student studying Art History at Oxford University.

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IN MEMORY OF MICHAEL STANLEY (1975-2012) Michael Stanley, Turner-Prize judge and Director of Modern Art Oxford, tragically died aged 37 in September. The loss of Michael is profound to all those who knew him; Modern Art Oxford and its audience as well as the wider art community. I have to declare an interest in writing this piece in memory of Michael; I was fortunate enough to work temporarily as his assistant in the spring of 2011, and subsequently he was very generous with his words of advice and time to me. I know, though, that the Edgar Wind Society as a whole will mourn Michael’s untimely death - he was an unfailing champion of the society’s endeavours, from its conception until the time that he died. In his obituaries he is described as a ‘rising star in the art firmament’, ‘one of the brightest stars in the contemporary art world’, and ‘a shooting star in the art galaxy’. This astral analogy is astute; as a curator and gallery director, Michael cast visionary new light upon the work of both established and up-andcoming artists, and as a colleague, he was a hypnotically bright and charismatic leader who was constantly formulating ideas for the future. Writing about Michael in the past tense is heartbreakingly at odds with his unshakeably forward-thinking outlook. Michael was an artist: he graduated in 1995 with a first in Fine Art from the Ruskin and he went on to assume a varied portfolio of curator- and director-ships before returning to Oxford to direct MAO. His thought process was rapid, holistic and ambitious, and when Michael worked with

an artist, together they would produce exhibitions which were really collaborations between two artists. David Austen, whose End of Love exhibition was held at MAO in 2010, remembers Michael as ‘a curator for and loved by artists, because he was an artist. Always giving, always a pleasure, everything solvable, nothing a problem, always yes! Let’s do it!’ This artistic directorship also resulted in changes to MAO’s architectural frame. The St Ebbe’s Street ‘Yard’ entrance to the gallery - an elegant, multi-functional art space and café with no façade - was Michael’s initiative. He told me: ‘I remember late at night drawing this thing on a bit of paper, and thinking, “this is what we should do”… to me it feels more like a box than a space, an object in the space, and potentially a sculpture.’ This kind of experimental yet practical thinking was what made Michael an innovative and exciting art director. Jenny Saville, whose recent exhibition at MAO was curated by Michael, labelled him ‘the kind of gallery director you wanted to work with…his poetic sensibility combined with a can do attitude where everything’s possible is what made him so magnetic and convincing.’

This willingness to create opportunities for young artists and those interested in art is one of Michael’s legacies – a legacy that is tangible in Platform, a rolling exhibition of the work of local graduate students on at MAO until 25th November. Working as Michael’s assistant at MAO it was almost impossible to impose order on his diary - he was constantly travelling back and forth from London and each day was full of appointments. His schedule

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MICHAEL STANLEY, 2012 IMAGE > MELLER MERCEUX GALLERY

was very varied – one minute he would be meeting with an important artist or director, the next he would be dashing off to an Oxford college to judge a student art competition. Michael was a great supporter of the Edgar Wind Society in particular; he spoke at the society’s inaugural event on the subject ‘Artworks That Have Made Me Cry’, and actively encouraged a connection with MAO. It is a testament to this on-going support that at the time when Michael died, the society was in the process of organising another event at which he should have spoken. This willingness to create opportunities for young artists and those interested in art is one of Michael’s legacies – a legacy that is tangible in Platform, a rolling exhibition of the work of local graduate students on at MAO until 25th November. Michael would treat young people with the same level of frankness and respect as he would anyone else - in fact he was something of a maverick as to the art-world status quo. Once, when Michael and I received an unnecessarily rude email, he came into the office and made such an

irreverent comment about it that it has passed into my family lore; he always had a twinkle and never an unhelpful thing to say. He was never too busy – even though of course in reality he was – to make an opportunity for you or to think really seriously about how he might help you with something that you were trying to do. As the art makers and writers, curators and art audience of the future, those involved with the Edgar Wind Society should take what they can from Michael’s ‘anything is possible’ mind-set. Michael’s death is incredibly difficult to accept in light of his infectious ability to inspire joy and enthusiasm in others, his ingenuity, and his unwavering will to get things done in the best possible way. He was married to artist Carrie Robson, and he was a father of three. Michael mentioned his family often and with intense pride and love; most of all my thoughts are with them.

Lizzie Brown DESTRUCTION

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REPRODUCTION AS DESTRUCTION The process of reproduction is ostensibly constructive. To duplicate, copy, or re-create an object is to bring forth a new version of it into existence. However, when one considers the impact of reproduction upon the original creation, it could also be interpreted as a destructive act. The cultural critic Walter Benjamin in his1936 essay on The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction discussed photographic reproduction in connection with the notion of authenticity, arguing that a work of art’s unique aura is depreciated through the production of a plurality of photographic versions. Although Benjamin saw this collapse of the artwork’s autonomy positively (in terms of “emancipation”), it is interesting to consider the potential of photographic reproduction to injure the work of art in various ways. A photograph of a page from an illuminated manuscript made in 1874 by the British designer William Morris illustrates the potential of the photograph to fragment, distort, and essentially misrepresent objects.

Scholarship surrounding the photography of art has tended to focus on sculpture and architecture. This is because of what is inevitably erased in a flat photographic image of an object whose impact on a viewer is dependent upon us experiencing its physical three-dimensional presence from multiple vantage points. In the case of architecture this involves quite literally being engulfed by the work. Morris’ illuminated manuscript also has a format that presents problems for the photographer. A product of collaborative craftsmanship, assembled from myriad components constituting a complete structure with an interior and exterior, the illuminated manuscript has indeed been compared by Morris himself, amongst others, to a work of architecture.

The photograph’s ability to wrench an object from its historical context, to obliterate its tactile and three-dimensional qualities, and to fragment it beyond recognition, somehow manages to go largely unnoticed. Manuscripts have a long and complicated history of being reproduced using photographic techniques. What is especially interesting about this history is the manner in which they have repeatedly been dismembered through their reproduction. Although some very expensive facsimiles ex-

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WILLIAM MORRIS, EDWARD BURNE-JONES AND CHARLES FAIRFAX MURRAY; ILLUMINATED MANUSCRIPT OF THE ODES OF HORACE; 1874; 17.3 X 12.4 X 2.4 CM; INK, PAINT AND GILDING ON PARCHMENT WITH A GOATSKIN BINDING; BODLEIAN LIBRARY (MS. LAT. CLASS. E. 38) IMAGE > NAYLOR, GILLIAN (ED.), WILLIAM MORRIS BY HIMSELF: DESIGNS AND WRITINGS (LONDON 1996)

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ist of complete manuscripts it is frequently sections of a page – initials and miniatures and other snippets of decoration – that are replicated without their neighbouring text. Even a page photographed in its entirety, such as this image reproducing page 54 of Morris’s illuminated manuscript of Horace’s Odes, is an incomplete view of the object. This fragmentation is often necessary and to some extent inevitable. Just as it usually unrealistic to attempt to photographically record a sculpture from all its viewing angles, it is not always possible, or even desirable, to photograph every single page of a manuscript. And yet the selection of individual pages or details for reproduction leads to decontextualisation. This is not just the separation of the work from its socio-cultural context but likewise a fraction of the object from its totality. Furthermore, the fragment can be utilised to encourage a certain visualisation of the whole. The reader of the monograph on William Morris that I have taken this photograph from might imagine this degree of decoration as invariable throughout the manuscript, when in actuality this is the most lavish page and many others remain incomplete, with only the text inscribed on the parchment. Unsurprisingly it is this page that one finds photographically reproduced in art publications on Morris, endorsing a Romantic view of the designer as obsessive virtuoso, single-mindedly devoted to his work. The photograph fabricates its own narrative from the disfigured reality of the object.

Destruction would appear to be intrinsically linked to creation. Photographs of illuminated miniatures in which previously encircling script has been eradicated transform their subjects into paintings. This process of re-presentation dates to the age before photography when manuscripts were physically cut up and their decorations marketed as independent pictures. The photograph’s deletion of context results in the elevation of the object – or at least a part of it – to the realm of high art from the domain of the ‘lowlier’ decorative arts. A new object has been fashioned from the dissolution of the old.

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The majority of us often encounter art through the medium of photography â&#x20AC;&#x201C; in books and magazines, on postcards and advertisements, as well as increasingly on the internet. Photographs of art are everywhere and yet because of this they are invisible. The photographâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ability to wrench an object from its historical context, to obliterate its tactile and three-dimensional qualities, and to fragment it beyond recognition, somehow manages to go largely unnoticed. These processes may not physically harm or alter the actual work itself, but they have a bearing upon the way in which we might subsequently approach the original, now inescapably in the light of its reproduction. Photographs can be misleading and can promote a particular understanding of an artwork. Even as art historians we are not as mindful as we should be that it is usually through the often warping lens of photographic reproduction that we view the objects upon which our discourse hinges.

Emma McKinlay

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DESTROYING THE ARTIST: MARINA AMBRAMOVIC’S RHYTHM 0. There have been countless cases in Art History when individuals have broken laws and destroyed works of art. Take the suffragette Mary Richardson, for instance, who slashed the Rokeby Venus in protest. But what happens when the viewer is invited to destroy the work of art? Does the destructive impulse still remain? And what if that work of art is a living thing? What if it’s the artist herself? MARINA AMBRAMOVIC; RHYTHM 0; 1974 IMAGE > MOMA

In 1974 Marina Abramovic put her body into the hands of an audience. She stood silently in a gallery next to a table of objects with a sign saying: “There are 72 objects on the table that one can use on me as desired. I am the object. During this period I take full responsibility”. These objects included the pleasurable, such as honey and a feather, and the painful, including whips, knives and a gun with a single bullet. The audience was invited to delight the artist. Or to destroy her. Marina recalls that at first the audience was hesitant, but once her passivity was assured, they began to experiment with her body. The first participants opted to pleasure the artist spraying her with perfume and putting flowers in her hands. They snapped images of her with the Polaroid camera that was on the table and stuck them to her body. Then someone cut off her clothes with scissors, exposing her to the audience. With this major personal boundary having been

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transgressed, and her vulnerability emphasised, they began to inflict pain on her. Someone stuck rose thorns in her stomach. They began stroking her with chains and then whipping her. They wrote abuse over her stomach. Mob mentality escaladed and the audience members surrounded Marina. Eventually someone loaded the pistol and pointed it at her neck until another audience member took the gun away. Six hours into the performance Marina ended it, fearful for her own safety, and walked towards the audience with tears in her eyes. Like Pygmalion’s statue, the work of art became alive. She remembers the audience members turning away to avoid confrontation.

There are 72 objects on the table that one can use on me as desired. I am the object. During this period I take full responsibility.

They had viewed her exactly as she had presented herself: as an object. Yet when she began to re-establish her identity as a human being, the audience began to shy away, embarrassed by their actions. The desire to destroy is inherent in the viewer of every work of art. When we see an artist’s creation we feel an immediate inadequacy and failure in our own talents, and to deal with this we aspire to destroy. Like a child knocking down a sand-castle. Not everyone acts on this destructive impulse. But when invited to act on it, Marina’s experiment shows that we are more likely to carry it through. Moreover, when invited together with a group of unknown viewers, we feel invincible. We take the act of destruction to extremes.

Albert Bates

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BEAUTY AND ITS DESTRUCTION

‘We must certainly have committed crimes which have made us accursed, since we have lost all the poetry of the universe’ (Simone Weil, La Pesanteur et la grâce, 1947) What is it a sacrilege to destroy? We are reluctant to confront so direct a question today. Those of an earlier age could offer an answer, and yet we seem to have none. We live in the hideous after-glow of the most destructive century man has

BRADEN PIPER; FELLED ASPEN; 2012 IMAGE > BRADEN PIPER PHOTOGRAPHY

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yet seen. All are today martyrs to destruction. Whatever was sacred is no longer. To say as much has become something of a platitude. This inability of ours to even speak of what has been lost is a testament to our poverty. Like Nietzsche’s last men, we can but blink at the broken wasteland we would call home. What has the last century or so taken that all the others could not? Man has been shadowed by destruction since his first thinking breath. Every epoch has witnessed unmentionable crimes and catastrophes and yet there is something peculiar about our modern predicament. What crime could have left us so accursed? The answer, I believe, can be found in a work by the Catholic poet and priest Gerard Manley Hopkins. In 1879 he composed a poem to commemorate the felling of a clutch of aspens that had stood by the Thames at Binsey, a small distance from Oxford. The twenty four lines he devoted to memorialising the trees he had so loved are among the most brilliant he ever wrote. What Hopkins saw at Binsey confirmed him in the belief that our late age was inhospitable to the one thing that made a life worth living and a man worthy of life: Beauty. ‘After-comers cannot guess the beauty been,’ he writes. The young Jesuit knew that beauty, the third of the ancient transcendentals, was inviolable and imperishable. Yet the desolation of Binsey had taught him that men of a new, modern temper were now able to exist without it.

As with the good and the true, the beautiful will not suffer proof or disproof. It is not something which can be reduced to an object of knowledge. As such, beauty does not ‘exist’ but the idea of the beautiful does. The intrinsic value of the idea of beauty is the sole measure of its credibility. The question we must now ask is whether we have lost our ability to respond to this primal idea. Hopkins saw no future for beauty in the world that was emerging in the west. Arguably it was this premonition that produced the great anxiety and fear we find in the terrible sonnets of 1880s. Material interests and an insomniac obsession with efficiency and technique has all but destroyed our sense of the beautiful. And what a great loss that is. In the words of another Jesuit, the theologian Hans Urs Von Balthasar, ‘the witness borne by being becomes untrustworthy for the person who can no longer read the language of beauty’.

Nik Prassas

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THE GALLERY OF LOST ART IMAGE > TATE

ART THEFT AS SACRILEGE: THE MUSEUM AS A RITUAL PRECINCT Sacrilege. Desecration. Blasphemy. These words carry with them not just the connotation of destruction, but destruction of something sacred, something religious. So when seven pieces of art were pilfered from the Kunsthal museum in Rotterdam last month, there was a feeling that this was not just a crime, but a violation. Emily Ansek, the Kunsthal director, said that the news has “hit the art world like a bomb.” On

one level, art theft is devastating because of the art’s value; Meyer de Haan’s Self-Portrait, Gauguin’s 1898 Girl in Front of Open Window, Monet’s Waterloo Bridge, London and Charing Cross Bridge, London, Matisse’s 1919 Reading Girl in White and Yellow and Picasso’s 1971 Harlequin Head and Freud’s Woman With Eyes Closed, all stolen on October 16th, are worth an inestimable sum. But it goes beyond the art’s monetary value, doesn’t it? The museum has a place in modern society as the temple of art, a secular religious establishment. Carol Duncan, in “The Art Museum As Ritual”, writes that aesthetics—the appreciation of beauty, the discussion of taste, imagination, and sense—“can be understood as a transference of spiritual values from the sacred realm into secular time and space.” In this way, the gallery and the museum become the “ritual precinct”

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for this “aesthetic cult”. In this holy precinct, public art enlightens and invites reflection. Duncan mentions Benjamin Ives Gilman, who in his Museum Ideals of Purpose and Method, describes the “modern aesthete as a devotee who achieves a kind of secular grace through communion with artistic geniuses of the past—spirits that offer a life-redeeming sustenance.”

that were “destroyed, stolen, discarded, rejected, erased, ephemeral”. Online viewers can explore different areas of the site dedicated to various works, some stolen, others destroyed by their own creators. One such artist highlighted by the Tate is Michael Landy, whose Break Down Inventory project in 2001 consisted of him systematically destroying all of his personal belong-

Art thieves desecrate the aesthetic space’s sacredness by ignoring it; without reverence, they break all of the rules of its aesthetic religion—touching, taking, and abusing the art instead of looking, learning, and elevating. The architectural layouts and the rituals performed inside art museums do nothing to discourage this comparison. Take as an example the National Gallery in London. Look at its architectural design and then survey the Parthenon in Athens or St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. All three are constructed to instill respect and to encourage a type of attitude in the devotee as he or she enters. The only difference between the National Gallery and the Parthenon is the object of devotion inside. Even the decorum which is expected upon entrance implies that museum-going is a ritual act: hushed tones, no-touching rules and maintenance of proper distance, the gleaning of wisdom from labels accompanying artwork, the introspection and subsequent feeling of transformation and refreshment. Thus the construction of this secular temple of art displays a belief about art’s inherent spiritual qualities while simultaneously imparting spiritual qualities to it in the ways in which the museum presents art. The way that museums react to the loss of artwork reveals their assumptions about the importance of the aesthetic realm. The Tate has an online exhibition entitled Lost Art that, according to the site, “tells the stories of artworks that have disappeared”,

ings in an empty department store with a team of twelve assistants, dismantling his father’s favorite sheepskin coat, Landy’s record collection, birth certificate, and credit cards. The site also highlights the theft of five paintings in 2010 at the Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. The theme of destruction is approached in two different ways here: in Landy’s case, his art is the destruction. In the case of Paris’ modern art museum, theft acts as a form of the destruction of art. Tate’s Jennifer Mundy, head of collection research, explains on the Lost Art site that art thieves have “every incentive to take reasonable care of the items”. However, this only emphasizes the idea that the real destruction going on is not to the canvas itself but to the sacrosanct atmosphere surrounding it. Art thieves desecrate the aesthetic space’s sacredness by ignoring it; without reverence, they break all of the rules of its aesthetic religion—touching, taking, and abusing the art instead of looking, learning, and elevating. When events like the robbery in October happen, it is a reminder of the place that art and its temple—the museum—have in society today.

Brianna McGuire DESTRUCTION

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BRINGING DOWN THE MIGHTY FROM THEIR SEAT

Destruction of art has, in the past, been decried as “depriving future generations of their artistic heritage”. One school of thought suggests this is an especially accurate analysis with regard to the iconoclasm that swept Europe in the wake of the Protestant Reformation. Destruction of religious art is an especially controversial form of destruction; not only does it constitute a physical removal of our ancestors’ most sincere objects of devotion but, arguably, it strays into the realm of sacrilege, a destructive act against God Himself.

Yet, if such a view is taken, how can we explain the regular instances of iconoclasm throughout Christian history? The iconoclast party became notably dominant in the Byzantine Orthodox Church during the 8th and 9th centuries- leaving us with a number of churches (such as Istanbul’s Hagia Irene) that are completely lacking in the customary Orthodox ornament. However, the greatest period of European iconoclasm and, arguably, destruction of art historically, was the Protestant Reformation. Northern Europe during the 15th century surpassed the South in terms of ornamentation and also artistic production (the schools of Bruges, Antwerp, Ghent, etc. being of particular note). Yet a century later whitewash reigned supreme in houses of worship which were, lest we forget, the principal public viewing places for any form of art until the inauguration of museums in the 19th Century. To explain this exclusively as an example of mind-

Destruction of religious art is an especially controversial form of destruction; not only does it constitute a physical removal of our ancestors’ most sincere objects of devotion but, arguably, it strays into the realm of sacrilege, a destructive act against God Himself. less destruction by the generations of the mid-sixteenth century would be unjust. Rather, we ought to see the iconoclasm of the Reformation as a new expression of creative impulse and, arguably, art in itself. We might see it as art for the new generation of thinking- not unlike the Brit-Art revolution in recent times: to the early modern mind a desecrated statue of St James the Less was as stimulating and provocative as Emin’s un-made bed was in our time. Viewing iconoclasm as an artistic expression in itself rather than wanton vandalism does far greater justice to

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those at the time. The comfortable modern, liberal attitude might be to condemn such actions as those of philistines yet we ought to remember that, in the minds of the iconoclasts they were involved in the creative process of something much more beautiful and much closer to the divine than Catholic ornamentation ever was.

mentation was undertaken. We ought to see destruction in this case as a divine rage, simultaneously creative and destructive, that forever changed the religious and, indeed, artistic map of Europe.

Fergus Butler-Gallie

Whilst it would involve a serious limitation of the scope of worship to purport what the Protestant iconoclasts advocated - an entirely plain church interior - one cannot help but respect the integrity with which the destruction of orna-

THE ICONOCLAST THEOLOGIAN JOHN THE GRAMMARIAN AND AN ICONOCLAST BISHOP WHITEWASH AN IMAGE OF CHRIST; 9TH CENTURY PSALTER IMAGE > GOOGLE IMAGES

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THE DESTRUCTION OF THE TRADITIONAL MODE OF VIEWING

RICHARD WILSON; 20:50 SITE SPECIFIC OIL INSTALLATION; 1987; DIMENSIONS VARIABLE; USED SUMP OIL AND STEEL IMAGE > GOOGLE IMAGES

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Over the course of five centuries art audiences of the West have come to accept certain rituals of art viewing as axiomatically proper. So entrenched have they become through simple repetition that to question their existence to a compan ion would provoke the same bemused reaction you might expect were you to question the value of seats in a theatre. One enters an art gallery, the paintings are hung from the walls; such an arrangement seems mind-numbingly unremarkable. But the standardisation of a ritual does not induce its impotence and it must be recognised that the methods by which we have presented our artworks indelibly mark our experience.

The act of hanging a painting has a very distinct effect upon the mode of viewing. The arrangement situates the object itself within a perpetually impermeable realm; the viewer – though he may enact an undoubtedly powerful spiritual or emotional relationship with the object by medium of his vision – is emphatically denied physical connection. The object/subject distinction is forcefully perpetuated, each painting straight-jacketed by hooks and chains, defying gravity to pin to a horizontal surface. By contrast, the viewer assumes autonomy, wandering freely through 180 degrees of largely unrestricted viewing space. What is repeatedly emphasised is a distinction; the viewer, as the autonomous, enlightened subject, and the painting – though its content may be spiritually overwhelming – as an ultimately passive and unthreatening specimen of study with which one can never physically engage.

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Entering the room, one is struck by the repugnant smell of the matter; the polite traditions of the clinical art venue – so exalted by the epoch of the white cube gallery and all of the Modernist minimalism that that entailed – is crushingly rejected, Wilson insisting upon the honest presentation of the visceral, the unattractive.

Richard Wilson’s 20:50 must then represent the destruction of the ‘traditional’ relationship between artist and viewer. Currently located in the Saatchi Gallery in West London, Wilson has submerged the floor of an entire room in thick black crude oil, creating an overwhelming sensory experience that is at once both wondrous and intimidating, but which ultimately enacts the union of art viewer and art object. Entering the room, one is struck by the repugnant smell of the matter; the polite traditions of the clinical art venue – so exalted by the epoch of the white cube gallery and all of the Modernist minimalism that that entailed – is crushingly rejected, Wilson insisting upon the honest presentation of the visceral, the unattractive. Rather than the viewer confronting the piece, the piece confronts the viewer, rudely challenging their entrenched preconceptions. Equally, the piece offers an aesthetic subversion of the tradition of limitation enacted by standardised curatorial elements. The black oil is disarmingly suggestive of infinity; one cannot tell that it is only a few centre metres thick. When one steps into the gangway – which is lowered into the

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oil itself – the oil appears to either represent an endless and unimaginably powerful chasm, or a reflective surface, creating a second image of the physical environment. The former is disconcerting in its morbidity, while the latter is terrifying in that it distorts our perception of the room’s architecture, eliminating the calming familiarity provided by the physical contexts of ‘traditionally’ curated works. While one can still not touch the art object, the sensory attack it enacts enforces a radically new mode of viewing in the spectator. Wilson’s piece, then, is the destruction of a convention that one does not realise existed, aggressively destroying the boundary between art viewer and art object.

Dylan Holmes Williams

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CORNELIA PARKER; COLD DARK MATTER: AN EXPLODED VIEW; 1991; WOOD, METAL, PLASTIC, CERAMIC, PAPER, TEXTILE AND WIRE IMAGE > ANDREW GILL

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CORNELIA PARKER, COLD DARK MATTER: AN EXPLODED VIEW, 1991

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, And the dry stone no sound of water. Only There is shadow under this red rock, (Come in under the shadow of this red rock), And I will show you something different from either Your shadow at morning striding behind you Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust. T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, 1922 (lines 19–30)

‘A heap of broken images:’ an ashen trumpet, a charred bucket, a mutilated pram, a scorched walking stick, a selection of forsaken toys, shards of torn wood. All of these forms, the contents of an exploded garden shed, coalesce to create a specific portrait of East London suburbia of the early 1990s. In 1991, Cornelia Parker reconstructed this British institution, the garden shed, in the white cube space of Chisenhale Gallery in East London. Its contents, quotidian objects living a funny half life – not quite discarded but not quite in use - had been

carefully selected by the artist from carboot sales. Transported to a firing range, the shed was then blown-up in a controlled explosion conducted by the British army. Back in the gallery, Parker then suspended the blasted remains from the ceiling on wire, centred around a 200W lightbulb, in a rectilinear arrangement: the contradiction of a shed in perpetual explosion. Irrevocably transformed in its exploded form, Parker’s work reminds us that not all destruction is bad. The Big Bang for example. An explosion from which all life stems.

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In Cold Dark Matter, Parker has performed a visual alchemy, the waste land transformed: the melting pot of base ingredients fathoming esoteric meanings.

Shifting from the micro to the macro, we are able to identify our own mundane lives in these prosaic discarded objects. In Cold Dark Matter, Parker has performed a visual alchemy, the waste land transformed: the melting pot of base ingredients fathoming esoteric meanings. The white cube is thus transformed into universe, the exploded shed the known galaxy, the domestic lightbulb now sun, pulling the viewer into its orbit. And so the objects are imbued with a new anthropological significance: the toy dinosaur evoking prehistory; the bike a byproduct of the invention of the wheel; a domestic paint can calling forth architecture and the human compulsion towards ornamentation; a hot water bottle and a fan, the triumph of man to control his environment. But what happens when the lightbulb expires? Every thesis has its antithesis and so the Big Bang has its Big Crunch. A certain entropy ensues as the universe redresses the explosive-implosive balance and we are left, small, insignificant, in awe and fear of this inexorable power, this beauty of destruction, this Cold Dark Matter, this â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;handful of dust.â&#x20AC;&#x2122;

Juliet Bailey

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THE DICHOTOMY OF DESTRUCTIVE ART It seemingly goes against the grain when destruction is regarded as creation. Yet there is a body of artistic production that is, paradoxically it would seem, created by destruction. In April 1920 in Cologne, the artists Max Ernst, Johannes Baargeld and Willy Fick organized an exhibition in the courtyard of the Brauhaus Winter, a popular pub. As well as the openly provocative nature of the show (entry was through the pub’s toilet and visitors were greeted by a girl in a communion dress reciting lewd poetry), visitors were invited to destroy a sculpture

Metzger sprayed and splattered acid on a nylon screen stretched across a metal frame, declaring, “Auto-destructive art is an attack on capitalist values and the drive to nuclear annihilation”. using an axe that was attached to it. When this happened, the sculpture was replaced with another version. Here was apparently a case of creativity’s triumph rather than the act of destruction being creative in itself. Similarly, Man Ray’s Object to be Destroyed, a metronome with a photograph of an eye paper clipped to its pendulum, was either destroyed by a visitor to the exhibition in which it was displayed, or by Man Ray himself (sources disagree). It was subsequently replaced by an identical work, ironically titled Indestructible Object.

Whilst these examples seem to demonstrate the anti-conventional tendencies that characterize Dada, in a merely physical way they illustrate nothing more than destruction as a means of eliminating something in order to replace it with something else; destruction as a part of the creative act which is only complete when the object is re-created or takes another form. Of course, works of art, be they pigment on canvas or metronomes with a photograph attached, are intended to be more than just physical objects. By their very existence as ‘art’, they insist on meaning something. If nothing else, the destruction and replacing of a sculpture challenges the preconceived ideas of artistic creativity and, by association, the institutions that perpetuate these ideas. For Dada, it was the capitalist bourgeoisie; not for nothing was a banner erected at the 1920 Berlin Dada-Messe declaring: ‘Dada struggles on the side of the revolutionary proletariat’. On London’s South Bank in the summer of 1961, Gustav Metzger’s demonstration of auto-destructive art resurrected Dada’s political impetus, albeit transformed by the Cold War. Metzger sprayed and splattered acid on a nylon screen stretched across a metal frame, declaring, “Auto-destructive art is an attack on capitalist values and the drive to nuclear annihilation”. Five years later, Metzger initiated the Destruction In Art Symposium (DIAS), which ran throughout September at various venues in London. The American artist Raphael Ortiz performed Piano Destruction, Yoko Ono recreated her Cut Piece, sitting motionless on a stage whilst members of the audience came up and cut off her clothing. John Latham’s Skoobs, three-metre high towers of books were set on fire. In fact, it was Latham and like-minded individuals who chewed the pages of Clement Greenberg’s Art and Culture and returned it to St Mar-

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GUSTAV METZGER; DEMONSTRATION OF AUTO-DESTRUCTIVE ART; LONDON 1961 IMAGE > STEPHENS, C. AND STOUT, K. (EDS.) ART AND THE 60S: THIS WAS TOMORROW (TATE GALLERY, 2004)

tin’s School of Art library in pulp form. Unsurprisingly, Latham’s teaching contract was not renewed but he had drawn attention to what he regarded as the stifling hegemony of Greenberg’s high art principles. The political motivation of destructive art is well-established, from Dada to DIAS, but there is another, often unrecognized factor. Whilst destruction is creation’s opposite, it is also its corollary. “Autodestructive art is deeply concerned with beauty,” noted Metzger, and it is this aesthetic dimension that serves to confound

destruction’s culturally radical and politically critical credentials. The artist destroys in order to create. But this carries with it the potential penalty of aesthetic conformity. After all, Man Ray’s Indestructible Object is scrutinized by visitors to any number of museums that own one of the replicas produced by the artist and Latham’s pulped book is now preserved as an exhibit at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

Graham Whitham

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CUT AND PASTE Tree of Codes is a novel – and a work of art – born from Bruno Schulz’s Street of Crocodiles. The book is a delicate creation, in paperback format. At first glance it appears to be quite ordinary-looking. Upon opening the volume, the die-cut pages flutter apart, revealing their unusual, ‘shredded’ pages. From Schulz’s original novel, Jonathan Safran Foer has contrived to cut away sections of the text, leaving behind words and phrases. Even the title is recycled: Street of Crocodiles. Foer’s creative use of his favourite text has conjured up both a stunning short story in its own right, and a highly artistic treatment of the book form.

ent optimism, even the audacity, of the making new of something so well-loved. Tree of Codes is an extraordinary reading experience, and constitutes a very provocative piece of art. The text plays tricks on the brain by allowing the eye to look forward and back to odd words, glimpsed through the overlaid die-cut holes, causing repeated sparks of déjà vu and uncanny premonition for the reader. The temporal qualities of reading are highlighted by the reader’s negotiation of these unfamiliar textual spaces. The acute awareness of this active journey through the fragile, material nature of the novel provokes important questions about our sensory experience. Like much of the modern art land-

Tree of Codes is testament to the hotchpotch accretion and recycling of cultural graffiti that we experience all the time – moreover it enacts a celebration of this quality of cultural life. This novel is an imaginative, sidelong look at reading practices. As Michael Faber comments, “I suspect that this book will be appraised more as an artefact than as a story.” I agree, and I think this ‘butchered’ novel asks the ideal questions of destructive art. Foer regards the ‘new’ piece as entirely his own work. In my mind this attitude makes even more sense when his novel is thought of as a form of ‘constructive destruction’. Rather than seeing Tree of Codes as a morbid meditation on the futility of art, I read his novel as an inspired, confident endeavour. It asks the reader, and even the viewer - for the text presents an engaging visual experience to both alike - to think deeply about the ways in which culture has to adapt to survive. The selective deletions from the original text certainly pose questions of transience and permanence, but I find myself buoyed by the inher-

scape, Tree of Codes is an instance of an artist fearlessly stripping back in a world of information overload. The sensory inundation in our lives is turned into a gentle game, which asks us to consider the absences that have been cut away and to bring our full attention to the remnants that have endured. Tree of Codes is testament to the hotchpotch accretion and recycling of cultural graffiti that we experience all the time – moreover it enacts a celebration of this quality of cultural life. In this way, Foer’s treatment of Schulz’s text becomes an alternative kind of tribute. Contemplation of Foer’s constructive destruction may lead us to begin to decipher the codes of his remarkable novel.

Hannah Ryley

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JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER; TREE OF CODES; 2010 IMAGE > GOOGLE IMAGES

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CONTRARY TO CONSERVATION

extremely skilled, manually dexterous labour. Yet this artefact was made not to be preserved and displayed, but to be broken and buried.

At some point in the last century a conservator painstakingly realigned the fragments of a 5500-year old Predynastic Egyptian flint knife. They ensured that the joins were smooth, that the piece was once again complete, and that it was perfect for display. It was a near immaculate repair. Perhaps as they worked the restorer marvelled at the regular, parallel flaking that ripples across the implement’s upper surface, traced their finger over its finely serrated edge, and slipped their palm across its smooth, ground underside. Few pieces of flintwork of any age, from any country come close to the technical and artistic mastery that such prehistoric artefacts embody. It would have been fashioned over the course of many hours, entailing

Pitt Rivers Museum object number 1911.33.1 appears to be a delicate specimen. It is less than 1 cm thick and about 25 cm in length. The knife’s age and the fineness of its craftsmanship further impart to it an aura of fragility. That it was found in several pieces during the 1911 excavations of a cemetery just south of Cairo – at a site near the modern village of Gerzeh – seems to be, therefore, unsurprising. After all it had been concealed for several millennia under a heavy pile of sand, dirt and gravel. The archaeologist who cleared tomb 25 noted, however, that the distribution of the fragments on the grave floor proved that this knife had been originally placed in the ground in the same shattered state in which it was discovered. The rest of the burial was undisturbed: the forty pottery

PREDYNASTIC EGYPTIAN FLINT KNIFE; 1.0 X 25.0 CM; PITT RIVERS MUSEUM (1911.33.1) IMAGE > MALCOLM OSMAN, PITT RIVERS MUSEUM

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vessels that encircled the corpse were all still intact and there were five carnelian beads nestled in the deceased’s right hand. Several such exquisitely crafted flints were discovered in the Predynastic graves at Gerzeh. Cracked at their centres, the caramel-coloured chert was often found split into two. In one case the two halves had been set down beside the body articulated as a whole implement, but with one half ripple-side down, the other ripple-side up. These were acts of deliberate destruction, achieved with a short, sharp punch.

In the unwitting attempt to erase those traces of violence and to mute the ancient drama that jagged shards materialize, the repair to this antiquity might be viewed as another kind of destruction in itself.

Breaking beautiful objects in this way was very probably part of the funeral performance itself – the knife smashed at the tomb edge, the recently deceased in view, the bereaved community perhaps in attendance. As objects of enchantment – in Alfred Gell’s sense of the phrase – these were potent and powerful things. They consumed and radiated effort, energy and emotion. Not

just

broken

then,

but

killed.

This was not the only act of ‘destruction’ that this object experienced however. In the unwitting attempt to erase those traces of violence and to mute the ancient drama that jagged shards materialize, the repair to this antiquity might be viewed as another kind of destruction in itself. For what was concealed here was not the accidental ravages of time, but the purposeful intentions of a brief and intense moment in the past. Now silenced.

Alice Stevenson

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WHAT DUST WILL RISE? In 1941 the Frankfurter Zeitung reported on the destruction of the Talmudic library at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Lublin, Poland. Amidst cries of Jewish protest, the marketplace bore witness to a blaze of books that lasted twenty hours. Sixty years later the great Buddhas of Bamiyan, deemed idolatrous by the Taliban, were

dynamited and destroyed in the Bamiyan valley in Afghanistan on the orders of the now notorious Mullah Mohammed Omar. Human history is punctuated with violent acts of destruction, whether of cultural monuments, works of art, or even, and most appallingly, of people. Little has altered in the twenty-first century except the means.

MICHAEL RAKOWITZ; WHAT DUST WILL RISE?; 2012 IMAGE > GOOGLE IMAGES

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A single work of art may seem a drop in the ocean then, except that Michael Rakowitz’s What Dust Will Rise? engages with our capacity for destruction by building on the ruins of what has been left behind. Exhibited at this year’s documenta – an art show held every five years in Kassel, Germany – Rakowitz collects the traces of cultural desecration. He collates books damaged by fire in the Allied bombing of the Fridericianum in Kassel, shrapnel from the rounds of ammunition used to destroy the Bamiyan Buddhas, the text of the Frankfurter Zeitung that glorified the destruction of the Talmudic Library, and a fragment of stone gathered from the London rubble. What Dust Will Rise? exhibits these relics alongside the resurrected library of the Fridericianum. Reproduced complete with decorative detail, pages, and even text where the book lies open, Rakowitz’s work is given an extra dimension by the stone these lost volumes are carved from – stone brought from Bamiyan Valley where the Buddhas once stood. Indeed, a number of the stone carvers who worked to help execute the project were from Afghanistan. ‘Dust’, seen from Genesis to T.S. Eliot as symbolic of man’s ultimate finitude, his inevitable degeneration, is given a resurrective power by Rakowitz whose title for the piece echoes Maya Angelou’s Still I Rise:

For an exhibit concerned with freedom of speech and artistic expression, the title is doubtless a conscious choice by Rakowitz since Angelou was herself an important advocate for freedom of expression, most notably in the Civil Rights Movement that altered the course of American history in the 1950s and 60s. Dust, from which man was fashioned and to which he will return, is also the single legacy of an explosion such as that which shattered the Bamiyan Buddhas. ‘Out of the huts of history’s shame / I rise’ Angelou writes. Affirming the redeeming power of art, Rakowitz raises from the rubble of recent history an exhibit that recognizes the value of human works, and human words. It is this belief in the value of expression that totalitarian regimes such as the Third Reich and the Taliban have sought to suppress, yet in stone quarried from their own destructive legacy Rakowitz has resurrected this right from the dust. Though destruction and our continuous engagement with it unhappily receives more press attention than creation, there is always the opportunity to rebuild from the rubble once the dust has settled. Rakowitz has gone one better, rewriting on the ‘rubble’ itself a book that can never be burned.

Helen Olley

You may write me down in history With your bitter, twisted lies, You may trod me in the very dirt But still, like dust, I’ll rise

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DEFACEMENT: E.J. BELLOCQ AND THE STORYVILLE PROSTITUTES

E. J. BELLOCQ; C. 1912 IMAGE > GOOGLE IMAGES

Ernest J. Bellocq (1873-1949) was an obscure photographer working in New Orleans in the early 20th century. He made his living photographing banal commercial subjects like ships and machinery for local companies. He would probably be completely forgotten today, had artist Lee Friedlander not chanced upon Bellocq’s private passion in the late 1960s: eightynine glass negatives featuring Bellocq’s

photographs of prostitutes from Storyville, the notorious Red Light district of New Orleans which legalized prostitution between 1897 and 1917. Moved by Bellocq’s haunting yet sensitive treatment of the subject, Friedlander set to work reprinting a selection of the plates using turn-of-thecentury methods, which were then made famous in a dedicated exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1970. These compelling images show the

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women of Storyville in various scenes and in various stages of dress: sprawled nude on a day bed, standing against improvised backdrops, posed artfully with draped fabric and flowers. The women seem at ease with the photographer, and while some images certainly point to the erotic, few are overtly pornographic; rather, they seem to be poignant portraits of individual women, artistic studies of the nude. With the MoMA exhibition and subsequent publication, Bellocq’s photographs became an instant classic, a recognizable and influential addition to the history of photography. In her introduction to a reprinted publication of the Storyville photographs, Susan Sontag attempted to describe why Bellocq’s images have come to be regarded as such a treasure in the history of photography: “So much about these pictures affirms current taste: the low-life material; the near mythic provenance (Storyville); the informal, anti-art look, which accords with the virtual anonymity of the photographer and the real anonymity of his sitters; their status as objets trouves, and a gift from the past. Add to this what is decidedly unfashionable about the pictures: the plausibility and friendliness of their version of the photographer’s troubling, highly conventional subject. And because the subject is so conventional, the photographer’s relaxed way of looking seems that much more distinctive.” But, despite the relaxed tone which Sontag observes, one of the most striking and well-known aspects of these images is the fact the faces of the prostitutes were violently scratched out on several of the photographic plates, leaving an ominous void in place of their heads. At first, some attributed this curious act of destruction to the artist’s brother, a Jesuit priest who inherited Belloq’s possessions after he died in 1949. However, if the ultimate goal was puritani-

cal censorship, why not deface all of the images, or even destroy the plates altogether? And why scratch out their faces instead of their breasts or genital region? Furthermore, Freidlander’s experimentation with printing processes seems to indicate that the scratching must have taken place during the wet collodion processes of producing the negatives, meaning that it was mostly likely Bellocq himself who was responsible.

One of the most striking and well-known aspects of these images is the fact the faces of the prostitutes were violently scratched out on several of the photographic plates, leaving an ominous void in place of their heads Susan Stewart, speaking on the subject of portraiture within the tradition of miniature painting, observes that the body parts invisible to ourselves – the head and shoulders- become the primary subject matter of portraiture and sculpture; because our own faces are invisible to us, images of faces become “gigantic with meaning and significance.” She gives the example of the pornographer who blindfolds his models, so that they might be transformed into ‘only’ a body. And, indeed, in several of Bellocq’s other portraits, women are photographed wearing masks. Stewart argues that because one cannot see their own face without a mirror or external image, the face belongs to the other more than to the self, and to apprehend the face is to somehow possess it. If this is true, could Bellocq’s defacement be seen to be an act of jealous cupidity, ensuring his perpetual and exclusive possession of their image? In support of this theory, Adele, a former Storyville prostitute who claimed to have

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modelled for Bellocq, suggests that he was only interested in looking politely at the women of Storyville, never pursuing any further sexual acts with them. The defaced photographs, then, might be seen as the ultimate manifestation of his voyeurism: rather than understanding it as destructive, perhaps we should see the act of scratching the negatives as his means of ‘taking’ these women purely through looking. When considering the relationship between body and image in these defaced photographs, a final point curiously emerges from critical and historical accounts of Bellocq’s Storyville portraits: in nearly every text that I have encountered, authors inevitably make mention of Bellocq’s own unusual corporeality. This seems to originate from conversations recorded in the original exhibition catalogue, in which various characters from New Orleans who remembered Bellocq during his Storyville days claimed that the artist was unusually small and had probable hydrocephalus. Although never explicitly stated, there seems to be an unspoken assumption throughout

these texts which correlate this physical deformity with his access to and treatment of the prostitute’s bodies. Perhaps building on the legend of Henri ToulouseLautrec, there is a romantic notion that his abnormal body allowed him to move freely in a world of other outsiders. With this in mind, could the gesture of scratching the negatives be seen as some sort of self-loathing projection of his own unusual corporeality onto a figure of beauty? Is it therefore an act of destruction after all? Or does this assumption merely reflect our own pre- judgments about the deviance of both deformed and prostitute bodies? The true motivation of the defacement in E.J. Bellocq’s Storyville portraits will probably always be a mystery, but I would argue that the potential of this destructive element strongly contributes to that ineffable quality which makes these images so compelling.

Chelsea Nichols

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DESTRUCTION AND RECREATION ‘The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author.’ - Barthes.

The continuum of creative process is cyclical in nature, repeatedly fluxing between creation and destruction through the process of reading and collapsing. Barthes does not push far enough: the author must be his own first reader from the first moment of demarcation, through repetition to ending. Problems of destruction must lie in the break in evolutionary continuum. The destruction of relational temporality is a violation of human experience.

So why the horror of destruction in art? We are not dealing with a violation of the ‘I’ if the author sees his own death in continuum. Yet Derrida’s Glas promotes a continuum of dialogue that constantly collapses in on its self, simultaneously destroying and giving birth to new moments of discourse. So where is the problem in painting if not in writing? There are multiple relations to the cycle in painting; extending another’s work, marking or physically destroying, or to extend by interpretive viewing.

To repeat, collapse, and recreate in discourse is seen as progress. The words are borrowed first, and slotted together next. In painting, the marks are slotted together first, and borrowed next. So to destroy in painting is violence to a raised power. Then there is difference in intentionality during moments of the destructivecreative cycle: to extend enfolds the intention to create, to evolve a painting from a frozen moment in time. To mark another’s work enfolds the intention to destroy, violence towards the purity of a frozen moment in time.

But permeating all moments is creation embodied in the moment of destruction: the creation of the destruction. And permeating all moments is the residual intention to metamorphose, to evolve. Evolution is temporal; the process of creation is a cyclical continuum of moments with each moment being destroyed in creation of the next. To create is to destroy, to destroy is to create. Ad infinitum.

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MELLER MERCEUX G A L L E R Y Greetings from Meller Merceux Art Gallery Meller Merceux specialises in modern and contemporary art. With exhibition spaces in Oxford and Witney, we have the pleasure of catering to a wide national and international clientèle. Offering collectors an exciting range of investment pieces, we have recently exhibited works by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Marc Chagall and René Magritte. The galleries are directed by Aidan Meller, who comes from a collector’s background and is regarded as an expert in this field. We look forward to welcoming you to view our collections.

Donald Wyland

Oxford Gallery, November 19th to December 31st Meller Merceux presents the art of Donald Wyland, the nom de pinceau of two artists whose work explores the human drama behind the construction of the Three Gorges Dam in China. The change rural China is undergoing is symbolised by a sculpture of a cormorant which forms this exhibition’s dramatic centrepiece. Wyland’s dramatic paintings, meanwhile, recall Turner whilst speaking of cultural issues that are thoroughly twenty-first century.

Ezra Cohen

Oxford Gallery, December 31st - January 31st Cohen explores the fluid nature of contemporary identity through new experiments in paint. His roots lay in the legacy of expressionist artists such as Schiele and Nolde, as evidenced in his emotive approach to figuration. This show updates that expressionist vision, approaching the idiom of figures such as Anselm Kiefer and Gerhard Richter. Exploring richly symbolic forest spaces, Cohen’s dense and painterly canvasses incorporate twigs, earth and other natural materials into their heady flux.

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P R I Z E F O R A RT C R I T I C I S M Call for Submissions Meller Merceux Gallery is delighted to announce its second prize for art criticism. Open to undergraduate and postgraduate members of Oxford University, the Meller Merceux Prize for Art Criticism celebrates excellence in new critical writing. We invite submissions of original articles of 500 to 800 words. Your entry must be a review of a currently running (or soon to open) exhibition of work by twentieth century or contemporary artists. The deadline for the prize is 31st September 2013, and entries are encouraged throughout the year, so that they may be considered for publication in The Art Collector magazine. The Art Collector is published by Meller Merceux on a monthly basis and and sent out to thousands of homes both nationally and internationally. The overall winner will be announced at a black tie dinner held by Meller Merceux and the Edgar Wind Society during Michaelmas term. The winner receives a prize of ÂŁ500. The judges are especially keen to reward work which demonstrates some or all of the following characteristics: creative thinking, originality of argument, understanding of the cultural and historical contexts of artistic trends; imaginative use of critical theory. They are eager to recognise critics who write with clear and distinctive voices and who exhibit a persuasive, fluent writing style.

Meller Merceux Gallery 105 High Street Oxford OX1 4BW Tel: 01865 727996 oxford@mellermerceux.com Meller Merceux Gallery 46 High Street Witney OX28 6HQ Tel: 01993 708606 witney@mellermerceux.com

www.mellermerceux.com

Submissions should be made electronically in MS Word format and sent asap to curator@mellermerceux.com

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MICHAELMAS TERM 2012

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