Iconoclasm and the Museum

Iconoclasm and the Museum
Author: Stacy Boldrick
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2020-09-24
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0429767242

Iconoclasm and the Museum addresses the museum’s historic tendency to be silent about destruction through an exploration of institutional attitudes to iconoclasm, or image breaking, and the concept’s place in public display. Presenting a selection of focused case studies, Boldrick examines long-standing desires to deface, dismantle, obscure or destroy works of art and historic artefacts, as well as motivations to protect and display broken objects. Considering the effects of iconoclastic practices on artworks and cultural artefacts and how those practices are addressed in institutions, the book examines changing attitudes to the intentional destruction of powerful artworks in the past and present. It ends with an analysis of creative destruction in contemporary art making and proposes that we are entering a new phase for museums, in which they acknowledge the critical roles destruction and loss play in the lives of objects and in contemporary political life. Iconoclasm and the Museum will be important reading for academics and students in fields such as museum and gallery studies, archaeology, art history, arts management, curatorial studies, cultural studies, history, heritage and religious studies. The book should also be of great interest to museum professionals, curators and collections management specialists, and artists.

Iconoclasm in New York

Iconoclasm in New York
Author: Wendy Bellion
Publisher:
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2021-05-21
Genre:
ISBN: 9780271083650

King George III will not stay on the ground. Ever since a crowd in New York City toppled his equestrian statue in 1776, burying some of the parts and melting the rest into bullets, the king has been riding back into American culture, raising his gilded head in visual representations and reappearing as fragments. In this book, Wendy Bellion asks why Americans destroyed the statue of George III-and why they keep bringing it back. Locating the statue's destruction in a transatlantic space of radical protest and material violence-and tracing its resurrection through pictures and performances-Bellion advances a history of American art that looks beyond familiar narratives of paintings and polite spectators to encompass a riotous cast of public sculptures and liberty poles, impassioned crowds and street protests, performative smashings and yearning re-creations. Bellion argues that iconoclasm mobilized a central paradox of the national imaginary: it was at once a destructive phenomenon through which Americans enacted their independence and a creative phenomenon through which they continued to enact British cultural identities. Persuasive and engaging, Iconoclasm in New York demonstrates how British monuments gave rise to an American creation story. This fascinating cultural history will captivate art historians, specialists in iconoclasm, and general readers interested in American history and New York City.

Iconoclasm, Identity Politics and the Erasure of History

Iconoclasm, Identity Politics and the Erasure of History
Author: Alexander Adams
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited
Total Pages: 167
Release: 2020-12-22
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1788360508

Iconoclasm, Identity Politics and the Erasure of History surveys the origins, uses and manifestations of iconoclasm in history, art and public culture. It examines the various causes and uses of image/property defacement as a tool of political, national, religious and artistic process. This is one of the first books to examine the outbreak of iconoclasm in Europe and North America in the summer of 2020 in the context of previous outbreaks, and it examines the implications of iconoclasm as a form of control, censorship and expression.

Art Under Attack

Art Under Attack
Author: Tabitha Barber
Publisher: Tate
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2014-11-04
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9781849760300

"Published to accompany a major exhibition at Tate Britain, this fully illustrated catalogue explores the history of attacks on art in Britain, from the reformation of the sixteenth century to the present day, demonstrating how religious, political, moral and aesthetic controversy can become arenas for assaults on art. Through eight essays, the broad subject of iconoclasm is broken into three overarching themes: the state-sanctioned iconoclastic zeal of religious reformers, who aimed to purge both churches and minds of the sin of idolatry; the symbolic statue-breaking that accompanies political change such as the targeted attacks on cultural heritage by the suffragettes; and attacks on art by individuals stimulated by a moral or aesthetic outrage. Importantly, the aim of the study is to present the rationale of iconoclasm, its significance to the history of an object, and how it has become a productive and transformational practice for some modern and contemporary artists."--Publisher's description.

"Striking Images, Iconoclasms Past and Present "

Author: Stacy Boldrick
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2017-07-05
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1351547690

All cultures make, and break, images. Striking Images, Iconoclasms Past and Present explores how and why people have made and modified images and other cultural material from pre-history into the 21st century. With its impressive chronological sweep and disciplinary breadth, this is the first book about iconoclasm (the breaking of images) and the transformation of broader sets of signs that includes contributions from archaeologists, curators, and museum conservators as well as historians of art, literature and religious studies. The chapters examine themes critical to the study of iconoclasm: violence, punishment, memory, intentionality, ruins and relics and their survival. The conclusion shows how cross-disciplinary debate amongst the contributors informed Tate Britain?s 'Art under Attack' exhibition (2013) and addresses the challenges iconoclasm presents to the modern museum. By juxtaposing objects and places usually considered in isolation, Striking Images raises provocative questions about our understandings of cross-cultural differences and the value of representational objects from the broken swords of pre-historical bog graves to the Bamiyan Buddhas and contemporary art. Are any such objects ever ?finished?, or are they simply subject to constant transformation? In dialogue with each other, the essays consider this question and expand the field of iconoclasm - and cultural - studies.

The Destruction of Art

The Destruction of Art
Author: Dario Gamboni
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Total Pages: 529
Release: 2007-05-15
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1861893167

"This is the first comprehensive examination of modern iconoclasm. Dario Gamboni looks at deliberate attacks carried out - by institutions as well as individuals - on paintings, buildings, sculptures and other works of art in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Truly international in scope, "The Destruction of Art" examines incidents, some comic and others disquieting, in the USA, France, the former Soviet Union and other eastern bloc states, Britain, Switzerland, Germany and elsewhere. Motivated in the first instance by the recent destruction of many monuments in Europe's former Communist states, which challenged the assumption that iconoclasm was truly a thing of the past, the author has discovered just how widespread the destruction of art is today, manifested in explicable and inexplicable vandalism, political protest and censorship of all sorts. Dario Gamboni examines the relationship between contemporary destructions of art, older forms of iconoclasm and the development of modern art. His analysis is illustrated by case studies from Europe and the United States, from Suffragette protests in London's National Gallery to the controversy surrounding the removal of Richard Serra's Tilted Arc in New York and the resultant debate on artists' moral rights. "The Destruction of Art" asks what iconoclasm can teach us about the place of works of art and material culture in society. The history of iconoclasm is shown to reflect, and to contribute to, the changing and conflicting definitions of art itself." -- BOOK JACKET.

Striking Power

Striking Power
Author: Edward Bleiberg
Publisher: Pulitzer Arts Foundation
Total Pages: 80
Release: 2019-09-17
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780997690194

Striking Power--the very first exhibition and publication to explore the history of iconoclasm in ancient Egyptian art--is an in-depth examination of the widespread campaigns of targeted image destruction that periodically swept through ancient Egypt, driven by political and religious motivations. Focusing on the legacies of pharaohs Hatshepsut (reigned c. 1478-58 BCE) and Akhenaten (reigned c. 1353-36 BCE), as well as the destruction of objects in Late Antiquity, the book pairs damaged works, from fragmented heads to altered inscriptions, with undamaged examples. In ancient Egypt, the deliberate destruction of objects--a nearly universal practice that continues in our own day--derived from the perception of images not only as representations but also as containers of powerful spiritual energy. Considering this historical phenomenon, Striking Power raises timely questions about the power of images and the ways in which we try to contain them.

Iconoclasm

Iconoclasm
Author: David Freedberg
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 361
Release: 2021-06-29
Genre: Art
ISBN: 022644550X

With new surges of activity from religious, political, and military extremists, the destruction of images has become increasingly relevant on a global scale. A founder of the study of early modern and contemporary iconoclasm, David Freedberg has addressed this topic for five decades. His work has brought this subject to a central place in art history, critical to the understanding not only of art but of all images in society. This volume collects the most significant of Freedberg’s texts on iconoclasm and censorship, bringing five key works back into print alongside new assessments of contemporary iconoclasm in places ranging from the Near and Middle East to the United States, as well as a fresh survey of the entire subject. The writings in this compact volume explore the dynamics and history of iconoclasm, from the furious battles over images in the Reformation to government repression in modern South Africa, the American culture wars of the early 1990s, and today’s cancel culture. Freedberg combines fresh thinking with deep expertise to address the renewed significance of iconoclasm, its ideologies, and its impact. This volume also provides a supplement to Freedberg’s essay on idolatry and iconoclasm from his pathbreaking book, The Power of Images. Freedberg’s writings are of foundational importance to this discussion, and this volume will be a welcome resource for historians, museum professionals, international law specialists, preservationists, and students.

Imagining the Byzantine Past

Imagining the Byzantine Past
Author: Elena N. Boeck
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2015-07-09
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1107085810

The first comparative, cross-cultural study of medieval illustrated histories that engages in a direct, confrontational dialogue with Byzantine historical memory.

The Brutish Museums

The Brutish Museums
Author: Dan Hicks
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2020
Genre: BUSINESS & ECONOMICS
ISBN: 9781786806833

Walk into any European museum today and you will see the curated spoils of Empire. They sit behind plate glass: dignified, tastefully lit. Accompanying pieces of card offer a name, date and place of origin. They do not mention that the objectsare all stolen. Few artefacts embody this history of rapacious and extractive colonialism better than the Benin Bronzes - a collection of thousands of brass plaques and carved ivory tusks depicting the history of the Royal Court of the Obas of BeninCity, Nigeria. Pillaged during a British naval attack in 1897, the loot was passed on to Queen Victoria, the British Museum and countless private collections. The story of the Benin Bronzes sits at the heart of a heated debate about cultural restitution, repatriation and the decolonisation of museums. In The Brutish Museums, Dan Hicks makes a powerful case for the urgent return of such objects, as part of a wider project of addressing the outstanding debt of colonialism.