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A rough Classification of the Iconoclastic Gestures

19 January 2015
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Given the ongoing dispute around what sort of image taboo should be or should not be broken it might be useful to have a look again at the classification of iconoclastic gestures made for the Iconoclash show (following by a few tweets written during the week-end). Full article available in "What is Iconoclash ?" or "Is there a world beyond the image wars" ?

Extract from Iconoclash, Beyond the Image-Wars in Science, Religion and Art (edited by Peter Weibel and Bruno Latour), ZKM and MIT Press, pp. 14-37, 2002. Full article accessible on http://www.bruno-latour.fr/node/64

A Rough Classification of the Iconoclastic Gestures

Now that we have some idea of how the material for the show and the catalog has been selected, it might be useful for the reader as well as for the visitor to benefit from a classification of the iconoclashes presented here. It is of course impossible to propose a standardized, agreed-upon typology for such a complex and elusive phenomenon.

It would even seem to run counter to the spirit of the show. As I have claimed, somewhat boldly: are we not after a re-description of iconophilia and iconoclasm in order to produce even more uncertainty about which kind of image worship/image smashing one is faced with? How could we neatly pull them apart? And yet it might be useful to briefly present the five types of iconoclastic gestures reviewed in this show, for no better reason than to gauge the extent of the ambiguity triggered by the visual puzzles we have been looking for.

The principle behind this admittedly rough classification is to look at:

  • the inner goals of the icon smashers,
  • the roles they give to the destroyed images,
  • the effects this destruction has on those who cherished those images,
  • how this reaction is interpreted by the iconoclasts,
  • and, finally, the effects of destruction on the destroyer’s own feelings.

This list is rudimentary but sturdy enough, I think, to guide one through the many examples assembled here.

The “A” People are Against All Images

The first type – I give them letters to avoid loaded terminology – is made up of those who want to free the believers – those they deem to be believers – of their false attachments to idols of all sorts and shapes. Idols, the fragments of which are now lying on the ground, were nothing but obstacles in the path to higher virtues. They had to be destroyed. They triggered too much indignation and hatred in the hearts of the courageous image breakers. Living with them was unbearable [1].

What distinguishes the As from all other types of iconoclasts is that they believe it is not only necessary but also possible to entirely dispose of intermediaries and to access truth, objectivity, and sanctity. Without those obstacles, they think one will at last have smoother, faster, more direct access to the real thing, which is the only object worthy of respect and worship. Images do not even provide preparation, a reflection, an inkling of the original: they forbid any access to the original. Between images and symbols you have to choose or be damned.

Type A is thus the pure form of ”classical” iconoclasm, recognizable in the formalist’s rejection of imagination, drawing and models (see Galison) as well as in the many Byzantine, Lutheran, revolutionary movements of idol smashers, and the horrifying ”excesses” of the Cultural Revolution (see Stoddard). Purification is their goal. The world, for A people, would be a much better place, much cleaner, much more enlightened, if only one could get rid of all mediations and if one could jump directly into contact with the original, the ideas, the true God.

One of the problems with the As is that they have to believe that the others – the poor guys whose cherished icons have been accused of being impious idols – believe naively in them. Such an assumption entails that, when the philistines react with screams of horror to pillage and plunder, this does not stop the As. On the contrary, it proves how right they were (see Schaffer). The intensity of the horror of the idolaters is the best proof that those poor naive believers had invested too much in those stones that are essentially nothing. Armed with the notion of naive belief, the freedom-fighters constantly misconstrue the indignation of those they scandalize in order to effectuate an abject attachment to things they should destroy even more radically.

But the deepest problem of the As, is that no one knows if they are not Bs!

The ”B” People Are Against Freeze-Frame, not Against Images

The Bs too are idol smashers. They also wreak havoc on images, break down customs and habits, scandalize the worshippers, and trigger the horrified screams of "Blasphemer!, Infidel!, Sacrilege!, Profananity!." But the huge difference between the As and the Bs – the distinction that runs through this whole exhibit – is that the latter do not believe it possible nor necessary to get rid of images. What they fight is freeze-framing, that is, extracting an image out of the flow, and becoming fascinated by it, as if it were sufficient, as if all movement had stopped.

What they are after is not a world free of images, purified of all the obstacles, rid of all mediators, but on the contrary, a world filled with active images, moving mediators. They do not want the image production to stop forever – as the As will have it – they want it to resume as fast and as fresh as possible.

For them, iconophilia does not mean the exclusive and obsessive attention to image, because they can stand fixed images no more than the As. Iconophilia means moving from one image to the next. They know ”truth is image but there is no image of truth.” For them, the only way to access truth, objectivity, and sanctity is to move fast from one image to another, not to dream the impossible dream of jumping to a non-existing original. Contrary to Plato’s resemblance chain, they don’t even try to move from the copy to the prototype. They are, as the old iconophilic Byzantine used to say, ”economic” (see Mondszain), the word meaning at the time a long and carefully managed flow of images in religion, politics, and art – and not the sense it now has: the world of goods.

Whereas the As believe that those who hold to images are iconophilic and the courageous minds who break away from the fascination with images are iconoclastic, the Bs define iconophilic as those who do not cling to one image in particular but are able to move from one to the other. For them iconoclasts are either those who absurdly want to get rid of all images or those who remain in the fascinated contemplation of one isolated image, freeze-framed.

Prototypical examples of Bs could be: Jesus chasing the merchants out of the Temple, Bach shocking the dull music out of the Leipzig congregation’s ears [2], Malevich painting the black square to access the cosmic forces that had remained hidden in classical representative painting [3], the Tibetan sage extinguishing the butt of a cigarette on a Buddha’s head to show its illusory character [4]. The damage done to icons is, to them, always a charitable injunction to redirect their attention towards other, newer, fresher, more sacred images: not to do without image.

But of course many iconoclashes come from the fact that no worshipper can be sure when his or her preferred icon/idols will be smashed to the ground, or whether an A or a B does the ominous deed. Are we requested, they wonder, to go without any mediation at all and try out direct connections with God and objectivity? Are we invited to simply change the vehicle we have used so far for worship? Are we spurred into a renewed sense of adoration and asked to resume our work of image-building anew? Think of the long hesitation of those waiting at the foot of Mount Sinai for Moses to return: what have we been asked to do? It is so easy to be mistaken and to begin molding the Golden Calf (see Pinchard).

Are neither the As nor the Bs sure of how to read the reactions of those whose icon/idols are being burnt? Are they furious at being without their cherished idols, much like toddlers suddenly deprived of their transitional object? Are they ashamed of being falsely accused of naively believing in non-existing things? Are they horrified at being so forcefully requested to renew their adhesion to their cherished tradition that they had let fall into disrepute and mere custom? Neither the As nor the Bs can decide, from the screeching noise made by their opponents, what sort of prophets they are themselves: are they prophets who claim to get rid of all images, or the ones who, ”economically,” want to let the cascade of images move again to resume the work of salvation?

But this is not the end of our hesitation, of our ambiguity, of our iconoclash. As and Bs could, after all, be simply Cs in disguise.

The C People are not Against Images, Except those of Their Opponents

The Cs are also after debunking, disenchantment, idol-breaking. They too leave in their trail plunder, wreckage, horrified screams, scandals, abomination, desecration, shame and profanation of all sorts. But contrary to the As and to the Bs, they have nothing against images in general: they are only against the image to which their opponents cling most forcefully.

This is the well-known mechanism of provocation by which, in order to destroy someone as fast and as efficiently as possible, it is enough to attack what is most cherished, what has become the repository of all the symbolic treasures of one people (see Lindhardt, Sloterdijk). Flag-burning, painting-slashing, hostage-taking are typical examples. Tell me what you hold to be most dear, and I will wreck it so as to kill you faster. It is the mini-max strategy so characteristic of terrorist threats: the maximum damage for the minimum investment. Box cutters and plane tickets against the United States of America.

The search for the suitable object to attract destruction and hatred is reciprocal: ”Before you wanted to attack my flag, I did not know I cherished it so much, but now I do” (see Taussig). So the provocateurs and those they provoke are playing cat and mouse, the first looking for what triggers indignation faster, the others looking eagerly for what will trigger their indignation most fiercely.[5]. During this search, all recognize the image in question as a mere token; it counts for nothing but an occasion that allows the scandal to unfold (see Koch). If it were not for the conflict, everyone in the two camps would be perfectly happy to confess that it is not the object that is disputed; it is just a stake for something entirely different [6]. So for the Cs, the image itself is not in question at all, they have nothing against it (as the As do) or for it (as in the case of the Bs). The image is simply worthless – worthless but attacked, thus defended, thus attacked ...

What is so terrible for idol smashers is that there is no way to decide for good whether they are As, Bs or Cs. Maybe they have entirely misunderstood their calling; maybe they are misconstruing the screams of horror of those they call philistines who witness their idols smashed to the ground. They see themselves as prophets but may be they are mere ”agents provocateurs.” They see themselves as freeing the poor wretched souls from their imprisonment by monstrous things, but what if they were, on the contrary, scandalmongers looking for ways to shame their opponents most efficiently?

What would happen to me if, in criticizing the critics, I myself was simply trying to create another scandal? What if Iconoclash, in its pretension to re-describe iconoclasm, was nothing but another boring iconoclastic gesture, another provocation, the mere repetition of the endless gesture of the intelligentsia’s most cherished treasures? We don’t know for sure.

Ah, but that is why it is called Iconoclash.

The ”D”People are Breaking Images Unwittingly

There is another kind of icon smasher present in this exhibit, a most devious case, those who could be called the ”innocent vandals.” As is well known, vandalism is a term of spite invented to describe those who destroy not so much out of a hatred of images but out of ignorance, a lust for profit and sheer passion and lunacy [7].

Of course, the label can be used to describe the action of the As, the Bs, and the Cs as well. They all can be accused of vandalism by those who don’t know if they are innocent believers furious at being accused of naiveté, philistines awakened from their dogmatic sleep by prophetic calls, or scandal-lovers delighted at being the butt of criticism and thus able to demonstrate the strength and self-righteousness of their indignation.

But the innocent vandals are different from the normal, ”bad” vandals: they had absolutely no idea that they were destroying anything. On the contrary, they were cherishing images and protecting them from destruction, and yet they are accused later of having profaned and destroyed them [8]! They are, so to speak, iconoclasts in retrospect. The typical example is that of the restaurateurs who are accused by some of ”killing with kindness” (see Lowe). The field of architecture is especially filled with those ”innocents” who, when they build, have to destroy, when their buildings are accused of being nothing but vandalism (see Obrist, Geimer). Their heart is filled with the love of images – so they are different from all the other cases – and yet they trigger the very same curses of ”profanation,” ”sacrilege,” and ”desecration” as all the others.

Life is so difficult: by restoring works of art, beautifying cities, rebuilding archeological sites, they have destroyed them, their opponents say, to the point that they appear as the worst iconoclasts, or at least the most perverse ones. But other examples can be found like those museum curators who keep the beautiful New Guinean ”mallagans” although they have become worthless since, in the eyes of their makers, they should be destroyed after three days … (see Derlon, Sarro) or those African objects which have been carefully made to rot on the ground and which are carefully saved by art dealers and thus rendered powerless – in the eyes of their makers (see Strother) [9]. The apprentice sorcerer is not a really wicked sorcerer, but one who becomes wicked out of his or her own innocence, ignorance and carelessness.

And here again, the As as well as the Bs and the Cs can be accused of being Ds, that is, of aiming at the wrong target, of forgetting to take into account the side effects, the far reaching consequences of their acts of destruction. ”You believe you freed people from idolatry, but you have simply deprived them of the means to worship;” ”You believe you are a prophet renewing the cult of images with fresher images, you are nothing but a scandal-monger thirsty for blood;” and similar accusations are frequently leveled in revolutionary circles, accusing one another of being constantly on the wrong foot, of being, horresco referens, reactionary. What if we had killed the wrong people, smashed down the wrong idols? Worse, what if we had sacrificed idols for the cult of an even bloodier, bigger, and more monstrous Baal?

The ”E” People are Simply the People: they Mock Iconolasts and Iconophiles

To be complete, one should add the Es who doubt the idol breakers as much as the icon worshippers. They are diffident to any sharp distinctions between the two poles; they exercise their devastating irony against all mediators; not that they want to get rid of them, but because they are so conscious of their fragility. They love to show irreverence and disrespect, they crave for jeers and mockery, they claim an absolute right to blasphemy in a fierce, Rabelaisian way (see Pinchard), they show the necessity of insolence, the importance of what the Romans called ”pasquinades,” which is so important for a healthy sense of civil liberty, the indispensable dose of what Peter Sloterdijk has called kynicism (by opposition to the typically iconoclastic cynicism).

There is a right not to believe and the even more important right not to be accused of believing naively in something. There may be no such a thing as a believer. Except the rare icon smasher who believes in belief – and, strangely enough, believes himself or herself to be the only unbeliever. This healthy, wide ranging, popular, indestructible agnosticism may be the source of much confusion because, here again, the reactions they trigger are indistinguishable from those created by the As’, Bs’, Cs’, and Ds’ acts of destruction-regeneration. It is so easy to be shocked. Everyone has a quantity of ”shockability” that can certainly be applied to different causes, but not in any case emptied or even diminished.

[PICTURE: Maurizio Cattelan La Nona Ora]

Take the now famous icon of Pope John-Paul II struck to the ground by a meteorite (see Maurizio Cattelan, La Nona Ora). Does it demonstrate a healthy irreverence for authority? Is it a typical case of a cheap provocation aimed at blasé Londoners who expect to be mildly shocked when they go to an art show but don’t really give a damn for the killing of such boring image as that of the Pope? Is it, on the contrary, a scandalous attempt to wreck the belief of Polish museum visitors when the piece is shown in Warsaw? Or is it, as Christian Boltanski claims, a deeply respectful image showing that, in Catholicism, the Pope is requested to suffer the same breaking, the same ultimate destruction as Christ himself [10]? How is it possible to test this range of interpretations [11]?

Hence the sound scape of this exhibit.

Notes:

[1] As recalled into Centlivres (see catalog) Mollah Omar made a sacrifice of 100 cows, a very costly hecatomb by Afghan standards, as atonement for having failed to destroy the Buddhas for so long: 100 cows to ask remission for this horrible sin of eleven centuries without wrecking them.

[2] Denis Laborde, Vous avez-tous entendu son blasphème? Qu'en pensez-vous? Dire la Passion selon St Matthieu selon Bach, in Ethnologie française, 22, 1992, pp. 320-333.

[3] Boris Groys, Staline, oeuvre d'art totale, Editions Jacqueline Chambon, Paris, 1990.

[4] Heather Stoddard, Le Mendiant de l'Amdo, Société d'ethnographie, Paris, 1985.

[5] Political correctness is part of this attitude: scouting everywhere for good occasions to be scandalized.

[6] For the mechanism of scandal mongering in contemporary art, see Heinich, Gamboni, in this catalog and his book, The Destruction of Art. Iconoclasm and Vandalism since the French Revolution, Reaktion Books, London, 1996. For social and political ”affaires” see Luc Boltanski, L'amour et la justice comme compétences, A.-M. Métailié, Paris, 1990. The typical mechanism for seeing objects as tokens has been proposed by René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1987.

[7] Louis Réau, Histoire du vandalisme. Les monuments détruits de l'art français, Edition augmentée par Michel Fleury et Guy-Michel Leproux, Bouquins, Paris, 1994; André Chastel, The Sac of Rome – 1527, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1983.

[8] Censorship may be one aspect of the Ds: tearing down or hiding images for the sake of protecting other images and choosing the wrong target. Filmmakers are busy deleting images of the World Trade Center from their film so as not to shock the viewers. In International Herald Tribune, 25 October 2001.

[9] Other cases could be found of retrospective destruction in technology: asbestos used to be the ”magic material” before its producers were accused of killing thousands of people with it; DTT used to be the magic pesticide before being accused of the same crimes. See Ulrich Beck, Ecological Politics in an Age of Risk, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1995, for an account of this retrospective accusation around the notion of ”after-effect.”

[10] Boltanski, personal communication.

[11] I proposed a test to Cattelan: to replace the Pope, whom everyone (but perhaps the Poles) expects to see smashed to the ground, by someone whose destruction would trigger the intellectuals’ indignation: for instance to show Salman Rushdie shot to death by an Islamist bullet … Too horrifying, too scandalous, I was told (Obrist, personal communication). Ah ah! so the Pope can be struck but not someone really worthy of respect in the eyes of the critically minded! But when I proposed what appeared to be a true sacrilege and not a cheap one, what was I after? Another provocation directed at faithful critics instead of faithful Popists? Who is to tell? I can’t even be sure I understand the reactions of those who recoiled in horror at my suggestion.

A few tweets written by Bruno Latour during the last week-end :

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