The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism Since the French Revolution.

By Dario Gamboni. New Haven: Yale University Press. 416 pp. 151 black-and-white photographs. $40.

Norman Bryson

English is not the only European language to be of two minds about the impulse to attack works of art. On the one hand, there is the word iconoclast, and on the other, the word vandal (similar distinctions are made in French and German). The terms seemingly refer to very different beasts. The iconoclast has an intellectual program, a doctrine opposed to the official use of imagery, whether ecclesiastical (as in the case of the disputes over the nature of the divine image in Byzantium) or secular (in a looser, yet still respectable sense, the iconoclast attacks "venerated institutions or cherished beliefs regarded as fallacious or superstitious" - OED). The iconoclast is, or almost is, one of us. The vandal, however, belongs to the mob, to the gutter. His attacks on the image are ignorant, oafish, blind; unable to understand beauty, he can only destroy it. The iconoclast acts from some high moral ground, but the vandal is Attila the Hun.

In one sense, this is a strange distinction to make, since the activity of iconoclasts and of vandals is essentially the same - both smash idols. It can be usefully compared with the difference between the words erotic and pornographic; pornography, in Robbe-Grillet's phrase, is the other's eroticism. In the sixteenth century, when Julius II ordered that the most venerable church in Christendom, Old St. Peters, be razed, no one accused the pontiff of Attila-like inclinations. Baron Haussmann's mid-nineteenth-century creation of the Paris of the boulevards, which entailed the wholesale destruction of the Paris of the Middle Ages, met with opposition in his own time, but like Julius II, he was free from the charge of barbarism. Destruction "from below" is condemned all round, destruction "from above" is likelier to be viewed as progress.

Dario Gamboni's fascinating study insists that if we are to understand the effacement, degradation, or annihilation of art, neither the term destruction nor the term art can be taken as simple givens, which people at all times and places would recognize and agree upon. These categories are socially produced, highly contested, and constantly changing. Gamboni follows a principle similar to a certain school of criminology in the '60s: instead of asking "Why do people do these bad things?," ask rather, "Why are these things viewed as bad in the first place, and by whom, and when?" The emphasis accordingly shifts from the destruction of art as an expression of art's power to move the spectator, of which iconoclasm provides a dramatic measure (albeit a negative one). At the same time, the terrible power of the vandal (which was the focus of an earlier study of the destruction of art, by Louis Reau: for Reau "the mob is always vandalistic") declines in importance as well. Gamboni's more skeptical and nominalist framework tends to be neutral about the value of the art whose destruction he chronicles. It is the social process around art, rather than the thing itself, that interests him.

The advantages of this approach are clear in Gamboni's discussion of the toppling of Communist monuments in the wake of 1989 - the spectacular assault on statues of Lenin and other party luminaries which, by 1993, made Russia "the land of empty pedestals." As relayed by the Western press, the image of the great leader being helped from his platform with nooses and cranes became an easily recognized icon for the fall of a regime and the people's spontaneous anger against their former oppressors; journalists rarely reported the discussions that took place prior to a monument's removal. Yet, as Gamboni explains, the moment of destruction was typically preceded by often complex public debate. In Berlin, especially, many expressed the view that the statues should be left to stand as witnesses guarding against a possible repetition of history, or as proof that the traumas of the past had been successfully worked through in the present, and therefore had no need to be buried or repressed.

Surprisingly, there were even more graphic moves to protect certain monuments that already had about them the look of doom. Beneath the statue of Marx and Engels in front of the Palast der Republik were spray-painted the words "We are Innocent" - leaving open the question as to whether it was Marx and Engels who were innocent of what had been done in their name, or whether it was the statues themselves that had never harmed anyone and were entitled to a bit of peace. When the nineteen-meter-high statue of Lenin was removed from Leninplatz in 1992, anonymous mourners began to affix poems, cartoons, and photographs to the fence surrounding the demolition site, in a quasi-funereal cult of remembrance of the lost statue. Significantly, none of those defending the sculptures did so on aesthetic grounds, for by the early '90s this was conceptually and politically impossible. According to the Western definition of the art object as an autonomous aesthetic creation, as opposed to an instrument of propaganda, the statues simply did not count as art: hence the legitimacy of tearing them down. Not only did this mark the globalization of the Western definition of art, it revealed a paradoxical situation in which the alleged autonomy and noninstrumentality of art could be politically and instrumentally mobilized to eradicate a non-Western aesthetic.

The Destruction of Art embraces every kind of slippage between the categories of art and nonart in this century: the slashing of Velazquez's Rokeby Venus by an outraged English suffragette in 1914; the ascendency of the readymade; the incorporation of destruction into art by Man Ray, Arman, Tinguely, and others; the removal of Serra's Tilted Arc from Federal Plaza in 1989. The sheer range of the project is impressive, though the desire for coverage may not be without its drawbacks. While Gamboni's writing is always thorough and reliable, the discussion of such cases as Saddam Hussein's megalomaniacal monument to himself in Baghdad is perfunctory compared, for instance, with the passionate and chilling account by Samir al-Khalil (in The Monument, 1991).

Gamboni truly comes into his own with out-of-the-way, even parochial cases and examples. By far the longest and most thoughtful case study concerns the Eighth Swiss Sculpture Exhibition held in Bienne in 1980, an exhibition at which almost half of the works presented in the open air ended up being trashed by anonymous members of the public: mobiles hurled to the ground, works covered with graffiti or treated as waste receptacles, or - in one instance - removed by a gardener who claimed in court not to have recognized the object in question as art. Gamboni's take on all this is pure Bourdieu: it turns out that the exhibition was conceived by local worthies for the greater

[INCOMPLETE TEXT FROM ORIGINAL PUBLICATION]