Interviewed by the MAGS Team, April 7, 2022.
Dr. Stacy Boldrick pictured above. Picture Courtesy of Stacy Boldrick
How do museums present iconoclasm today?
Taking the example of the Art under Attack exhibition at Tate, we looked first at religion. Then we looked at politics and then at aesthetics. We looked at different specific phases of the Reformation in England, to show that what Henry VIII was not responsible for all iconoclasm. Henry VIII basically wanted to take wealth from monasteries and shrines. He banned images of Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury who was a rebel saint from centuries before Henry VIII's time. But images of Thomas Becket all of a sudden represented rebellion: Henry VIII decided that nobody could have images of Thomas Beckett or the Pope in their religious books or in churches or anywhere, but the policy didn't encourage people to go around smashing up all sculpture. Under later rulers, Edward VI and Elizabeth I, major policies of taking down religious sculpture came in, so that's when most of the destruction took place. In the Art under Attack exhibition at Tate Britain, there was maybe a bit more interpretation than they would normally have. There were more text panels for each display. In the politics section of the Art under Attack exhibition, we had a room full of fragments from monuments that had been toppled. They were also protests against rulers - in the case of Nelson’s Pillar, a Dublin monument, the protest against Britain occupying Ireland. We also had some coins that had been defaced as an act of protest. And then we had one room dedicated to the suffragettes and we showed paintings that had been attacked by the suffragettes at Manchester Art Gallery. We had a recording of Mary Richardson later in life describing how she planned her attack on the Rokeby Venus and what it felt like. We tried to use different media as well, where we could with recordings and things like this but there was still a lot of reading required by the viewer at the time as well, to understand why, how, where, what and when iconoclastic events happened.
In the aesthetics section of the exhibition, we focused on more contemporary works. One of the rooms focused on something called the Destruction in Art Symposium: led by the artist Gustav Metzger, a group of international artists came together in London in 1966 to talk about destruction as a creative force, to talk about destruction in art making and its relationship to the Cold War. We saw that as exploring a moment when destruction entered artistic practice. We had a fragment of Yoko Ono's dress from when she did a performance of Cut Piece: she's sitting on the stage and invites people to cut bits of her dress off because she did a performance of that in 1966 at this symposium. In the final room, we had contemporary artworks made by artists who were exploring or using destruction in their work in some way. What we were trying to do was to represent iconoclasm as something that relates to different time periods, and how artists use it as a positive creative force.
A recent example of which I thought it was a very good approach to presenting an object of iconoclasm is the display of the Colston statue that was toppled in Bristol and thrown into the harbour. M Shed in Bristol displayed it not upright, as it was as a monument, but horizontally and deposed, retaining the graffiti that was on it. I don't advocate taking down all monuments, but I do support acts of protest. I thought the M Shed display was very good in that the interpretation is visual, in that when you see it, you're seeing it not in a previous state, but in its more recent state and it embodies those acts of protest in a really direct way.
How does recent reports of acts of destruction of museums and heritage in the war in Ukraine fit within your research?
It's heart-breaking. There are lots of consistent threads of discussion within iconoclasm and one of the most serious ones is the parallel between genocide and the destruction of cultural heritage. This is why there's a certain amount of protection of monuments. That's part of NATO's policy. There have been a number of really good books written about this by architectural historians, cultural heritage specialists and others. It's very important because once a culture’s heritage is destroyed, that's one of many elements that destroy a culture and a group of people. So, there are parallels between actions against objects and actions against people. When the Puritans took down certain religious sculptures that hadn't already been taken down, there were parallels between forms of punishment at the time and actions committed against sculptures, taking off the heads or the nose or an ear. I'm not saying that those parallels are exactly there, in every culture and every time, but sometimes they are, and those specific parallels between specific forms of punishment and, say, sculptures - the broad parallel between the attacks on cultural heritage and attacks on groups of people, are real.
Some people get upset when they see that there's greater protection afforded to cultural heritage than people: this is one of the things that came up with the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas by the Taliban. The Taliban leader said, “Why? Why do you care more about these statues than our children?”. That's another whole area. There are great artists tackling these issues and questions really well – for example the Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz, whose website takes you through some of the important projects that he's done (www.michaelrakowitz.com).
Sounds from the discussion so far that iconoclasm is an act of power, and whether it's an act committed by those who already have power, or against those with power, that's going to have different implications and meaning. Absolutely. It can happen from top down or bottom up. That's why the discussion is quite often polarized: 'Iconoclasm - it's either good or bad', or 'are you on this side or that side?'. A lot of the debate around sculptures and statues and monuments that are happening in the UK, and around the world, are contentious and all about power.
What are some books you recommend on the topic?
Barber, Tabitha and Boldrick, Stacy, eds. Art under Attack: Histories of British Iconoclasm. London: Tate, 2013.
Bevan, Robert. The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War. 2nd edn. London: Reaktion, 2016.
Boldrick, Stacy. Iconoclasm and the Museum. London and New York: Routledge, 2020.
Boldrick, Stacy and Clay, Richard, eds. Iconoclasm: Contested Objects, Contested Terms. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007; republished London and New York: Routledge, 2017.
Gamboni, Dario. The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism since the French Revolution. 2nd edn. London: Reaktion, 2018.
Ovenden, Richard. Burning the Books: A History of Knowledge under Attack. London: John Murray, 2020.
Tugendhaft, Aaron. The Idols of ISIS: From Assyria to the Internet. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020.
Von Tunzelmann, Alex. Fallen Idols: Twelve Statues That Made History. London: Headline, 2021.
Edited by MAGS Team