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Recreating Destroyed Destructions: Felix Gmelin's Art Vandals

There are many signs indicating that attitudes are slowly changing regarding the material preservation of works of art and damage or transformations imposed upon them. One such sign is the organization of the session "Between Creation and Destruction: The Aesthetics of Iconoclasm" at the 91st Annual Conference of the College Art Association; another one is the interpretation of iconoclasm as continued creation in Art and Agency (Oxford, 1998), published posthumously by the British anthropologist Alfred Gell; yet another one is the series of works realized from 1994 to the present by the 40-year-old Swedish artist Felix Gmelin under the generic title Art Vandals. I will first examine this series before discussing Gell's text and other claims to the creative status of attacks against works of art. Art Vandals was prompted by the invitation to participate in a group show on iconoclasm which did not materialize. Gmelin's series initially comprised twelve works. It was first shown in Berlin in 1994, travelled from 1996 to 1998 in Sweden, Finland and Estonia, and was later shown in England and again in Germany. It was accompanied by a small catalogue and presented on a website that is still maintained. The exhibition has toured in Germany and Sweden, and later also in England, Finland, and Estonia. The series has been augmented by several works dealing in part with more recent cases and it is considered as a work in progress by the artist.

In an interview that I recently conducted with him, Gmelin mentioned some of the broader circumstances leading to this project. He had made several site-specific interventions that questioned the institution of the museum and was looking for one that would be more independent, "an institutionable critique that is moveable". Art Vandals also made many things come together for him: trained as a "skillful painter" at the Royal of Fine Arts in Stockholm, he had soon found out that there were "taboos everywhere". He was therefore "looking for better reasons to make art", for an argument that would allow him to question in its turn the radical modernism in which his father, a German media theoretician, had been deeply involved. This revisitation of radicalism is continued in two remakes of videos from the early 1970s that Gmelin is currently completing and will present in parallel with the original films.

Gmelin recognizes that most of the objects in Art Vandals remain in what he calls a "frustrated state between documentation and new works". The main exception in his eyes is also the only sculpture in the series, A Case of Poisoning. It is a bronze version of a doughnut included by Robert Gober in a 1989 one-man show and which an artist named Ed Brzezinski had treated as regular food at the opening. In the catalogue, on the website, and on labels hanging beside the works in the exhibition, Gmelin has provided information on this story and on the other cases, gathered from the press or from secondary literature. Gmelin recalls that he was at first overwhelmed by the wealth of documentary material involved and felt the need for a narrow selection of cases. But what interested him most was the dialectics of avant-garde iconoclasm subjected to vandalism, of works that involved violence and tried to change society, and had found themselves injured by viewers. He consequently left out attacks against Old Masters and concentrated on the second half of the twentieth century. The oldest cases he dealt with are Robert Rauschenberg's 1953 Erased De Kooning Drawing, Asger Jorn's painting The Avant-Garde Will Never Give In of 1962, and Tony Shafrazi's assault on Picasso's Guernica in 1974; all the other ones date from the 1980s and 1990s.

Their visual treatment is relatively diverse. Kill Lies All, a two on three meter large oil painting on canvas, takes its title from the inscription sprayed by Shafrazi on Guernica and can pass for a reconstruction of a relevant detail of the painting in its damaged state, except for some liberties taken with the original composition and for the fact that the inscription is ostentatiously painted and not sprayed. A New Painting after Rauschenberg's Erased de Kooning Drawing, on the other hand, turns the sheet of paper with its passe-partout into a green painting and the traces of de Kooning's drawing into blackboard-like white markings. The Avant-Garde Will Never Change its Spots replaces the emphatic inscription "The avant-garde will not give in", painted by Jorn on the background of an unsigned portrait of a girl bought on a flea-market, with "Jorn- or Pollock-like gestural brushwork". Gmelin explains that he was not only bound to homogenize these pictures since he painted them with all their historical layers himself, but actually wanted to do so in order to turn their "clashes" into unified works of art.

Gmelin's partial recreations of damaged or modified works, which must be seen in combination with the accompanying information on the events they refer to, are thus also comments, variations and extrapolations upon these works and events. The Overpainting, which evokes the overpaintings by Arnulf Rainer found anonymously overpainted in 1994, does so by convoking Jasper Johns's Field Painting of 1963-64. An important aspect of this process is the development of a meta-iconoclastic intertext. This development builds upon cross-references existing in some of the works in question - we have seen that Asger Jorn, by adding a moustache and a goatee to the girl with a skipping-rope, had alluded to Marcel Duchamp's 1919 L.H.O.O.Q. - but it goes beyond them: in 2001, Gmelin made an obvious reference to Rauschenberg's gesture by entitling Erased Green Dollar Sign his version of Alexander Brener's 1997 spraying on Kasimir Malevich's painting Suprematism in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

Gmelin does not understand the elements of Art Vandals as copies but as homages, and homages paid less to the original works than to the moment when they were "vandalized", which the author of the introduction to his 1996 catalogue, Jörgen Gassilewski, describes as "that second when a work of art becomes just another thing among all the other things in reality" [p. 5]. The same author writes that, "Felix Gmelin's art explores different vantage points, but does not endorse any one of them." He means this as a general remark, but it raises the question of the artist's attitude toward the "vandalism" that he comments upon.

In our conversation, Gmelin condemned explicitly these "radical gestures", especially when they take the literal form of Brener's action rather than the indirect or metaphorical ones favored by the historical avant-gardes and for instance Duchamp. For Gmelin, radicalism is about changing people's thoughts and attitudes and requires no physical violence. In addition, at a time when museums hire artists to make radical gestures, it amounts to "breaking open doors" and limiting oneself unduly to the narrow confines of the art world. Gmelin thus points out that when he made a piece about Brener's action, three years after the fact, he made a point of erasing the dollar sign almost completely. For him, the institutionalization of artistic radicalism turns such actions into "publicity stunts", immediately appropriated by their victims when not actually staged by them.

Painting Modernism Black adds to Damien Hirst's own use of the assault on his 1994 piece Away from the Flock, a white lamb floating in a tank of formaldehyde into which a penniless artist named Mark Bridger had poured black ink at the Serpentine Gallery. The information accompanying The Overpainting suggests that Arnulf Rainer was himself the author of the alleged "destruction" of his works and emphasizes the fact that he eventually exhibited them.

In this perspective, the title chosen by Gmelin for his version of Jorn's The Avant-Garde Will not Give In, namely The Avant-Garde Will Never Change its Spots, seems emblematic of the artist's affectionate but sceptical relationship to the "radical gestures" that he commemorates. Indeed, Gmelin sees his own contribution as an inversion of them, since he makes careful replicas of revolutionary gestures and transports them into museums, institutions devoted to the care and preservation of objects and traditional targets of cultural radicalism.
In this sense, his project is comparable to the intentions of the exhibition Iconoclash, shown last year at the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, which included a selection from Art Vandals and proposed to "suspend the iconoclastic gesture" and to turn iconoclasm "from a resource into a topic".

However, Gmelin's series lends itself to many different interpretations and is profoundly ambiguous. In a comment bearing his signature that accompanies Kill Lies All, Gmelin quotes Shafrazi's later explanation of his action, according to which he "wanted to bring the art absolutely up to date, to retrieve it from history and give it life".
He compares this intention to Picasso's own attitudes and ideas and concludes that, "by turning […] Guernica into a masterpiece, the museum helps to make the picture historic, thereby rendering it invisible in the present". Generally speaking, the reconstruction or evocation of the "vandalized" state of works of art implies an acknowledgement of the value - heuristic or creative - of such "moments", and Jörgen Gassilewski attempts to describe the complexity of Gmelin's homage by writing that it "honours institutions that exhibit the work of artists who honour artists who destroy the work of other artists'. Most importantly, by including in its technical descriptions mention of the type: "after Pablo Picasso (1937) and Tony Shafrazi (1974)", Art Vandals tends to support implicitly the claim made by several of the "vandals" that they were performing an artistic action or even collaborating with the authors of the original works.

This claim has tended to gain ground during the last decade of the twentieth century, raising questions to which I would now like to turn. When Brener made it forcefully in 1997, he found a vocal defendant in the art critic Giancarlo Politi, director of the Italian journal Flash Art. In an increasing number of instances, individuals have made, on works by famous artists exhibited in museums, illegal physical interventions that were denounced as vandalism but defined by themselves (or at a later stage by their lawyers) as art. To mention but one last example, referred to in 2001 by Felix Gmelin in Puking in Blue on a Composition in Black, Red and White, a 22-year-old Toronto art student named Jubal Brown vomited at the end of 1996 primary colours on paintings by Dufy and by Mondrian before being arrested and explained that he was engaged in a three-part performance meant to "destroy art, to liberate individuals and living creatures from its banal, oppressive representation".

The arguments put forth by these "creative vandals" are generally weak and contradictory. Their artistic record prior to the action in question also tends to be low or inexistent, which leads one to suspect that the cultural capital and the social visibility embodied in "masterpieces" and museums is more at stake than the specific properties of the works transformed. This was not the case with the attack against Velázquez's Rokeby Venus made in 1914 in the London National Gallery by Mary Richardson, for which Alfred Gell made a claim similar to the ones we have been considering (but not made at the time by the assailant herself). In Art and Agency, the caption for this National Gallery archival photograph reads "Mrs Pankhurst by Mary Richardson: the Rokeby Venus by Vélazquez slashed by Mary Richardson, 1914", and the text introduces it as follows [p. 62]: "I refer to the 'Slashed' Rokeby Venus, the work of a suffragette artist, Mary Richardson (and Vélazquez). This work only existed for a few months, before it was superseded by the 'restored Rokeby Venus' which can be seen in the National Gallery today (by Vélazquez and the Museum's picture-restoration staff)."

The written explanatory statement provided by Richardson began in the following way: "I have tried to destroy the picture of the most beautiful woman in mythological history as a protest against the Government for destroying Mrs Pankhurst, who is the most beautiful character in modern history." Emmeline Pankhurst, founder of the Suffrage movement, was then on hunger and thirst strike in Holloway Prison. Gell introduces the slashed Rokeby Venus in his remarkable discussion as an "example in which the sufferings of the index [the painting] do genuinely connote the suffering of the prototype [Mrs Pankhurst]" and he contends [p. 63] that "Mary Richardson was an artist who produced a new, 'modern, Rokeby Venus, now a representation of Emmeline Pankhurst (standing for modern womanhood as Venus stood for mythological womanhood)." I believe that he misinterprets the evidence and that Richardson, in fact, retaliated for her leader's sufferings upon a negative image of physical (v. moral) beauty, with the additional aim to expose the hypocrisy of a society that would condemn the damage done to a picture while tolerating the destruction of human life.

This difference in interpretation, however, is marginal for our purpose. Gell's broader proposition for an "anthropological theory of art" is to extend agency beyond the artist to the index (the work itself), the prototype (that which the work "represents"), and the recipient (who can also be the patron) [p. 29]. "Agency", as he employs it, is not absolute but relational: "for any agent, there is a patient, and conversely, for any patient, there is an agent." [p. 22]. This dissemination of agency in the social field and on the diachronical axis can be compared to the efforts by social historians and sociologists of art to consider all the actors involved and to put the history of reception on a par with the "aesthetics of reception". We have seen that Gell attributed the current Rokeby Venus to "Vélazquez and the Museum's picture-restoration staff". In fact, no material object survives for an extended period of time without being submitted to numerous interventions, be they called maintenance, conservation, restoration or modernization. The changing attitudes regarding the preservation of works of art which I alluded to at the beginning are nowhere more visible than in the theory and practice of conservation, which have witnessed an increasing scepticism toward the ideal of the "original state" of artefacts and a growing respect for the various historical stages incorporated in their present materiality. This has not, however, suppressed the necessity of making choices, and it has been accompanied by the ethical imperative of making the conservators' interventions reversible.

In a similar way, recognizing the dissemination of agency does not imply giving equal status to all interventions. Distinctions among them depend first on the cultural context, to which Gell, who deals mostly with non-Western examples, is duly attentive. In his major incursion in the field of Western modern art, he proposes to understand Marcel Duchamp's œuvre as a "distributed object", a coherent ensemble of discrete but interrelated public materializations of "artistic consciousness". This approach is implicitly predicated upon the understanding of art as the expression of an individual mind that has given birth to the notions of intellectual property and moral right, including - in the terms of the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works - "the right to claim authorship of the work and to object to any distortion, mutilation or other modification of, or other derogatory action in relation to, the said work, which would be prejudicial to [the author's] honour or reputation". Indeed, interpreting an œuvre as a system of places where the artist's agency has stopped and assumed visible form requires that the individual works have not been appropriated by other creators for their own œuvre (real or imaginary).

From this point of view (which is not the one of the lawyer, of the curator, or of the conservator), there is still something to learn from the debate around Tony Shafrazi's "Guernica action" almost thirty years later. After Shafrazi had been arrested and the picture swiftly cleaned by the conservators of the Museum of Modern Art, the artist Jean Toche issued a handbill in the name of an "Ad Hoc Artists' Movement for Freedom". It protested that Shafrazi had "freed GUERNICA from the chains of property and returned it to its true revolutionary nature" and that "the erasure of this […] SHAFRAZI/PICASSO political conceptual work" was "a crime against Freedom of Expression and Artistic Freedom"; it also called for the kidnapping of museum's trustees, directors, curators and benefactors. When Toche was arrested, another group of artists including Yvonne Rainer, Louise Bourgeois and Hans Haacke protested in their turn but replied that "no one has the right to unilaterally and arrogantly 'join' another artist's work" and that Shafrazi, rather than collaborating with Picasso, had acted against his artistic freedom by "infringing on the artist's inviolate right to make a statement without censorship, alerting, annexing or parasitic 'joining'".

When Guernica was returned to Spain in 1981, it was exhibited behind a bullet-proof glass in the Museo del Prado's annex Casón del Buen Retiro, a former royal palace. In 1989, when I saw it there, an inscription placed on the opposite wall joined the names of Juan Carlos I and Picasso in the same way as the names of previous kings and of the artists whom they had commissioned to decorate the palace. As the monarch who had helped to restore democracy in Spain, Juan Carlos certainly deserved some credit in the return of the painting, but this false symmetry struck me as another exaggerated claim to "collaboration", coming from an opposite quarter from Shafrazi's. It also prompts me to think that developing a broader view of creation and artistic agency requires even more the ability to make distinctions.