The cover held a stiking image of a portrait being slashed by red paint or just a knife; for sure it reminded of blood.
The book numered several assaults on well- known, publicly displayed art works in our century, while seeking for an answer to the assailant's motives. Instead of regarding the assaults as acts of one who is considered to be mentally disturbed, the writer characterizes them as 'interaction between people and images'. For him the assauts are a way for people to deal with images, a kind of response to them. Images are nothing more than a kind of a description to a perception.
Wikipedia: "Iconoclasts:.. A term that has come to be applied figuratively to any person who challenges established dogma or conventions." while at the same time it is a term strongly related with the making and worshipping of 'graven images'.
Freedberg writes: 'It seems that an attack on an image should seem to be an appropriate mode of making a political point.'(p.11)
He writes about 'the man who in 1975 slashed the Nightwatch with a common eating knife' that the 'loci of his slashes' could be explained through the symbolic manipulation of light and darkness; figures dressed in black became in the assailants mind the personification of evil.
Mary Richardson who slashed Velasquez's Rokeby Venus in March 1914 said after the assault: " 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. Justice is an element of beauty as much as colour and outline on canvas..."
Velasquez, Rokeby Venus, detail. London, National Gallery. As damaged in 1914
Master of Alkmaar, Seven Works of Mercy, detail. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. Damaged state before restoriation.
Willem Drost, Christ appearing to the Magdalene. Kassel, Germaldgalerie, as damaged in 1977.
Really interesting is the appeal that the destruction of an image has on people: " Every newspaper attempts to give a photo of the damaged work...In 1911; Het Eleven captioned its photograph of the damaged Nightwatch with the most specific details of the likely movements of the assailant's hands...Even the normaly dry and sober Press Reports of the National Gallery went so far as to detail the size and numbers of the slashed strips, how they fell to the floor, and so on..."
Also interesting is the huge response that the restoration of the Nightwatch in 1975-76 had, 'most of which the Director of Rijksmuseum had allowed to be carried out in public, behind glass ' where 'many more than the usual number of visitors are reported to have flocked to see it'.
It seems that there is a freeing emotion at the moment when a figure is destroyed, a break of the hold that all representations have on people.
All the restoration acts carried out in public behind glass could play the role of a metaphor; they act as a celebration of the victory of a language of symbols again: the assailant kept in jail or in the mental hospital punished for his insane act, while people watch the 'awesome difficutlies of repairing the work', the almost' magical success of making it appear as if the attack had never happened'.
Some days after, at a friend's house, i started browsing IG Ballard's book 'Crash'.
I read the following description: "...Vaughan devised a terrifying almanac of imaginary automobile disasters and insane wounds- the lungs of elderly men punctured by door handles;the chests of young women impaled by steering-columns, the cheeks of handsome youths pierced by the chronnium latches of quarter lights...For him these wounds were the keys to a new sexuality born from a perverse technology. The images of these wounds hung in the gallery of his mind like exhibits in the museum of a slaughterhouse."
Everyone familiar with the book already knows that it presents an image of the human body being pierced, smashed into hundered pieces. In the preface of his book he admits he is using the car as a metaphor of modern technology. He questions: " Will modern technology provide us with hitherto undreamed of means of tapping our own psychopathologies? Is this harnessing of our innate perversity conceivably of benefit to us?"
He continues: " I feel myself that the writer's role, his authority and licence to act, have changed radically. I feel that, in a sense, a writer knows nothing any longer. He has no moral stance. He offers the reader the contents of his own head, a set of options and imaginative alternatives. His role is that of the scientist, whether on safari or in his laboratory, faced with an unknown terrain or subject. All he can do is to devise various hypotheses and test them against the facts." (Ballard 1995)
Ballard's book lead me to browse Kafka's 'Castle'. There are some quick notes taken from the editor's preface:
"...There is a common relationship between parts even if it cannot be understood..."
"...In a unified world nothing can be seperate..,"
As the editor comments on Kafkas ' The Castle' he talks about the duality in the writer, somehow about the other side of the coin:... "In one aspect the surface as experienced seems fragmentary, disconnected, and therefore inexplicablle, a source of anxiety. In one other there is a dream-like acceptance which implies a belief in haromny beyond intellectual perception."
The fragmenation of the human body- old phenomenon but at the same time it could not be more modern- is for sure charged with essential fear. But it could also be charged with the feeling of hope, hope that comes when all these fragments instead of just being hung in "the galleries of our minds", come together in another assemblage and start to signify another 'whole'.
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