Curators'

An

Concepts:

End

to

Peter

the

End

Weibel

of

Art?

On the Iconoclasm of Modern Art

The crisis of representation began at the historical moment when painting lostunder
the pressure of photography and the praise of its unprecedented, truthful
representationits interest in presenting reality and took insteadfrom paint to brush,
from canvas to framethe means of expressing representation as the subject of
representation. With Van Gogh the color began no longer to be bound to the object.
With his pure, absolute suprematist color painting, Malevich banished the object from
the picture. At the same time the represented object vanished by being replaced through
a real object: the ready-made of Marcel Duchamp. In 1921Rodchenko painted three
monochromes as the last paintings.
The self-dissolution of painting can be explained in three steps: first, by a shift of accent
the color is analyzed as the medium of painting and becomes the main element, above
form, i.e. in Impressionism and Expressionism. Second, color becomes independent,
leaves behind the laws of local colors and receives its own absolute status, see, for
example, Suprematism and monochromes. Third, paint is replaced by other materials,
such as white by aluminum. Surface design without painted color allowed for the
making of "unpainted" paintings, allowed mere surfaces of wood, metal, marble, or
cardboard to hang or lean on the wall as paintings. In this dialectics of liberation, which
consists of declaring progressively historical elements of easel painting independent
(from color and canvas up to the frame) and making them absolute, not only were
objects repressed from the abstract image but finally the picture itself became repressed
and destroyed (empty canvases, empty frames), in the end leading to the departure from
the picture.
The paint-less or monochrome easel painting could beas was shown by artists from
Lucio Fontana to Yves Kleincut or drilled or torn, attacked by fire or acid. Finally
only the empty frames of paintings or just the backs of paintings, were shown. Even the
surface of the canvas could be replaced by the surface of the skin. Naked bodies covered
with paint became the instruments for color application or became the canvas itself.

Painting as the arena of action (Action Painting) became a bodily action on the canvas
and finally a painting on the body, an action without canvas. Centered on the artists
body, even the products of this body [like feces] could find the social consensus to be
accepted as an artwork.
From the empty image to the empty gallery, from the white painting to the white cube
(O'Doherty), we see the iconoclastic gesture of modern art. In this iconoclastic tradition
we also see the substitution of painted images with texts. The material-bound, objectlike paradigm was replaced by insight into the linguistic nature of all artistic expressions.
Yet by leaving the picture and the mediation, modern art has also produced a way out of
the crisis of representation. Especially the Neo-Avantgarde after World War II and
movements like Kinetics, Fluxus, Happening, Actionism, Body Art, Process Art, Land
Art, Arte Povera, Concept Art and above all the development of Media Artfrom
Expanded Cinema to Virtual Reality, from closed circuit video installations to
interactive computer installationsprepared social practices as open art forms, by
making the pure spectator a participating and interacting user.
Thus began the farewell to the idea of modernism (T. J. Clark), that was determined by
the iconoclastic gesture. These practices, in forms of intervention, interaction,
institutional critique and contextualization took art beyond the White Cube, where
questions of gender, race, class, power, colonialism had not been asked. With the end of
the epoch of modern art, which announced the end of art, new practices beyond the
crisis of representation began.
From mathematics to medicine, from computer-supported proof methods to computer
tomography, we see a triumphant return of the image to the natural sciences. While
modern art turned more and more into an iconoclastic strategy, in a critique of
representation, we see the advent of an iconophilic science trusting the representative
power of the image.
We live in a period where art, as the former monopolist of the representative image, has
abandoned this representative obligation. Yet science, in contrast, fully embraces the
options which technical machine-based images offer for the representation of reality.
Therefore, it could be the case that mankind will find the images of science more
necessary than the images of art. To be able to maintain its significance up against the

sciences and their picture-producing procedures, art must look for a position beyond the
crisis of representation and beyond the image wars.
Curators'

concepts

: Dario

Gamboni

Image to Destroy, Indestructible Image

Picturing the destruction of pictures
Quite a few images represent people attacking images. They may be based on actual
events witnessed by their authors but they always go beyond mere documentation. They
include a reflection on what it means to damage or destroy a picture, a monument, a
work of art, and they suggest reasons why this is done. Normally, they take sides for the
objects under attack and condemn their assailants. This is not surprising, because the
artists who created them were themselves involved in the production of images. But this
condemnation can also express the point of view of the public at large, who has come to
regard the intentional degradation of cultural property as a barbaric and irrational form
of behaviour.
What is to be done with political monuments?
It is easier to understand why political monuments are targeted. When a regime is
challenged or toppled, the buildings and statues it has erected come under attack as
instruments and symbols of its power. Their function is not lost but transformed; their
fragments are often preserved and turned into souvenirs, relics, and new monuments.
This happened to the Paris Bastille in 1789, and to the Berlin Wall two hundred years
later. But many fear that the removal of political monuments destroys collective
memory and may lead to repeating the same mistakes rather than learning from them.
And others suggest that what is currently rejected as propaganda may turn out to have
been art after all.
Vandals against Iconoclasts
Industrial and post-industrial societies have kept destroying huge parts of their material
heritage in the name of progress. In the arts, the ideal of the wiped slate and the
rejection of past tradition has inspired the iconoclasm of the avant-garde. Not only
have artists appropriated reproductions of older works and created self-destroying
happenings, but some have turned against originals and claimed the destruction of art to

be art. Meanwhile, more or less involuntary or ill-prepared visitors, confronted with

modern art in museums and in public space, have sometimes expressed their rejection
physically and been labelled vandals. But the iconoclast and the vandal can be
closer than they think and. In some recent works, the destruction of images becomes a
theme again and invites us to pause and reflect upon the urge to destroy and the need to
preserve.
Curators'

concepts

Cells

Peter

Galison

of

Science

Quantum

Cell

From the earliest days of the quantum in the 1910s, visualization has been on trial. Niels
Bohr wanted to draw pictures of the atom back in 1913 and yet refused to picture how
electrons jump from one orbit to another. Erwin Schrdinger and Werner Heisenberg
clashed furiously over the role of pictorial intuition in physicsSchrdinger demanded
pictures, Heisenberg resolutely blocked them. Eventually pieces of both views entered
quantum mechanics of 196. Built into the fabric of physics itself, the complementarity
of pictures and numbers echoes like a leitmotif throughout the whole ballad of
twentieth-century physics. This background sets the stage here for a recent clash over
quantum reality. Physicist Eric J. Heller has developed a remarkable technique for
simulating the path of quantum motion of electronsthe results, both artistically and
scientifically fascinating, suggest new relations of quantum physics to classical and
chaotic physics, and have given rise to entirely new phenomena such as scarring.
Picturesproduced not in the laboratory but on powerful computershave begun to play
a

significant

Image

role

in

new

and

discoveries

within

condensed

Logic

matter

physics.

Cell

At the heart of experimental physics lies a fundamental tensionon the one side pulls
the desire to image the microworld, and on the other the equally powerful hope to find
refuge from images through statistics. Decorating the cover of textbooks and imprinted
on our cultural imagination are the wispy tracks of cloud chambers, nuclear emulsions,

and bubble chambers. But against those images, less familiar no doubt, is a long
tradition of devices that aim to avoid images altogether: counters, spark chambers, wire
chambers. Perhaps the most significant development in the laboratory of the last fifty
years has been the fusion of these two lineages into the production of digital images
controllable images built from statistics and computers into remarkable images of the
subvisible world. Here the working cloud chamber, counter array, and spark chamber
embody in demonstration form the impulses to count and see. Alongside them stand a
mixture of art and discarded fragments of microphysics, all drawn from the evanescent
material

culture

of

science.

Mathematics

Cell

For centuries, mathematicians have struggled over the role of the diagram. Aids to
understanding? Necessary foundation of true mathematics? Or are these visual-sensual
models and pictures threatening distractions from the disciplines will to truth? This cell
focuses on the conflict, born in the nineteenth century, between the production of
mathematical models and a countervailing impulse to banish all such seductions of the
eye. Here are displayed a remarkable Gttingen collection of wire, plaster, and wooden
models of mathematical functions developed in the nineteenth century both to further
research and to train the budding mathematician. Mathematician Felix Klein was the
foremost advocate of modelsas far as he was concerned, without visual intuition
[Anschaulichkeit] there simply was no real understanding. Mathematician David Hilbert
is supposed to have quipped that, to the contrary, the propositions of geometry would be
just as true if one took every occurrence of line, point, plane in Euclids
geometry and replace them with table, chair, and mug. In the end, he believed,
mathematics was a combination of abstract rules and meaningless signs, for which the
fascination with construction, intuition and models was irrelevant. Where are we now?
In a sense here too we may be beginning to see a by-passing of the image wars as
central areas in both mathematics and physics begin to share a language part
mathematical,

Structure

part

visual,

of

and

the

part

physical.

Universe

For several decades, Margaret Geller and her colleagues have used visual techniques to

map the deep-space distribution of galaxies. To widespread astonishment, she and her
colleagues were able to show that galaxies were not evenly scattered through the
universe, but instead clustered in relatively thin sheets as if on the surface of soap
bubbles. But coming to and sustaining that conclusion has relied in fundamental ways
on forming new ways to picture what was happening far out into the universea process
that has demanded a constant back-and-forth between statistical-formal analysis and the
pattern-grasping capability of the human eye. Visualization in astronomy has a long
history of being celebrated and challengedearly in the century astronomers tried to bypass the eye, so to speak, in sorting the spectra of stars. But the eyes judgment never
quite leaves. Images persist, though increasingly in early twenty-first century
astrophysics, the images flow back and forth between data analysis and complex digital
pictures. This cell represents some of the stages in the shuffle between images and data:
the raw pictures of the Zwicky Plates, the spectra that showed how far the galaxies were
from earth, the maps that visually presented the distributions. There were many steps on
the long path from first tentative data plots to the computer-simulated walk through
the galaxies. That video-loop left an enormous impression on all who saw itand stands
as a striking illustration not only of the soap-bubble distribution of matter in the
universe, but of the increasing fusion between data crunching and image production.

Curators' concepts : Bruno Latour

What is Iconoclash ?

Iconoclasm is when an image or a representation is smashed to pieces. There might

be many reasons for such an act. It might be to get rid of something that is an offense to
ones values, to give way to some other greater and better image, or perhaps to dispense
entirely with any form of representation. For many people iconoclasm is a curse,
what people usually assume that vandals, heretics, madmen or barbarians do.
But for others to be an iconoclast is a virtue, the proof of his or her ability to resist
authority, to show critical acumen, to break radically with the past.

What we call icono-clash [not clasm], is when there is a deep and disturbing
uncertainty about the role, power, status, danger, violence of an image or a given
representation; when one does not know whether an image should be broken or
restored; when one no longer knows if the image-breaker is a courageous innovator or a
vandal, if the image-worshipper is a pious bigot or a respectable devout, or if the imagemaker is a devious faker or a clever fact-maker and truth-seeker.
Through a powerful visual experience, we are offering here many iconoclashes to
put the visitors in a state of doubt as to what can be expected from images, their builders,
worshippers and breakers. We dont just want to suspend belief in the images but also to
suspend disbelief in them. Maybe those fragile representations are all that is available to
us in order to reach objectivity, truth, beauty, sanctity and democracy. But then another
distribution between confidence and diffidence in the images has to be proposed.
To do so we have to compare different patterns of belief and disbelief in representation.
In the European tradition, a large part of our repertoire to deal with images comes from
religion, especially Christian religion in its relation to Judaism and Islam. In religion
there is simultaneously a ban on images and a fabulous proliferation of images. Hence
the presence of their many iconoclashes in the show.

But there also exist many types of representations, inscriptions and models that come
not from religion but from the rich European tradition in the sciences. Here again,
scientific practices simultaneously fight against the power of images and imagination
while providing indefinite sources of representation indispensable to produce objective
knowledge. Hence another type of confidence and diffidence, also present in the show.
But it is in the arts that the most systematic experiments for and against images has
been going on in all the media from paintings to cinema, from theater to sculpture, from
dance to video. Here too apparent requests for new modes of image-breaking has also
generated a constant stream of new forms of image-making.

All of those various patters of beliefs and disbeliefs in images --whether in science,
religion or art --had, at some point, a powerful link with the domain par excellence of
representation: namely politics.

We are inviting the visitors to a three stage pilgrimage through the many iconoclashes
assembled here. In the first part they are invited to witness cases where they have to
take sides; ferocious debates are going on for and against the images; iconoclasts and
iconophiles are clearly at war. Then in the second part, visitors are invited to shift their
attention not to the images but to the complex, devious and clever ways in which they
are produced and sustained. Taking sides becomes more difficult when the intricacies of
image-making are deployed. Finally, visitors are invited to move beyond the imagewars and explore for themselves different modes of attachment and distance with image
and more general mediations. The rich and contested history of image-making and
image-breaking can then be revisited.

Add to Watchlist
Next
Miss Violence