Alexis Harding, Temporary Wet Painting No. 7 (Red freestanding/leaning), 2007.
photo : permission de | courtesy of the artist & Mummery+Schnelle, Londres
A certain uncanniness is transmitted by any act of destruction of art. Some forms or ways of creating a damaged or “destroyed” painting not only modify but also mutate representation from something affirmative into a territory that dislocates meaning and becomes performative. The destruction of painting is a wide field worth investigation, and by crossing into art history reveals aspects that the academic perspective often overlooks. In the practice of some contemporary artists, the act itself of destroying painting can be seen as a form of abstracting the content of painting by minimizing its narrative load and reflecting on the subjacent void that exists in any built form. Destroying or dismantling existing layers of paint as a form of systematic vandalism has been conducted in recent practices as an investigation of the processes of creation and value attribution.

The paradigmatic work Passage was performed in 1955 in Tokyo by Saburo Murakami, one of the members of Gutai, the Japanese avant-garde action group whose experiments foreshadowed (much earlier than the Euro-American avant-garde) the essence of happenings, Nouveau-Realism, Abstractionism, and Conceptualism. For Gutai, interested in the materiality and force of elements, action is a way of painting with the elements. Murakami, who jumped through a row of canvases in his performance — tearing them completely apart in the process — practises painting as a form of spirituality not far from animism through immersion into matter and the natural processes of decomposition. Painting, for Murakami, is a way to awaken matter just as perforating his own canvases is a way of awakening painting. This excerpt from Gutai’s manifesto addresses its new vision of performativity: “Under the cloak of an intellectual aim, the materials have been completely murdered and can no longer speak to us. Lock these corpses into their tombs. Gutai art does not change the material but brings it to life. Gutai art does not falsify the material.”1 1 -  Jiro Yoshihara, “The Gutai Manifesto,” proclaimed in October 1956 and published in Geijutso Shincho Art Journal (December 1956),accessed May 2012, http://web.archive.org/web/20070630202927/http://www.ashiya-web.or.jp/museum/10us/103education/nyumon_us/manifest_us.htm.

Saburo Murakami, Passing Through, 1956.
photo : © Makiko Murakami and the former members of the Gutai Art Association,
permission de | courtesy of Ashiya City Museum of Art & History, Japon

The jump into nothing has a long history in contemporary art and can be read as a somewhat fatal drive for nonsense or negation in artistic terms. In the case of Murakami, the artist’s jump into the paintings annuls the finality, the justification, and the consequences of his own artistic acts. At the same time suicidal, provocative, social, and philosophical, Murakami’s act is also a statement of preservation by freezing a sacrificial moment of loss that ultimately leads to transformation and renewal, thereby becoming a mode to integrate his art into a historical flow.

Angela de la Cruz, Super Clutter XXL (Pink/Brown), 2006.
photo : permission de | courtesy of the artist &  Lisson Gallery, Londres

The shock and rupture in the continuity of representation and the interruption of narration and narrative potential that this act of destruction brings seems to be a condition of the modern aesthetic experience. This broken continuity, which Walter Benjamin connects to the apparition of film, also means the beginning of a critical, political experience of art. The first symptoms of this new awareness see Benjamin connected with the art of Dada, followed by the segmented images that film brought with it, and which he situated in opposition to the painting in modern times. Decades later the painting itself came to incorporate this broken identity.

“From an alluring appearance or persuasive structure of sound the work of art of the Dadaists became an instrument of ballistics. It hit the spectator like a bullet, it happened to him, thus acquiring a tactile quality. It promoted a demand for the film, the distracting element of which is also primarily tactile, being based on changes of place and focus that periodically assail the spectator. . . .The spectator’s process of association in view of these images is indeed interrupted by their constant, sudden change. This constitutes the shock effect of the film, which, like all shocks, should be cushioned by heightened presence of mind (italics mine).”2 2 - Walter Benjamin, “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit” [first published 1936],in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 7 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989), 379. (Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” [first published in 1936] in Walter Benjamin, Collected Works).

The event itself, based on this shock and abrupt break or rupture, has played a tremendous role in recent theory, especially regarding our perception of time and space. Following Benjamin, the event is a consequence of technology, and its representational effects cut, stop, and then again release space and time. This ahistoricity, indetermination, and discontinuity produce an object of art that is not only contingent but also performative. It is an object that is a result of representation but also creates its own reality and actively brings it into manifestation.

Carlos Bunga, Elba Benítez Project, 2005.
photos : Luis Asín, permission de | courtesy of the artist & galería elba benítez, Madrid

In this light, a destroyed painting is more than a painting on which an intervention has been performed and more than a hybrid. It is a new media, which determines the viewer’s participation and brings into being the instruments through which the painting can be perceived and conceptualized. It transforms the bi-dimensional surface of painting into a tri-dimensional object while at the same time incorporating its documentation. A destroyed painting is one that carries the marks of the actions performed upon it.

The young Portuguese artist Carlos Bunga engages in the partial or total destruction of paintings based on an extended vision of painting itself. Painting is, for him, an architecture of colour, of superimposed layers that form the constructed space of colour. In his performative architectural constructions, he builds walls out of fields of colour but also exhibits landscapes of pigment that, for him, represent the decomposition of the act and result of painting itself. Here, the result of a performative act carries within itself the documentation of the destruction of the initial painting.

Much like the actions of Murakami, in an early performance work, Paintings, Bunga perforated a work, stepping and disappearing into the space of the actual painting. Bunga’s main aim is to determine a set of transformations in the pictorial space and shake up the pre-supposed spatial continuity by breaking its identity and destroying its narrative load. In his practice, a destroyed painting becomes a document of the instability of space and of the transformations that it experiences. By staging “accidents” and through the process of voluntary demolition, he introduces into painting a contra-rhythmical time frame and various overlapping temporalities as forms of investigating space and time, not according to what remains visible but to the yet unmanifested potentialities that they carry. He is documenting not specific events but the potential of painting to carry this trauma of visuality that is intrinsic to all contemporary forms of representation. The viewer himself slips into an ambivalent position: he is included in the event of the work, but he is, at the same time, a critical observer and witness.3 3 - For an extended interpretation of this performative space in modernity, see Delfim Sardo, “Low-Tech Connections and Performativity,” in Anamnese Catalogue, ed. Miguel von Hafe Pérez (Lisbon: Anamnese Project, 2007).

In the curatorial text that accompanies the exhibition Iconoclash (2002, ZKM Karlsruhe), Dario Gamboni4 4 - Iconoclash. Jenseits der Bilderkriege in Wissenschaft, Religion und Kunst, multimedia event and exhibition, May 3 – September 1, 2002 at ZKM | Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe, Germany, www.iconoclash.de. follows — in science, religion, and art — the phenomenon of disputes around image worship (iconodulia) versus image phobia (iconoclastia) and the vandalism that these conflicts have brought to the history of culture. For Gamboni, any representation of the destruction of an image is not only a documented act but, more importantly, a reflection on the meaning of damaging or destroying a work which has been identified as a product of a particular culture, be it a public monument, painting, or religious icon. Gamboni writes that throughout the history of art, the representation of the destruction of a painting by overpainting has usually been regarded as vandalism, since, from the perspective of the public domain and the desire to protect cultural heritage, the destruction of a cultural product will inevitably be understood as irrational and barbaric.

Steven Parrino, Skeletal Implosion #2, 2001.
photo : © Steven Parrino, permission de | courtesy of the Parrino Family Estate and Gagosian Gallery, New York

In all acts of destruction of a finished piece, there is a subtle movement between the long and arduous process of building a culture and the momentary action: the impulse to destroy these emblems and with them everything they symbolize. Through the process of destruction, the images themselves become mobile. A single image is context–dependent and proves its intrinsic multiplicity while still being able to serve a plurality of discourses (for example, iconodulistic and iconoclastic) at the same time.

The long history of destroying paintings is aligned with progress rather than annihilation: cultural heritage is destroyed to make room for new ideals. Destruction, understood as appropriation, was the weapon that the neo-avant-gardes used against the classical avant-gardes. In 1953, Robert Rauschenberg erased a drawing of Expressionist Willem de Kooning. Now in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Erased de Kooning Drawing is considered the first neo-conceptual gesture.

In Steven Parrino’s art,5 5 - For a contextualized analysis of these paintings as monochromes, see Brian Muller, “212121 Painting,” in Contemporary Magazine, New York, 58: 33 – 41. vandalized painting is also a response to a fetishistic approach to painting itself. Directed against the supremacy and self-sufficiency of the monochrome, his acts consist of removing his own paintings from their frames, destroying them, and then reintroducing them, with folds and fissures, back into the frame. Alexis Harding, who started working a decade later, allows the actual pigment to slide out of the frame and “disappear” into the exterior space. Angela de la Cruz destroys paintings to a point where they lose their pictorial expression and become broken, useless objects in space.

These works respond not only to the quality of painting itself but also to an academically and hierarchically oriented educational system (one based on the supremacy of masters and their skills) that new generations need to adopt and transmit within a teacher-master relationship.
 Action, as a suicidal performance of the artist, is therefore a way of introducing movement into an educational system that would otherwise suffocate its younger progeny.

Alexis Harding, Halt!, 2006.
photo : permission de | courtesy of the artist & Mummery+Schnelle, Londres
Manuel Eiris, Meeting Points II, 2009.
photo : Borja Bernárdez Armada, permission de | courtesy of the artist & MARCO,
Museum of Contemporary Art, Vigo

Other artists react against the perfection of their own painting: Noel Dolla throws stains and dots over his works after completing them; Pascal Pinaud, one of his students, draws over, scratches, and lacerates his paintings. The materiality and the processes of intervention therefore come into the foreground of representation, bringing into disequilibrium the iconicity of the monochrome. Brian Muller explains that a destroyed painting is also one that is not looked upon as a precious object on the wall but which lies on the ground and is viewed from above.6 6 - Ibid., 33 – 5.

Throughout the history of art, these processes have consistently demonstrated that the destruction of art is itself another form of art. The appropriation of an image or existing work through an intentional action is a form of creating art as a protest without any compensation or even justification: it is an extreme artistic manifesto. These radical gestures are, at the same time, ways of refusing to bring anything to the new, empty place that they themselves have created. These empty spaces and the rejection of substitution is the highest form of protest.

Destruction can also be archeological. In the work of Manuel Eiris, peeling off coats of paint on the walls of abandoned sites is a work of cultural discovery with anarchic connotations. For Eiris, delving into architecture by removing paint is equal to an inversion of pre-established aesthetic canons in order to obtain a retrograde vision of the processes of development, evolution, productivity, and progress. In Eiris’ practice, the destruction of paintings (often in buildings that are protected by virtue of their historical significance) can be considered a form of regressive painting, not as an additive process but as a removal that connects art to a possibility (that which it could have been) and to its unmanifested past or prospective future. On the other hand, painting as destruction of painting can be seen from its perspective of an enhanced performative painting, one that is not concerned necessarily with negation but with a modality of prolonging the agency that brings painting into being. Eiris’s performance results in a painting that surpasses its historical borders in time and becomes one that does not stop being painted and that can transform into shapes which are foreign to that which the visible carries: an event in which the unexpected meets a set of given cultural conditions that the painter’s own lived/performed experience inserts into an historical substance.

Carlos Bunga, Marta Jecu, Saburo Murakami, Steven Parrino
This article also appears in the issue 76 - The Idea of Painting
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