If you want to touch people’s hearts, you have to damage their art – every war criminal knows that. But what if artists decide to damage art?
Albert Westerhoff from Groningen is working on a podcast series about damaging art. Destruction as discourse is called the series. It is a title with which you can upset people: ‘Difficulty!’ It does little to detract from the spectacular stories that Westerhoff tells about what happens in the depths of art history.
Episode 3, A masochistic martyr , begins like this: “On a chilly winter day in 1995, a man in a suit walks towards Red Square in Moscow. He has a facial expression that tells you he wants to beat the shit out of someone. The man takes off his clothes, down to his boxer shorts, then puts on two boxing gloves and starts to get hot and scream.” A fool, you think as a listener.
That changed when the same man, Alexander Brener, used a spray can of paint to leave a bright green ‘s’ with two vertical stripes on a painting by Kazimir Malevich two years later in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Brener turns out to be an actionist, someone who is part of a broader movement that hangs together like loose sand, but deserves serious attention because she wants to push boundaries.
Soup against the glass plate
Nowadays, when art is damaged, people think of activists who throw soup at the glass plate of a painting or stick themselves to the frame to draw attention to the climate. People like Brener want to do something different. They appropriate works of art to create new art or a performance and thus keep the conversation going about what art is and can be.
They place themselves in a tradition that first flourished at the time of Dadaism around 1918. Westerhoff escapes Destruction as discourse one destructive artist after another to oblivion. Also Andres Serrano, known for Piss Christ in the Groninger Museum, passes by. That recently posters for Serrano’s exhibition America & Trump were fitted with a (Hitler) mustache in Forum Groningen, which is fitting.
Two episodes are devoted to the most famous case of art damage in the Netherlands, two paintings by Barnett Newman in 1986 and 1997. The perpetrator, Gerard Jan van Bladen, emerges as a man with both major mental problems and a fascinating idea about art and artistry. We don’t have to contradict the judge, his actions were unforgivable. But also unforgettable.
Tags: Albert Westerhoff Groningen podcast series creating art damaging art
