[UA] Re: Goya

[edige at juno.com]

It is interesting you should bring up Goya since there is a weird issue involving ownership and post-modern control and his pictures...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1078574,00.html

Blam! Pow! Splat! 

The 'comedy terrorist' attacks the Chapman brothers, the Chapmans attack Goya... Don't panic, says Matt Shinn, the latest wave of vandalism is part of a grand tradition 

Thursday November 6, 2003
The Guardian 

Defaced?: one of the Chapmans' 'rectified' Goyas.
  
What would it take for you to walk into a gallery and deface a famous painting? The "comedy terrorist" Aaron Barschak faces a possible jail sentence, after being convicted last week by Oxford magistrates of criminally damaging works in the Chapman brothers' summer exhibition The Rape of Creativity. What makes the case unusual is that some of the artworks concerned, now part of the Chapmans' Turner prize show, have themselves given rise to accusations of vandalism: they include an edition of 80 rare original impressions of Goya's The Disasters of War, on which faces of clowns and puppies have been drawn. 

You can tell a lot about someone from the art they choose to attack and the way they choose to do it; and you can tell a lot about the age they live in, too. Of course, art destruction is nothing new: in its religiously inspired form, it stretches from the whitewashings and burnings of eighth-century Byzantium to Britain's own periods of iconoclasm in the 16th and 17th centuries. And beyond in some places - it's not long since the Taliban took their bullets and explosives to the 1,500-year-old statues of the Buddha at Bamiyan, Afghanistan. 

But these collective programmes of destruction are not the modern way in the west. These days, in the vast majority of cases, art vandalism is carried out by isolated individuals, who broadcast their opinions to the world in a deliberately anti-social manner. The acts are even "signed": the perpetrator lingers, allowing himself to be caught (it is usually "he"), before giving a full explanation to the judiciary and the press. 

The era of the individualistic art vandal was ushered in with the 20th century. A sign of the times - in the years up to the first world war, there was a spate of attacks involving people who were destitute. "I was miserably hungry," said Prolain Delarre at her trial for a red-ink attack in 1912, "and the sight of the young woman in the picture [by Boucher] with a happy smile and luxurious clothes maddened me." 

At the same time, there were some famous politically motivated attacks. In 1914, Velázquez's Toilet of Venus was slashed with a hatchet by Mary Richardson, a militant Suffragette, in protest at the arrest of Emmeline Pankhurst. She said she hadn't liked the way the work was ogled by men. 

Above all, in the modern era, artists should beware other artists. In 1920, artist Delivigne slashed a still life at the Grand Palais in Paris, and then stood admiring his handiwork. He explained to police that, as a sufferer from neurasthenia, this particular work had been more than his nerves could bear. In 1962, German-born artist Franz Weng threw an unopened bottle of ink at Leonardo's Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and John the Baptist, in the National Gallery (this is one of several works that has been attacked more than once; it was shot from close range in 1987). The two people who independently pelted Marcus Harvey's Myra at the Royal Academy's 1997 Sensation exhibition (with eggs and ink) were artists. Tony Shafrazi, who sprayed the words "Kill lies all" (sic) on Picasso's Guernica in 1974, was an artist at the time and is now a successful New York art dealer. 

In this age of anti-art, moreover, it is increasingly common for vandals to claim their mutilations and additions are themselves "art". A wide array of techniques is available to the modern destruction artist. Mark Bridger claimed that by pouring black ink into a tank containing a white lamb in formaldehyde (Damien Hirst's Away from the Flock), he had transformed it into a new work, Black Sheep. Yuan Cai and Jian Jun Xi Ianjun's double-handed work, Two Naked Men Jump Into Tracey's Bed, involved them bouncing on and rolling in Tracey Emin's My Bed at Tate Britain. The same interpretative style was then applied to Marcel Duchamp's Fountain, to create Two Artists Piss on Duchamp's Urinal (2000). 

Barschak claimed unsuccessfully to have been creating a new work by throwing red paint over the Chapmans' efforts. What is it that motivates these artist-vandals and links these different attacks? Is there perhaps some dark connection between creation and destruction revealed? Psychologists Victor Allen and David Greenberger think there might be: their "aesthetic theory of vandalism" is based on evidence that vandals experience an artistic kind of pleasure in what they do, a pleasure heightened by the complexity of what is damaged, and by the novelty and ingenuity of the way it is attacked. 

For David Freeberg, the psychology of art vandalism combines attention-seeking, obsessiveness (the attack is an attempt to break the hold of a compelling image), and an antagonistic attitude to authority. Thus it may be that the very greatness of old artists triggers feelings of inadequacy and aggression, particularly in other artists. 

So are the Chapman brothers, favourites for this year's Turner prize, essentially the same as these art vandals, whose "fusion of versatility and malice" has made itself felt in modern times? Well, not quite. 

Of course, to deface an artist's work remains a genuinely shocking thing to do. Especially when it's Goya. Especially when it's The Disasters of War. Maybe all good artists are engaged in an Oedipal struggle to overcome or "correct" what their forebears have done, but that does not require them literally, physically, to obliterate parts of that legacy. 

What sets the Chapmans apart from the vandals, though, is that the Goya etchings were theirs, bought and paid for, which makes all the difference in the eyes of the law. As owners of the prints, they were able to go through them, meticulously drawing on all the faces of the victims of war that Goya had depicted. 

If I were to make substantial alterations to a listed building, no matter how "beautifully", I might well end up in court. The question here is about the private ownership of cultural property, about what money does and does not entitle you to do. Because they have a legal title to it, the Chapmans are not answerable, in the way that a vandal would be, for their destruction of a small piece of Spanish and world heritage. Why should buildings be protected and not rare prints by Goya? 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1078574,00.html

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