While art is typically the building of something - be it layers of paint, clay, or wood - there’s
also a long history of destruction in art.
Claude Monet destroyed 30 paintings after having eye surgery for cataracts.
John Baldessari cremated all his pre 1970s work, then took the ashes and baked them into
cookies, to declare his transition from painter to conceptual artist.
Whether as recreation, rebellion or spectacle, Let’s take a look at just 5 artists from
the the generations of artists for whom destruction has served an essential meaning in art.
Let’s start off with Robert Rauschenberg, an American painter. After his early monochrome
white paintings, he started to envision work created entirely by erasure.
He began by erasing his own work, but soon craved the work of a more established artist.
Because he was a fan of de Kooning, he approached the established artist for a drawing that
he could erase to create a new work of art.
After some persuasion, de Kooning gave Rauschenberg a work that was deliberately difficult for
Rauschenberg to erase: heavily worked on with crayon, ink, pencil and charcoal. He also
made sure to not choose works that he did not like.
It took him about 2 months to erase as much as he could of the work, using a variety of
different erasers. He placed the final result in a plain gilded frame and had artist Jasper
Johns inscribe it.
Jean Tinguely was a Swiss painter and sculptor best known for his sculptural machines or
kinetic art known as metamechanics.
His work often satirizes the mindless overproduction of material goods in an advanced industrial
society.
“Homage to New York” was described by Time magazine as “A machine that destroys
itself”
Two hundred and fifty people watched his 27-foot sculpture saw itself apart, before setting
itself on fire and imploding in 27 minutes.
Tinguely said “Homage to New York was for me an attempt to liberate myself from the
material,” “The best way to do this was to make it self-destroying, like Chinese fireworks,
so that during the event—and naturally it became an event, a spectacle—all these materials,
even the smoke, became part of the sculpture.”
Michael Landy is a British artist who also was a huge fan of Tinguely. He created an
installation called Breakdown, in which the machine systematically destroyed all his possessions:
all 7,227 of them, including including books, mementos, clothes, artworks and his entire
art archive.
“In its entirety, I was thinking about the first 37 years of my life as a consumer,”
says Landy. “I did it on an industrial scale on a conveyer belt, not in an angry, violent
way. It was basically everything I had collected over the first 37 years of my life—things
that had a monetary value to things that had a sentimental value.”
“It was the happiest two weeks of my life because it was so liberating, but also it
was a kind of witnessing my own death”
Thomas Demand is a German sculptor and photographer known for making photographs of large scale,
three-dimensional models that he builds from found photographs - often from the popular
press, of historically or culturally significant events.
The result is a very convincing, though not entirely perfect, image of a space.
Landing is one of these pieces. The viewer is confronted with this image of a shattered
vase.
The image is based on a widely reported accident at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England,
in which a museum visitor tripped on their shoelaces, fell down the stairs, and knocked
over three Qing Dynasty vases.
His model, built from paper and card, is destroyed after being photographed, making the image
the sole art work displayed.
Raphael Montañez Ortiz is an American artist, educator, and founder of El Museo del Barrio,
In 1966 Ortiz participated the Destruction in Art Symposium. There a diverse group of
international artists, poets and scientists to talk about the theme of destruction in
art, in response to the senseless destruction of human life and landscapes endangered by
the Vietnam war.
Ortiz performed a series of seven public destruction events, including his piano destruction concerts.
Highly conscious of the meaning behind his actions as a destruction artist, he’s written
his influential Destructivist Manifesto in 1962
In it he warns against the aggressive destructive urges that evoke war, genocide, exploitation
and other consequences of human actions, and to instead pay attention to the link between
the history of art, human development, ritual and inner relationships of the mind, body
and spirit.
So there’s 5 artists who’s destroyed their own or other people’s work of art to create
an entirely new work of art in the process. What do you guys think? As always, let me
know in the comments section below if you have any works of art you want to add to the
list. Please subscribe for all the 5 in 5s that
come out every Sunday morning. Thanks so much for watching, and I’ll see you next time.