VISUAL IMAGERY—THAT IS, visual art— is well known for its ability to please. It also can provoke. And thus we have a human history of iconoclasm, literally, to smash images we don't like. And there’s been a good deal of art-smashing lately, at least with statues.
The iconoclasts, from whom we derive the terms, were a twice-active movement among Eastern Orthodox purists in the Byzantine Empire of the 8th and 9th centuries. Simply, they widely destroyed religious icons, those elaborate, gilt or mosaicked images of deities and saints. The idea was that God was transcendent, impossible to distill into imagery. So it was a sin to "worship" imagery, or endow it with special powers.
Iconoclasts drew their justification from Moses smashing the idols set up by the back-sliding Israelites. Already, the Egyptian pharaohs were defacing the carved stone images of their predecessors to consolidate their upstart regimes. Today, the Islamist Taliban blow up Buddhist statues carved in mountainsides. (Islam has always banned images of God and the Prophet).
And so it has gone for all of human history. As everyone knows, images are powerful tools of communication: Simple and direct. Enlarge these images in statues, buildings, or in popular imagination, and you have what is called "propaganda." It is unavoidable.
One man's propaganda, of course, is another man's art and art history. It seems that the two views will never be reconciled. Up to our present day—especially amid media-driven social movements or riots— images are attacked for the message they send to the public. We are back to the motives behind the Iconoclasts.
A fine line divides the religious argument over images and the motive for secular, political and cultural provocation. When the Puritans arose in England, and then the United States, they undertook what one historian called a systemic "de-Catholicization" of everything. Catholicism relished images and art. So Puritans forbid any and all "graven images."
For Western culture, it was this Protestant Reformation that launched the great divide we now have between "word" and "image." For Protestants the word was paramount—everyone should have access to the Bible, for example. Catholicism relied on the experience evoked by its imagery, such as visual stories, and aesthetic atmospheres.
Modern art took up this divide. Generally, it has been the clash between "conceptual art"—art based on ideas—versus art that is "literary," picturing stories. One modern-day art critic put a nice gloss on how this work: the simpler the art (modernist), the more it needs intellectual explanation. This is why a landscape can be taken at face value; a painting of two colored stripes on a gigantic canvas, by contrast, requires reams of intellectual elaboration.
Abstract art may offend some sensibilities because it lacks a clear story or explanation. Perhaps that is why there has been very little physical smashing of abstract art (there is a good deal of verbal smashing, of course), and a great deal of iconoclasm toward identifiable images.
Statues come to mind. When a sculptor chisels or casts statuary, his focus is surely on the craft and aesthetic itself. The patron and the public, however, see they statue as telling a legitimizing story about persons and times in history. A statue honors.
Totalitarian regimes through history have always visually "erased" people and events in order to shape the public mind. Democratic governments, in turn, choose by committee the artistic symbols it wishes to have predominate. There's a trace of similarity in both (the propaganda side of art, for instance). But who could not tell the difference between the totalitarian mode and that of an open, debating society?
Before the year 2020, the United States had been debating whether to retain, or remove, statues, murals, and other artwork (even books) that portrayed the time of Christopher Columbus, slavery, and the Confederate leaders in the Civil War. In the original creation of such works, some artisan had infused his heart-felt skill into making the object. That workmanship can be respected. Still, some in society look beyond the artist's intention—and attack what the art object signifies, or justifies. It almost sounds like the “word v. image” religious conflicts of old.
Advocates of historical preservation have good arguments to retain the past. In turn, some past memories may evoke so much public bitterness that, with a statue, for example, it might do best being moved to a museum or cemetery (in the case of war memorials). The line has to be drawn somewhere. We can’t just destroy everything that reminds someone of past grievances or slights. Then, there is always the question of destroying art, the work of some unnamed, sincere artisan.
Iconoclasts care little for the art side of things. They wish to cleanse society of images that perpetuate political and social milieus they don’t like, whether it be a Confederate general in bronze, a Neo-classical facade, or a traditional oil painting. The iconoclast is unsatisfied with a mere denunciation, even if that leads to putting the offensive object in storage, out of sight, out of mind. It’s “smash the idols,” or nothing.
The debate goes on. Art not only pleases and provokes, it also, we are told, always is in search of "what is new." The new must replace, or overshadow, the old to gain its rightful place. The outcome is museum vaults filled to the brim and running out of space. Perhaps iconoclasm is the practical result of too much art and too little space. It is another unresolvable dilemma, even in the age of digital archiving.
So, put yourself in the shoes of one particular nineteenth-century British suffragette, fighting for the women's vote in England. To get attention, she slashed a famous oil painting in London's National Gallery. The women's vote came by other means. It's questionable whether destroying a painting, an act of publicity-seeking, had any effect at all, except in the thrill of the moment. In free societies, at least, the Iconoclasts rarely win—people just like art, so why smash it?