Visual worlds chapter 20, worshipping and destroying images (on iconoclasm, idolatry, iconophilia, iconophobia, and iconoclash

iconoclasm the destruction of a material religious image or sculpture; more recently, the destruction of images of any kind.. Leading Concepts idolatry iconoclast iconoclasm aniconism i

idolatry the worship of

an image, such as a statue

or icon.

iconoclasm the destruction of a material religious image or sculpture; more recently, the destruction of images

of any kind.

Leading Concepts

idolatry iconoclast iconoclasm aniconism iconoclash iconophilia iconophobia onomoclasts

taghut nekelmû(m)

The study of the worship of images—idolatry—and the

destruc-tion of images to prevent their worship—iconoclasm—has

re-cently developed in two directions First, it has become topical

in light of contemporary developments involving the destruction

of ancient artworks by followers of Shia Islam; and second, it has

expanded, in academic scholarship, to become a model for

under-standing our responses to images in general In this chapter we

pursue both themes, first by noting the historical complexity of

iconoclasm, and then by considering twenty-first-century uses of

iconoclasm and related terms in critical theory

20.1 Elements of the History of Iconoclasm

The twenty-first century opened with an act of iconoclasm: the

dyna-miting of two stone statues of Buddha in Bamiyan, northwest of Kabul,

Afghanistan, in March 2001 Since then there have been several other

prominent iconoclasms: the jihadi group Ansar al Dine destroyed

man-uscripts in Timbuktu in 2012, and the Islamic State destroyed

Assyr-ian artifacts from Nineveh in Mosul in 2015

Iconoclasm—the destruction of a religious image or sculpture—has

a long history, and includes many cultures In the Judaeo-Christian

tradition, Iconoclasm begins with King Hezekiah’s destruction of the

idol of the Nehushtan (ןחשותנ), a bronze serpent that had been made by

Moses, but later used as an object of worship (c 715–686 b.c.e.) The

origin of that story in the Second Book of Kings might be the serpent

cults practiced in pre-Israelite settlements in Canaan; Hezekiah may

have destroyed objects like the one shown in Figure 20.2, nr 1

The first European iconoclasms appeared in the context of the

Byz-antine image controversy, which began with the removal of an icon of

Christ from the main entrance to the Great Palace of Constantinople, the

Chalke Gate, by Emperor Leo III in 726 or 730 a.c.e The following

icon-oclastic policy, sanctioned by a council in 754, was invalidated in 787 by

the Council of Nicaea (named after a town in present-day Turkey known

Worshipping and

This is an excerpt from the book Visual Worlds, co-authored by James Elkins and Erna Fioren>ni The book is available on Amazon Please send comments, ques>ons, and sugges>ons to jelkins@saic.edu.

as İznik, near Istanbul) When the Empress Theodora II allowed icon wor-ship in 843, the Byzantine dispute about images was definitively settled Since then, however, there have been different expressions of European iconoclasm, of which the most far-reaching was the icono-clastic movement accompanying the Protestant Reformation process

of the sixteenth century Iconoclasm assumed different forms, from wide-ranging acts of destruction (Figure 20.3) to institutionally man-dated removals of images and sculptures

Aniconism—the religious practice of avoiding representation—

was known in Semitic areas at the time of the development of Judaism Nabataean, Mesopotamian, Syrian, Phoenician, and Egyptian cultures all had aniconic traditions: in that sense, Judaism is simply the tradition that survived

The first iconoclasm in the Muslim religion dates from 630 a.c.e., with the destruction of Arabian deities in the Kaaba in Mecca The Kaaba may have contained several hundred sculptures of gods such as Amm, Wadd (a moon god, for whom snakes were sacred), Manaf, and Hubal (described as having a gold right hand) These and others are

described in Hisham Ibn Al-Kalbi’s (737–819) Book of Idols, but none

have survived—the iconoclasm was thorough Within Islam there has been a long history of representations of Muhammad, usually veiled, and other figures including Jesus and Adam and Eve, mostly in Persian miniatures under both Sunni and Shia rule Occasionally there have

even been depictions of Muhammad unveiled, and of Iblis, the devil

(see Figure 20.4); but there have never been depictions of Allah, and in that sense Islamic aniconism is complete

Buddhist iconoclasm and aniconism is also complex The earli-est representations of Buddha, up to the first century bce, were an-iconic Buddha himself was not shown, but rather his empty throne,

Figure 20.1 One of the

Buddhas in Bamiyan,

Hazarajat, Afghanistan Sixth

century.

aniconism religious

opposition to the use

of images or icons to

represent religious figures

or natural or supernatural

creatures.

the Bodhi tree under which he sat, or the horse on which he rode But

the extent and meaning of that aniconic period has been disputed

According to John and Susan Huntington, the period was brief and

images of Buddha were made within a generation of his life, even

though textual sources enjoined aniconism In a critical review, Rob

Linrothe has noted the relative paucity of these texts that prohibit

representations of Buddha Because “Buddhists insisted that the

Bud-dha’s nirvana was beyond even the ‘relative’ immortality of the

high-est gods” such as the “Yaksas, Yaksis, Nagas, Garudas and Devas of

popular traditions and of the emergent Brahmanical pantheon,” he

concludes it was an “artistic, rather than a theological convention” to

avoid representations of the Buddha

Studies of these historical iconoclasms have been a traditional

part of art historical scholarship since the mid-twentieth century

In the twenty-first century, however, the worship and destruction of

images has become a more general category for the understanding of

images of all sorts In this chapter we review the current state of the

concept iconoclasm, and introduce several new terms

Figure 20.2 Serpent cult object Megiddo, Israel, 1650–1150 B C E

20.1 Elements of the Histor y of Iconoclasm | 2 6 5

20.2 Concepts of Iconoclasm

In the first decades of the twenty-first century, there was a rapid in-crease in the discussion of the concepts of iconoclasm, idolatry, and iconophobia in art historical scholarship The exhibition and book

Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion and Art (2002) set

much of the agenda for this resurgence At the same time, iconoclasm

acquired a more general meaning Earlier it had denoted mainly the destruction of religious images; beginning in the twenty-first cen-tury, the term has been understood to include the desire to destroy images of any kind The first decade of the twenty-first century saw terror attacks against European representations of Muhammad, Wah-habi Sunni attacks on early Islamic sites in Saudi Arabia, and conflicts between Shia and Sunni Islam It is possible such events may have prompted the European and North American development of a gen-eral, cross-cultural, nonreligious meaning of iconoclasm

In a sense the broadening and abstraction of the concept of icono-clasm could also be understood as an organic development of earlier uses

of the word, because iconoclasm had not always been a matter of the reli-gious beliefs The art historian David Freedberg has suggested three mo-tivations for premodern iconoclasms, which could appear separately or

Figure 20.3 Iconoclastic

riot in Antwerp, 1566.

Figure 20.4 Iblis, the devil, from Abû Ma’shar’s The Book of Nativities (Kitâb al-Mawalid), 1582.

20.2 Concepts of Iconoclasm | 2 6 7

together: looking for attention; breaking the image’s hold on the viewer’s imagination; and damaging symbols of power

By the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, icon-oclasm was widely understood to be a fundamental term in image criticism of all kinds, even apart from the historical examples of

icon-oclasms For example, the book Fluid Flesh: The Body, Religion and the

Visual Arts (2009) centers on iconoclasm, but describes it in relation

to representations of body and religion In Idol Anxiety (2011),

icono-clasm is presented as an optimal way of thinking about what happens

to images in general

In historical terms, iconoclast is the opposite of idolator: the latter

worships images, and the former wishes to destroy them The term

iconoclash was intended to embody the perennial conflict and mutual

dependence of iconoclasm and idolatry

A recurrent theme in the book Iconoclash is the ambiguity of the

concept of iconoclasm “Simple” iconoclasm is considered a chimera

In historical practices, iconoclasm can be split from itself in the sense that iconoclasts never succeeded in destroying what they aimed at, which was idolatry rather than the physical sculptures and paintings themselves As the art historian Joseph Koerner put it in his essay in

Iconoclash, “iconoclasts’ hammers always seemed to strike sideways,

destroying something else.”

Iconoclasm can also anticipate itself, redouble onto itself, and

repeat itself Pierre Centlivres, for instance, notes in Iconoclash that the

Buddhas in Bamiyan were originally faceless, so their destruction in

2001 was an iconoclasm of an iconoclasm (see Figure 20.1) The faceless Buddhas in Bamiyan, made seven centuries after Buddhism’s aniconic phase, were partly aniconic in that they had changeable faces made of wood and cloth The Taliban iconoclasm therefore echoed an original avoidance of full representation

Iconoclasm can also be wedded to its opposite Dario Gamboni argues in the same book that modernist images are “indestructible” because they continue to spring up after innumerable iconoclasms (just after one artist declares the ultimate reduction of painting to a monochrome abstraction, another tries to outdo that very iconoclasm):

in that sense, modernist images are blends of iconoclasm and idola-try Gamboni and others note that iconoclasts, “theoclasts,” and “id-eoclasts” have produced “a fabulous population of new images, fresh icons, rejuvenated mediators: greater flows of media, more powerful ideas, stronger idols.” In other words, iconoclasm is always already its opposite

Koerner puts the central ambiguities of iconoclasm succinctly

“Long before the hammer strikes them,” he writes, “religious images are already self-defacing Claiming their truth by dialectically repeating and repudiating the deception from which they alone escape, they are, each of them, engines of the iconoclash that periodically destroys and

iconoclash a recent term

that refers to the conflict

and interdependence of

idolatry and iconoclasm.

renews them.” Koerner agrees with the claim, often made in “image

wars,” that iconoclasts are secretly idolators: they covertly desire what

they publicly repudiate (Chapter 14, Text Box 14.1, connects these

ideas to Derrida’s Truth in Painting.)

In a sense idolatry is only a fiction, because no one is an idolater

in the way that is implied by iconoclastic gestures Iconoclasts are

“be-lievers in belief,” he says, because they hold to the fiction that idolaters

worship images and not God But iconoclasts “do not confuse

repre-sentations with persons”—that is what they accuse idolators of doing

“Rather,” Koerner argues, “they confuse representations with facts

Imagining that iconophiles know the wood falsely (as God, not wood),

they hit the wood but instead strike representation . . . no wonder the

critical gesture rebounds.”

Koerner ends by saying that an interest in religious iconoclasm—

in “the impulse to pass beyond representation” or to do without

representation altogether—“entraps us in a world that is only

repre-sentation: religion as nothing but what people customarily do.” This is

a strong claim because it means that the entire subject of iconoclasm

tends away from the religious truths that it seeks to understand

20.3 Iconophilia, Iconophobia

The topic of iconoclasm is no longer limited the physical destruction

of images, but includes desire to avoid, simplify, erase, or abstract

representational images in general In that sense, modernism itself

is iconoclastic, and artists interested in conceptualisms and

abstrac-tion participate in a cultural iconoclasm Idolatry is marginalized,

pushed outside the boundaries of fine art This new broad

under-standing of idolatry and iconoclasm is expressed by two further

terms, iconophile and iconophobe: people who love images, and

people who fear images

Iconophile has been used by visual theorists such as Tom Mitchell

to describe people who like images, including scholars who study them

No scholars would destroy images or worship them, so iconophobe and

iconophile are useful terms for current secular interests in images The

contemporary use of iconophile is consonant with historical senses,

such as John of Damascus’s apologia On the Divine Images (eighth

century a.c.e.) that claims “visible things are corporeal models which

provide a vague understanding of intangible things.” But the

contem-porary scholarly literature on images in art history and visual studies

is also iconophilic in a nontheological sense, outside of religion—as the

word iconophile (“friend of images”) implies.

The organizers of the exhibit Iconoclash included Koerner, an art

historian specializing in the Reformation; the philosopher of science

Bruno Latour; and the artist and curator Peter Weibel The three had

different ideas about what constituted iconoclasm in contemporary

iconophile in secular usage, a person who loves images; in religious usage,

a person who supports the use of representational religious images.

iconophobe a person who hates or fears images, or opposes the religious use

of representational images.

20.3 Iconophilia, Iconophobia | 2 6 9

art and science From Weibel’s perspective, the history of modern art is a history of iconoclasm: older images were not physically de-stroyed, but modernist artists from Cézanne to Malevich and Mon-drian doubted many of the conventions of academic painting As Koerner says:

If you try to do a show, like Iconoclash, in which you trace the aftermath

of Protestant iconoclasm, and if you are slightly easy-going about how iconoclasm is described, then what you get is a canonical representation

of twentieth-century art Every twentieth century artist who makes his way into a textbook … from Malevich and Duchamp and Picasso onwards, marching through the whole history, is an iconoclast That was what was so surreal … about organizing the show For the “art section,” all we had to do was transfer the modern art gallery … [We] didn’t even have to make choices There was not a single exclusion.

In twenty-first-century scholarship, idolators and iconoclasts are studied by iconophiles and iconophobes Modernism replaced ani-conism by abstraction and conceptual art The discourse is secular, but its cultural context, and possibly its motivation, are not: the

exhibi-tion Iconoclash (Figure 20.5) appeared one year after the destrucexhibi-tion

of images in Bamiyan The contrast continued in 2014 with the rise of the Islamic Caliphate and its dissemination of aesthetically managed videos of decapitations

See Chapter 21 for

uses of images in

terrorism.

Figure 20.5 The exhibition

Iconoclash!, Karlsruhe,

Germany, installation view,

2002.

taghut [Arabic] in Islam, the worship of false gods and figures other than Allah, such

as Satan or various jinn

It has sometimes been generalized to include a worship of earthly power, and as such is also condemned.

For the lingchi, see

Chapters 25 and 27.

onomoclasts a complex religious argument exists over the idea that the name of God is itself part

of God and therefore holy The use of names as part

of religious representation

is supported by so-called name-glorifiers; those who oppose this practice are onomoclasts.

20.4 Onomoclasm, Khay’yal

The four terms we have defined here—idolatry, iconoclasm, iconophilia,

iconophobia—and the neologism iconoclash, can be usefully augmented

by several others

European scholarship has tended to focus on the Jewish origins

of iconoclasm (as in the Second Commandment, “Thou shalt not make

unto thee any graven image”), in Protestant iconoclasm, and in

cur-rent Islamic iconoclasms Yet as the historian Marie-José Mondzain

has demonstrated, Byzantine iconoclasm provided many of the

oper-ative metaphors for our current thinking about image and

represen-tation Among dozens of possibilities one that is especially salient is

onomoclasm, the destruction of names.

Iconoclasts were also onomoclasts (in the original Greek, they were

onomatomachoi) The Council of Nicaea decreed that “an icon is like its

proto-image,” that is, its divine original, “not according to essence but

only according to name [kata to onoma].” In the Council’s opinion, the

correct way to understand the relation of an icon to the divine

sub-jects it depicts is through its naming As the philosopher Sergei

Bul-gakov (1871–1944) puts it, “without names, without the inscriptions,”

schematic portrayals, allegories, and symbols, “icons would be totally

impossible.” This led to onomatodoxy (Russian: imiaslavie)

Accord-ing to Aleksander Najda, this line of thought can be traced from the

Pseudo-Dionysius through Plotinus, John of Damascus, Eriugena, and

Gregory Palamas, to Russian mystics of the early twentieth century

such as Bulgakov and Pavel Florensky (1882–1937)

Onomoclasm is widely applicable to iconoclasm and to

iconopho-bic art and criticism The Chinese execution and torture known as the

lingchi, the so-called death of a thousand cuts, for example, was a kind

of onomoclasm because its legal purpose was to erase the name of the

accused, so that his family would be forgotten

It is not widely noted in European and American scholarship that

Islam has an equally long and complex history of injunctions against

the image One way to broaden the conversation is to consider the

Arabic word for image According to the Iranian writer

Moham-mad-Reza Shafiei Kadkani (b 1939), the Arabic word for image khay’yal

(Ɲܿƪ߀Ƨࠄ) also meant “scarecrow,” because the image is an object that lacks

the quality of veracity but retains the quality of existence In Farsi, the

cognate word khial Ɲܿ߀ࠄ also means “dream”—a sweet dream or

day-dream Associated meanings include “fiction” and “metaphor.” The

Arabic and Farsi words are much less about the representation of truth

than the Greek icon, and more about dreams and illusions.

There are many other possibilities for changing the vocabulary of

conventional talk on iconoclasm The Arabic word for idolatry, taghut

(ƃࣤݐ࣑ܿ), for example, means “to rebel” and “to cross boundaries,”

yield-ing a different sense of what idolatry does As the vocabulary of

20.4 Onomoclasm, K hay’yal | 2 71

The top image is an angel from a rood screen (a

partition between the nave and chancel) in the

church of St Michael, Barton Turf, near

Nor-wich, England, painted in the fifteenth century

and defaced during the Protestant iconoclasm

For unknown reasons, but possibly because

the iconoclasts were discovered, the vandalism

was hasty and nearly random; few heads on the

screen were damaged.

Much of the study of iconoclasm is

con-cerned with analyzing exactly what has been

ruined, and why Consider this head of an

Ak-kadian king found in Nineveh, in present-day

Iraq (bottom) Why did someone put out just

one of the king’s eyes, cut off the ends of his

beard, strike his nose, and cut off both ears?

There are several theories; Claudia Suter

sug-gests these mutilations are “in line with both

iconoclasm on Neo-Assyrian reliefs and

physi-cal punishment of war captives and criminals”

in contemporaneous cultures It is also possible

this iconoclasm would have been understood in

terms of the Akkadian word nekelmû(m), the

maleficent “glare” of powerful figures.

Some iconoclasm aims at the entire image

or sculpture, but most—even the dynamiting

in Bamiyan—leaves parts and contexts In this respect, premodern iconoclasms differ from modernist iconoclasts, whose target is more likely to be naturalism or representation itself.

TEXT BOX 20.1

Premodern Iconoclasm

iconoclasm grows, the discussions about the worship and destruction

of images may change fundamentally

*

If iconoclasm and its allied concepts are to occupy a central place in the interpretation of images, we should try to discover what limits we wish

to put on their applicability One limit could be the difference between even the most activist scholarship on iconoclasm and iconoclastic acts Even though there have been iconophiles in a literal sense in the past—

they were also known as iconodulists or iconodules, people who used and advocated images—we do not use iconophile in that sense in our own scholarship The root philos in iconophile behaves more like the philos in

philosophy: it names a person who takes great pleasure in his or her subject, but not someone who would strike a sculpture or painting, or a person who would put him or herself in danger protecting a sculpture

or painting That is the subject of the Chapter 21

Chapter 4,

VHFWLRQ‚KDV

another discussion of

nekelmû(m).

nekelmû

[Akkadian] literally, “to

glare”; usually associated

with Akkadian deities, a

malicious gaze that causes

harm to its human object.