Friday, May 15, 2009

Vandalism AS Art, and Vandalism OF Art Presentation

Vandalism AS Art, and Vandalism OF Art

Vandalism:

- Vandalism is a behaviour attributed. It’s the ruthless destruction or spoiling of anything beautiful or venerable. Such action includes criminal damage, defacement, and graffiti 
1- Ignorance: ex writing a swear word on something
- Denying owner’s property, public space, or the community (no respect).
- Acting out in anger, frustration, anti-social behaviours. 
- Envy, immaturity, stupidity, jealousy
- Self-expression
2 Vandalism in a form of Activism, something that has significance  
- to get your voice heard
- action to bring about social change, political change, economic injustice, or environmental wellbeing.

- Self-expression

Vandalism as Art

Marchal Duchamp’s Vandalism of Mona Lisa which is titled “L Ash.O.O.Que, which translates to “She has a hot ass” in English.
Marcel Duchamp's Mona Lisa readymade, Duchamp added a moustache and goatee to a reproduction post card of Mona Lisa. 
At the time it was extremely shocking, because it is making fun of da Vinci s adored painting, Monal Lisa represents ideal beauty and with just a moustache added to her, her gender became ambiguous. 

Jacques Villeglé work using torn up billboards

Jacques Villeglé is a French mixed-media artist who is famous for his “de-collage” canvases. He puts together a college by placing images over one another, and then completely at random he rips the colloge apart. Leaving parts of images to be exposed and other parts to be thrown in the trash. The work presents nothing less than a modern ruin of advertisements, dominated by the haunted face of the woman in the middle. In the reading that I read, it said that woman in the center is supposed to represent us as the modern consumers, the woman is nearly eclipsed by all the commercialism that is around her.  

Art Mark and their project called Barbie Liberation Organization

In 1989 the Barbie Liberation Organization was formed. They spent $8000 dollars to buy barbies and J.I Joes, and what they did was basically they took the dolls apart and switching voice box circuits Teen Talk Barbie and the Talking G.I. Joe dolls 
The BLO re-packaged the dolls back in the original boxes and snuck them back into the store shelf’s, and then the store resold them to children. When the little girls opened up the Barbie, the Barbie would yell out “Vengeance is mine!” and G.I. Joes who say “Let’s plan our dream wedding!”. 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVT4T7OR3iQ  

Billboard Liberation Front / Ron English

BLF is a group devoted to "improving" billboards by changing key words to radically alter the message, often to an anti-corporate message.

McDonald’s
BLF made a billboard celebration of McDonald’s 50th Anniversary called “To Serve Man”. BLF included big cartoon figures of Ronald McDonald force feeding a hamburger to an obese child, with a backdrop of a well-fed Ronald McDonald and alien figures.
Robert Rauschenberg. Erased De Kooning. 1953
Rauschenberg did asked Dekooning, (who was a sucseful painter at the time) if he would erase one of his drawings. 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpCWh3IFtDQ 

Banksy. 
British pseudo graffiti artist who vandalizes many walls in an attempt to have public awareness of politics, culture, and ethics. The message is usually anti-war, anti-capitalist or anti-establishment. Usually his work include rats, monkeys, policemen, soldiers, children, and the elderly. He is often called an "art terrorist" artist
(1:20) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8e0IJSOq0xg 
And this is Banksy’s Israel's Segregation Wall, called “Palestine job” in 2007
The Israeli West-Bank wall is a barrier that is being constructed by the Israeli government. The idea was to create a physical barrier between the Israeli and Palestinian populations. The Palestinian population and its leadership are essentially against the barrier, because they have been separated from their own farmlands, work places and schools, and many more will be separated as the barriers near Jerusalem are completed.
Banksy, reminds the viewers of his work that Israel's 425-mile-long West Bank barrier is considered illegal by the United Nations because it "essentially turns Palestine into the world's largest open prison."


Vandalism of Art 

When someone Vandalises an Art Work it is a form of protesting.

>Feminist Activism: Diego Velazquez “Venus and Cupid”; vandalized in 1914 by Mary Richardson.

Richardson was an active suffragist. She walked into London’s National Gallery and slashed Velazquez’s Venus and Cupid with a meat cleaver in 1914.

The “Venus and Cupid” was a celebrity picture before Richardson attacked it. It had been brought to England by one of the nation's heroes, the Duke of Wellington.
In 1906 the price of the painting was $ 45,000 dollars, at the time it was considered a notorious value for a painting. It was declared as "perhaps the finest painting of the nude in the world.”
In Richardson's own words, her motive was to protest the incarceration of Emmaline Pankhurst. Emmeline Pankhurst was a political activist and leader of the British suffragette movement (figting for women’s right to vote), and she was arrested the previous night. Mary Richardson said "I have tried to destroy the picture of the most beautiful woman in mythological history as a protest against the Government for destroying Mrs. Pankhurst, who is the most beautiful character in modem history." 
She also later said that she "didn't like the way men visitors gaped at the painting all day long".
As Mary Richardson puts it “there is something that the government care far more than human life, and that is security of property, and so it is thorough property that we will strike the enemy”. 
This painting was also a controversially a de-grading depiction of a woman. The viewer sees the model’s face in the mirror, but the perspective lines are wrong for her to see herself. The reflection of the woman’s face in the mirror is a substitute to what it actually should be reflecting; Venus’s genitals, not her face. 
"The incident has come to symbolize a particular perception of feminist attitudes towards the female nude; in a sense, it has come to represent a specific stereotypical image of feminism more generally.”

>Political terrorism- Rembrandt “Dunae” 1636; vandalized in 1985

This painting was a Celebrated image of sexual vulnerability.
Her naked body is open to our gaze as she raises a hesitant hand at a golden shower that is really Jupiter, a supernatural aggressor who will penetrate her defences. 
In 1985 a man entered Hermitage in St.Petersburg and mutilated Rembrandt’s Dunae "He lunged at the painting with a knife thrust in the region of Dunae's lower belly..., and then pour sulphuric acid on it."
Dunae’s vandalism was categorized as a tactic of "political terrorism", because the vandal was reported to be a Lithuanian who destroyed the painting to protest the Soviet occupation of his native land.

>Hate art: Barnett Newman “Who’s afraid of red, yellow and blue III; vandalized in 1986

Newman's painting is an all-over red monochrome painting, except for a blue stripe on one end and a yellow stripe on the other.
Gerard Bladeren attacked Barnett Newman's painting in 1986.
Newman's canvases are composed of flat planes of color, relieved only by lines or rectangles that make no human reference. Yet the image has been a targets of vandalism and assault.
Bladeren was a frustrated artist who told authorities he hated “abstract art and realism”, and “he wanted to take revenge on abstract art”.

>Institutional: Kazimir Malevich, Suprematisme 1920-1927. Vandalised in 1997

Malevich’s Suprematisme is an oil on canvas painting, it depicts a white cross on a light grey background. 
The Russian performance artist Alexander Brena went into the museum and sprayed a green dollar sign over Malevich 's Suprematisme. Brena said he intended the dollar sign to appear like it was nailed to the cross. 
Brena said to the police that his vandalism is a protest against the "corruption and commercialism in the art world". 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8MM_cf2e-U&feature=related 

Power of art work: images, photography, painting, sculptures (meaning and importance that images carry)

Leonardo Deviancies’ Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John the Baptist

This image was attacked In 1987 with a gun. The blast caused significant damage, but the bullet did not go through the painting because of the protective glass covering. People in London's National Gallery referred to the damage as "the shotgun wound." 

Mater Dolorosa by Durer (c. 1498)

a man threw acid on Durer's Mater Dolorosa (c. 1498) in Munich in 1988, the paint was said by newspapers to "run like blood."

These images, when destroyed are so tragic that they have been given very animated titles, as if it were a real murder, saying it “ran like blood”. 

Gridly McKim-Smith says 
“These sayings register as an implicit belief that the painting is more than an inert combination of pigment and support, the language describes the damaged paintings as if they were living victims of personal assault.”

Destroying reproduction of images. 

Images carry a certain power, and to say that one has ripped it part means that they have possessed a great amount of hate or aggression towards it. 

For example: In 1913, outraged by Matisse's painterly violations of the female body, students of the Art Institute of Chicago found Matisse guilty of "artistic murder" and proceeded to burn reproductions of Matisse’s "Blue Nude". 

Atrocity of Flag Burning  

Burning an image of something is the ultimate way to express hate.
Flags as an image carry very powerful meaning.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OT8VzErIRMU 

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