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

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 Worshipping and Destroying Images The study of the worship of images—idolatry—and the destruction of images to prevent their worship—iconoclasm—has recently 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 understanding 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 dynamiting 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 manuscripts in Timbuktu in 2012, and the Islamic State destroyed Assyrian 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 (‫)נתושחן‬, 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 The first European iconoclasms appeared in the context of the Byzantine 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 iconoclastic 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 20 Leading Concepts idolatry iconoclast iconoclasm aniconism iconoclash iconophilia iconophobia onomoclasts taghut nekelmû(m) 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 | elk90915_ch20_263-274.indd 263 263 11/19/19 06:16 PM 264 | WORSHIPPING AND DESTROYING IMAGES 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 elk90915_ch20_263-274.indd 264 as İznik, near Istanbul) When the Empress Theodora II allowed icon worship 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 iconoclastic 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 mandated 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 earliest representations of Buddha, up to the first century bce, were aniconic Buddha himself was not shown, but rather his empty throne, 11/19/19 06:16 PM 20.1 Elements of the History of Iconoclasm | 265 Figure 20.2 Serpent cult object Megiddo, Israel, 1650–1150 B.C.E 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 Buddha’s nirvana was beyond even the ‘relative’ immortality of the highest 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 elk90915_ch20_263-274.indd 265 11/19/19 06:16 PM 266 | WORSHIPPING AND DESTROYING IMAGES Figure 20.3 Iconoclastic riot in Antwerp, 1566 20.2 Concepts of Iconoclasm In the first decades of the twenty-first century, there was a rapid increase 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 century, 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, Wahhabi 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 general, cross-cultural, nonreligious meaning of iconoclasm In a sense the broadening and abstraction of the concept of iconoclasm could also be understood as an organic development of earlier uses of the word, because iconoclasm had not always been a matter of the religious beliefs The art historian David Freedberg has suggested three motivations for premodern iconoclasms, which could appear separately or elk90915_ch20_263-274.indd 266 11/19/19 06:16 PM 20.2 Concepts of Iconoclasm | 267 Figure 20.4 Iblis, the devil, from Abû Ma’shar’s The Book of Nativities (Kitâb al-Mawalid), 1582 elk90915_ch20_263-274.indd 267 11/19/19 06:16 PM 268 | WORSHIPPING AND DESTROYING IMAGES iconoclash a recent term that refers to the conflict and interdependence of idolatry and iconoclasm elk90915_ch20_263-274.indd 268 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, iconoclasm was widely understood to be a fundamental term in image criticism of all kinds, even apart from the historical examples of iconoclasms 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), iconoclasm 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 idolatry Gamboni and others note that iconoclasts, “theoclasts,” and “ideoclasts” 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 11/19/19 06:16 PM 20.3 Iconophilia, Iconophobia | 269 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 “believers in belief,” he says, because they hold to the fiction that idolaters worship images and not God But iconoclasts “do not confuse representations 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 without representation altogether—“entraps us in a world that is only representation: 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 abstraction participate in a cultural iconoclasm Idolatry is marginalized, pushed outside the boundaries of fine art This new broad understanding 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 contemporary 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 elk90915_ch20_263-274.indd 269 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 11/19/19 06:16 PM 70 | WORSHIPPING AND DESTROYING IMAGES art and science From Weibel’s perspective, the history of modern art is a history of iconoclasm: older images were not physically destroyed, but modernist artists from Cézanne to Malevich and Mondrian doubted many of the conventions of academic painting As Koerner says: If you try to 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 was transfer the modern art gallery … [We] didn’t even have to make choices There was not a single exclusion See Chapter 21 for uses of images in terrorism In twenty-first-century scholarship, idolators and iconoclasts are studied by iconophiles and iconophobes Modernism replaced aniconism by abstraction and conceptual art The discourse is secular, but its cultural context, and possibly its motivation, are not: the exhibition Iconoclash (Figure 20.5) appeared one year after the destruction 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 Figure 20.5 The exhibition Iconoclash!, Karlsruhe, Germany, installation view, 2002 elk90915_ch20_263-274.indd 270 11/19/19 06:16 PM 20.4 Onomoclasm, Khay’yal | 71 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 current Islamic iconoclasms Yet as the historian Marie-José Mondzain has demonstrated, Byzantine iconoclasm provided many of the operative metaphors for our current thinking about image and representation 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 subjects it depicts is through its naming As the philosopher Sergei Bulgakov (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) According 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 iconophobic 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 Mohammad-Reza Shafiei Kadkani (b 1939), the Arabic word for image khay’yal (Ɲܿƪ ߀Ƨࠄ) 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 daydream 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 (ƃࣤ‫)࣑ܿݐ‬, for example, means “to rebel” and “to cross boundaries,” yielding a different sense of what idolatry does As the vocabulary of elk90915_ch20_263-274.indd 271 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 For the lingchi, see Chapters 25 and 27 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 11/19/19 06:16 PM 72 | WORSHIPPING AND DESTROYING IMAGES iconoclasm grows, the discussions about the worship and destruction of images may change fundamentally nekelmû [Akkadian] literally, “to glare”; usually associated with Akkadian deities, a malicious gaze that causes harm to its human object Chapter 4, VHFWLRQ‚KDV another discussion of nekelmû(m) * 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 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 TEXT BOX 20.1 Premodern Iconoclasm 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 Norwich, 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 concerned with analyzing exactly what has been ruined, and why Consider this head of an Akkadian 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 suggests these mutilations are “in line with both iconoclasm on Neo-Assyrian reliefs and physical 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 elk90915_ch20_263-274.indd 272 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 11/19/19 06:16 PM 20.4 Onomoclasm, Khay’yal elk90915_ch20_263-274.indd 273 | 73 11/19/19 06:16 PM 74 | WORSHIPPING AND DESTROYING IMAGES Further Reading Byzantine images and iconoclasm: Emmanuel Alloa, “Visual Studies in Byzantium: A Pictorial Turn avant la lettre,” Journal of Visual Culture 12 (2013); Marie-José Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy: The Byzantine Origins of the Contemporary Imaginary, translated by Rico Franses, 2004 (French original 1996) Semitic aniconism: Tryggve Mettinger, No Graven Image? Israelite Aniconism in its Ancient Near Eastern Context, 1995; see the review by Joseph Patrich, in Israel Exploration Journal 48 (1998) Al-Kalbi, Hisham Ibn: answering-islam.org/Books/Al-Kalbi Buddhism aniconism: John Huntington, “Early Buddhist Art and the Theory of Aniconism,” Art Journal 49 (1990); Linrothe, “Inquiries into the Origin of the Buddha Image: A Review,” East and West 43 (1993): especially pp 253–54 Fluid Flesh: The Body, Religion and the Visual Arts, edited by Barbara Baert, 2009 Freedberg, David: The Iconoclasts and their Motives, 1989 John of Damascus: On the Divine Images, translated by David Anderson, 1980, p 18 iconoclasm and Koerner: James Elkins, “Iconoclasm and the Sublime: Two Implicit Religious Discourses in Art History,” in Idol Anxiety, edited by Josh Ellenbogen and Aaron Tugendhaft, 2011 Koerner’s anecdote: unpublished conversation, 2006; compare Joseph Koerner, Reformation of the Image, 2008, preface onomoclasm: Sergei Bulgakov, Icons and the Name of God, translated by Boris Jakim, 2012, p 120; for the Council of Nicaea, Bulgakov cites Johannes Mansi, Sacrorum conciliorum nova et amplissima collectio, 1759–1927, vol 3, pp 241, 244, 258 Islamic sources: Mohammad-Reza Shafiei Kadkani, Dehkhoda Encyclopedia [in Farsi], pp. 10180–82 Text Box 20.1: for theories about the head found in Nineveh, see Claudia Suter, “Gudea of Lagash: Iconoclasm or Tooth of Time?,” in Iconoclasm and Text: Destruction in the Ancient Near East and Beyond, edited by Natalie May, 2012, p 58 elk90915_ch20_263-274.indd 274 11/19/19 06:16 PM ... PM 74 | WORSHIPPING AND DESTROYING IMAGES Further Reading Byzantine images and iconoclasm: Emmanuel Alloa, ? ?Visual Studies in Byzantium: A Pictorial Turn avant la lettre,” Journal of Visual Culture... elk90915_ch20_263-274.indd 267 11/19/19 06:16 PM 268 | WORSHIPPING AND DESTROYING IMAGES iconoclash a recent term that refers to the conflict and interdependence of idolatry and iconoclasm elk90915_ch20_263-274.indd... broad understanding 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