Description

This module explores episodes of image debate and image destruction from the Reformation to today. Controversy over the validity of religious images became a central theme in the 16th-century Protestant Reformation, and in recent years extremist regimes such as the Taliban and Islamic State have ordered the destruction of Buddhist, Christian and Islamic artworks. Secular art can also come under attack, as seen in the destruction of visual symbols of political power during the French Revolution, or more recent attempts to censor art perceived as offensive or obscene. This module will examine a selection of such episodes to explore the motivations driving both pro- and anti-image sentiments, asking how the roles and powers of visual imagery have changed (and endured) over the centuries.

Objectives

By the end of the module, students should be able to:

• Understand specific image debates and iconoclastic episodes across a broad time frame
• Analyze the range of arguments used for and against images in different cases
• Evaluate changes and consistencies in attitudes towards visual imagery

Preliminary Reading

• Stacy Boldrick and Tabitha Barber, Art Under Attack: Histories of British Iconoclasm (Tate, 2013)
• Stacy Boldrick and Richard Clay, eds, Iconoclasm: Contested Objects, Contested Terms (Ashgate, 2007)
• Carlos M.N. Eire, War Against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin (Cambridge University Press, 1986)
• Finbarr Barry Flood, ‘Between cult and culture: Bamiyah, Islamic iconoclasm, and the museum’, Art Bulletin 84:4 (2002): 641-69
• Dario Gamboni, The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism since the French Revolution (Reaktion Books, 1997)
• Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion and Art (MIT Press, 2002)
• Sergiusz Michalski, The Reformation and the Visual Arts: The Protestant Image Question in Western and Eastern Europe (Routledge, 1993)
• James Noyes, The Politics of Iconoclasm: Religion, Violence and the Culture of Image-Breaking in Christianity and Islam (I.B. Tauris, 2013)
• Lawrence Rothfield, ed., Unsettling ‘Sensation’: Arts-Policy Lessons from the Brooklyn Museum of Art Controversy (Rutgers University Press, 2001)
• Claire Smith et al, ’The Islamic State’s symbolic war: Da’esh’s socially mediated terrorism as a threat to cultural heritage’, Journal of Social Archaeology, 16:2 (2016): 164-88