Even today, if you want to enter the National Portrait Gallery in London, you have to give up your rolled umbrella at the door…along with your muff, any parcels and selfie sticks. The suffragettes can’t be blamed for the latter but fears that women might hide weapons in said umbrella, after Mary Richardson slashed the ‘Rokeby Venus’ on 10th March 1914 with a hidden axe, led to the edict. As further measures, newly-invented Triplex Glass was substituted for plate glass in front of paintings and floors were turpentined ‘to reduce slippery polish’, because pursuers apparently slipped giving chase. Scotland Yard issued a chauvinistic statement:
‘If women are to be admitted to public galleries there seems no alternative but to hand-cuff their hands behind their backs and to put up a grille to prevent them butting or barging into the pictures. Only under these conditions do I think it safe to admit them
However, Anne Hunt, described as a militant, managed to smuggle in a butcher’s cleaver on the 14th of July and attack a portrait of Carlyle by Millais further confusing the issue. Hunt was described by a hyperbole-driven media as a ‘Hatchet Fiend’, ‘Wild Woman’ and ‘Fury With a Chopper’. Carlyle, as an historian, might have wondered why he was singled out and why the 19th century world he knew when women knew their place had altered so much since his death in 1881. However, further militant tactics were called off by the suffragette movement when a greater war was declared in August 1914 and Art was returned to its former status as paint on canvas.
However, Art and Politics can never be completely separated. Try telling the Taliban that ancient Art has no power. The famous Buddha statues in Iraq’s Bamiyan province were first bombarded by tanks and artillery shells before Islamic State fighters planted explosives and blew them up in 2001. Back in 1975 there was a prequel when a former school teacher William de Rijk slashed Rembrandt’s Nightwatch shouting ‘I did it for the lord’ before being overpowered by guards. Invoking the almighty as justification was eerily echoed by the fanatics who shouted Allahu Akbar as the Buddhist statues came down in 2001.
And then there was the Cleveland Museum of art in 1970 where three sticks of dynamite were used to blow the legs off Rodin’s Thinker. A radical activist group Weather Underground were suspected but someone should have told them no act of artistic vandalism has ever achieved anything other than to heighten security
Less noticed, unless you live in South Australia, was the graffiti attack on the statue of Colonel Light in the name of Aboriginal protests about black deaths in custody. Similar attacks on statues commemorating colonial success followed all over the UK. As symbols of seeming public discontent with the history of the former British Empire, statuary has borne the brunt. Whatever Colonel Light represents today, we are however eternally grateful that he laid out Adelaide in 1836 like an army camp with straight roads wide enough to drive a whole regiment down.
But it’s not just politics that stirs such passions. Art itself can hold its own. Tony Shafrazi was an artist with dreams of changing the world. On the afternoon of April 30th 1974 he sprayed KILL LIES ALL on Picasso’s Guernica. In fevered speech he shouted ‘I am an artist’ to the astonished crowd of art lovers present. Picasso, having died a year earlier would no doubt have pointed out that that was his point.
And in 1986 at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam a 31-year-old painter named Gerard Jan van Bladeren took exception to Barnett Newman’s, Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III (1967-68) being displayed as Art and using the reasoning that ‘my kid could do that’ to set about destroying the massive painting. Some more reasonable thinkers suggested that measuring at 544 by 224cm it would have taken a very tall ‘kid’ to have painted the Newman in the first place. However, attempted restoration did more damage over the ensuing year than the vandalism and the painting in question still appears in every anthology of Modern Art. Unnamed critics were also at work in Chicago in 2006. The tall sky blue Daliesque sculptures built by a local artist were knocked over not once but twice. The crime angered the Evanston art community but no doubt Dali would have been delighted at still being a figure of controversy
Art critics notwithstanding, there are also the souvenir hunters. The Art Gallery of NSW took a dim view of the visitor who kissed a 19th-century statue of Narcissus while wearing red lipstick, leaving a large stain on its buttocks in 2012 and another visitor who pulled the nose off a statue of a clown by Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone. Whether the visitor chose to wear the nose isn’t known but the lipstick smacker appeared endlessly in the media as her fifteen minutes of fame came and went. The National Gallery of Australia in Canberra also suffered as several sculptures were vandalised with graffiti, including one that had ”Josh Latif Rules” scratched into it – whoever Josh Latif was. At least he signed his work for which the police were grateful. There was no message or physical souvenir hunting when police arrested a man who sprayed red paint in a graffiti style on Adelaide so called Malls Balls, two stainless steel spheres mounted on top of each other and then proceeded down the Mall attacking shopfronts. There was also no reason given for painting an eye on the work of internationally recognised artist Hossain Valamanesh in Adelaide’s CBD. The sprayed words on the newly installed pigs in Rundle Mall though had a decidedly political flavour with ‘liberal’ emblazoned on their flanks. Adelaidian vandals are obviously of the opinion that any public work of art is fair game.
Of course, art is damaged no matter what. A tomato canape wielding patron/visitor to the Canberra National Gallery lost control of her topping. Several dried droplets of red material were located on the work at the lower edge, right of centre after cleaning and then there was damage to paintings by Brett Whiteley and Picasso, in both cases by clumsy children bereft of parental control. Forklift accidents have also happened in other Australian public art galleries. A 2000-year-old Roman statue worth more than $1 million sustained damage after it was dropped from a forklift at the National Gallery of Victoria in January 2020 and several artworks have been damaged falling off the walls of the Art Gallery of NSW after the failure of Velcro hanging mechanisms. If we were to add to the list of banned items in art galleries then canapes, forklifts and Velcro look like suitable candidates and keeping women, children and artists outside might save a bit in restoration costs.
I think the point here though is that there will always be a price to pay for ‘hanging’ expensive public art anywhere whether it be political, artistic, historical or simply gratifiying the needs of the wholly untalented who can’t stand to see anyone being recognised and seek to drag society down to the lowest common denominator through acts of destruction to which they can put their names -albeit anonymously -through illegible tags. Trying to destroy the Mona Lisa [many have tried] to get your name in the papers may not seem on a par with shooting John Lennon but inevitably, cultural artefacts of all types are seen as soft targets and a way to instant fame, however short-lived.
