Relics as New Monuments: Destroyed painting

A certain uncanniness is transmitted by any act of destruction of art. Some forms or ways of creating a damaged or “destroyed” painting not only modify but also mutate representation from something affirmative into a territory that dislocates meaning and becomes performative. The destruction of painting is a wide field worth investigation, and by crossing into art history reveals aspects that the academic perspective often overlooks. In the practice of some contemporary artists, the act itself of destroying painting can be seen as a form of abstracting the content of painting by minimizing its narrative load and reflecting on the subjacent void that exists in any built form. Destroying or dismantling existing layers of paint as a form of systematic vandalism has been conducted in recent practices as an investigation of the processes of creation and value attribution.

The paradigmatic work Passage was performed in 1955 in Tokyo by Saburo Murakami, one of the members of Gutai, the Japanese avant-garde action group whose experiments foreshadowed (much earlier than the Euro-American avant-garde) the essence of happenings, Nouveau-Realism, Abstractionism, and Conceptualism. For Gutai, interested in the materiality and force of elements, action is a way of painting with the elements. Murakami, who jumped through a row of canvases in his performance — tearing them completely apart in the process — practises painting as a form of spirituality not far from animism through immersion into matter and the natural processes of decomposition. Painting, for Murakami, is a way to awaken matter just as perforating his own canvases is a way of awakening painting. This excerpt from Gutai’s manifesto addresses its new vision of performativity: “Under the cloak of an intellectual aim, the materials have been completely murdered and can no longer speak to us. Lock these corpses into their tombs. Gutai art does not change the material but brings it to life. Gutai art does not falsify the material.”¹ 1 -  Jiro Yoshihara, “The Gutai Manifesto,” proclaimed in October 1956 and published in Geijutso Shincho Art Journal (December 1956),accessed May 2012, http://web.archive.org/web/20070630202927/http://www.ashiya-web.or.jp/museum/10us/103education/nyumon_us/manifest_us.htm.