In 1974, Tony Shafrazi spray-painted Picasso’s famed anti-war painting “Guernica,” which was on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, with the words “KILL LIES ALL.”
Two years later at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, a window washer hurled a small bronze sculpture at Bouguereau’s 1886 mythologized full- length nude portrait of a woman, “Return of Spring.”
In 2001, the Taliban, which was governing Afghanistan, exploded two ancient, monumental statues of Buddha in an attempt to rid the country of what it saw as heresy.
So, when Kathleen Folden entered the Loveland Museum/Gallery on Wednesday afternoon and destroyed a lithograph by Enrique Chagoya, she became the latest in a long history of perpetrators of violence against artworks.
But somehow, perhaps because this attack happened in Colorado, it seemed different, more real, and area art museum directors were still in shock Thursday.
“What is amazing to me is that I’ve never seen such license, this incredible license to do violence to a work of art,” said Adam Lerner, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. “I really hope it doesn’t create any kind of precedent.”
The artwork, part of a show titled “The Legend of Bud Shark and His Indelible Ink,” was shown in 2009 at the Denver museum, where it didn’t generate a whiff of controversy.
Though the circumstances are different with every art attack, they all raise a similar question: What is it about those works that provoke such strong emotions that they lead to vandalism or even destruction?
The image that inspired Folden’s attack consists of the head of Jesus Christ on a woman’s body. A face of a man is shown near the body’s crotch, and he could be interpreted as engaging in a sexual act.
Chagoya, an internationally recognized artist who teaches at Stanford University, does not deny that the scene is provocative, but he said he was not trying to be controversial or blasphemous.
“There is no nudity in the whole page,” he said. “There is no genitalia. Actually, there is not even a sexual act. There is a man with his tongue out on the bottom of the page, which might be suggestive, but it’s not graphic.”
Controversial panel
The image is one of 12 panels in a 2002 work titled “The Misadventures of the Romantic Cannibals,” and Chagoya said the controversial panel must be seen in the context of the whole. The overall piece draws on a range of sources, from comic books to Mayan art, and it addresses such issues as war and sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.
“I’m very surprised by the attack,” he said. “I’m trying to make sense of it. I believe it’s just become part of the polarized politics right before the elections.”
The Loveland attack, like many of its predecessors, reveals an inevitable clash of rights: The right of an artist to express himself. The right of an art museum to choose what it puts on its walls. The right of a community to hold onto its values.
The question, of course, is this: What are those values and can they ever be truly universal?
“A deeper problem”
Lerner said there’s nothing wrong — to a point — in believing that art should be about who we are as a community or as a society.
“There is a deeper problem, though, when people have a very, very narrow sense of who the ‘we’ is,” he said. ” ‘We’ hold these values, and they therefore are universal values.
“That’s a much bigger problem that in many ways has nothing to do with art and has to do with a national problem that we have no ability to think of a ‘we’ that incorporates different voices.”
Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson, director and chief curator of the Aspen Art Museum, believes that art museums should be a safe, unfettered place for such myriad voices to be heard.
“That’s the beauty of a museum,” she said. “It’s one of the few places, particularly museums that don’t have admission, where regardless of economics or gender or religious belief or political belief that people can come together and rub shoulders with people that are potentially unlike them. It’s a sacred space of building a community.”
Kyle MacMillan: 303-954-1675 or kmacmillan@denverpost.com
