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This paper examines utopian ideologies and their effects in motivating iconoclasm. Using the cases of Islamic State, the Nazi’s destruction of Warsaw, and the Taliban’s destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, this paper analyzes the utopian elements of each group’s ideology that motivates iconoclasm. I argue that Islamic State engages in iconoclasm in order to promote a unified and ideal community rooted in their utopian religious ideology. They achieve this goal by destroying cultural artifacts and museums that clash with their vision. While most of the debate around Islamic State has focused on non-religious aspects like oil-backed finance, this paper attempts to reorient the debate around the religious character of Islamic State’s actions. Given the salience of Islamic State and other similar groups in recent attacks globally, this paper attempts to analyze their operational motivations through the destruction of cultural artifacts.

This article examines the textual criticism of the most influential Byzantine liturgical commentary, Historia Mystagogica Ecclesiastica (HME). In the current scholarship it is usually taken for granted that this commentary belongs to St. Germanus I of Constantinople. This view was substantiated in detail by R. Bornert in his book, Les commentaires byzantines... (Paris, 1966). My own study of all the oldest extant manuscripts of the HME has led me to the conclusion that Borner’s arguments are insuffi cient, and his typology of redactions of the HME is erroneous and therefore deserves to be revised. I have collated all the 10–12th-century manuscripts of the HME — as well as the early Latin and Slavonic translations of it, — and identifi ed the oldest redactions of the commentary. One of these should be considered to be the primary one, and I put forward the arguments in favor of the very redaction which is witnessed by the oldest manuscripts of the HME and which seems to have been the most widespread in the Middle Byzantine period. All the manuscripts of this primary redaction of the HME attribute its authorship to St. Basil the Great, but the commentary, undoubtedly, does not belong to him. It is a composition by a nameless author of the late 7th or of the first half of the 8th century, who comments on the Liturgy of St. Basil. Such a dating is supported by the presence of some specifi c liturgical and theological features in the HME (these will be studied further in the upcoming articles). Finally, I present my own critical edition of the primary redaction of the HME, accompanied by a new Russian translation.

The purpose of the research is analyzing philosophical and theological aspects of iconoclasm taking into account its various forms and secular analogies. The study concentrates on such semiotic features of iconoclasm as negation, prohibition, or deliberate breaking certain visual images. The principles, criteria, and practices of iconoclasm are examined in the aspects of semantics and pragmatics. It is emphasized that every society requires methods that provide the division of the visual images into the acceptable (true) and unacceptable (false) ones. Although it is considered to be a rule that iconoclasm appeared in conditions of monotheism, it is stated that iconoclasm had analogies in early forms of religion. The author claims that the manifestations of the iconoclastic attitude can be found in Platonic metaphysics and the metaphysical tradition, which fought against distorted or false copies of ideas. Iconoclasm is considered retrospectively; a special importance is paid to changes in the structure of representation in late modernity. Representation is understood as the substitution of one object by another, in which the object that is replaced is the referent, whereas the substituting object is the signifier. The analysis focuses on the evolution of mediation structures, which originates from the emergence of the concept of logos as the embodiment of a universally meaningful meaning. As a result, this evolution broke relationship between the referent and the signifier, and the signifier gets its autonomy. Despite the fact that the complete autonomy of the signifier is a characteristic feature of late modernity, as a trend it manifested itself already at the early stages of modernization and indicated a qualitative leap in the strengthening of the power of signs, including visual images. The new quality of this power in modern research is interpreted using a term borrowed from the linguistic theory of speech acts – performativity, the ability to “create things with words”. When applied to signs and, in particular, to visual images, this means that the representation that has been released and therefore has become self-referential takes the place of the referent and is understood as reality itself, which requires an appropriate course of actions from a person. At the same time, the treatment of self-referential representation as “the thing itself” is considered not only as a consequence of its performativity, but also as a paradigm of idolatry, which the iconoclasts criticized precisely for identifying the Deity with various images that were considered autonomous and self-referential. Therefore, in the context under consideration, self-referentiality means performativity, and iconoclasm seeks to reject not specific visual images as they are, but the internally contradictory idea of autonomous representation. Self-referentiality of representation as a condition of its performativity can arise in two ways. At the first stages of weakening the connection between the representation and the referent, it can be destroyed by a person consciously in order to give the representation an arbitrary meaning. At the last stage of the development of the structures of representation, this connection disappears for objective reasons, corresponding to the regime of signs, which is the reason for the steady predominance of simulacra. These changes turn the iconoclastic attitude into a necessary aspect of cultural criticism. Целью статьи является анализ философских и теологических аспектов иконоборчества с учётом его различных форм и секулярных аналогов. Исследование основывается на анализе семиотических особенностей иконоборческой установки в качестве отрицания, запрета или целенаправленного разрушения определённых визуальных образов. Принципы, критерии и практики иконоборчества рассматриваются в статье в аспектах семантики и прагматики. Подчёркивается, что каждое общество нуждается в средствах, обеспечивающих разделение визуальных образов на приемлемые (истинные) и неприемлемые (ложные). Хотя считается, что соответствующие принципы, критерии и практики возникли в условиях монотеизма, отмечается, что у иконоборчества есть аналог в ранних формах религии. Указывается также, что проявления иконоборческой установки могут быть обнаружены в платоновской метафизике и метафизической традиции в целом, боровшейся против искажённых или ложных копий идей. Иконоборчество в статье рассматривается в ретроспективе, особое значение придаётся изменениям структуры репрезентации в позднем модерне. Репрезентация понимается как замещение одного объекта другим, в котором тот объект, который замещается, является референтом, тогда как замещающий объект является означающим. Анализ сосредоточивается на эволюции структур опосредования, которая берёт начало от возникновения концепции логоса в качестве воплощения общезначимого смысла. Отмечается, что в итоге эта эволюция привела к разрыву отношений между референтом и означающим, то есть к появлению у последнего автономии. Несмотря на то, что полная автономия означающего является характерной чертой позднего модерна, как тенденция она проявилась уже на ранних этапах модернизации и указывала на качественный скачок в усилении власти знаков, включая визуальные образы. Новое качество этой власти в современных исследованиях интерпретируется с помощью термина, заимствованного из лингвистической теории речевых актов, – перформативность, способность «создавать вещи с помощью слов». В применении к знакам и, в особенности, к визуальным образам это означает, что высвободившаяся и поэтому ставшая самореференциальной репрезентация занимает место референта и понимается как сама реальность, которая требует от человека соответствующего образа действий. При этом обращение с самореференциальной репрезентацией как с «самой вещью» рассматривается не только в качестве следствия её перформативности, но и как парадигма идолопоклонства, которое иконоборцы критиковали именно за отождествление Божества с различными образами, считавшимися автономными и самореференциальными. Поэтому в рассматриваемом контексте самореференциальность означает перформативность, и иконоборчество стремится отвергнуть не конкретные визуальные образы как таковые, но внутренне противоречивую идею автономной репрезентации. Отмечается, что самореференциальность репрезентации как условие её перформативности может возникнуть двумя способами. На первых этапах ослабления связи между репрезентацией и референтом она может быть разрушена человеком сознательно с целью придания репрезентации произвольного смысла. На последнем этапе развития структур репрезентации эта связь исчезает по объективным причинам, соответствуя тому режиму знаков, который является причиной устойчивого преобладания симулякров. Указанные изменения превращают иконоборческую установку в необходимый аспект критики культуры.

Copyright of Historia y Sociedad (01218417) is the property of Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Facultad de Ciencias Humanas y Economicas and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article discusses political aspects of Byzantine mysticism. Topics include the monastic context of Byzantine mysticism as presented in the book "Life of Antony," monastic interest in the iconoclasm in relation to mysticism, and political issues related to the theologians Symeon the New Theologian and Gregory Palamas.

Slightly metaphorically, this article deals with the subsequent waves of dramatically different ideologies and their impact on existing value-systems. The transition from one prevalent legal system to another, laden with central notions at variance with the previous one, destroys the old order to build up a new order. An example is taken from the modern history of Germany: starting from the Weimar Republic, through to the Third Reich with its Nazi-ideology, to the division into the democratic Federal Republic and the socialist-communist German Democratic Republic and their reunion in 1990. This article depicts the strategies put into place to accomplish and implement subsequent iconoclasms, and sketches successes and failures. Each iconoclasm finds its origins in the previous legal system and leaves its traces in the next one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two iconoclasms took place in twentieth-century Russian history: the iconoclasm after the October revolution, and the iconoclasm after the breakdown of the Soviet Union. These two (ideologically opposite) phases of iconoclastic actions (dismantling, destruction) were incited by programmes concerning the abolition of tsarist monuments of 1918 and met by controversial reactions to the removal of the statues of the former Soviet politicians in the 1990s. The revolutionary demolition of the symbols of the imperial past was executed in accordance with a clear-cut plan and included the erection of new monuments for outstanding communist activists. The official aim of the post-soviet removal of these monuments, to delete traces of a problematic past, was confronted with a revitalized communist ideology on the one hand and with the reaction of the Human Rights Organization Memorial on the other, which criticized the insufficient demolition of soviet symbols. This multifaceted situation is complicated by the reconstruction of destroyed pre-revolutionary monuments of Russian (predominantly religious) history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My point of departure is a conflict over images in the churches in Bergen, Norway in the 1560s, around 30 years after the Reformation. This introduced a brief period of iconoclasm in Denmark–Norway, inspired by Reformed theology. Soon, however, mainstream Lutheranism took over and statues and pictures were reintroduced. The different views on images in the two Protestant confessions – Lutheranism and Calvinism – are, of course, well known, as are also the various theological arguments in the debate between them. More interesting is the practical question of how it was possible to manage without images when addressing a largely illiterate audience. Here, Lutherans seemed to have basically the same attitude as Catholics, although they differed in the exact way the images were used. Both were 'mass religions', aiming at including the whole population and using whatever means necessary for this purpose. By contrast, Calvinism was an intellectual and elite religion, creating tight communities of true believers in accordance with the belief in Predestination. It has therefore been regarded as an important factor in modernization theories, from Weber's explanation of capitalism to later theories of the link between Reformed Protestantism and modern science. Although there is little to indicate that pictures are an obstacle to science, the intellectual and elitist character of Reformed Protestantism may have contributed to the scientific revolution in the early modern period. Generally, the history of iconoclasm illustrates the fact that images are a powerful medium, particularly when most people are illiterate, and that a religion that abstains from this medium is faced with the challenge of finding a replacement for it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Central to this reflection upon the interconnectedness between the destruction of a monument in Norway after the Second World War and iconoclasm will be work by Swiss art historian Dario Gamboni who, in The Destruction of Art (1997), argues that any understanding of modern and contemporary iconoclasm must be contextualized via the redefinition of art and its actual autonomy. In so doing, this article will open a twofold reflection concerning iconoclasm as an act of destruction, while also reflecting as to whether or not the very term 'iconoclasm' is perhaps best understood by what Dutch scholar Mieke Bal (2002) has called a 'travelling concept'. The latter will hopefully allow for a consideration of iconoclasm through interdisciplinary cultural analysis, and, as such, enrich our understanding of the term and its practices in both historical and contemporary perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historical interpretation of Portuguese Overseas Expansion has changed considerably from the late nineteenth century to the present. Ideological appropriations of historical events are commonplace. The propaganda of the regime of Portuguese dictator Antonio de Oliveira Salazar extensively used the topic of Portuguese Overseas Expansion as a founding myth for justifying its own colonialism, even in times when decolonization processes were the common trend. Damnatio memoriae , on the one hand, and apologetics, on the other, were strategies spread from primary school textbooks to university programmes. They were responsible for the exclusion and even persecution of many Portuguese scholars, who had to ask for refuge in other European Universities. It created myths, for example around Henry the Navigator or the Nautical School of Sagres. Key-personalities, such as Magellan, were long defamed as anti-heroes. This article will show how these myths and twisted interpretations are still commonplace today. Even now, many Portuguese feel that, in times of crises, these fictions are used to create a sense of national identity and self-confidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the significance of some recent architecture and urban demolitions in Berlin. As an example of present-day iconoclasm in the heart of Europe, the relevance of these cases lies not only in the destruction of politically-charged artefacts, but also in their replacement with replicas of eighteenth-century architecture, thus materializing a Prussian revival and a nostalgia for the country's royal past. In 2006, Berlin initiated the demolition of the Palace of the Republic (Palast der Republik). The Palast der Republik occupied the site of the original Berlin Palace, or Berliner Schloss , the residence of the Hohenzollern dynasty between 1701 and 1918. The demolition of the Palast has been followed by the construction of a replica of the eighteenth-century Schlos s, but now intended to house the new Humboldt Forum, a museum dedicated to non-Western art. In recent years, both Berlin and neighbouring Potsdam have witnessed several integral reconstructions of historical buildings. This series of architecture demolitions and replicas therefore appears as a calculated and well-orchestrated operation to redefine the presence of the past through built artefacts, deserving to be examined from the broader perspective of iconoclastic precedents in art and architecture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the chryselephantine statue known as the Palaikastro Kouros, which was recovered in the excavations at Palaikastro in eastern Crete in the 1980s. The statue and the sanctuary building in which it had stood had been deliberately destroyed c. 1450 bc. It is probable that the motivation for the destruction was iconoclastic. This situates the fate of the Palaikastro Kouros within a broader context of iconoclasm in the ancient Near East and Mediterranean area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pope Gregory the Great (s. 590–604) wrote two letters to Bishop Serenus of Marseilles, reproaching his acts of iconoclasm that had led to schism in his community. These short documents are considered to contain Gregory's theory of art as a book for the illiterate and have been criticized for destroying the aura of sacred art to all subsequent Western developments. Here, I argue that the pope's fundamental contribution is to offer instead a theory of iconoclasm. Relying on previous ideas about the pedagogical and communicative power of art and its ability to reach a larger audience beyond the elite, Gregory defends the rights of the community of 'gentiles and illiterates' who find in portable painted panels an expression of their identity in the church at Marseilles. Serenus's wish to impose a superior orthodoxy on the pious if incorrect habits of his flock cannot justify his resorting to iconoclasm. The pope's vigorous condemnation protects the vulnerable minority and sets an important precedent against any acts of iconoclasm in the West. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stunde Null – this expression is used to indicate the end of the German Nazi regime in 1945 and the beginning of a new Germany. This historical turning point was marked by the re-naming of the former Germany in both East and West, and Nazi symbols, institutions, values and paraphernalia were taken to the tip. Naming and re-naming were part of this iconoclastic attempt to undo a recent past by turning the memory of it into a negative memory soon to disappear out of sight. However, Vergangenheitsbewältigung is a cumbersome process in which iconoclasm acts both as a singular event and as a moment in an ongoing historical process. The iconoclastic destruction in 1562 of the cathedral in Lyon opens a discussion of the interdependence of event and process in iconoclasm as an intervention in collective memory. Using re-naming to exemplify this cultural dynamic, the motto of the French Revolution, Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité , serves as a brief illustration of how revolutionary iconoclasms were exploited later to redesign French history. To finish, post-colonial India sets the scene for a demonstration of the ambiguities embedded in iconoclastic processes in the short story 'Lawley Road' (1956) by R.K. Narayan, an ironic account of a back-and-forth process of re-naming of streets and places in the aftermath of Indian independence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Iconoclasm mainly concerns the destruction of icons, based on the Commandment of the Bible ' Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image ...' (Exodus 20:4). Iconoclasm can be presented in two different ways. One is that of an 'inside aspect', taking place within a given religious system. The other is an 'outside aspect', through which a religious system destroys the religious symbols of another religion. Dealing mainly with the 'outside aspect', one may find many religious sites which were destroyed or had their functions changed while these were occupied by another religious group. The holy city of Jerusalem, which lived under different religious regimes, can present this phenomenon, as each regime changed the landscape of the city according to its own perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking a cue from Gottfried Boehm's Bildkritik, I consider the iconoclastic ruination by protesters in 2016, of the statue of the first State President of the Republic of South Africa, on the campus of the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein. With reference to other sculptures and image events on this campus, debates are transposed from the more usual South African visual culture studies perspective on iconoclasm, to an image studies perspective. This entails that the importance of the nature and historical agency of image objects themselves over centuries, in the process of iconoclastic events, is considered when analysing the current event. I argue that although the persistently "desiring image" may sometimes invite enthrallment and hopeless violence, there is a strong strand in image theory and history, to support its potential projection of hospitality and communion to open horizons of expectant futurity. The historical awareness of the power of images to critically unfetter cultural imaginations in a country predisposed by a complex colonial history, may aid the reconsideration of colonialism's symbolic exclusions, rather than perpetuate its patterns of symbolic violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nostalgia has long been considered central to the development of early modern English antiquarianism. In the wake of a seminal article by Margaret Aston, historians have readily identified "nostalgic" antiquarianism as a response to the iconoclasm wrought during the Protestant Reformation. Rarely, if ever, have scholars interrogated the nature of this nostalgia for the architectural and aesthetic glories of the medieval world. This article reconsiders the nostalgia of late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century antiquaries with a view to refining our understanding both of antiquarianism and the workings of nostalgia itself. It argues that, although it has long been characterised as an entirely modern phenomenon, nostalgia avant la lettre was an important mode of perceiving the past in early modern England. Inspired by ecclesiastical ruins and shaped by a complex relationship between time and space, nostalgia helped contemporaries to make sense of the divide between past and present, medieval and early modern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper questions the capacity of refugee images to evoke compassion and incite political action. I argue that the Christian image economy perseveres in the Western mediascape and that the religious icon displaces the depicted suffering into a spiritual realm, thus blocking an active engagement with distant events. The argument builds on a close analysis of Fatih Akin's The Cut (2014), a filmic depiction of the 1915 Armenian genocide and the ensuing odyssey of an Armenian man in search of his daughters. In a self-reflexive manner, The Cut illuminates audience responses to suffering as it is displayed in the visual media of cinema, the icon, and photography. I emphasize a photograph's ability to convey the mourning of another exactly through what remains oblique to a general audience. The paper suggests that mourning, rather than compassion, provides an effective model for ethical responses to contemporary crises of mass displacement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article describes the context for the appearance of the Dada movement in Zürich in 1916, presenting the characteristics of the avant-garde Dadaist movement, such as proclaimed antitraditionalism, iconoclasm, collective participation in the creation process, an interest for primitive art, designing the path for the future performative art. Also, we argue that the so-called originality of the movement, proclaimed by its founders, is not completely justified, as long as its members had been influenced by the pre-avant-garde groups from Créteil, Puteaux, Rue du Delta or by Futurism. Nevertheless, the Dada movement became a turning point for the future actionism, through its interest in a synthesis of the arts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This analysis of the despoilation of monumental brasses and tombs in London during Edward vi's reign is based on evidence provided by contemporary inventories of church goods and churchwardens' accounts, supported by fieldwork and discoveries of recycled brasses during conservation. It reveals how the Reformation impacted the fortunes of the London marblers producing brasses, describes how plundered memorials were sold and provides evidence on their fate. Estimates, based on volumes of metal sold, create a potential range of 700–812 brasses lost from possibly forty-three London churches over 1548–53. After c 1550, marblers engraved 2mm thick hammered plate (cast from despoiled latten church goods, such as candlesticks and crucifixes) to sustain production when supplies of looted brasses diminished. The trade in plundered brasses ended after the accession of Edward's Catholic half-sister, Mary, in August 1553. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whilst lamenting the passing of so many inspirational and creative voices, Peter Cook can still hear the echoes of a 30‐year period of iconoclasm that was the antecedent and antithesis of the circumspect introspection of architectural design today. Here he celebrates Alsop's achievements and records some shared traits. The power of Alsop's oeuvre is ever‐present for those who occupy and encounter his buildings, and his persona lingers in the air for those who knew him well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal for the Critique of Science, Imagination & New Anthropology / Časopis za Kritko Znanosti, Domišljijo in Novo Antropologijo is the property of Institute for the Critique of Science and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

El presente escrito busca poner el foco en películas de tintes distópicos en las cuales se puede apreciar la destrucción de monumentos o elementos patrimoniales no solo como parte de un espectáculo visual, sino también como símbolo o refuerzo semántico de la trama. Para ello, ahondaremos en las raíces de conceptos como el de iconoclastia que nos permitirán hacer un recorrido por la Historia del Arte y la Historia Reciente mediante el cual se establecerán las bases de otros más complejos como el de “trauma cultural” o “iconoclash”. Así, de la realidad a la ficción, estableceremos paralelismos y buscaremos los enlaces e identificaciones asentados en el inconsciente colectivo que nos permitan entender el poder de la destrucción del patrimonio en el cine. This paper focuses on dystopian films in which we can watch the destruction of heritage or cultural elements, not only as a part of a visual spectacle, but also as a symbol or taking an important meaning for the plot. According to this view, we will delve into the origin of a few concepts, such as iconoclasm, which will allow us to direct our way across different periods of Art and Recent History to establish more complex concepts like “cultural trauma” or “iconoclash”. Thus, from fact to fiction, we will draw parallels, and find links or images between one and another, which, immersed in the collective unconscious, could be a crucial line of research to understand the power of the destruction of our heritage in films.

Dhanapāla's hymn to the image of Mahāvīra at Sanchore, composed in Apabhramsha around the beginning of the eleventh century, has been recognized to contain the earliest reference in an Indian language to Maḥmūd of Ghazna's raids in northwestern India in 1024, culminating in his destruction of the temple of Shiva at Somnath, in Gujarat. This hymn has been read as referring to another act of iconoclasm—or rather attempted iconoclasm, since it was ultimately unsuccessful—by Maḥmūd of Ghazna. This article shows that the attempted iconoclasm in question is not Maḥmūd's, but rather that of an earlier king. These earlier events, together with the geography of conquest and pilgrimage provided by Dhanapāla, suggest a political subtext for the hymn; namely, a veiled critique of the inability of the Cauḷukya kings of Gujarat to protect the religious landscape, and a veiled praise of Dhanapāla's friend and patron, the Paramāra king Bhōja. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Material Religion studies religion through its material aspects such as food and foodways, clothing, architecture, images, postures, etc. everything that is not discursive. Dealing with body and objects, it breaks with Eurocentric methodologies about religion based on texts only. Little explored in the Brazilian academia, it arouses many doubts, since it is not only a matter of mentioning and describing the usage of objects and body practices in religions, neither means to analyze its symbolisms, but rather, it is a matter of reviewing categories like body, things, fetishism, idolatry, animism, concepts used along history to diminish religiosities in the colonial contexts. This paper aims to clarify what Material Religion is and to show how to give voice to nonwestern epistemologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Life of Nikephoros i, patriarch of Constantinople, is a long and rhetorically elaborate text written by Ignatios the Deacon. This paper reconsiders the interpretation of the education excursus contextualizing the section within a longer textual segment. It shows that N. studied at a monastery on the Asian side of the Bosporos and that Ignatios was not underlining the fact that his curriculum comprised secular and sacred topics, but rather that it included both Jewish Classical tradition and Christian perspectives. I argue for this revised interpretation through close readings that reveal several significant intertexts, principally Themistius's Oration to the Nicomedians. I conclude that the education excursus was designed to portray the background of the future patriarch beyond the topics of his studies, delineating his lineage as a 'Nazarene', i.e. a person following traditional Jewish and Christian customs. More research is required in this field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By revisiting my ethnographic engagement with the Baga of coastal Guinea, West Africa, in this article I analyse, in the first place, the ways in which secrecy and its associated verbal arts (silence, metaphor, gesture) has worked as an 'imagination trigger' in a post-iconoclastic religious landscape in the 1990s and early 2000s, inviting people to create in their minds possible scenarios of pre-iconoclastic pastness and notions of 'double-ream', or dabal, in Baga language; in the second place, and in sharp contrast, I discuss how Baga of today, belonging to a generation historically removed from the traumatic colonial iconoclasm but facing new and dramatic environmental challenges, are relating to historical knowledge in ways that make the arts of secrecy, so prevalent in the field twenty years ago, less relevant, but that nonetheless highlight the plastic, transformative nature of African systems of secrecy. A particular attention is given to the changing relationship between the ethics of secrecy and the presence or absence of slavery memories in the villages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Indigenous pedagogy includes the interplay between physical, visual, spiritual, and intellectual components of an experience to develop knowledge, spirituality, wisdom, and ontology. Ceremony is central to this method. As many Indigenous ceremonies are tied to sites in Indigenous territories, the land thus creates human life (Wildcat, 2016). In this theoretical application, Grandfather Rock (mostos-awasis asiniy) a 400-tonne rock sacred to several Indigenous nations on the Great Plains of Turtle Island (an area of what is now known as c/a/n/a/d/a [Stewart, 2015: xiv]1), is imbued with power beyond that of any state-sponsored monument. Therefore, its 1966 destruction demonstrates an unexamined component of Canadian iconoclasm. While contemporary Canadians wring their hands over the supposed violence towards and loss of colonial monuments, they overlook the historical and ongoing destruction of sacred Indigenous places and spaces. Indigenous monuments such as mostos-awasis asiniy shape Indigenous belief, relationships, and societies. The physical and written treatment of mostos-awasis asiniy over the past several decades, is indicative of its ongoing centrality in Indigenous life and pedagogies, and a settler imagination that denies Indigenous history, presence, and futurity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dean of the College of Architecture and Design at the University of Tennessee, Jason Young looks at the work of one of the most prolific astronauts of drawn space, Michigan architectural academic Perry Kulper. Whether by hand or with the aid of computers, Kulper's drawings represent an odyssey of exploration, graphic verve and unafraid experimentation – bold, joyful and invested in a playful iconoclasm that is immediately endearing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses four recent, prominent cases of protest over art in South Africa. It reveals that the contemporary art world is a critical space used by engaged artists and social actors to battle out key political, racial, gender and class struggles. In analysing these "art battles," the importance of interpretive contests over the ideological status of artworks, the organisational power to stir outrage, and the underlying, often opportunistic motivations of protesters is underscored. In the predominantly anti-racist and pro-social transformation context of the post-apartheid era, protests over art are found to involve complex stand-offs between parties which to varying degrees, and in often contestable ways, position themselves as progressive or radical. As a prominent, highly visible site where ideological ambiguities, ambivalences, reversals and ironies are publicly staged, clashes over art are shown to play an important role in the (re)negotiation of relations of race, privilege, gender and tradition within the country's post/neo-colonial present. Other key findings concern the way in which acts of iconoclasm often engender further, counter-iconoclastic acts, and the way in which protests against highly politicised artworks to an important degree impact on the latter's success or failure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jean-Luc Marion is often interpreted as a thinker of the purely invisible and apophatic, in tension with the rich forms of mediation found in Christian practice. I will challenge these assumptions through a close reading of one of Marion's rare concrete examples, the "icon"— not his philosophical use of the term, but the holy image that initially inspired it. Marion defines the sacred image by its "transparency," "self-effacement," or "kenosis." This seems to indicate that the icon must cancel itself out to make room for God, an iconoclastic attitude with troubling consequences for the believer who prays to the icon and for the rest of the finite world. By rigorously developing Marion's understanding of this word "kenosis," I argue that, counter to initial impressions, this account of the sacred image is deeply faithful to the essential aspects of the Byzantine icon understood as a "window into heaven." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This study’s point of departure is a question: given that the Old Testament God so categorically prohibits all images, why is His Word, i.e., the Bible, so full of visions and visual imagery? In this paper, the issue is discussed in terms of a distinction between the visual, broadly understood, and the pictorial, relating in a narrow sense to graphic artefacts. I argue that mental images are distinct from and, in a sense, superior to pictures. The latter are contrasted with an ‘enhanced’ visual imagery that includes sensory and motor images as well. Holistic units of these ‘enhanced’ visual memories are termed as ‘image-experiences’. The first and most important quality of the ‘enhanced vision’ is its spatial character, which can even predetermine the emotional key of the response. This is particularly the case with ‘limitless’ natural spaces, such as the sea, the skies, or mountainous landscapes. The complex structure of the natural sublime and its affinity with divine imagery is discussed using the concrete example of the modern European aesthetics of mountains in its historical evolution. Then the paper turns to the hierotopic approach, according to which the spatial experience of religious imagery emerges from organized ensembles of sacred objects and symbolic pointers, conceptualised as spatial icons. Another important quality of the enhanced visual is in its organic link with movement and action. Image-experiences are lived through rather than passively watched. Calvinist visual theology provides a remarkable example of an iconoclast ideology, which explicitly supports the ‘enhanced visual’ and shows a way to develop it into a form of understanding and transforming the world. The motional/actional aspects of the ‘enhanced’ visual are further discussed in terms of a hierarchical model of motion control proposed by Nikolai Bernstein in which two kinds of spaces are defined: first, space as a geometric medium of locomotion defined by delimiting surfaces and dynamic constraints; secondly, spaces of purposeful tool-mediated activity as collections of meaningful objects. Our human talent for identifying things by unclear or incomplete features is instrumental to our ability to recognize objects in drawings and photographs. The Bernsteinian system helps to explain why the perception of 2D images is dominated by object-oriented parsing. Hence, there is a danger that the response to pictures be reduced to subject-object interaction in which many important holistic qualities of the enhanced visual would be lost. Hierotopic creativity – the construction of sacred spaces – can be seen as a strategy to mitigate these dangers by integrating image-pictures into higher-level spatial constructs of enhanced visuality.

This article takes as its point of departure the recent wave of contestations relating to colonial-era monuments in Europe. While the toppling of monuments has long been a part of political regime change, recent attacks on monuments need to be understood instead, not as celebrations of a change that has already occurred, but as attempts to affect ‘mnemonic regime change’ as part of a larger struggle for racial equality and social justice. Monuments are materialisations of larger narratives that operate within a broader culture of memory; at the same time, they have a particular role to play in mnemonic contestations since they offer a physical platform for public performances of adherence to, or dissent from, dominant understandings of collective identity and memory. Using insights from the field of cultural memory studies, this article illustrates these dynamics with detailed reference to the controversy around the Edward Colston statue in Bristol. It argues that its dramatic toppling in June 2020 was part of a much longer and slower two-track process whereby the narrative underpinning Colston was undermined and an alternative narrative of Bristol’s complicity in the slave trade was unforgotten. It concludes by reflecting on the importance but also the limits of memory activism focussed on statues.

Vasco da Gama’s arrival in Malabar on 21 May 1498, would hasten an epoch of social and cultural transformation in Malabar’s history. This article examines one development of this transformative period. Namely, it seeks to understand how the arrival of a people who came in search of “Christians and spices” would result in lasting changes to the form and the style of Christian architecture in Malabar, in present-day Kerala (southwest India). It highlights the efforts of the Estado da Índia (Portuguese State of India) to reconcile concomitant political, religious, and economic ambitions in the region by broadly sketching interventions to the practice of Christianity and the architectural style of churches in sixteenth-century Malabar. The article further proposes the reading of Portuguese-style façades in churches that, to the Portuguese, recalled Hindu temples or “pagods” as an interventional program to hide or cloak the political, religious, and historical portent of the traditional Malabar church.