‘How can we imagine forms of theory and practice that break the deadlock created by the war of images and counter-images, of terror and counter-terror?’ asks Sven Lütticken poignantly in the notes accompanying his exhibition, ‘The Art of Iconoclasm’. The answer, the exhibition suggested, might lie in iterations of art’s investigation of its own status as image. Lütticken notes the role of the de-sacralisation of religious idols in facilitating their transformation into art objects, and the iconoclastic aspects of modern art’s shift away from representation—effected, in certain cases, with a dogmatism bordering on the religious—as demonstrative of art’s potential to contribute to considerations of contemporary religion and visual culture alike. For Lütticken, this is less an academic conceit than a social one as we watch the so-called return of fundamentalism play out in the form of mediatised ‘image wars’, from uploaded terrorist broadsides to legislative confrontations between secular and faith-based ideologies.
‘The Art of Iconoclasm’ was conceived as part of The Return of Religion and Other Myths, an ongoing research project at Utrecht’s BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, which also takes in academic seminars, public programs and a critical reader. BAK’s intellectual dynamism aside, Utrecht seemed the perfect setting to rethink iconoclasm, the city’s picturesque medieval streets forever blighted by a sprawling, incongruous 1970s shopping mall that serves as a utilitarian monument to commodity fetishism. It should be said that Lütticken, at least according to standard divisions of art-world labour, is not a curator but a critic, one of Europe’s most incisive and original. But if at times ‘The Art of Iconoclasm’ did indeed take on a thesis-like character, this did not detract from its eminently propositional character, making