Censorship and Iconoclasm: Unsettling Monuments

Author(s): John Peffer

Source: RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics , Autumn, 2005, No. 48,
Permanent/Impermanent (Autumn, 2005), pp. 45-60
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Peabody Museum of
Archaeology and Ethnology

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20167676

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 Censorship and iconoclasm?unsettling monuments

JOHN PEFFER

What is the relationship of iconoclasm to by Hendrik Pierneef, a striptease at the Voortrekker

censorship?1 According to David Freedberg, iconoclasts Monument in Loslyf#1, andTracey Rose's performance
of all varieties enact a form of censorship: a blotting out at a police monument in Oudtshoorn. Through these
of obscene, or fleshy, or morally repugnant scenes.2 For examples, I suggest the general relevance of iconoclasm
Freedberg such obi iterative acts against art reveal the to counter-memory, in opposition to officially and
hidden power of images to be precisely that which stirs unofficially sanitized versions of history. And through
our passions. Michael Taussig has argued further that them we can witness attempts to come to terms with the
defacement in general tends simultaneously to unmask problems of political and artistic representation,
and to enhance the power of images.3 Looking entangled as they have been, in the contradictory terms
specifically at the European avant-gardes, Dario of the ideology of apartheid. Each of my examples is an
Gamboni has written that an iconoclastic attitude act that unsettled older images formerly held in high
toward earlier art, and to bourgeois culture in general, regard. They belong to a specific class of iconoclastic
can be considered a convention for modernist artists.4 In acts that Gamboni would call "metaphorical," in that
South Africa at the end of apartheid,5 a number of artists they did not make permanent material changes to their
followed their European peers and turned to the objects, only to the reproduced image. They performed
modernist tradition of image breaking as a way to a type of "d?tournement," to borrow from the
engage critically with repressive images from their Situationists. That is, through acts of witty erasure or
recent past. They used the iconoclastic gesture to attack intrusive addition they displaced the potency of a
censorship. Their actions inverted the expected hierarchy symbolism that had bolstered the paternalistic ideology
of iconoclasm as censorship, revealing instead that of whites-only rule.6 Paradoxically, too, and most
censorship itself is a form of iconoclasm. crucially, each of these acts of violence against images
This essay looks at several instances of temporary or set iconoclasm to work against concrete manifestations
symbolic defacement of public monuments in South of censure that had propped up the ideology of
Africa: Wayne Barker's overpainting of landscape scenes apartheid. This was possible because the original
images, the monuments themselves, were founded on
erasure and repression.
1. An earlier version of this essay was first given as a talk at the
College Art Association annual meeting in 2003. My gratitude to 6. For the Situationists' own extended definitions of d?tournement
Finbarr Barry Flood and Z. S. Strother for encouraging me to think see Guy Debord and Gil J. Wolman, "Methods of D?tournement," and
through problems of iconoclasm in the South African material. Thanks n.a., "D?tournement as Negation and Prelude" in Situationist
also to Z. S. Strother, Dana Leibsohn, Hans Belting, participants in the International Anthology, ed. and trans. Ken Knabb (Berkeley: Bureau of
Graduate Colloquium in Art History at Northwestern University, to Public Secrets, 1981), pp. 8-14 and 55-56. See also Asger J?rn,
H?ctor Reyes, Lyle Massey, and Carrie Lambert, and to Francesco "Detourned Painting" in On the Passage of a Few People Through a
Pellizzi, Nuit Banai, and an anonymous reader at RES for their Rather Brief Moment in Time: The Situationist International
generous comments. 1957-1972, ed. E. Sussman (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1989), pp.
2. Freedberg sees these destructive acts as analogous to the kind 140-142. The most succinct and often cited formulation of the idea of
of writing about art that de-sexes the image through an overly analytic, d?tournement was originally printed in the journal Internationale
formalist approach to the object. David Freedberg, The Power of Situationniste 91 (June 1958), and is reproduced in Knabb, pp. 45-46.
Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: It reads, "D?tournement: Short for d?tournement of preexisting
University of Chicago Press, 1989). aesthetic elements. The integration of present or past artistic
3. Michael Taussig, Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of production into a superior construction of a milieu. In this sense there
the Negative (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). can be no Situationist painting or music, but only a Situationist use of
4. For an exhaustive exploration of the question of modernism as these means. In a more primitive sense, d?tournement within the old
destruction, see Dario Gamboni, The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm cultural spheres is a method of propaganda, a method which testifies
and Vandalism Since the French Revolution (London: Reaktion Books, to the wearing out and loss of importance of those spheres." This
1997). See also the omnivorous compendium of images and their definition is close to the intentions of the South African artists, though I
destruction: Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, Iconoclash: Beyond the do not know whether they were aware of each other. Such "influence"
Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art (Cambridge: The MIT Press, is, in any case, not the concern of this essay, which seeks rather to
2002). point to a common mechanism between acts of censorship and acts of
5. Here I refer broadly to the years just preceding and just after iconoclasm, and to specific artistic strategies meant to harness this
the first democratic elections in 1994. mechanism.

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 46 RES 48 AUTUMN 2005

Wayne Barker's Pierneefs looking images, claims Barker, but they are also quite
heavy. They are images of pain and torture, murder,
I destroyed Aptes River in a performance in a black
emasculation, and a hard labor that bloodies the hand,
working-class bar for an SABC television show on the artist
Braam Kruger, who was living in town. The bar was called pisses red, lobotomizes. In Barker's grim view, this
Avanganye, "let's be friends." I destroyed the work while beautiful South African landscape defecates diamonds
being filmed and interviewed, saying "this is the violence, and gold, and buries its shattered men in their place.
this is the workers. . . ."7 In order to understand Barker's attack on this
painting, we need to also consider Pierneef's original
In order to better understand the conflict over images
monumental picture that preceded it, and which seems
in South Africa at the time of that country's first
so innocent to our eyes. Apies River is one of thirty-two
democratic elections in 1994, it is useful to look to a
panels commissioned by the South African government
slightly earlier time, before the liberal political
in 1929 for the Johannesburg railway station. Other
transformation. By 1989 hundreds of political activists
panels include similarly majestic rural scenes of the
had been murdered, thousands had died in inhumane
Drakensberg mountains and the Karoo, as well as
conditions in the mines, the last scraps of arable land
picturesque depictions of quaint towns like Hermanus
were being appropriated from the native population,
and Graaf-Reinet. Pierneef's landscapes are often
and tens of thousands were banned or detained, many
dominated by an expanse of sky with a heroic stack of
of them children, many of them without trial. By the late
clouds, or a mountain silhouette taking up two-thirds of
1980s, too, the resistance movement had made the
the frame. Pierneef rarely painted people into these
black townships ungovernable, and was bombing "soft
pictures. Characteristic too was his stark, flat, and almost
targets" in the cities. Mass protests in the form of
monochromatic use of color, his prismatic atmospheric
funerals had become a regular feature of South African
effects, and his imposition of "the logic of science on his
life. And Apies River was destroyed.
perception of the logic of nature."8 Through his travels
That is how Wayne Barker described the creation of
abroad in 1925-1926, he became aware of roughly
his own painting, made in a performance before a live
contemporary developments in art in Europe, and post
audience in downtown Johannesburg in 1989. Barker
cubist forms of geometric abstraction and decorative
arrived at the bar, in what was then and is still a rough
ideas from Art Nouveau made their way into his designs
part of town, with a very large, and exacting, copy in oil
for landscape painting.9
of an idyllic scene by South Africa's best-known
As one of the earliest South African artists to integrate
landscape painter, Jacob Hendrik Pierneef, titled Apies
European modernist trends in his work, Pierneef has
(monkeys) River (figs. 1 and 2). As he would do in
been called "the foremost interpreter of the South
subsequent years with other well-known works by
African landscape." In her discussion of the
Pierneef, Barker made his copy by projecting the image
Johannesburg Station Panels, Ri?a de Villiers claimed:
onto canvas and then adding color in paint-by-number
fashion. Once finished, the Pierneef was then erased, Pierneef had so intensely made the South African landscape
crossed out, or painted over with images of consumer his own, had interpreted it in such a way, that South
Africans learnt to see their country through his eyes. Just as
goods, cartoons after the style of Jean-Michel Basquiat
certain parts of Provence are regarded as Cezanne's
or Philip Guston, targets in the colors of the national
landscape, and the environs of Aries carry van Gogh's stamp,
flag, and splashes of blood-red enamel paint. In Barker's
so we identify Pierneef with the Transvaal Bushveld.10
Apies River the landscape was first roughly smudged
out, then various organs and disembodied heads drawn
over its surface. The cartoons look stressed out, they 8. E. Berman, Art and Artists of South Africa (Cape Town: A. A.
sweat and cry under halos of exclamation marks. A large Balkema, 1983), p. 330.
saw with two heads sewn together at the mouth 9. Pierneef's aesthetic ideas were influenced by the later
Impressionists, by the prismatic art of Feininger and Delaunay, and the
threatens the whole scene from above, and a large
decorative art theory of Willem Van Konijnenburg. See Berman, note
diamond pops out of a chute and rises into the middle 8, p. 329; and Rina de Villiers, J. H. Pierneef: Pretorian, Transvaaler,
of the picture. As in Basquiat's art, these are very goofy South African (Pretoria Art Museum, 1986), p. 11. For an overview of
the artist, see n.a., J. H. Pierneef: His Life and His Work (Cape Town:
7. Wayne Barker, interview with the author, July 1, 2002. Unless Perskor, 1990). Of particular relevance is N. M. Coetzee, Pierneef,
otherwise noted, all subsequent quotations are from this interview. For Land and Landscape: The Johannesburg Station Panels in Context
further background on the artist see Charl Blignaut, Wayne Barker: (Johannesburg: Johannesburg Art Gallery, 1992).
Artist's Monograph (Johannesburg: Chalkham Hill Press, 2000). 10. de Villiers, note 9, p. 12.

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 Peffer: Censorship and iconoclasm 47

Figure 1. J. H. Pierneef, Apies River, Pretoria. Oil on canvas on panel, 140 x 126.5
cm, 1932. Collection ofTransnet Heritage Foundation.

Indeed, as one of South Africa's first international And he declared, "You must travel with your own
artists, Pierneef was preoccupied with evoking the people on the ox wagon,"12 at a time, after the Anglo
national spirit of the Afrikaner in his art. His benevolent Boer War and before the establishment of the apartheid
seeming cumulus masses, dramatic rock formations, ideology, when like-minded intellectuals and artists
diminutive placement of architecture, and pyramidal were still endeavoring to create a sense of cultural unity
construction of space declare, not so subtly, the and a political voting bloc, in opposition to British rule
presence of the divine in the South African countryside. and against competition with African wage laborers for
The artist's vision was not simply the sight of God in His
creation. For Pierneef it was imperative, too, to promote
the idea of manifest destiny. He was "an earnest 12. Ibid. A reference to the mythology of the Great Trek, the mass
crusader for the cause of Afrikaner art and culture."11 emigration of Dutch-speaking farmers from the Cape province in their
ox-drawn covered wagons in order to escape from British rule after
1835. The Great Trek is the pivotal national narrative for the Afrikaner
people, an assertion of their independent spirit and their rights to the
11. Berman, see note 8, p. 328. settled land.

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48 RES 48 AUTUMN 2005

Figure 2. Wayne Barker, Apies River. Oil and enamel on canvas, 1989, approximately
140 x 130 cm. Photo: Wayne Barker, courtesy of the artist.

jobs in the cities.13 This defensive form of cultural unity, synonymous with religious righteousness.14 In the words
often referred to as a laager mentality, was one rooted in of Piet J. Meyer, a prominent leader in the nationalist
a repressive Calvinist theology and a nationalist ideal movement, head of the Broederbond secret society, and

13. Begun in the late nineteenth century, the culmination of this came to power in the elections of 1948. Broederbond members
effort at creating a national mythology for the Afrikaner volk was the included most South African Prime Ministers, Afrikaans university and
establishment of a secret society, the Broederbond; the standardization corporation chairmen, and heads of the South African Broadcasting
of Afrikaans grammar and spelling; the institution of the Great Trek and Corporation and the parastatal weapons contractor ARMSCOR. For a
the Day of the Vow as legitimizing narratives of the Afrikaner's divine detailed account of this history and analysis of the contradictions
right to settle the "empty" land of the South African interior and to inherent to the myth of Afrikaner purity, see Leonard Thompson, The
bring God and civilization to the native people; and the development Political Mythology of Apartheid (New Haven: Yale, 1985).
of the idea of "separate development" and separate amenities for the 14. For the nineteenth-century Voortrekkers the laager was a tight
different "races" into a political ideology after the Afrikaner Nationalists circle of ox wagons lashed together, a way of hemming themselves in

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 Peffer: Censorship and iconoclasm 49

chairman of SABC, "The Afrikaner accepts his national landscape never actually was, and they performed a
task as a divine task, in which his individual life-task, symbolic rubbing-out of the history of the land.
and his personal service to God has been absorbed in a For Asraf Jamal, what is at stake in Wayne Barker's
wider, organic context."15 attack on Pierneef's paintings is a double indictment,
In Pierneef's painting the South African landscape is "against the classical landscape art of Pierneef, [and]
cast as God's land, and by extension the exclusive against the lies upon which power?aesthetic and
province of His Chosen People, the Afrikaner volk. His imperial?subsists."20 Barker's iconoclasm brought to the
view of Apies River, Pretoria, is one purged of any surface that which the Johannesburg Station Panels
evidence of the Ndebele and other African people who repressed: all the horrors censored behind a screen of
were defeated by Boer commandoes and scattered as white purity, the empty land presided over by God, and
labor onto white farms near Pretoria after 1883.16 Also the political ideology of apartheid that was their bolster.
virtually erased from the picturesque landscape of It also recast the station panels, in their simplicity and in
rolling hills and bubbling stream is any hint of the city their placement, as a kind of South African popular art,
of Pretoria itself, especially the Union Buildings (here monumentally ensconced in their niches in the large
diminutive and hardly recognizable in the background), central hall of the train station. Everyone coming and
which would have been an irksome reminder of British going to work would have seen them, distractedly, as
rule.17 Pierneef's landscapes represent a form of idyll part of their everyday lives.21
more extreme even than the Utopian fantasies of some of Barker, like Pierneef, grew up in Pretoria and his
his Afrikaner Nationalist colleagues. He grew up in upbringing was also in a military family?his father was
Pretoria at the turn of the century, when it was still a a pilot?and staunchly Afrikaner Nationalist. But he
small town. In his pictures of the place, it seems, he identified with a different generation of Afrikaner youth,
wished it would have stayed that way. Apies River many of whom wanted nothing to do with apartheid and
blocked from view the urban industrial congestion, and chose to live in the inner city, where the streets were
the presence of gold and diamond mines. His view of dangerous and the art scene, and the party scene, was
the country was void of the Afrikaner's fears of a swart more multiracial than in the suburbs. Most white people
gevaar, of the impending danger of blacks swamping the fled the inner city of Johannesburg after the Pass Laws,
cities?an idea which was used to bring the Nationalists designed to keep Africans out of the cities, were
to political power in 1948.18 For Pierneef the landscape abolished in 1986. But a small number of intrepid artists
was frozen in a state of empty apartness, perpetually of all races moved into downtown, which became a de
ready for white settlement, and timelessly open for the facto "grey" area?neither purely "black" nor "white"
prospect of white prosperity.19 His Johannesburg Station according to apartheid urban areas restrictions. At the
Panels were a Utopian fantasy of what the South African time he painted over the Pierneefs, Barker was living in
the center of town, squatting in a gallery he had
founded, wishfully named "Famous International
Gallery." As if still angered by the memory in 2002,
against attacks by those native people whose land they were Barker described his relationship to Pierneef's paintings:
encroaching upon.
15. Cited in Thompson, see note 13, p. 43. My initial feeling was instinct: there were these paintings,
16. For a history of the Ndzundza Ndebele and their mural art see and they represented [President] Raul Kruger, the
Elizabeth Schneider, "Paint, Pride, and Politics: Aesthetic and Meaning [Voortrekker] Monument, the [train] stations, the air force?
in Transvaal Ndebele Wall Art," Ph.D. thesis, University of the it was like one melting pot of like this f***ing apartheid that
Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 1986. I was against. There was a state of emergency in
17. This idealized absence in Pierneef's other Pretoria landscapes Johannesburg. There was chaos.
is noted by deVilliers, see note 9, p. 10.
... I was very interested in pop art. For me they were
18. See Shula Marks and Stanley Trapido (ed.), The Politics of
the first pop images, they were the [train] station panels,
Race, Class, and Nationalism in Twentieth-Century South Africa
(London: Longman, 1987). originally. So the third class citizen comes to work for the
19. For a valuable discussion of the ideology of landscape art white guy. . . . And then he gets these magnificent
which brings W. J. T. Mitchell's Landscape and Power and J. M.
Coetzee's White Writing to bear on recent South African art, see Ashraf 20. Jamal, see note 19, p. 162.
Jamal, "Zero Panoramas, Ruins in Reverse, Monumental Vacancies: 21. Barker saw them there when he was a child. In 1980 the
Contemporary Perceptions of Landscape in South African Art," in panels were eventually moved to a museum built for them near the
Contemporary South African Art: The Gencor Collection, ed. K. Geers train station, and to the Johannesburg Art Gallery. Today they are in the
(Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball Publishers, 1997). collection of the Transnet Heritage Foundation.

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 50 RES 48 AUTUMN 2005

landscapes that are overwhelming. And he's the worker. Barker meant to lower the Pierneefs from their place
That can really f*** with your mind.22 up high in the train station, from their exalted place as
At the time he claimed to take offense at these premier examples of South African art, and from their
"cleansed landscapes, uninhabited by people, least of semi-divine association with manifest destiny. His earlier
all blacks."23 Asraf Jamal comments: "The land was art, a series titled "Images on metal," had used the
never an Eden, never a site for pure contemplation, "pop" packaging and the detritus of the inner city?Oros
never a sphere which affirmed the perceiver's being in a men, snuff tobacco boxes, and lithographs of popular
manner which could be regarded as 'pure.' Rather, the icons like Voortrekker and President Paul Kruger?to
South African landscape has always invoked anxiety and bring the viewer down to the level of the street, to hold
fear, has always been subject to the 'dreamwork' born of a mirror to South African life at street level.28 By taking
cultural and material domination ... a boundless zone down the Pierneefs, he meant to reveal that they were
condemned to exploitation."24 already "pop" images themselves, that they were already
Barker recalls that his Pierneef series "dealt with pedestrian, and doubly insidious because ofthat. In his
breaking down the icons of the apartheid era."25 In own words he speaks like one of those mad iconoclasts
retrospect, he chose Pierneef because enumerated in David Freedberg's writings on art,
iconoclasm, and reception. He shares, with those
His monumental landscapes represented the newfound discussed by Freedberg, a desire to attack persons in
land of the Afrikaner nation, which they believed was given
authority (and the nature of authority) by attacking the
to them by God in a covenant against the black people,
symbols of authority and the images of those in power.29
which were heathen and barbarian in their view. They saw
themselves not only as superior but as a "chosen people" in
He wanted to "break down the icons" of apartheid. But
a "promised land." The irony of Pierneef paintings is that he also meant to "re-create" them by "pulling that vision
they are "landscapes" of the land taken from the native apart" and "bringing in other possibilities." Imagine the
black people. The style of these monumental portrayals of Pierneef landscapes as an accordion folder, stretched to
the land enshrined a white supremacist-colonial view, which its limits, with bomb casings, targets, snuff wrappers, an
was used to consolidate the Afrikaner national identity. undertaker's shovel, and bleeding hearts all stuffed inside.
/ re-created the paintings in 1989 as almost perfect In his discussion of nudity in art, Freedberg
pastiches of the originals commissioned by the notes that in the history of Christian censorship a
government for exhibition at the main railway station in central motivation has been to keep the spiritual
Johannesburg. . . . / then created an intervention on the
uncontaminated by the "fleshy," by the material sensual
surface of these pastiches using found objects that
world. The divine and the everyday need to be kept
deconstructed these images and questioned the
appropriation of land, exploitation of labor and raised
clearly separate.30 Where Pierneef's art enacted a similar
notions of culture in transit.26 kind of censorship, separating the image of the "divine
land" from the people living within it, Barker's
And, back in 1989, he stated succinctly: overpainting slapped them back together roughly. He
As I understand it, Pierneef was a kind of propagandist for put manifest destiny back into bed with the mine dumps
the white view of South Africa. He belonged to a ruling and the mass graves. It is important that Barker's
class and invented South Africa for that class. / try in my Pierneefs do not remove the hated symbols of the old
work to pull that vision apart by bringing in other order. These are kept around, roughed up a bit, and cast
possibilities.27 in a new mold. Or perhaps the faults in the mold are
what are revealed through overpainting, and the faulty
22. The artist's notes rephrase this idea: "They were in a sense the mold is what we are left with. Here destruction is in the
first South African 'pop images' created for commuters on their way to service of re-creation, and in this case of a reinclusion,
and from work. At this time the majority of the population (being
black) could only travel 3rd class and could not sit or stand in the
by means of scratch i ng-over, what is censored out
'whites only' areas." iconographically, aesthetically, and ideologically from
23. Anthea Bristowe, "Barker's energy now focused," Business Day pictures of the South African countryside.
(September 28, 1992).
24. Jamal, see note 19, pp. 158-159.
25. Barker, unpublished notes on his work, artist's scrapbook, n.d.
Emphasis mine. 28. Ivor Powell, "Scraping up Art from the Hidden Nooks of
26. Ibid. Jo'burg," Weekly Mail (June 9-14, 1989), p. 23.
27. Quoted in Ivor Powell, "Catching SA Art with Its Rants Down," 29. Freedberg, see note 2, p. 390 et passim.
Daily Mail i]u\y 16, 1990). Emphasis mine. 30. Freedberg, see note 2, p. 368 et passim.

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 Peffer: Censorship and iconoclasm 51

Figure 3. Rage one of Picturesque Pretoria, a brochure published in 1965 by the

Pretoria Publicity Association. Collection of the author.

Barker's iconoclasm enacted a return of repressed commemorating "Day of the Vow," a mythic event in
things. Pierneef's paintings, though calm on the surface, 1838 when the Voortrekkers, greatly outnumbered by
are anxious and Barker's symbolic destruction of them their enemy in Zululand, were said to have made a
displaced all the censored anxiety onto their surface. covenant with God in exchange for the defeat of the
Zulu impis at the Battle of Blood River. One official
view of the monument that neatly described the
Going commando relationship of ideology, architecture, and performance
The Voortrekker Monument, a national shrine commemorating from an Afrikaner Nationalist perspective can be seen in
the Great Trek, was dedicated in 1949. It is a visible tribute the brochure, Picturesque Pretoria, published by the
to a group of people who played a mayor [sic] part in the Pretoria Publicity Association in 1965 (fig. 3).
establishment of Western civilization in South Africa. A very different view of the same monument can be
Famous for its marble friezes and museum, its piece de seen in a striptease pictorial from the premier issue of
resistance is the crypt in the basement hall of the the first Afrikaans-language pornography magazine,
monument, where, precisely at noon on 16 December each
Loslyf, published the year after South Africa's historic
year, a beam of sunlight shining through an opening in the
general election in 1994 (fig. 4). This was a period when
dome, illuminates the words "Ons vir jou Suid-Afrika" (We
the question of what to do with the old regime's
for thee South Africa) chiseled in gold letters on a
sarcophagus in the centre of the floor. monuments was the subject of heated public debate.
The text reads (in translation):
In 1949, a year after the Nationalist Party had been Loslyf (loose body/morals) indigenous flower of the month
voted into power, a grand ceremony announced the Dina.
dedication of the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria. The Dina, Loslyf's very first indigenous flower, is a Boer gal
monument was designed as a focal point for the in her bones and marrow. "My great-great granddaddy,
celebration of Afrikaner nationalism, in the context of Hendrik Potgeiter, was my hero since I was very small. He

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52 RES 48 AUTUMN 2005

Figure 4. "Inheemse blom van die maand: Dina," Loslyf 81 (June 1995), pp. 124-125. Original photos by "Antonelli."
Courtesy of Loslyf.

was the sort of man who could inspire people to walk According to the current editor of Loslyf (\n 2003), the
barefoot over the Drakensburg mountains, so that our Boer original intention of its founder, J. T. Publishers, a South
folk can live in freedom and peace in the Transvaal. If only African subsidiary of Hustler magazine, was to sell an
today we could have a leader of his calibre," she sighs.
"entertainment" magazine to a local niche market of
The 24-year-old nurse from Pretoria (lit.) doesn't change
Afrikaner readers.33 But the editor of the magazine
her nappies (i.e., is very direct/coarse) when she speaks
about her love of Afrikaans language and culture. "All those
people who want to chastise the Afrikaner folk and want to
trample and to profane their monument, are playing with 32. Annie Coombes, "Translating the Rast: Apartheid Monuments
in Post-Apartheid South Africa" in History After Apartheid: Visual
fire. They must know: when you grab my symbols, you
Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa (Durham:
grab me."31
Duke, 2003). Versions of this essay also appear in Coombes and Brah
In her writing on the changing status of South African (eds.), Hybridity and Its Discontents (London: Routledge, 2000); and
D. Taffin (ed.), Du Mus?e Colonial Au Mus?e Des Cultures Du Monde
monuments, Annie Coombes has argued that the Loslyf
(Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 2000). I am sympathetic toward
spread of "Dina at the Monument" is subversive.32 Coombes's larger project, which goes beyond the scope of the present
essay. Though our concerns are largely parallel, there is one major
difference: for Coombes it is the trajectory of the official discourse on
31. My gratitude to Anton Kannenmayer, who worked on this issue culture that is the primary object. My project is interested in
of Loslyf, for assistance in translating the idiomatic Afrikaans in the uncovering the mechanisms of subversion through art.
text. Additional suggestions were made by Tracey Rose and Abrie 33. This is the less subversive direction the magazine has in fact
Fourie. taken in recent years, according to Mark Green, current editor of

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 Peffer: Censorship and iconoclasm 53

during its first year of publication was Ryk Hattingh, a daims" and to "the imperative for the Afrikaner
dissident member of the Afrikaans literary set. Hattingh nationalists to appropriate Africa to itself."37 The Dina
was known for his work as sub-editor at the left-leaning pictorial openly miscegenated the divine and the
Afrikaans newspaper Vry Weekblad, and for the scathing profane, as well as these native and European aspects of
critique of the South African military in his 1988 play the Voortrekker Monument. For instance, the photo
Singjy Van Bomme (Sing about bombs).34 Under shoot was set strategically, in the landscape of
Hattingh's direction the first issues of this pornography indigenous wildflowers at the base of the monument?
magazine had a distinctively avant-garde aspect, thus situating Dina "in nature."38 Also, unlike the girl in
including articles with famous writers, irreverent and Voortrekker drag shown entering the scene from the
obscene cartoons by Joe Dog and Konradski of bottom left in the 1965 brochure, Dina stands barefoot
Bittercommix, and copy shot through with double in the veld. In the brochure there are mock versions of
meanings. Through his intervention, according to traditional Zulu beehive homes that are, like Dina,
Hattingh, "Afrikaners have always been portrayed as similarly positioned in the bushes below the monument.39
khaki-clad repressed people and I wanted to show them Here the Zulu are intended to be seen as a "natural"
as normal, sexual, f***ing human beings."35 "Dina at the part of the landscape. Both Dina and the Zulu
Monument" did more than that. It re-inserted what the symbolically await exploitation by the (white, masculine)
monument itself, as a quasi-divine symbol of Afrikaner viewer. But Dina only feigns innocence, as in the
nationalism, had pulled out of the picture. The Loslyf days of crossing the mountains with her great-great
pictorial was iconoclastic, in the sense that it slyly granddaddy and the Voortrekkers, for she is also dressed
assaulted the image of the monument by profaning it, (temporarily) in a commando's belt and vest. She wears
while at the same time claiming to be on the side of leopard-print shorts, suggestive of a randy sexuality but
its founders. also of camouflage. She is white, a bit butch, and a
Coombes identifies what she terms the "hybrid "native girl" ripe for the taking at the same time.
nature" of the iconographie schema of the Voortrekker The Afrikaner national myth brought civilization to
Monument, by pointing out that other indigenous Africa by taming nature, subordinating women, and
African monumental architectures, in Egypt and at Great subduing the local inhabitants, which all amounted to
Zimbabwe, were important models for Gerard Moerdijk, the same thing: colonization as a sexualized form of
the architect of the Voortrekker.36 These models, she violence. For Coombes. "The conceit of Dina as an
argues, point to the "anxiety of the Afrikaner's originary 'indigenous flower' plays with the implicitly sexual
content of such an ideology and the violence that
underscores it."40 While the original form of the
Loslyf, in an interview with the author, January 10, 2003. Green also
monument censored the violence from the myth of the
explained that this first issue of Loslyf sold out quickly, ultimately
Afrikaner nation, "Dina at the Monument" meant to
topping 80,000 in sales. Coombes, see note 32, p. 49, claims she is
reveal and to redirect that violence.
not aware whether or not this particular issue of the magazine had
much impact (though this is not critical to her argument). I can say There are further reasons for interpreting the Loslyf
from experience in the South African art scene, and from the editor's spread as an instance of anti-censorial provocation. For
numbers, that Dina's iconoclastic spread in particular had enormous
instance, the "L" in "indigenous blom (flower)"?it is a
impact. My recollection, having lived in Johannesburg at that time,
was that everyone spoke of the magazine but few could get a copy? poppie, in Afrikaans slang, a little doll (a "sweet little
because it was sold out. In recent years, according to Green, sales girl"). If you pluck the cartoon poppy in the picture, the
have evened out around 20,000 copies sold per issue. Green attributes blom becomes a bom, the flower becomes a bomb. Her
this to having lost some of the novelty factor in the market to name also has a double meaning: Dina is dynamite.
numerous other new magazines. Ryk Hattingh, the founding editor, left
Hattingh's editorial introduction on page 2 even predicts
the magazine after the first few issues.
34. See Bafana Khumalo, "Tales from the Heartland," Weekly Mail Dina's name with its title LOSBARS! (explode!/bust
(September 20, 1996).
35. Ibid. 37. Coombes, see note 325 p. 38.
36. Here Coombes adapts Homi Bhabha's formulation of the term 38. Ibid., pp. 40-43, Coombes notes the complex relation of the
"hybridity." See Homi Bhabha, "Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Afrikaner to the natural landscape as part of the ideology of
Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817," in stewardship of the African land. See also my comments on the
The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994). For Bhabha mongrel foundations of the myth of the Great Trek in "Chimera,
(p. 114), "Hybridity reverses the formal process of disavowal so that History's Monster," World Wide Video Festival Catalogue (2003).
the violent dislocation of the act of colonization becomes the 39. These are still standing today.
conditionality of colonial discourse." 40. Ibid., p. 42.

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 54 RES 48 AUTUMN 2005

joe theron
stigter en uitgewer

ryk hattingh
rodakteur
tosbarsf
groepsredakteurs
charl pretorius
jeff zerbst

subredakteurs
lorraine louw In jou hande hou jy die heel eerste kraakvars uit
Stephen haw gawe van Loslyt die eerste Afrikaanse sekstydskrif
kunsredakteur wat nie doekies omdraai nie; die eerste tydskrif in die
mel miller geskiedenis waar jy na hartelus in Afrikaans na doos kan
kyk, in Afrikaans kan kwyl en sommer in Afrikaans kan
assistent-kunsredakteurs lekkerkry ook.
matthew kearney Loslyf \s (n tydskrif vir Afrikaanssprekende grootmense wat hulself

Figure 5. Title for the editor's page, Loslyf #1 (June 1995), p. 5. Courtesy of Loslyf.

loose!)?whose exclamation point has a sparking fuse down the monument metaphorically; it also meant to
running out of its top, like a stick of dynamite (fig. 5). make the Afrikaner appear less "repressed," and to give
And so, Dina says, in effect, "Don't mess around with the Boere a new self-image for a new South Africa. She
the monument or you are messing (around) with me," in is the little bombshell, the Dinamite nurse who comes to
the context of a girlie magazine where the reader is heal the old wounds of apartheid by exploding them
supposedly desirous of messing around with the models. with her mongrelizing sexuality.
Following Alfred Gell one may claim further that Dina is "Dina at the Monument" took advantage of a
a model for the Afrikaner viewer's own self-image and particular moment in South African history: the
behavior. Gell, in his reading of Michael Taussig's reconsideration of old truths and historical legacy after
Mimesis and Alterity proposes: "To see (or to know) is to the first democratic elections. Andre Brink, whose
be sensuously filled with that which is perceived, writing was banned in the old South Africa, once
yielding to it, mirroring it?and hence imitating it remarked in relationship to state-sponsored censorship
bodily."41 In order to enjoy the pictures of Dina, must that when "the lie has become established as the norm:
one also imagine oneself in her place, doing what she truth is the real obscenity."42 If the Voortrekker
does? For an Afrikaner population raised on a strict diet Monument, and the divine myth it concretized,
of Calvinist self-denial this sort of pleasure is potentially represented a "cover-up," then celebrating it (and
caught up in double guilt: the guilt of sexual joy, and the assailing it) in the profane manner proposed in Loslyf,
guilt of having gone along with the cruel lie of separatist consisted of denuding it, revealing the naked truth, and
ideology. By using the vehicle of pornography to thus making an obscenity of it, not just for the fun of it.
conflate self-flagellation and self-abuse, Ryk Hattingh's Afterwards the Voortrekker Monument was stained, and
and Dina's subversive spread worked not simply to bring left to stand for more than its authors intended.

41. Alfred Gell, Art and Agency (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 42. Andre Brink, Mapmakers: Writing in a State of Siege (London:
p. 100. Faber and Faber, 1983), p. 247.

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 Peffer: Censorship and iconoclasm 55

Figure 6. Tracey Rose, Unravel(led). Performance, 1998. Photo: Abrie Fourie, courtesy of Fourie.

Cocooned Arts Festival in April 1998 (fig. 6). The festival took place
in Oudtshoorn, a small, predominantly Afrikaans South
[Tracey] Rose's attempt to unravel 25 crocheted doilies?
some given to her by her grandmother, others made by African town, one of the earliest places where the
women in a colored community outside Oudtshoorn?and racially exclusionist landscape of apartheid was laid out.
wind the threads around a police monument of an officer Each designated "race" group was given its own
and his dog in the town's main road was halted when she residential area, and no one who was not white was
was surrounded by several officers demanding that she allowed to live in town. Things have changed somewhat
cease work. Finally, one of the officers cut the doily threads since the elections of 1994, but it is still a very
with a knife.
conservative place. The town, and its environs in the
For Rose the physical act of unraveling constituted a Karoo, is to this day one of the last holdouts of an
laying open of the past, making visible those events and
anachronistic white separatist mentality. In 1997 Miriam
those race groups previously oppressed under apartheid,
Makeba was pelted with beer cans by rowdies at a
and yet still glaringly absent from the festival. Yet her
concert there and a sculpture by Willie Bester was
intentions and the nuances of the piece were lost on the
visibly threatened Oudtshoorn police, who dismissed the urinated upon by a local gentleman: this despite the fact
performance as "an embarrassment" tarnishing their ?mage that a very large section of the population is "colored"
and demanded that she leave.43 under the (still-tenacious) arbitrary apartheid definitions
for persons of "mixed race." Afrikaans-speaking Rose,
I would like to conclude my examples of iconoclasm whose art often problematizes issues of color and race
resisting censorship by narrating an unfinished designated identity, and who would have been classified
performance by Tracey Rose, at the Little Karoo National as "colored" herself under the old regime, made a point
of confronting the tensions in this small town and the
43. Lauren Shantall, "Feathers Fly at Feast," Mail and Guardian contradictions of the Afrikaner festival (which was hardly
(April 9, 1998). nationally representative in its content).

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 56 RES 48 AUTUMN 2005

Why doilies? I asked. "In Afrikaans naai means South African society, and more so the self-contained
'stitch,' but it also means 'sex,'" Rose replied. She was fear within those black women subjected to the rule of
adamant about this point: white men?that Rose refers to in her remarks on

Where I grew up all the women are shut up in this thing, in

doilies and women's self-silencing. The doilies
a women's knitting circle, from age sixteen and up. . . . sublimate repression.
doilies were like a trophy of f***ing female worth. They "I didn't choose this body but am expected to
were female damage control. Doilies reek of oppression. represent it," claims Rose. If asked, she will represent it
They represented so much oppressed p****. Bottle it up. in a manner that differs from what is expected.
You don't want to speak, and even if you do, the gross Wrapping a monument to the police in doilies was
incapacity to speak is tied up in these little knots. Your meant to be a contradiction of the publicly imposed
busying hands shut you up in the box of self-censorship.44 terms of colored identity?but it was meant to be a
In unknotting the doilies and stringing them around revelation too, an unraveling ofthat which lay behind
the police monument, Rose saw her performance not as the public image. For Rose, the gesture was a
destruction (of the doilies or the police image) but as "romantic" one. She saw the police statue as kitschy, but
re-creation, as reformation of something already created: also very sexy: "It was big, and intimidating, but also
the tension between colored women and white men in sensitive looking with the german shepherd (which
reminded her of her own knock-kneed german
South Africa, especially in small dorpies (towns) like
Oudtshoorn. shepherd)?it was incredibly sexy." It epitomized the
position of white men in authority in the old South
You need to understand the relationship of the colored Africa. The previous day Abrie Fourie's camera caught
female to that town, within the general misogyny of
the artist posing like a pin-up girl on the monument,
male/female relationships in South Africa?especially in this
practicing for the following day's performance, her hand
small separatist town where a sizable number of the
resting provocatively on the cop's belt and her leg
population are "colored Afrikaans." The role/stereotype of
the colored female in South Africa is summed up in the dangling over the side of the german shepherd (fig. 7).
joke: "All the men who come through want to pass through At the actual performance Rose would wear a
the colored girls here." Not black nor white nor Indian, her provocative see-through white gown, and nothing
[colored] body stands for a sex act. Because of this, their underneath.
bodies were controlled or displaced. The performance was an effort to make peace with
the fractured past of the country: to put desire back on
The image of a "colored" person brings to mind a sex
the table and to bring love back into the picture, to have
act, and an image of miscegenation, which was the
a little sexy fun with a boorish image from the past. It
biggest contradiction for race purists. How could there
opened up the repressive loops of the doilies, and
even be such a thing as a colored or black Afrikaner?
wrapped them lovingly around a public image of the
According to Rose, if you were colored it was as if you
oppressor (but also the mate), covering it, and enfolding
were the product of some kind of "illicit sex." It appears
it. But the gesture was interrupted. "I felt frustrated
that "Everyone has been f***ing and raping to make
afterward," Rose said. "It felt like the beginning of the
you." When of course everyone is the product of some middle."
sexual encounter?but that is not the point. The point is
The performance began with a gathering of artists and
that in being labeled "colored" one was (and is?) being
friends, in town for the festival, at the police
labeled semi-criminal, a bastard, but also exotic, sexy,
monument.45 Rose calls these spectators her "cocoon"
desirable. It is this double sense?of being made in the
and claims she would not have been able to go through
image of a sex object but also repressed, contained, kept
with the performance if it wasn't for the protective
in one's place by apartheid and the general misogyny of
white, art-world bubble that surrounded her.
The monument was backed by a semicircular wall
44. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations are from an interview bearing plaques depicting the duties of the police. One
between Tracey Rose and the author, January 8, 2003. That interview
took the form of a casual, but intense, conversation whose tone I have
endeavored to replicate in prose. For background on the artist see n.a. 45. The event was reconstructed for me by Tracey Rose and Abrie
Fresh/Tracey Rose (Cape Town: South African National Gallery, 2003); Fourie, with the help of photographs and a diagram of the scene
Clive Kellner, V7ce Verses (Linz: O.K. Centre of Contemporary Art, drawn by Rose. As Carrie Lambert pointed out to me, my own textual
1999); and Rory Bester (editor and curator), Democracy's Images: reconstruction based on these recollections is itself a record and a
Photography and Visual Art After Apartheid (Umea: BildMuseet, 1998). reenactment, as well as an interpretation of the performance by Rose.

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 Peffer: Censorship and iconoclasm 57

Figure 7. Tracey Rose practicing for Unravel(led), 1998. Photo: Abrie Fourie, courtesy of Fourie.

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 58 RES 48 AUTUMN 2005

of the plaques, illustrating "fighting communism," had keep down) and the women serve and keep quiet. Her
been taken down after the 1994 elections. A stain was performance both revealed that hidden order of things,
left in its place, marking the edges of the missing pointed to the ways in which the small-town monument
bronze. In the place of this plaque Rose affixed museum bolstered those gendered race relations, and redirected
labels with the names of women who made the doilies them temporarily. By dressing sexily and actively
she would unravel. From the moment she stepped up on embracing the kitsch statue with her kitsch doilies, Rose
the sculpture the local police were there, unnerved by took the passive sexuality of the colored woman and
what was going on. In under ten minutes it was over: made it active, and she took the dominating image of
the white masculine oppressor and "protector" and
The police said in Afrikaans, very politely, to get off the
statue: "Hey, hey lady. Please, would you. ..." I said back wrapped it in love. Her goal was to make a giant doily
to them, in Afrikaans: "I'm sorry I don't understand out of the police statue. In doing so perhaps she also
Afrikaans." Then they were forced to speak in broken meant to wrap the big white phallus of a sculpture in a
English, "Can you climb off?" "But I'm not finished yet." giant womb woven by the colored community: a strange
act of reconciliation.
One of the policemen started sobbing, begging her to But a failed one. She claims the curator of the show,
get off. Another said, "Don't insult us." The artist Willem
who was helping with the performance, at one point got
Boshoff, who was standing in the crowd (and was also
really nervous. His break in confidence brought down
exhibiting at the festival), told the offended officer, in the hers. The cocoon of white artists she relied on for
purest Afrikaans: "But these are doilies, they are made
protection had broken down, so the cocoon of
with love. How could they be an insult?" The policeman
reconciliation she was trying to wrap around the police
replied aggressively: "Ja. But how would you like it if I
monument also fell apart. For a moment, though, she
put one on your head!" Then Boshoff took one of the
had unsettled that small-town image of the ideal way of
doilies from the stack in his arms, placed it on his head,
life. I could not help wondering, when Tracey Rose
and just stood there. One blond policeman was visibly
explained the whole thing to me, if perhaps her
angered, placed his hand on the base of the statue,
performance and its frustrated "ending at the middle"
opened a pen knife, then climbed up and began cutting was not an apt metaphor for the sexualized state of
the strings as Tracey laced them around the figure of the South African race relations at the moment.
man and his dog. Eventually the captain came out,
smiling, and told Rose "You'll have to come down now
or I'll have to arrest you. You are upsetting the guys." At Censorship at a remove
which point the performance was ended and the group It is up to you to choose between the monument and the
of artists departed. The captain waved them off, saying, act that merits it.
"Send me a picture." Asgerjorn "Detourned Painting" (1959)46
For Rose the whole event transacted (and inverted)
the very sexual ?zed competition between men and Is the slippage between censorship and iconoclasm a
women, between white men and colored women, and universal aspect of iconoclasm, especially when it
comes to the abuse of historical monuments?47 If not,
between the police and the rest in South African society.
Who protects and who serves whom? For her it was what do the South African cases I have explored have in
common with other types of iconoclasm from
refreshing to see "male sensitivity" from these
elsewhere? The examples I have given share all of the
supposedly hardened men. What was so unsettling for
motivations discussed by Freedberg and Gamboni for
these white police about the brief performance? Was it
iconoclastic acts: seeking attention, depriving an image
their fear of the black peril: now that the Africans had
of its power, and diminishing a political power by
taken over the country, were they planning to invade
this small town too? I do not think that was the whole assailing its symbols. They also took place during
story. The group around the performance was composed
periods of social upheaval (Barker) and regime change
(Dina and Rose). It is fascinating to note in this regard
of rag-tag-looking white artists and the police
themselves. Where was the swart gevaar in one lone that though it is not his primary area of concern, almost
colored woman climbing on a statue? The answer lies in
what Tracey Rose identified as the structured sexual 46. Reprinted in Sussman, see note 6, pp. 140-142.
competitiveness between white men and colored 47. I am grateful to Anthony Cutler for encouraging me to consider
women in South Africa, where the men protect (and the wider applicability of this idea.

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 Peffer: Censorship and iconoclasm 59

every instance cited in Freedberg's remarkable four-page attacked image still stands, it is even enhanced
sweep of the history of image smashing, from ancient afterward. Wayne Barker's avant-garde appropriation of
Egypt to the Reformation, contains some component of Pierneef as a "kitsch artist" has helped secure the latter's
social upheaval or popular grievance.48 It is intriguing to status as a historically important South African painter.
consider that revolutionary times do not only encourage The Voortrekker Monument, which in 1994 was a
iconoclastic acts but may also contribute to the dinosaur threatened with extinction, is now cared for by
longevity of the semantic turn accomplished through a private Afrikaner historical society. It is also a
acts of desecration. During periods following civil war touchstone for a new generation of artists, mischievous
or social revolution?whether in South Africa, or young Boere, and tourists looking for signs of the old
Lebanon, or Britain in the 1980s after the race riots? South Africa to play around with. Finally, in Oudtshoorn
artists have tended to see the potential for social change today the police and residents are likely more defensive
in their work with a seriousness to which many of their about (and more aware of) their quaint statue than they
colleagues elsewhere around the world pay only lip were before Tracey Rose and her artist friends came to
service.49 that small town. Following Taussig we might call the
What is less immediately apparent is that particular artists' actions "defacing defacement," or defacing
images, like the Voortrekker Monument or Pierneef's censorship, recalling that defacement or sacrilege itself
Johannesburg Station Panels, are more anxious than only succeeds if it reinvests the object with power,
others. They are more inherently contradictory, and thus with a semantic twist.52 Their kind of iconoclasm is
lend themselves more readily to powerful acts of revelation, more than it is obliteration.
desecration during periods of great social disturbance. In Interestingly too, each of the South African artists had
one similar instance, Gamboni describes the problem of a personal investment in the objects they assailed, and a
Soviet-era monuments in a manner that resonates with desire to ridicule the object while keeping it whole.
the South African examples.50 Monumental images of Their objects were also themselves. The effect of this
Stalin often physically displaced previous signs of local kind of reinvestment in the object, rooted in self
culture, and forcefully inserted the new monumental reflection, is that the artist's iconoclasm is blocked from
figure as a stand-in for the homogenizing collective falling into a new kind of censorship, thus precluding a
state. The destruction of those Soviet images, whether repetition of the cycle.53 The South African artists also
symbolic or real, has entailed a process of self correspond to what Bruno Latour has called "B"-type
detestation and guilt analogous to what transpired in iconoclasts, since what their destructive actions fight
South Africa, where breaking the image of the old order against is "freeze-framing, that is, extracting an image
meant also admitting that what many had gone along out of the flow, and becoming fascinated by it, as if it
with had been a grave mistake.51 were sufficient, as if all movement had stopped."54
It is precisely when the contradictory nature of the Latour states further that, "The damage done to icons is,
original censoring image is kept on the surface of the [to "B"-types], always a charitable injunction to redirect
new object that is formed through iconoclastic their attention towards other, newer, fresher, more
intervention that the usual relation of iconoclasm to sacred images: not to do without image."55 From this we
repression and censorship is inverted. What is most may conclude that where top-down censorship supports
profound about the acts I have described is that the a static conception of history and a semantic freezing of
images, iconoclastic modification from below promises
to thaw the scopic regime. Thus a truly revolutionary
48. Freedberg, see note 2, pp. 386-389.
49. Beral Madra makes a similar claim in Mediterranean
Metaphors II: Contemporary Art From Lebanon (Istanbul: Borusan
Culture and Art Center, 2000). 52. Taussig, see note 3, p. 28 et passim.
50. For other examples of destruction of anxious monuments from 53. Gamboni, see note 4, p. 71, concludes similarly that artistic
the ex-Soviet world, and discussion of their significance within the actions against Soviet monuments that left the originals whole but
frame of symbolic contradiction, see Gamboni, note 4, pp. 55-67 et somewhat shifted from former positions were perhaps the most
passim. successful and least likely over time to reproduce the repressive
51. Ibid., pp. 56, 68, and 71. Here Gamboni relies on Albert function of the original monuments.
Boime, "Perestroika and the Destabilization of the Soviet Monuments," 54. Bruno Latour, "What Is Iconoclash? Or Is There a World
ARS: Journal of the Institute for History of Art of Slovak Academy of Beyond the Image Wars?" in Latour and Weibel see note 4, p. 26.
Sciences 2-3 (1993). 55. Ibid., p. 27.

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60 RES 48 AUTUMN 2005

approach to images does not suffice to bury old (or

ideologically oppressive) images in the waste heap of
history. It gives them a swift kick and keeps them in play.
There are many ways to unsettle a monument. One
can remove the offending object, or one can detourn the
meaning of the thing and reveal a new semantic wealth
by opening up previously occluded meaning. One can
attempt, as Wayne Barker described it, "to pull that
vision apart by bringing in other possibilities." For like
minded iconoclasts and artists the art attacked is a
"found object." It is also a screen, pulled back through
acts of desecration. This is one of the uses of iconoclasm:
against censorship.

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