Are acts craziness or simply personal statements?
Crimes of art? No, crimes of the heart.
So claims the woman who vandalized a Cy Twombly painting in France this summer.
We may never really know why she and a small percentage of art viewers become vandals, but their stories are compelling.
The vandalism of the Twombly occurred in July at the Collection Lambert in Avignon, a museum of contemporary art. Cambodian-born artist Sam Rindy, 30, planted a big, fat, smeary red "kiss" on the deliberately vacant, all-white canvas by the respected abstract painter. Between Rindy's arrest and her trial Nov. 16, some 80 blogs discussing the event sprang up on the Internet, according to Eric Mézil, director of the Collection Lambert, which owns the painting.
The Collection is a respected repository of contemporary art amassed by art dealer Yvon Lambert, who plans to give it to France eventually. Lambert, who had asked for more than $2.9 million in damages to cover the value of the painting and the $47,000 restoration cost, was doubtless unhappy with the judgment that directs Rindy to do 100 hours of community service, pay Lambert $1,465 and pay Twombly a symbolic one euro, or $1.50.
Twombly, an American born in 1928 in Lexington, Va., who now lives in Rome, requested the symbolic fine. According to Mézil at the museum Web site (
www.collection lambert.net), Twombly is ironically aware that now his name will be known to all but "only as the artist who made a white canvas kissed by a woman."
Rindy's actions are not unique this summer and fall.
Vandals busy in Europe European news sources have also been following the events of Oct. 5. That's when four people in black masks wielding crowbars and axes quickly cleared out visitors to a small Swedish university museum in Lund, shouting, "We don't support this ----." The exhibit was controversial New York photographer/provocateur Andres Sarrano's "The History of Sex." The series has been around a while. An ArtForum critic called it "a variety show of amateurs and models acting out scripted sexual scenarios" in 1997.
It may be old hat in the art world, but the Swedish vandals had their own agenda. They brought along their own videographer to record their actions -- complete with lettered signs held up like captions saying "This is art?" -- and posted the video on YouTube. It was halted by YouTube owner Google, not for the self-conscious violence but for the alleged pornographic content. The vandals also left leaflets "Against decadence and for a healthier culture," according to reports in The New York Times. The show continues at Lund through December and then continues to travel in Europe.
The vandals have not been found.
In a third vandalism, around midnight on Oct. 7, five apparently drunk teenagers opened a back door and set off an alarm and were captured on video inside Paris' Musée d'Orsay. One young man was taped striking a Monet painting and creating a 4-inch-long horizontal tear. That vandal turned himself in and identified the others.
According to BBC News and Agence France-Presse, French police arrested and questioned four men and one woman, all 18 or 19 years old. The incident occurred during Nuit Blanche (White Night), an annual all-night arts and concert gala that coincided with France's rugby victory over New Zealand.
France's cultural minister has called for tougher measures against art vandals. The trial is pending.
Vandal motivation Some experts chalk up such acts to aberrant behavior.
Columbia University art historian David Freedberg speculates in his book "Iconoclasts and Their Motives" that such acts attempt to declare supremacy and deprive images of power. Vandalism, he writes, is basically "one of the most striking and dramatic forms of response" to art. Christopher Cordess, who teaches forensic psychiatry in the School of Health and Related Research at the University of Sheffield in England, is trying to amass profiles of art vandals.
Few museum directors want to talk about art crimes, worrying that the mere mention may spark action.
However, Stedelijk Museum director Rudi Fuchs spoke up after the 1997 slashing of a $2 million 1951 Barnett Newman abstract painting in the Amsterdam museum by Gerard Jan van Bladeren. Turned out, this was van Bladeren's second successful attack on a Newman work at the same museum. He had repeatedly slashed a 1967 Newman painting in 1986.
Fuchs told The New York Times, "It's like being raped. It changes your life. Now people will forever be looking over their shoulders when they go to museums."
Not all vandalism is simple damage done through craziness. Check out the list accompanying this story for the variety of excuses offered over the years.
Another theory was put forth in the 2002 "Vandals" exhibition and panel in San Francisco -- home of the still-unsolved 2001 case in which a slasher mutilated hundreds of books in the public library dealing with women, homosexuality and AIDS.
The exhibit premise was that art vandalism now reflects the attempts of individuals in the 21st century to gain attention in an Internet world dotted by spam and pop-ups, YouTube and MySpace, blogs and Web pages. "Vandals," at the University of San Francisco's Thatcher Gallery, addressed the relationship of vandalism to art, censorship and First Amendment rights. Some vandalism is rationalized as conceptual art. Graffiti is sometimes justified as freedom of expression or speech.
Recently, there has been an effort to describe some acts of vandalism as performance-based "art intervention."
British art historian Richard Murphy tried to make sense of such things in "Theorizing the Avant-Garde: Modernism, Expressionism, and the Problem of Postmodernity" (Cambridge University Press: 1999).
He wondered if we are not seeing an implied critique by "artists" that an earlier "tradition" of the avant-garde is dead. (In the case of the Twombly, for instance, a once-shocking all-white canvas needs color and higher shock value.) In this sense, the vandalism is an intervention, Murphy writes, "that is, a form of continuation of the original joke or even an elaboration of the original artistic conception."
Reporter Diane Heilenman can be reached at (502) 582-4682.
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