kaBOOM!
march 9 - april 28
"THE BRIDE STRIPPED BARE..."
- brandishing scissors, bachelors in the crowd attacked the girl in the wedding gown.
THE EXHIBITION
kaBOOM!
The museum is a place where art takes shape, gains meaning and where, at last, it comes to its end. kaBOOM!
That we live in a state of emergency, no one is authorized to doubt any longer. That is what being alive means now: experiencing an ever-present movement of revolt, forever clearing the ground before us to make it safe.
kaBOOM! is an effort to embrace this moment within a public, social space, to enlarge the confrontation, and to finally allow direct action. If the role of recent art has been to provoke reactions, kaBOOM! will allow direct action.
kaBOOM! will compress and present the current process of life and art into real time. Over the course of the exhibition, museum visitors will be invited to smash, drop, throw and slash artworks exactly for that purpose.
Opening reception: Saturday March 9, 6pm to 10pm. Suggested admission: $5.
Regular museum hours are 1-6pm Wednesday through Sunday.
1909 - Courbet’s painting THE RETURN FROM THE CONFERENCE (1863) is bought and destroyed by an “exalted Catholic” for being anti-clerical.
1914 - Mary Richardson, a suffragette, repeatedly hacks at Velasquez’s nude, THE ROKEBY VENUS (1640-48), at the National Gallery in London. “I didn’t like the way men visitors gaped at her all day.”
1934 - Diego Rivera’s mural MAN AT THE CROSSROADS in the Rockefeller Center, New York, is destroyed for portraying Lenin among its figures.
1946 - Alfred D. Crimi’s fresco (1938) on the rear wall of Rutger’s Presbyterian Church is painted over because it “places too much emphasis on Christ’s bare chest.”
1959 - Acid is thrown on Ruben’s FALL OF THE DAMNED at Munich’s Alte Pinakothek. The assailant says that he did not directly destroy the work, that the acid “relieves one from the work of destruction.”
1966- Gustav Metzger throws acid on several of his nylon “paintings” which disintegrate within minutes.
1961 - The over-sized testicles on Jacob Epstein’s angel sculpture for Oscar Wilde’s tomb (1914, Paris) are hacked off by two indignant English ladies. They are recovered by the cemetery keeper, who uses them for paper weights.
1965 - The executors of David Smith’s estate, with the support of Clement Greenberg, order the removal of white paint from a number of Smith’s open-air works to increase their resale value.
1971 - Hans Haacke’s one-man exhibition is cancelled by the Guggenheim Museum, because it was thought that it might offend some important New York landowners. Thomas Messer, the director, is criticized for censorship and made to leave the museum.
1989 - As director of the Corcoran Gallery in Washington D.C., Christina Orr-Cahall cancels the touring Mapplethorpe exhibition before it arrives. Orr-Cahall stated "if you think about this for a long time, as we did, this is not censorship; in fact, this is the full artistic freedom which we all support". She is forced to leave the museum for her pre-emptive actions.
1999 - Three days into its run, Graham Beal, director of Detroit's DIA, shuts down the museum's show entitled "Van Gogh's Ear." An exhibition dealing with new art of the nineties, he claims that he is forced to close it in order to protect the public. He is applauded in the art community for his "decisiveness."
1974 - “KILL LIES ALL” is written on Picasso’s GUERNICA in the Museum of Modern Art (New York) by Tony Shafrazi, who considers himself an artist and describes his Guernica “action” as innovative art. Tony goes on to run a successful New York gallery.
1976 - In Omaha’s Joslyn Museum, a bronze statue is taken off its pedestal and thrown at the Bouguereau painting, THE SPRING (1886), by a 37-year-old window-cleaner who finds it filthy.
1977 - A 43-year-old woman, Ruth van Herpen, plants a heavy lipstick kiss on a white monochrome canvas by the American painter Jo Baer, at the Oxford Museum of Modern Art. At her trial, she said that she had found the painting cold and had wanted to “cheer it up”.
1982 - Josef Kleer attacks Barnett Newman’s WHO’S AFRAID OF RED, YELLOW AND BLUE IV (1969-70) with one of the very bars meant to keep museum visitors from getting too close to the work.
1988 - Hans Haacke’s wooden monument in the city of Graz Austria, Mariensaule, is set on fire by a former Nazi and a young neo-Nazi.
1989 - Three men receive life imprisonment for splashing paint on a portrait of Mao in Tiananmen Square.
1989 - Richard Serra’s TILTED ARC (1981) is dismantled and removed from the Federal Plaza in New York.
1995 - The heads of Henry Moore’s bronze King and Queen (1954) are sawn off on a remote hillside in Scotland.
1937 - Nazis mount the exhibition ENTARTETE KUNST in Munich. Over 100,000 visitors.
1953 - Richard Nixon: “There is a need to investigate ‘objectionable art’ in governmental buildings with the view to obtaining removal of all that is found to be inconsistent with American ideals and principles.”
2002 - The partially nude statue at the Justice Department Building, the Spirit of Justice (1934), will now be covered with a blue drape “for aesthetic reasons.”
2001 - The Taliban government destroys several statues of Buddha that are nearly 2000 years old.
2005 - Duchamp's FOUNTAIN attacked with hammer. (click)