ABSTRACT
Destruction in art is not destruction of art, but rather an aesthetic technique for creating new forms of perception and knowledge related to violence in society, war and trauma, tra‚cking in bodies, economic crisis, environmental contamination, natural disaster, and especially the aermath of World War II, the Shoah, and the use of the atomic bomb (Stiles 1987). e Japanese artist Saburo Murakami ran through and broke open wall-size paper screens in 1955 at the “1st Gutai Art Exhibition” in Tokyo, an action symbolizing an aack on and destruction of traditional Japanese culture. In 1959, Gustav Metzger, a Polish-German Holocaust survivor, published “Auto-Destructive Art,” a manifesto describing site-specic, self-destructing civic monuments that required collaboration between artists and scientists to link destruction to science and technology, and that would implode anytime from twenty seconds to twenty years with the aid of internal computerized devices (Metzger 1959). e Swiss artist Jean Tinguely built Homage to New York in 1960, a large kinetic assemblage that partially destroyed itself in the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art in New York when an unintended re broke out in one of its mechanical parts. In 1961, the American artist Niki de Saint Phalle created Tirs, in which she red a gun at her own gurative assemblages, the same year that the Argentinian Arte Destructivo group, led by the artist Kenneth Kemble, exhibited destroyed objects in Buenos Aires. en in 1962, NBC commissioned and televised Tinguely’s Study for an End of the World No. 2, a kinetic sculpture that exploded on the Nevada desert near the US nuclear tests grounds. 1962 also saw the Puerto Rican American artist Raphael Montañez Ortiz’s “Destructivism: A Manifesto,” which described artists as “destroyers, materialists and sensualists dealing with process directly” (1962, 52). Soon Yoko Ono would perform Cut Piece (1964), siing silently on a stage while the audience cut o her clothing, according to her instructions.
