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Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art
Moxey, Keith. The Art Bulletin 85.3 (Sep 2003): 604-605.

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Abstract

Moxey reviews "Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art" edited by
Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel.
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Full Text

BRUNO LATOUR AND PETER WEIBEL, EDS. Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in
Science, Religion, and, Art Karlsruhe: Center for Art and Media; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 2002. 703 pp., 300 color ills., 535 b/w. $45.00 paper Massive in size and weight, but
creatively edited and profusely illustrated, this is an attractive book on an exciting subject.
Though it is by no means a catalogue, the book was published in conjunction with an
exhibition that took place at the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe in 2002. The editors,
who were also two of the exhibition's curators, have brought together a variety of scholars
from the many walks of art history to comment on striking instances of the type of image
conflict that interests them. Some of the contributions are full-length essays, others are short
one- or two-page notes. These texts are also interspersed with brief excerpts from works of
literature. The result of this mixing of genres is an eminently readable volume of great variety
and considerable charm.
According to its guiding spirit, Bruno Latour, the point of the exhibition and book was to bring
religious images and those used in scientific investigation together with modernist art, so as
to demonstrate the operation of what he calls iconoclash at work in all of them. Making no
distinction between images that have traditionally been identified as "art" and those for which
no such claims have been made, Latour defines iconoclash as the tension produced by the
conflict of the opposing principles of iconoclasm and iconophilia. In drawing attention to their
contradiction and by arguing that each of these motives is contained and necessitated by its
opposite, Latour hopes to confront the antagonisms that have traditionally fueled their
conflict: "If images are so dangerous, why do we have so many of them? If they are so
innocent, why do they trigger so many and such enduring passions? Such is the enigma, the
hesitation, the visual puzzle, the iconoclash that we wish to deploy under the eyes of the
reader" (p. 18).
The exhibition and book are clearly related to Latour's larger philosophical project. As the
founder of something called "science studies," Latour has used poststructuralist theory to
argue that scientific facts are socially constructed, while at the same time proposing that the
radical opposition that poststructuralism posited between language and its referents cannot
be sustained.1 In doing so, he has attempted to transcend some of the important battle lines
drawn in contemporary philosophy. While bringing a critical theorist's skeptical view to bear
on science's claims to "realism," Latour also wants to suggest that the gulf drawn by
deconstruction between language and the world cannot be justified. In this context, Latour
claims that religious iconoclasts are actually iconodules because of the value they attach to
the image, that scientists who would dispense with images in the name of logical abstraction
cannot afford to do without them, and that the continuing desire of modernist artists to
question and contest the concept of art has actually served to institutionalize their works
under this rubric. By focusing on how the incompatibility of these theories of the image
coincides with their mutual dependence, Latour tries to overcome the animosity between the
partisans of each camp. In an era in which fundamentalist religion and radical politics
continue to take their toll on the artistic heritage of the world's cultures, his position comes
across as an important plea for tolerance. The exhibition and the book therefore are not so
much concerned with presenting art to the public as with articulating a philosophical idea in
visual terms.
Perhaps the most ambitious contribution to the section on religious images is Joseph
Koerner's essay, "The Icon as Iconoclash." In a review of a number of instances of violence
against images in the context of the German Reformation, Koerner points out the double
irony of iconoclasm in a Christian tradition that had always insisted that its images were self-
defacing: "Visited on a crucifix, iconoclasm merely repeated the antagonism between
appearance and truth that the image already displayed" (p. 196). In the name of fanaticism,
Christian imagery was denied its mediatory status, its function as a sign or reference to a
presence that must remain forever absent. Koerner is at his most suggestive when
discussing the art of Lucas Cranach, whose works are so often dismissed on aesthetic
grounds, as a demonstration of the "death of art" for which the Reformation was responsible.
The apparent failure of the artistic principles that had traditionally animated the production of
religious art in this period is interpreted in a way that invests Cranach's innovations with
historical function and aesthetic dignity. Cranach's deliberate rejection of the "reality effects,"
the late medieval and Renaissance "naturalism" of his contemporaries, is viewed as a means
of directing attention to the arbitrary nature of the pictorial sign. Rather than gesture at a
hidden God in terms that render him or her accessible and intelligible, Cranach strips the
visual sign of anything that might naturalize its referential function: "The drastically formulaic
character of the painting as painting thus suits a religion where the real truth, by definition,
lies not in faithfulness to a world but in faith in words" (p. 212).
In the section dealing with scientific imagery, Peter Galison addresses the continuing tension
between abstraction and particularity in the practice of science. He describes the continuing
disagreement among scientists as to the value of images in scientific research. While there
are some who regard images as indispensable aids to apprehending and conceiving the
nature of natural phenomena, others argue that images only impede the process of rational
inference on which science depends. For those who support their use, images have the
following qualities: "By mimicking nature, an image, even if not in every respect, captures a
richness of relations in a way that a logical train of propositions never can. Pictures are not
just scaffolding, they are the gleaming edifices of truth itself that we hope to reveal." For their
opponents, images are an age-old deception, all too capable of leading us into error: "Logic,
not imagery, is the acid test of truth that strips away the shoddy inferences that accompany
the mis-seeing eye. Abstraction, rigorous abstraction, is exactly that which does not depend
on pictures" (p. 300).
Galison's aim is to "explore the ways in which the sciences find themselves locked in a
swirling embrace of iconoclasm and iconophilia" (p. 301). Reviewing the history of
mathematics, he describes the ebb and flow of the popularity of images as influential
theorists have either favored or dispensed with them. He points out that they have often been
popular as aids to intuition and pedagogy and that they have proven particularly useful as a
means of demonstrating the assumed correspondence between mathematics and the natural
world. Galison concludes by arguing that in science today the logicians and the imagists are
more interdependent than ever before:
Just when the scientific image moves towards abstraction we are left with the last glimpse of
a frozen picture and ignore what happens next. At just that moment when the abstract-logical
becomes pictorial, we forget the picture to celebrate the last remembered moment of non-
image. It is all too easy to forget the incessant traffic back and forth between the scientific-
artistic desires to grasp with eyes open and shut. (p. 323)
The explosive tension between iconoclasm and artistic creation is perhaps most easily
demonstrated in the history of modernist art. The ideology of modernity, with its teleological
vision of historical development (together with its location in an age of social and political
revolution), could hardly have accommodated an unchanging concept of art. The artistic
movements of the modern era have continually grappled with the issue of their own
legitimacy, each one attempting to obliterate that which preceded it. As soon as one set of
ideas gained currency, it was promptly sabotaged by the next. The aggressive battle of
opinions included attempts to destroy the institution of art itself, but this proved
philosophically flexible enough to absorb everything that was leveled at it. Some of the most
virulently iconoclastic gestures, the work of Marcel Duchamp, for example, have become
enshrined as part of the modernist canon. Peter Weibel, who offers a fascinating
philosophical reflection on this trajectory, as well as a striking illustrated history, writes:
One of modernity's consequences is the aesthetic reflection on its own nature: the critique of
modernity is an integral part of modernity itself. In its striving for transparency under
rationality and the terms of the European Enlightenment, modernity continuously feels the
need to justify itself. Hence, novelty for its own sake is less a characteristic of modernity than
is radical reflexivity, which ceaselessly revises the conventions and agreements regarding
the nature of art and modernity, (p. 663)
Several authors reflect on the importance of abstraction in the modernist tradition, offering a
variety of insights into its iconoclastic strategies. Caroline Jones, for example, argues that
abstractions always manifest the sources they have cannibalized in the process of becoming:
"Modern artworks . . . always encode their own iconoclasms. They do it before you can do it
for them-they show off the smashed or scissored bits that constitute the 'composition' in order
to surface the hard work (conceptual and physical) of making abstraction out of the world" (p.
412). Hans Belting, on the other hand, ponders the way in which the high art of abstraction
was haunted by popular culture in an age of mechanically produced imagery:
If art was to keep a separate position, it had to part with all those images as they were
omnipresent in a media society. When it did not allow images any longer, it had to offer
something more important than images. This "something more important" became the
distinguishing mark of art, at least for its partisans. It promised a vision unmediated and
untainted by images. The visible had to be purged and turned to silence. A resounding lack
of images became art's new pride, (p. 390)
As a book, Iconoclash fulfills the ambitions of its principal architect. Latour's thesis is
addressed by almost all the contributors, and the volume has a coherence that belies its size
and scope. Perhaps the text is too successful for its own good. The antinomies on which the
argument depends sound a little too trite, as if we could or should derive satisfaction from the
revelation of a binary opposition. Such a conclusion, however, would be unwarranted.
Latour's project is neither an exercise in structuralist analysis nor an attempt to reveal the
basic building blocks of cultural life so much as an effort to get us to look beyond iconoclasm
and iconophilia in order to appreciate that the conflict between these positions is an
ideological one that has no epistemological foundation. Being his own kind of iconoclast, he
enables us to look with new eyes at images whose power over us has often proven difficult to
acknowledge.
Footnote
Note
1. See, for example, Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993); and idem, ed., Pandora's Hope:
Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1999).
AuthorAffiliation
KEITH MOXEY is Anne Whitney Olin Professor of Art History at Barnard College and
Columbia University [Department of Art History, Barnard College, 3009 Broadway, New York,
N. Y. 10027, pm154@columbia.edu].
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Indexing (details)
Subject Art;
Science;
Nonfiction;
Image;
Religion
People Latour, Bruno, Weibel, Peter
Title Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art
Author Moxey, Keith
Publication title The Art Bulletin
Volume 85
Issue 3
Pages 604-605
Publication year 2003
Publication date Sep 2003
Year 2003
Section Book reviews
Publisher New York
Publisher College Art Association, Inc.
Place of publication New York
Country of publication United States
Journal subject Art
ISSN 00043079
CODEN ABCABK
Source type Scholarly Journals
Language of publication English
Document type Book_Review-Favorable
Subfile Nonfiction, Science, Religion, Art, Image
ProQuest document ID 222959181
Document URL http://search.proquest.com/docview/222959181?accountid=15533
Copyright Copyright College Art Association of America Sep 2003
Last updated 2010-06-09
Database ProQuest Central

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