Damaging or harming?

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

10 October

The other day, when I heard that someone was reported to have harmed a painting by Mark Rothko, it did sound quite right - maybe one can harm the natural world, so there is no need for a living creature, capable of being harmed, but would one's first choice for damage to an artwork be that it had been harmed?

The person accused of the act, which he denies was criminal damage, was mentioned on the news again, his name one of many with which Ian Skelly had difficulties to-night. This time the man was said to have damaged the Rothko, which gives rise to this stupid thought :

Could a piece of art be damaged, but not harmed, if the damage were done in the right way? For, what if the damage actually, objectively (in art-critical terms), improved the piece, and, maybe, the living artist approved of it : no point, then, in restoring the work to how it had been before.

Actually, although I do not think that history claims that the fracturing to Duchamp's so-called Large Glass was deliberate, it was a ready-made that he adopted (i.e. rather than making the thing over again from new). But, of course, what Richard Hamilton did in the 60s was to make a re-creation of the work, and, not least as he could not have got the glass to fracture in the same way, it resembles its pre-facture appearance.

Hamilton's piece is on display at Tate Modern, and I take issue with the fact that the label does not draw attention to the fact that the original, some 40 years younger, is in Philadelphia or some such. That said, Duchamp approved what Hamilton had done (and, probably, Hamilton had his agreement before setting out), and I think that he went further, which was to say that, by signing it, it stood for the original for all purposes. My issue? You would only know that, if you knew it, and, if a friend, who had seen the original, asked you what you thought of the cracked glass, you would shake your head, not remembering any.

Finally, on this and as to Francis Bacon, the same Tate advised that he was such a keen reviser of his work that it had had to refuse permission for him to borrow key canvases from its holding : it knew very well that what Bacon would have returned would have been different works from what had been borrowed! If the works were in Gerhart Richter's private collection, no one would deny his right to the practice of overpainting earlier works, but might question his judgement, if not artistic integrity (which is abundant from the film Gerhard Richter : Painting (2011)).

If Bacon had broken into the Tate, with the assistance of one of his lovers, and worked on some canvases, would be have harmed them, by causing them to appear differently from the image in the catalogue and what people would expect to see if they wished to view what Turnage called Three Screaming Popes? Or would he have damaged them, but without harming them - and who knows what glories the Tate presented us from seeing to surpass what we have?

In the extreme case of Van Gogh, we might wish to say that his artistic legacy was not safe with him - but do we have a right, as an inheritance gives us, to remember someone for works that he would have destroyed. And so into, sadly, the moral debate about Max Brod and Franz Kafka, which I generally find rather sterile.


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