Iconoclash: Beyond the image wars in science, religion,
and art
Edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel.
Cambridge (Mass): The MIT Press
ISBN 0-262-62172-X
8" x 11," 704 pp., 798 illus. (309 in color)
$45.00; October 1, 2002
Reviewed by Wilfred Niels Arnold
Email: warnold@kumc.edu
"A raging mob of workmen, sailors, and peasants, together with
prostitutes, beggars, and thieves, perhaps three hundred in all, armed
with clubs, axes, hammers, ladders and ropes, only a few of them with
firearms and daggers, threw themselves, inspired by fanatical fury,
into the villages and hamlets of St. Omer. ... overturned altars, shattered
the images of the saints and trampled them underfoot. ... they went
towards Ypres where they could count upon a large number of Calvanist
adherents ... broke into the main church [and] scaled the walls with
their ladders to mutilate the paintings." That's iconoclasm in
August 1566 as portrayed by J. Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) in his
thesis (1788) on the Reformation in the Low Countries. It got him a
professorship in Jena.
Perhaps because I was distracted by the subtitle of the present volume
I had innocently expecting something along the same lines, plus the
promised extension into science. But it was iconoclash, which is defined
by the editors as happening, "when one does not know, one hesitates,
one is troubled by an action, for which there is no way to know without
further inquiry whether it is destructive or constructive. This exhibition
[catalog] is about iconoclash, not iconoclasm."
The exemplar, nicely placed in the prologue, is a still shot from a
video news story. Two guys with axes are breaking protective glass to
get at some precious work of art. It turns out to be the "Shroud
of Turin!" However, the men in red rubber coats and helmets are
firemen saving the "icon" from an adjacent fire. "Thus,
we can define an iconoclash as what happens when there is uncertainty
about the exact role of the hand at work ..." It's hard to believe
that the average reader is now completely convinced, but Bruno Latour
can't wait and raises the rhetorical question, "Why do images trigger
so much passion?" Seven pages later we are told that "Iconoclash
is neither an art show nor a philosophical argument, but a cabinet of
curiosities ..." I went forward to page 324, "The holy shroud:
how invisible hands weave the undecidable," a contribution by M.
J. Mondzain, which I had hoped might follow-up on the lead example.
However, she makes an unconvincing argument, seemingly unaware that
the late Walter C. McCrone debunked the Shroud of Turin as a religious
relic, on physical and chemical grounds.
There are loads of images that will catch your eye on a coffee table.
But try as I did, I could not get beyond the impression that this is
indeed a "cabinet of curiosities," and the prose is sad compared
with Schiller's.