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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.

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