The George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "Creative Destruction" @wsj - By Richard B. Woodward 

Washington

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "Creative Destruction" @wsj - By Richard B. Woodward      

When visitors step off the escalator at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and enter "Damage Control: Art and Destruction Since 1950," they are greeted by towering Kodachrome images of slow-motion explosions. Blooming into flowery clouds, these shots of nuclear tests—excerpts from 1950s films made by the defense contractor Edgerton, Germeshausen & Grier for the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission—are like a silent ballet for smoke monsters.

Nothing that follows in this smart, provocative show, which is about the dangerous wish to eradicate the past and start anew, can match the hellish beauty of these toxic pictures.

That hasn't stopped curators Kerry Brougher and Russell Ferguson from filling the outer ring on the second floor with 100 or so works that play with the crunching, fiery theme of violence. All of the paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, films and performances—by a stellar group of artists from the U.S., Europe and Asia—are about the spectacle of destroying things.

As such acts can arouse contrary reactions, depending on who is doing the destroying, what is being destroyed and why, the show is guaranteed to upset and divide audiences.

Artists have for a long time smashed all sorts of things on purpose. A Yamaha grand piano lies in shambles in the first room. It was recently demolished by Raphael Montañez Ortiz, author of the 1962 Destructivist Manifesto, who has done this more than 80 times since the 1960s for filmed concerts that explore the post-John Cage sonic regions between noise and music. (Rock 'n' roll equipment bashers and feedback freaks who seek high-art credibility can cite Mr. Ortiz as inspiration.)

The thing destroyed can be someone else's art or one's own. In 1953 Robert Rauschenberg asked Willem de Kooning for a drawing to erase. De Kooning reluctantly agreed to the collaboration, but gave the younger artist a work so deeply marked it took Rauschenberg a month to wipe clean. "Erased De Kooning Drawing" shares a room with documents from John Baldessari's cremation of his own pre-1970 oeuvre. He photographed the act, confirmed it in a newspaper notice, and even made cookies from the ashes.

Another kind of whimsy can be found in car-crash photographs from the 1950s to '70s by the Swiss policeman Arnold Odermatt. He focused not on human victims, but on smashed auto bodies as a new, delicate form of sculpture. (His 1965 image of a Volkswagen VOW3.XE +0.07% Volkswagen AG Non-Vtg Pfd. Germany: Xetra ^€200.15 +0.15 +0.07% Jan. 8, 2014 5:35 pm Volume : 470,813 P/E Ratio 11.50 Market Cap€91.14 Billion Dividend Yield 1.78% Rev. per Employee €353,101 20120019919810a11a12p1p2p3p4p5p 01/08/14 Mexican Auto Exports Break Yea... 01/08/14 Mexican Auto Production Hit Re... 01/07/14 Brazil Posts First Drop in Aut... More quote details and news » VOW3.XE in Your Value Your Change Short position in an Alpine lake, Hitler's "People's Car" sinking in a Romantic setting, is the catalog cover.)

"Damage Control" brings back forgotten movements, such as Auto-Destructive Art. Its 1961 manifesto, written by Gustav Metzger, a Polish Jew who had fled the Nazis for England, called on artists to harness the forces of nature in order to make public art that would disintegrate in moments or years. ("Not interested in ruins," the manifesto specified.) In a 1963 film he is seen torching a hanging sheet into ashy wisps.

Jean Tinguely, the Swiss Dadaist inventor of clanky, self-immolating machines, is prominent here. An archival find is a 1962 performance, improbably commissioned by NBC, where he is seen prowling Las Vegas junkyards for stuff to blow up in a casino parking lot. The network not only devoted 22 minutes of air time to his actions, but also employed David Brinkley to explain them as a commentary on U.S. consumerism.

The British artist Michael Landy, a fan of Tinguely, used his personal belongings for public spectacle in his audacious piece "Break Down." In 2001 he rented a London shop where visitors could watch over 11 days as a machine he conceived of destroyed everything he owned. The 16-minute video documents the slow compacting and shredding of 7,227 items—books and bedding, art by friends as well as his own art, and finally a coat given to him by his father. The pipe-dream of starting one's life again without any baggage has seldom been so poignantly realized.

Questions about artistic license to destroy grow more vexing in a gallery where three photographs of Ai Weiwei show him dropping and smashing a Han Dynasty urn. This 1995 work is not far from a kindred desecration by Jake and Dinos Chapman, who in 2004 drew in colored pen on Goya's series "The Disasters of War," claiming that their additions "improved" the 80 etchings.

In neither case did the artists rely on reproductions, as many other artists since Marcel Duchamp have done. Mr. Ai irreparably broke a third-century Chinese artifact; and the Chapman brothers have marred a set of rare masterworks.

It's a toss-up which action is more irresponsible. Is Mr. Ai's forgivable because of his dissident status? Or is it less so because the urn is no longer recognizable as a functional object, whereas most areas in Goya's etchings remain untouched by the Chapmans' graffiti? Why do both gestures seem more scandalous than, say, composing a disco version of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony? Is it their arrogance or the permanence of the harm they've done to another's work of art?

The curators go too far in apologizing for artists who trash the past for a giggle. But there's no denying that strains of Modernism (and capitalism) encourage disruption. Futurism was only one movement that believed art could "move forward" only by razing the old order.

Dario Gamboni's catalog essay takes care to distinguish among various individuals or groups that have defaced art in the name of a higher calling. He mentions Mary Richardson, who in 1914 took a meat cleaver to Diego Velázquez's "Rokeby Venus" at the National Gallery in London. (To protest the imprisonment of fellow suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst, "the most beautiful character in modern history," Richardson thought it right to destroy "the most beautiful woman in mythological history.") Tony Shafrazi spray painted "KILL LIES ALL" on "Guernica" in 1974, when Pablo Picasso's mural was still at MoMA. (He claimed his actions were an anti-Vietnam War protest and an attempt "to bring the art absolutely up to date" and "give it life.")

Self-righteousness can justify any act of havoc. In 2001 the Afghani Taliban dynamited the Buddhas in Bamiyan, calling them idols of the infidels. In a Byzantine art exhibition now at the National Gallery of Art one can see classical statues that were vandalized in the fourth century by Christians who "improved" Greek and Roman art with incised crucifixes.

Historical cycles of political and religious fervor, though, should not obscure the fact that, when safely consumed, mayhem is a basic food group in the world's entertainment diet. Science-fiction movies pump up their box office numbers with ever more extravagant disasters, as Mr. Brougher writes in his essay.

Watching things explode can be mesmerizing, as in Ori Gersht's "Big Bang I" from 2006, a slow-motion video of a flower vase's shattering. David Letterman used to feature a popular segment in which things were thrown off buildings or crushed by steamrollers, to the delight of his audience. "Mythbusters" often relies on similar small-scale acts of televised havoc.

"Damage Control" brings together artists from different eras who don't usually schedule play dates. Bruce Conner's "A Movie," his 1958 montage of nukes and nudes, turns out to be a distant relative of Douglas Gordon's 2007 "Self Portrait of You + Me" series, portraits of celebrities with faces deformed as if by an atomic blast.

The curators want us to share in the anarchic glee, safely contained by a museum. But behind the fun and games, their expertly installed show also raises difficult-to-answer questions about technology, politics, the role of an avant garde in history, and what we want art and artists to do for us.

Mr. Woodward is an arts critic in New York.

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