Abstract
First presented as the Clarendon Lectures at the University of Oxford in 2009, James Simpson’s short new volume of essays, Under the Hammer, is a counter-history of iconoclasm, rewritten to show that image-breaking is not only the work of ‘medieval’ regimes, but is ‘a recurrent feature of . . . Western modernities’, discernible in both visual and non-visual texts (p. 4). Framed provocatively by a discussion of international criticism of the Taliban’s destruction of the Bamiyan Buddha statues in Afghanistan in 2001, Simpson argues that Western accusations of barbarity and backwardness in response to image-breaking conceal the iconoclastic impulses at the heart of modern Anglo-American art and culture. The author’s task, therefore, is to track this quiescent iconoclasm from its overt manifestation in the legislated smashing of Christian icons in England between 1538 and 1643, to its more abstract cultural work in attacking ‘idols of the mind’, exemplified in a range of sources, including Protestant ecclesiastical architecture, the writing of John Milton, and the neutralizing phenomena of cabinets, art galleries and – ultimately – the emergent 18th-century art market (p. 85).
The four chapters of the book concentrate on iconoclasm in 20th-century North American art, legislative iconoclasm in Late Medieval England, iconoclasm during the English Revolution, and iconoclasm and the Enlightenment. In the process, the essays also touch on subjects as diverse as the CIA’s international promotion of Abstract art as part of a Cold War cultural campaign against Soviet Realism; the Puritan trauma of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA); and the paradoxes of late 14th-century Lollard iconomachy. Using a method that he describes as ‘cultural etymology – a practice of historical investigation that assumes, as a hypothesis, that artefacts carry their secrets embedded in their form’ (p. 32), Simpson utilizes an extensive archive to develop the thesis that the perennial tension between the perceived vivacity of images and the impulse to contain them has been productive of ‘image trouble’: a paradigm through which we may better understand Anglo-American modernity (p. 75).
In several respects, Under the Hammer is an intriguing volume. The eclecticism of the essays’ foci suggests that the book will have wide appeal for scholars of art history, modern and contemporary visual culture, museology, literature and theology. In places, the parallels that Simpson’s magisterially broad archive enables him to draw between seemingly unconnected sources are both innovative and refreshing. For instance, taking a long historical perspective usually missing from studies of modern art (which habitually cite the World Wars, the Holocaust and Hiroshima as the generators of 20th-century abstraction), Chapter 1 traces back the formal ‘flatness’ of Abstract Expressionist artists, such as Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhart, to an iconoclasm that has its origins in late 14th-century English Protestantism’s flight from all material instantiations of the Church (p. 34). This new ‘etymology’ of abstract art allows Simpson to compare the ‘dramas of history and space’ exemplified in the absence of formal depth in 16th-century New England meeting houses and Congregational churches (p. 43) to ‘the new Puritan temple of MoMA’, arguing that the modern museum grapples with the unfinished historical business of iconoclasm, at the same time as it ‘resacrilizes the image’ (p. 48). This line of reasoning serves as an exemplar of the book’s apparently intended scope and project: to re-conceive the impact of the ‘century-long ferocious repression of the pre-Reformation visual regime by early modern evangelical English and Scottish clerics’ as continuing to ripple throughout Anglo-American culture in a never-ending battle between iconoclasm and idolatry (p. 15). But the import of all this for visual culture after the mid 20th century, and for modernity itself, remains unclear.
While the essays’ long historical reach is the basis of their originality and potentially wide appeal, it is also the source of a bewildering narrative structure that obfuscates the clarity of Simpson’s thesis. Although it is worth remembering that the four main chapters were originally conceived of, and delivered, as a series of lectures, the short introduction and notably slight conclusion to the volume do not provide enough framing, summary and contextualization to mitigate the leaps of faith that Simpson asks the uninitiated reader to take alongside him. Indeed, the introductory commentary on the Taliban’s destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas appears to be an after-thought, intended to provide a half-hearted contemporary justification for a timely reassessment of iconoclasm, rather than an integral part of an argument that has something to tell the reader about iconoclasm in the 21st century. As a framing device, therefore, the discussion of the Bamiyan Buddhas works counterproductively to remind the reader that the author provides very little evidence for iconoclasm after the 1960s and yet no explanations as to why the cultural phenomenon might have receded later in the 20th century. Similarly, the four-page conclusion is the narrative equivalent of a perfunctory hand-shake rather than the lingering farewell that the complex argument requires.
More puzzling still is the author’s refusal to pursue his thesis into the 19th century. Although this omission is justified on the grounds that the period saw a ‘massive rapprochement with the pre-Reformation and the Catholic’ (p. 16), and was therefore characterized by the making, rather than the breaking, of images, it is a gaping hole in a volume that argues elsewhere that iconoclasm, ‘once started, is difficult to stop’ (p. 85), and is, in essence, ‘unfinishable’ (p. 13). While Simpson’s contention that iconoclasm comes in waves may account for the more than one hundred year hiatus that he identifies, this explanation itself requires further development to maintain the trajectory of his thesis and to bolster it. Similarly, the chronological leap backwards from the Taliban’s image-breaking in 2001 to the iconoclastic flatness of Ad Reinhart’s 1960–1961 work, Abstract Painting, ignores a multiplicity of shifts in cultural, political, religious and formal contexts. If these intervals are the exceptions that prove the rule that iconoclasm is a hidden underlying principle of modern Anglo-American culture, surely they must be given as much attention as the periods in which iconoclasm rose to the surface of visual and non-visual texts.
Simpson’s historical method of ‘looking for recognitions between present and past obscured by the passage of time and the urgency of the present’ provides an, at times, astonishingly original thesis that locates contemporary denouncements of iconoclasm, such as those levied at the Taliban in 2001, in a longer historical frame, with the effect of illuminating the irony of Western charges of medievalism (p. 48). As the author states in his introduction, this is a ‘small book capable of activating a large theme’, and the thoroughness of the extensive endnotes and bibliography certainly belie the volume’s slimness (p. 17). Simpson convincingly shows that the trauma of Early Modern iconoclasm had a profound impact on Anglo-American culture that continued to ripple through modernity long after the last ecclesiastic images had been broken under the hammer; he also shows that the work of iconoclasm remains incomplete, rather like Simpson’s volume itself.