Why do images trigger so much passion?

"Freud is perfectly right in insisting on the fact that we are dealing in Egypt with the first counter-religion in the history of humanity. It is here that, for the first time, the distinction has been made (by Akhenaton) that has triggered the hate of those excluded by it. It is since this distinction that hatred exists in the world and the only way to go beyond is to go back to its origins." (Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian)
 Bruno Latour : What we propose here in this catalogue "Iconoclash, beyond the image wars in science, religion, and art" is an archeology of hatred and fanatism.
Why ?
Because we are digging for the origin of an absolute - not a relative - distinction between truth and falsity, between a pure world, absolutely emptied of human-made intermediaries and a disgusting world composed of impure but fascinating human-made mediators.
"If only, some say, we could do without any images. How so much better, purer, faster our access to God, to Nature, to Truth, to Science could be." To which other voices answer :
"Alas, we cannot do without images, intermediaries, mediators of all shapes and forms, because this is the only way to access God, Nature, Truth and Science."

("La vérité est image mais il n'y a pas d'image de la vérité." Marie-José Mondzain)

What has happened that has made images the focus of so much passion? To the point that destroying them, erasing them, defacing them, has been taken as the ultimate touchstone to prove the validity of one's faith, of one's science, of one's critical acumen, of one's artistic creativity?

Furthermore, why is it that all those destroyers of images, those "theoclasts" those iconoclasts, those "ideoclasts" have also generated such a fabulous population of new images, fresh icons, rejuvenated mediators: greater flows of media, more powerful ideas, stronger idols?

And what has happened to explain that after every icono-crises infinite care is taken to reassemble the smashed statues, to save the fragments, to protect the debris? As if it was always necessary to apologize for the destruction of so much beauty, so much horror; as if one was suddenly uncertain about the role and cause of destruction that, before, seemed so urgent, so indispensable; as if the destroyer had suddenly realized that something else had been destroyed by mistake, something for which atonement was now overdue.

Why have images attracted so much hatred?
Why do they always return again, no matter how strongly one wants to get rid of them?
How is it possible to go beyond this cycle of fascination, repulsion, destruction, atonement, that is generated by the forbidden-image worship?

(Bruno Latour, Peter Weibel : "Iconoclash, beyond the image wars in science, religion, and art")

books

Three books to study :

Iconoclash, beyond the image wars in science, religion, and art
Edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel
2002 ZKM, Karlsruhe

Moses the Egyptian
The memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism
Jan Assmann
1997, Harvard University Press

Idols of the Market
Modern Iconoclasm and the Fundamentalist Spectacle
Sven Lütticken
2009, Sternberg Press

Imi Knoebel, 30 stretchers, 1968 - 1969

selfportrait iconoclasm

Is it possible to commit iconoclasm on a selfportrait?
Yes, it is possible to commit iconoclasm on a photographic portrait of myself.

Images don't cry, nor laugh.
Because of a crises in image representation artists are restless seeking for expressing their selves in not known ways. The crises of image representation is going to help artists in an interesting necessity to destroy figurative images. Figurative images have to destroy abstract pictures.
Iconoclasm is the future !

iconoclasm II

The idea for a ban on images, how and why is it born?

In the ten commandments, inscripted on two stone tablets which God wrote with his finger and delivered by Moses, it is on a very important second place :

I am the Lord your God, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery;
1 : Do not have any other gods before me.
2 : You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.
3 : You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me, but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments. 

Because images can be powerful and therefore dangerous?
People are simple and scared and therefore they like to worship an image, of a golden calf for example. Is it that bad? God is a jealous god and that is very human quality. He or she or it has no form, god is fire, or light, sound, clouds, thunder and lightning.
Why is that jealous god so afraid of image making?
Abstract or figurative images are they equal from power?
The most powerful images are pornographic images?

"The more power pictures have, the less we seem to know about how they operate"
(Peter Weibel in Iconoclash).
To combat the figurative image, you must first acknowledge, admire and confess the figurative image?
Idolatry and iconoclasm are finally dealing with the pornographic image?
Powerful images in the vast flood of images today are images of what? Of sex, of violence, of war, of death? 


Images don't cry...