History dies in ISIL’s hands, but curators worry buying artifacts would fund terrorism

ISIL terrorists have destroyed a number of shrines in Iraq and Syria — including Muslim holy sites — to eliminate what they view as heresy.

As ISIL terrorists use power drills, bulldozers and explosives to destroy the cultural and architectural heritage of ancient Mesopotamia — Christian, Muslim and pre-Abrahamic from the ancient Assyrian capital Nimrud to the tomb of the Biblical Jonah in Mosul — western curators hoping to preserve what is left are caught in a dilemma.

Some want to buy artifacts to protect and preserve them, such as James Cuno, president of the J. Paul Getty Trust, the world’s wealthiest art institution, who has described the vandalism as “an argument for why portable works of art should be distributed throughout the world and not concentrated in one place.”

But others are loudly calling for an effective ban on trade in Assyrian antiquities and other relics from the war zone. They say the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant is not simply eradicating the idolatry it denounces as heretical, but in fact is hypocritically selling what it can on a black market, and destroying everything else. In this view, buying artifacts to preserve them in Western galleries is tantamount to funding terrorism.

The targets of the vandalism include Shia shrines, a Christian monastery, and any relic that ISIL considers idolatrous, including prehistoric statues. Most destroyed sites are Islamic, which Reichel said is “one of the great perversities or paradoxes.”

“An image grab taken from a video made available by Jihadist media outlet Welayat Nineveh on April 11, 2015, allegedly shows members of ISIL destroying a stone slab with a sledgehammer at what they said was the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud in northern Iraq.”

Ugo Rondinone “Seven Magic Mountains”/spraypaint

In June 2016, vandals defaced this outdoor public installation set in the Nevada desert. Comprising seven colossal stone forms in various day-glo colors, unidentified perpetrators painted phrases like “666″ and “Hella Spiders,” as well images of genitalia on several rocks.

Experts believed the damage was reversible. 

Multiple works by David Tschitschkan/protestors 

On Tuesday, February 8, 2017, masked perpetrators attacked the Visual Culture Research Center (VCRC) in Kiev, destroying an exhibition by the Ukrainian artist David Tschitschkan. 

The targeted exhibition featured artworks with political content in which the artist expressed a critical view on nationalism, and a sense of a missed opportunity in the Maidan Movement and Ukrainian Revolution of 2014.

Surveillance footage from the site shows two women and 12 masked men appearing at the VCRC shortly before 6 p.m. The group attacked a security guard and immediately began to destroy artworks in the show. The attack lasted two minutes, after which the squad left the premises. In addition to tearing and spraying over collages, the vandals scrawled slogans such as “Moscow’s Mouthpiece,” “Servants of Separatists,” or “Glory to Ukraine.” VCRC Director Wassyl Tscherepanyn told APA on Wednesday that the police arrived 40 minutes after the incident and initially refused to search for the perpetrators.

The show, which opened on February 2, had received threats from right-wing extremists prior to the attack. A guided tour with the artist slated for February 4 had been called off, but right-wing radicals reportedly attacked a visitor that day and tore down posters advertising the show.

According to VCRC director Tscherepanyn, the exhibition, which will remain on view in its current vandalized form, also critically confronts a current ideological policy in Ukraine, which, with a state-ordered removal of symbols and designations from Soviet times, propagates the “decommunization” of public space.

Pat Lasch cake sculpture, 1979 / MoMA

When sculptor Pat Lasch wanted to loan her cake sculpture from New York’s Museum of Modern Art for a retrospective of her work at the Palm Springs Art Museum, she learned that MoMA had “discarded” the work after it “deteriorated beyond repair.”

According to the New York Times, MoMA denied that Lasch’s sculpture was part of its permanent collection in the first place, explaining that it was commissioned simply as a “decorative element” for its 50th anniversary exhibition. “While it was not intended for the collection or future display at the Museum,” the statement said, “it was kept in our storage facilities for many years.” Although no attempt was made to return the work to the artist, the piece was never formally accessioned, either, so when its condition deteriorated, it was thrown away instead of conserved, with Lasch none the wiser.

Various items in the Museum of Islamic Art, Cairo / car bomb

On January 24, 2014, a jihadist car bomb attack caused considerable damage to the museum and its holdings. Though the attack was actually targeted at the Cairo police headquarters on the other side of the street, experts estimated at the time that 20-30% of the museum’s artifacts would need restoration.

In the end, of the 179 items affected by the attack, 160 were restored and back on display when the museum reopened on January 20, 2017. These repaired relics were accompanied by special gold labels to indicate their tumultuous past. 

Among the works damaged beyond repair were glass lanterns from the Medieval period.

Joseph Beuys “The Pack” / moths

In January 2017, it was announced that the felt components of this 1969 work, which the artist had personally installed in Kassel’s Neue Galerie, had been visibly eaten away by moths. 

Those components were temporarily taken off-view; museum experts believed the damage could be repaired.

Rescuing the Lost Art of 9/11: How 9/11 spawned one of the most unusual art preservation efforts of the modern era

Excerpts:

Works by artists like Pablo Picasso, Roy Lichtenstein, and Le Corbusier graced the walls of the Twin Towers, and were obliterated in the tragedy; a sprawling tapestry by Joan Miro that hung in the lobby of 2 World Trade Center was demolished when the building came down around it. Cantor Fitzgerald, the brokerage firm which lost some 650 employees that day, was home to a vast collection of Rodin’s works; from the artist’s drawings to the original Three Shades, which welcomed visitors to the firm’s lobby on the 105th floor of the North Tower. The task force estimated that a staggering $100 million in art from private collections, and an additional $10 million worth of public art was lost in the tragedy.

Some works of art did survive, though. The red steel sculpture which towered over the WTC courtyard, Alexander Calder’s Bent Propellor, emerged from the wreckage of the towers weeks later, though only 40 percent of the original sculpture was recovered. The Sphere, a 27-foot-high rotating bronze sculpture by German artist Fritz Koenig and one of the most recognizable works of public art at the World Trade Center, was relocated (without repairs) to Battery Park amid much controversy about what that move might signify. In June, the Port Authority finally voted to return the battered sphere to its rightful place as the sculptural heart of the World Trade Center.

Cantor Fitzgerald’s “museum in the sky” carries the strangest story of resilience and rebirth, as parts of these works began to turn up amid the rubble at Ground Zero and the Fresh Kills landfill in the months after the attacks. A bust of The Burghers of Calais was surfaced almost unscathed from the rubble. A cast of Rodin’s The Thinker was reportedly spotted and recovered before “mysteriously disappearing”—though there are photos of workers posing with it immediately after the discovery—and according to reports, it was never seen again. And most prominently, by a stroke of luck, it was former Fitzgerald curator Joan Vita Morotta who identified Three Shadesfrom her home upstate while watching a news report on the Fresh Kills recovery efforts. “All of a sudden the camera shows a fuselage from one of the airplanes,” she told The Wall Street Journal. “And lying next to it is a portion of The Shades.”

But to say these works were fully saved would be premature. Like the 2,500 9/11 artifacts that lay forgotten in an airplane hangar at John F. Kennedy Airport until this July, they’d entered a strange limbo unique to the art world. Damaged beyond restoration, they were declared a “total loss,” a classification attributed to objects deemed devoid of any market value by insurers and resigned to warehouses and storage spaces while their legal owners are paid an indemnity—often destined to be forgotten and unappreciated as a quirk of the art insurance market. While fragments of Bent Propellor and Three Shades live on in the 9/11 Memorial and act as physical testaments to the world-historical trauma that was that fateful day, other artifacts have been subsumed under a strange new legal definition: “not art.”

From there, it profiles the Salvage Art Institute, a group well worth looking up if you’re not familiar.

Jeff Koons “Balloon Dog (Magenta)” / poor mounting?

In November 2016, this sculpture was broken while on view in Bernardaud’s booth at the DesignMiami fair. One of three editioned pieces, each mounted to a silver wall-hung display, the work seems to have detached and fallen of its own accord, shattering upon impact. Priced at $8-9,000, the piece was damaged beyond repair. 

THE FACTORY OF FAKES: How a workshop uses digital technology to craft perfect copies of imperilled art

Excerpts from this extremely interesting article:

“The Factum Arte warehouse, in Madrid, is filled with copies of treasured art works, including a facsimile of an Assyrian winged lion that once stood in Nimrud—a site, in Iraq, that has been largely destroyed by ISIS.

A winged-lion replica, which was nearly complete, loomed over the workshop. I touched its front paws, and the plaster surface felt craggy, echoing the eroded surface of the original, which stood, for nearly three millennia, on the site of a palace in Nimrud, in what is now Iraq. In April, 2015, soldiers from isis besieged what remained of the Nimrud site. After a few days of hacking and bulldozing, they released a video of the entire archeological site being blown up. They also took a cruel photograph of a winged lion similar to the one being fashioned in Madrid: a militant was obliterating its smile with a drill.

The British Museum wasn’t the only Western institution that owned precious objects from Nimrud. Many treasures were spirited out of Iraq during the nineteenth century, the heyday of imperialist archeology. After the Iraq War began, Lowe contacted curators at five museums that own pieces from the throne room of the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II and secured permission to replicate them. The British Museum’s lion was scanned, at night, in the course of five weeks. (Recording at a resolution of three hundred microns takes time.) 

Lowe’s initial plan was to help Iraqi curators partly “reassemble” the throne room in a library in Mosul. Facsimiles of the winged lion, and of reliefs depicting a lion hunt, were completed in 2014. High-density polyurethane is expensive, so the milling alone cost four hundred thousand euros. “We got them all through Turkey, through Kurdistan, through Erbil, down though Iraq into Mosul,” Lowe said. Then isis ransacked the library. The facsimiles were likely destroyed.Fortunately, Factum saved its molds. “The beauty is that we can send another set,” he said. The winged lion being finished by Beyro, then, could be a replacement for a replacement.

Now that ISIS has laid waste to all of Nimrud, Lowe has conceived an even bolder proposal. He told me that Boris Johnson, the British foreign minister, had announced plans to help reassemble the Nimrud fragments remaining from the recent destruction, following the model of the Acropolis, in Athens. This struck Lowe as foolish nostalgia—fetishizing stone shrapnel that was likely too ruined to conjure the monuments’ beauty. A smarter way to honor Nimrud’s past, he told me, would be to “scan all the known fragments”—he gestured to a wall that held copies of Nimrud friezes that are in the Pergamon Museum, in Berlin—“and have copies erected on the site.” He planned to start a campaign to promote his idea, presenting his latest lion to potential donors as a proof of concept.”

“When footage emerged of ISIS destroying the ancient city of Nimrud outside Mosul, the world stood powerless in the face of a group of militants using sledgehammers and electric drills to obliterate centuries-old archaeological gems. 

But 17-year-old Nenous Thabit rolled up his sleeves and began work on replicating the sculptures. "They waged a war on art and culture, so I decided to fight them with art,“ he says. He did so by sculpting immaculate statues that resembled some of the most precious Assyrian artifacts lost in Nimrud and other ancient areas in and around Mosul. 

In a modest apartment in the Kurdish city of Irbil, where Thabit and his family took refuge after fleeing Mosul, the young artist has meticulously carved 18 Assyrian statues and one mural over the past year.”

Berninini’s “Elephant and Obelisk” / unknown instrument

In November 2016, this 17th-century landmark was damaged by unidentified vandals while on permanent view in Rome’s Piazza della Minerva. One of the figure’s tusks was broken off and was found laying next to the statue by Spanish tourists who proceeded to alert authorities.

The event happened overnight, leaving police police to scour CC-TV footage in an attempt to identify and locate the perpetrators.

According to Rome’s mayor, Virginia Raggi, “A first estimate of the damage suggests that it will be a few days before we try and reattach the fragment and return the statue to its former glory.”

statue of archangel Saint Michael / tourist

In November 2016, this 18th-century sculpture was damaged while on view at the National Museum of Ancient Art in Lisbon, Portugal. An unidentified museum goer - a tourist visiting from Brazil - accidentally backed into the work while attempting to take a selfie with it, knocking the statue to the ground. 

Although significant damage was done to the wings, arms and mantle, museum experts believed the work could be restored.

Earlier this year, the museum director Antonio Filipe Pimentel had expressed concern that such an incident might occur, as financial pressures had lead the museum to shed staff. “There are only 64 people for 84 chambers open to the public; I am very sure one day we will see hazards in the museum,” he said, according to the Daily Mail.

Goldschmied & Chiari Where Are We Going to Dance Tonight? (2015) / janitors

In October 2015, this party-themed installation piece was accidentally destroyed while on view at the Museion Museum for Modern and Contemporary Art in Bolanzo, Italy. Inspired by the hedonism of ‘80s Italy, the work included a haphazard arrangement of 300 champagne bottles, confetti and cigarette butts.

Following an event in the museum’s nearby foyer, and not realizing the installation was in fact an artwork, janitors dutifully swept up the strewn materials. Fortunately, the staff had conscientiously sorted the artwork into glass and paper for recycling, and the museum was able to salvage and reinstall the work.

Cy Twombly “Untitled” (1954) / museum visitor

In March 2015, this work was accidentally smashed while on view at the Menil Collection in Texas. Not aware of the statue behind her, a museum-goer backed into the piece and knocked if off its black platform, sending it to the ground and detaching its top half in the process. 

The piece was eventually repaired.

Bernini’s Barcaccia Fountain / soccer fans

In February 2015, this 500-year-old public work, installed at the foot of the Spanish Steps in Rome, was damaged by Dutch soccer fans during a match between Feyenoord and AS Roma. A large group of people gathered around the fountain and began assaulting it, throwing debris into/at it, kicking it, smashing bottles and lighting firecrackers and smoke bombs on its exterior, resulting in chips and splinters in the fountain’s surface. 

Following a heated standoff between authorities and fans that included tear gas and physical clashing, the Italian police arrested 29 vandals. While experts were immediately brought in to address the damages done to the fountain, much of the harm was thought to be permanent.

Statue of the Two Hercules (circa 1700) / tourists

In May 2015, this outdoor sculpture was damaged while on display in the northern Italian city of Cremona. Having climbed upon the work in the hopes of taking a selfie, a pair of tourists accidentally knocked off a portion of the statue’s crown, which shattered on the ground.

The two perpetrators were identified by police but were not charged with a crime. The crown was shattered beyond repair.

the Townley Venus / waiter

In December 2015, the right thumb of this ancient Roman sculpture was accidentally broken off by an unwitting waiter during a catered event at the British Museum.

The waiter, who was working for one of the external catering companies employed by the museum, got too close to the statue; he bent down underneath it and, upon getting up, bumped into the marble hand, snapping off the right thumb.

Luckily, it was a clean and easily-repaired break, with the restoration carried out in the gallery during off hours.

This was not the first time the statue encountered such an accident. In 2012, a visitor to the museum bumped into the statue, cracking the same hand. As with this most recent incident, the damage was soon repaired. 

What’s more, the statue’s right index finger was broken off before the Venus came to the British Museum and remains so to date, although how this occurred isn’t entirely clear.

Roy Lichtenstein, Nudes in Mirror (1994) / pocket knife

This work was damaged in 2005 while on view at Austria’s Kunsthaus Bregenz. It was repeatedly slashed, with four cuts each measuring nearly a foot in length.

From press:

“The perpetrator, armed with screwdriver, spray paint, and pocket knife, was a thirty-five-year-old Munich ex-prostitute suffering from schizophrenia. A museum visitor and an employee held the woman until police arrived. She scratched a police officer in the face and bit another in the leg during questioning. According to newspaper accounts, the attacker’s actions were spurred by her conviction that the painting was a fake—that as the Coburg Neue Presse reported,Nudes in Mirror ‘was not a genuine Roy Lichtenstein’—a claim the show’s curator, having had insult added to injury, of course immediately refuted.”

The painting was eventually able to be restored, and recently went back to auction.

Statue of Francisco Franco / eggs

On October 18, 2016, a headless statue of the Spanish dictator was pelted with eggs after being temporarily installed on a Barcelona street as part of the city-sponsored public exhibition “Franco, Republic, Impunity and Urban Space.”

Scuffles broke out between people who wished to ban the historical display and those who backed the decision by Barcelona’s left-wing council to open the exhibition. As soon as the equestrian statue was put in place outside the Born cultural centre, protesters arrived, some throwing eggs at the figure. It was unclear whether those individuals faced legal penalties. The sculpture itself was not permanently damaged.

This was not the sculpture’s first encounter with vandals: the figure was decapitated by an unidentified party while in municipal storage after being removed from Barcelona’s Montjüic palace in 2001.