IS might have destroyed Mosul’s ancient statues, but humanity will have the last laugh

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There’s something deeply upsetting about the film of IS militants in Mosul attacking ancient monuments with hammers and drills. The Assyrian and Akkadian statues, dating back thousands of years, are a testament to Mesopotamia’s rich history. Mere stone isn’t worth much next to the human life IS has destroyed; but their vandalism is still a powerful emblem of the violence the militants have inflicted—and the monomania of its followers.

Justifying their violence, IS claimed to be following in the footsteps of the Prophet Mohammed, who forbade worshipping statues. “These idols, these artefacts, if God has ordered their removal, they became worthless to us even if they are worth billions of dollars,” they claimed—never mind that no one was worshipping them, or that ISIS itself has benefited from selling stolen antiquities. (In fact, the destruction might well have been trying to quash reports about such deals). IS has also made a point of blowing up Shia mosques and Sufi shrines, as well as churches, and gleefully publicising their crimes on the internet.

Iconoclasm for religious or political propaganda reasons is not new. A couple of years ago an interesting exhibition at Tate Britain, Art Under Attack, showed how a variety of groups over the centuries have defaced, destroyed or banned certain images. During the English Reformation, Protestant radicals, citing the second commandment, scrubbed the walls of churches and cast down Catholic icons. For financial as much as theological reasons, Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries. In one of history’s ironies, 100 years later, the King’s funeral monument in St George’s Chapel, Windsor, was itself stripped by Oliver Cromwell’s Parliamentary forces.

In 1914, the Suffragette Mary Richardson slashed Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus with a meat cleaver, claiming she was drawing attention to the arrest of Emmeline Pankhurst the previous day. Hers was also a protest against the female nude: in a later interview, she said she disapproved of the way “men visitors gaped at it all day long.” Fifty years after the Easter Rising, in 1966, the IRA blew up Nelson’s Pillar—a 121-feet doric column in Dublin—which they believed symbolised the overhang of British imperialism in Ireland. No one was killed in the explosion, but it presaged a campaign of violence in Northern Ireland and on the mainland by the Provisional IRA, which was formed three years later.

The most famous modern example of iconoclasm was the dynamiting of Afghanistan’s Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001. As much for anti-Buddhist reasons, the Taliban chose a target whose destruction would cause outrage round the world—it was their way of sticking two fingers up at civilisation. There is currently an interesting debate about whether the Buddhas should be rebuilt or whether the space they took up should remain empty, as a reminder of the scarred history of Afghanistan. This debate points up an unforeseen irony in the actions of militant iconoclasts: their hatred focuses our attention on the objects under attack. The haunting images of the Buddhas before they were blown up are arguably more freighted with meaning than they were before, when apparently most of the locals had forgotten what they represented. (Hana Makhmalbaf’s 2007 film Buddha Collapsed from Shame exploits this effect movingly.)

Similarly, I wonder how many more people are now visiting Mark Rothko’s restored Seagram Murals at the Tate after one of them, Black on Maroon, was vandalised in 2012. The culprit, Wlodzimierz Umaniec, daubed some words in black paint on the bottom right-hand corner, saying he was acting in the radical artistic tradition of Marcel Duchamp. The courts disagreed and he was imprisoned for a year and a half. When he came out, he apologised for his actions, saying “I'm sure the restoration team has done a wonderful job and I encourage everyone to see the restored picture.”  Was this Umaniec’s plan all along—to make us look again at a familiar object? Certainly this short video detailing the two-year restoration process is a work of art in itself.



So while it’s natural to feel outraged at IS’s attack on Iraq’s treasures, I suspect humanity will have the last laugh. It's blackly comic seeing grown men put so much effort into wrecking mere stone. And long after IS are a grotesque footnote, the video of these monuments being destroyed will survive as a shameful reminder of how low humanity can sink. In trying to destroy a symbol, IS has gifted its opponents a greater one.