Iconoclasm, Censorship and Bildakt
Historical and ethnographic evidence of the power of images is abundant. People have destroyed images for theological, aesthetic or religious reasons. Images have been destroyed to provoke anger, shame or revenge. Attacks have been incited or spontaneous, and the motives for these acts have generally been reduced to psychological problems of individuals or to popular, magical or animistic behaviour. Throughout history, idolatry, fetishism, ignorance or madness have been used as alternate explanations for understanding the power of images. Attacks on their dangerous influences denote nothing other than the acceptance of their capacity and nature as powerful social, political and aesthetic triggers. The diverse responses they have generated over the centuries are directly related to their condition and their mechanisms for producing meaning
David Freedberg's pioneering work, The Power of Images (1989), sought to address images outside the margins of art history. His interest was in the relationships between people and images. The context in which he produced this work was one in which art history showed excessive interest in high art. Sometimes it was simply relegated to the realm of the individual and the psychological rather than the human and the collective. The responses that have received attention are those that are considered intellectualized, but rarely those that are more “emotive.” Freedberg proposes to think of “kinds of responses” and “kinds of images.” From his study, it became clear that some responses were linked to certain types of images such as wax figures, funerary effigies or pornographic images. Responses that were generally excluded from academic interest because they were considered crude, rough or impolite. The problem of responses is not only related to the elevated and the popular, the high and the low, the Western and the primitive as categories.
Another unavoidable approach is that proposed by Horst Bredekamp with the concept of Bildakt. Images as objects produce acts of image, which refer not only to what people do with images but to what images do. The image is considered from the capacity it has to act by itself in interaction with the subject. The act of image asks the question about how, when observing or touching the image, it passes from latency to the externalization of feeling, thought and action. That is, the act of image produces, by the force of the image and the interaction, an effect on thinking and acting. There is an intrinsic power of the form that forces us to understand that the image cannot be placed before or behind reality since they are not its consequence but a form of its condition. The act of image reflects on how and why images affect the way people think, act and feel. From this perspective, this line of research addresses acts of image such as iconoclasm, censorship, animation or substitution, punishment in effigy or damnatio memoriae.
