Destruction Can Be Beautiful Or Can It?

The destruction was too widespread to be happenstance. Items: Several burned neckties. A smashed mirror. A torn book titled What I Believe. A row of glass bottles, their necks grotesquely melted halfway down inside their bodies. A series of self-destructing slides--on their first showing, they melt and dissolve in the projector's heat.

The idea behind the wreckage? Very simply that destruction can be beautiful. The thesis, as propounded in a provocative exhibit currently at Manhattan's Finch College Museum of Art, unaccountably fails to note the Dadaists, who introduced purposeful mangling into art half a century ago. "There is a great negative work of destruction to be accomplished," ran the 1918 Zurich manifesto. "We must sweep and clean." But the Finch exhibition compensates by showing how large a role destruction has come to play in the work of contemporary artists.

Italy's Alberto Burri, who began by charring panels of wood, now creates haunting images by scorching skeins of plastic; after all, since nature is in a state of constant metamorphosis, fire, which transmutes plastic's clarity into murk, is a legitimate artist's tool. Philip McCracken offers a long, narrow Plexiglas case, with five light bulbs lined up inside, four of them shot to bits and bullet holes piercing the case on either side of them. The piece seems to ask the question "When?" as the eye canvasses the damage already done and the mind awaits the next bullet from a ghostly sniper. Arman's smashed guitar glued to a board--a requiem for Harlequin--is an effective device to make death real in art.

Pop-Psych. Smashing a violin over the head of an onlooker, on the other hand, is an altogether different order of violence--purposeless instead of purposeful. But violin smashing is just what occurred during the current series of events at Manhattan's Judson Memorial Church staged by a group of self-styled "destruction artists." Among the crowd-pleasers: Vienna's Hermann Nitsch, who stuffed his trousers with calves' brains, then dragged the bloody carcass of a lamb around the courtyard. Artist Ralph Ortiz and Judson Gallery Director Jon Hendricks had planned to tear limb from limb two live chickens, one white and one black, as a ritual killing symbolic of U.S. racial strife. The event failed to come off when a couple of humanitarian Philistines spirited the birds to safety.

Destruction artists try to draw their esthetic justification on an odd mixture --the theories on aggression propounded by Austrian Naturalist Konrad Lorenz, Aristotle's idea of dramatic catharsis, and pop-psych. "We're all very hostile," says Ortiz. "The guy who beats his kid, the wife who has affairs. But art becomes a place where one can deal with the most chaotic problems without threatening one's emotional and physical well-being." Whatever the merits of destruction art, Ortiz's grasp of psychology is clearly sketchy, at least by Freudian lights. The master taught that both man's creative and destructive instincts, which he called Eros and Thanatos, should be channeled into useful and socially productive channels. In other words, any thinking adult who enjoys killing chickens perhaps needs analysis more than an art show.

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