No. 22 (2022)

In February 2002, Collin Powell gave a rather routine press conference in the relevant room of the United Nations, in which he was analyzing the development of the latest events of the so-called Gulf War. In that room there is an authorized copy of Picasso's Guernica, which, however, was subtly veiled before the speech of the then U.S. Secretary of State began, supposedly so as not to hurt the sensibilities of television viewers, who could easily associate the canvas with a generalist symbology of the suffering of war victims.
Destroying images, hiding them, covering them up, dissimulating them or, directly, violating them, has always constituted an act of white power exercised on the basis of symbolic violence. Although historically, the phenomenon has been associated with religion, having in the Second Commandment of the Decalogue one of its most decisive historical milestones and establishing since then a clear link between iconoclasm and idolatry, this is by no means the only area in which iconoclastic gestures can be found today. The question of modern iconoclasm raises questions already formulated in the past that seem to return because they have not yet been resolved: to what extent does the physical destruction of images imply the mental destruction of their meanings; to what extent is it a political practice of counter-power to disseminate images that counterbalance the statuesque iconology? Is the distinction between idol and icon, on which the theoretical justifications of iconoclasm in antiquity were based, still valid? And perhaps the question par excellence that generates every iconoclastic act: how is it possible that an image can generate so much hatred and so much pain?
From the field of art, new forms of iconoclasm have also arisen that broaden the scope of problematization: can't Bacon's somber reinterpretation of Velázquez's portrait of Innocent X be considered iconoclastic? And what about the seven slashes endured by a Canadian suffragette in 1914 by the Venus in the Mirror? Is iconoclasm a way of "politicizing art," as Walter Benjamin invited us to do in The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility, in the face of the aestheticization of politics? Was abstraction, as Gottfried Boehm suggests, an iconoclastic act directed against figurative painting? And, to generalize, is not the history of Western thought itself, so logocentric and text-driven, an endemic exercise of violence against images?

Fedro. Revista de estética y teoría de las artes invites researchers from academic fields linked to philosophy and aesthetics to contribute a renewed vision of iconoclasm, a phenomenon of now and always, of which we want to explain its contemporary metamorphoses and drifts, as well as to propose new questions that allow us to understand it with a more current look.

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