News - Archive of Destruction

Archive of Destruction

After-War

Kristina Norman After-War Tallinn, Estonia 2009

How Ya Like Me Now?

David Hammons How Ya Like Me Now? Washington DC, USA 1989

A Series of Unexpected Incidents

Maja Bekan A Series of Unexpected Incidents Warsaw, Poland 2014–2017

Monument for Strangers and Refugees

Olu Oguibe Monument for Strangers and Refugees Kassel, Germany 2017

The James Joyce Tower in Bread

Marta Minujin The James Joyce Tower in Bread Dublin, Ireland 1980

Scaffold

Sam Durant Scaffold Minneapolis, USA 2017

Skoob Tower Ceremonies

John Latham Skoob Tower Ceremonies Oxfordshire, UK 1964–1968

Elterwater Merz Barn

Kurt Schwitters Elterwater Merz Barn Cumbria, UK 1947

Homage to New York

Jean Tinguely Homage to New York New York, USA 1960

The Books in Landscape Experiment

Avital Geva The Books in Landscape Experiment Messer, Palestine; Kibbutz Metzer, Israel 1972

Untitled Sculpture

Garth Evans Untitled Sculpture Cardiff, UK 1972

Apollo Pavilion

Victor Pasmore Apollo Pavilion Durham, UK 1969

Orbital Reflector

Trevor Paglen Orbital Reflector Space 2019

Marsh Ruins

Beverly Buchanan Marsh Ruins Georgia, USA 1981

Untitled (Flag 2)

Josephine Meckseper Untitled (Flag 2) Kansas, USA 2018

Study for a Pavilion

Tina O’Connell and Neal White Study for a Pavilion Askeaton, Ireland 2017

De Blauwe Golven

Peter Struycken De Blauwe Golven Arnhem, The Netherlands 1977

Wrapped Reichstag

Christo and Jeanne-Claude Wrapped Reichstag Berlin, Germany 1971–1995

13 Most Wanted Men

Andy Warhol 13 Most Wanted Men New York, USA 1964

Greetings from Jerusalem Avenue

Joanna Rajkowska Greetings from Jerusalem Avenue Warsaw, Poland 2002

John Gerrard Western Flag Digital commission 2017

The Fountain: An art-technological-social drama

Maddie Leach The Fountain: An art-technological-social drama Lund, Sweden 2021–2024

Partially Buried Woodshed

Robert Smithson Partially Buried Woodshed Ohio, USA 1970

Restoration

Hew Locke Restoration Bristol, UK 2006

Boys Club Mural

Keith Haring Boys Club Mural New York, USA 1987

Demolition of a Wooden House

Lara Almarcegui Demolition of a Wooden House Otwock, Poland 2011

Prototype 180

Mary Ellen Carroll Prototype 180 Houston, USA 1999

300 Meters of Black Tape to Mourn a Public Square

Horacio Zabala 300 Meters of Black Tape to Mourn a Public Square Buenos Aires, Argentina 1972

Tilted Arc

Richard Serra Tilted Arc New York, USA 1981

The List

Banu Cennetoğlu + UNITED for Intercultural Action The List Liverpool, UK 2018

The Skoghall Konsthall

Alfredo Jaar The Skoghall Konsthall Skoghall, Sweden 2000

Window Blow-Out

Gordon Matta-Clark Window Blow-Out New York, USA 1976

Palace Ruin

James Beckett Palace Ruin Amsterdam, The Netherlands 2016

Ambit

Alison Wilding Ambit Sunderland, UK 1999–2002

Ensacamento (Covering)

3Nós3 Ensacamento (Covering) São Paulo, Brazil 1979

Untitled

Michael Asher Untitled Münster, Germany 1977

Break Down

Michael Landy Break Down London, UK 2001

Department for Conservation and Restoration

Nada Prlja Department for Conservation and Restoration Skopje, Republic of North Macedonia 2016–2024

Outside the Wall

Yu Wen-Fu Outside the Wall Taipei, Taiwan 2009

Cambridge Piece

Barry Flanagan Cambridge Piece Cambridge, UK 1972

Enclosed

Amina Menia Enclosed Algiers, Algeria 2012

SOLANGE

Katharina Cibulka SOLANGE Ljubljana, Slovenia 2021

Brussels Anti-Demolition Campaign

Olivia Hernaïz Brussels Anti-Demolition Campaign Brussels, Belgium 2012–2013

Madonnenfigur

Katharina Fritsch Madonnenfigur Münster, Germany 1987

Pissed Off & Shoe Tree

David Hammons Pissed Off & Shoe Tree New York, USA 1981

Sketch for a Fountain

Nicole Eisenman Sketch for a Fountain Münster, Germany 2017

Flailing Trees

Gustav Metzger Flailing Trees Manchester, UK 2009

Grande Cretto

Alberto Burri Grande Cretto Sicily, Italy 1985–2015

Association of Friends of Angel Square

aapA Association of Friends of Angel Square Porto, Portugal 2007–2021

House

Rachel Whiteread House London, UK 1993

full stop. Dot dot dot

Henry VIII’s Wives full stop. Dot dot dot Arbroath, UK 2014

Metro-Net, Transportable Subway Entrance

Martin Kippenberger Metro-Net, Transportable Subway Entrance Syros, Greece 1993–1997

Time and Relative Dimensions in Space

Mark Wallinger Time and Relative Dimensions in Space Oxford, UK 2001

Heidelberg Project

Tyree Guyton Heidelberg Project Detroit, USA 1988

Draped Seated Woman

Henry Moore Draped Seated Woman London, UK 1957

Oscar Wilde’s Tomb

Jacob Epstein Oscar Wilde’s Tomb Paris, France 1912

News

18 September 2024

I was delighted to discover the work of Beverly Buchanan recently, and, in particular, her site specific sculpture Marsh Ruins (1981) in Georgia, USA.

Made up of three sculptural mounds, arranged in a triangular formation, the work is submerged in water twice a day. It is ‘decrepit, forgotten, overgrown and broken’ not only because it has been destroyed by elemental forces and the movement of time, but also the wilful amnesia of white America. It speaks of ephemerality, vulnerability, and ghostly, immaterial, love.

Read more about the work here.

20 July 2024

I met Carla Cruz at a conference we both spoke at in Lund in 2023. Her project, ‘Association of Friends of Angel Square’ (developed with Ângelo Ferreira de Sousa and others) was so beguiling and strange, I just had to dig deeper and include it in the Archive of Destruction.

I love projects / artworks / things that extend our thinking around what public art can be. This one takes a destroyed sculpture by a male artist produced in the 1990s for a shopping centre in Porto, and ushers it down a revolutionary path. The story involves the creation of a fake association, guided tours to the ruins of modernity, the installation of plaques to plaques, dinner parties in abandoned underground car parks and costumed pilgrimages through the streets of Porto. It’s gorgeous!! Read the story here!!

Image: José Rodrigues, The Angel, 1996. The sculpture is seen here in pieces, taped by municipal conservators to check for missing pieces after it had been cut into sections by thieves in 2006. Credit: aapA archive.

11 July 2024

I’ve always wanted the Archive of Destruction to be a teaching / learning tool, so I’m delighted that the MA Culture Criticism and Curation course at Central Saint Martins (part of University of the Arts, London) has adopted it as a project partner for 2024.

Students will be mulling over a number of rich, associative questions:

How can an archive record something that no longer exists?

How can an archival practice destabilise or disrupt conventions of classification?

What is the value of operating outside of institutional frameworks?

They’ll also be thinking through the critical potential of the speculative, the experimental, and the imaginative to address omissions and sites of erasure in historical narratives.

Students will realise their proposal in some public form towards the end of the year. I can’t wait to see what transpires.

09 May 2024

I’ve written a text for this gorgeous new publication that documents an ambitious art commissioning programme in the Ruhr region of west Germany, called Emscherkunstweg. It’s about destruction and how important it is. How the vulnerability of an artwork is intrinsic to its success and how artworks need to forge a visceral relationship to their publics – this is what gives them their traction!

You can access a copy of the text on my website.

01 April 2024

I’ve been invited to speak at a conference at NYU Abu Dhabi in April 2024. ‘The Generative Archive: Research, Methods and Practices’ and has been convened by Salwa Mikdadi, Director, al Mawrid Arab Center for the Study of Art, NYUAD, along with colleagues at University of North Texas and University of California, Berkeley.

I’ll be using the Archive of Destruction to discuss communal memory, critical fabulation, the role of AI, building archives beyond institutions and alternatives ways of constructing narratives.

11 February 2024

New artwork text! This one is complex and multi-layered, working across two generations of artists in the city of Skopje, Republic of North Macedonia. It reflects on acts of erasure, occupation and obliteration, and moves from earthquake, to childhood dreaming and redemption.

Nada Prlja’s Department for Conservation and Restoration (2016 – ongoing)

26 January 2024

I’m putting together ideas for the second Archive of Destruction reader, which will be made up of conversations with artists and curators; texts on destruction, love and range; and a newly commissioned graphic story.

I’m looking for funding (it’s just me, Jes Fernie, covering the costs of this project through lectures and commissioned texts). Please get in touch if you can help – or if you’d like me to give a lecture for your students or programme. You can also buy a copy of the first Reader from Flat Time House. All proceeds go directly to artists and curators.

You’ll see at the back of the Reader, I’ve included responses to the project from a range of people. Please send me yours for potential inclusion in the next issue! Make it strange / interesting.

Image: Pilar Quinteros, Janus Fortress, Folkestone, 2021. Prematurely destroyed by a member of the public, who also stole the skull sculpture that Quinteros had installed inside this shell. “Fragility and metamorphosis are part of my work – my sculptures are a kind of monument to uncertainty”. AoD Reader II will include an in-depth interview with the artist about her work and the Folkestone commission.

27 November 2023

You can listen to Jes’ lecture at the Fountains Failures Futures: The afterlives of public art symposium in Lund (Sept 2023) here.

Jes argues that the destruction of public artworks is often viewed as a shameful display of failure. She explores how we could rethink this response and embrace the idea of destruction as a potentially transformative, expansive, cathartic act which revels in unruly, unknowable live contexts, and offers opportunities for the accrual of new narratives. Drawing on examples of artworks in the online Archive of Destruction, Jes highlights public artworks by Nicole Eisenman, Amina Menia, and 3Nós3.

09 October 2023

We’ve written a new text on Marta Minujin’s incredible James Joyce Tower in Bread sculpture which was constructed on the streets of Dublin in 1980s.

Fire engines, cranes, and volunteers helped move the tower onto its side. Local people stripped it of its loaves (“Didja bring any butter, missus?”), staggering home with their arms laden with bread.

References were made by critics to ‘process sculpture’, transubstantiation and communion, Irish literature, and the ‘annihilation of the notion of art’.

Read it here.

19 May 2023

Jes Fernie will be talking at a conference held in Lund in September 2023 about failure, reinscription and the afterlives of public artworks.

Organised by Maddie Leach at Valand Academy, this two day event will discuss issues relating to custodianship and whether ‘failed’ artworks can be revitalised and thought anew; how this raises implications for their authorship and ownership, and what challenges it presents for commissioners, artists, architects, and urban designers. How can producers, owners and custodians of public artworks and the communities and publics living with these works anticipate and accommodate complex afterlives of public art?

Speakers: Patrick Amsellem, Lisa Le Feuvre and Jes Fernie.

Details here

24 February 2023

Jes Fernie (right) will be talking about the Archive of Destruction with artist Sam Durant (left) on 26 April 2023 at Art Exchange, University of Essex.

Large-scale drawings from Durant’s ‘Iconoclasm’ series have been installed around the labyrinthine University of Essex campus. Based on TV and newspaper images, they depict acts of destruction enacted on public monuments and statues.

The story of Durant’s ‘Scaffold’ sculpture is written up in the Archive of Destruction. It’s a pretty compelling read, involving a huge international outcry, a ceremonial burning, and the eventual transferral of the intellectual property rights of the work to the Dakota people.

Join on Zoom if you can’t make it to the Essex Unviersity campus.

16 February 2023

We were very happy to be invited by Arcade Gallery in Brussels to hold an event for the first Archive of Destruction Reader.

One of the many lovely things about printing a publication in newspaper format is that it’s not precious (…it’s easily destroyed). We covered the walls of the gallery in the paper, creating interesting juxtapositions (Boredom / Futurist Suit / Death etc).

The display system was designed by artist Anna Barham – it’s part of a project called Crystal Fabric Field that she did with MIMA and Site Gallery.

03 November 2022

Jes will be speaking at the forthcoming ‘Curating Contemporary Art and Design: Archives and Collections Intensive‘ at the RCA on 10 Nov 2022.

Her contribution will consider the status of the Archive of Destruction as a curator-led, self-initiated project, existing beyond an institutional framework. She will discuss the playful way in which modes of destruction in the archive have been arranged (fear, love, greed, boredom etc) in order to critique the system of categorisation often employed by museums.

05 October 2022

Thank you to everyone who came to the launch of the first Archive of Destruction Reader at Flat Time House! It was an incredible evening with much enthusiasm and conversation.

You can buy a copy of the publication here. All proceeds go towards contributors fees for the next reader.

Many thanks for your support.

20 September 2022

New York based art historian Dana Liljegren has written a new essay for the Archive of Destruction.

The récupération movement, established in Dakar, Senegal in the 1990s is characterised as a process of recovery, reclamation and recycling involving man-made objects and natural materials. Liljegren discusses the work of three artists who use discarded objects to think through the subject of destruction and position it as a transformative act.

Image: Ndary Lô, Délit de surcharge, 2004. Installed in the grounds of the French Cultural Centre, Dakar, Senegal. Photo: © Susan Kart

18 September 2022

Join us to celebrate the publication of the first Archive of Destruction Reader.

Tuesday 4 October 2022

6.30 – 8.00pm

Flat Time House, London

www.flattimeho.org.uk

Curator and writer Jes Fernie will introduce the archive and the Reader at 7pm. She will be joined by Gareth Bell-Jones (Director, Flat Time House) and Jo Melvin (curator and writer) who will briefly respond to the provocations embedded within the archive.

The reader includes conversations, texts, stories, artworks, and pictures by artists, curators and writers, including Joe Namy, Marianne Wagner, Kasper König, Britta Peters, Vanessa Onwuemezi, Marysia Lewandowska, Horacio Zabala, Candice Purwin, and Joanna Rajkowska.

This will be an informal affair. Everyone welcome!

Copies of the reader will be on sale for £8 – please bring cash.

29 August 2022

Jes talked to journalist Kyle MacNeill (pictured here) about the Archive of Destruction for an article in Saturday’s Guardian newspaper.

11 April 2022

Jes is currently putting together the first in a series of AoD newspapers, to be launched in the summer of 2022 at Flat Time House in London.

The series will be made up of interviews, commissioned texts, and graphic illustrations by artists, curators, and commissioners. They will be playful, experimental and ephemeral in character, and will offer readers the opportunity to dive further into issues relating to the destruction of public art. The first issue will include interviews with artist Joe Namy on their commission for the Borås Biennial 2021, and the curators of Skulptur Projekte Münster 2017 Kasper König, Britta Peters, and Marianne Wagner. We’ve also commissioned illustrator and writer Candice Purwin to tell the story of the destruction of Robert Smithson’s Partially Buried Woodshed (1971) in the form of a graphic story.

Sign up to the Archive of Destruction newsletter to be kept up to speed with developments. Link in ‘About’ section.

Image: Katharina Fritsch, Madonna, 1987, Münster.

28 January 2022

New artwork text! This work by Austrian artist Katharina Cibulka was destroyed three days after it was installed on the facade of Cukrarna Palace in Ljubljana, Slovenia in 2021.

Sewn in the gendered language of pink cross-stitch, the work reads: ‘As long as the hope we spread is stronger than the fear we face, I will be a feminist’. It is part of a series of publicly sited works by Cibulka called SOLANGE, German for ‘as long as’ – a project that forms a critique of gender-specific social inequalities and power structures. Read the full story here.

31 December 2021

Many of the stories in this archive will never be finished – the narratives around public artworks are a continually shifting, live affair. Where possible, texts will be updated to reflect these changes. The story of Nicole Eisenman’s public fountain in Münster, Germany, which was destroyed in 2017, has been extended to included details of an incredible campaign by local people to install a new edition of the work. Read it here.

02 November 2021

Jes has written a text on Alberto Burri’s Grande Cretto (1985-2015) – one of the world’s biggest land art pieces installed on the site of a Sicilian town after it was destroyed by an earthquake in 1968. The work takes the footprint of the original town; huge ’cracks’ in the structure replicate the street layout.

26 October 2021

LA-based writer Matt Stromberg has written a really nice, in-depth article in The Art Newspaper about the Archive of Destruction.

13 September 2021

This month’s Art Monthly (449: Sept 2021) includes an insightful essay by art historian Matthew Bowman on the subject of destruction, taking the Archive of Destruction as a focal point for discussion.

09 September 2021

Jes has written a text on Maddie Leach’s The Fountain: an art-technological-social drama, an interesting example of a work / research project that takes an existing artwork and considers an alternative proposal for it – picking up on issues relating to authorship, originality, and the extent to which it is possible to reimagine a work of art by another artist.

01 June 2021

To coincide with the launch of the Archive of Destruction, Jes has organised two online talks involving artists, curators and writers whose work appears in the archive.

Please take a look here and join us!