5 - The Joker at the Museum in Tim Burton’s Batman: Artistic Vandalism in Hollywood

Summary

Abstract

This chapter analyzes the aesthetic and political stakes raised by artistic vandalism as practiced by the Joker at the Flugenheim Museum in Gotham City in Tim Burton's Batman (1989). The starting point for this analysis is the use that Swiss-American artist Christian Marclay makes of this scene in Made to be Destroyed (2016), a video exclusively composed of film scenes showing artworks being burnt, smashed, or defaced. While Marclay's editing work tends to reduce artistic vandalism to the compulsive repetition of the dialectics that connects creation and destruction, the Joker's playful iconoclasm reveals the symbolic violence exercised by the aesthetic object and the universalist claims of the art museum as an institution.

Keywords: vandalism, iconoclasm, avant-garde, museum, Batman, Marclay

“Gentlemen! Let's broaden our minds!”

‒ The Joker, Batman (1989)

Christian Marclay's Made to Be Destroyed, or the Joker at the Swiss Institute

In the spring of 2016, New York's Swiss Institute held the exhibition Fade Inon the presence of art and the representation of the artist in film and television. Twenty-five artists, including photographer Cindy Sherman, conceptual artist William Leavitt, and video artist Michael Bell-Smith, explored the role of art on screen. In the last room of the gallery, the visitor discovered a film by Swiss-American artist Christian Marclay entitled Made to Be Destroyed, a 24-minute video composed exclusively of shots showing artworks being destroyed, most often with spectacular violence – Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisaburnt with a flame-thrower by two totalitarian-looking soldiers in Kurt Wimmer's Equilibrium (2002); a classical sculpture smashed with a hammer by a tormented poet in Jean Cocteau's The Blood of a Poet (1932); Thomas Gainsborough's Blue Boy ruined by a clumsy police lieutenant played by Leslie Nielsen in The Naked Gun (1988). Through extensive archival research, selection, and editing, Made to Be Destroyed reveals a motif to be found in almost every culture: violence against art; what Dario Gamboni refers to as “artistic vandalism,” namely, the “acts of violence carried out voluntarily, by individual or poorly organized agents, without any explicit theoretical or strategic framework, against objects that officially have the status of works of art.”