Randy Burman

The Art of Destruction project room installation paid tribute to a rich anti-art tradition beginning with the Futurists, who proposed demolishing Italy’s museums and libraries. Duchamp’s collection of notes chronicling the creative process behind The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1923), described the use …of a Rembrandt as an ironing board. Robert Rauschenberg’s deliberate erasure of a drawing by the Abstract Expressionist painter Willem de Kooning (Rauschenberg, when accused of vandalism, defended his action by explaining that he was exploring a new kind of creative act — making a work of art through the unmaking of another). Raphael Montañez Ortiz, one of the pioneers of Happenings, destruction of pianos. And rock stars Pete Townshend smashing guitars (he had been exposed to German/British artist Gustav Metzger’s theories on Auto-destructive art at art school) and Jimi Hendrix setting his guitar on fire.