Stik, skær, brænd. Sprækken som (kunst)historisk berøringspunkt i værker af Carla Zaccagnini, Annarosa Krøyer Holm og La Vaughn Belle

Abstract

On the 10th of March 1914, Mary Richardson went into the National Gallery in London and attacked Diego Velázquez’ Venus del espejo (1647-51) with around seven cuts from an axe before she was stopped by the museum guard. Richardson was one of the English suffragettes that since 1903 had been organized in Women’s Social and Political Union. The suffragettes organized more or less violent demonstrations and actions in order to create focus on the lack of women’s right to vote. In 1913-14 they attacked works and objects in English museum collections. Seen through the violent attacks by the suffragettes, museum collections appear as places where an ongoing fight for visibility, history, and identity exists. With the suffragettes’ attacks in museum collections as a starting point, this article will analyze contemporary works of art that cut, slit, and burn different white surfaces in the museum space: Annarosa Krøyer Holm’s Tent (2015), La Vaughn Belle’s Cuts and Burns (2016), and Carla Zaccagnini’s Elements of Beauty (2012). These are works that have an aesthetic connection through the white colour and through the very tangible incisions that break the surfaces of the works. These are works that not only engage different historical moments, but also make cuts in these histories. Through a reading of the works, the article seeks to ask how it is possible to (re-)read the museum’s space as a place filled with violence and pain? This is done through a queer feminist and decolonial perspective.