The Vandals

Inspired by Edith Wharton and Honoré de Balzac, the exhibition examines the tensions between posession, ownership, and the act of looking.

“‘The vandals,’ he muttered, ‘the desecrators of beauty; if I thought it would ever get into their hands I'd burn it first.’”—The House of the Dead Hand, Edith Wharton.

 Drawn to objects that bind aesthetic pleasure to larger questions about privacy, possession and refusal, writers across centuries have returned again and again to the strange psycho-spiritual force of the masterpiece. The Vandals, a group exhibition at Gladstone’s KLth Street location, takes its theme from two short stories—Edith Wharton’s The House of the Dead Hand (PQRL) and Honoré de Balzac’s The Unknown Masterpiece (PXYP)—both of which revolve around artworks hidden from public view and the destabilizing consequences that accompany their revelation. 

In both Wharton and Balzac, the concealed artwork acquires an almost occult charge. Artists and collectors alike become custodians of objects whose exposure threatens to destroy the delicate conditions that sustain their power. Blurring the boundaries between desire and love, the power of art and the impulse to possess and see it, these texts propose that to fully apprehend art may itself constitute a form of vandalism. Looking becomes inseparable from domination; admiration slips toward desecration; ultimately an image can harm or be harmed through being seen. Great works appear less as stable objects than as volatile psychic containers, things that perhaps require protection not only from the world, but from our need to consume them.