Art under Attack, Tate Britain

Despite mixed reviews, we still think you should visit Art Under Attack, the Tate Britain’s unusual Autumn exhibition, which takes a metaphorical sledgehammer to the concept of art as ‘creative’. An exploration of what happens when art is desecrated for political purposes, this is a show with ruins at its heart, and the first of its kind to study the history and notion of art-vandalism in Britain from the 16th Century to the present day.

The ‘assaults’ which come under the microscope in this show range from the religious-ideological to the gender-political, over the course of 500 years. Early-modern sculptures and texts, defaced by waves of state-sanctioned religious iconoclasm in the 16th and 17th centuries sit next to sculptor Allen Jones’s infamous 1969 Chair, which was damaged in a feminist attack in 1986. The piano destroyed by performance artist Raphael Ortiz during the first international Destruction in Art Symposium, held in Covent Garden in 1966, is on display for the first time, posing complex questions about whether and how artists can harness destruction as a creative impulse.

The biggest buzz so far has come from the general direction of the recently-rediscovered medieval Statue of the Dead Christ (c.1500-20), a stone rendering found beneath the chapel floor of the Worshipful Company of Mercers in the City of London in 1954, during operations to remove bomb debris. Its arms, legs and the top of its head were hacked off before it was secreted below ground, and it’s thought to have been attacked brutally by Protestant iconoclasts in the Reformation who feared its truly harrowing depiction of the body in rigor mortis. 

The reviews of this exhibition have been fairly mixed- but this exhibition is worth a look - some of this work is being displayed for the first time. Don't forget to have a look round the brand-spanking new wing!

Tickets: £13.10 (£11.30 concessions, £6.55 Art Fund, FREE for Members)