The Body as a Trace

Is art an act of making or an act of unmaking? It is impossible to answer this question without looking at how the body engages with the world. The body is not just a vehicle of existence but an instrument of intervention. Marina Abramović’s walk along the Great Wall of China was not just a journey—it was the body performing an act of transformation, a way of marking space and time. When the body moves, it alters its surroundings; it reshapes what exists, it displaces, it erases.

But does erasure truly mean disappearance? Statues, buildings, cities, memories—they are all defined as much by their vanishing as by their presence. The exhibition "Damage Control: Art and Destruction Since 1950" demonstrates how destruction has always been embedded in the very foundation of art. Harold Edgerton’s atomic explosion footage, Raphael Ortiz’s destruction of a piano, Ai Weiwei’s act of dropping a Han Dynasty urn— each of these works frames destruction not as an end, but as a method of creation.

Ortiz’s act of smashing a piano during the 1966 Destruction in Art Symposium aligned with other artists in the movement who saw art not as something that only accumulates but also as something that removes. Just like Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece, in which she invited the audience to cut away her clothes, art is as much an act of disappearance as it is of appearance.

Artists do not only intervene in objects and their own bodies; sometimes, they erase each other’s art. Robert Rauschenberg famously asked Willem de Kooning for a drawing—only to erase it. Jake and Dinos Chapman defaced Francisco Goya’s Disasters of War etchings, replacing the faces of war victims with grotesque clown and dog heads. These acts are not merely acts of vandalism; they rewrite history, suggesting that art is never a fixed entity but a continuous process of revision, destruction, and reimagination.

But is erasure truly an act of destruction? Rauschenberg’s erased De Kooning drawing was never really gone. If anything, its erasure made its presence even stronger. Ai Weiwei’s broken vase, in the moment of its shattering, became an artwork. Destruction is not always an end—it is often a beginning.

Cities, too, exist in this cycle. Buildings are demolished while new ones rise, yet even in their destruction, their traces remain. The removal of Cecil Rhodes’ statue at the University of Cape Town was not merely an act of taking something down; it was the beginning of something else. But when an anonymous person painted the shadow of the statue onto the empty plinth, it became a reminder that sometimes what is absent speaks louder than what is present.

Can a building, a statue, or a city exist without the bodies that inhabit and disrupt them? Krzysztof Wodiczko argues that buildings are not just material structures but ideological instruments—they discipline bodies while also offering them a space for play. If a city gains meaning through the bodies that move through it, then to destroy and rebuild is not just a physical transformation, but also an act of identity-making.

Which brings us back to the question: Is art an act of making or unmaking? The body exists by moving; it defines space by intervening in it. If every act of making contains destruction, then perhaps the real question is: Can art exist at all without destruction?