The Art of Undoing - Erasure, Intervention, and the Rewriting of Authorship
- Diamond Zhou
- May 24
- 20 min read
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SATURDAY EVENING POST
May 24th, 2025
Throughout modern art history, a subversive strand of artistic practice has embraced undoing as a form of creation. Painters, sculptors, and conceptual artists have intentionally altered, erased, destroyed, or remade artworks – sometimes their own, sometimes by others – turning acts of negation into new works or provocative statements. Such gestures challenges traditional notions of authorship, materiality, and permanence in art. Why would an artist obliterate what they or another have made? What does it mean when destruction itself becomes the art?
One of the most legendary acts of artistic erasure occurred in 1953, when Robert Rauschenberg created Erased de Kooning Drawing. To make this piece, Rauschenberg obtained a drawing from the abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning and then spent weeks diligently erasing it. The result was a blank sheet bearing only smudges of the original, presented in a gilded frame with a neat inscription (hand-lettered by Jasper Johns) that reads: “ERASED de KOONING DRAWING / ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG / 1953.” Rauschenberg’s goal, as he later explained, was to test the limits of art by using removal rather than addition: “to discover whether an artwork could be produced entirely through erasure” He initially tried erasing his own sketches, but found that conceptually unsatisfying, “If it was my own work being erased, then the erasing would only be half the process, and I wanted it to be the whole,” he recalled. For the erasure to register as art, it had to target a creation “everybody agreed was great,” so that “the erasing [is] the whole act” Thus, he chose de Kooning, at the time one of the most celebrated living artists, ensuring the gesture carried real weight.
De Kooning reluctantly consented to Rauschenberg’s request, even picking out a particularly challenging drawing (with dense layers of grease pencil, ink, and charcoal) that he said “would be missed” Rauschenberg laboured for nearly two months to obliterate the image, “wear[ing] out a lot of erasers” in the process. Without the telling label, a viewer might assume the framed paper was simply blank or damaged. But the inscription and context transform it into a profound conceptual statement. Erased de Kooning asks the viewer to consider authorship, where the work is often described as a collaboration between de Kooning and Rauschenberg, and to contemplate whether the idea of removal can be art. In effect, the act of erasure itself becomes the creative act. Art historian Catherine Craft notes that Rauschenberg’s piece extends Duchamp’s avant-garde notion of the artist as an originator of ideas rather than mere craftsmanship. By literally “undoing” a drawing by a modern master, Rauschenberg flipped the script on creation and destruction, turning absence into presence.
Rauschenberg’s iconoclastic gesture had a ripple effect, influencing other artists to explore erasure, negation, and palimpsest in their work. Indeed, Erased de Kooning can be seen as part of a broader trend in post-war art where removal or alteration of existing imagery became a creative strategy. Even earlier, Dadaists had toyed with similar ideas, Marcel Duchamp famously “assaulted” the Mona Lisa (via a cheap postcard reproduction) by drawing a moustache on her in 1919 (L.H.O.O.Q.), slyly questioning art’s sanctity. In the 1960s and beyond, various forms of artistic erasure emerged: for instance, the Conceptual Art movement occasionally featured works consisting of the elimination of content. In the realm of poetry and literature, “erasure” techniques (where a text is partially erased to create a new work) also gained currency, paralleling the visual art experiments.
If Rauschenberg’s erasure was a quiet, private act made visible only through framing and text, other artists in the 1960s took a far more dramatic approach to destruction-as-art. In London, the German-born artist Gustav Metzger pioneered what he termed Auto-Destructive Art – art that inherently destroys itself or is destroyed as part of its realization. Metzger, a Holocaust survivor haunted by the destructive potential of technology and war, saw auto-destruction as an urgent political statement. “Auto-destructive art is to do with rejecting power,” Metzger explained in a later interview. It was a response to living in the nuclear age and a direct protest against the oppressive forces he’d witnessed: “Facing up to the Nazis and the powers of the Nazi state coloured my life as an artist,” he said, linking the impulse to destroy with a rejection of authoritarian power structures.
In 1959 Metzger wrote his first manifesto on auto-destructive art, and in 1961 he staged an iconic public demonstration on London’s South Bank. Wearing a gas mask, Metzger stood before large sheets of nylon painted in bold colours and, using a spray pump, hurled acid at the nylon canvases. Before a crowd of onlookers, the acid slowly ate holes through the fabric, dramatically “painting” by subtraction. “The important thing about burning a hole in that sheet,” Metzger recalled of this act, “was that it opened up a new view across the Thames of St. Paul’s Cathedral. Auto-destructive art was never merely destructive. Destroy a canvas and you create shapes.” In Metzger’s eyes, the jagged holes and charred edges left behind were themselves the art, they are frames through which the world could be seen anew. The work existed only in its disintegrative moment; once the material was fully destroyed, the artistic act was complete. Metzger’s contemporaneous manifestos described auto-destructive art as a public art form suited to an industrial society, one that “mirrors the compulsive perfectionism of arms manufacture – polishing to destruction point” By harnessing processes of decay, corrosion, and mechanical ruin, Metzger sought to “re-enact the obsession with destruction” that he felt defined modern life. It was art as a political and moral warning: the self-destroying artwork dramatized humanity’s capacity to bring about its own end through technology and war. At the same time, Metzger insisted on an anti-ego ethos for the artist. He often refused to promote his personal image and even went on “art strike” from 1977–1980 (producing no art) to protest the commercialization of art. In auto-destructive art, the process and message eclipsed any object or artistic persona.
Around the same period, across Europe and the U.S., other artists also turned to theatrical destruction to critique materialism and celebrate impermanence. The Swiss kinetic sculptor Jean Tinguely produced perhaps the most famous self-destructing artwork of the era with Homage to New York (1960). Invited by the Museum of Modern Art in New York to create a piece for its sculpture garden, Tinguely (working with engineers and fellow artists like Billy Klüver and even Robert Rauschenberg) built a massive contraption out of scrap metal, bicycle wheels, gears, motors, a piano, weather balloons, bottles, a bathtub, an entire 27-foot-high mechanized jumble of junk. This machine was designed to literally tear itself apart in front of an audience. On the evening of March 17, 1960, before a black-tie crowd of art patrons, Homage to New York was set in motion. For 27 minutes it performed a cacophonous dance of creation and destruction: wheels spun, a player piano plunked out tunes until it caught fire, painted canvases were mechanically made and then promptly ripped to shreds, coloured smoke bombs went off, bottles smashed, a meteorological balloon inflated until it burst – a riotous spectacle of entropy. Eventually, the machine began to go genuinely haywire, sparking an actual fire. Famously, a piece of debris flew off and struck an NBC cameraman, and the commotion grew dangerous enough that a fireman stepped in with a hose to extinguish the flaming sculpture, abruptly ending the performance. What remained was a heap of charred, dripping wreckage – bits of which MoMA salvaged as relics of the event (some fragments now reside in museum collections). Tinguely wryly referred to Homage to New York and similar works as “self-constructing and self-destroying” sculptures. In other words, the machine lived, acted, and then suicidally died, like a fleeting organism. This absurdist tragedy-comedy was Tinguely’s commentary on the speed of technological obsolescence and the excesses of consumer society. By building a machine that devoured itself, he satirized the faith in industrial progress. Yet he did so playfully, as the work had an almost slapstick character even as it evoked profound ideas about transience. The critic Calvin Tomkins noted that Homage to New York created “a joyous sense that destruction and creation were one, that the chuckling machine was performing a dance of death that was also a dance of life”.
Indeed, Tinguely’s destructive art often had an element of celebration: an embrace of impermanence as liberating. It also set a template for later artists, like Britain’s Michael Landy, who in 2001 would channel Tinguely’s spirit by systematically destroying all his personal belongings as an art piece titled Break Down. As Sotheby’s head of contemporary art noted, Banksy and others have “cleverly nestled [themselves] in the pages of art history” alongside figures like Rauschenberg, Metzger, Tinguely, and Landy who literally destroyed art or possessions as artistic acts.
It’s worth noting that auto-destructive tendencies were not limited to male Euro-American artists. For example, French-New Realist artist Niki de Saint-Phalle in 1961 began her series of Tirs (or “shooting paintings”), in which she loaded pockets of paint into assemblages and invited participants to shoot the artwork with a rifle. With each bullet, the piece would “bleed” drips of vivid colour, the act of violent destruction completing the painting. Saint-Phalle framed these performances as a release of anger and a metaphorical destruction of the traditional art object, a cathartic creation-through-destruction. Such gestures paralleled Metzger’s and Tinguely’s in reimagining the artist’s role: no longer a careful craftsman preserving art for eternity, but an instigator of processes beyond their full control, embracing entropy and chance.
The rise of performance art and happenings in the 1960s reinforced this outlook. Artists like Yoko Ono (with her 1964 Cut Piece, where viewers were invited to snip away her clothing) also used acts of physical unmaking to symbolize social or personal themes, emphasizing process and concept over object. Collectively, these experiments shifted the focus of art from permanent objects to ephemeral actions and ideas. The destruction was never senseless: it was performed with intent, often documented on film or in photographs, which themselves became part of the work’s legacy. In a sense, these artists made destruction constructive.
Not all acts of artistic destruction are so public or performative. Some are private, born from an artist’s personal evolution or perfectionism, yet they too speak volumes about authorship and artistic intent. A dramatic example is John Baldessari’s Cremation Project (1970). Baldessari, a California artist, had spent the 1950s and early 1960s painting semi-abstract canvases. By the late ’60s, he grew disillusioned with traditional painting and was pivoting to the new realm of Conceptual art. In a bold rite of passage, Baldessari decided to literally incinerate his painting practice to date. In July 1970 he gathered all the paintings he had created between 1953 and 1966 that remained in his possession, which was roughly 100 works, and brought them to a crematorium in San Diego. There, like a Viking funeral for his student-years oeuvre, the canvases were cremated. Baldessari did not stop at mere destruction; true to his witty conceptual style, he transformed the aftermath into art. The ashes of the paintings were collected and divided: some portions were placed into a decorative book-shaped urn which he kept on his bookshelf, while other ashes were baked into a batch of cookies. These “cremation cookies” were later actually exhibited (the Museum of Modern Art in New York displayed them in an exhibition). Finally, Baldessari commissioned a bronze memorial plaque listing the birth and death dates of his destroyed paintings (1953–1966), as if commemorating a deceased person. He even took out a tongue-in-cheek obituary in a local newspaper announcing the “death” of his painting output.
The Cremation Project was rich in layered meaning. On one level, it was a practical clearing-out of past work Baldessari no longer identified with, as he was heading to teach at CalArts and moving to a smaller studio and saw little value in storing his conservative early pieces. But more profoundly, it was, as art historian Lynne Cooke observed, “in part a statement of frustration, in part a gesture of renunciation,” marking Baldessari’s decisive break with the limitations of painting. Cooke called it “a liberation from painting – not simply as a medium but as an arena – to a realm of activity that seemingly had no boundaries”. Indeed, after 1970 Baldessari embraced photography, text, video, and conceptual performance in a free-wheeling practice that helped define West Coast Conceptual art. The theatricality and absurd humour of the Cremation Project also set the tone for the ironic tone of Los Angeles art in that era. Critic Lucy Bradnock noted that Baldessari’s ritual had “critical paradoxes” – by baking the ashes into edible treats and preserving them, he reified the remains even as he negated the art object. This tension – between rejecting the past and yet commemorating it – reflects the conceptual complexity of Baldessari’s gesture. He often joked about the creative side of destruction: “To be creative you have to have destruction quite often too,” he said later, invoking the myth of the phoenix rising from ashes. In destroying his early work, Baldessari essentially authored a new artistic self. Fittingly, one year later he would make his famous commitment to experimentation by having students at Nova Scotia College hand-write his mantra “I will not make any more boring art” repeatedly on a gallery wall.
Where Baldessari’s purge was a conscious artistic rebirth, other artists have destroyed their own works out of obsessive self-critique or a desire to control their legacy. Francis Bacon, known for his visceral figurative paintings, was notoriously merciless in editing his own works. He often tore, slashed, or discarded canvases he found inadequate, sometimes even near-finished pieces. After Bacon’s death in 1992, researchers cataloguing the chaos of his London studio at 7 Reece Mews found “one hundred slashed canvases… arranged in stacks”amid the debris. These weren’t minor scraps; many were sizable paintings that Bacon (or his trusted studio assistant and friend John Edwards) had deliberately mutilated with a knife. Edwards recounted helping Bacon destroy about twenty large works around 1976, at Bacon’s request, cutting them into tiny bits so that no dumpster diver could retrieve even a fragment. Bacon insisted on this thoroughness precisely because in the past people had scavenged discarded fragments from his trash and treated them as valuable collectibles. The spectre of unfinished or “failed” Bacons circulating without his consent horrified him. By slashing them, Bacon asserted absolute authorship: only he would decide which paintings survived to represent his oeuvre. It’s said that Bacon destroyed an astonishing number of works over his career, almost as many as he released, calling them “rubbish” if they didn’t meet his standards. “The practice of destroying canvases is not unusual among artists,” notes the Estate of Francis Bacon, “and in most cases the work is taken to a stage of near finality before the canvas is destroyed.” In Bacon’s case, the motive was perfectionism and self-censorship. His art was deeply tied to his psyche and reputation; thus, destruction served as a form of editing or curating his legacy. Paradoxically, the fragments and slashed remains he left behind have themselves become prized artifacts – some have been exhibited to give insight into his process. This raises an interesting philosophical point: once the artist has exercised their will by destroying a work, what is the status of the remnants? In Bacon’s mind they were trash, but the art world’s hunger for anything related to a famous artist can transform even “non-art” debris into fetishized objects. (A trove of Bacon’s torn paintings and studio ephemera that an electrician saved from a skip in the 1970s eventually sold at auction in 2007 for almost £1 million, a scenario Bacon likely would have abhorred.) Bacon’s story illustrates the tension between an artist’s intention and the afterlife of their art: he tried to undo part of his career, yet in doing so he inadvertently created a new category of Bacon artifact – the destroyed work as cultural relic.
Even an artist as revered as Claude Monet engaged in furious acts of self-destruction. In his later years, Monet became famously dissatisfied with many of his canvases, particularly those from his Water Lilies series which he struggled with as his eyesight dimmed and his ambitions grew. On multiple occasions, Monet vented his frustration by literally attacking his own paintings. In May 1908, for example, Monet slashed at least 15 large water lily canvases with a knife and even used his boot to stomp through them. Monet’s wife Alice wrote in distress, “He punctures canvases every day… One day, things are not too bad; the next day all is lost.”. This pattern of creation and destruction was fuelled by Monet’s obsessive pursuit of perfection. As he wrestled with capturing the elusive effects of light and water, Monet grew convinced that many of his paintings fell short. He preferred to destroy them rather than let subpar work leave his studio. “My life has been nothing but a failure, and all that’s left for me to do is to destroy my paintings before I disappear,” the aging Monet lamented in a moment of despair. Those close to him understood that his wrath toward his canvases was the flip side of his genius, “He was his own greatest critic,” observed French statesman Georges Clemenceau, noting that Monet’s anger at his work drove him to slash at the images he couldn’t reconcile. Only death, Monet said, would save him from seeing imperfections in his art. Ironically, the paintings Monet spared from destruction, the ones he finally deemed acceptable, are today among the most cherished masterpieces in museums worldwide. Knowing how many he relegated to flames or the knife adds poignancy to those that survive. It also raises an ethical question: Monet’s contemporaries recognized the loss when he destroyed works (one critic even quipped that it’s “a pity… that some other painters do not do the same” to enforce higher standards), but posterity might lament the disappearance of 500 or so Monet paintings that might have been treasures.
Numerous other artists have, for varying reasons, destroyed or drastically altered their own creations. The German painter Gerhard Richter, upon defecting from East to West Germany in 1961, famously destroyed almost all the paintings he had made before, determined to reinvent his style free from socialist realism. The Abstract Expressionist Agnes Martin reportedly ripped up many early works during periods of creative block, preserving only what met her refined sense of harmony. Even centuries earlier, legends tell of Michelangelo smashing his incomplete sculpture (the Florentine Pietà) in a fit of frustration, and of Leonardo burning drawings to keep his secrets – though these tales blend truth and myth, they convey the long-standing idea that artists sometimes unmake to move forward. In non-Western contexts, there are also ritualized practices of intentional ephemerality: Tibetan Buddhist monks, for example, create intricate sand mandalas only to ceremonially sweep them away upon completion, symbolizing the transience of all things. Such acts, while spiritual rather than part of the gallery art tradition, share a philosophy that has seeped into modern art’s understanding of destruction: namely, that impermanence can be embraced as an integral part of an artwork’s meaning. The artists who destroy their own work, whether in a blaze of glory like Baldessari or in solitude like Monet, ultimately force us to consider what an artwork truly is. Is it the physical object, or the creative intention it represents? When Baldessari burned his paintings, he arguably completed them in a different medium. When Bacon slashed his, he was asserting that those images did not reach the status of art at alL. In each case, the act of undoing becomes an inseparable chapter of the artwork’s “life,” often telling us more about the artist’s ideas than the intact work might have.
Rauschenberg’s erasure of de Kooning was one early example of collaborative negation, done with consent. Far more transgressive was the series “Insult to Injury” (2003) by the British duo Jake and Dinos Chapman, who quite literally defaced the work of a long-dead master. The Chapman brothers obtained a pristine 1937 edition of Francisco Goya’s The Disasters of War – a set of 80 famous etchings depicting the horrors of war, regarded as one of the art world’s most revered print series. In an act that made many in the art establishment shudder, the Chapmans “systematically defaced” these original Goya prints by drawing their own imagery on top of them. They added cartoonish heads – clowns, grotesque faces, even kitschy smiley faces and Mickey Mouse-like characters – onto Goya’s anguished figures. Where Goya etched scenes of torture, famine, and mutilation, the brothers planted absurd, acidly satirical motifs, essentially collaborating with (or vandalizing) Goya across a 200-year time gap. This project, pointedly titled Insult to Injury, was instantly polarizing. Many viewed it as a profanation or “desecration of the memory of Goya,” as one critic wrote. After all, the Chapmans had irreversibly altered cultural artifacts of significant. The brothers saw their intervention as a continuation of Goya’s spirit by shocking modern viewers just as Goya shocked his own time. They called their alterations “rectifications” (a dark joke referencing The Shining, where a ghostly butler urges, “correct them” to fix a situation). In their characteristically provocative way, the Chapmans argued that by adding outrageous new content, they forced today’s viewers to confront the visceral horror of Goya’s images afresh, breaking the polite distance that antique art can acquire in museums. Interestingly, over a decade later, the once-scandalous Insult to Injury works were exhibited in 2017 at the Goya Museum in Zaragoza, Spain, effectively endorsed as part of Goya’s artistic legacy. The curator of that show suggested that the Chapmans had “taken Goya’s message, that war can’t be justified, that violence can’t be justified, and transformed it and built on it”. This institutional acceptance shows how time can shift the lens on authorship disputes.
Other instances of unauthorized artistic intervention have prompted even sharper legal reactions. When performance artist Alexander Brener spray-painted a dollar sign over a Kazimir Malevich painting in 1997 as a protest against the commercialism of art, he was jailed for vandalism – his act viewed as a criminal assault on another’s work, not a creative statement. Likewise, when a man defaced Mark Rothko’s painting in London’s Tate Modern in 2012 by scrawling “a potential piece of yellowism” on it (alluding to a nonsensical art movement), he was swiftly arrested and later imprisoned. The judge in that case highlighted that society does not permit individuals to impose themselves on public cultural treasures in that manner. The stark difference between these outcomes and something like the Chapman brothers’ project often comes down to permission and context. If you have consent (or legal ownership) and frame it as art, an act of alteration might be tolerated or even lauded; if you do not, it’s likely to be seen as mere vandalism. In 1995 Ai Weiwei created Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, a photographic triptych showing him smashing a 2000-year-old ceremonial urn. This work was celebrated as a commentary on the Communist Chinese government’s destruction of cultural heritage (and on the idea of breaking from antiquity to create anew). Ai owned the urn and accepted the consequences of obliterating an antiquity. But in 2014, another artist, Maximo Caminero, walked into an exhibition of Ai’s work in Miami and deliberately smashed one of Ai Weiwei’s painted urns in “solidarity”, effectively mimicking Ai’s gesture to make a point. Ai Weiwei, however, did not appreciate this unsolicited collaboration and condemned it, and Caminero was arrested for criminal mischief. Most recently, Ai Weiwei's Porcelain Cube was intentionally destroyed by Vaclav Pisvejc at Palazzo Fava in Bologna in 2024. As one commentator succinctly put it regarding destructive gestures, “Ai Weiwei’s destruction is elevated as art, [while] Pisvejc’s [action] is condemned as vandalism. Is it ownership, not consent, which distinguishes the actions?” This rhetorical question highlights a key point: when Banksy shreds his own painting at auction, it’s art; when someone else shreds a Banksy without permission, it’s a crime. Authorship and agency are central. The only reason Rauschenberg’s erasure of de Kooning wasn’t a scandal is because de Kooning had handed him the drawing and tacitly blessed the experiment. One can only imagine the uproar had Rauschenberg stolen a de Kooning drawing to erase. The layers of authorship in these cases are complex. In Erased de Kooning, two artists share credit (the “original” marks may be gone but de Kooning’s presence is felt, and Rauschenberg signs the result.
Meanwhile, some artistic interventions live in a grey zone between reverence and irreverence. A century ago, Duchamp’s mustachioed Mona Lisa was seen as a blasphemous prank by some, yet it paved the way for thinking of art as a fluid conversation. In the 1980s, artists like Sherrie Levine “re-authored” others’ art by re-photographing famous photographs – appropriation art that didn’t destroy the original but certainly usurped its authorship in challenging ways. And in street art, it’s common for artists to tag or modify each other’s works (sometimes as homage, sometimes rivalry), an informal dialogue that occasionally makes it into galleries. The institutional response to these practices is telling: museums now sometimes acquire the results of such interventions, effectively blessing the secondary artist’s role. For instance, the Tate acquired and displayed the Chapman brothers’ defaced Disasters of War prints, and SFMOMA, as noted, proudly displays Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning. This suggests that over time, what starts as an anti-authorial gesture can itself become canonized, with the “story” of the intervention adding a compelling layer to the work’s provenance.
In each case, what might superficially look like an act of nihilism is in fact loaded with creative and conceptual purpose. These gestures compel us to ask: What do we value in art? Is it the hand of the artist, the permanence of the object, the sanctity of creativity? Or can an act of erasure be as generative as a brushstroke? Can destruction reveal new truths that creation alone cannot?
Philosophically, the art of undoing aligns with a broader understanding that creation and destruction are entwined. Just as a sculptor might chisel away marble to free an image from the block, these artists chisel away at the assumptions and materials of art to free new ideas. In doing so, they expose how the physical object can serve not just as a bearer of meaning, but as a site of challenge: a surface to be contested, rewritten, erased, or obliterated. Whether through theatrical public acts, quiet studio obliterations, or the re-authorship of others’ images, these gestures reveal the inherent instability of the art object and the cultural narratives it carries.
They also highlight the temporality and fragility of human endeavours. In a world where everything from buildings, to civilizations, even norms, can collapse and be rebuilt, art too is not static. It ages, it degrades, it is reconsidered. The artists who embrace undoing remind us that impermanence is not a limitation but a vital aspect of artistic meaning.
In a sense, every act of creative destruction in art is a conversation across time: it speaks to the past, to the present, and to the future. These artists and their works remind us that art is not only about beautiful objects for contemplation, but also about bold ideas that can unsettle and transform our perspective. The ruined canvas, the blank page, the detonated sculpture, these voids are not empty of meaning, because they are filled with questions and insights.
We can always take a moment and appreciate how these radical gestures open fertile ground for discussion about conservation, authenticity, and the evolving purpose of art in society. They force institutions to evolve, collecting intangible or damaged works, and challenge viewers to engage with art intellectually, not just visually or emotionally. In the end, what is undone in form is often redone in thought. The art of undoing is, itself, a form of artistic becoming.
CURRENT EXHIBITION
Barbara Astman: Concealed/Revealed
Exhibition on through Saturday, June 7th.
UPCOMING EXHIBITION
Tony Robins: Flowers of Resistance
Opening Saturday, June 21st, 2025
