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In a 2001 essay, W. J. T. Mitchell addresses the phenomenon of offensive images and the violence frequently directed against them. "A kind of theatrical excess in the rituals of smashing, burning, mutilating, whitewashing, egg- and excrement-throwing," he writes, "turns the punishment of images into a spectacular image in its own right."1 Mitchell is on the mark: damaged images are spectacular in their own right. But what are they images of? Vandals tend most often to attack the representational work of art, deliberately impairing the relation between sign and referent. They assume that the offensive image is linked magically to what it represents, and they wish to sever that link. In 1972, on Pentecost Sunday, Laszlo Toth struck Michelangelo's Pieta fifteen times with a three-pound hammer, while crying out, "I am Jesus Christ!" He broke the arm of the Madonna in several places, gouged out the left eye, and knocked off her nose. Redig de Campos, the director of the Vatican Museum, concluded that the masterpiece was "totally destroyed."2 The Pieta now portrayed as the mother of God a woman with no nose and a disfigured face. The art world was thrown into turmoil, but it clung nevertheless to the ideal of the statue's previous referent, demanding that the work be restored to its fabled perfection. No one made the case that a disfigured woman was the statue's new referent, any more than one argues that the Venus de Milo represents a double amputee.
Vandalized images fail to represent what they represented before their injury-and yet we resist the fact. The act of vandalism changes the referential function of the art work, creating a new image in its own right. If this is true, two unforeseen consequences present themselves. First, the act of vandalism is an act of creation because a new image comes to life. Second, if a new image is created, it is potentially the case that a new referent also emerges. Beholders are free to fantasize about what damaged images mean, and as one beholder of these images, I wish to explore a very particular aesthetic fantasy-what I might also call a thought experiment. My intention here is to imagine vandalized works of art in the context of disability studies. Are...