[MSN] Sweden. Gallery Vandals Destroy Photos. Video published on YouTube

[Museum Security Network Mailing list]

October 9, 2007
Gallery Vandals Destroy Photos 
By CAROL VOGEL
A grainy video of four masked vandals running through an art gallery in
Sweden, smashing sexually explicit photographs with crowbars and axes to the
strain of thundering death-metal music, was posted on YouTube Friday night. 

This was no joke or acting stunt. It was what actually happened on a quiet
Friday afternoon in Lund, a small university town in southern Sweden where
"The History of Sex," an exhibition of photographs by the New York artist
Andres Serrano, had opened two weeks earlier. 

Around 3:30, half an hour before closing, four vandals wearing black masks
stormed into a space known as the Kulturen Gallery while shouting in
Swedish, "We don't support this," plus an expletive. They pushed visitors
aside, entered a darkened room where some of the photographs were displayed
and began smashing the glass protecting the photographs and then hacking
away at the prints. 

The bumpy video, evidently shot with a hand-held camera by someone who ran
into the gallery with the attackers, intersperses images of the Serrano
photographs with lettered commentary in Swedish like "This is art?" before
showing the vandals at work.

No guards were on duty in the gallery, said Viveca Ohlsson, the show's
curator, although security videos captured much of the incident. 

"There was one woman who works at the gallery who tried to stop them until
she saw the axes and crowbars," Ms. Ohlsson said. "These men are dangerous."

By the time the masked men had finished, half the show - seven 50-by-60-inch
photographs, worth some $200,000 over all - had been destroyed. The men left
behind leaflets reading, "Against decadence and for a healthier culture."
The fliers listed no name or organization. 

"I was shocked and horrified," Mr. Serrano said in a telephone interview
yesterday from New York. "I never expected something like this, especially
in this magical town, which is so sweet I joked about it being like
something out of Harry Potter." 

Mr. Serrano said he had flown to Sweden for the opening and was met with
great enthusiasm by gallery visitors. "The reaction was so positive," he
said. "I could never imagine anything like this happening." 

Officials at the local police station said yesterday that the vandals had
not been caught but that they were believed to be part of a neo-Nazi group. 

Ms. Ohlsson said the attack was clearly well planned. "We think that they
had been at the gallery a few days before," she said. "They knew where to
go." 

The show consists of photographs, made in 1995 and 1996, of various sex
acts, including a depiction of a naked woman fondling a stallion. It was
divided into two rooms. One had white walls, the other black. The vandals
went to the black room, where Ms. Ohlsson said the photographs were a bit
racier. 

This is not the first time Mr. Serrano's work has been attacked, physically
or in words. In 1989 the National Endowment for the Arts came under fire
from conservative politicians and religious groups for helping to finance a
$15,000 grant to Mr. Serrano related to past work that included a photograph
of a crucifix immersed in urine. A print of that work was attacked and
destroyed in 1997 when it was on view at the National Gallery of Art in
Melbourne, Australia.

It is not the first time the Kulturen Gallery has seen violence, either.
About 10 years ago vandals raced into the gallery and put paint on images by
a Swedish photographer. 

"The History of Sex" remains on view, but with bolstered security, Ms.
Ohlsson said, explaining that the group had threatened on the Internet to
attack the show again. 

Paula Cooper, Mr. Serrano's New York dealer, whose gallery in Chelsea
exhibited his "History of Sex" photographs in 1997, said she was horrified
by the attack in Sweden. "Art inflames people," she said.

Ms. Cooper said that her gallery was working to replace the destroyed
photographs as soon as possible so they could go back on view in Lund. (Mr.
Serrano produced each in editions of three.) 

After "The History of Sex" closes in Lund in December, it is to travel to
the Alingsas Art Museum in Alingsas, Sweden. 

http://www.nytimes.com/