World-Making: Materiality, Social Culture and Visual Language

23rd Annual Visual Impetus Graduate Conference

Art History and Visual Studies, University of Victoria

March 10, 1914 - The Manifold Versions of Mary Richardson’s Affect

On the morning of the 10th of March 1914, a minute woman walked into London National Gallery, with a meat chopper hidden up her sleeve. On that morning, Diego Velazquez’s 1 Rokeby Venus, 1647-51, was violently butchered by a supporter of the Universal Suffrage in the name of Womanhood. This event has been attributed to a moment of folly, a demented feminist action. Alternatively it has been analysed in art historical scholarship as a modern example of iconoclasm, dictated by socio-political intent and moralising disapproval. These interpretations however, leave one side of the woman’s motives to the inexplicable, the folly, the unconscious. The question thus is: What got into her? What affected her judgment? Is it possible to analyse an episode of iconoclasm as resulting from or as expression of affect?

This paper revisits this short event in order to locate what happened inside Mary Richardson, inside the National Gallery. The story is retold four times, each honing in on a different aspect while employing distinct accounts of affect theory. Where is affect taking place? In Mary’s premeditated deed or through unreasonable forces (Spinoza, Freud); in the colliding of the perception of her outside and inside worlds (Bergson, Lacan)? Does affect reside in the painting itself or in the art historical tradition of female nude subjects (Deleuze, Guattari); Or in the cultural institution and its intrinsic ideology seizing art as capital and women as disposable product (Massumi)? The aim of the narrations is to delineate, if possible, the temporality and causality of affect and its implication in a famous event of violent institutional critique. Richardson did not set off to completely erase the painting from existence, but to call attention to it and to her action, to leave a trace. And if affect is this trace, has it thus since disappeared? Does affect ever end? Does it ever begin?