Arts Writers is a new collaborative initiative between Glasgow International, Glasgow School of Art and The List, which sees students from the Glasgow School of Art's Master of Letters in Art Writing programme write features and reviews about works at this year's Glasgow International. The writers and critics will receive mentorship and publication via The List. The next work in this series is a feature on Sam Durant's Iconoclasm by Rachel Harris-Huffman.

Art has always been a socially-engaged practice, from cave paintings that served as cultural and shamanic symbols; to protest signs and songs; to temporary spaces created for the purpose of dinner and dialogue. At times, socially-engaged works can push the definition of art beyond its traditional limits, actively addressing political postures, favouring ethics over aesthetics and societal change over archival preservation. The creation of monuments and memorials to people and events is one form of art as social action, celebrating and modelling the heroes and behaviours preferred by a dominant class. They are often made from durable materials such as bronze and marble, but these works and the ideals they represent — especially those erected in public places — have a lifespan.

Many works of art as social action are on display as part of Glasgow International. At Tramway, Martine Syms presents S1:E4 of her ongoing video series SHE MAD, which scrutinises 'the sign of blackness in the public imagination'. A film and audio works by Alberta Whittle in business as usual: hostile environment at Glasgow Sculpture Studios reflects on the colonial history of the Forth & Clyde canal and how the infrastructure of the city continues to affect communities and public understandings of race, poverty, and class.

In a similarly local vein, Jimmy Robert's multimedia body of work, Tobacco Flower, examines the traces left by Glasgow's role within colonialism and the cultural framing of identities and desires. These are just a few examples of artworks reflecting socio-political histories and ideologies. Sam Durant's drawing series, Iconoclasm, also considers the relationship of art and social action, but from a different angle.

Iconoclasm consists of large-scale graphite renderings depicting the destruction of monumental public sculptures. The represented events occurred primarily in the 20th and 21st centuries, with a few outliers going back as far as the 1572 defacement of the altarpiece in St. Martin's Cathedral in Utrecht, Netherlands during The Great Iconoclasm. The timeline of events in Durant's series demonstrates that the destruction of artworks as social action is nothing new, and his choice of an ephemeral medium, graphite on paper, draws attention to the impermanence of art, ideals, and social mores — even those that are literally carved in stone. This message of impermanence is reinforced when these works on paper are displayed outdoors, mounted on walls and fences throughout the city, where they become vulnerable to acts of nature and human intervention.

Durant is not merely an observer of the removal of contentious artworks. His monumental public sculpture, Scaffold, originally commissioned for documenta (13) in Kassel, Germany, faced intense scrutiny and protest when installed at the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden of the Walker Art Center. The design of Scaffold, which was intended to be a literal platform for discussions about capital punishment, slavery, and racism, referenced several historic gallows including one from which 38 indigenous men from the Dakota tribe were hanged in 1862 in Mankato, Minnesota. This hanging was the largest mass execution ever to occur in the United States. The structure was put up before the garden was open to the public, but because of its size, it was visible from public spaces. Without the availability of contextual information and no outreach to the local Dakota community, Scaffold was seen as a monument to genocide rather than an artwork intended to provoke dialogue.

In response, Durant and the Walker Art Center allowed the sculpture to be dismantled by an indigenous construction firm after being cleansed in a Dakota ceremony. The disassembled materials along with Durant's intellectual property rights to the work were given to the tribe. Creating the drawings in Iconoclasm was part of Durant's process of reflecting on these events. He says the drawings 'raise the question as to whether iconoclasm might be nearly universal as a response to symbols and images that are disturbing or offending' by showing 'iconoclasms throughout history, across the world and resulting from a variety of impulses: political, religious, cultural'.

The debate over the destruction/removal of artworks as social action has raged in recent years. Spurred by the tragic death of George Floyd and an international call coming out of the Black Lives Matter movement to recognise and abolish racist and colonial legacies, sculptures commemorating perpetrators of violence against oppressed communities have been brought down. While some argue that erasing such artworks erases history, monuments to historical figures tell us very little about our past. They are almost always inherently biased as they are erected to promote a political agenda, such as the statues of Confederate generals that were commissioned and installed in public places throughout the American South during the Jim Crow era, or the Bristol bronze of infamous slave trader Edward Colston, erected 174 years after his death.

Keeping these symbols of oppression in public view maintains a hostile atmosphere. As society changes, and technology offers us a more cosmopolitan perspective of the world and its people, our values evolve, and so should our surroundings.

When asked what he believes the place of art to be in relation to social action, Durant responded, 'I believe that certain art works that we might call "great" ( i.e. powerful, meaningful, particularly moving, Beautiful with a capital 'B' or however you want to define 'great') can affect individual people, can help one see the world in a new way, or show what we call the status quo, everyday reality for what it is—a construction that could be changed into some other, possibly better, construction.

'Art could change us as individuals, giving us the possibility to then work together with others to do the political, social, and material work of producing a society that is better for human life or even for all life. I don't think that art does this material work directly; it effects individual people who then can become the agents, consciously or unconsciously, who do change the reality of social relations'.

Sam Durant: Iconoclasm is available to view at multiple public sites across Glasgow until Sun June 27.