Iconia Guide to Feb. ‘07 Issue, Art in America
January 29th, 2007 by Menachem Wecker
From time to time, Iconia will offer the religious art aficionado’s quick guide to specific publications. Some will appear only in print, in which case links will not be provided. This feature is intended to help readers not only expose themselves to more religious art coverage, but also to get a feel for what type of coverage different publications give to religion and art. This post tackles AIA.
Page 107 ff: In “Shape Shifter,” Nancy Princenthal covers Allan McCollum’s installation that seeks to assign a shape to each person alive (through the year 2050) titled “Shapes Project.” Seven thousand were shown, and 31 billion shapes are planned. The piece has a bit of Brave New World in it, but however uneasy it is to see people collapsed to Adobe Illustrator constructed “monoprints,” Princenthal sees McCollum’s piece as not only preoccupied with “absence, and with death” (his words), but also as “a frank exploration of mortality — indeed, so breezily candid that it’s easy to miss its depth.”
Page 111 ff: Joan Simon interviews Hedda Sterne, 96, the last surviving member of the first generation of the New York School. Sterne was born in Romania, and she escaped the Nazis and moved to Paris and then America (via Portugal) in 1941. Asked if her family was religious, Sterne replied:
No. Jews were assimilated and they had the illusion that if they didn’t look at the problem, maybe it would go away. And to be quote assimilated was to be civilized. Everything associated with religion was backward. My father was a thinking agnostic, or atheist if you want, and my mother was totally uninterested and indifferent. So I was brought up without any kind of mention of religion at all. Well, there was a moment when I wanted to convert to Christianity [laughs]. I was about 11, and I read The Imitation of Christ. I read everything.
Page 152: Jonathan Goodman reviews Phil Joanou’s work, including “Tower of Babble” (2000), which Goodman calls “a tower of bust-length figures that rises above a teeming crowd, as smaller, ghostly bodies fall through the air.” Goodman adds, “Calling out without connecting to each other or the crowd below, the characters comprising the tower seem to symbolize the loneliness of human existence, as Joanou’s brush bears down on an existential truth.”
Page 155: Robert L. Pincus writes about Lisa Venditelli’s work, which includes the “major element” of images that resemble “religious apparitions.” Included are the Virgin Mary made from tea stains on an ironing board (with piled clean laundry) and a wall mounted piece that incorporates thin strands of pasta (no elephant dung this time) which suggests that “religion doesn’t trump food, nor the reverse.” To Pincus, “Venditelli knows how to manipulate conventional icons and make them work for her.”
Page 158: Joe Fyfe explores Alix Le Meleder’s work, which a French art critic calls Taoist. Fyfe concedes “one can certainly see connections to Eastern thought in her apparent concerns with the unity of opposites,” but his own analysis is far more creative: “Le Meleder’s edifying paintings seem to demonstrate life as a kind of metronome, with many subtle but irreversible changes occuring at every click.”