Unslanted: Guardian, Reuters 1 and 2, CTV, LA Times (with news of the gallery’s creative director’s resignation), and a very intelligent post at Tesserae.
I’m also pretty surprised Evangelical Outpost has not posted on it.
Above item: Tom Waits on Letterman, singing the Chocolate Jesus.
In a post about the Times religion debate: “The pro-religion people were apparently plants. One guy’s whole argument was that religion is good because it has produced religious art. That’s just about the weakest defense of religion I have seen.”
[Penraker]
Hispanic Christian artists “portray this very tangible, very human God more strikingly, perhaps, than any other religious art I can think of.”
[Thursday night gumbo]
The Australian reports that the chocolate Jesus, pictured, a.k.a. My Sweet Lord by Cosimo Cavallaroby, has been taken down. See the Catholic League’s responses here, here and here.
Thomas Krehbiel sees an irony in the public’s response on both a political and artistic level:
I hope all the people who keep saying that Muslims are the only ones who freak out when people offend their religion are taking note of incidents like this. Oh, but there weren’t any riots, burnings, or killings, people will say. The end result is the same, though: Intimidation of minorities and stifling free thought.
P.S. I can understand people being upset about religious art displays involving elephant dung and urine, but chocolate??
“[I]t has long been assumed that the arts are only for those poor souls who have an aesthetic bent, for those who are rather dreamy and not very practical,” writes Fra Domenico (whom I’d love to interview at this point). “Because of this misunderstanding, the arts have been placed in the realm of the subjective. Everyone thinks that art is merely a matter of personal taste. But for the arts which are placed at the service of the worship of God, this is not so.”
“If you say Islam to most Americans, they say terrorist,” says curator Jonathan Bloom, a professor of Islamic art and architecture. “We want to show there’s a different side to Islam. That it has a very rich and long culture.”
[Chicago Tribune]
Mr. Stuart is giving a quiz on Islamic art on Tuesday. Wouldn’t it be nice if he made it available to Iconia readers (hint, hint)?
In honor of Holy Week, Canon Peter Dodd is leading free sessions on Christian art. The only catch? You have to be in Newcastle.
In a post on Christian art, here’s one line I really enjoyed: “We don’t have to be afraid of ‘writer’s block’ — it is like the void before the world began. We trust God to make something out of nothing.”
[GroshLink]
Ethan Gilsdorf, at the Globe, is excited Matthew Polly’s “American Shaolin: Flying Kicks, Buddhist Monks, and the Legend of Iron Crotch: An Odyssey in the New China” is the good kind of memoir, not the kind that “is like a dinner guest who natters on about some personal experience, encounter, or adventure — the inept camel ride, the drunken night in Bangkok, the beggar’s mundane wisdom — all the while oblivious to the listener, whose pasted-on smile can barely conceal a look of utter tedium.”
According to his site, Jim Ekstrand’s photography “is dedicated to capturing landscape and nature images that reveal the glories of God’s creation.” Eckstrand began his career as a landscape and nature photographer, but switched to the more lucrative fields of technology and marketing.
“However, Jim never lost his passion for landscape and nature photography, and during the past year, he’s decided to re-dedicate himself to landscape photography. He’s done this in part because he’s seen a need in the Christian art market for high quality fine art photographic prints celebrating God’s creation.” Here is what Eckstrand had to say in an exclusive interview with Iconia.
MW: I see on your site that people can add a Bible verse to your works. Do you create works that are compatible with any biblical verse? If so, how does that impact your photography?
JE: I leave it up to the viewer to decide if a particular work is compatible with a specific Bible verse. I do find that as my work matures I am very conscious of visual metaphors that we find in nature that frequently connect directly with a specific Bible verse. The Bible is full of these etaphors: rocks speak of salvation and sanctuary, pathways speak of guidance, water speaks of life, and so on. I find that viewers frequently have the same response to a scene that I did, but I also let them have their own response.
Many people visiting my Web site already have a favorite Bible verse in mind, so their quest for a photo starts with a Bible verse. In much the same way, I find my photography being impacted. I now set out on photo shoots with a specific Bible verse (or verses) in mind and try to capture something in nature that reminds me of that verse.
MW: When you create work with “an inspirational Christian theme,” do you view your art as religious? As about religion? Both? If so, does the religion come from the viewer who chooses to include it, or is that something that you as a photographer infuse within the work?
JE: I actually don’t see myself as creating the work. I am merely a recorder of God’s creation. In other words, it is God who is the creator of the image, not me. I am not deliberately attempting to infuse religion into my work, but I do hope that the work inspires a spiritual response or at least a moment of thoughtfulness in the viewer.
MW: Do you create any figurative work? Does any of your work have religious content to it?
JE: It depends on your definition of figurative work. I believe there are visual metaphors in nature that remind us of different aspects of God. So, from the perspective that some of my work captures those metaphors, it is figurative. If your definition of figurative work is a visual metaphor that I would create by altering an image, then my work is not figurative. Again, I don’t really see myself as creating the work. My role as the photographer is to record a moment and a place in God’s creation.
I don’t consider my work to have religious content in it. It may evoke a
spiritual response in a viewer, but I’m not attempting to deliberately place any religious content in it.
The Anti-Shop promises to create “a new opportunity for Christian art” by “bringing together independent and underground Christian clothing companies … as well as Christian musicians and recording artists.”
[PR Web]
Was Hitchcock Catholic or Protestant in his films? Mardecortesbaja says both.
Dr. Sheila Canby, assistant keeper of the Department of Oriental Antiquities of the British Museum, hopes a new exhibit will help educate “people [who] really do not understand Shiite Islam at all. I hope this exhibition will help give a context to that.”
[CHNA]
“My Islamic art works have been inspired by Islam, its cultural heritage and its splendour, the glorious achievement of the renaissance and the symmetry of the Islamic architecture,” says Swadeka Ahsun. “Most of my artworks focus on the spiritual representation of objects and beings, not on their material qualities.”
[Muslim News]
The NY Times’s Holland Cotter on the Met’s “Venice and the Islamic World, 828-1797.”
Apprently, this reviewer doesn’t appreciate the irony of this artist grabbing a chainsaw and cutting up “the perfect tree” to create the face of St. Francis, “the patron saint of animals and the environment.” What’s next? Turning a baby into a sculpture of Nicholas?
[News-Bulletin]
David Jasper is professor in literature and theology at University of Glasgow, teaching theology and culture, history of doctrine, literature and theology. His research interests, about which he has written many books, include: Theology and modern European literature, religious aesthetics, language and liturgy. Belief and the critical spirit, theology and the visual arts. Here is what he had to say about religious art.
DJ: I do not think that religious art is defined by the artist being ‘religious’ or even by its subject matter. It may be something more like art which which allows us to glimpse something more of the ‘other’ - whatever that is, or give a sense to the traditonal terms of religion like eternity, the infinite, etc.
Kitsch is art which simply does not take to any new place, ultimately. It
cannot be transformative, but simply leaves us, at best, where we are.
Religious art - my favourite! Hard to say - it depends on where I am at any given moment. I come back to Rembrandt and Velasquez always. Yes - I think that must be it. And Mozart. And Dostoevsky. Because they are always new.
There is more religious art around now that ever. It is just that it takes a
long time sometimes to recognize when something is relgious. The best
religious novelist in the USA that I know of is Cormac McCarthy. He knows the devil..
All religion divides. It always has - because it tends to make universal and exclusive claims and thus get into arguments with other people doing the same.
The family of Nazi Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, who tried to assassinate Hitler, doesn’t want Cruise may to play von Stauffenberg in a forthcoming film, because of his Scientology views.
[Guardian, via Salon]
Bob posts some wonderful lines from James Arthur’s poem “The Death of the Painter,” in this week’s issue of the New Yorker.
[Art Blog by Bob]
Live Prayer with Bill Keller is going on Howard Stern.
[Christian Post]
Since “many of Tucson’s most important and passionate expressions of creativity are located in worship centers and temples,” WildLife staff writers sought “the most distinct and spiritual art centers in Tucson,” for which “You don’t have to be an art critic or an alter boy to enjoy this art. You just have to be human.”
[Wildcat]
Fra Domenico on sacred art: “One should be able to kneel before a painting or statue, and gaze upon it for a long time, allowing it to lead one to the prototype of the image. If one cannot gaze upon an image for any length of time, there is a problem. The image is not leading the soul to contemplation.” I worry that this insists on too much of a cerebral art form.
[Credidimus Caritati]
Yesterday, I recieved a mass email from Chai Hecht, which read:
To all:
I hope this finds you well.
I have entered (with co-producer Shealtiel Weinberg) a film in a CJF sponsored contest. The winner is determined through voting. Below is a link to the video. If it is not too much of an inconvenience, please vote for our video and forward this email to others as you see appropriate. Our entry is the third one on the list, entitled ‘Embracing the Dichotomy’ (it’s an interview with Rabbi Norman Lamm).
http://www.yu.edu/CJF/FILMFEST/voting.asp
Voting ends tonight at midnight.
Thank you very much.
Voting has closed for the Yeshiva University Center for the Jewish Future video contest, Who is your Jewish Hero?, and I am unable to get the clips to work. I will post my own reviews if and when I can get my computer to play them. For now, though, I am very amused that the heroes YU students can come up with include: Richard Joel (kissing up), a tank (Israeli I assume), and Rabbi Soloveitchik (see entry under Joel).
Discussions of Doctrines posts on Hindu art and idolatry. The first argument cited establishes idolatry as a judgement of the beholder–so far so good. But then DoD launches into a different line of argument:
So WHY make a god out of materials that aren’t really real, bow before it and claim you are bowing to your god and not the thing, which you are really bowing before because you think your god can see you through it, because you say you have to SEE your god in order to believe in him/her even though what we SEE isn’t really real. ??? Does anyone else see the inconsistency here?
The inconsistency only arises if one is still stuck in a Western mindset. Just because one is bowing to a God, doesn’t mean the God needs it, or that the bower needs to see the God to believe in it. These claims carry no logical weight, and they equate the “real” with the tangible.
Visions of the Cross opens in Washington at the Episcopal Church of the Redeemer next week. See one piece from the show here.
[RyhopeWood]
Arnie Adkison writes that Christians should “who worship the Creator ought to be the most creative, and avoid copying the broader culture’s art” and “DEFINITELY should not produce bad art.” He adds, “The American church needs to find a way to produce more artists” and:
There really isn’t such a definitive category as Christian art. What makes a book or a song Christian? How is a painting or a sculpture Christian? Do they have to mention Jesus? Do they have to overtly point to God or some biblical truth? Some people seem to think that a movie is not a Christian movie unless it has some blatant invitation to respond to the gospel, as if the Holy Spirit cannot work in subtle tones (see the second point above). There is really only good art, mediocre art, and bad art. And Christians should DEFINITELY not be making bad art.
I find this kind of thinking small minded and far more moralistic (ironically) than the artists who try to steer viewers to the Gospels. Artists, Christians and non-Christians alike, should do their best at making work that is in their voice, and that is all that has to be said about that. The work will be Christian, if it wants to be, just as the artist will be Christian if she or he wants to be.
[Stimulation]
Where have all the mothers gone? “The image of Mary has been, throughout Christendom and therefore through the history of the West, at the centre of our conception of motherhood. The ‘Madonna and Child’ is written into our psyches through two thousand years of Christian art.” A lamentation of a time “In which women are reluctant to be women, and men reluctant to be men.”
[RealClearPolitics]
Joshua Blankenship posts a very interesting piece on Christian art, with a lot of comments, original post here.
Jonathan D. Greenwald is a photographer. See his site and his photoblog and his flickr page. The image is “A Man and A Bird” from Greenwald’s photoblog post for today, and I encourage everyone to spend a lot of time on his site looking through his other images.
According to his bio, Greenwald lives in Brooklyn and is an IT manager by day and “by night (or during lunch, weekdays, etc.), I’m a street photographer.” He calls himself “self-taught” and says he takes most of his photos in NY, though “you can often find me walking the streets of Toronto, Ontario while visiting my biggest supporter, critic, and wife, Lesley.” Greenwald spoke with Iconia over email, and please note that I have not posted this solely because he said he liked so many of my questions. Here is what he had to say (when I refer to images, they can all be found on his site):
MW: You mentioned “Even when photographing a religious edifice, it is not with the intent of making a religious statement. To make such a statement, means one must be consistent in their statement of risk being scrutinized for it.” Are there different processes that surface in shooting a religious edifice like Drumming Pagoda? Are there unique challenges because it is so charged?
JDG: I hold a Bachelors Degree in Architecture. In fact, I worked in the field for several years before making the leap to technology. Even after so many years, I am still passionate about architecture, especially when one thinks of a church, synagogue, or other religious edifice. For me, I try not to capture the essence of the structure, rather the obvious beauty in it’s construction. It just so happens that more often than not, the most beautiful structures are those with religious significance.
MW: Can you tell me a little about “Hot Seat”? How do you balance the importance of the message with the artistic elements? Did you ask the subject to take his picture?
JDG: Great question. When I look at this image, I see two things: a homeless man trying to stay warm and the same individual sitting in a very comfortable position on a New York City sidewalk. I passed this gentleman on the way to Bryant Park and the sidewalk was too crowded for me to take his photograph. I thought that if I were to walk back towards work and he is still there, I will try again at that time. It just so happened that he was sitting in the same position when I returned nearly 40 minutes later. Yes he is homeless, or at least that is the impression I got from the bags he was sitting on and his lack of interaction with people, but the way he was sitting on the sidewalk really caught my attention. He didn’t appear to have a worry in the world and, in fact, looked quite comfortable. As for permission, I did not ask that of him nor did I interact with him.
MW: What did you mean by the word transcending in “Transcending Cultures”? The wealth?
JDG: “Transcending Cultures” was not as much about the wealth of the subjects as it is about their attire. The two young women in this photograph are wearing traditional head scarves and Western style clothing. I really enjoy images like this because it sends the message that traditional values are important, but modern influences play a large role in defining an individual.
A Moscow church is suing a museum for showing “Forbidden Art–2006,” which includes a Mickey Mouse Jesus and a caviar Virgin Mary. “It’s considered blasphemous to mock Christian feelings. It’s like insulting the American flag.”
[Baltimore Sun, via Religion Clause and Dispatches from the Culture Wars, who is ever so tired of “small-minded authoritarians who think that if anything offends them it should be banned”]
While on the topic of banning art, A Spanish pornographic bible has been posted online, which shows “images of the Virgin Mary, Jesus etc in Pornographic attitudes.” See an image here, and a great discussion “Pornografia religiosa: Are you scandalized or is this freedom of speech?” on WordReference.com.
Christian artist Annie Ho Cooper creates work inspired by “words and images from Scripture, traditional hymns, prayers and Contemporary Christian Songs.”
[Diocese of Oxford Reporter]
Mima’amakim Journal of Jewish Art is looking for submissions of poetry, prose, artwork, and essays. Contact: makim2007@gmail.com, with a May 1 deadline.
[Jewschool]
From one live rabbi to a bunch of dead ones; Velveteen Rabbi reflects upon dead rabbis and other artwork at HUC.
[Velveteen Rabbi]
Tintoretto, pictured, “Who seems to paint only on terrible nights when the ships are sinking,” created “staggeringly inventive” religious art. A review of the master’s work, that often proves trigger-happy with the adjectives.
[Times Online]
Is the Coca Cola logo a Zionist plot to defame Allah and the Prophet Mohammed? This post says so and focuses instead on the “many and varied beautiful examples from Islamic art that show the name of Allah as it is written by Muslims. These are the true images of Allah.”
[Covenant Zone]
A petition is circulating with signatures of artistic sorts condemning the Louvre’s collaboration with Abu Dhabi, but Jonathan Bronitsky will have none of the “snobbery and anti-globalization prejudice.”
[American.com]
The Muslim Students Association and the Saudi Students House (Carnegie Mellon) are showing two films on Islam: “Muhammad: Legacy of a Prophet” and “Islam: Empire of Faith,” an “exposition of Islamic art, artifacts and architecture combined with interviews with scholars from around the world to recount the rise of early Islamic civilization.”
[Post-Gazette]
Some visitors to the Dalai Lama’s Archives Museum in Dharamsala “treat their visit as a religious pilgrimage and behave as one might in a Buddhist shrine hall, making traditional offerings,” while others “are westerners who walk around the museum, looking carefully but not making offerings or bowing.”
[Chronicle Herald]
Strong words from Mark Nowakowski: “Art is spiritual. Art is deep. Art is a vehicle of travel, a method of lifting the soul, and a major way of glorifying God. At least, any art that is any good aspires to such things. Personally, I view any artistic endeavor outside of these ramifications as a superb waste of time.”
[Navitas et. al.]
In an article with a slanted title, “UN Sec-Gen Visits Arafat’s Grave, Meets Parents of Terrorists,” the fact that Ban will meet Olmert and tour Yad VaShem’s Holocaust Museum’s is buried in the last two paragraphs.
[IsraelNN]
State money is tight for renovations for a collection of New Mexican religious art.
[SF New Mexican]
“This is the yearning,” says Donald Jackson, lead scribe of a seven-volume Bible project, “the voices of people in different cultures and religions, voicing their yearning for closeness to God.”
[Christian Post]
Tamar Yellin has won an award for her Jewish writing, but what shocked me most about this report is that the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, “an award for outstanding work by an emerging writer that carries a whopping $100,000 purse,” is one of the largest literary prizes.
[JPost]
Gospel Music Channel is doing quite well, number one in its class in fact.
[Christian Today]
The St. Raphael’s Catholic Church guild makes rosaries for missionaries. “They’re a labor of love,” one rosary-maker says. “It takes two to three hours to make one.”
[LA Times]
More on the 168-hour Christian film masterpieces.
[Christian Post]
WIRED blogs has an interesting flashback on porn and This Is a Naked Lady.
[WIRED]
Nextbook’s newest book is on Chagall, whose “lovers and his rabbis, his massive bouquets and his violins were equally dubious, equally cloying, not kitsch, but living somewhere dangerously close to that ballpark.”
[Globe and Mail]
The Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development and the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Arts are offering 15 fellowships (travel and accomodation) to Islamic art scholars to attend Rivers of Paradise: Water in Islamic Art and Culture at in November.
[All about Scholarship]
Marco Polo is on exhibit in “Venice and the Islamic World” at the Met.
[NY Times]
Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Sharjah are all calling themselves the “cultural capital” of the UAE.
[Financial Times]
“Splendours of the Court” is on exhibit at the Palazzo della Pilotta as part of the program “Arts and Music from the Islamic World.”
[adnki]
My painting, The Windows of Heaven, 2007 (18 x 24, Acrylic and collage on canvas) appears in the exhibit Of Doors and Keys, opening tomorrow at the Baltimore JCC. The accompanying text appears below.
Jewish theology conceives of heaven in many aesthetic ways from a place jam packed with angels (how many can dance on a pin head?) to a castle-in-the-clouds, in which God looks down upon the world from atop
a fantastic throne. But two of the most interesting and bewildering images of heaven feature quite familiar interior decorating.
One Talmudic text, from within the Rabba bar Bar Chana ‘aggaditah’ (Baba Batra: 74a) narratives, tells of Rabba’s trip to the point where heaven and earth meet with an Arab merchant as a guide. Rabba finds heaven full of windows. He puts his basket on one of the sills, and the two set off on a heavenly stroll. When they return, Rabba’s basket is missing, and he ask the merchant, quite shocked, “Ika ganvei po” (Are there thieves even here?!). The merchant tells Rabba that his basket sits in the same window where he left it, but the heavens rotate (take that Copernicus!) and he must return at precisely the same time on the next day to retrieve his basket.
According to a second model, he might have also encountered heavenly
doors. Psalms, quoted in the morning Shacharit prayers, refers to the many doors of heaven, including the famous Gates of Prayer, which open to let prayers in, and shut on Yom Kippur when the deadline to “pass” the holy test arrives.
Why is heaven made of openings? What can it mean for the place that has teased the hopes and imaginations of religious people of all faiths to be made of empty spaces?
My painting explores these questions by singling out three of the important doors in Jewish history: the infamous door over Auschwitz that declared ‘Arbeit Macht Frei,’ the Jaffa Gate in Jerusalem and the iconic gate that occupies the title page of books of the Talmud. The painting shows how doors and windows—essentially frames without art inside them—are perhaps the greatest models for Jewish art. Indeed, through the opening of Jaffa Gate (decorated with patterning from the Dome of the Rock, because surely there is room, even in the Jewish heaven, for all, especially as it took an Arab merchant to help Rabba find the heavens), several Rothko paintings peek through, plucked from the artist’s collection of catalogs and old issues of Art in America and Art News.
In heaven, the lucky inhabitants have no need for doors and windows, which are solely useful in the domain of the material. Movement in heaven, presumably, will be of the spiritual sort and not the physical, which is why Rothko’s work surfaces. Like no other painter before him, Rothko the Jew painted forms that carry immense weight, and yet they loom in the air, floating like Chagall’s kissing couples. Rothko’s rectangles occupy both positive and negative space—that is they live nowhere—and they are the windows and doors of my heaven, which bring viewers through space, deeper and deeper. In heaven, one can simply circumvent the harmless windows and doors, but who would want to?
In the above al-Aqsa TV music video, which I found via ReligionNewsBlog (see the original Ynet story here), the daughter of suicide bomber Reem Riyashi sings to her mother, as Riyashi carries out a suicide attack.
The daughter is initially scared, “Mommy, what are you carrying in your arms instead of me. A toy or a present for me? Mommy Reem! Why did you put on your veil? Are you going out, mommy? … Come back quickly mommy. I can’t sleep without you, unless you tell me and Ubaydah a bedtime story.”
But after seeing her mom on TV, the daughter changes her tune: “Instead of me you carried a bomb in your hands. Only now, I know what was more precious than us. May your steps be blessed, and may you be flawless for Jerusalem. Send greetings to our messenger Muhammad.”
And finally, the girl decides herself to become a bomber, as she finds explosives in her mother’s drawer and says, “My love will not be (merely) words. I am following mommy in her steps.”
I think a music video aimed at turning children into suicide bombers is exploitive and sick, but the video does grapple with the difficult question of motherhood and sacrifice. The Ynet article is titled “Bombs more precious than children,” which is the mother’s implied decision, though it is the child who realizes that she is less important than the bomb; her mother never reflects upon it.
The responses on Ynet centered on the video’s sick nature. “Palestinians will never, ever have peace as long as their culture and society thinks this way,” said one. Another added, “This is the path of the dark forces that will one day end up in the Lake of Fire.” Another, calling him/herself cato the younger, wrote, “Too sick. This proves once and for all, that there can never, ever be a so-called ‘Palestinian State.’ Anyone who still indulges him/herself in this fantasy is perhaps, as distorted in their thinking as the people who put the little child up to this.”
“Yisraeli” got racist:
Were dealing with a real group soul of Amalek here and you know what the Bible says about them and what to do with them. Once they sacrificed children to Moloch now to some Allah, all still the same. Hatred not just for jews but even for those amongst themselves is burned so deep and it has nothing to do with your so called “occupation”, nothing whatsoever. They have removed themselves from any normal civilised behaviour. Barbarism has become an under statement of them. And I accept that its not all of them, yet the silence of the good ones has now made it all part of their neanderthall culture. Theyre isnt a place for them on earth, maybe only up there with theyre mohammed and so called allah.
But I found a post by a Josh to be most interesting. “And what makes someone become like this? Israelis need to answer that question. 60 years of occupation has come to bear fruit now!”
Within the logic of the video, something changes in the child which allows her natural feelings of love for her mother and fear and longing in her absence to turn to love for the cause for which her mother sacrificed herself. Children, certainly not children that age, are not able to learn that lesson. That perspective is the domain of much older people, who are able to weigh their own selfishness (not in a bad way, in an aware way) with a larger cause. This is ultimately why the video is propaganda, but there is something very powerful within the logic of the video where the child understands that there are larger things than she, even to her mother.
If this movie is simply propaganda, it is quite gutsy and courageous to even raise the idea that suicide bombers have children who might be much worse off for their mother’s actions.
Joseph Israel’s album brings religion back into Rastafarianism, with maintaining its political stance.
[PopMatters]
Amid a somewhat tribalistic post on how Jews should share their truths with members of other faiths, without reciprocating, Yitzchok Adlerstein moves to the question of embracing art of other faiths: “Could I be inspired by religious art, music, drama? Undoubtedly yes. But I think that it is forbidden under the rubric al tifnu el ha-ellilim [”Do not worship idols”]. I am not prepared to sacrifice one iota of halacha [Jewish Law], chas v’shalom [God forbid], to engage people of other communities.”
[Cross-Currents]
The Islamic Council of North America is cosponsoring Arts & Islam USA Tour with a bunch of organizations. Included is an artist who combines graffiti art and Islamic calligraphy.
Bach’s “miraculous” St. Matthew Passion, is “a musically minor moment in a work regarded by some as the greatest spiritual document in the canon of Christian art,” and yet also “quasi-Buddhist. Life is suffering. Death is the end of struggle.”
[LA Times]
March is the fourth annual Gospel Hip-Hop Month, which aims to “shine the light” of the musicians “to hold Bible studies, start churches, take positions as youth leaders and pastors, hit the streets as evangelists and fly to foreign soil on missionary trips.”
[Christian Post]
Susan Sontag felt the novel was more moral than other media [Guardian], which provoked the charge of Luddite from Andrew Sullivan. [Daily Dish].
Michael Apted, Amazing Grace director, talks about going to church, lying on the grass and talking to God, presenting Christian characters to secular audiences, and actor Youssou N’Dour, who is Muslim, reflects:
I can understand behind this message a lot of great things. I think whether you’re a Muslim or Christian, the message is the same. Understanding when people apologise. When someone apologises, ‘now my eyes are open’ - and I want to experience something like that.
One wonders (satirically) if he meant to exclude Judaism from that discussion.
[Christian Today]
“My Name is Rachel Corrie” is coming to Seattle, to protests from the Jewish community, including the Va’ad HaRabanim of Greater Seattle, which is calling for “balance” ot the play’s politics with other pro-Israel plays. I will never understand why people pick on artists and insist that they display journalistic detachment and objectivity. Journalism has its place, but it makes terrible art.
[Seattle Times]
One of Clyfford Still’s two daughters, Sandra Campbell, says of her dad:
“There was nothing but church and work.”
[IHT]
The only divine image the Koran allows is Nur or light, so stars appear in Muslim design. Here’s how they made their designs using tiles.
[VOA]
Paintings of Abu Ghraib demonstrate that “Images of torture in a human context (no saints - no glory in the sky) is (like images of sex in a way) so powerful for the viewer that it’s difficult to respond except to the acts portrayed.”
[Body Impolitic]
In the age of Duchamp and beyond, art gets mistaken for trash all the time and discarded. But da Vinci’s “St. Jerome” is a bit more surprising.
[Bloomberg]
The Christian Post has a field day with “American Idol” Christian contestants, including Chris Sligh, who has a spokesman for fundamentalist Bob Jones University upset, even as his home church holds weekly parties to support him. See also here.
John Hoyt’s The Mirror, see above, graces the cover of Spectrum. In an interview, Hoyt said a “deep-seated religious neurosis” is a key to understanding his work, and discussed the struggle with religious ideology, and exploring alternate spiritual reality in his work.
[Spectrum Blog]
A very interesting post comparing Pollock’s Cathedral work with Islamic geometric forms. See also a post on from whence the “messiah” of art’s Second Coming might arise.
[Art Blog by Bob]
“It is a strange feeling today to be part of a faith community whose leadership does not seem to value the cultural sensibilities of a considerable portion of its flock,” write Bill McGarvey of the Pope’s admission that he didn’t like Dylan’s music.
[Busted Halo, tip: Michael Dubitzky]
Thanks to Mobius (see his great post on a kaffiyeh dress) for alerting me to a post on BiblioOdyssey of images from the Lorsch Gospels, created in for Archbishop Gero of Cologne (c. 969 AD).
A few preliminary thoughts, before I fall asleep:
In the full page images, the artist has done a good job of creating circular compositions (mostly playing off halos), while balancing them with harsher triangles and diamonds.
The frames, which are so ornate they evoke Indian miniatures, are only semi-framing objects, and it is interesting to see where the interior action overflows the borders.
In the first image, the four winged forms–eagle, ox, man, lion from Ezekiel–seems to represent the four evangelists, Sts. John, Luke, Matthew, and Mark. Those four appear in the four evangelists’ solo portraits.
The thumb touching the ring finger is a popular configuration. I am not positive what it references, although I’ve seen some indications that it forms the letter cee for Christ.
Binghamton University hosted a panel on moral and legal questions surrounding Holocaust-looted art.
[So spoke the semicolon]
Christians don’t seem to exhibit great interest in re-developing the Arts, although the topic does get “batted around every time a movie like Amazing Grace gets released, or a book like Anne Rice’s series on Christ the Lord.”
[The view from her]
Carl Stam’s quote of the week is about Christian art from pastor-scholar Philip Ryken: “even if God may be glorified by art that is not explicitly offered in his honor, he is most truly praised when his glory is the aim of our art,” via views from the grass.
The show “L’Chaium: Artisans of Life” promises to bring forth “the message of the Word of God for people to see. The Word is illuminated with imagery rather than in written words.”
[PrWeb]
Modern Christian artists consider themselves gods, which is essentially “an idolatry of creativity. The point of creating a work of art is ‘the shock of the new,’ creating something that hasn’t been created before, or doing something that hasn’t been done before.”
[Robyn deGroot]
In Katherine Young’s work, feminine gender anxieties meet “obsessive decoration and fervent craft usually associated with religious art.”
[Digging Pitt]
In a post titled “What is ‘Real’?” everyday theology questions how the Last Supper might have really looked, da Vinci aside:
I couldn’t help but think about how much of our Christianity we “baseline” in terms of some event, experience, or artwork. Don’t many of us think of Jesus as an anglo, and usually wearing a white robe with a blue sash? Does anyone really believe that is what Jesus looked like?
When you think of the Lord’s Supper, do you picture DaVinci’s painting? When you think of the Moses leading the people across the Red Sea, do you see Cecil B. DeMille’s version, which was produced in 1956? Do you think Moses actually looked anything like Charlton Heston?
What other aspects of our lives as Christians, as part of the church, as followers of Jesus, have we set up in terms of some extra-Biblical source?
I don’t intend to try to tackle this large question in one post. But this is a major question with which all textual religious art must grapple. To the extent that the bible represents characters in words, one could argue convincingly that an image might restrict the imagination of the reader.
But the counter-argument, with which I tend to sympathize, is that the words in the biblical text are just as limiting as are the lines and colors of a painting. When monks drew biblical figures in their bibles, their art was as much an act of biblical exegesis as it was artistic. They were not limiting the characters, so much as making the characters their own.
Many Jewish and Muslim artists might debate this point. But if we can get beyond the question of whether representation is prohibited, it seems a bit much to me to suggest that seeing an image of Moses will necessarily solidify that image in my mind as Moses. I think responsible adults can comfortably admire da Vinci’s painting without worrying about compromising their religious imagination.
Joshua Hernandez is so sick of Christian art that he has come to hate it. His piece could afford a good deal of copyediting, but his comments on Christian art as stealing merit some contemplation. I wonder what exactly he means by it.
[On the Lam]
Idle Speculations has a very interesting post on the Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, in which “The images are not accessories. They are an integral part of the Compendium. It is obligatory that they be reproduced in all its printings. And they must always be placed in the same position relative to the text.”
A post on religious art and mimesis that has a few gems embedded in the rough.
[Matthew’s Random Ramblings]
Whitney isn’t a very faithful church-goer, but she can stomach symbolism found in Christianity.
[Fine Arts]
Samuel Bak creates abstract art that is tied to Holocaust memories (see Study #1 above). The artist calls one image “the most poignant image of Jewish Crucifixion.”
[encore]
Thanks to Mobius for the tip: a very interesting looking book on church design.
Un-Muted Mumblings wonders what happens when a church is stripped of it’s Catholic art. “Potted plants take the place of the statues. Felt banner art takes the place of the stained glass. Children’s art projects replace the icons. And we get someone to be in charge of art and environment! Isn’t it ironic that when they rip out all the beauty, they have to hire somebody to try and dress it up again.”
“There is no doubt that Islamic art, historical or contemporary in origin, abstract, surreal, impressionist, surrealist, cubic, however we define them, now or the past, is an important part of the global identity of a Muslim.”
[Muslim Minorities]
How should Muslim artists, when writing scripts - for books, for movies - balance portraying what would be considered appropriate to share, according to Islam, and the reality of what exists in Muslim communities? In wanting to reflect the culture of Muslims in the world today, how do we balance showing the positive and negative aspects of our communities?
Jewish collector and patron Raymond Nasher, 85, has died.
[Dallas Morning News]
Twenty Tibetan Buddhist monks created a sand mandala at the Smithsonian in Washington.
[PBS]
Damien Hirst is exhibiting religious work, though he insists, “I was brought up a Catholic, but I don’t believe in God. I think I’m an atheist. Hardcore atheist. I’m trying to be a hardcore atheist, and then I keep making work like this.”
[Art News Blog and ART INFO]
The seventh annual Spiritual Art Show in Minnesota (March 23-29) is accepting art that the artist considers “spiritual or religious.” The show will run at the St. Boniface Catholic Church in Minneapolis, 612-789-6527.
[Pioneer Press]
Jim Ekstrand is a photographer who focuses on the Christian market. “When you slow down and pay attention to nature, it’s a natural thing to consider God and consider one’s relationship with him,” he said, “My photography tries to capture that.”
[St. Petersburg Times]
Bethesda Daily Life was surprised to see an image of Jesus being tortured while bystanders simply ignore his pain.
Aliza Olmert’s (wife of the Israeli PM) photographs are on exhibit in “Tikkun” at the Philadelphia Museum of Jewish Art through April 30.
[The Philadelphia Inquirer]
I covered the show for the Jewish Press just about two years ago when it was at HUC in New York, but since the review does not appear online, I am pasting it here:
Repairing Tikkun Olam
By Menachem Wecker
Aliza Olmert: Tikkun
February 14 - June 30, 2005
Hebrew Union College Museum
One West 4th Street, New York HUC
The question is a very postmodern one—what happens when your tools no longer work, or reveal themselves to have never functioned at all. Take “Tikkun Olam,” or the notion of good deeds as cosmological mending apparatuses. What happens when the very conception of mending itself falls—like Humpty Dumpty—off the proverbial wall: can all the king’s horses and all the king’s men put Tikkun Olam together again?
That Humpty Dumpty doubles as a postmodern linguist aside from his profession as liable wall sitter ought not to surprise readers familiar with Lewis Carroll’s sequel to “Alice in Wonderland” called “Through the Looking Glass.” Alice engages Humpty Dumpty in a philological debate, wherein Humpty meditates, “‘When I use a word…it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.’” Alice is not easily intimidated; after all, she has spoken with a rabbit late for an important date, dealt with shrinking and bloating pills that tempt “Eat Me” and encountered a whole slew of surreal marvels that would send Dali reeling. “‘The question is…whether you can make words mean so many different things,’” she charges, to which the large egg counters in grandiose deconstructionist fashion, “‘The question is…which is to be master—that’s all.’” Alice then calls upon Humpty to explain the enigmatic Jabberwocky poem, but we leave Alice to her own devices and instead borrow Humpty.
Aliza Olmert’s current exhibition, “Tikkun” mercilessly attacks the eggshell—if not Humpty, at very least a blood-relative—pricking him with safety pins, tying him up with wires and exposing his empty innards. Olmert conducts this exploration in the name of Tikkun Olam, which derives from a verse in a prayer that many attribute to Joshua, “Aleinu/V’al Kein.” The verse states, “to perfect (l’takkein) the world under the sovereignty of the Almighty,” and “l’takkein” stems from the root “Tikkun,” to fix. In the conception of Sixteenth Century Kabalist Isaac Luria, God retracted (tzimtzum) His divine sparks (nitzotzot) into containment shells (sefirot) so as to create the world, and the role of the righteous is to liberate the sparks by breaking the shells (shvirat ha’keilim). The entire Kabalistic device is thus one of restoration or Tikkun, and many mitnagdim later adopted and expanded the concept of Tikkun Olam to include all sorts of humanitarian service that seeks to perfect the world. Continue reading ‘Aliza Olmert’s Eggshells’
Beer + monks + religious art = a great sounding time.
[The Gazette]
As a child, Rev. Christopher Armstrong saw Faust and was mesmerized by Marguerite, “dressed in white, bathed in white light, ascending a staircase amid beautiful music.” His mother told him, “she’s going to heaven. And I thought to myself, if this is the way you go to heaven, then I want to go.”
[The Enquirer]
A good story on Islamic art history, after a short piece on N. Korea (via tokatakiya):
“What if somebody who falls outside of that world wants to make ‘Christian art’? Do they have to change their whole approach? Or what if I want to write a song that doesn’t directly refer to my faith in Christ? Am I to be shunned and banished to a place where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth?’ Enter the “believer-artist.”
[Mark Lee]
My review of Skin + Bones: Parallel Practices in Fashion and Architecture, which recently closed at MoCA LA is in this issue of NY Arts Magazine, titled Body Building.
In the piece, I refer to several examples of religious art, including a 1707 Hebrew, Latin and Turkish edition of Tobias Cohn’s medical encyclopedia, Ma’aseh Tuviah (“The Work of Tobias”), which went up for auction last year at Kestenbaum & Company.
I use the illustration, which maps a human body over a three-story building (the kidneys become stoves, the intestines a fountain and the liver a cauldron) as an example of the sort of body-mapping that surfaces in the MoCA show.
I also explore Turkish-Cypriot artist Hussein Chalayan’s “Afterwords” collection (about “having to flee home in times of strife”) and “Between,” which addresses burkas and nudity.
A “limited vision of the kingdom of God” leads some Christians to view Christian art as evangelical in purpose, but “Far from being a method of strongarming belief, God’s art and music exist because they are, beautifully and carefully, tangible expressions of what is even more real, though invisible - the inner self of God.
[Into the Desert]
A son of the president of Bashkortostan, a passionate collector of Jewish art, is doing quite well for himself.
[St. Petersburg Times]
China Daily, surely a reliable, disinterested source, says there is a renewed interest in Buddhist books, CDs and DVDs of Buddhist music and Buddhist lectures.
"Iconia has been on my blogroll from the very beginning" -Sincerae
Iconia
Iconia is a blog about religion and art by Menachem Wecker.
Contact: E-mail/AIM
Iconia is part of the Canonist network of religion blogs.
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