During an intense fire and brimstone lecture, Paul Washer used the metaphor of a child seeking his parent’s approval for a lousy drawing to reference our relationship with Jesus. Listen to the 1 hour 20 min. podcast (6/26/07) Our Ambition is to Please Him here.
Rather than doing their jobs responding to Hamas’ rise to power, Ben Harris reports in JTA that they were “rubbing elbows with the paparazzi at a swanky Manhattan club and celebrating the launch of the July issue of Maxim, the men’s magazine famous for its scantily clad cover girls and sexual content.” See also the NY Post’s Babes in Oy Land Scuffle and Lighten Up, Israelis-I’m Kosher. Money quote from Israeli Consul-General Arye Mekel: “This is the first time we used the word ’shoot’ in connection to Israel and we’re not talking about killing people.”
Right: Image, NY Post.
The Museum of the History of Polish Jews is scheduled to open in 2009, reports the JTA. Sigmund Rolat, chairman of the museum’s North American Council, says, “Nothing that I am involved in is as close to my heart as the museum … I do it for my grandchildren.”
“I’m not usually one for a rant,” writes Davis of Audacious Deviant, “but in these ‘latter days,’ one increasingly hears neo-con Christians attacking artists (and everybody else) for being, shall we say, ’sinners’ whose work is held up to scorn for being outside ‘True Christian Values.’” He also picks a fight with The Lion and the Cardinal over Eric Gill.
“The colonists did not see the worth of the Americas’ religious art and creativity. Christopher Columbus, she argued, felt that Europeans had the right to subjugate indigenous peoples. Westerners understood themselves as objective and correct; in what Segovia termed a ‘war of images,’ colonists called Amerindian religious art ‘idolatry,’ denying its religious power.” The she is Suzanne Hoeferkamp Segovia; the what is a lecture on “A Divine-Human Encounter at the Cross Road of Creation”; and the location is UChiBLOGo.
“I think the ‘iconography’ of tarot cards, and some of the similarities in symbolism, is what got me hooked on religious art,” writes Sally Big Woods of Grand Forêt. “I love finding, and then recognizing a saint’s attributes in an image.”
In response to my questions, Rabbi Lapin wrote me back as follows:
Dear Reb Menachem,
I remember you well and thanks for writing—I am sorry I only received your note from my office now. I am racing off to do a lunch speech so sorry that I can’t respond fully but if I recall the program you refer to, it would have been based on a series of shiurim distinguishing between Athens and Jerusalem and discussing the banning of Chodesh, Shabbos, and Milah, (all time related) and the Greek ideal captured in the Keats poem On a Grecian Urn of timeless love (homosexuality—Greek style?) or even Grecian Formula to dye my hair and defy the passage of time…. Seems Greeks are best known for statuary rather than music though that might be a push. Anyway, the idea is that if you hit pause on a video you see a picture but if you hit pause on an audio you get silence because the two art forms do have entirely different relationships with time. There is no objective change to a picture as we move along the time axis or even if we halt time temporarily, but without time (and memory, which is partially why Shofar sound is played on Yom HaZikaron of course) music doesn’t exist and is nothing but thinly sliced instants of sound-no tune, no music.
I am not by any means an art expert so could easily be off base but that is how it strikes me. It is true that I do find most (not all) art galleries insufferably boring—but that is just my own personal preference for spending time with humans. As for religious art, it is a bit like sex—I’d rather be doing it than looking at pictures about it.
Warmest wishes
Daniel Lapin
And by way of clarification, I’ve heard some feedback from my previous post that it sounded like I was complaining that Rabbi Lapin had not yet responded to my email. In fact, he replied in quite a timely manner, and in good faith. My apologies to Rabbi Lapin for the unintended interpretation.
I think the question of the interplay of time and art is worthy of more discussion, and perhaps I will get back to it in a later post.
The Foxhole Manifesto includes a number of modern Gods: the Santa Claus God, a bad ass hillbilly, a president, a keyhole, a used car salesman, a football player’s best friend, a race horse, a donkey, a watered down, a national guard, and a mechanic, in a poem by Jeffrey McDaniel, with video by Nick Fox-Gieg. Ht: Michael Dubitzky.
Designer Liz Claiborne, who was famous for designing collections for working women, has died at 78, NPR reports. According to the Encyclopedia of World Biography, “Liz received a strict Roman Catholic upbringing,” although it doesn’t seem to have affected her work.
(Right) Liz Claiborne. Photo: Reuters.
Brian Eno’s 77 Million Paintings, which are “self-generating art,” make him feel a bit like God, “watching them get on with their lives,” reports the SF Chronicle. No word on which God…
Elliott Malamet’s summer reading suggestions in the Canadian Jewish News includes: Yeshiva University’s Jewish Spirituality and Divine Law, which touches on “spirituality in the Bible, as well as in Jewish prayer and Jewish education, Jewish art, chassidut and Kabbalah.”
The white paint and religious art which now cover a wall of Christ the Servant Apostolic Catholic Church in Tampa are no consolation for Ahmed Bedier, the executive director of the Tampa chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, reports the Tampa Tribune (HT: The Flying Imams). He is right to be appalled by the anti-Muslim hate speech sprayed inside the church by vandals.
A great piece on Zatorski + Zatorski, whose hOly bIbL is a three-year project which translated the King James Bible into text messages, by warm hunting. Also included is an interesting piece “Cordero,” which “recreates Francisco Zurbaran’s 17th century painting of a sweet, docile sacrificial lamb symbolically representing Christ‘s sacrifice.”
“The drawings depicting Allah, are truly seen as a major no no to depict Allah, even more so in a comic,” writes ChuckM in a comment on the blog Dvorak Uncensored, “I wouldn’t think that Mohamed is as much an untouchable. Of course, burning a representation of Mohamed, will be asking for trouble.”
Here is the YouTube video Dvorak posted about a group in Denmark burning Mohamed in effigy. The video is offensive of course, but it ought not even be taken that seriously. It’s absolutely lousy, immature art.
As the traditional Korean home “is a rarity today, and the articles used to furnish them in the past are becoming coveted works of art,” the Museum of Korean Buddhist Art exhibits Chosun Dynasty (14th to the 20th century) wooden furniture, reports Arirang News.
“I hate to see myself on screen, I hate the way my voice sounds, so I chicken out,” says gay Jewish playwright Tony Kushner, explaining why he avoided seeing himself on screen in “Wrestling with Angels,” reports Yedioth. Kushner says:
I see myself as an agnostic Jew, namely a man who is not religious or atheist but rather in between, uncertain. I think that in any great faith there is also room for doubt. I don’t keep kosher, or keep the Sabbath, I lost the Hebrew I learned while studying for my Bar Mitzvah and yet Passover is still important to me and I go to synagogue once in a while. I think that I know more about Judaism today than in the past and where my art is concerned, much of it tends to be directed towards theology.
This morning, I sent the following email to Rabbi Daniel Lapin of Toward Tradition:
Right: Rabbi Daniel Lapin, source: www.ksfo.com
Dear Rabbi Lapin,
I enjoy listening to your podcast very much, and I feel very lucky to have met you in New York City a few years back when you were supposed to deliver humorous remarks at an event affiliated with the Republican convention (alas you were unable to do so because time ran out), when your children Ari and Ruthie introduced us (I was friends with them in college).
I must take issue with your recent podcast, though, in which you say that music incorporates time, whereas art, since it does not, is boring. I was shocked that someone of your education and achievement would say that art museums are boring. There is such a long tradition of important religious art that ought to interest you.
Further, time is quite important in “reading” a painting, as the forms unfold over time to the viewer.
I was hoping you could clarify your point for mention on my blog on religious art, Iconia, and potentially for other publications as well.
Thanks,
Menachem
I received a form letter back:
Thanks so much for taking the time to share your thoughts, questions and comments. I value all the letters I receive - whether they agree or disagree with my opinions.
While my office does keep me up to date as to what reactions are flowing in, unfortunately my travel and lecture schedule doesn’t always allow me to read everything in a prompt and timely manner. And the same time constraints mean that I can only respond personally to a small portion of remarks.
Don’t miss the opportunity to sign up at my website at www.rabbidaniellapin.com to receive special discount offers on my CD’s and books as well as notification of speaking events in your area.
Best wishes,
Rabbi Daniel Lapin
I am hoping to receive more in the way of an answer than a CD offer. Do listen to the podcast to hear Lapin give an otherwise fine lecture, save a totally unnecessary, and absurd Plato-like denouncement of art.
Roxbury Tavern got rid of its jukebox, pool table and TV to avoid conflicts among patrons. The owner even got rid of cursing. If this sounds unusual, there is also an old poster of a Muslim art show is “a little display of our tolerance.”
[Capital Times]
The Tel Aviv Museum of Art has begun constructing its new wing, pictured below, named for Herta and Paul Amir. It will be designed by Preston Scott Cohen, whose work I saw at Skin + Bones: Parallel Practices in Fashion and Architecture at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.
[Jewish Journal (LA)]
Forty Doha children and teens have won awards for their Islamic art, courtesy of H E Sheikha Mayassa bint Hamad Al Thani, Chairperson of the Qatar Museums Authority.
[The Peninsula (Qatar), and Gulf Times]
Doris Duke, daughter of James Buchanan Duke, who owned the American Tobacco Company and the Duke Energy Company, brought her passion for Islamic art to Hawaii. Her property is now a museum, owned by the Doris Duke Islamic Art Foundation.
[Times (NZ)]
My article “Mordecai Ardon: Symbols without significance” is in this week’s issue of My Jewish Learning. Ardon was a director of the Bezalel Academy in Israel and artistic advisor to Israel’s Ministry of Education and Culture. His work seems to draw from Kabbalah, though his daughter-in-law said over email that he was not a kabbalist.
In honor of the 40th birthday of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Márquez’s 80th birthday, and the 25th anniversary of his Nobel Prize, Ilan Stavans, professor of Latin American and Latino culture at Amherst, writes on “García Márquez’s ‘Total’ Novel” in the The Chronicle of Higher Education (requires subscription).
Stavans references the “character obsessed with photographing God” in the novel which he says “decodes the DNA of Hispanic civilization.”
The article has its ups and downs. Here is one typical paragraph:
But the signature mix of exoticism, magic, and the grotesque that García Márquez employs doesn’t come from the world of soap operas. Known as “magical realism” — a category loosely connected to what the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier called “lo real maravilloso” — the term has achieved such ubiquity and elasticity as to become meaningless. For a while it denoted an attempt to erase the border between fact and fiction, between the natural and the supernatural. But its current use is chaotic. It helps in cataloging García Márquez’s second-rate successors, like Isabel Allende, as it does in understanding Salman Rushdie’s baroque hodgepodge of dreams and nationalism in Midnight’s Children and Toni Morrison’s phantasmagoric meditation on slavery in Beloved. All have been linked to “magical realism,” with various degrees of success.
I am not sure about Rushdie’s “baroque hodgepodge,” but I’m glad Márquez is getting this sort of attention.
In the June 22 installment of NBC’s Nightly News, Brian Williams reported on Jewish designer Isaac Mizrahi’s $50 wedding dresses on sale at Target. (To see the clip, click here, and find the link titled “Here comes the bargain.”) See also the Tribune’s blog posting.
Above: Isaac Mizrahi for Target® Full Ball Skirt and Lace Shell, exclusive, $69.99 - $129.99. Link.
Avival Beigel’s A Woman of Valour “proclaims that all divine presence is not about beauty and grace on the surface of things, but about their deeper essence—their light.” It does this through the words Shekher ha-Chayn (”Beauty is a lie”) and conspicuous red breasts.
[NY Arts Magazine]
French modernist painter Georges Cyr’s exhibit “Georges Cyr dans les collections libanaises” includes the art he created after moving to Beirut in 1934. The show is being hailed as a representation of “the cultural crossroads that have long given form to art in Lebanon” and of exploring his atelier, which “served as an artistic meeting place and studio for training others interested in art which is part of a longer history of art in Beirut.”
[Daily Star]
The Book of Kells was created by monks, ages 16 to 22, “with good eyesight,” who also demonstrated a sense of humor. “For example, cats and mice play with the Communion wafer.”
[Star-Telegram]
From the lede graf of a wonderful review in the Times Online:
Lust is one of art’s favourite subjects. Or, at least, it used to be. But to understand what was going through Lucas Cranach’s mind in Germany at the beginning of the 16th century, when he painted the charming Adam and Eve that is the focus of an enticing new display at the Courtauld Gallery, we need to understand lust in the old way, and not in the new way. Which is to say, we cannot approve of it on any level. We cannot show it any tolerance or allow it any mitigating circumstances. We cannot mistake it for a mere human foible, and we cannot, most certainly, in any situation, forgive it. To understand Cranach’s Adam and Eve, to understand any of his paintings in which naked chaps are paired with naked girls in pretty forest clearings, we need to recognise lust as the atom bomb of sins: the ultimately destructive human weakness, a lethal crack in our make-up through which everything that is terrible in the world slunk in.
Photographer Cella Neapolitan feels “closest to the sacred when simply being in nature … In youth I was drawn to a neighborhood pond for quiet, contemplative moments. Now I am fortunate to have a little land of my own, which I have planted with redbuds, dogwoods, and other beloved trees. I hope these images convey the awe and peace I feel in experiencing the sublimity of nature.” She is exhibiting in the 11th Annual Sacred Art Exhibition at BoxHeart Gallery in Pittsburgh.
[The Herald-Citizen]
K Bolsover likes mandalas, but doesn’t like the idea of meditating with one, “but I think I might take inspiration from them - and the principles which guide their creation - for a little art project.” The project includes a Spirograph, a Mandala Designer toy (”for all budding Buddhist children?”) and a computer program called Mandala Painter.
[Me and my pemphie]
City Attorney Roland Blossom is controversial for “his stance on prayer at public meetings and religious art,” specifically orderging “paintings removed from City Hall because they contained religious images. After the threat of a federal lawsuit, officials returned the art.” Now he is being asked to resign.
[Orlando Sentinel]
From the tags of the YouTube video below on “Jew taxes” of Kashrut. The video is paranoid and misinformed (the tax is, after voluntary, and is similar to a label of ‘dairy’ or any other ingredients), “In judging the Jewish people’s attitude on the question of human culture, the most essential characteristic we must always bear in mind is that there has never been a Jewish art and accordingly there is none today either; that above all the two queens of all the arts, architecture and music, owe nothing original to the Jews. What they do accomplish in the field of art is either patchwork or intellectual theft. Thus, the Jew lacks those qualities which distinguish the races that are creative and hence culturally blessed.”
“Over generations, various local customs found their way into the legal text of the ketubbah and ketubbah decorations reflected the Jewish art of each locality and period,” including Islamic-style Ketubbot.
[Mavi Boncuk]
“To the best of my knowledge there is no sacred institute for liturgical arts in the United States with artistic education as it’s primary purpose,” says In Principio erat Verbum, “In addition to the initiation of a school for sacred arts, perhaps every parish community would be best served by trying to incorporate local artists into all of their projects.” I couldn’t have said it better myself, and have nothing to add.
(Above) The Court of Fath by Ali Shah with foreign ambassadors and envoys Iran, Tehran, c.1815., The Aga Khan Trust for Culture, posted in Artdaily.
More on “The Arts Of Islam” from VOA, including this gem from Khalili:
In actual fact, if you open any design book of any other culture in the West, you cannot escape not seeing something Islamic, and this is something that the world is not aware of, and this exhibition is a step toward that direction to tell the world that there is tremendous amount of influence of Islamic culture into the culture of the West.
The photography show “Prayers for Santos and Orishas” at Centro Cultural Español “peels back the veil on contemporary religious life in Cuba by depicting in a rare light the devotional soul of the island,” with attention to Cuba’s “myriad syncretic religious cults based on West African religions,” The Miami New Times reports. “Slaves who worked on sugar plantations during the colonial period camouflaged their deities with the Catholic saints to preserve their faith.”
A great piece on religious differences on the question of image-making, with words from Brent Plate, who recently published “Blasphemy: Art That Offends.” Plate told MCT, “Ancient sacred texts are virtually silent on what modern people consider pornographic.”
A great photo shoot of the Consecration of the New Sacred Heart Shrine from Rome of the West. Here’s video:
My review, Illustrating The Postmodernist’s Bible: Nature in John Bradford’s Art is in this week’s Jewish Press, on Bradford’s bible series.
John Bradford, “Moses before Pharaoh.”
Here is the complete interview:
MW: To what extent do you consider your work Jewish per se?
JB: I am not Jewish. I believe Judaism is authentic religion. My work celebrates the Hebraic Biblical ethos at the heart of our American heritage. Our modern era is a consequence of a perspective unique to Judaism (and the Puritan Calvinists who promulgated a radically Judaized Christianity): that nature is disenchanted and that man struggles creatively within nature to build a system of Justice, which was the single positive commandment given to Noah. The U.S. might well be the quintessential Noahite country (our enemies certainly believe that) and to the extent that that’s true, it’s worthy of expressing in art.
MW: Are there any biblical stories that you think should be off limits to painters?
JB: No, sources agree that it isn’t idolatrous for a Jew to make a painting, so much the less for a Gentile. Of course I detest contemporary trends that blithely expropriate Biblical stories to expound on current events or to ridicule or demean Judaism, but even in that case, it’s a free country.
Continue reading ‘The Non-Jew Who Paints All Things Jewish: John Bradford’
In this new Iconia feature, I rate art objects as art and as religion. The average is then taken of the results. I am still looking for a name for this feature. Suggestions are welcomed. (Thanks to Michael Dubitzky for the idea for the feature.)
Today’s object is: Isaac Newton’s papers which reveal his religious side (and prediction of the Apocalypse):
In one manuscript from the early 1700s, Newton used the cryptic Book of Daniel to calculate the date for the apocalypse, reaching the conclusion that the world would end no earlier than 2060.
“It may end later, but I see no reason for its ending sooner,” Newton wrote. However, he added, “This I mention not to assert when the time of the end shall be, but to put a stop to the rash conjectures of fanciful men who are frequently predicting the time of the end, and by doing so bring the sacred prophesies into discredit as often as their predictions fail.”
The rating–Religion: 9 (if he got through the Book of Daniel once he’d deserve a 9, and he seemed to have done it several times), and Art: 3 (the big brown thumb print on the right just looks messy).
Congratulations Mr. Newton, you get a 6.
Poor Rushdie. Just when he got the all clear from the bodyguards, Iran is after him for becoming Sir Rushdie. Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini, commenting on Rushdie’s recently being knighted, said, “Giving a medal to someone who is among the most detested figures in the Islamic community is … a blatant example of the anti-Islamism of senior British officials.”
[BBC]
From L-R. Dean Norman Adler, President Richard Joel, Salman Rushdie in the Yeshiva University Beis Midrash. Photo by Menachem Wecker, 2004.
The Times Online reports “Pakistan says Rushdie knighthood justifies suicide bombings,” quoting Pakistan’s religious affairs minister, “If somebody has to attack by strapping bombs to his body to protect the honour of the Prophet then it is justified.” Andrew Sullivan also weighs in on Daily Dish. I can understand why many Muslims are upset by this, but having met Rushdie, I am shocked that anyone would try to attack him. He is without a doubt one of the most creative men alive, and far more respectful that he is portrayed.
He has photographed Pope John Paul II thousands of times as the Vatican’s official photographer for 50 years. But Arturo Mari has retired, and will be replaced by his deputy. What would you do next?
[Catholic World News]
“It’s homage,” says tap dancer Savion Glover. “It’s respect and prayer, every time I hit the floor.”
[NY Times]
Thomas D. Anderson, “distinguished lawyer and leader in medical, religious, art and musical organizations in Houston,” has died at 95. “He could have earned a living as a professional pianist if he had wanted to,” a friend says.
[Houston Chronicle]
Above: The Museum of Islamic Art, Egypt, posted on galenfrysinger.com.
The $15 million restoration of the Museum of Islamic Art in Cairo, Egypt, is scheduled to finish in December, says Egyptian Culture Minister Faruq Hosni. The Egyptian Tourism Society provides a little more information.
[Prensa Latina]
Rebecca at Jewess seems to have more art-filled roundups than I can manage here. Here are a few:
(JPost) Convertess’ artist’s work displayed in Knesset. Adele (formerly Victoria) Radievsky emigrated to Israel from Russia a year ago, converted to Judaism, and is now one of Israel’s rising artistic stars, having shown at the Knesset and Tel Aviv’s Biblical Museum.
(Jewish Journal) Shake that…belly! Belly dancing Jewess Suzy Evans is “the founder of the now 11-year-old International Academy of Middle Eastern Dance (IAMED)” and “is producing her fourth ‘This Is Belly Dance!’ concert at the Ford Amphitheatre [in L.A.] on Aug. 11.”
(J) Something queer at the opera. A Jewess in San Francisco, who sings on High Holy days in a local synagogue choir, wrote, produced, and performs in “‘A Queer Night at the Opera,’ an off-coloratura evening of music, insight and on-stage fabulousness” that will be performed at the 10th annual National Queer Arts Festival on June 29.
“The Dome of the Rock is the cradle of Islamic art. It’s the oldest standing Islamic monument in the world. Its original design is still intact and unaltered,” says Old City tour guide and art history and architecture professor at al-Quds University in Jerusalem, Yusuf Natsheh.
Rev. Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, Catholic priest and New Testament professor at the Ecole Biblique et Archeologique Française in Jerusalem disagrees: “The Temple Mount esplanade is Jewish. The buildings on it are Muslim. The paradox is that both the architecture and the mosaics of the Dome of the Rock are all the work of Christian artisans.” Rocks, paper, scissors?
[Statesman.com]
The gallery doth protest too much methinks: “It has nothing to do with it being Islamic art, but more because it is such an important international collection and [has] not been seen in Australia before,” says a spokeswoman for the Art Gallery of NSW of the security surrounding The Arts Of Islam. But it’s being called “The biggest security operation in the Art Gallery of NSW’s history.”
[Sydney Morning Herald]
Continue reading ‘Arts Roundup: LDS Art, Laser Kells and Securing Islamic Art’
“Guernica was not just a painting; it was a prophecy.” If you are hearing this, then you are also watching Simon Schama’s Power of Art on PBS. Schama’s tale has a good deal to say about Hitler and the Holocaust, and some of his theories are quite insightful: through Guernica, Picasso “rescued modern art from the curse of its own cleverness.”
Above: Schama, from Andy Serkis’ site.
According to the PBS site:
In 1941, during the Nazi occupation of Paris, the Gestapo visited Pablo Picasso’s Left Bank flat, where a member of the secret police spied a postcard of the artist’s most famous work, Guernica. The giant mural memorialized Germany’s 1937 aerial obliteration of a small Basque village. “Was it you who did this?” the Nazi demanded of Picasso, to which he replied, “No. It was you.”
Money quote: “When a devastated Bernini needs a miracle to salvage his reputation, he sculpts one.”
It looks like there are more religious pieces in store, including Bernini’s The Ecstasy of St. Theresa, Caravaggio’s David With the Head of Goliath and some Rothko pieces.
My article, Louise Nevelson: Scavenger Par Excellence, Wandering Jewess is in today’s issue of My Jewish Learning. The show attends to Nevelson’s current show at the Jewish Museum:
Nevelson considered her father—a woodcutter and junk collector—an influence on her wooden sculpture scavenger hunting. Yet, she maintained a complicated connection to her father and his steadfast shtetl ways of life. Biographers have suggested she exhibited “surprisingly little curiosity about her homeland,” falling prey to “selective amnesia often found among this generation of immigrants.”
“Iraq’s archaeological and artistic culture is in danger of being wiped out due to a lack of protection and targeted assassinations,” reports Al Jazeera. “There aren’t archaeologists remaining in Iraq because most of them have been killed and the others have fled from the violence. Our situation is getting critical in Iraq. Archaeologists and artists are being targeted by militias and insurgents,” says Fuad Rassi, Iraqi archaeologist and professor of antiquities at Baghdad University.
In a post on Francis Schaeffer’s Art and the Bible, Aqueduct writes, “there’s no such thing as ‘Christian art’ or ‘Nonchristian art,’ it is either art made by someone who happens to be a Christian or art made by someone who isn’t. All people are reflecting their beliefs through their works.”
Jesus “didn’t give a theology lesson” but instead “created a piece of artwork,” says Purify Your Bride. “Just a small piece but he made a deep truth available to a simple mind. We need to learn how to do that.” The post is well worth reading.
“Islamic art doesn’t refer to religious art especially, but to any art made by or for Muslims,” thus a The Australian review of The Arts of Islam: Treasures from the Nasser D. Khalili Collection at the Art Gallery of NSW. See also The Muslim Weekly.
“I fell in love with the beauty of those curves,” says “Japan’s leading authority on Arabic calligraphy” on Arabic calligraphy according to The Japan Times. And yet, “To me, blue has more than 20 different variations … My colors reflect my sensibility as a Japanese.”
“For me at this moment in time, integral art has some relation to or is bound up with sacred art,” writes Joty on zaadz, “and invokes a deeper/higher state and looking back I can see integral strands, an integral lineage of artists and artworks.” Joty makes an interesting point, but I am not sure Buren was trying to do anything sacred, any more than Picasso was. Transcendent does not necessarily imply sacred.
Above: A video from NOIZECENTER, who calls it “one of three in a triptych. Triptychs are generally associated with painting, but because I see this video as a sort of painting I decided to adopt the use of the term. I hope you enjoy the Christian meditation.” The video is quite wonderful in its abstract form at the beginning, but gets far too obvious when the cross and text surface later.
Mommy Life post’s on Rembrandt’s religious art, particularly Belschazzar’s Feast. Note the Hebrew writing on the wall, which Michael Zell suggests was inspired (in its top-to-bottom recording, rather than right-to-left, by the teachings of Rembrandt’s pall Menashe ben Israel). See also here.
Right: “A striking arch in the ancient Moorish fortress, the Alhambra,” posted by Odyssey, who adds, “There is an eternity in these curves, a transcendance that invites the soul to contemplation. Does it do more to stir the soul or less than does the ornate and explicit religious art of Spanish Catholicism?”
Although Motorboat Meghan is pretty sure Warhol’s work is blasphemous, “the problem is … I think sometimes it’s hard to tell what’s really sacred. And sometimes the only way to figure out what is sacred, or what actually does matter, is to make fun of all the stuff that people treat as sacred and in the end figure out what part of it remains, and that’s what really counts.” Here’s a great book on the subject.
Of the show Italian Arts from Another Capital City at the National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo, Robert Reed writes in The Daily Yomiuri, “Some knowledge of Renaissance religious art will also be of help for fuller appreciation of the paintings. But in terms of the paintings themselves and the size of the collection, this is a world-class exhibition worthy of the National Museum of Western Art.” One section of the show is Pictures of the Sacred and Profane–The Triumph of Mannerism.
Mohammed Ali’s “unique fusion of aerosol art with Islamic calligraphy has taken an urban art form from street walls to galleries and spiritual art into new dimensions.”
Rebecca Honig Friedman, over at Jewess, interviews Leah Siegel, independent singer-songwriter Jewess.
Money quotes:
JEWESS: If you could do a duet with any woman, or man (what the heck), from the Bible, who would it be?
SIEGEL: Moses. We’d do a “Singin’ in the Rain” medley starting and ending with the classic “Moses Supposes…” Is that too obvious?
Right: Photo of Leah Siegel, Jewess.
and:
JEWESS: You’ve been playing on the historically Jewish and now impossibly hip Lower East Side for years. How has the neighborhood influenced you?
SIEGEL: … I lived across the street from the Streits Matzah factory and every other morning at 7:30 a huge truck would pump something into the place through a big hose they connected to a hatch they would open. Boxes of matzah, I guess. It was loud. It was impossible to sleep. I developed allergies I’d never had before. I was sick most of the time and was generally depressed and scared. So yeah I guess you could say that somehow the LES influenced me and my music.”
Citing a CNN article “Brain gets a thrill from charity,” The Raiser’s Razor addresses, in part, the Communities Foundation of Texas’ grants to the American Indian Arts Council and the Museum of Biblical Art.
Above: ‘Angkor Wat Sunrise,’ posted on Flickr by Heaven’s Gate (John), who writes, “The Temple of Angkor Wat was dedicated to the Hindu God Vishnu by King Suryavarman II, who reigned between AD 1131 and 1150. The Temple was constructed over a period of 30 years, and illustrates some of the most beautiful examples of Khmer and Hindu art.”
“In a world where religious art has declined in prominence in the past few centuries, the range of spiritual expression in the show is startling,” writes the Anglican Journal of the show Sacred Expressions.
“What’s perhaps less obvious [about Keith Haring and Andy Warhol] is that both also were religiously devout,” writes Brad Hundt, of the Observer Reporter (Pa.), on the show “Personal Jesus …: The Religious Art of Keith Haring and Andy Warhol.” Not surprisingly, “Neither artist’s work is something you would find in stained glass at the church up the street.”
Continue reading ‘Arts Roundup: Warhol’s Personal Jesus and Lucie-Smith Arrives in Iran’
This week’s Busted Halo podcast addresses, amongst other things, the Divine Mercy Chaplet.
The hosts also address Saint Faustina’s painting (right) of Jesus, with a red ray (blood) and a blue one (water). St. Faustina claimed to have seen Jesus in a vision, and Jesus instructed her to paint his portrait in this particular manner. He also told her to place the particular text on the image, which would serve as a sort of get-out-of-hell free card.
Yet, like the Midrashic texts that suggest that God showed Betzalel (and Moses) an image in fire of the Tabernacle as He wanted it constructed, this sort of claim begs the question: Is God a realist? From the sounds of it, the Tabernacle sounded like a remarkable structure–a portable assemblage of animal skins, dyes, gold and silver, and a parking lot of sacred objects of all sorts, with all different functions. Yet, I am fairly certain that Frank Lloyd Wright and Frank Gehry could have brought their own styles into the project, and affected the architecture for the better.
Must we say that the divine design is perfect, because it is divine? If so, that is a remarkable notion of aesthetics, whereby an ideal form exists, upon which the artist cannot hope to elaborate or improve. If not, does that do damage to the notion of God, if He asks for a Tabernacle that can be improved?
But perhaps more importantly, if we take St. Faustina (is the Faust reference intentional?) at her word, then are we to assume that her work depicts Jesus as he truly looked? What would it have meant if Jesus had asked for a Cubist work? A Fauvist one?
Bits’n Pieces is back and posting on John Felstiner’s biography of Paul Celan.
On a similar note, Richard McBee is back at The Jewish Press, this time writing on the new Jewish Gallery in Brooklyn, which “clearly looks forward to attracting a sophisticated clientele imbued with an interest and openness to Jewish art in all its myriad forms” promising to fulfill McBee’s “wildest dreams for a resurgent Jewish visual art.”
Right: Rabbi in Prayer with Torah, by Jankel Adler, from McBee’s review of The Jewish Gallery. McBee writes, “what is this figure actually doing with the Torah? We don’t normally prance around with the holy Torah, therefore this painting shifts into a symbolic mode, expressing our emotions not normally acted out in the physical world.”
An eastern German museum is collaborating with Israel’s Yad Vashem to show paintings and drawings by Holocaust victims, the AP reports. “I want to put the art center stage and to show with it how artists who were victims of the Nazi terror used art to endure the nightmare in the death camps and to tolerate the intolerable,” says Martin Roth, director of the Dresden State Art Collection.
“Cradle of Christianity” at Emory University includes Holy Land artifacts from the first through sixth centuries, reports the AP, offering “a striking glimpse into everyday life in what is now Israel at the time when Christianity emerged, as well as a powerful reminder of how rooted Christianity was in Judaism.”
Although Michael Dubitzky writes, “Not Iconia-worthy, even though Lebron has the religious marketing slogan (”I am a witness” and “The second coming”),” The Onion has a hilarious item on God Wondering If He’s Being Too Cruel In Allowing Cavaliers To Reach NBA Finals.
And below is easily the best Etch-A-Sketch artist I’ve ever seen, George Vlosich, though when he puts it flat it is clear that the foreshortening and proportions are off. Still amazing.
Garrison Keillor points out today is the anniversary of the Nazis’ 1940 march into Paris. “And a few weeks afterward, Hitler himself made a visit. He came to the Eiffel Tower and the Opera building and visited Napoleon’s tomb,” Keillor says. “Hitler said, in 1941, ‘I’m getting ready to flatten Leningrad and Moscow without losing any peace of mind, but it would have pained me greatly if I’d had to destroy Paris.’”
[Writer’s Almanac, or non audio]
Philosophical Conversations links a 2004 interview with W. T. J. Mitchell, in which he is asked “Isn`t it more or less our own desires that we project onto the images?” Mitchell talks of religious art, which wears its “heart on [its] sleeves … The picture wants your body. It does not just want your consent or your attention. It wants you physically. Some pictures demand sacrifice.”
[Philosophical Conversations]
African Shapes of the Sacred: Yoruba Religious Art moves to Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, N.Y. “Yoruba culture has had a profound impact on the Americas, particularly in religion, art, and music,” says an organizer.
[Colgate U. News]
In “Biblical art on the web,” Mark G. Vitalis Hoffman posts on some good resources.
[Biblical Studies and Technological Tools]
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