In the Name of...
Religion is in the news. Odd since usually everyone likes to poo-poo it. (Seriously, it is very difficult being an open believer in this age of American Ultra Christianity. Empathy a vice? What in the actual fuck? Anyways…) But now, religion is in vogue, which has me musing on the original muse: religion.
The influence of God and Christ in medieval art is obvious and well documented. Since then theme of faith has traversed time and space in a way that no other subject has. From sculptures covered in dung, to crucifixes submerged in pee, everyone’s got something to say about believing. One of my all time favourite works of art is Casper David Friedrich’s Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer. When I first came across it in Hamburg, I thought it the perfect companion piece to the quest I was on. For so long I’d been walking in the darkness, then after choosing to climb a most frighteningly steep and precarious mountain, I’d found myself at the summit. Looking at all I’d traversed with the satisfaction of a glorified ganderer. I spent countless minutes staring at that postcard in my studio apartment, in awe of how such a simple image conveyed my life travels. Yet, I felt that there was something deeper in what I was seeing and feeling, and lamented at not being able to see the original as it was touring. As life would have it, The Wanderer Above the Sea and Fog came across my path and last week we finally met face to face. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is not the Hamburger Kunsthalle, where one can sit before a painting for as long as one’s conscious needs. The sheer throng of people moving about the gargantuan museum makes any sort of reflective art viewing impossible, and I’m sad to say that my encounter with The Wanderer was a little less than ideal. Perhaps because my pursuance of self is over, the deep personal relationship I had with the painting has dissipated, and my focus was could not remain constant amongst the tourists and their fiendish phones. I now stand on my own two feet, triumphant but every moving through the crests and troughs of existence, much like I believe Mr. Wander would have to do once he came down. Like other romantics Friedrich was religious, and it was quite interesting to see his other works that are so overtly religious in ways his opus is not. They seemed overwrought, overdone and just too obvious, with the adjective kitschy peppering my mind.
One’s spirituality is deeply personal and I flinch when I say this, but there is no right or wrong way to believe. We as humans were given free will meaning we can think and interpret whatever, however we want. It’s when our actions towards ourselves and others become harmful in the name of God, that belief becomes problematic. That’s why no matter how controversial, I think it important that there be art that reinterprets and comments on faith--though nothing as awful as The Da Vinci Code, please. From Chris Ofili’s The Holy Virgin Mary to the umpteen million Last Supper iterations, these pieces need to be made and viewed. Because just as the artist is questioning their narrative of faith they are provocatively asking us to do the same.
Pope Francis recently passed and he did so on the most holy day for Christians, Easter. I’m reminded of Maurizio Cattelan’s La Nona Ora, where Pope John Paul II painfully falls to the ground after being struck by a meteorite. I have never found this piece—or other artist commentaries on God—controversial. I see it as a conversation starter. The Pope is possibly the most powerful and well-known religious leader living. A demi-god to some, he can do no wrong, so for him to be struck down by a hot rock from outer space must mean his is human. But hold on a minute, it’s a fucking meteorite. Not a stone, not the broken wing of a gargoyle, but a meteorite! A space ball of metal, rock and whatever else that has accumulated in space and has fallen from the sky. Literally a vis major. Pope Francis was a pontiff blessed with integrity and dignity. A Jesuit, he gave, lived humbly, and rolled in a Popemobile that wasn’t a Mercedes Benz. To the best of his ability, I think he lived a life as close to Christ as was possible. Standing before La Nona Ora, what would he have mused?
