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    Brian’s Story Explained: Art that Is Critical of Religion
    
    B
    
    rian, the student who made the Cibachrome Elvis crucifixions, is an example of an artist who feels alienated from religion and wants to use his or her art to stir up some controversy. It’s an open secret in the art world that the best-known antireligious artists aren’t really against religion. Andres Serrano, whose Piss Christ caused such a stir, is a committed but skeptical and conflicted Catholic. His house is filled with Baroque religious sculptures. The same is true of the Argentine artist León Ferrari (see figure 15), and Andy Warhol’s versions of Leonardo’s Last Supper are other examples (See figure 22). Warhol was a devoted Catholic, and the fact that he staged the opening of his exhibition of Last Suppers across the street from the original in Milan doesn’t necessarily mean that all he had in mind was publicity; it has even been argued that the paintings are a kind of confession of faith.1 Perhaps the most interesting religious art is critical but open-minded, or deeply undecided. That is what I mean by “art that is critical of religion”: not only art that criticizes religion, but art that ponders religion from a few steps outside it. A few years ago at our graduation exhibition, one of the school’s students exhibited underwear stitched with beads in the form of religious scenes, like the ones on large votive candles. At first it seemed like a deliberate insult, but later I found out the student was trying to work through issues about the church and sexuality. Using underwear wasn’t entirely successful, because it could be easily misunderstood as a cheap shot at sanctity, but it wasn’t simply antireligious. It is possible to imagine contemporary art that is critical of religion as a spectrum: on one side is the work that rails against the church, and on the other side work that simply asks that viewers reconsider ideas about religion. The first option is the ultraviolet of antireligion, and it tends to be heated and combative. The second is the infrared of critique, and it can be low energy and less definite in its ideology. Brian’s work seems like the
    
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    Fig.22. Andy Warhol, Last Supper. 1986. ©The Andy Warhol Foundation, Inc. Photo: Alinari/Art Resource, NY.
    
    ultraviolet end of things, but actually is closer to the infrared. Brian was not emotionally or philosophically attached to his work. His crucified Elvis seemed antireligious when I first saw it, but it wasn’t, really, because Brian didn’t care that much about Catholicism. He could have been an atheist, or an agnostic. He did not say, and it didn’t matter for his art. Brian’s Elvis and his Madonna-as-the-Madonna photograph were semisacred even in their semisecularity. After all, Elvis is a kind of saint to some people. The critic Harold Bloom has studied the American pro-life movement, and he thinks there is a parallel between placards of unborn fetuses that are paraded in front of abortion clinics and traditional images of the baby Jesus.2 Both are rallying points, both inspire intense devotion, both are images of precious lives that needed to be protected. (He also
    
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    makes a parallel between the American flag and the cross.) Bloom is eccentric to think that the fetus and the flag are new religious icons, but he is not wrong to point out that religious images are always being reinvented, and secular images can be covertly religious. The most virulent antireligious thinking hasn’t been in visual art, but in theology itself. No artist I know is as dogmatic as to say, as the historian Friedrich Max Müller did in the late 19th century, that religion is merely a “disease of language.”3 One reason Manet’s Dead Christ and the Angels is not an illustration of Renan’s naturalized religion is because it is still clearly about a sacred subject. I do not know any artists who would bother to debate the proposition that “the whole Divine law . . . has come down to us uncorrupted,” which is what Spinoza first doubted in the 17th century; and I have yet to see an artwork illustrating Nietzsche’s famous and often misunderstood aphorism “God is dead.”4 The enormous issues of the past have floated away, and the current generation of artists is not against anything as large as religion or truth. Truly antireligious artwork, the ultraviolet kind, is a minority. It lightens by invisible grades into work that is conflicted about religion, like Serrano’s, and then it fades into the dimmer shades of work that has nearly lost its anger and it seems the artist is thinking of other things, as in Brian’s work. In their apparently careless disregard of serious antireligious polemic, contemporary artists are following another long-established tradition: the history of learning to ignore religion, instead of railing against it. In the Western tradition, the Greek philosopher Epicurus was among the first to do this. He thought the gods had nothing to do with people, that they lived in “flat” places “between” worlds (he called them intermundia), and that in any case the gods were too weak, too rarefied to care about what happened on Earth.5 I don’t think Freud wrote about Epicurus’s theology; if he had, he might have said that Epicurus had worked through the psychological dependence on divinity and even through the rejection of that dependence. Epicurus did not resent the fact that the gods had gone away. Like forgotten parents, they were neither loved nor hated. (In that, Epicurus was different from the plangent melancholy of romantic poets like Friedrich Hölderlin and Gérard de Nerval, who swooned when they thought of how far away the gods had gone.) Though Freud decried the dependence on the “illusion” of God, I wonder if he imagined it would be possible for God the Father to be so thoroughly divested of power, so absent from a person’s affections or thoughts, that he might vanish into the Empyrean as the Greek gods did for Epicurus.6 That, as far as we can tell from the surviving texts, is what Epicurus achieved. It is a parallel road to the one that Brian was on when he put
    
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    his last Elvis on the cross. He was on the way from hating to not caring. There is a wonderful long word for Epicurus’s achievement (in fact, the longest word in the dictionary that is not a scientific neologism): floccinaucinihilipilification, the act of saying something is without value. It can be difficult to achieve in the case of religion; most work critical of religion, from Warhol’s to Brian’s, still has an edge. Brian was in a class of mine in which we looked at the transformations of common symbols. It’s a surprising fact that at one time in the ancient Near East, crosses were made from swastikas. Take a swastika and dismember it as in Diagram 1. Rearrange it, shifting each piece clockwise, and you have a Greek cross as in Diagram 2. This little trick (swastika = cross) is like Brian’s little trick (Madonna = the Madonna).7 They are part of the same game of mutable religious symbols. Visual culture is permeated with examples. In a medieval manuscript, a saint is decorated with three swastikas, each one formed by four axes with their blades touching (See figure 23).8 The manuscript is the Hours of Catherine of Cleves, and the swastikas are, of course, entirely accidental. Before nazism, Western artists shifted indifferently from swastikas to their mirror images, sometimes called sauvastikas.9
    
    Diagram 1. A Swastika, disassembled.
    
    Diagram 2. A Greek cross.
    
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    Fig.23. St. Matthias Apostle, in The Hours of Catherine of Cleves. 1435. Pierpont Morgan Library MS 917, p. 235.
    
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    AU: I can’t find letter to match in this language— please insert correct letters AU: I created a pict file of this from the manuscript. I’ll have to see if I can set it in type. —TS
    
    The Impossibility of Transcendence
    
    In the class I also introduced examples from non-Western cultures. In India, the Jain devipuja ( , “shining worship”) ritual involves swastikas and crosses, along with labyrinths (See figure 24). Each worshiper pushes grains of uncooked rice into a design that represents the courses that his or her life may take.10 The designs are slightly different for each person, but they are built around the swastika, an emblem of the four possible lives: incarnation as heavenly brings, human beings, animals, and hellish beings. At the top is a crescent moon, cradling a single dot: the siddha, resting place of enlightened souls. Jain worshipers also call the swastika sauvastika or sauvastikayantra, and the whole diagram nandyavarta or nandyavartayantra (“diagram of the nandyavarta”). The swastika and this yantra (diagram) are two of eight auspicious symbols in Jain religion. If there is one thing that everyone knows about crosses and swastikas, it is that they are ubiquitous, crowded with meanings, and therefore in danger of collapsing into meaninglessness. Even when they were not decoration, some ancient crosses, like some ancient swastikas, may have symbolized nothing. Carl Jung thought that the reversed swastika, called a sauvastika, symbolized ideas tunneling into the unconscious. Müller thought they symbolized the autumnal sun. In the past, swastikas have meant goodness, the Third Reich, the spring sun, Jaina redemption, the four directions, and nothing—either nothing in particular or nothing at all. That is the condition of religious symbols, as Hegel said; they combine the specificity of “natural” meanings (the cross is also a crossroad, as in the devapuja rice maps) with many other meanings that are unrelated, from the Third Reich to the accidental configuration of hatchets in the Hours of Catherine of Cleves.11 Brian found that part of the class congenial, perhaps because it gave him license to play with symbols. Any cross, any swastika or sauvastika, might also be just decoration, or so I thought Brian hoped. Brian’s game of transmuting symbols was also religion’s game, except that Brian was playing the easy part, stressing the fact that religious symbolism is arbitrary. He wanted to say something jokey against Christianity, and also to make a work that would mean different things to different people. His colossal Cibachromes were not successful art, but they were on their way: they were better, at least, than the plastic “BEAM ME UP SCOTTY” crucifix. Art that trumpets its discontent with religion can seem too strident, too superficial. The many shades of gray, the conflicted second thoughts, are where art begins to happen. Brian’s art, when I saw it, was working its way out toward the infrared
    
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    Fig.24. A Jaina devapuja ritual. From Jyotindra Jain and Eberhard Fischer, Jaina Iconography, 2 vols. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1978), vol. 1, pl. VI (a). Used with permission of Jyotindra Jain.
    
    of carelessness. There is another mode of contemporary art production that is antireligious, but is fumbling its way toward something that might eventually be a kind of faith. An example is the images that have been seen in the eyes of the miraculous image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, a miraculous image imprinted on a tilma (a Central American garment) on December 9, 1531 (See figure 25).12 The story begins with Alfonso Marcue, who was the official photographer for the Basilica of Guadalupe in Mexico City. In 1929 he was photographing the tilma and found the reflection of a bearded man in the image of the Virgin’s eye. Then, in 1979, José Aste Tonsmann of the Mexican Center of Guadalupan Studies, magnified the Virgin’s eyes 2,500 times (the practical limit of light microscopy) and discovered the reflections of at least 13 people that, he supposes, the Virgin must have been looking at on December 9, 1531, when the miracle occurred. Among them are Bishop Zumárraga, who is known to have been at the scene; the interpreter Juan González; the Indian Juan Diego, who unfolds his own tilma in front of the bishop; a female Negro slave who is known to have been in the bishop’s service; and a man with Spanish features.13
    
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    Fig. 25. Virgin of Guadalupe, detail. 1531. Guadalupe, Mexico.
    
    All that is background. The slow drift back toward faith can be seen in the work of the American artist Jeffrey Vallance, who took Tonsmann’s findings a step further. Vallance looked into the Virgin’s eyes on the tilma and found “over seventy-five simian faces, all looking embarrassingly like popular versions of Bigfoot or Yeti (Abominable Snowman).” Vallance’s website diagrams a dozen or so (See figure 26). He says that he was not sure of the significance of his finds until he discovered that “in Mexico, the Spanish name for the Devil is the traditional term chango, or ‘monkey,’ ” so that the miraculous Virgin’s vision records apparitions of the devil, as reported in an early source. Vallance adds that other apparitions have also been seen (he does not quite say by whom), including “a shroudlike portrait of Christ, several profiles of Elvis (either looking up in adoration, or with eyes closed as if in prayer), . . . an image that looks somewhat like folk singer Bob Dylan (during his ‘born Again’ experience),
    
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    Fig.26. Jeffrey Vallance, Simian and human figures in the left eye of the Virgin of Guadalupe. From http://www.sixty-five.com/jeffreyvallance/.
    
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    . . . a diabolical visualization of cult leader Charles Manson, an image of famed Mexican wrestler and political activist Superbarrio, a profile of President Abraham Lincoln, and the carcass-imprint of Blinky, the Friendly Hen.”14 This is all presented seriously, but at the same time none of it is really meant to be believed. The usual art world reading of Vallance would be that it’s a snide kind of camp, a jokey fake-serious send-up of the pole-faced findings of the official church. There is truth in that, but I also think of work like Vallance’s as the tentative beginnings of a new kind of belief. He is making fun of the church and its acceptance of the reflections in the Virgin’s eyes, but at the same time he has spent a lot of time finding his own figures and providing them with elaborate technical and textual justifications. In the language of the art world, Vallance’s work is simply fun—it’s campy, quirky, and entertaining to explain. Yet it is also tentative and coy, because there is meaning behind the playful antireligious veneer. Why trouble yourself with the complicated history of the Virgin of Guadalupe if something doesn’t draw you to it? And if you find Vallance’s work funny, then you might ask yourself why. There is a serious content somewhere just beyond work like Vallance’s or Brian’s. It cannot be avowed: the only thing that can be said aloud is that old religious meanings seem ridiculous. But the work is about religion: it experiments with religious meanings, as if it were searching for a way to stay near religion—in Vallance’s case—or to drift away from it—in Brian’s. The artworks I mention in this book are just scattered emblems of a vast territory, mostly unexplored in scholarship. Consider, as evidence of the breadth of the phenomenon, the exhibition catalogue Faith: The Impact of Judaeo-Christian Religion on Art at the Millennium—or, as the cover copy puts it, “This is not your ordinary art catalogue, this is Faith.” Most of the artists in the exhibition were interested in using contemporary art to say something about religion. There is one of Hermann Nitsch’s bloody installations (a record of one of his invented rituals); a large cast concrete model of a church mounted upside down by Nicholas Kripal; Kinke Kooi’s O, God, an Ed Ruscha-type painting that depicts those words as if they were a swirl of cotton candy; a painting of the crucifixion, R. Crumb-style, by Manuel Ocampo, overwritten with slogans including “Invalid forms of inward looking”; a very serious tinted photograph of Jesus guiding the hand of doubting Thomas, done in professional-looking style by Bettina Rheims and Serge Branly; a book by Diane Samuels embroidered with a prayer beginning “Dear God, I do not know how to pray”; Linda Ekstrom’s table of blood samples on silk, called
    
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    Menstrual/Liturgical Cycles; and many works in minimalist, abstract, and expressionist idioms.15 Many related works are held in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Religious Art in St. Louis, Missouri, including paintings by Michael David, Daniel Smajo-Ramirez, Michael Tracy, Bernard Maisner and sculptures by Ann McCoy (See figure 27).16 There is, it seems, no end to the examples.17 A flood of art addresses itself to religion without quite being religious itself.
    
    Fig.27. Museum of Contemporary Religious Art, St. Louis. Installation view, showing worl by Michael Tracy (back wall), works by Michael David, Daniel Smajo-Ramirez, Bernard Maisner, and Ann McCoy. Courtesy Terrence Dempsey, Director, MOCRA, St. Louis.
    
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