Jesus 2000

National Catholic Reporter, Dec 24, 1999 by Michael J. Farrell

Jesus 2000 is the whole point of it

The images came from the ends of the earth, six continents, in bulky bundles or neat envelopes, harbingers of an old-new artistic and religious phenomenon. The images came on slides, technology's way of reducing contemporary inspiration to workable proportions. Finally there were 1,678 representations of Jesus Christ from 1,004 artists in 19 countries.

It began as a journalistic enterprise. As the millennium approached scarcely anyone seemed to recall the whole point of it: its reference to the arrival among us of Jesus. All the talk was whether our banks and VCRs would fail. We at the National Catholic Reporter set out to see what this meant. We opted for an exploration in visual art, in keeping with Christianity's great tradition of recreating our divinity for each age and culture.

The first question was soon answered. People are still intrigued, at least. Heroes, stars, saints and scholars have come and gone, but there has been something about the historic persona of Christ -- whether one is a believer or not -- that grips the imagination and is still reluctant to let go in our own age of diminished deities. An extraordinary response, first from the media, across the United States and around the world, hinted that this Jesus 2000 competition was an idea begging to be announced.

This wide recognition was significantly advanced by the gracious consent of Sr. Wendy Beckett, famed BBC art expert, to judge the final 10 entries. On one hectic fall weekend our preliminary panel of judges, Sherry Lynn Best of Kansas City, Mo., Cory Stafford of Boulder, Colo., and Pattie Wigand Sporrong of Chicago, viewed approximately 2,000 slides, debated, reviewed and finally settled on 10 works of art that best corresponded with the aims and ideals of the Jesus 2000 project.

Such terms as winners and losers are meaningless in this context. One of the most interesting remarks in Sr. Wendy's adjudication (see page 7) is that at various times in the process she favored five different works as No. 1.

Art is quixotic, subjective, spiritual, unquantifiable, and while conventional wisdom picks favorites, from the "Mona Lisa" to any old Picasso, in the end the act of creation may mean more than the art. Thus, everyone who participated in this adventure is a winner. They said so themselves time and again, on the phone or in writing: that, win or lose, what counted was being involved in an exciting process at a privileged moment of our history.

Still, the process would not have happened if we had not gone in search of a winner and offered a top prize of $2,000 to show we meant business. So we congratulate the top 10 for surviving a rigorous adjudication process by a panel of professionals, who, artists themselves, took every single work seriously. We congratulate the fourth, third and second place winners for winning Sr. Wendy's attention and admiration. Their works are on the following pages.

And, finally, congratulations to Janet McKenzie of Island Pond, Vt., for creating the winning image of Jesus at 2000 (see cover image and page 7).

This is a Jesus likely to call for a second look. By all accounts the historical messiah turned heads wherever he went and whatever he did. He was controversial, a surprise, not average. McKenzie's "Jesus of the People" is likely to cause debate as did the original model. Were everyone to say, "that's nice" and move on, the project would have failed in its primary intention of generating something new, not a Jesus of yesterday but a risky squint into the future at the next step of our journey.

In media interviews and other discussions we got a strong impression that the era of the blond, blue-eyed Jesus is over. When the church was overwhelmingly a Western institution, we made Jesus in our likeness. But now at last Christianity has spread to the ends of the earth as the founder prayed it would. This work of art may be prophetic of where and how Christianity will flourish in the next millennium or two.

We offer this special supplement as a commemoration of Jesus 2000. We offer it as a gift to our readers and all those who participated. The supplement includes about 60 works chosen by the judges along with a few NCR favorites. They are not necessarily the best images of Jesus -- the word has little meaning in this context -- but they aim to be representative of all the other entries, a cross-section of the styles and visions of both the renowned and less-famous artists who participated.

The human face is one of the wonders of the world. There have been billions of us, and each face different. There are few of us who, if we could, would not improve on our own familiar faces, throw in a wrinkle for character, wipe out a wrinkle for vanity. What we would do is akin to the project the artist undertakes: not necessarily to make a pretty or perfect image, but something appropriate for the world, in tune with our reality, an idealization, an incarnation of our best imagining. Just as in reality, no two are alike.