Dangerous art

Sojourners Magazine, May/Jun 2003 by Maksymowicz, Virginia

Sometimes the best art isn't at all beautiful

AS A SCULPTOR, college professor, and Christian in the Catholic tradition, I often find myself in the position of translator between professional artists and those who might have had very little exposure to art. A number of years ago, I became involved in an interchange of letters in The Catholic Agitator, a newspaper published by the Los Angeles Catholic Worker, about a sculptural frieze encircling that city's federal building. Called "The New World" and created by sculptor Tom Otterness, the relief presents a seemingly endless queue of chubby, cartoon-like figures, struggling to lift and carry huge spheres, cylinders, and cubes. One letter-writer, dubbed it "the shame of L.A.," calling it offensive and lamenting that neither the artist nor the patron had an "uplifting, aesthetic,or beautiful" image in mind.

I responded by agreeing that the image, with its Sisyphean depiction of labor based solely in the accumulation of wealth, was most certainly not uplifting or aesthetic. But I continued with a reminder that not all art is meant to convey the beautiful. One only has to look at medieval crucifixion scenes or Hieronymus Bosch's depictions of hell. In more modern times, there are Francisco Goya's etchings about the horrors of war, Picasso's painting of the bombing of Guernica, or Kathe Kollwitz's lithographs of starving children in Germany. These are all difficult artworks.

Artists are messengers. We report the news of this world; we don't create it. So, then, why does that great mass of Americans we like to call the "general public" (and counted among them, many Christians) often get more riled up about artistic images than the "news" behind those images? Could it be because, by making touchy subjects visible, artists provide easily aimed-at targets? So easy to aim at, in fact, that the most vocal protesters often have never seen the actual artwork at which they are shooting? (A favorite cry is "I don't have to see it to know what it's about!")

I myself ran afoul of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights back in 1994 without even knowing it. The contemporary art gallery at the college where I teach was cited by the group for mounting an anti-Catholic exhibit. As manager of the gallery, Ialong with a committee of other faculty members and students-had agreed to show the work of an Austrian artist named Josef Schutzenhofer. Called "Arsenal of Democracy," the paintings we chose used satire to take a hard look at the relationship between power and society. Figures such as George Bush Sr., Pat Robertson, Lee Iaccoca, and Pope John Paul II were all subjected to scrutiny. No one from the league ever contacted me or any members of the committee, and, consequently, the information listed in their report is filled with inaccuracies. In fact, I'm not convinced that anyone from the group saw the show. Interestingly, I had made a point of inviting the college's Catholic campus minister to view the paintings, and he had no trouble understanding what the artist was trying to illustrate-namely, that power has the tendency to distort the worldview of those who possess it.

Was Schutzenhofer's statement so revolutionary? I don't think so. Was no one from the Catholic League aware of church history? I don't think so. Why is it that, in a tradition that honors prophets and saints who told off the popes to their faces, there are Catholics who recoil at the slightest amount of criticism of their institutional structure? Maybe a picture really is "worth a thousand words."

A more famous controversy surrounded the "Sensation" exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum in 1999. This time it wasn't only the Catholic League protesting. For weeks, crowds gathered outside the museum, chanting and praying. Mayor Giuliani was ready to shut the museum down. Chris Ofili's collaged abstraction of an African-featured woman titled "The Holy Virgin Mary" was at the center of the fray. The colorful image incorporated a resin-coated, clay-like form shaped like the kind of gravity-defying breasts one sees on the painted Madonnas of the Middle Ages. It turned out that the material used was dried elephant dung.

The New York tabloids had a field day. What in actuality is a very stylized rendering became transformed into "a portrait" of Mary on which an artist had thrown and smeared fresh excrement. Whether or not Ofili's painting is great-and for the record I think it's rather mediocre-it is most definitely not what the press made it out it to be. If the artist and the audio guide accompanying the exhibit were telling the truth, his intention was not to defile anyone's religious belief (Ofili himself is a Catholic of Nigerian descent). While an undergraduate, he won a scholarship to study in Zimbabwe. It was there that he saw how extensively elephant dung was used as agricultural fertilizer to nourish the otherwise barren land. It interested him enough that he used the material in each of the other three paintings included in the show. In the case of "The Holy Virgin Mary," it seems that the artist wanted to focus on the sources of life-whether they be agricultural, historical (many experts believe that human life began in Africa), biological (through a woman), or spiritual.