I think what I’ll do first is talk a bit about my motivation for working on this series, my intentions and the process.  And then open it up for some questions and comments before taking you on a small tour around the room and introducing you to the characters and pieces, also reading a few excerpts from the texts.  

First then, my motivation for doing a series on Christian art. 

My use of Christian imagery is nothing new.  For the past number of years I’ve used it occasionally in my work, but last summer when Lubos and I talked about a show, I was quite definite about wanting to do something that actually focused on the Christian images and themes. 

Part of that motivation is a result of my background which is loosely Mennonite.  That doesn’t necessarily tell you anything as there are so many different kinds of Mennonites.  My family wasn’t extremely conservative, not like the horse and buggy type.  I didn’t wear long print and floral dresses or  black head scarves.  Nor was it liberal like the Mennonites in Winnipeg who all believed in higher education and seemed quite unattached to the fundamental doctrines of the tradition.  We were very religious, my dad a minister and my mom the church organist.  While music was encouraged, art was not a part of our lives and I knew nothing about religious art, but at the same time, the imagery was present in the bible stories like the annunciation, the birth, death and resurrection of Christ and the Old Testament prophets. 

I suspect too, that part of the motivation to work with the imagery and themes had to do with needing to see how I felt about them.  See how I would treat them and how I would bring them into my present reality.  I’d left the church some time ago but while the leaving was fraught, I wasn’t interested in representing the Christian faith in a negative light.  Not interested in representing anything really.  Simply wanting to bring the images into the gallery context and in so doing, removing them from the isolation of the evangelical church and bringing them into the air of the broader culture. 

I have to clarify here as this last statement could be confusing.  Historically Christian art has been bound up with both church and culture.  It has not existed in isolation.  I’m speaking personally here.  The tradition I grew up in holds the Christian images and themes to be sacred.  They’re the given, the Word of God.  And to remove them from their place of authority, to tamper with them in any way is seen to be disrespectful and even blasphemous.  Even so, it was a necessary thing to do.   Necessary to take these images along with me and out of the evangelical church.  This in order to maintain a relationship with them.  After all, they did and probably still do represent home for me.

An aside:  I just came across an article in an old Canadian Art Magazine on Gathie Falk whose background is also Mennonite.  The article says that some of her early paintings were consciously religious works, in particular a series of upside-down crucifixions.  After being severely criticized, she left Christian iconography alone, or at least, became less open about it.

2.  In terms of process, as my work has been narrative these last years it’s been essential that I concern myself with the story, the setting and the characters.  Depending on my dreams for the narrative initially, the process became streamlined, the story a kind of ready-made.  I had only to find the right setting and characters.

Introducing text more recently has complicated things but at the same time given me an opportunity to range about, to expand on the images, to satisfy some creative urge to go if not deeper, wider.  So far, I’ve chosen not to insert text into the actual collage but to use it as an adjunct.  A companion piece that is in relation to the work, but not necessarily or completely aligned.  I’ve carried this practice into the present show, touching on the Christian themes but again, moving outside the immediate context in order to pull in other material.

When beginning each new piece, I start with the theme.  With the idea.  The pieta, for instance.  And from there a kind of conversation takes place between the actual composition and the text.  At times the composition comes together first.  I might find an item that is irresistible… like the image in a Life Magazine of an older woman trying out a mattress.  So…in No Rest for the Pious, I began writing the text after solving the composition although I’m quite sure I had a definite sense of the text already, that it would focus on the idea of piety and sacrifice, that I’d refer to Abramovic and would use Anne Carson’s Isaiah story.

3.  For this particular series, my intent was that there to be a dialogue between the Christian themes and artistic concerns.  Again, there is such an obvious link between the two, Christian art having dominated the western world for such a long time and even now maintaining a prominent place in the gallery collections.  But whereas art was in the service of Christianity, the icons originally helping to sustain the faith, that dynamic no longer exists.  Art has been freed up from that mandate and the images and themes as well.  The link, however, still exists and the images are now available to secular artists for their uses.  There’s Bacon using the crucifixion as a way of representing feelings.  Bill Viola beginning to integrate Christian imagery into his work, influenced by a 15th century painting of the crying Madonna.  “It opened up a whole new dimension of grief for me’ he said, adding that he found the icons to speak powerfully to his humanity and to his emotions.  Many others.  Chris Burden.  Andy Warhol.  Kiki Smith.  The Brits.  It’s interesting too.  In these old Canadian Art Magazines, I have read so many titles that come for the Christian tradition.  The Word of God.  Annunciation.  And there are artists even like Attila Richard Lukas whose work references these themes.  

Once I’d decided to move forward with the dialogue I needed to find some way to make it happen for me.  It’s one thing to say there’s an historical link, quite another to find the way in.    To find the thing that would make it work for me.  For that reason I was pleased when I came upon the likes of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, William James and Cieran who all believed artists, thinkers and heroes to be great and necessary human types alongside the saints.  Artists and saints…both in the same category.  Perfect.  Too, when I began looking into the life and art of performance artist, Marina Abramovic, I saw a definite connection between her attitudes and those of the saint and martyr.  Both keen on pain and its usefulness in opening the door to the other side.  Both believing Art and/or God to be life itself.  At that point I had my entry into the project.  A means of really linking the two.  Art and God.  The artist and the saint.  Marina Abramovic.

4.  As for the themes in this series I’ll read you a list.  The centrality and usefulness of pain and sacrifice for the saint and artist.  The simultaneous desire for relief from pain.  The hope for transcendence.  The absolute commitment to the Muse and/or God and its driving force.  Methods of performance.  The temperament of saints and artists.  The complicated life of Art in that it’s seemingly set up to fail and renew itself on a continual basis.  The various ways secular artists relate to Christian themes and images.  Misogyny in the classical, religious and artistic world.  The importance of connections in story-telling.

It’s become apparent to me that while I’ve engaged in a discussion involving Christian themes and artistic concerns, my interest is not so much in the themes themselves nor in a discussion about art.  Rather, it’s in that little knot at the centre.  The place they intersect.  (It puts me in mind of Diebenkorn’s paintings.  The huge color fields and then this tight little area of busyness. This area of electricity.)  One instance.. The Relaunching of Larry.  There are so many connecting points here.  Lazarus sits at the centre while Andy Warhol, David Bowie, Sylvia Plath and the question of the perpetual death and resurrection of art circle round. 

Or consider Meet Me at the Oasis where Abramovic, silent film star Theda Barra,  and the prophet Ezekiel are thrown together as performance artists, all making use of silence, melodrama and gesture.  All involved somehow with the other side.  It’s an unlikely trio but they’re pulled together by their ‘calling’. 

Aside:  Now…by looking at Meet Me at the Oasis, you won’t find evidence of any real connection between the three characters.  In fact, they don’t really figure at all.  There’s no Ezekiel, and Abramovic and Barra are only used as hair models.  Instead, the collage indicates a place of respite from all of that melodrama while the text tells the story.

5.  And that brings me again to the text, an integral part of this series.  The images could stand alone and work, but the addition of the text fleshes out the story or discussion, allowing for the kinds of connections I like making and in general leading to a larger experience. 

Writing the text for this series I see that my stance is somewhat aloof.  I maintain a distance unlike the saint and artist who are passionately involved.  I note, reflect, speculate, but only occasionally commit.  Instead I watch from the sidelines, marvelling at the depth of Abramovic’s dedication and horrified by the lengths she is willing to go for Art.  Appalled by Sebastien Horseley’s decision to be crucified.  And full of admiration for David Bowie as he makes his last music video, Lazarus, shortly before his death. 

Some of the writers I’ve used have been introduced to me by Eleanor Wachtel of the CBC program Writers and Company.  Here it is I crossed paths with Anne Carson, Karl Knausgaard and Colm Toibin.  And through them I found my Isaiah, Lazarus, Ezekiel and Mary.  I was so very pleased to find their particular versions of the bible stories as they injected some much appreciated humour and nuance into otherwise overly familiar bits of sacred text. 

Questions.

Tour Around the Room

1.  Such a Pieta.  This first image was, at the time, a kind of throw-away piece.  A way to get into the project.  Initially I wasn’t thinking of it as a keeper but changed my mind along the way.  It’s loaded up with pieta imagery.  The wallpaper, picture on the wall and the sad woman in the foreground.  I always think of a cheap hotel room when I see this piece.

2.  Confirmed Instances of Piety.  Here I continued with the pieta theme introducing Marina Abramovic to the series.  She’s the one in red, her eyes upward, seemingly moving into some kind of ecstasy.  This is a story of a chance meeting with her, recognizing her because of the way she holds me firmly in place with her eyes.  Also the red dress.  The floating pieta on the wall is my own version.

If you don’t know anything about Abramovic, she is Serbian, born in ’46.  Her parents were partisans in WW2 and later were employed in the communist government of Tito’s.  She found her medium when she discovered the power of performance, using her body as a site for artistic and spiritual exploration.  

3.  No Rest for the Pious.  I made two versions of this piece as I wasn’t satisfied with the first and smaller orange one.  It was near the beginning of the project and I was feeling some unease.  Constraint.  I’d never before worked to theme to such a degree and felt some kind of internal pressure to stay true to theme whatever that meant.  And after this first attempt I thought I’d do a second and have more fun with it.

I’ll read you an excerpt.  “In the Book of Isaiah Anne Carson writes:  ‘There is a kind of pressure in humans to take whatever is most beloved by them and smash it.  Religion calls the pressure piety and the smashed thing a sacrifice to God.’  Even God is susceptible to that particular pressure.  One time he smashed Isaiah.  Isaiah called him on it and they came to an agreement.  Performance artist Marina Abramovic is also susceptible.  She smashed her own body.  No agreement was required.

It’s evident that humans feel a lot of pressure.  A lot of piety.  I mean, there’s an awful lot of smashing going on.  A word of warning:  be careful about making yourself too beloved.

Michelangelo made a sculpture and named it for this pressure.  The Pieta.  Actually not so much for the pressure as its resulting sacrifice.  If the pressure is called piety, the result is called pity.  Grief.  Lamentation.  There’s the mother holding her dead son.  Her smashed son.  God’s son.

And to what end, all of this?  What drives a pressure named for such a thing as piety?  As duty?  This is not easy to understand unless there are high stakes involved.  Unless there is skin in the game.

Easier is the impulse toward expansion and transformation which Abramovic speaks of.  This expansion comes to her as she smashes her own body and moves through the door of physical pain to a higher consciousness.  Transformation also arrives for Carson’s Isaiah who is sweet-talked by God and given a new contract.  Suddenly ‘milk pours from his breasts.  He forgets about righteousness and as he feeds the milk to small birds and animals he thinks only about their little lips.”

In the collage, I used the Life magazine woman as a substitute for the dead-post-sacrificial object of pity.  Instead she’s a living object of care. Again… the image and text don’t totally correspond.  

3.  Laundered and Levitating.  Abramovic shows up once more in my version of her kitchen series  where she’s paying homage to St Teresa who was given to torturing herself because she wasn’t perfect.  After torturing herself enough God blessed her with rapture and with spontaneous levitation which appears to have been a rather mixed blessing.  In this piece Abramovic plays two roles:  that of the levitating Teresa and a Maytag washing-machine-saint attended to by three women.  This little bit I took from playwright David Ives Lives of Saints.  It seems that these women saints tended to eroticize pain.  Teresa found her excessive pain to be sweet and the Maytag likewise hysterically begs the repair man to break her so he could later fix her.

4.  Meet Me at the Oasis.  Here’s the piece I mentioned previously, the text containing the story of the prophet and the performers, the composition the relief from all the fatigue that must surely follow these excessive performances.  It contains some of the hand gestures used by the saints.  

The silent screen.   Exaggerated gestures.  A tinkling piano and the occasional sub-title.  Immediately you’re in,  captivated as Theda Bara begins her seduction of the rich businessman in A Fool There Was, one of her few surviving films.  You note the way she approaches.  Drops the rose.  Engages him with her eyes.  Of course.  It’s so obvious.  This visual short-hand.  And no matter what one may think of the technique, it does move the story along.  Gets to the point.

Performance artist Marina Abramovic also understands silence.  Gesture.  Hers too is the broad gesture.  The dramatic. Notice as she places instruments of pain and death alongside the mundane on the table at Studio Morra for her performance Rhythm 0.  This in the service of Art. ‘Art is life and death’ she says, ‘There is nothing else.’  And for her, this seems true enough.  Her body, expendable.  A kind of vehicle.  A means.  Medium by which to act and be acted upon.  To be moved through.  She wants that process.  Wants also the other side. Bara wants neither.  Just talks to the other side, ‘medium’ being a term used to describe her by the Fox spin doctors.

As Karl Knausgaard describes the experiences of the prophet in A Time To Every Purpose Under Heaven it’s apparent that Ezekiel too can be described as a medium.  And as with Bara and Abramovic, gesture is his language.  Silence.  His tongue paralyzed by God.  It’s an odd situation to be in.  He eats God’s honey-flavoured words and what follows is the loss of his own, his ability to speak limited to God’s words and these only at particular moments.  During the performances.  And perform he must.  But in the service of God rather than Art.  There’s Ezekiel arranging to get himself tied up in his own house, the audience outside waiting for hours and then days.  Finally his tongue loosened he speaks out:  ‘So says the Lord God, he who will hear, let him hear’ while people, having deserted their posts, collect once again, anxious to see what outrageous things Ezekiel will say and do.

While it could be said these artists own the broad gesture, successful TED Talkers know the value of  the somewhat subtler gesture.  Of quantity.  I read that the most successful TED Talkers are those using their hands an average of 465 times during an 18-minute talk.  Expressive hands rather than jazz hands.  There’s a difference. Expressive making sense and somewhat scripted.  Standardized.  Somewhat akin to the gestures of silent film stars.  And saints.  St Teresa’s open-palmed hands.  Abramovic’s.  The benediction hands.  The amazement.  The be quiet.  Listen.  Wait.  Jazz hands in contrast…think Ezekiel.  Knausgaard writes ‘his arms and legs beat against the earth, his head turns from side to side, eyes open all the while.’  Jazz body.  Inadequate.  Ineffectual.  The least successful.

5.  The Relaunching of Larry.  In this piece I’m using the death and resurrection of Lazarus to consider the death and revivification of art.  This with a view to an essay called Has art ended again? by Owen Hulatt.  At the end of his essay  Hulatt suggests that as a culture we’ve had an idea of art…what counts as art and what it should do… that no longer applies.  The choice:  to look at art differently, think in terms of many overlapping narratives or to wait for a new all-encompassing or grand narrative.

6.  Everyone Has a Cross to Bear.  Here I’m dealing with Christian art and using a group of British artists, all of whom drink at the Golden Heart Pub, to check out how they use the material.  They all happen to have dealt with the crucifixion.  Some politically.  Gilbert and George putting a Union Jack loin cloth on Christ and calling the image Christian England.  The Chapmans using Ronald MacDonald as a substitute Messiah, come to bring food to the poor.  Tracey Emin using the sense of the crucifixion autobiographically.  And Sebastien Horseley as a symbol of heroism.  He was extreme and actually sought out the experience of being crucified.  

7.  It’s All in the Headgear.  This piece is about the Romantic and Symbolist artists identifying with Christ as martyr.  Munch.  Gauguin.  Van Gogh.  Delacroix.  Gauguin paints himself as Christ in the garden.  Van Gogh as Christ in the pieta.  

8.  Annunciation in a Melian Boat.  Mary and the angel.  Misogyny.  Here’s part of the text.

 A show at the Mark Miller Gallery in New York with the catchy title Hot Dry Men Cold Wet Women.  2015.  Has to do with Greek humor.  Or more accurately, the Greek theory of humors.  According to Hippocrates and Galen, our physical characteristics, temperaments, moods, behaviours are influenced by four bodily fluids known as humors.   Blood, phlegm, yellow bile, black bile.  A proper mixing results in good health; an improper, in disease.  Some years later the elements fire, water, air, earth with their qualities of hot, moist, cold, dry are introduced and combined, so to speak, with the fluids.  What you want is hot/dry/yellow bile.  Certainly not its opposite.  Cold/wet/phlegm.

I’m reading Anne Carson.  Dirt and Desire:  Essay on the Phenomenology of Female Pollution in Antiquity.  (Men in the Off Hours)  She writes that women are perceived as posing the greatest threat to social order among the Greeks. The reason?  Well, the assumption, with its ground in mythology, is that women are wet and therefore unbounded.  ‘They are formless creatures who cannot or do not or will not maintain their own boundaries and who are awfully adept at confounding the boundaries of others.’  ‘Pollutable, polluted, polluting.  Units of danger.  Unstable compounds of deceit and desire.  Prone to leakage.’   And here Carson calls up the image of a boat filled with holes, an image used by the Greeks themselves to signify an out-of-control woman.

Unfortunately for all those hot, dry men, women are necessary for some functions, procreation being one of them.  Even for the gods.  Women have a propensity to make trouble though, cheating on the gods or pushing them too far and often dying as a result of this mischief, the unborn child having to be snatched from their womb at the last minute.  At least, if it’s a son.

There’s the Hebrew god as well.   Wants a son.  Needs a woman.  Perhaps the women in his circle are warmer, dryer, less phlegmy.  I check.  Do a search starting with ‘Jewish humor’.  You can imagine.  No bodily fluids, no talk of elements.  Instead word play, irony, satire and comedy.  Changing directions I go for ‘pollution,’ finding plenty.  It’s complicated; women most often implicated.  Etc.

9.  So Where is This Divine Miranda and her Divinely Apathetic Athambic Aphasic Partner?

Or you could ask…where is her uninterested, self-assured and therefore having no need of us and unable to communicate with us partner?  The Betrayal of Babylon next door talks in terms of the inadequacy of language.  Karl Knausgaard portraying the prophet Ezekiel includes gesture in that inadequacy.   In this piece Samuel Beckett counters that with the fact that language is all we have even while agreeing to its inadequacy.   His character Lucky demonstrates this lack but at the same time is successful in revealing our dilemma.  If there is a God, God is arbitrary and erratic.  Not to be counted on.  So this is a kind of version of Waiting for Godot.  

Many of the faces I’ve used here are those of Ana Marie Pacheco, a Brazilian-born sculptor.  She understands torment.  Hers are the refugees, the ones that Lucky’s god has forsaken.  And if they’re hopeful as they wait for deliverance, for their Godot, I can’t tell.  Pacheco thinks they are but their faces are so full of fear and apprehension.

10.  Roadside Attractions.  It’s clear that life is suffering.  This piece is about the additional suffering people take on in order to help rid themselves of the original.  They do any number of things, a pilgrimage being one of them.  This is a kind of version of the pilgrimage to Compostela.

11.  Ms Abramovic and Miss Stein Discuss Stair Treatments.  I found the background first.  Wanted to use these two women but wasn’t sure how to put them into this setting.  I had one of Abramovic’s performance in mind but had no sense of Stein’s connection to stairs.  Happily there was one.

We find performance artist Marina Abramovic and writer/painter Gertrude Stein each sitting on a story separated by a staircase.  Abramovic on the second story, Stein on the first.  I am not aware of any particular power dynamic.  If there is an upper hand, I’d cast my vote with Stein as it’s her home.  As for their discussion on the topic of stairs, they’re in partial agreement about not using them in the conventional way, that is, as a means to move from one story to the next. 

As for the stories, here’s Abramovic’s:  It’s called The House With The Ocean View.  A performance piece in which she sits, stands, lies down, drinks water, uses the toilet and takes a shower on a raised platform over a period of twelve days and nights.  Three platforms actually.  All this in front of an audience.  There are three sets of stairs, well, ladders, one in front of each platform.  And if you look closely you’ll note the rungs are made of large butcher knives.  Immediately the connection between the ladders and their normal function is lost, the meaning subverted.  Instead of serving as a means for Abramovic to leave the platform or audience members to join her, they’re mocking the entire notion of access.  And of course, this is the point.

Miss Stein’s story:  It’s in the October 13, 1934 issue of the New Yorker and has to do with her daily routine.  Is called:  Tender Buttons.  So every morning Stein gets up at ten and drinks some coffee, her partner Alice Toklas already up for hours dusting and fussing around.  At some point Stein bathes and combs the poodle, brushes his teeth, and either before or after, bathes herself in an oversize bathtub made especially for her.  The tub is so large the staircase has to be taken out in order to install it.  Post bath she puts on a huge woollen  bathrobe, finally ready to write.  From this we gather that accessing the second story is not as important a priority as bathing for Miss Stein.

12.  Slow Down!  Big Themes Ahead.  Well…this is the summing up piece.  Similar to what I’ve been doing now I suppose.  I’ve used myself, in part because I was getting tired of trying to find the right images.  And I am the one driving this thing, after all.