Intimations of Resurrection

Hija Yu, Resurrection, 1996

This week, the faculty has been interviewing candidates for Dean of the Seminary. The interviews are held in the Board Room, which is a gracious, light-filled space with comfortable chairs and tables of dark, polished, wood. Many years ago, the room was also fitted out with rails to make it easy to hang artworks without damaging the walls, and a few years later track lights were installed to make the art glow.

This morning, as I sat among my faculty colleagues facing the candidate on the other side of the room, my attention was frequently drawn to the large painting behind him. The painting is called Resurrection. It consists of 7 panels, each of them 96” high by 15” wide. It is very abstract, consisting of mainly blues and whites, and suggests a larger-than-life-sized human figure, seen as if from a very high vantage point. The head seems to be bowed, and the arms stretch out beyond the edges of the last panels on the left and the right. The dark blue, nearly black areas in the lower corners stand in extreme contrast with the brilliant, nearly glowing white bands further up that seem to lift the arms through the sheer power of light. Above the figure, cloudy areas of a greener blue shift and intermingle with the more purple blue of the figure and the areas below it, creating a sense of limitless space.

There is no indication anywhere in the painting of geographic location, facial features, clothing, or anything else that might indicate gender, ethnicity, or any other mark of individuality. Even so, the gesture of a body suspended between outstretched arms almost automatically suggests crucifixion. This, however, is no lifeless Jesus, hanging on the cross in agony. Rather, we are given a vision of Christ rising amid powerful waves of energy, unbound by any earthly constraint.

The painting was made in 1996 by one of our Artists-in-Residence, Hija Yu. Hija is a slight, Korean-American woman, which might come as a surprise to someone who encounters this massive, heroic painting for the first time. I remember her working in the studio with such intense concentration that she would be unable to speak if someone addressed her. She did not paint with brushes at an easel, but rather laid each large canvas out on the floor and poured pigment directly onto it, thinning the paint with copious amounts of turpentine. Then, kneeling, she would lift the canvas up a few inches, tilting it this way and that coaxing the thin layer of pigment into just the right place. Once the paint was dry, she would do it again, building up the colors little by little until they became so rich and deep that one could lose oneself in them. It has always been amazing to me that Hija was able to achieve such control, not just on a single, large, canvas, but across a seven panels that must be joined together for the image to be perceived.

The conversation this morning kept circling around questions of hearing diverse voices, both within and outside the seminary. Who has the right to speak in the seminary community? How do we hear one another? How do we listen for the voices that are not at the table? It seems to me that one answer was hanging on the wall behind the candidate, silently waiting to be recognized. This image of the Risen Christ emerged from the artist’s willingness to surrender to the physical properties of flowing liquid, gravity, and time. It is an object lesson in the way that an artist’s practice of patience and process can speak with a resounding silence. I hope that the new Dean, whoever that may be, will remember that the Word of God is more than words.

Our Lady of San Juan de los Lagos

It’s already old news that the world did not end in December. Since last I wrote, we celebrated the birth of Jesus, and the visit of the Magi, and the Baptism of Christ. Now, we are in Ordinary Time for a very few, short weeks, the semester has started, and I’m getting back into the regular rhythms of seminary life. My favorite souvenir from my time away is a small painting of Our Lady of San Juan de los Lagos, which I brought back with me from the annual conference of the North American Academy of Liturgy, held this year in Albuquerque.

This picture is not, strictly speaking, an icon, but rather an image made in the santos tradition of the American Southwest. The santero, Charles M. Carrillo, also holds a doctorate in archeology and anthropology and teaches in the religious studies program at the University of New Mexico. Invited to give a plenary address at the conference, he told stories about the relationship that his relatives and other people in his community have with the pictures and statues of saints that they treat like regular members of the family. His deep, funny, faith-filled tales raised questions and a few eyebrows among academy members more comfortable with intellectual explanation and high liturgical practice than with folk customs and private devotions.

For me, Carrillo’s paintings of Santa Cecilia – patroness of musicians – tooling down the road in her classic car with her guitar hung over the radiator cap, or of Saint Isidro – patron saint of farmers, real estate agents, and gardeners – kneeling in a newly-planted field carved out of the Southwest desert, felt like home. The clear colors and flat, simplified, decorative forms felt as familiar as those the parts of the Los Angeles where the Virgin of Guadalupe smiles from car dashboards, the sides of buildings, and urban gardens.

But I had never met Our Lady of San Juan de Lagos until that day at the conference when Charlie Carrillo and his wife were setting out the santos among the scholarly books, liturgical vessels, and ornate vestments that are the usual offerings outside our meeting rooms. As I hurried by from one session to another, I was stopped in my tracks, wondering if perhaps I had somehow missed them the day before. Transfixed by the evocative power of these simple retablos, it was not a question of whether one would go home with me, but which one. As my eyes and hands kept reaching out to this nearly doll-like figure, framed by drawn-back curtains and flanked by two candles, it became clear that she was the one.

Dr. Carrillo says on his website that the work of the santero “is one of those art forms you cannot separate from the people. We write our own history by what we say and the art we do.“ I am not a member of the community to which the santos are native, but they speak to me about the divine in ways that full of meaning that I am unable to articulate. I simply stop and look, and know that I am in the presence of God.

Not the End of the World

Yesterday was 12/12/12, but it was not the end of the world. It is, however, the end of the semester, and time to take a break. By the time I return, the twelve days of Christmas will have run their course, and we shall see new things in the light of Epiphany.

 Before I go, however, I’d like to share one more artwork that I saw in Chicago last month. Our hotel was just opposite Grant Park, and every time the shuttle bus brought us back from McCormick Place, I would notice a group of tall, headless figures walking around in the grass. They looked familiar, like an acquaintance from some other part of my life that I couldn’t quite place. Finally, I decided to go find out who they were and what they were doing there.

 

From a distance, the figures seemed to be identical to one another, a literally faceless mass of near-humanity. As I approached, I began to realize that each one was a little different from the others—some taller, some shorter; some in groups and some alone; each facing in a different direction, aimlessly or intentionally following some secret intention. Missing both heads and hands, the eerie giants were stopped in mid-stride, as if held in an unseen force field. All were hollow when seen from the back, mere false fronts rather than solidly planted.

By the time I was among them, I was pretty sure that I knew who had made them. A glance at the plaque on a nearby stone confirmed my guess that it was Magdalena Abakanowicz, and told me that the name of the group of 106 rusty, iron folk was Agora, the word for gathering place or town square in ancient Greece. Although I had never even seen a photograph of this installation, it seemed familiar because I have been aware of Abakanowicz for many years. She began her career as a textile artist who was well known when I was a weaver in the 1970s. In those days, I admired her courage to break free from the technique-driven constraints of craft, instead  making the ugly, ungainly, yet oddly affecting installations of burlap and sisal that she called Abakans.

The walking simulacra populating the Agora seemed familiar because they were! No longer soft and unstable, relying on suspension lines hanging from the ceiling to remain upright, these hard, durable figures stand on their own two feet. However, like their ancestors the Abakans, they loom over their puny visitors, ignoring the intrusion into a realm that is at once mystical and menacing. And, like the Abakans, the inhabitants of Agora will also decay, albeit more slowly. Already covered in rust, one day they, like their textile forebears, will fall to the earth, unable to stand up to the ravages of time. For them, it will be the end of the world.

Designing Architecture for Art

Last week, I was privileged to participate in the end-of-semester critique for an undergraduate class on sacred space in the Catholic University’s School of Architecture. I had already met the students and most of the other jurors earlier in the semester, when, along with Julio Bermudez’s graduate students, they showed their concepts for a hypothetical, twelve-person monastery situated between the C&O canal and the Potomac River, near what is actually the popular site for picnickers, cyclists, and kayakers known as Fletcher’s Boathouse,. Some reflections and pictures from that experience are in my October 3 posting, Sacred Space. 

Catholic University School of Architecture
students preparing for a jury

In planning the undergraduate project for the remainder of the semester, Luis Boza, was intrigued with the idea that the monks might create a Center for the Arts and Religion nearby. Using our actual mission statement as a starting place, Professor Boza assigned a brief to design a 25,000 square foot building that would be just up the river from the monastery, to house a gallery, an art library, a café, and studio spaces. In assigning the project, he wrote

Architecture is a communicative medium; a language in which meaning is transmitted through the physicality of objects in space. Our physical and sensory experiences are translated through acute interpretations of scale, proximity, perspective, materials, and form. Light, however, is the medium that reveals what is hidden and ultimately, illuminates our visual experience. As such, Light, with its ethereal variation can orchestrate the intensity of the architectural experience. The perceptual essence and metaphysical strength of architecture is driven by qualities of light and shadow as shaped by solids and voids, by opacities, transparencies and translucencies.

Light is particularly important in exhibition and studio spaces. Painters, particularly, are sensitive to not only the direction of the light, but also to its color. The appearance of pigments, and therefore the color harmonies within a painting, can be dramatically different when seen by unfiltered daylight than when illuminated by yellow incandescent bulbs. Even the color of walls will affect perception, as light is reflected and refracted from every surface. Sculptures often need strong side lighting to bring out their contours, accentuating the difference between heights and depths. In a gallery, an exhibition that may be seem drab and unexciting will come to life when fully lit. 

The ten talented and dedicated third-year students had clearly grown in their ability to think about the relationship between light and space. One created a complex of layered boxes around a central courtyard, a modernist interpretation of the Gothic cathedral as the multi-roomed City of God. Another included a dark-walled interior space for the exhibition of digital art, featuring an intriguing system of ceiling perforations that could be adjusted to admit light in pixellated patterns. A third designed a screen to cover the entire glass-walled building, controlling the amount of light that entered each space through small, round openings that differed in density, just as ben-day dots control the amount of pigment on a half-toned page. 

The other jurors were especially interested in the poetics of the spaces the students presented, asking questions about the relationship of building and river, the processional movement of people as they approach entries and vistas, the changing aspect of spaces and voids in the annual cycle of seasons. I found myself more grounded in practical matters, like the need for freight elevators for moving artworks up to top-floor galleries; flexible, directional lighting in all exhibition spaces; and pinnable walls and convenient sources of water in workshops and studios, to name just a few. The faculty members reassured me that next semester the students would be brought down to earth, learning to grapple with such things as building code compliance, accessibility for people with disabilities, and similar constraints. In the meanwhile, these intelligent, thoughtful, committed young people give me hope for a future in which light is both metaphor and physical property, giving shape to their own boxes of miracles.

"Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time" Revisited

This past Saturday was the opening reception and artist’s talk for Beneath the Old Masters: Evolution & Process, Woodcuts by Trudi Y. Ludwig, at the Washington Printmakers Gallery in Silver Spring, Maryland. I’ve been watching Trudi’s masterful image, The Exposure of Luxury, emerge from the wood for most of the year. Indeed, right before I left for Chicago, I saw the finished plate. Even so, I was unprepared for the breathtaking sight that greeted me as I came up the entry stairs into the gallery. There, filling the entire visual space, not one, but four versions of intertwined skeletal forms danced and floated before my eyes, daring me to choose which one spoke most strongly.

Four Versions of The Exposure of Luxury

I leave it to the printmakers to talk about the technical specifications of papers and ink. For me, it was simply a delight to contemplate the subtle and not-so-subtle differences between a print made on stark, white paper; one made on the soft, fibrous side of another paper with a yellower, more bone-like cast; a third pulled on the harder, less porous side of that same, cream-colored substrate, and embellished with gold leaf; and, in mirror image, the inky black of the actual plywood plate. On each of the hand-printed sheets, the marks of the baren evoked clouds and memories, as if the bones had emerged from dreams rather than from the tedious, hard physical labor of carving into plywood for hundreds of hours.

It was also a delight to hear Trudi talk about her process, revealing her ideas about art and life just as her astonishing, life-sized prints reveal the underlying structures of works of art by those we often refer to as “old masters.” Other works in the show included a reprinting of a block originally cut in 2000, Prima Veritas, showing the bones under Botticelli’s three Primavera Graces; the skeletal underpinnings of Rodin’s Thinker, titled Nosce Te Ipsum (Know Thyself) from 2005; and That Mystic Smile (Mona Revisited) from 2002. As she spoke in multi-layered puns and double entendres, the works became ever more resonant, exposing the essential truth that bones support every one of our living bodies, no matter how luxurious our outer trappings. These exquisite networks of shape and form are a testament to luxury of a different kind than that depicted in the Bronzino work that inspired Trudi’s newest prints. They neither exploit nor bemoan the decadent, transient pleasures of the flesh. Rather, they revel in the luxury of time to work in the studio, time to think and to pray, time to remember that we are more than just our skin and bones, we are also spirit, dancing eternally with the God before whom all are equal, and all are beautiful.