MOCRA: Good Friday Exhibit

Two weeks ago, as part of Holy Week, I attended a fantastic art exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Religious Art on the SLU campus. 

Good Friday: The Suffering Christ in Contemporary Art is an exclusive exhibit shown nowhere else in the country, and it is an eye opening experience that will rip your heart out and boggle your mind. More importantly, seeing the exhibit will make you engage in some critical thinking and analysis (something I could use and fortunately enjoy).

Here is a description of the exhibit from MOCRA: 

Suffering, Passion, and Unconditional Love: Good Friday was originally presented in Spring 2009 as the second of two exhibitions cel­ebrating MOCRA’s fifteenth anniversary. The exhibition includes works by over 30 artists of diverse backgrounds who have used the events of the day of Jesus’ death as inspira­tion for their own reflections on such themes as faith, suffering, loss, compassion, and unconditional love. The selected works are drawn from the MOCRA collection and works on long-term loan, and employ a wide range of media from painting and sculpture to fiber arts. Some works em­ploy familiar images such as Hans Holbein’s The Dead Christ in the Tomb (1521), or Heinrich Hoffmann’s Jesus in the Garden of Gethse­mane (1890), while others make use of traditional devotions such as the Stations of the Cross. Many of the artists translate the events of Jesus’ Passion to contemporary situations and draw forth a variety of insights, from the personal to the political.

 

In addition to the exhibit, I attended a lecture by the Director of MOCRA, Father Terry Dempsey, S.J., graduate of the GTU and of JSTB in Berkeley (yay!). The lecture addressed the question of relevance of the image(s) of the suffering Christ in contemporary world. I think for the majority of us, and for me especially, the answer was a resounding YES. The more intriguing discussions were about the issues of HOW relevant, in WHAT WAYS relevant, for WHAT REASON(S), etc....

There was no question, said Fr. Dempsey, that the "ongoing vitality of the images of the death of Christ has not ended" in contemporary art. In fact, artists continue to use the images of the suffering Christ to generate controversy, in protest, in solidarity, for consolation, and for ambiguity. Fr. Dempsey's lecture offered several art samples for each category and I was fascinated. Some I had seen before; many others were brand new to me though they were pieces created by artists many, many years before. 

One example was "Piss Christ" by the artist Andres Serrano -- a photo of which I have added to the beginning of this blogpost. Without knowing anything about this piece, seeing it for the first time, you would think it is a sepia photograph of the crucifix. And you would be wrong (as I was). It is a photograph of the crucifix submerged in the artist's urine. If you were alive and attentive in 1989, you would know about the controversy (read about it briefly here on wiki) generated by this piece of art. 

Or, take for example, the piece "Execution of Christ" by the Gao Brothers in 2009. In this piece, the figure of Christ is standing in front of a firing squad, and all the soldiers not only look like Chairman Mao, but they are all Maos. Artistic controversy at its best! The image of the Suffering Christ as political controversy, as provocateur, as artistic expression being inhibited, flaunted, censored, limitless... 

Other interesting points that the lecture touched upon, and which I continued to mull over for days after attending the exhibit: 

• Why use primarily Christian images to express protest against violence and injustice, death and destruction?
• Artists are recasting images of suffering Christ to address issues of racism, discrimination, inequality, injustice --> how are we called to respond to these images?
• If these images are to provoke in us a desire for change... are we listening to them? How are we attending to these calls? 
• What are some concrete actions that you or I can take in response to these works of art that are inspiring political responses to remedy conditions through social and political action? 
• Many works of art, such as Eleanor Dickinson's 1988 piece "Crucifixion of Dountes" elevates the everyday person to monumental scales, claiming that the average person has value and attention must be paid, and calls us to stand in solidarity at the foot of the cross that each person has to bear -- so, in our daily witness, are there folks that we know who are being crucified and with whom we need to stand in solidarity? 

Many of the pieces that Father Dempsey included in his talk were from different religious traditions, such as Dinh Q. Le's 1997 untitled piece depicting the face of Buddha split by the pieta image of the Crucifixion of Christ, or Marc Chagall's 1938 piece "The White Crucifixion" (in which the figure of Christ is depicted not as a redeemer but as a sympathetic observer/brother of the atrocities enacted on the Jews during the Holocaust). In this piece, who else would we say could stand in the place of the "sympathetic" observer?

Truly these images of the suffering Christ transcend the traditions with which we've become familiar. As Father Dempsey said, these images "speak to the heart of all humanity regardless of the religious tradition".

The question I was left pondering was this, especially now that we are in Easter season: How do we move beyond the image of the suffering Christ, beyond Good Friday, and look toward Easter, the risen Christ?