For those who have eyes to see...

This morning's New York Times ran two stories about a dead artist - David Wojnarowicz - and the current controversy his ants/crucifix video is causing all over again. The news article recounts the artist's first battle with censorship after America's self-appointed champion against pornography both real and imagined - the Reverend David Wildmon - misrepresented Wojnarowicz's work and was sued for misrepresenting his art. The artist won! (For context and the actual NY Times story: www.nytimes.com/2010/12/11/arts/design/11ants.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper)

But the battle isn't over because the Smithsonian Institution - under pressure from Bill Donohue of the Catholic League - has now withdrawn Womnarowcz's work from the "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture" exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. Art critic, Holland Cotter, gives some shape and form to the current censorship skirmish in the second Times' article.(www.nytimes.com/2010/12/11/arts/design/11hide.html?ref=)

(NOTE: this video clip is disturbing and may not be suitable for every person.)

In all of this, there are all too troubling shades of the 80s culture warriors blustering against the all too visible and shocking excess of the 60s gone rococo in the 70s. Remember the fracas religious zealots raised about Andres Serrano's "Piss Christ." Without ever seeing it, I recall being offended. But then I saw the photograph - and learned what the artist was trying to accomplish - and my offense gave way to a deeper appreciation of both the beauty and the scandal at work in this complex creation. In Cynthia Freeland's insightful little book, But Is It Art?, she concludes:

Serrano's title is (no doubt intentionally) jarring. It seems we are meant to be torn between being shocked and musing over an image that is mysterious and perhaps even reverential. With regard to the artwork's 'material' qualities... Serrano does not regard body fluids as shameful, but as natural. Perhaps his attitude stems from his cultural background as a member of a minority group in the United States (he is part Houndran and part Afro-Cuban.) Art historian, Lucy Lippard, notes that in Catholicism, bodily suffering and body fluids have been depicted for millenia as sources of religious power and strength. Vials in churches hold fabric, bits of blood, bones and even skulls that commemorate saints and stories of miracles.

Instead of being regarded with panic or horror, these relics are reverences... (Clearly) the artist wanted to condemn the way that culture pays only lip service to a religion without truly endorsing its values... (for) Serrano claims that his work was not done to denounce religion but its institutions - to show how our contemporary culture is commercializing and cheapening Christianity and its icons. (pp. 18-21)

The same depth and insight must be applied to Wojnarowicz, too. Holland Cotter writes: That "A Fire in My Belly" (the artist's video creation in question) is about spirituality, and about AIDS, is beyond doubt. To those caught up in the crisis, the worst years of the epidemic were like an extended Day of the Deay, a time of skulls and candles, corruption with a promise of resurrection. Wojnarowcz was profoundly angry at a government that barely acknowledged the epidemic and at political forces that he believed used AIDS - and the art created in response - to demonize homosexuality. (NY Times, December 22, 2010, p. A3)

Religious zealots in the United States almost always feel entitled, if not qualified, to criticize and condemn art they don't comprehend. Think of the creation of the National Legion of Decency formed in 1933 by Archbishop John McNichols of Cincinnati, OH. The goal was to identify and control motion picture content that was deemed objectionable by the Roman Catholic Church. For 25 years this coalition of Catholics, Protestants and some Jews censored film art in the USA by forcing the creation of a ratings code.

The Presbyterian elder, Will Hays, created much the same type of censorship through the Hays Code of the Motion Picture Association between 1930-1968. Tipper Gore and other Protestant evangelicals were instrumental in bringing to birth the Parents Music Resource Center in 1985 to inhibit the sale of certain music to young teens. And, of course, the infamous David Wildmon, founder of the American Family Association, used his position as a United Methodist clergy to pursue censorship in the name of Jesus on artists, musicians, writers and social activists.

All were religious zealots who, to paraphrase Mark Twain, "were good people in the worst sense of the word." And none understood art: they did not have eyes to see and more often than not reacted out of fear and bigotry. Some things never change... And yet, thanks be to God, there is a growing school of religious thinkers and artists who DO understand and appreciate the arts.

+ Some take their roots back to Paul Tillich and the insights he gleaned from visual artists working in post WWI Germany.
+ Others look to Hans Rookmaaker, a Dutch Reformed theologian - or the English theologian, Jeremy Begbie, now at Duke - or the Swiss Roman Catholic Hans Urs von Balthasaar.

+ And still others are exploring the interpretive work of the New Religious Humanists affiliated with Gregory Wolfe -or the renewed sense of theological aesthetics of Eugene Peterson - or the movement of beauty in Makoto Fujimura's International Arts Movement.

In the introductory essay to For the Beauty of the Church - a collection of essays born in an arts and theology conference held in 2008 in Austin, Texas - David O. Taylor recalls the third verse to a beloved old hymn by Folliot Pierpoint:

For the joy of ear and eye,
For the heart and mind's delight,
For the mystic harmony,
Linking sense to sound and sight:
Lord of all, to thee we raise
This our hymn of grateful praise.

There are those without eyes to see - and they are dangerous: Lord, strengthen your servants of beauty that they might help us.