Visual Representations and Symbology
Craving the Material: Art, Artists, and Theo-political Change
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Robin Willey, Carolyn Jervis
“Art is dangerous. It is one of the attractions: when it ceases to be dangerous you don't want it.” This quote, attributed to both the jazz musician Duke Ellington (1899-1974) and author Anthony Burgess (1917-1993), points out the relationship between art and social change. As such, this paper investigates the burgeoning relationship between visual art and religious innovation in Canadian Evangelical communities. We connect this experimentation with the arts to broader processes of religious “cosmopolitanization.” Thus, we will focus on what art is doing and has done to Evangelical communities and artists that have let art into their religious lives. This work is an extension of Robin Willey’s multi-sited ethnography that focused on Evangelical political practice, and makes use of an additional nine months of ethnographic observation and interviews in a large western Canadian city and Grand Rapids, MI.
Christ as a Larron: Confronting Mathias Grünewald’s Crucifixions
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Albert Alhadeff
Who would have called Christ a despicable low thief, a robber stalking dark forests? Angry, seditious talk. And yet this and other pungent images on Christ, Saint John, and the Virgin Mary are the stuff of one of the earliest modern studies on Grunewald, studies of 1886 by Émile Verhaeren. When Verhaeren first published his intensely personal response to Grünewald’s vivid image of Christ’s putrid body in 1886, Grünewald’s oeuvre was barely known and was all but an embarrassment to men like the great art historian Charles Blanc who readily omitted discussion of Grünewald’s various Crucifixions in his seminal École Allemande (1875). Verhaeren, on the other hand, gladly embraced Grünewald’s blistering images, blaspheming his way with sacrilegious metaphors to relive for himself and his readers the anguish Christ’s “green, pustulated body” stirred in him. Crushed by Christ’s pain, Verhaeren’s essay on Grünewald (one he would expand in 1894 into a much larger essay) ranks with Joris Karl Huysmans far better known discussion of the Karlsruhe panel (1891) as one of the most revealing studies of the German master of the late nineteenth century, an essay rich in appalling, grinding images that plumb anew the turgid and uplifting mysteries of les gothiques allemands. My talk with the Religion Society then intends to highlight Verhaeren’s little known essay, place it in perspective in Grünewald studies and demonstrate why coming upon the Karlsruhe panel was a revelation for Verhaeren.
Prehistoric Religious Roots of Cervid Imagery in Contemporary Folk Arts of Eurasia and the Americas
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Malgorzata Oleszkiewicz Peralba
From the study of the Neolithic Tripilian-Cucuteni civilization, as well as other Eurasian cultures from the Paleolithic to the present, a number of distinct, recurrent symbols emerge. Similar symbolism is present in Native American civilizations in North, Central, and South America. From these motifs and their iconographic arrangements, as well as from myths and rituals, the world view of these civilizations can be deduced. Although in Europe this cosmic vision is largely forgotten, the iconography is still present in folk art, garments, and everyday objects of many traditional cultures, especially in Eastern and Central Europe, the Near East, and Central and Eastern Asia. Many of the beliefs, myths, and rituals are still alive in Siberia, Mongolia and China. In the case of live Native American cultures, such as the Mesoamerican Maya and the North American Huichol and Navajo, similar symbolism can be observed in iconography, myth, and ritual. I analyze the elements that constitute the world view of these civilizations and cultures, based on the reconstruction of ancient as well as contemporary materials. From the analysis of iconography on rupestrian art, Neolithic ceramics, contemporary weavings, headdresses, Easter eggs, paper cutouts, Siberian shamans’ costumes, contemporary shamanistic practices, dances, and rituals, as well as myths transformed into legends and fairy tales, a conviction emerges that the first known deities adored by humans in these parts of the world were female cervid figures, such as the elk, reindeer, and deer, in addition to the bear and aquatic birds.
