Unlikely Icons
James Scarborough
Icons nowadays
are not the first thing one thinks of as one stands before a work of art. Nor
reverence. And hardly awe. Indeed, “shock” has replaced “awe”
as an operative unit of reverence, as per a current war on terrorism. It joins
Robert Hughes’s Shock of the New as a contemporary synonym for “awe.
Think of those bejeweled, folding, three-paneled gewgaws, redolent of incense
and flickering like sunlight through stained glass. In the period of their cultural
preeminence, they had the power to evoke the immanence of the Divine and the
transcendence of this world. The erosion of religious faith has thoroughly decontextualized
those images and deprived them of their former power; they languish in museums
as aestheticized objects of commerce and commentary.
Contemplation of an icon for the purpose of spiritual edification requires a
sustained experience before the work itself, something precluded by the short-attention
spans of web surfers mesmerized by blinking cursors and pop-up ads. Nonetheless,
contemporary icons, “object(s) of uncritical devotion” (Merriam-Webster’s
Collegiate Dictionary, Tenth Edition, 2001) are indeed possible, secular or otherwise,
if conceived of as hyperlinks, if not to the sacred, then at least to an idiosyncratic
system of belief. This can be seen in the work of eight artists who teach in
the Art Department at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. Of these, four
create work that can be seen as objects of devotion: Jane Brucker, Teresa Muñoz,
Soo Kim, and Michael Tang. The other four, Michael Brodsky, Garland Kirkpatrick,
Rudy Fleck, and Carm Goode create anti-icons, works of critical devotion, which
quash misdirected, unwarranted devotion. All eight artists create unlikely icons
with contemporary relevance, visual and conceptual jewels laden not just with
transcendence but with humor, poignancy, and irreverence (and thus iconoclasm).
Jane Brucker sanctifies memories of individuals so to foil the dehumanization
of ready-to-wear ephemerality and off-the-rack anonymity. She collects articles
of clothing to form an emotionally-primed canvas which she then stretches onto
supports and arranges on the wall. She filters an Arts and Crafts sensibility
through a Minimalist serialty to create quilted hyperlinks to a memory of an
individual. Collectively the blocks intone like a digital choir. Here, William
Morris, Marcel Duchamp, and Donald Judd meet K-Mart, Calvin Klein and the Salvation
Army.Teresa Muñoz’s collotypes (prints made from collages) reinterpret
medieval beauty in contemporary terms. As with Brucker, her material includes
things one might not associate with beauty and transcendence, much less with
the printing process — things like leaves, twigs, nails. With its horizontal
bands of vibrant color, the work suggests medieval conceptions of the universe,
hell in the bottom panels, heaven in the topmost ones, and our shoddy mortality
somewhere in between.
Like Teresa Muñoz, Soo Kim transfigures the everyday to reference another
order of existence. She photographs the most neutral, bland scenes that she can
find, some with people and others quite vacant. Within each photograph she cuts
out images of things in motion, for example, the time-lapse sequence of a bird’s
flapping wings as it takes flight. Her unemotional, detached viewpoint is intentional:
she absents herself to become more receptive to the platonic evocation of simultaneous
and parallel worlds in those kinetic white forms.
As with Brucker’s serial images and Kim’s peripheral idealism, Michael
Tang composes visual chants. He creates collages, frenetic and lively, from his
photographs of religious sculpture that stood in parishes in which he has served.
He then paints the collage as a large watercolor. Because a monumental, spiritually-charged
image has been fractured into a cubist collage and then rendered in watercolor,
it flickers as if viewed by the light of a thousand candles. Similarly, the rendering
of shadow implies mystery while the works’s execution in watercolor suggests
ethereality, a transitory status – his, ours – that opens up onto the
eternity of its original context.
Michael Brodsky creates prints that serve as anti-icons. He takes corporate logos,
designed with unerring accuracy to induce consumption, explodes them, graphically
if not literally, and makes large-scale, two-dimensional prints of the results.
He subverts belief in corporate icons, i.e., logos and brand marks, so we don’t
worship the false idols of advertising whose messages serve to induce, subliminally
and otherwise, a passive state of consumerism (like plainsong towards a more
spiritual end). In so doing, he wrests the primacy of the icon’s metaphorical
function from the realm of advertising back to more socially and spiritually
beneficial functions.
Similarly, Garland Kirkpatrick offers visual elements which suggest visual illiteracy.
His Rorschach marks of which we either claim familiarity or we don’t, marks
borrowed from graphic design, from graffiti, from road signs, arranged in a decorative
grid on the wall, suggest the relative crap-shoot of visual communication and
a shared universal language. Like Brodsky, he alludes to the paucity of visual
communion; abstractions of communications that one can appreciate like Japanese
calligraphy can be appreciated for its aesthetic appeal even when one cannot
read the language.
Rudy Fleck undermines the ceremonial and, by extension, religious function of
classical Greek ceramic vessels by separating their form from their function.
With skill and humor he creates vases that suggest those of classical Greece
which were used to commemorate sacred sporting events as well as to hold ceremonial
and sacrificial wine. Because it replaces ritual with irreverence, his work mediates
between the sacred and the profane.
With humor, learning, and not a little nostalgia, Carm Goode reminds us of devotion’s
former depth and unity. He begins with a pre-existing library of books, many
of which he has hand-written and illustrated, some he has altered, and some he
has turned into sculptural objects. He then creates a retrospective exhibition
of his library, with a scholarly essay written by one fictitious scholar, and
short descriptive, very tongue-in-cheek entries by another fictitious scholar.
Along with Fleck, Goode restores reverence to devotion’s integration of
form and function, in his case, of books, words, and images.
As material is removed from its original context – no one, for example, any longer
wears Brucker’s items of clothing, discarded objects chosen by Muñoz
no longer lie along the roadside – its original specific significances undergoes
a transformation from raw material into a metaphor. Each artist weaves a collage
of memory, of historical associations, and of personal idiosyncrasies into a
panoply of unlikely icons, secular or sacred; a marriage of the visible and the
invisible, bridged by an act of faith that art is always of more than the sum
of its parts. The work is organic. It participates in our lives. It enhances
us, clarifies us, and guides us. We follow art which follows something else,
like readers of Dante following him following Beatrice following Something Else.
