Sacred Texts: Sacred and Profane: the Words We Live By, The Stuff of the Wo
By Paula Rabinowitz
"Sacred Texts," an exhibit of work by nine artists assembled by Minneapolis College of Art and Design curator Diane Mullin, investigates interactions between words and beliefs. It opened a few weeks after Janet Jackson flashed her flesh before the Super Bowl television audiences of millions and General Antonio Taguba filed his mostly-ignored report on prisoner abuse to the military brass. This brainy exhibit served as an advance warning for Mel Gibson’s reconstruction of the sacred texts of the Gospel and Cecil B DeMille, The Passion of the Christ.
In this moment of heightened sensitivity to "obscenity," in the form of Janet Jackson’s breast or Howard Stern’s farts, the New York Times reports that radio station engineers recently beeped out the word "parachutes" from a newscast when the announcer’s slip of the tongue resulted in a mispronunciation: parachutes became pair a shits. The degrading images of torture by U. S. military personnel at Abu Ghraib prison remind us of photography’s disturbing power "regarding the pain of others," as Susan Sontag noted. Words and symbols matter. And not just as spin. Language becomes matter when it is inscribed on the page, when it induces a gesture, an act, and becomes part of its record. The material effects, the fallout of belief: War, occasionally the Sublime, more often the Absurd. In the beginning was the word–in the end, too.
Curator Mullin amassed a seminar of MCAD students to work with her on the show. They studied the history of fundamentalism, the many version of the Declaration of Independence, and scoured recent journals and newspapers for artists and topics engaging the word. The show features Vito Acconci’s 1990 Wavering Flag, which reappeared as a significant text as the Supreme Court heard testimony about the deletion of the words "under God" from the Pledge of Allegiance. Douglas Beube’s sandblasted atlases, which remapped the world as the borders of this nation shut down while those of the European Union become more fluid, also makes an appearance. A film by Jila Nikpay transforms the image of the woman in hijab from a shrouded subject to an active worshipper of her own liberating dance. Ken Aptekar floats the idiotic, recorded messages found ubiquitously on answering machines over a herald angle stolen and repainted from a nativity by Robert Campin. Hele¢ ne Aylon’s installation, My Wailing Wall, part of her long-term work "The Liberation of G-d," bisects the gallery space, acting as a divider between the flow of bodies through the building (the gallery is also the lobby of MCAD) and the other work. It intrudes, it demarks, it borders. Plastered on either side, like leaflets and posters covering an empty wall, like misshaped bricks crumbling under the weight of time, is each page of the Torah, the Five Books of Moses, one side English, the other Hebrew, overlaid with translucent vellum. Aylon has spent years pouring over the text, highlighting, with silly hot pink marker, offensive passages spoken in the name of God: words of hatred of women, homosexuality and those of incitement to violence. Her "wailing wall" takes on even more ominous connotations as Ariel Sharon proceeds to build the massive concrete wall separating Israel from occupied Palestinian lands.
The most powerful piece in the show, Linda Ekstrom’s Cluster, alters the object of the book–in this case THE BOOK–making its already tactile form even more inviting to the human hand. Ekstrom shreds, compresses, and re-glues a Bible into a softball-sized sphere. The connective tissue of words–the origin of Judeo-Christian culture, the source of fundamentalist truths–now a product of another socially-organized species, beeswax. The solemn gray ball, textured like an old piece of felt, recalls Joseph Beuys’s sensuous investigation of the materials crucial to his survival–gray felt and yellow tallow. For almost a decade, Ekstrom has been deconstructing Bibles and refashioning them as she meticulously cut-up balls of rolled words–tiny ones for Seed–that fill a silk bag open to sifting and fingering from passersby. The Word Made Flesh.
Just behind Aylon’s wall, falling from the enormously high ceiling, a long banner unravels into the center of the gallery, covered with type, the Teletype crawl of web cast news services. The interminable flow of language, from banal local reports on town picnics to Breaking News reports on gunfire in Iraq, forms the backdrop for an endless procession of figures projected onto the falling screen. Barbara Nei’s uncanny vision of the ghostly entrance of strangers into our psyches as we absorb the onslaught of information and humans circulating in our cities, across our televisions, through our computers, is eerily soothing. Dwarfed by the scale of the world’s events and the earth’s population, we can marvel or cringe. In this airy space–too light during the day, with the bright Minnesota sun reflecting off the winter snow outside the huge picture windows and marble floors within the gallery, to see the projected figures, you needed to return after dark for that–the endless stream of news disasters seem almost comforting. Oh, those catastrophes. Yesterday’s crisis, today’s fleeting memory; even Paul Wolfowitz can’t recall how many U.S. soldiers have died in Iraq, what’s next? Keep moving through this silent world of words.
Silence is broken, even on the moon, when any of us try to actually say something. It’s rarely profound, barely even comprehensible, as we hem and haw, stammer and repeat ourselves in an endless litany of monosyllables. Nina Katchadourian transcribes the sounds of human voices far away: Neil Armstrong on the moon and NASA scientists on earth in the minutes just before and after his banal recital of the words "that’s one small step for man, one giant step for mankind," bungling even this canned sentence’s meaning by leaving off the article that rendered him a singular, a solitary soul, lost in space. Lost in a black box, we hear, instead, the endless uncertainty of speech, haunted as we are by the ghosts of indecision, indecipherability and the slow stutter of speech in "uhs," "ohs," "uh-ohs," "I don’t knows". Listening to the sounds between speeches, dead sounds uttered on the dead lunar surface, is at once soothing and unsettling, lulling us with the banality of even the most momentous events. Indecision on the Moon evokes bizarre giggles and squirms as we register the embarrassment caused by hearing unedited tapes of plain speech. Katchadourian graphs the sound in a series of lovely blue ink tracings. Flatlines interrupted occasionally by blips, a sudden heartbeat claiming human presence.
In Memorial, Piotr Szyhalski traces human presence in the community of names that, since Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, has come to symbolize the act of public mourning. At once sanctifying yet parodying the recitation of names, Szyhalski’s installation randomly assigns a date in the future to each name of MCAD’s community and projects it for fifty minutes–the length of a psychoanalytic session–on a wall. It becomes a marquee or a tombstone decorated with a bunch of flowers left as an offering. Memorials, by definition, record the past. But what if these future dates become the time of trauma still to come? What if they pass unnoticed? Who would read these illusive words once they pass from view?
