Incisions and Excesses

Kyla McFarlane

I

The works in Votive: Sacred and Ecstatic Bodies are part of a strong current in contemporary visual art practice that engages with, and challenges, the traditional iconography and politics of religion. As a site of intervention from which to explore issues of faith, along with other contemporary cultural concerns, the realm of religion is potent terrain.
As artist Ian Breakwell noted in a text about his work The Sermon (1983):

Many people trot out the cliché that religion is no longer a major force in modern society and is irrelevant to our world in 1983. I disagree. Try that cliché in Belfast, Beirut, Warsaw, Jerusalem, or St. Peter’s Square in Rome. And in more general terms the moral ethics of Christianity are imbued in most of us from an early age whether we are aware of it or not. [1]

Fifteen years later Breakwell’s comments remain relevant-thrown into even sharper relief since the recent terrorist attacks in New York
and Washington and the subsequent pitting of the “Christian” world against the “Islamic” in a war viewed by some as a fight against terrorism’s “evil”, and others as a holy jihad. In the world of contemporary art, the force of religious feeling has been apparent in the many controversies surrounding artworks dealing with issues of faith and religious iconography. I want to comment on two of these, both of which occurred in Australasia, in order to provide a context for Votive.

II

In October 1997, Melbourne’s National Gallery of Victoria closed an exhibition of works by American artist Andres Serrano after two physical attacks by members of the public on his photograph Piss Christ (1987). This incident followed earlier claims by Christian groups and senators in the USA that the work was indecent and obscene. [2] The photograph was an enlargement of a small commercially produced crucifix immersed in Serrano’s own urine. Although the piece had the heavenly glow and beauty of a medieval altarpiece, the artist’s twinning of the sacred with the profane, emphasised in his choice of title, aggrieved some viewers.
In a matter of days, Tania Kovats’ Virgin in a Condom (1994) was stolen by a visitor to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney.
Virgin in a Condomis a sculpture that is small in scale and simple in gesture. Only seven and a half centimetres tall it, too, features a
mass-produced statuette: a Madonna who is draped in a condom. Exhibited as part of Pictura Britannica, a show of work by young British artists, it
provoked numerous letters of protest and complaints from incensed Christians and Muslims when it toured to Te Papa/Museum of New Zealand the following year. Why did this work provoke such anger? It could be read as a critique of the role of women in the church, or a feminist response to the church’s stance onabortionand contraception. Instead, it was seen as more deleterious than critical and labelled by protesters as blasphemous and
disrespectful to both the Madonna as religious icon and those who revere her.
Whether these works are scandal pieces intended to provoke viewer reaction, considered critiques of the church, or even acts of
religious devotion is open for debate. But the incidents described above indicate that toying with traditionally sacred iconography still has the capacity to excite passionate response, particularly when literal use is made of figures such as Christ and the Virgin in order to broach issues of gender, sexuality and the body in relation to the historical symbolism and contemporary attitudes of the church.

Andres Serrano Piss Christ, 1987 Cibachrome, silicone, plexiglass, wood frame 1524 x 1016mm, edition of 4 Courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery, New York	Tania Kovats Virgin in a Condom, 1994 Painted and varnished resin on MDF shelf, edition 9/12 105 x 40 x 30mm Courtesy of asprey jacques, London

click on images to enlarge

Cultural critic Mieke Bal has pondered this contemporary traversal “from sacred to the profane, the spiritual to the bodily,” noting how the shift
“both turns the tables on this cultural narrative and foregrounds the eroticism in religious tradition.”[3]
She adds that:

The flesh that is so important in the Christian tradition takes on different meanings at different moments in history. From the perspective of an engaging late twentieth century [and now the twenty first century] where pain and suffering are often bound up with sexuality, we are now enabled, by artists who endorse this baroque historiography and the entanglement that characterises it, to scratch away the dust of a disembodied religiosity and gain access again to a religious life that is much closer to bodily experience.[4]

Bal writes in relation to a direct quotation of Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of St Thomas (Doubting Thomas) (ca. 1601-1602) by Norwegian artist Jeannette Christensen in her 1995 installation work Ostentatio Vulnerum, which reproduces a detail from his painting featuring St Thomas’ finger probing Christ’s open chest wound.[5] Bal’s analysis, drawn as it is from the example of Caravaggio’s painting and those exploring and responding to his work through the field of visual culture, emphasises the baroque as a discursive entry point towards what might become a more corporeal religiosity.
The connections she draws between baroque and contemporary sensibilities, particularly in the way the body and its sexuality are figured, are certainly resonant for the work of artists such as Serrano. They also stand as a strong subtext to the work of several of the artists in Votive, who survey and problematise the role of flesh, the body and its excesses in a religious context.
Beyond this, however, lie other issues raised by Kovats’ and Serrano’s works that resonate with the concerns featured in Votive. In particular, they question the role of religion as an historically and culturally institutionalised locus of power with the capacity to affect the individual. The notion of faith is persistently questioned in these works. As Serrano puts it, his choice of images is intended to “redefine and personalise my relationship with God,”[6] whilst Kovats’ Virgin in a Condom alludes to the effect of church policy on individual actions in the highly personal realm of sexualbehaviour.
How, then, might we think beyond the scandals surrounding these works and gain a deeper understanding of them? How do they relate to and comment upon the connections between the corporeal body, individual being, church orthodoxy and contemporary thought? I want to think through these issues in relation to the works featured in Votive, noting the role of the corporeal body as an emblematic touchstone throughout.

III

To do this I want to turn, somewhat unexpectedly, to an analogy drawn from the secular world of mathematics. In her book Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism, [7] feminist theorist Elizabeth Grosz has a specific project-to tie subjectivity to the corporeal specificites of sexed bodies. Grosz’s account of the Möbius strip, an infinite form twisted in the middle and joined at each end, is an analogous model for the functioning of the corporeal body in relation to internal and external forces and an insightful point from which to explore the works featured in Votive.
It is not my intention, however, to simply force a theoretical model upon this exhibition. Instead, the Möbius analogy opens up readings of the works that highlight the complex and shifting relationships between subjectivity, corporeality and institutionalised religion.

In her imagining of the Möbius strip, Grosz describes a conception of the corporeal body in which it is intrinsically bound to and informed by both subjectivity and social codes. The relationship is one between inside (the psychical interior) and outside (social codification), with each being informed by the other. The model of the Möbius strip illustrates this well as, due to the folding over of a single rectangular strip, “tracing the outside of the strip leads one directly to its inside without at any point leaving its surface”.[8] This means that the Möbius can be read from the outside in-and from the inside out. Using this analogy to describe the body allows for a reading in which the psychical interior shows itself on the exterior of the body and also of outward, social inscriptions generating psychical depth. As Grosz puts it:

If psychoanalysis and phenomenology can be regarded as knowledges concerned with the psychical inscription and coding of bodies, pleasures, sensations and experiences, then this mode of psychical (re)tracing or writing marks the “inside” of the Möbius surface; what marks its “outside” surface is more law, right, requirement, social imperative, custom, and corporeal habits. If the psychical writing of bodies retraces the paths of biological processes using libido as its marker pen, then the inscription of the social surface of the body is the tracing of pedagogical, juridical, medical, and economic texts, laws, and practices onto the flesh to carve out a social subject as such, a subject capable of labour, of production and manipulation, a subject capable of acting as a subject and, at the same time, capable of being deciphered, interpreted, understood.[9]

In this latter relationship, flesh is the bodily material marked by various cultural inscriptions, enabling them to become emblematic of various laws and beliefs. Whereas desire and lack form the narratives in the psychical model, law and constraint preside over the exterior. It is here that Grosz’s observations have resonance for the works in Votive. Vacillating between inside and outside, reason and desire, the sacred and profane, these works reconfigure, through representation, the relationship between the body and religion.

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