Shocked and horrified for all the wrong reasons , however, You could line the walls with pictures of aborted children if all you want to do is shock and horrify people.
It doesn’t stop at a simple visceral reaction – that is, if the viewer isn’t immediately turned off totally by the style. And that, I’d argue, is a matter of both openness to new things and taste: I myself always found it difficult to meditate on the passion of the Christ looking at the saccharine, nigh-bloodless plastic things that pass for the Stations in some parishes.
These are raw and vicious, the stuff of nightmares – as they should be. How better to appreciate the divine sacrifice than by seeing not a doe-eyed, bobble-headed ‘Precious Moments’ vision of the passion but a monstrosity reflecting the monstrous things that were done on that day?
Sarabande:
Art from every era has done that, whether it was “good” or “bad” art, but has it gotten it’s point across?
It has done so for me, and I don’t even believe Jesus was God.
It actually reminds me to a lesser extent of how people were disgusted with Serrano’s controversial and insulting “P–s Christ”. And although I don’t believe the artist of the Stations was trying to insult, I can see how people can view it that way, especially to those who do interpret it as rotting corpses: a rotting and decrepid Church that has no relation to the world today.
The fact that these Stations are on the website of a Catholic diocese and seriously presented as an artistic vision of the Via Dolorosa should easily disabuse anyone of the notion that it’s, uh, taking the… well, I seem to recall I’ve gotten in trouble for
that pun before, so let’s not go there again. Disabuse anyone of the notion that it is deliberately insulting or mocking, there. Check out Ms. Tarkowska’s statement on the page – I had to run it through babelfish to get any sense out of it, but she seems quite serious and respectful, whether or not she is herself Catholic.
To me, although I find the Stations artwork interesting as in what the artist was thinking and feeling psychologically to create something like this, it is “horrifying” to me for all the wrong reasons when I view for my own reaction and not for any undestanding of the artist’s pychological makeup. It’s more like something out of my worst nightmares and the thing identified as our Lord as this horrible, unloving monster waiting to eat me or dehumanize me.
Maybe I’m just more used to the art of the distorted and the monstrous, I guess. I love Schiele, Dali, Giger, Beskinski, and so on and on (and what comes out of the business end of my pencils often turns up clawed, deep-eyed, and mouthless) – sure, it isn’t for everyone. But that doesn’t make it ‘not art’ and it doesn’t make it disrespectful. There can be such a thing as a loving grotesquery – ask any parent whose child hasn’t quite grasped that
teeth drawn like that are freaky.
The only exception was this church called St. Ignatius in Paris. Now that was pretty surreal and a bit revolting. It looked like someone tore up the inside of a beautiful, old church and replaced it with the interior of a church built in the 1970s over here in the States.
