I take your points here, Stephen, but want to suggest that what we are
smitten with are monuments of the past, now rather empty of
contemporary spiritual meaning for all but a few, & those still locked
into a past unrecoverable. Any attempt to reconstruct it is even more
empty, as my experience of a brand new cathedral to Mary in the middle
of a field in Poland proved to be (overwrought but dead). And it seems
to me that it's a strain of Christianity that insists we can do
whatever we want with the lower orders of animals & plants, ie, the
environment.
So, we need to find in the world as it is (or can be if not totally
exploited) the icons of faith in what is that inheres in art, it seems
to me.
Doug
On 19-Jul-05, at 10:02 AM, Stephen Vincent wrote:
> Thanks, Doug. What was (in the piece, "Word Icons") is an awareness of
> how
> stripped bare of icons - with attendant architecture - we are in this
> west.
> I got that consciousness particularly after being in Rome and inside a
> number of Churches with all the adherent sculpture, painting and the
> iconic
> architecture implicit to the rituals and celebration of Catholic
> belief. I,
> as many Protestants before me, was totally smitten, infatuated, etc.
> Along with that experience came the consciousness of how such
> adoration is
> so minimally expressed in a west of simple churches; "Direct Faith" or
> communication with God involved renouncing - as "we" know - most of
> all of
> the icons, the intermediaries, including the complexities of Church
> hierarchy. Comparatively, early on, the western US the west, as a
> religious
> situation, is/was terribly barren. At best we were left celebrating the
> sublime as manifested in the landscape (Beirdstadt, Carleton Watksins,
> Ansel
> Adams,Weston, etc.) And, that celebration is more often now than not a
> besmirched myth, replaced by environmental exploitation and
> destruction of
> all sorts.
>
> Curiously, Ed Rusha - raised Catholic - turns Hollywood and LA signage
> and
> street maps into relative - perhaps bemused - signs of the Cross.
> Yes, I think part of the aim of my piece, was to celebrate the ways in
> which
> we - among the bereft of formal iconography (and now an increasingly
> bereft
> landscape) - exploit a deep consciousness of the empirical
> to make a transformative practice of art and poetry. And boy, not to be
> self-piteous, does that take faith!
> The importance of Jewish and Buddhist traditions - among others - to
> becoming at home with the Protestant separation from the Church is
> another
> important element in this story, as well. But today, I will not risk
> articulating any or all of such!
>
> Stephen V
> Blog: http://stephenvincent.durationpress.com
>
Douglas Barbour
11655 - 72 Avenue NW
Edmonton Ab T6G 0B9
(780) 436 3320
NOT MUCH
Not much you ever
said you were thinking
of, not much to
say in answer.
Robert Creeley
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