Seeing the Funny Side of Sainthood

When the Vatican recently cleared both Pope John XXIII and Pope John Paul II for sainthood—a hyper-holy two-fer—critics all along the political spectrum grumbled over the honoring of one man or the other. Like the chipped and worn statues of Christian antiquity, the image of sainthood’s taken a beating over the centuries. Just as modern medicine’s makes the required miracles harder to come by, modern cynicism sees more flaws than faith. Michael Landy: Saints Alive, which runs through November 24, 2013 at the National Gallery, London, puts a modern spin on the sainthood system through a series of kinetic sculptures designed not to move you towards piety but to move you to a new perspective on what it means to elevate a person to spiritual superstardom. By seeing the funny side of sainthood, Landy pokes fun at the past while also warning us about the idolatry of the present. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Seeing the Funny Side of Sainthood."

[Image: Michael Landy. Spin the Saint Catherine Wheel and Win the Crown of Martyrdom, 2013. Mixed media. 371 x 440 x 84 cm. Michael Landy, courtesy of the Thomas Dane Gallery, London. © Michael Landy, courtesy of the Thomas Dane Gallery, London / Photo: The National Gallery, London.]

[Many thanks to the National Gallery, London, for providing me with the image above and other press materials related to Michael Landy: Saints Alive, which runs through November 24, 2013.]

[Many thanks to Hugh, my eyes in London, for pointing out this exhibition to me and sharing his insights.]

 

Breaking News

When Colin Powell tried to defend the United States’ continued presence in Iraq, he invoked what he called the “Pottery Barn rule” or “You break it, you bought it.” Of course, Pottery Barn has no such rule, thus protecting Powell’s streak of disseminating misinformation, but could you imagine if museums had such a “You break it, you bought it” rule? Just last month a woman tripped at a Royal Academy exhibition and knocked over a 9-foot-tall sculpture titled Christina by Tatiana Echeverri Fernandez, smashing it to pieces. (The sculpture appears above, with show curator Tracey Emin standing alongside.) Fortunately for the stunned woman, nobody presented her with a bill for £6,000. Laura Barnett of The Guardian published a piece last month titled “Breaking Art” recounting Christina’s fall along with a litany of other art disasters. It turns out that most broken art is broken by professionals—curators, gallery staff, etc.—mainly thanks to the fact that they’re the ones called upon to move such fragile treasures from place to place. Still, I confess to moments of vertigo when face to face with some precious works of art with no protective barriers in between. It’s great to have unfettered access, but my inner klutz knows his potential for destruction and holds me back just enough.

One of the most famous cases of breaking art, which Barnett doesn’t mention, involved Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (aka, The Large Glass; above, from 1912). Workmen moving Duchamp’s work dropped it and shattered the pane of glass Duchamp had created his images upon. Making lemonade out of lemons, Duchamp viewed the patterns of shattered glass as a happy accident and incorporated the adventure into the work itself. Duchamp loved to create works that invited gallery-goers to touch, such as his mounted bicycle wheel. Those yearning to give it a spin soon find themselves under the watchful gaze of a museum guard. Always the iconoclast, Duchamp would be disappointed to know that his works no longer feel that human touch, but such is the price to pay for later generations to see such works intact.

Of course, accidents do happen, with nobody to blame. When Andrea della Robbia’s Saint Michael the Archangel Weighing Souls (above) recently came loose from its wall moorings and fell to the floor of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, fingers pointed at everyone who could possibly be blamed. Fortunately, della Robbia’s work can be saved, thanks to a miraculous mid-air flip by Saint Michael that helped it land on its flat side. As someone who has walked through a museum or two with a baby in a baby carrier (both front and rear), I can honestly say that my absolute worst nightmare is to clip some priceless, irreplaceable work of art from a wall mount and send it crashing into oblivion. The Met provides rear baby carriers that are not only difficult to get on but are pure recipes for disaster for the unaware. Fortunately, Alex made his presence continually known (usually by playing with my balding pate), so I was fully aware of just how far I should stand away from the art. No museum will ever exact a price from anyone who has an honest mishap (vandals are a whole different issue), thankfully, but the psychological toll on someone who has erased the work of a skilled artist for all time would be a debt any true lover of art could never fully repay.

Stuck in the Corner

“There is no comparison between him and me; he developed a whole new way of making art and he's clearly in a league of his own. It would be like making comparisons with Warhol,” Tracey Emin once said of fellow member of the Young British Artists, Damien Hirst. Born July 3, 1963, Emin brings a very, very personal feminist perspective to that group in works such as Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 (above, from 1997), a blue tent in which she has placed the name of every person she has slept with in any sense—from boyfriend and fellow artist Billy Childish to her grandmother to two unnamed (but numbered) fetuses she presumably aborted. Emin’s sexual history took physical form under the prompting of curator Carl Freedman, with whom Emin was having a sexual relationship at the time. Charles Saatchi purchased the tent and placed it in his Momart warehouse, where a fire destroyed it and many other Young British Artists’ works in 2004. The British public showed little sympathy for the lost works, especially Emin’s sex tent—the ultimate case of “too much information.”

Emin stuck with the sex theme in her next major work, My Bed (above, from 1997). Like Robert Rauschenberg’s 1955 work, Bed, it is an actual bed owned by the artist set up as a work of art. Unlike Rauschenberg, however, Emin stained the bed sheets with her own bodily fluids and scattered condoms, panties stained with blood, and even a pair of slippers around the bed itself, just to drive the coital theme home. I’ve always seen the Young British Artists movement as a poor echo of the punk music movement in 1970s led by the Sex Pistols. Johnny Rotten surely would have gleefully sneered at Emin’s work, but there’s such a commercialized feel to Emin’s work (although not nearly on the scale of the master, Hirst) that it seems more market-targeted posing than anti-establishment punk. Saatchi purchased Emin’s Bed for £150,000, a nice rate of return on the initial investment by Emin. Billy Childish, “star” of Emin’s sexual history tent, offered to sell another of Emin’s old beds for the more reasonable price of £20,000.

For all her excesses, Emin does have another side to her, and I don’t just mean the side shown in The Last Thing I Said to You was Don't Leave Me Here II (above, from 2000), a photographic self-portrait of Emin in a tiny beachside hut she owned in 1992, before fame and riches called. Along with Childish and other artists, Emin pushed the new art movement of Stuckism, which called for a new appreciation of the figure in contemporary art. “When I think about sex it makes me realize how alone I feel,” Emin once said, and this photograph, reminiscent of the self-portraits of Egon Schiele, one of Emin’s major influences, shows the private side of sexuality that public statements such as her tent and bed broadcast publicly. I find this aspect of Emin’s art much more intriguing than the bombast of the sensationalist conceptional art. Unfortunately, the headline-making, infamy-earning works attract wealthy patrons, Turner Prize nominations, Venice Biennale slots, and membership in the Royal Academy of Arts. Emin offsets all that glamour with great charity work, especially for HIV and AIDS charities. Perhaps if the contemporary art world valued that more compassionate, more thoughtful work, Emin’s secret identity wouldn’t be stuck in the corner.