Lent & Iconoclasm
Lent is a season in which I can choose to adopt forms of discipline, disorientation and de-familiarization in order to re-orient myself to the suffering and sacrifice of Christ as He approaches his Passion.
Traditionally, the practices for Lent have included disciplines like fasting, increased prayer, charity—in these we abstain from the comfort and security we often take from food, from control of our time, and from the perception of stability or power rooted in our uses of money. I have practiced all these disciplines, and will continue in future seasons, but I wanted—if want is the word—to disorient myself in a different way.
As a symbol, the cross pervades our experience of art, religion, and even pop culture. It is simultaneously devotional sign and luxury object. There are more variations than one can count. I myself have made some. But to the extent that we "make" them, we make them, largely, to accommodate our desires and needs. As an item of jewelry, the cross is often beautiful—made from precious metal and gems. It is also generally light in weight, and cast to compliment the contours of the human body, and our occasional desire to [virtue] signal our faith, if not our, apparently, discretionary income or generous relations. As an item of architectural design, it crowns steeples, adorns sanctuaries, and reassures our aesthetics with the balance of its spatial geometry. And whatever the intentions which guide their individual fabrications, the cross as a symbol has become so ubiquitous it our experience that it often collapses into the realm of cliché. To use another cliché, familiarity, as is so often the case, breeds contempt. Or disregard, or apathy, or indifference.
It is something of a commonplace in many sermons I have heard to remind the congregation that the cross was not, originally, beautiful. It was horrid. It made an art of barbarism. Through public violence the cross made a spectacle of human suffering and required someone’s body to conform to its merciless contours. It was this violence to which I have wanted—again, if wanted is the right word—to reorient myself. To remind myself of the torture of innocent life that necessarily precedes all possibility of regarding the cross as wonderful and sacred. My attempt to remember and recover this perception of the cross resulted in something of an iconoclastic art installation that seeks to re-encounter some of the iconic power of the cross by approaching it through de-symbolized materiality.
I took scrap wood from a variety of old projects (including liturgical clocks and crosses) and mistreated it in about as many ways as I could think of without making the material of the wood utterly illegible. I drilled holes through each one, so that they could be threaded and worn, hanging from garden twine. The pieces range from 1" to 5," and while light enough to wear without discomfort, offer no deference to sensitive skin, no compliment to vanity. I set them up in my church on Ash Wednesday, and left them for the taking.
I still have some left. If you’d like one, I will mail one to you for the cost of shipping.
A most dolorous Lent to you.
