Yummy mummy anti-Palin protest
Design cultures collide in this stunning religious-themed Sarah Palin protest in Alaska.
October 02, 2008
September 10, 2008
Chinelo dancers in Brooklyn
Animal explains:
The dancing custom has pre-Hispanic roots and is steeped in Aztec imagery, but as the role of Christianity expanded, the garb eventually adapted to include Catholic elements and icons. These elaborate costumes you see in these photos came later in the mid 19th century as a way to mock he the Spaniards and later European occupiers while staying anonymous: "The elaborate dress, gloved hands, uptilted beard and arrogant stance makes a mockery of the salon dancing so beloved of the upper classes during the period of the French intervention (1864 - 1867) under the hapless Hapsburg Emperor Maximilian and his Empress Carlotta."
August 27, 2008
Elvis Rotating Christmas Tree
The first ever, so be sure to get yours now!
January 29, 2008
Too hot for Craft Magazine: What would Jesus sell?
Murketing has gone where Craft feared to tread: printing the censored article, "What would Jesus sell?" The title is actually a riff on a new Morgan Spurlock documentary; the article itself is not about Christianity. Rather, it's an inquiry into the commodification of handicraft, asking whether the market for handcrafted items is actually consistent with the movement's do-it-yourself ethic.:
But I can't help thinking: Isn't shopping, no matter how wonderfully crafty and politically correct still, well, shopping? Can you escape the so-called sin of consumerism by buying handmade? Isn't the whole point of modern crafting Do It Yourself--not Buy from Someone Who is Doing It Themselves? Not to be a total hypocrite; I shop Etsy and artisan crafters as well as buy the crap from China just like everyone else. It's just that I see a new trend, which is moving away from crafting and towards consuming. What's next? "Hip Craft" aisles at Wal-Mart?
The presumption--now denied--that the reference to Jesus would be offensive to Christians highlights an unintended consequence of protests against blasphemy: rather than speaking of Christianity more reverently, people might conclude that mentioning Jesus at all is more trouble than it's worth.
November 30, 2007
Ground Zero Miracle Cross pendant
About a block from my office is St. Paul's Chapel, "The Little Chapel That Stood" as the Twin Towers collapsed behind it. One day shortly after I started my current gig I popped in for a moment of reflection and discovered, much to my surprise, that the sanctuary has been converted into an all-out 9/11 tourist attraction. There's not just an exterior display noting the chapel's experience of 9/11; the inside is a veritable 9/11 pilgrimage site, replete with sacred relics and . . .
Pictured above: Part of the Ground Zero "Miracle Cross" collection
Talk to folks who live in the City about the street vendors who surround the pit--as it's not so affectionately known around here by folks weary of the endless construction--and you'll inevitably hear a fair stream of invective against the commodification of 9/11 by soulless jackals profiting from tragedy.
But is it any different when the seller is a church?
Arguably yes, judging from the lack of any objections among the Chapel's visitors. Shoot, lack of objection is an understatement--today I had to stand in line to just to get a look at the display case, and to my left was another line snapping up literally boxfuls of the "The Little Chapel That Stood" children's book personally autographed by the author. The store is a testament to the power of transformative design--a vendor on the street is merely selling things, but a shop in a shrine is not commerce.
November 11, 2007
Bareback feathered angel
The typical Flickr image of a photoshopped woman with angel wings is a visual cliche--yes, it embodies the aspiration to rise above their given physical nature, but the typical image is so gauzy and idealized that when you've seen about a thousand of 'em it looks mundane and routine.
Not the one below, which I ran across on a site to which I have become addicted: the design image blog FFFFOUND! The raw naturalism of this image is true to our innate schizoid fusion of flesh and transcendence.
October 03, 2007
Erect banana Buddha, religious realism and the Palad Khik
Is this statue a hate crime?
Police in the UK are investigating that very question. The rationale: this statue, a depiction of the Buddha with banana-and-egg genitalia that is part of artist Colin Self's intentionally provocative The Trilogy: The Iconoclasts, violates the U.K.'s Racial and Religious Hatred Act of 2006. While the investigation continues, the gallery has agreed to display the piece with its back to the window.
This police inquiry provides additional evidence that the West is moving toward an age of enforced Religious Realism. By realism here I don't mean accuracy, but rather an idealized depiction, akin to the stirring portraits of Soviet dictators and robust peasants in the Socialist Realism of Stalinist art. Whether the motivation is regard for diversity or fear of offense the effect is the same. The only permitted visual depiction of religion is one that portrays its subject as noble and pure.
What do we lose? A world without profane religious art is a world that has lost touch with its own religious history. The originators of our enduring religious traditions weren't afraid of a sacred sphere rife with blasphemy and body parts--they reveled in the contradictions, and if we acknowledged their legacy as it was and not as we would like to be, laws such as the one described above would not exist.
Case in point: the palad khik, traditional religious amulets from Thailand. Although palad khik may sound exotically new age, the name actually refers to a surrogate penis. The amulets--crafted by monks in the shape of a penis and adorned with sacred invocations and spiritual imagery--make the so-called iconoclasm of postmodern art seem rather tame.
Yes, we could legislate a world where the only sacred penis is one that we revere, but c'mon, that would just be silly.
HT: the always fun and informative Alt Religion!
August 22, 2006
The icon and the axe
Customized labrys from hoardmag.com, part of a stylized collection of ladies' weaponry.
REFERENCE EXTRA: The inspiration for the title of this post? This classic book on Russian culture.
July 06, 2006
June 26, 2006
Spiritual sampler
Embroidered samplers have long been a popular means for communicating spiritual and moral messages, not least of all to the young. My childhood room sported no less than three embroideries on the wall, featuring such patterns as
- the "Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep" prayer, whose line "if I should die before I wake" practically scared me to death every night I read it;
- the Lord's Supper, in which the gender of certain apostles was even less apparent than in the Da Vinci painting on which it was based; and
- Neil Armstrong walking onto the moon--which might explain why my earliest childhood ambition was to be a minister and an astronaut.
The Vogue Sampler pictured below is a consciously postmodern pastiche of the spiritual & the pop, crafted by London-based artist Kate Westerholt as part of the "Fashion Fantasies" pictorial in the July, 2006 issue of British Vogue.
