Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

Availability

Open Access Thesis

Keywords

Brooches--Exhibitions; Religious articles--Exhibitions; Art and religion; Brooches; Religious articles; Exhibition catalogs;

Abstract

What we believe constructs the person we are and will become, the ways and means we conduct our lives and form our sense of right and wrong at all levels inward and outward: politically, socially, and personally. My own beliefs, founded on my faith in God, have directed me in my work. This thesis exhibition is an exploration of how to express these beliefs visually. During my exploration, I had to alter and develop my own visual iconography to express my ideas of God. Conventional transcendent icons including the cross, the 1 Christ figure, and the Virgin Mary, have been usurped by pop culture and art. As a result of this borrowing in the late twentieth century, these icons have begun to lose value or meaning to me. In the following paragraphs I intend to discuss reasons why. Christian iconography has been used to create shock value or to undermine sanctity associated with the icon. This occurs when an artist appropriates the idea of God, as signified by the icon, for his or her own purpose rather than for higher means. For instance, Jeff Koons's ceramic Saint John the Baptist, depicting Saint John holding a pig and a penguin with a golden cross behind, is "baptizing people in banality" (380). This purposely erodes at the historically sanctified meaning held by Christian and Catholic churches. This becomes more complex when the artist is working for higher means but questions the idea and meaning of the existing Christian and Catholic iconography. Robert Gober in an untitled installation, created a shocking image of a concrete Virgin Mary pierced through the womb by a large drainpipe. In Andres Serrano's Piss Christ, a plastic crucifix is photographed in urine. More recently, Chris Ofili's Holy Virgin Mary, depicted a black Virgin Mary surrounded by the real elephant dung and images of vaginas. Serrano and Ofili, who claim to be Catholic, caused a public outrage against their work. This was due to the difficulty for the audience to reach beyond the ideology of what they have been told or learned previously about these symbols. This, in turn, could cause offense or misinterpretations if the symbol is used in what the audience would believe as an "unsanctified" manner. However, the definitions or rules of what is sanctified is debatable. Craig Dwetweiler (2000) states: "Its like a property issue as far as who Jesus belongs to and who has the right to appropriate his image and teachings for their own artistic purposes" (3).

Year of Submission

2000

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Department

Department of Art

First Advisor

Kee-Ho Yuen

Second Advisor

Phil Fass

Third Advisor

Tom Stancliffe

Comments

If you are the rightful copyright holder of this thesis and wish to have it removed from the Open Access Collection, please submit a request to scholarworks@uni.edu and include clear identification of the work, preferably with URL.

Date Original

2000

Object Description

1 PDF file (14 leaves)

Language

en

File Format

application/pdf

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