I can almost always rely on maximum spin and distortion for a story from the Religion News Service. This article by Kimberly Winston delivered via RNS and Crux is very laughable in a sad way.
Were some Catholic saints transgender? Berkeley show raises eyebrows
BERKELEY, Calif. — Step into the one-room art gallery inside the Pacific School of Religion and look closely at the saints in the paintings: Some have beards; some have buzz cuts; some have their breasts obscured; some appear in unisex clothes like tanks tops and jeans.
Are they women or men?
That’s the point of artist Alma Lopez’s new show, “Queer Santas: Holy Violence,” on display at this theological school known for its embrace of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender persons. In playing with the gender characteristics of religious icons usually depicted as feminine, Lopez asks us to reconsider our ideas of religion, beauty, and gender.
Justin Tanis, who teaches at the school, said it’s as if these saints, with their direct eye contact and open arms, are saying, “‘I am natural, I am one of God’s people.’ And yet this is an image that many people would consider heretical because gender play is involved.”
Gender play is at work in each of the icons in the show — St. Lucia, St. Wilgefortis, and St. Liberata.
Lopez, a visiting artist at the University of California, Los Angeles, said she was attracted to these saints because their stories have a common theme — each one tried to step out of the expected role for a woman of her time and, as a result, was the victim of terrible violence.
Take St. Wilgefortis’ story. A 14th-century noblewoman promised in marriage without her consent, she prayed to God to be made ugly so she could keep a vow of chastity she made to Jesus. God granted her a man’s beard. The marriage was off, but Wilgefortis — whose name means “strong face” — was crucified by her father.
The stories of St. Liberata and St. Lucia are similar: Liberata sprouted a beard, and Lucia had her eyes torn out when she disappointed her family.
“All of these saints are women who took their own agency and stepped outside gender norms,” Tanis said as he stood before Lopez’s rendition of St. Liberata, arms splayed in a way that suggests both crucifixion and winged flight. “In that sense, they were queer and violence was done to them for it.”
As they say “Read the whole thing” if you want to get hit repeatedly with the stupid hammer.
“So far it’s been quiet,” he said. “But we are prepared to offer hospitality to any protesters.”
In other words “Where are the protesters? We did something shocking to draw the loving media gaze and nobody is giving us free publicity by protesting us.”
4 comments
It never surprises me that these things pop up and I can imagine the sly smirk of those who do it thinking, “Oh man, this will blow people’s MINDS!”
But in the end, it just seems so tired and boring.
I remember something Fr. Benedict Groeschel said about the “shocking” ABC show “Nothing Sacred,”
“If you’re going to attack the Church, give me a Voltaire or somebody like that with a little class!”
I’m sure some of the pictures are more offensive… but actually, the picture of St. Lucy that is online was pretty standard. The only “transgressive” thing was that she drew a zaftig middle-aged Latina instead of the standard thin teenaged Lucy.
(Because Lucy was a teenager. The one that’s amusing/interesting is St. Apollonia’s standard image being the standard young holy virgin, when Apollonia was actually a virgin old lady known for still having all her beautiful teeth, which is why her persecutors pulled them out and she’s a patron saint of dentists.)
It sounds like the artist is fighting the compulsion to do decent, beautiful, and sacred art. She’s not drawing anything like icons; she’s drawing giant-sized versions of holy cards and santo pictures, probably straight out of her childhood. Associating the saints with crazy ideology is pretty much just to satisfy her friends and tell herself that she’s a super liberal artist. Even if the rest of the show was deliberately blasphemous, she’s still subconsciously calling on the saints to help her.
She should just be Catholic. Then she wouldn’t be fighting herself.
Okay, found more of her work by using the artist’s name as a search term. Basically she seems to have used women she knows as models for the saint drawings.
Apparently she had an earlier series called Our Lady of Controversy, where she did about a zillion versions of Our Lady of Guadelupe, mostly stupid ones with a naked chick wearing strategic flowers and boxing gloves, a self-portrait that was a sort of Wonder Woman jogging Guadelupe, and a few that actually managed to be blasphemous. So yeah, probably not recommended to look them up.
But yeah, she still can’t help trying to make things beautiful and sacred, even when she’s striving for ugly blasphemy. She is wasting an awful lot of talent on fighting her parents or her neighborhood, or whatever her issue is. Caravaggio didn’t let his issues keep him from being a great artist, and he was using his most lowlife friends as models. OTOH, at least she’s being an honest enemy, not pretending and being “subversive.”
Do something people expect, and then invert it!
That’s about as much creativity as progressives allow themselves to have. This is beyond tired and well into sad. Can we put the last nail in post-modernism’s coffin now?