Pact

Pact (2) Jenny Evans, 2010

This is a response to work by Jenny Evans, originally exhibited in Bones, Market Gallery London, June 2010.

Pact is a pair of paintings. Each depicts a valentine steak; meat sliced most of the way through and folded open, giving an almost heart shaped symmetry. The paintings reflect on human agreements: promises or pacts, and physical relationality. The combination of promises and flesh recalls, among other things, the Torah. It records that to seal a covenant participants would cut an animal into pieces, place them on the ground and then walk between the pieces with joined hands. The Hebrew term for covenant is Karath Berith - 'to cut a covenant'.

The paintings are roughly human-sized and stand on the floor. They are placed facing each other across the room; a further symmetry which the viewer disturbs by walking between them. They are figurative paintings yet they are attempting to make you aware of both how they relate to each other and your own spatial relationship with them; like a piece of minimalist sculpture might.

The pairings suggested in the work’s title, and the actual appearance of the flesh, are strongly sexual in nature. This is affirmed by the words of the co-exhibited neon sign You Made Us Male and Female. In this work a biblical quote ('male and female he created them') is subtly altered into second person narrative; appropriating or paraphrasing the text into a personal context. The direction of the statement is thereby altered, so that the viewer is given access to part of a conversation rather than necessarily being addressed. This idea could also be applied to the paintings. Sexuality is presented here as beautiful, risky - cutting yourself open, damaging the autonomy of your own body to facilitate something else. It's worth noting that in Christian theology, physical sexuality can be analogous to the way people relate to other people and things in a more general sense.

I like to see Evans' use of flesh as semi political in a 'the personal is political' sense. It seems to say that even if materially similar, we are, at a vital level, violently divided. Her feelings about the ideas presented seem almost uncomfortably direct. The paintings are specific, purposeful, asking us to think about how we, as meat, relate to other meat. No political mediators, just the fact of human interrelationality. It seems to me to relate not only to personal relationships but much broader ideas including those human relationships contained and shaped by economic, official and other communal structures.

http://jenny-evans.com/

An Introduction to Radical Orthodoxy

from Stefan Lindholm's talk - mp3 available from English L'Abri

- 'more of a loose tendancy than a exclusive movement'

- not ecclesial (relating to church)

- links to thought of Chesterton/Lewis/Schaeffer?

- mainly Anglican? Or even a 21^st century Catholicism?

- described as a postmodern thought. Although Milbank is v critical of nihilsm in postmodernism.

- 'participation' is one of RO's favourite words – in terms of relation between God and the world.

- Dependent creation and an independent God.

- Participatory framework supports a theology which touches all life – not confined to biblical or systematic theology.

*Systematic theology - rationalised Christian theory that tries to be universally applicable, like theory of relativity?

- Idea of participation is found in Analogy (medieval theologian Aquinus' doctrine of the 'analogy of being'. Similar thought in Augustus/in?) – every being has an analogous relationship with God.

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  (created) Words are neither completely non applicable, nor exactly the same, when applied to God. i.e language is not univocal – does not mean exactly the same in and beyond creation.

*Ontology – philosophical study of being/existence/reality

*Emergent church – late 20^th/21^st cent. Broad trends in churches developing in recognition of postmodern situation?

- The inherent value of the material. In any other world view, than the one where everything participates in God, the material will lose value and the world will be 'flattened'. Taken to its extreme, this thinking could lead to pantheism/atheism. Without it, the world is not valued as created by God – domination and exploitation allowed.

- RO applies these ideas to history.

- Robert E. Webber (RO sympathiser) argues that Reason has unnecessarily been relied on to validate Christianity, which does not require such validation. Is RO therefore fideistic or irrational?

*Fideism – reason cannot reach certainty (in religion) so a leap of faith (without, or against, reason) is required

- Is Fideism a bad thing?

- Milbank refers to 'knowledge by faith alone' in ref to radical pietism (17^th-18^th cent. Movement emphasising a religion of the heart, not of the head)

- He also discusses the idea that you cannot acquire any knowledge direct from the world, without mediation by God. Lindholm suggests that this could conflict with the inherent value of the material that RO set out to defend. I'm not sure if it does, Milbank is just saying that the material world only has value because God animates it.

- What does this viewpoint mean to non christian claims to knowledge?!

*Epistemology – theory of knowledge

- We need to think of reasons within the boundary of religion, not religion within the boundaries of reason (Kant).

- Lack of exegetes (biblical scholars) in RO?

*Open theism – view that God does not perfectly know the future (which reconciles God's sovereignty with human free will). Boyd explains it that the future does not exist to be known by anyone – God doesn't know it anymore than he knows square circles..

mp3

King & Queen Sub-Creators

These are my notes from Jerram Barrs' talk on 'Christianity and the Arts'
(audio available via theologynetwork.org)

He says that the closer you look at God's creation (i.e through a microscope), you just see new layers of beauty and perfection, compared to imperfection in what we have created. He gives the example of polished steel (up close it would have flaws). He notes that we (Christians) are forbidden to be ascetics - to deny the value of creation. The value of creation is one reason that being an artist is valuable, and not less spiritual than another vocation. The mentality that art is an extra add on to serious work like evangelism is a heresy[?!].

''For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, for it is made holy by the word of God and prayer''

'' And God saw that it was good''

So we must appreciate creation [although obviously this may not require art or artists]. We are called to be 'sub creators'. Psalm 8 - to be human is more glorious than anything else in creation. Revelation 21:24 - Kings will take glory (and cultures?) into heaven?

As we cannot create, all we can do is play with what god has given us [everything is play?]. 'Art needs no more justification than food or sex' - Rookmaaker. [Does this apply to institutional contemporary art?].

We are kings and Queens of earth, under God. We know we live in a broken world, and our calling as artists is to work against the fall, and to resist it. The (Christian) farmer makes food to feed people (rather than just to make money); this is their way of dealing with the fall.