Contemporary religious art--out of bounds/on the border (Thanks to Tyler Green)

OK--this image is Praying for Peace, a painting (or is it a print? Hell, I don't know) by The Painter of THE Light, Ron Dicianni. (This as opposed to the mere Painter of Light(R), Thomas Kinkade.) I would never have known this work existed had if I had not attended the iMOCA lecture Thursday night at IMCPL Central by Tyler Green, "Ten Things I Hate About Contemporary Art." This one fell under Hated Thing #7--Hypocrisy ("but I love art's ability to point out hypocrisy," said Green).

Green went on about how this composition picked up on conventions of Renaissance painting, including the positioning of the representation President Bush against a cross. There is also an interesting trinity (Father, Son, Holy Ghost) of what are presumably three Presidents, though I agree with Green--the one on the right must be Washington, but who knew? I also love the fact that Lincoln and "Washington" look like holograms. Hey CNN, take a tip. This is how it's done, baby.

Anyway, this work, for me, is out of bounds. Saccharine in feeling, slick in its combination of classic 20th-century and amped-up, 21st-century-techno illustrative memes, and sinister in its conflation of Christian iconography with American presidential history, (ouch! did I get that line from the Instant Art Critique Phrase Generator?) it isn't just bad--it's outright scary. I don't care how much you Rockwell-up President Bush, this painting reminds me of how I felt on the morning of Wednesday, November 3rd, 2004, when I realized upon awakening that I would be spending four more years in a theocracy. ("I earned capital in the campaign, political capital," said Bush on November 4, "and now I intend to spend it." .....Boy howdy.)

I famously stayed in bed the whole day.

But setting this image aside (oh, do let's!), I began to look for other contemporary American religious art(specifically Christian), and I came across an artist who--I think--operates right on America's most interesting and perhaps volatile border, exploiting the tension between freedom of expression and freedom of religion. Dylan Mortimer, a native of St. Louis, has created numerous series of work that confront viewers with their own feelings about public expressions of Christian faith. Tyler Green agreed with Lou Harry's item 3 on Harry's 10 Things I Hate about Contemporary Art list--artist's statements. Well, I think Mortimer's is a model statement with nary a clause from the Art Phrase Generator.

"Does evangelism have any place in the art world? Does the nature of Evangelical Christianity threaten the artistic process? How can the most used subject matter in the history of art still be challenging and relevant today? These are some of the questions I try to address in my work. I am a Christian, but I aim to warn and inform the public about the difficulties of my faith. The artistic process is essentially about questioning and doubting. Faith is the process of finding answers and believing. My exploration is to question whether the two can co-exist.

By employing the language of familiar public formats (signage, advertising, public communication systems, etc.) I aim to ask questions about public and private faith in contemporary society. I try to balance humor and seriousness, sarcasm and sincerity, in a way that bridges a subject matter that is often presented as heavy or difficult to deal with. By appropriating signs and materials, the work asks questions about society’s depth of spiritual belief, the customization of religion and the restriction or tolerance of religious behavior in public settings.

I am interested in presenting these ideas and issues in a way that will cause the audience to question their assumptions and beliefs. The intent of the work is to create questions that allow the viewer to confront their religious and spiritual feelings.

I would like to see a show of Mortimer's work, but a virtual presentation of it is convinces me that the work is smart, serious, and sincere, and gets me right at the place where I feel most threatened by the repressive agenda of right-wing Christian conservatism, (which is not to say that Mortimer is a right-wing or conservative. He's simply Christian), and most ambivalent about freedom of expression.

I am never content to stop with the work--I like to dig into the artist's biography. This penchant of mine can be an extremely annoying to some in the art world, but I am not going to apologize. I like to know what motivates an artist. Here's some background on Mortimer: he received his BFA from Kansas City Art Institute and his MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York City (2006). He is the son of a minister. In radio interviews, he has alluded to his former partying ways, and in a recent Kansas City Star interview he talked about his return to the church:

While attending the Kansas City Art Institute, he started going to church again at the brand new Rivercity Community Church in Westport. “When I first went, it was just my three friends and eight homeless guys,” Mortimer remembered. “It was real and authentic. For me, church hadn’t been like that before.”Mortimer continued his artistic education, earning his MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York before returning to Kansas City when Rivercity Community Church asked him to be its minister."

Some of Dylan Mortimer's sermons can be found here.

What Mortimer has never much discussed with the media is that he has cystic fibrosis. In the 1950s, children born with CF were unlikely to live past the elementary school years. Now it has advanced to age 30+. In a podcast Mortimer talked at length about his life with CF and sounds nonplussed by life expectancy statistics for people with the disease, opting to make whatever time he has count. (Above, Prayer Booth, now installed in NYC.)