On the air with Michael Byron and Fr. Dempsey

Yesterday afternoon I sat in on an interview with MOCRA’s Director, Fr. Terrence Dempsey, S.J., and Michael Byron. We were at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum on the campus of Washington University in St. Louis, and host John Lanius was recording the interview for the Saint Louis Art Map: On the Air podcast (available on iTunes or as XML).

The conversation was wide ranging, from broad questions about the potential for art to lead the viewer to an encounter with mystery, to specific questions about the genesis of the Cosmic Tears series and the interplay of text and image in Michael Byron’s work. I was particularly intrigued by Byron’s observations about the transition from the solitary environment of the studio to the public display of work in a museum, and the effect the public setting has on the art and the artist, as well as how he sees his work situated in the grand terrain of art history.

The podcast will be available online early next week, and we’ll have links to it from the MOCRA website…but I encourage you to subscribe to the Art Map podcast and stay up-to-date on the contemporary art scene in St. Louis. It’s an important contribution to the St. Louis arts scene, especially given the increasing paucity of print media coverage, and a great complement to the Saint Louis Art Map blog.

Sitting in on the interview whetted my appetite for Michael Byron’s talk at MOCRA on Sunday, November 15, 2009, at 2 p.m. I’m looking forward to hearing him expand on some of his comments from yesterday, and to hear what questions audience members want to pose about his work. More details about the talk are found here. We hope to see you there.

– David Brinker, Assistant Director

The principle at hand

Today I am at MOCRA. This is my 42nd day of work in row.* I am tired, but happy. This type of work in the arts is incredibly important to me. The Cosmic Tears exhibit  is a good one and Michael Byron will be speaking about his work on November 15th.

A few weeks ago, two men entered the museum and began looking around. The taller of the two asked me if I was an artist. I said yes. He said that he and his friend were both former students of Michael Byron. We then began discussing the two statements that Byron wrote to go with exhibit:

Cosmic Tears

The Universal Principal upon seeing its Creation, realized

the potential humanity could exert on the world. The very

thought caused a torrent of the tears – one for each man, woman,

and child. Each tear contained all the joy, pain, and sorrow each

person’s life would hold. To this day a cosmic tear is shed at the

birth of each child. It is the womb of our psyche. Our task is to shape that tear into

Meaning.

And on the opposite wall it reads again with a tiny change:

Cosmic Tears

The Universal Principle upon seeing its Creation, realized

the potential humanity could exert on the world. The very

thought caused a torrent of the tears – one for each man, woman,

and child. Each tear contained all the joy, pain, and sorrow each

person’s life would hold. To this day a cosmic tear is shed at the

birth of each child. It is the womb of our psyche. Our task is to shape that tear into

Meaning.

"Michael Byron: Cosmic Tears," at MOCRA, Fall 2009.

We talked about the definitions of principal and principle. We wondered about the words that were obviously purposefully capitalized. We then concluded that there was something intentional about the isolation and capitalization of “Meaning” at the end of the statements. We decided nothing concrete, but the conversation was enjoyable.

To me, I see a hint of Buddhism when I think of the bittersweet birth of a child. It is a happy occasion, but there is also sadness for me. I know the potential suffering that awaits the child. Buddhists wish to end human suffering and it seems that with each birth inevitably come more suffering and pain.

I am happy at the coming birth of my little girl. I am also worried about the pains life holds for her. Is this a cosmic tear? Or is this a cause of the tears? I think I see what Bryon is saying here…

– Bob Sullivan, Museum Assistant

* Not all of them at MOCRA. Bob has a busy teaching schedule as well! — ed.

Reflecting on “Good Friday”

It is gratifying to report that an article I wrote appeared in the Fall/Winter 2009 issue of Aquinas Institute of Theology’s Signatures magazine. (In the interest of full disclosure I must note that I am presently in graduate studies at AI.) You can find the article online here (it begins on page 9 of the PDF file).

I was invited to write on the intersection of art and religion, drawing on my experiences working at MOCRA. Had I been asked a year prior, I would probably have written generally about the museum’s mission and the ground we’ve covered in our exhibitions. But coming on the heels of MOCRA’s Good Friday exhibition, I knew just where I wanted to go with the article.

“The Presence of God in Art” describes the power that Good Friday held for several groups who engaged with the art as a form of theological reflection and prayer. Over the course of almost 15 years I have given presentations to dozens of groups of all ages and from all walks of life. Often the observations made, and the discussion they spark, can be quite revelatory, both about the work of art at hand and about the people making the remarks. However, there was a marked difference with the group discussions that took place with Good Friday.

An explicit invitation to approach the art in an attitude of meditation or prayer seemed to unlock a door for a number of our visitors who, even in a group setting, were willing to make themselves quite vulnerable in sharing their reflections about the art. These discussions also left me feeling more exposed than usual in my role as docent/moderator, both in receiving the visitors’ observations, and in leaving my accustomed “neutral” stance regarding the work to express more openly some of my personal responses.

I invite you to read the article and share your responses. For instance,

• If you saw the Good Friday exhibition, did you experience responses similar to those I describe in the article?
• Does the idea of approaching art this way leave you feeling ambivalent or even opposed?
  
• Could (or should) something like this take place in a “public” art museum?
  
• Or do MOCRA’s particular mission and setting on a university campus give us latitude to do things other institutions can’t safely attempt?
• Given that Good Friday has a clearly Christian point of departure, and that the groups I described were coming from a standpoint of Christian faith, is this sort of exhibition and approach to art transferable to art from other faith traditions?

You might reply to this post, or you can e-mail me through MOCRA’s website. If I receive enough interesting responses, I’ll incorporate them into a future post.

– David Brinker, Assistant Director

The not-so-big dig

When your museum is part of a university, you occasionally encounter matters beyond your control that nonetheless have an impact on your life. Consider, for example, the case of MOCRA’s front lawn, a courtyard shared with the rest of the Fusz Memorial building. Several weeks ago, we noticed that a section of the lawn was not draining as well as usual. In fact, it was coming to look alarmingly like a wetlands, and was becoming quite popular with the campus bird and squirrel population.

After some intramural attempts at remedying the situation failed to dry things out, our facilities crew called in some reinforcements. I looked out MOCRA’s lobby doors on Monday morning to see …

... a backhoe at MOCRA's door.

I popped outside, camera in hand, to document the proceedings.

No, MOCRA is not under renovation.

The suspected culprit was a water line feeding from a city main that runs down the campus mall. First, a precautionary shut-off of the water to the building.

Don't you hate it when you drop your keys?

Then the digging began. Early estimates were that they might have to go down as far as 18 feet to find the pipe, which would result in a terraced series of cuts into the lawn.

The first cut, contrary to popular song, is not the deepest.

It was starting to act like quick-mud. I watched a worker from the grounds crew sink in up to his knee a few days prior to the dig.

Still haven't found those keys.

Fortunately for all concerned, the pipe was encountered less than 7 feet down. Even at that depth, the crew had already had to cut through some stubborn Missouri clay.

Wait, there they are!

The pipe indeed had a break in it. In short order they replaced that section and filled everything back in.

Almost as if they were never there ... almost.

Now we wait to see if the problem is solved or if there are additional cracks in the pipe. Our thanks to the grounds and facilities crews, and to the contractors, for their efforts to rectify the situation. Although we’ll miss the spectacle of squirrels floating in the puddles with their water wings, we’ll be glad to look out our door onto good solid (and dry) ground.

– David Brinker, Assistant Director

Cosmic Tears is just the beginning

Visitor response to Michael Byron’s Cosmic Tears paintings has been positive, with quite a few questions posed about his technique. Just how does he achieve the trompe l’oeil effect of liquid droplets on the canvas?

Michael Byron, "Cosmic Tears 2" (detail), 2003. Courtesy of the artist and Philip Slein Gallery.

Perhaps Mr. Byron will address that question during his artist’s talk at MOCRA on November 15, 2009.

In addition to the works by Mr. Byron featured in the nave gallery, we are showing works from our collection, and a few works on extended loan, in the side chapel, sanctuary, and choir loft galleries. The artists include:

Seyed Alavi	Peter Ambrose	Lore Bert
Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons	Robert Farber	Donald Grant
Steven Heilmer	DoDo Jin Ming	Robert Kostka
Stephen Luecking	Bernard Maisner	Susan Schwalb
Shahzia Sikander	Thomas Skomski	Michael Tracy

The works have been chosen to harmonize with the Cosmic Tears works, and so tend to favor abstraction and muted palettes–but by no means are they inaccessible on the one hand, or without impact on the other.

A sampling of the work includes:

Shahzia Sikander, "Fourth Space II," 1996. Collection of the Museum of Contemporary Religious Art (MOCRA), Saint Louis University, St. Louis, MO.

DoDo Jin Ming, "Free Element - Plate XXXI," 2002. Private collection, St. Louis, MO.

Bernard Maisner, "'The Trojan Horse ...' (Henry Miller)," 1982.

– David Brinker, Assistant Director

MOCRA Director to deliver 2009 Dillenberger Lecture at GTU

MOCRA’s Director, Rev. Terrence Dempsey, S.J., is honored to deliver the 2009 Dillenberger Lecture at the Graduate Theological Union (GTU) in Berkeley, California, this Thursday, October 22, 2009.

Titled “The Wounded Body of Christ and the Modern Social Conscience,” the lecture will offer an overview of how images associated with the suffering and death of Jesus still have vitality, even in a pluralistic world. Images referring to the events of Good Friday have been employed by the artists of our time not only to manifest an expression of faith but more frequently to address life and death realities such as war, bigotry, poverty, oppression, genocide, sickness and pandemics in order to stimulate empathetic responses within the viewers.

Among the modern artists to be discussed are Georges Rouault, Kathe Kollwitz, Max Beckmann, and Graham Sutherland, as well as contemporary artists such as Michael Tracy, Juan Gonzalez, Eleanor Dickinson, Stephen de Staebler, Daniel Goldstein, Luis Gonzalez Palma, Adrian Kellard, Dinh Q. Le, and James Rosen.

The lecture takes place on Thursday, October 22, 2009. A reception precedes the lecture at 5:00 p.m., followed by the lecture at 6:00 p.m.

It will be held at the Graduate Theological Union (GTU)
Dinner Board Room, Flora Lamson Hewlett Library
2400 Ridge Road, Berkeley, CA

For more information, click here.

The Art of Dancing in the Street

For folks in the St. Louis region (or who might be passing through), there is a plethora of activity going on near MOCRA this Saturday, September 26, 2009. Most significantly for us, the museum will be participating in a gallery walk from 1 to 4 p.m. (Click here for a map of participating galleries.)

The gallery walk coincides with the third annual Dancing in the Street Festival, a celebration kicking off the fall arts season in the Grand Center Arts District. This event, featuring more than 50 dance companies and 700 dancers, runs from 1 to 9 p.m.

And, if all of that hasn’t exhausted your feet or your appetite for culture, you can round things off with the Midtown Alley Street Fest, held on Locust Street just to the east of Grand Center, running from 4 to 10 p.m.

More info about the gallery walk, and how to get to MOCRA, is on the MOCRA website. We hope to see you on Saturday.

– David Brinker, Assistant Director

Summer’s over, time for art

I imagine that everyone has his or her own threshold demarcating the end of summer: Labor Day, the first day of classes, the first leaves falling from the trees. For me, it’s the opening reception of our Fall exhibition, in the moments after the last of our guests leave. I finally have a chance to sit down and register for the first time the new exhibition in its totality. All of the transitional clutter of the installation process has vanished (well, not entirely…oftentimes it has just been tucked behind closet doors waiting to be sorted in the coming days), and, much like a theater set, the space has been transformed yet again.

"Michael Byron: Cosmic Tears" at MOCRA, Fall 2009.

This was the case Sunday after the pleasantly successful opening reception for Michael Byron: Cosmic Tears. Fr. Dempsey and I sat down after the rest of the staff left, and compared notes about the opening — notable guests, friends old and new, and the responses to the art both overheard and observed.

One of the more interesting questions I fielded was whether we had timed the opening of the exhibition to coincide with the release of the latest images from the recently refurbished Hubble Space telescope. Of course, it’s sheer coincidence, but it’s an intriguing connection. The Hubble images only begin to suggest what creation and destruction on a cosmic scale encompass.

Hubble Space Telescope image of Eta Carinae.

Michael Byron’s Cosmic Tears works do not overwhelm with the magnitude of the Hubble images — they are intimate, contemplative works. But they do pose the questions of whether an artist can tap into the same sort of creative forces that birth and rend galaxies, and whether art can serve as a means of engaging such mind-blowing realities.

– David Brinker, Assistant Director

A cool new obsession

Our appreciation for MOCRA’s erstwhile fridge is growing:

• A 1950s commercial promises “years of trouble-free service.” That’s a promise that the Fusz Frigidaire lived up to!

• Solidarity: We’re not the only ones who neglected to defrost the freezer compartment.

– David Brinker, Assistant Director

Farewell to the Frigidaire

An essential element of MOCRA’s personality as a museum is the building itself. It began its existence in 1954 as a chapel, part of the Fusz Memorial complex  that included dormitories and dining facilities for Jesuits studying philosophy at Saint Louis University.

By 1990, the Jesuits had relocated to a different building nearby, and the University acquired the Fusz Memorial. The dorms and dining hall were quickly repurposed for student housing, but the chapel remained vacant until University President Rev. Lawrence Biondi, S.J., accepted Rev. Terrence Dempsey, S.J.’s  proposal to use the space for a museum of contemporary interfaith art.  The transformation of Fusz Chapel into MOCRA was soon underway.

Fusz Chapel prior to the MOCRA renovation.

Installation view, Sanctuaries: Recovering the Holy in Contemporary Art, at MOCRA, 1993.

Much about the chapel has changed over the years, but for MOCRA’s first fifteen years there has been one constant anchor to the building’s history:

The venerable Fusz Chapel Frigidaire refrigerator

We don’t know exactly when this General Motors Frigidaire was installed in the chapel sacristy. It’s quite likely that is was chugging away for over fifty years without complaint. (Although, we might have neglected to defrost the freezer compartment as frequently as we should have — the frost free models apparently did not show up until 1958).

The GM Frigidaire crest

A cursory glance at the history of the Frigidaire refrigerator is enough to set one thinking about the way that technological innovation and the forces of consumerism carry us from a product that meets a basic need (preventing food spoilage) in a rudimentary fashion, to the sleek, convenience-encrusted appliances of today.

Recently we gave in to the inexorable press of progress. Last week the venerable GM Frigidaire was defrosted for the last time and its plug pulled (likely the first time that has happened since it was first put into service). Its place has been taken by a new Frigidaire, one that is more energy and space efficient and several decibels quieter — yet rather generic in its lines.

The new Frigidaire

The new Frigidaire crest, though it strives to evoke a retro space-age feel, loses any panache when expressed in plastic.

The new Frigidaire crest

So we bid a fond farewell to our old Frigidaire as we begin stocking the new one (and enjoying the luxury of frost-free living). It’s another little mile marker as we continue into our sixteenth year at MOCRA. It’s also a prompt to pause and remember all who, like that old refrigerator, have labored reliably and consistently, often underappreciated, over the years.

For all who work to fulfill society’s basic needs, and do so with quiet determination, we say thank you. And to all who live with uncertainty in this patch of economic quicksand, we offer support and hope.

Happy Labor Day. May you and yours have a restful holiday. We hope to see you on September 13 for Michael Byron: Cosmic Tears.

– David Brinker, Assistant Director