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

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

Updated MOCRA website

Several of our summer projects at MOCRA have focused on internal improvements — behind-the-scenes tweaks and improvements that visitors won’t ever see directly, but hopefully will result in better exhibitions and better service to our visitors.

One of our projects, however, is one that we hope many visitors will experience directly. We’ve launched an updated and expanded MOCRA website.

Among the notable features are improved navigation (including a left-hand menu bar and cookie trails); more robust visitor information; and an expanded selection of related links and resources.

It won’t win any Webbys, to be sure, but we hope visitors will find it to be a welcoming and useful site. It is a work in progress, so please send us your feedback…do you have suggestions on the organization and layout of the site? Any broken links we need to fix? Related links to recommend? Let us know!

–David Brinker, Assistant Director

Good Friday on Good Friday

It seems that every time I post I’m explaining the infrequency of our updates. But I’m pleased to say it’s just because we have been so busy.

The “Art and the Religious Imagination” conference was well received. Pamela Ambrose and Gerald Bolas gave distinct but complementary reflections on the way art museums can present the religious art in their collections in innovative ways. Charles Bouchard used the works in Good Friday to examine theological thought on the question of human suffering. (Sadly, Kevin Burke had to cancel due to a family emergency, but we anticipate inviting him back next spring.) A dynamic question-and-answer session followed, with some excellent insights from audience members.

A few pictures are included below, and we’ll try to have summaries of the talks available soon.

In the meantime, we are preparing for Good Friday on Good Friday. MOCRA’s Easter weekend hours are:

Friday, April 10, 2009 (Good Friday)		9:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.
Saturday, April 11, 2009		11:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m
Sunday, April 12, 2009 (Easter)		closed

To our readers observing Pesach or Holy Week, we wish you a season of peace and holiness.

Pamela Ambrose speaks at MOCRA’s Art and the Religious Imagination conference.

Pamela Ambrose speaks at MOCRA’s Art and the Religious Imagination conference.

Gerald Bolas speaks at MOCRA’s Art and the Religious Imagination conference.

Gerald Bolas speaks at MOCRA’s Art and the Religious Imagination conference.

Charles Bouchard speaks at MOCRA’s Art and the Religious Imagination conference.

Charles Bouchard speaks at MOCRA’s Art and the Religious Imagination conference.

Art and the Religious Imagination panel discussion. From left: Charles Bouchard, Pamela Ambrose, Gerald Bolas, Terrence Dempsey.

More about that wall

The wall that is now in the middle of the main gallery didn’t materialize out of thin air. It’s actually been hanging around MOCRA since it was built for the Fred Brown exhibition in 1996. Since then it has split in two, wandered up onto the sanctuary platform, come back together for the Latin American photography show, supported curtains for the Andy Warhol Silver Clouds exhibitions and a rear projection screen for Miao Xiaochun’s Last Judgment in Cyberspace, and most recently doing what it was originally made for: holding Fred Brown’s “Madonna and Child” and “Descent into Hell.”

The walls don’t move themselves, of course. Relocation involves a careful coordination of muscle, carpet scraps, shims, and (of course) at least a couple of staff members to supervise and offer helpful comments.

Once the wall was in place this time, it certainly shook up the typical MOCRA floor plan. Though the giant nave is now split, I can’t say it feels fractured. It serves a great function by creating a line between stages of the Passion of Christ.

– Bob Sullivan, Museum Assistant

Preconceived Notions

Roughly two years ago, I decided to do a solo gallery walk around Grand Center and other areas of St. Louis. I compiled a list of galleries and museums through a Google search. There was one venue that stood out amongst names such as The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, The Sheldon Art Galleries, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Saint Louis University Museum of Art and Bruno David Gallery. That venue was MOCRA, the Museum of Contemporary Religious Art.

Oskar Fischinger, "Outward Movement," 1948. Oil on canvas. © and Collection of Fischinger Trust.

I was worried about what I would see in a museum of strictly contemporary religious art. Visions of Werner Sallman’s Head of Christ almost prevented me from walking through those doors, but, as a student of art, I decided it was in my best interest to venture into uncomfortable territory.

The exhibition on display was Oskar Fischinger: Movement and Spirit. As I made my way through the side chapels turned galleries, a calmness took over. The museum had low light levels and was quiet… it sounded like an empty church (MOCRA is housed in a building that was once a chapel). There was a meditative presence in Fischinger’s technique… you could see that each line was painted one at a time with a steady hand. It was clear to me the man who painted these works was patient and deliberate.

In particular, the painting Outward Movement struck me as a tremendous example of Fischinger’s technique. There must be hundreds of gridded squares made with thousands of individual lines. They are placed one on top of the other and give a true illusion of outward movement from the center of the canvas. Fischinger used no stamps or silkscreen techniques when creating this work. He placed each line in position with a brush… one at a time… carefully spaced… producing a painting that captures your attention.

The connection of that exhibit to MOCRA’s mission was not obvious, but it was there. The act of creating paintings for Oskar Fischinger was a form of meditation, which is a common practice in most religions. And, because the religious connection was not “in my face,” I walked away with a better understanding of the spiritual as MOCRA presents it to its visitors. It is not sentimental. It is not aggressive. It is not obvious. It is something else entirely.

–Bob Sullivan, Museum Assistant

[According to the Fischinger Trust, Fischinger's original title for Outward Movement was Manhattan.]

Sanctuaries

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

MOCRA’s inaugural exhibition opened Sunday, February 14, 1993. Sanctuaries: Recovering the Holy in Contemporary Art featured more than 100 works from an wide-ranging roster of artists, including

Seyed Alavi	Steven Heilmer	Jim Morphesis
Lita Albuquerque	Tobi Kahn	Daniel Ramirez
Craig Antrim	Paul Kos	James Rosen
Nick Boskovich	Frank LaPeña	Susan Schwalb
Frederick Brown	Charlotte Lichtblau	Thomas Skomski
Michael David	Stephen Luecking	Kazuaki Tanahashi
Stephen De Staebler	Bernard Maisner	Michael Tracy
Eleanor Dickinson	Ann McCoy	Brian Tripp
Donald Grant

MOCRA’s Founding Director, Terrence Dempsey, S.J., noted at the time that

Sanctuaries offers an overview of a movement that gained momentum in the 1980s and has grown in strength in the early 1990s. A generation of artists have begun to renew their interest in the religious and spiritual dimensions of art, and within the last dozen years or so they have achieved recognition in the mainstream art world for the spiritual concerns which form the substance of their work.

Fr. Dempsey had assembled an extensive list of such artists in the course of writing his doctoral dissertation. These artists were generally in their 30s, 40s, and 50s. They tended to be disillusioned with the celebrity mentality of the 1980s and in response were seeking the “spiritual.” Their faith or religious practices were not always particularly orthodox, and in fact many would draw from various beliefs and philosophies.

Fr. Dempsey had concluded from his research that this artistic concern with the religious and spiritual dimensions was pervasive and yet not an organized movement, having no group manifesto. For the artists, this pursuit was risky. One artist, warned that his work would not sell, replied that the ideas were too important to ignore, whether or not the art was salable. Fr. Dempsey reflected,

For some of them, having faith is tough. They have to struggle. These are not commissioned works-they are the work of an artist pursuing personal vision or questions. … These artists have often been met with indifference and sometimes suspicion by religious and cultural institutions. Yet they have pursed this exploration even when it was financially unwise. They have done so because they perceived something was in danger of being lost: a sense of mystery, ritual, tradition-a sense that a major dimension of being human was being ignored.

The title Recovering the Holy in part alludes to the rediscovery by many contemporary artists of the power of art with a spiritual dimension to engage the viewer affectively. Indeed, said Fr. Dempsey, their art is compelling precisely because of the struggle.

Installation view, "Sanctuaries: Recovering the Holy In Contemporary Art," at MOCRA, 1993. From left: Steven Heilmer, "Nativity Stone: Mother's Milk"; Don Grant, "Rope and Candle"; Craig Antrim, "Icon Wall."

And so, for this inaugural exhibition of what was believed to be the first museum of its kind in the world, Fr. Dempsey assembled 100 works by 25 contemporary American artists reflecting the country’s religious and ethnic diversity. Artists came from Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist and Native American backgrounds, and their styles ranged from traditional Western figuration to minimalist and geometric abstraction.

The Artist and Sacred Space

Yesterday we looked briefly at how MOCRA came to be. Today we continue the story with some of the surprises that come with renovating an older building, and the encouraging response to a pre-opening conference.

Several months prior to MOCRA’s official opening in February 1993, St. Louis Post-Dispatch cultural news editor Robert W. Duffy reported on the “race to finish” the gallery prior to a November 7, 1992 meeting of the Society for the Arts, Religion and Contemporary Culture (ARC) to be hosted in the new museum.

Asbestos! MOCRA gets a new ceiling.

Construction had begun in the spring of 1992, and with the target of a completion date of early September 1992, everything seemed on track for the November 7 opening conference with plenty of time to install the art. Then, in late August, asbestos was discovered in much of the museum’s ceiling, and all construction stopped until it was removed and a new ceiling installed. To describe the abatement process as messy would be a severe understatement. By the time the project was completed the museum had a new ceiling and new drywall around its whole circumference.

Just days before the conference, Fr. Dempsey and the installation crew consider a work by Michael David.

Undaunted, Fr. Dempsey and the small MOCRA staff turned their energies to the ARC conference. The last of the scaffolding was removed on November 4, and the entire inaugural exhibition (which was to be previewed at the conference) had to be installed in two days. On top of that, there was an overlap between the installation completion and the arrival of the artists, speakers, and guests for the conference. Adrenaline and frayed nerves were in evidence—but it happened, and the museum was ready for the conference.

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The program, titled The Artist and Sacred Space, featured lectures and reflections from a number of distinguished speakers (titles and institutions are given as at the time of the conference):

Dr. Jane Daggett Dillenberger	(Professor of Art History, Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, CA)
Dr. John Renard	(Professor of Theological Studies, Saint Louis University, St. Louis, MO)
Rev. Terrence E. Dempsey, S.J.	(Founding Director of MOCRA and Assistant Professor of Art History, Saint Louis University, St. Louis, MO)
Doug Adams	(Professor of Art History, Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, CA)
David Miller	(Watson-Ledden Professor of Religion, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY)
Rev. Maurice B. McNamee, S.J.	(Professor Emeritus and Founding Director of Samuel Cupples House, Saint Louis University, St. Louis, MO)

These presentations were followed by a panel of 12 artists participating in MOCRA’s inaugural exhibition:

Seyed Alavi (Oakland, CA)	Charlotte Lichtblau (New York, NY)
Lita Albuquerque (Los Angeles, CA)	Stephen Luecking (Chicago, IL)
Craig Antrim (Los Angeles, CA)	Bernard Maisner (New York, NY)
Frederick J. Brown (New York, NY)	James Rosen (Augusta, GA)
Eleanor Dickinson (San Francisco, CA)	Thomas Skomski (Chicago, IL)
Tobi Kahn (New York, NY)	Daniel Ramirez (Madison, WI)

The artists and the audience engaged in an animated conversation on why many of today’s artists were addressing the religious and spiritual dimensions in their work.

The conference and its discussions reflected the excitement among the participants about the imminent launching of MOCRA. Artist Eleanor Dickinson remarked, “Art of the spirit and the soul is not very saleable. This museum is something we’ve needed for a long time to counter the excessive commercialization of art.” Over 120 people from across the country—St. Louis, New York, Washington, Chicago, Syracuse, Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Houston—attended the conference, including about 30 members of ARC.

After the excitement of the conference had subsided, it was now time to attend to the final preparations for MOCRA’s grand opening.

–David Brinker, Assistant Director

• Tomorrow: A new sanctuary opens