I like it when things appear to come full circle.  The other day in therapy as my therapist and I went down the long fifty-minute hour path of my thoughts, there was certain glee in my ability to take my answer to his latest question and tie it back to his original question that started the session.  The simple pleasures of life.  Of course those of my ilk believe real closure is impossible.  Whatever sense we have of completion or totality is just an illusion.  There is always at least one loose strand that refuses to get with the program. But even if it is an acknowledged delusion, we can still embrace the momentary pleasure when things seem to have that definitive period at the end of the sentence.  That last word spoken. End of story.  We are the champions.  Roll credits.  Fade to black.

And we tend to not like those who shake up our sense of closure.  There is more than meets the eye.  What you thought you believed as true…well, back to the drawing board, son.  Which is why artists tend to get the craw of people and institutions.   

Speaking of artists getting into the craw….one of the life’s little things coming full circle for me was in writing in this blog on the arrest of Ai Weiwei, my research brought to my attention the recent attack on Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ in France.  My first blog here at Dagblog, “Koran Burning and Other Performance Art,” on August 9, 2010 (started off with of course Pastor Terry Jones and his threat to burn the Koran, who himself was recently back in the news) ended with some musings related to the historical controversy regarding this particular piece of artwork.  Now as one article related the incident:

On Sunday morning, four people in sunglasses entered the gallery. One took a hammer from his sock and threatened security staff. A guard restrained one man but the others managed to smash an acrylic screen and slash the photograph with what police believe was a screwdriver or ice pick.

I ended my blog like this:

Would we feel differently if the person performing the Koran burning labeled him or herself an artist rather than a pastor?  If in an interview he or she said [altering an response given by Seranos during an interview from earlier in the blog]:

Look at my apartment. I am drawn to the symbols of Islam. I like the aesthetics of a Mosque. I like Mosque furniture. I like going to a Mosque for aesthetic reasons, rather than spiritual ones. In my work, I explore my own Islamic obsessions. An artist is nothing without his or her obsessions, and I have mine. One of the things that always bothered me was the fundamentalist labeling of my work as "anti-Islamic bigotry." As a former Muslim, and as someone who even today is not opposed to being called a Muslim, I felt I had every right to use the symbols of Islam and resented being told not to.

Would the outrage against the burning be any less justified?  Is the intent of the artist important?  How do we weigh the extent to which others offended?  What if it a flag of a country rather than a religious icon or text?  And the artist is a foreigner? A citizen?  I don’t think we can set hard and fast rules in which to guide us in all the infinite possibilities that might emerge.  We can have our principles like freedom of expression and respect for others. 

I guess one big question we need to answer is whether this work or that performance will help us move closer to a better world or further away.  Unfortunately, people like Pastor Jones sometimes think performances like burning the Koran is just exactly what is going to help us get to that better world.  Democracy is a messy thing.

In reflection on the recent attack, Jeremy Biles in an essay on Religion Dispatches writes:

It’s Easter weekend, and French vandals armed with hammers have given further reason for contemplating the crucifixion, or at least its representation. This past Palm Sunday, a group of young men masked by sunglasses wreaked havoc at an art exhibition entitled “I Believe in Miracles,” which comprises work collected by art dealer Yvon Lambert, in whose Avignon gallery the show is on display.

The vandals mainly targeted Immersion (Piss Christ), a now-iconic 1987 Cibachrome photograph by artist and former Catholic Andres Serrano depicting a plastic crucifix immersed in the artist’s urine. Guards at the gallery were unable to prevent the attackers from assaulting the photo—its protective plexiglass shield was smashed by a hammer and apparently scored by a sharp object, possibly an ice pick. The vandals managed to escape, shouting “Vive Dieu!” (“Long live God!”).

One question that jumps to mind is would some people react differently to the incident if the vandals had shouted “Allah is Great!” as they escaped? 

Biles ends his piece this way:

But the Palm Sunday attack on the image further complicates matters, bringing into relief still other competing notions of the sacred, and highlighting Piss Christ as a pivotal artifact within what David Chidester calls a political economy of the sacred, that is, “the ways in which the sacred is produced, circulated, engaged, and consumed.” In defacing the photo, the French vandals, we can surmise, sought to reveal the profanity of Piss Christ. They recognized the photo not as a Christian icon, but an icon of “what many modernists hold authoritative and sacred—freedom of expression.” If the photo is taken to be sacrilegious, a violation of the sacred, then defacing it amounts to a kind of “counter-desecration” intent on revealing the profane, merely earthly and human, origin of the “sacred” values of modernism. Yet, if the attackers are associated with the far-right Christian groups discussed above, it is clear that the transcendent authority in whose name they believe themselves to be acting is also enmeshed in worldly issues of political power.

Interpretations of Piss Christ could be further multiplied and their entanglements further elaborated. But we can leave off with one final look at the photo as it now stands in Avignon, like a reliquary holding its own sacred fragments. In their iconoclastic fervor, the vandals have in some way enhanced the power of the image they sought to deface. The image (and the artist whose hands wrought it) will undoubtedly enjoy increased cultural cache as a result of the assault. But looking at the modified image suggests something further. The shape of the smashed glass and scoring describe a curious perimeter around the cross, with the cracks emanating from the face of Christ appearing like a wildly thorny diadem giving way to a jagged halo. In violently defacing an image of the figure they would claim to adore, the vandals reveal the sacred power of images, their ability to incite endless conflicts of interpretation, at once productive and destructive—a scandal no doubt beyond what the perpetrators would have imagined.

The incident at the “I Believe in Miracles” exhibition dramatically evidences the power of images (and of the crucifixion as an image) to continue soliciting fascination and meaning. At least some transgressive art, then, offers not diminishing but increasing returns, miraculous “sacred surpluses” within the ever-turbulent political economy of the sacred. At once pious and blasphemous, abject and elevated, defacing and defaced, transcendent and profane, Serrano’s Piss Christ is a crucifixion that is itself continually resurrected.

Just some thoughts to ponder. Another piece regarding the incident related a nun’s opinion on the work:

Over the years, perhaps the most unlikely defender of Serrano’s work has been British art scholar and television personality (and Catholic nun) Sister Wendy Beckett, who spoke to Bill Moyers about “Piss Christ” some time ago. During the wide-ranging interview, which is worth watching in full, Moyers brings up Serrano’s piece, asking the religious woman if she found it offensive. This is her response:

"I thought he was saying, in a rather simplistic, magazine-y type of way, that this is what we are doing to Christ, we are not treating him with reverence. His great sacrifice is not used. We live very vulgar lives. We put Christ in a bottle of urine – in practice. It was a very admonitory work. Not a great work; one wouldn’t want to go on looking at it once one had already seen it once. But I think to call it blasphemous is really rather begging the question: it could be, or it could not be. It is what you make of it, and I could make something that made me feel a deep desire to reverence the death of Christ more by this suggestion that this is what, in practice, the world is doing."

As I mentioned earlier, this blog originally started with the arrest of the artist Ai Weiwei by Chinese authorities.  Part of the intent was to discuss that while I consider myself reasonably well-informed, this particular incident had passed me by until I happened to come across an article at the Daily Beast by Blake Gopnik

I had no idea that the previous Sunday at Chinese embassies all over the world, protesters had global sit-in to protest the detention.  And while the blog ended up being more about Piss Christ, I will still want to offer the online petition for the release of Ai Weiwei.

There was one blog about Ai’s arrest that I also want to offer that was written by the Guardian’s Jonathan Jones.  He begins:

The story of Ai Weiwei is turning into a dark fable that seems to belong in another age of modern history. In Bertolt Brecht's play Life of Galileo, a dissident intellectual recants his beliefs under pressure from an intolerant regime. It was a hit in the US, but Brecht, a communist, decided in spite of its success to return to live in east Berlin. Later, as he observed the absurdities of the Soviet regime, he was moved to joke that the state should elect another people.

Those absurdities are brilliantly recreated in the historically set Berlin film The Lives of Others, and anyone who has watched it must surely feel a shiver of familiarity at official news from China that Ai Weiwei is co-operating with enquiries into alleged economic crimes and bigamy. Observers who side with the Chinese government on this should be ashamed, and those who dislike Ai Weiwei's art and so welcome any prospect of his undoing are seriously confused about basic human rights. The fact is that regimes such as the Soviet and the Chinese are brilliant at exploiting weaknesses and flaws in the people they need to crush. Dissidents can be shamed and subdued in many ways. What do you think a police state is? It is a place where truth can be manipulated.

And ends with:

Ai Weiwei is not being tested here – not in the eyes of anyone who cares about freedom or justice. His oppressors are the ones who will be judged. Neither does he have to satisfy some western craving for heroics. "Pity the land that has no heroes," says a character in Brecht's play – to which Galileo replies: "Pity the land that needs heroes."

Brecht still has something to say to us even without the Alienation Effect in play.

As I try to bring this blog to some kind of closure, that impossible task, I turn to the film The Lives of Others mentioned by Jones.  I have not seen it, but it seems like something I would enjoy:  In 1984 East Berlin, an agent of the secret police, conducting surveillance on a writer and his lover, finds himself becoming increasingly absorbed by their lives.  What caught my interest was one of the quotes from the movie, spoken by the character Oberstleutnant Anton Grubitz, which I suppose has something to do with what happens when what we say what we say, regardless of what we mean to say, gets into the craw of the authorities:

I have to show you something: "Prison Conditions for Subversive Artists: Based on Character Profile". Pretty scientific, eh? And look at this: "Dissertation Supervisor, A. Grubitz". That's great, isn't it? I only gave him a B. They shouldn't think getting a doctorate with me is easy. But his is first-class. Did you know that there are just five types of artists? Your guy, Dreyman, is a Type 4, a "hysterical anthropocentrist." Can't bear being alone, always talking, needing friends. That type should never be brought to trial. They thrive on that. Temporary detention is the best way to deal with them. Complete isolation and no set release date. No human contact the whole time, not even with the guards. Good treatment, no harassment, no abuse, no scandals, nothing they could write about later. After 10 months, we release. Suddenly, that guy won't cause us any more trouble. Know what the best part is? Most type 4s we've processed in this way never write anything again. Or paint anything, or whatever artists do. And that without any use of force. Just like that. Kind of like a present.

Yet I can’t end there, exactly.  For the end, I turn to the beginning of another German film Lola Rennt (Run Lola Run), which starts with two quotes:

"We shall not cease from exploring and at the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”  T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding

“After the game is before the game.” S. Herberger

Then a narrator speaks as the camera moves through a crowd of people:

Man…probably the most mysterious species on the planet.  A mystery of unanswered questions.  Who are we? Where do we come from?  Where are we going? How do we know what we think we know?  Why do we believe anything at all? Countless questions in search of answer…an answer that will give rise to a new question…and the next answer will give rise to the next question and so on.  But, in the end, isn’t it always the same question? And always the same answer?  

Then one of the people in the crowd, a security guard who shows up later in the film, says:

The ball is round.  The game lasts 90 minutes.  That’s a fact.  Everything else is pure theory.  Here we go. [He picks up a football and kicks it up into the air]

Round is a kind of circle, no?