there's a lot more to say, but maybe none of that was what you intended to generate anyway. Catherine
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That was exactly the sort of complexity, ambiguity, and difficulty I was expecting or hoping to generate. Because I am so profoundly secular and outside any religious system of any sort, it makes it possible to see the crucifix.
A long time ago, I tried to draw one and work with some of the associated symbolism, the sheet, the nails, the wood, the wounds, and I came to the odd problem of depicting the genitals of the tortured and dead. They're not supposed to have genitals, or these are the site of torture so the solution becomes a kind of shadowy in-definability or a rag. Whatever the graphic solution, it is completely unsatisfactory from within the drama of Christianity.
``Hmm, what is Rubens with a sheet? Descent from the Cross? ie. people taking the body down and there's a sheet behind him?..''
Yes, that's the one. There is another that I like also, the raising of the cross, in extreme perspective. But my interest in these works had nothing to do with Christianity in the direct sense. And I suspect that their religious significance had already passed into pretext for Rubens, which puts the raging religious wars of the period into a strange light. But the crucifix was obviously a problem for Rubens, and even more so for Michelangelo. In fact I can't think of one that M did at all.
``...(a bunch of desk junk).. All of these are in there different ways "mass culture", but what do precisely do they represent officially? ''
Mass culture in the sense of mass produced or reproduced things that are called art, sold as such, and enjoyed as if. My problem with it is related to the appropriation of it by means of production completely beyond any active (as in making) engagement of it by any one outside the sites of production---while at the same time, calling it mass culture.
``Adorno might say that even this lego parrot is exemplary mass culture... no child spontaneously desires a red&yellow miniature parrot, rather the uses of the parrot are circumscribed, predicted and demanded by its sale and packaging (I think it's part of a pirate set)..''
Missed the pirate set. My kid was into the car and gas station sets. But the problem with legos is just as good, maybe better than the crucifix.
But what legos need is contrast. The one I am thinking of is from Mexico (fifty years ago). Day of the Dead. Children's toys or adult curios and icons which were clay models of skeletons on coffins, dancing in sombreros, skirts, paper machete masks---all of it hand made out of materials easily available on standard themes with huge variation. My choice (as a kid) was a rubber skeleton so I could play with it along with several small clay things and a mask. You couldn't do much with baked clay except set up little scenes. So the contrasting asethetic experience between clay and plastic and their production, and then their social dimensions leading off into different directions. The contrast goes back into pre-columbian mass produced arts, versus industrial mass produced arts. In way it encapsulates the dialectic of Mexico and the struggle to be Mexico.
I am rambling too. Got to go to work..
Chuck Grimes