Special
Report How Jesus 2000 grew wings, keeps on flying
By MICHAEL J. FARRELL
Last summer, as we prepared to
launch NCRs art search for Jesus 2000, I speculated one
pessimistic morning that we might get all of seven entries. I was wrong, as
certain people have not allowed me to forget. What threw me off was the
unpredictability of the human imagination. And the refusal of God, despite all
the prophets of doom, to die.
Jesus 2000 has by now become a household word in a good many
households. The winning entry, Janet McKenzies Jesus of the
People, has been on TV and the Web and in hundreds of newspapers across
the country and far beyond. But behind that image was an odyssey, a
seat-of-the-pants process, we searchers making it up as we went, like pilgrims
with latter-day Canterbury tales, with a few key players and a motley
supporting cast that got into the spirit of the thing, and together we all
turned Y2K into J2K.
Welcome, then, behind the scenes.
How the search began
It started with an abrupt dawning of awareness that in the
transition from one millennium to another there was scarcely a mention of Jesus
Christ outside official church circles. So the project in the first place was a
test of public opinion, or rather private opinion. Behind the silence did
anyone care?
Our reporters could have resorted to the phone and called the
usual suspects for comment. Instead, the art contest presented itself. Even the
most abstract thinkers rely largely on visual art for their concept of the
divine. If no one had ever invented art, perhaps we would know transcendence
through our sense of smell or through direct intuition. As it turned out,
pictorial art and Jesus have gone hand in hand for centuries. Someone once said
that art is the research and development aspect of a culture. If there were no
artistic response, this would tell its own tale about Jesus prospects for
the road ahead.
Fr. Michael Coleman of Kansas City, Mo., put the project in
perspective: It is not often -- I cant think of anything similar --
that the religious imagination of the people is explored and documented at a
given historical moment, and specifically regarding the person who lies at the
heart of the Christian movement.
We invented rules, making it up. We were prepared to put modest
money into what now seemed an adventure, until advisers said we should charge
an entry fee without which serious artists would not take us seriously. Some
begrudgers have accused us of making a bundle -- the word scam was
mentioned -- but Im sorry to tell them that when all was said and done
and paid for, its a modest bundle.
Girded with news releases, we wondered where to send them. We drew
up a list of college art departments, but in August all sensible art students
are off on golden beaches. We sent stuff to the top 100 papers, but most art
editors dropped the artistic ball, except for a few inspired exceptions,
especially Christopher Hume of Canadas Toronto Star. The feature
included a traditional painting of Jesus, which leaped out from the page in an
odd way, presumably because we are unaccustomed to seeing Jesus on Page
One.
Other Canadian media followed suit. I spent hours on radio talk
shows explaining and defending and figuring it out. But this excitement was
slow to trickle south into the United States.
Then, as she made the salad one evening, my wife casually
suggested we get Sr. Wendy Beckett, the art historian celebrated for her
several BBC series and elegant art books, to judge the contest. It was an
inspired idea. Finding the otherwise reclusive Sr. Wendy became a saga. That
she agreed to do it seemed little short of a miracle. This is the only
sensible millennium idea Ive yet heard, she wrote (she has the most
illegible handwriting imaginable, but the entire newsroom went to work on her
letter until we figured it out). I tried to make the task easier for her by
asking only that she look at the top 10 slides -- never mind that, at the time,
we had no slides at all.
Within a few days, USA Today was carrying a picture of Sr.
Wendy, twice in one day, and the story of an international search, no less -- I
was telling people in the media that NCR has subscribers in 93 countries
until Marketing Director Jessica Ovel assured me it was 96. An Associated Press
story and a segment on NBCs Today Show stirred up interest
until it was nearly out of control. NCR staff stalwarts Therese Johnson
and Jean Blake spent more time working the phones, faxes and computers than
John McCains volunteers.
The first question was being answered: Jesus was alive and well.
It remained to be seen what he now would look like.
Who do people say that I am? he had once asked, and
the contest was still asking the same question. I began to refer to the
venture, rather grandly, as our going down into the marketplace to see who he
was. We talked to artists and journalists all day, checking out the
marketplace. In a fit of hubris I decided I would go on any program however
thematically removed from art or, for that matter, Jesus. I went on a -- I
think hes what they call a shock-jock, name of Mancow, on the radio. It
didnt last long. After allowing me bare seconds to tell the airwaves
about Jesus 2000, this fellow launched an attack on the church for its stand on
divorce and such, then click, he hung up. It was like a slap. He seemed to have
two helpers whose job it was to giggle along at his jokes. I felt sorry for
them for having to stoop so low for a salary.
Now I was having second thoughts about the marketplace. A nice
young man invited me on The Daily Show, which is on Comedy Central,
which, bereft of cable TV in my personal life, I knew nothing about. Opinion
Editor John Allen recorded an episode. Either Jesus or I would have taken a
beating, I could soon see, so I made the decision for both of us to pass.
The art pours in
Then the first entry came in. The contest was official. Artist
Nicholas J. Riddell had depicted Jesus, not handsome but under stress and
beaten-up, the way he once was. We were all excited and passed the slide
around, and though it didnt win, it will always be etched in my
memory.
Finally there were 1,678 entries from 1,004 artists in 19
countries on seven continents. I soon learned those statistics and could recite
them like a poem, which in a way they were.
There was a spectacular variety. Three judges, Sherry Lynn Best,
Pattie Wigand Sporrong and Cory Stafford, convened in Kansas City for an
intense October weekend and chose the top 100 and then the top 10 to send Sr.
Wendy, who, at that very moment, was in Los Angeles making another TV series. I
was very nervous that the 10 precious slides, having survived the three judges,
might not survive the trip to L.A. I volunteered to fly out with them, but
Wendy would have none of it -- no, I never did meet her.
Ever so stealthily, the names of the winners came back. The next
problem was to keep them secret until Christmas, and we did.
Reams have been written about the winner, Jesus of the
People. It was, at least, controversial, as was the original Jesus. A
black face, a portrait based on a female model, a hint in the background of
other cultures -- Lord, was he still stirring it up! In the argot of the
marketplace it was a damn good story.
An interesting dimension of the coverage was that it came almost
entirely from the secular media, while the Catholic media scarcely seemed to
notice. At a time when accusations of anti-Catholic sentiment abound, the
respect and seriousness with which the mainline press treated the Jesus 2000
story was striking. I saw most of the hundreds of newspapers that carried the
story, and I feel obliged to mention that the only negative, mocking account of
the event, as far as I could see, came from a Catholic paper, a columnist for
Our Sunday Visitor, in what seemed to be its news section. This sad
little aside, however trite, is still part of the story of Jesus at 2000.
As the media picked up the image, the resulting early letters
could be divided into angry and furious.
Now we were back in the marketplace.
Why in the world would you print such venom? one
began. Are you that hard up for news?
Im concerned about the Jesus 2000 picture,
another began politely enough, then went on, Where do you get off putting
a black Jesus on the cover of your God depraved magazine?
One day you
will stand before the Lord Jesus Christ and he will be a Jew. This
one ended, May God have mercy on your sole -- Im not sure if
the spelling was intentional.
Many angry letters nevertheless called on God to have mercy on us.
Several ripsnorters were signed by A devout Christian or someone
similar. There was constant reference to the alleged politically
correct aspect of the picture, always with disapproval. One critic
announced his membership in the Ku Klux Klan.
You have been duped into categorizing the Lord of all
creation into some religious figure, another wrote.
You have no idea whatsoever who the creator is.
There were dozens such letters. Our first question was being
answered forcefully. People care. There is an odd but crucial ambiguity here.
Those angry writers were saying, in effect, Dont mess with my
Jesus. The Jesus they grew up with, their Jesus, was a given. It
was given on holy cards and calendars and in frames on living room walls. This
was the Jesus of their devotion, and art never entered the picture. They never
asked where the image came from or what artist had the audacity, once, to make
it new when previously there had been a different image.
Art has always been a minority interest. It has had to be subtle
and patient to gain entry and assent, taking individuals and populations by
stealth. Each new style or movement was at first resisted, if not reviled,
until gradually people let it out of the gallery and into the house and
eventually it became state of the art.
The ancient Romans called them lares et penates, their
household gods. Throughout Christian history we have had a series of them: our
God the Father with a beard, for example, and our various manifestations of
Jesus.
Only time will tell what the next enduring manifestation will be,
but McKenzies image is staking its claim. After that initial flurry of
angry reaction, there has been a surge of admiration and recognition -- not
necessarily that its the Jesus, which no picture ever is, but that
its a candidate through which many people can see a hint of their
divinity. The big numbers of requests for the NCR supplement and for
prints of Jesus of the People suggest that this work may be on its
way to the kind of domestication and veneration that popular icons acquire with
time.
Sr. Wendy, to whom we had of course sent copies of the supplement,
wrote to confirm, from the relaxed atmosphere of home in England, The
more I look at the images, the more sure I feel that the right choice was
made.
Art and meaning
Behind all the reactions, pro and con, lurk various questions
about what is art, what is religious art and anyway does it matter?
What mattered to Judith Neuwissen of New York was the dead
seriousness of so many entries: Do you really think Jesus never smiled?
Never cracked a joke? Could this Jesus get me out of my doldrums? Her
issue was the content of the work.
In faraway Australia, on the other hand, Marisa Loren was
preoccupied with the form. She cited her diary entry for Aug. 21, 1999: 6
p.m. vigil Mass at St. John the Baptist, Plympton. Fr. Nader mentioned the
NCR art adventure.
During the prayers leading to the consecration
I had an inspiration. The image people were searching for was the Consecrated
Host. I cannot stop thinking about it.
J. David Kammer from Florida suggests another way of looking at
it: I cant believe how practically all those who wrote letters on
the subject of Jesus 2000
have failed to see the spiritual.
There is another ambiguity about religious art that has never been
fully resolved. In six months of interviews and talk-show discussions, one of
the most common stumbling blocks I encountered was the Old Testament
prohibition against graven images, a prohibition deeply engraved on the psyches
of the startlingly high number of fundamentalist Christians who rush to attack,
some civilly, some fiercely, any and all icons.
This is nothing new. In the early Christian centuries, the
iconoclasts, devoted to destroying all religious imagery, caused many a
headache. This old wound has lingered to such a degree that Pope John Paul II,
in his April 1999 Letter to Artists, felt obliged to address it:
The council held in Nicaea in 787, which decreed the legitimacy of images
and their veneration, was a historic event not just for the faith but for
culture itself. The decisive argument to which the bishops appealed in order to
settle the controversy was the mystery of the incarnation: If the Son of God
had come into the world of visible realities -- his humanity building a bridge
between the visible and the invisible -- then, by analogy, a representation of
the mystery could be used, within the logic of signs, as a sensory evocation of
the mystery. The icon is venerated not for its own sake, but points beyond to
the subject which it represents.
That still begs the question, what makes a work religious -- or
sacred or spiritual?
Marshall Arisman, an artist of international stature and a
participant in the Jesus 2000 search (supplement, page 29), executed a
remarkable series titled Sacred Monkeys, exhibited, among other
places, in China. The very idea may recall the controversy surrounding a
certain painting of the Madonna at the Brooklyn Museum last year. Its a
pity how we raise our obscurantist eyebrows at what others consider sacred
while we burn the bridges that art should be building.
Arisman, though, has a tantalizing hypothesis that puts the
monkeys and ourselves in perspective: We can only speculate on the
reasons why monkeys were singled out [in the East] for divinity. If we, as
human beings, identify with their decidedly human characteristics, their oddly
human forms, we also envy their freedom to be who they are without all the
restrictions of our complicated social conventions. Genetic studies conducted
since 1990 show that chimpanzees share over 98 percent of our human genetic
program. Perhaps what is sacred to us about monkeys lies in the 2 percent
difference between us.
Perhaps if the answers were easy, they would be less worthwhile --
and all the entries for Jesus 2000 would be clones of each other instead of the
spectacular diversity that actually took place.
I was asked many times what we were looking for in an image. The
question, for starters, misconstrued the whole purpose of the search: to find
out, not what we at NCR fancied but what artists imagined. Still, eager
to stir up the debate, I occasionally pontificated on how the overall thrust of
the art of the receding 20th century had been from the less abstract to the
more abstract, on how there had been a paring away of nonessentials, and thus a
more abstract representation might be a fitting culmination of the century and
even millennium. The only thing wrong with my thesis was that our search was
not to sum up the old century but to create a new vision for times to come. For
the most part, the entries show, artists were less inspired by abstract visions
and more by the incarnational aspect of which the pope had written.
The search goes on
The adventure continues. A series of exhibitions of selected works
begins in New York May 1 and continues in other venues at least until the end
of the year.
Do not depend on the hope of results, Thomas Merton
warned in his Letter to a Young Artist. Out of all the entrants
there were only about four sore losers. Most were and are delightful
participants in a sprawling conversation that refuses to stop.
James D. Callahan of Cincinnati sent in a book on how to make the
perfect picture frame based on the Golden Section theorems of Pythagoras. One
man wrote to ask if Sr. Wendy had an older brother who was stationed in England
in 1943.
One of the most moving was submitted by Robert H. Kelly of San
Ysidro, Calif.: a folder full of creativity, poems and songs, written and even
sung, and pictures galore in glorious color. Wrote Kelly: I dedicate this
humble work to my wife Virginia, for her many years of devotion to me, our
children and to the cause of Jesus. Eleven of our children and grandchildren
helped draw, color and sing. Of these, three are deaf and one is mute, so I beg
your patience as your interest we recruit (rhyme was lying in wait on
every page). The artists were Anastacia, Angie, Cynthia, Janeth, Jehoshuah,
Maria, Philip, Priscilla, Selina, Tanya and Victor.
Its amazing what kind of passion this art has
evoked, another wrote. And another: The contest clarified for me
regarding my own inner thoughts related to my personal relationship with God
through Jesus Christ over this last 12 months as I have been dealing with
cancer. Several mentioned, apologetically or otherwise, that they were
not Catholic. I hope you do not mind an old Protestant guy
entering, wrote Charlie Moore. We did not mind a bit, Charlie. Several
attributed supernatural provenance to their entries. There were pictures of
Jesus appearing in trees or in the heavens. Some of these fulfilled the
qualifications for entry and some did not. Because of the
photographs special nature it would be inappropriate for me to accept a
prize, one wrote. We took him at his word. One sent a picture of the
pastor of her childhood church, whom she described as the perfect
servant of Jesus, and who, back then, floated across the ceiling of
the church.
This morning for the first time in perhaps 20 years, thanks
to your offer, I pulled out my drawing pads and paints, wrote Juanita
Perry. I am sure I will not receive the $2,000, but I have received the
prize.
Ubiquitous author Sr. Joan Chittister dropped a line as follows:
Rollo May says that when you dont know whats going on in a
society, there are two categories of people you should ask: one, the artists,
because they are sensitive enough to foresee it; and, two, the mentally ill,
because they cant stand it and break down under it long before anyone
else even knows its happening.
Sr. Margaret Broderick from the diocese of Brownsville, Texas,
said word of the search for Jesus reminded her of poet Carl Sandburgs
Remembrance Rock, in which the author introduces an artist trying to
carve a Christ head out of oak: When finished it would float and gleam,
cry and laugh, with every other face born human. And how can you crowd all the
tragic and comic faces of mankind into one face?
Then in my dream I saw
too that the face of Christ must have in it the essence and mystery of the sea
and the sky, the valleys and the mountains overlooked by sun, moon, stars and
the heavy darkness where men grope and stumble. For the face of Christ would
hold what every man sees, hears, smells, touches, tastes. And it would be very
old and very young.
Jesus had a habit of turning the argument back on people -- but
who do you say that I am? Robert Tilka of Jacksonville Beach, Fla.,
tried a little of that: The picture on the cover of your magazine should
be a large mirror, with the caption: the face of Jesus Christ. Take a look in
the mirror. He is all of us.
Becky Johnson got even more personal in an e-mail: May God
save this man Michael Farrell. May he reveal his self to him personally. How
would he like it if a prize were offered to give him a new look?
As a matter of fact, Becky, I could use one.
Sandburgs artist muses on: Before my Christ head comes
alive out of oak, my heart must be sunk deeper and get closer interwoven with
the hearts of all other men, the good who have some bad in them and the bad who
have some good in them, none being utterly good, none being utterly bad. I must
be shameless dust of earth, and roots singing underground till they become
blossoms of harvest triumphant in the sunlight above. I must know the sorrow of
endless tears and the deeper sorrow that has forgotten how to weep.
I must come near the miracle of those who can give and go on
giving when it is a mystery where they get what it is they give and never fail
in the having to give. I must be silent often and break my silence only with
prayer. I must believe in many deeds beyond my doing in the hope that one or
two such unbelievable deeds may come from my hands.
This is a work in progress, writes Robert H. Kline of
Richmond, Va., claiming the Artist had impeccable credentials.
Kline actually submitted a mirror.
The mirror, old tabula rasa, stares blankly, unless one
looks it in the eye -- and sees the work still in progress.
Michael Farrell is editor of NCR.
National Catholic Reporter, May 12,
2000
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