mary-masked

Catholicism is so Extra

Published: August 8th 2018, 4:00:02 pm

I think Extra is one word that really applies to all my art. Whatever I'm doing, it's generally intense, dramatic, over the top. Understated is really only an adjective that you'd apply to my acting. If I'm doing something goofy, I want it to be really goofy. If I'm doing something creepy, I WANT IT TO HAUNT YOUR NIGHTMARES. In college, my design teacher begged me to design something normal, something *doable*, something humans might actually wear. She pushed me to express character *without* putting everyone in plastic or panniers.

Yes, a lot of that was because I spent a lot of time watching experimental theatre and Terry Gilliam movies but I think a fair amount of that also happened because I spent an hour every Sunday of my first 17 years of life staring at varying depictions of a naked man being tortured.

Catholicism is EXTRA. It is all about pageantry. That's the major difference between Catholicism and Protestantism. Catholicism was about art and opulence and symbolism layered on top of, and stolen from, ancient pagan traditions. It was old and morbid and mysterious. It was people in dazzling clothing, standing with their backs to you, reading from a book you couldn't see, speaking a language you didn't know, in a building that took centuries to build, and all protestants wanted to do was to chill out, stop spending all this money, and just talk about Jesus with people. I respect that sentiment, but I think it gets boring real fast.

So a fashion exhibit devoted entirely to "The Catholic Imagination" was EXACTLY the thing I wanted to see. It did not disappoint.

Like The Met's other fashion exhibits on controversial subject matter, they completely ignored the controversy related to it. While I find that morally lazy, I was ok with it because I had that conversation on my own.

"What was controversial about it?" I can hear my  mother asking. And there's a couple answers. The first is there are a lot of reasons not to like the catholic church (I'm on board with most of them) and isn't it bad to glorify something that problematic? I don't have a great answer for that except to say that the Catholic Church has done a LOT of terrible things but it has also inspired a LOT of great art and I don't think that displaying the latter necessarily means endorses the former. That can (and should) be a much larger conversation, but it's not one I have the energy to write about.

The other controversy came up when I was looking at the garments and jewelry from the Vatican. The church forbade photography in that part of the exhibit (that need for mystery again) so I don't have photos but believe me when I say WOW. Diamonds on top of rubies, embroidery so fine it looked like a painting and took a dozen women 30 years to complete, more gold and silk than you could shake a censer at.

And, for me, it brought up the controversy so old, it goes back to Martin Luther; Isn't it hypocritical for the church of Jesus (a barefoot commie hippy who often bagged on rich people) to spend ALL THIS MONEY on itself? And the answer is definitely yes. But for me the answer is "Yes but....art?"

The decadence of the church is what gave us most of the beautiful art in Europe. It has a reverence for the beautiful, the mystical, the ineffable, all things that I think feed the human soul in some way that we can't name. I'm pretty agnostic, I don't know if God exists and I don't really care. But seeing the skill, the devotion, the sheer amount of *work* evident in a cathedral, a reliquary, a gold embroidered vestment, is what feels holy to me. It makes me feel connected to humanity, to the world around us, to something greater than myself or my life. And I don't think I would feel that overwhelming awe if the art I was looking at wasn't TOO DAMN MUCH.

I talked about this with my mom and she told me about her friend who watched a ceremony in Spain where they dress up the statues and parade them through the city.
(one such statue costume is pictured below)

My mom's friend asked a local woman "Wouldn't it be better to sell all that gold and silk and redistribute that money among the poor?"
The woman shook her head and replied "The communists said they would do that. They never did. But THAT," she pointed to the statue "I OWN that. That belongs to all of us and we can see it any time we want."

And that's a side of it that I hadn't quite considered. Especially in Medieval times when museums and art galleries and collections of beautiful things weren't accessible to regular people, cathedrals were a place to see something rich and beautiful whenever you needed to. And that cathedral, and the art inside it, was *yours* in a very real sense. Odds were good that people in several generations of your family had *built* part of that cathedral. They had carved the stone, or laid the glass or made the lace. In a world where resources were so scarce, that art, that craftsmanship, was your legacy and your inheritance. And, no, that didn't put food in your belly, but it did give you one more reason to live.

That's not the church's place in society anymore, and I'm glad that the current pope is rejecting decadence. But in the world on the whole, I think there must be room for both equality and excess. The puritan harshness ingrained into American culture is both destructive and pervasive. The idea that art is unimportant and frivolous, that people only deserve to live if they work a certain amount at a certain type of job, that people on government assistance shouldn't be able to buy certain kinds of food with it, the idea that no one should have decadence when there are people that are poor, I see those all coming from the same place. 

But I think humans need beauty and frivolity and fun. The same way we need sunlight. Yeah, we can live without it, but our mental and physical health *will* suffer without it. Our resources are abundant (for now at least) they're just distributed terribly.