Theorizing Scriptures: New Critical Orientations to a Cultural Phenomenon

16 Texture, Text, and Testament: Reading Sacred Symbols/Signifying Imagery in American Visual Culture

167 16 Texture, Text, and Testament Reading Sacred Symbols/Signifying Imagery in American Visual Culture Leslie King-Hammond Deeply embedded in the mythography of American civil religion . . . special revered or “hallowed” sites have long been fundamental elements of a powerfully sustaining worldview in American self-understanding. —Rowland A. Sherrill, “American Sacred Space and the Contest of History”1 It is quite commonly thought that the intellect is responsible for everything that is made and done. It is commonly thought that everything that is can be put into words. But there is a wide range of emotional response that we make that cannot be put into words. We are so used to making these emotional responses that we are not consciously aware of them until they are represented in artwork. —Agnes Martin, “Beauty Is the Mystery of Life”2 And when waste and age and shock and strife shall have sapped these walls of life Then take this dust that’s earthy worn and mold it into heavenly form. —Rosa Lytle, Prayer3 Leslie King-Hammond 168 Reading sacred symbols and signifying imagery in American visual culture is still one of the most under-explored aspects of visual expression in modern and postmodern art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Global history has provided the artist with a wealth of examples in the expression and creation of objects, artifacts, and monuments inspired by personal motivation and religious belief systems. Modernity has posed challenges to the artist’s need to connect with a spiritual core fundamental to living a meaningful life in a world of global conflicts and civil wars. Encoded meanings have mandated that the elements represented in contemporary artwork sometimes, as painter Agnes Martin has observed, “cannot be put into words.” Yet works of art express or signify ideas and attitudes regarding the nature of the sacred or spiritual world of the invisible and the unspoken. This essay is a journey into that aspect of American visual culture. Using the metaphors of textures, texts, and testaments, this proposed rereading of sacred, signifying symbols and imagery attempts to expand the possibilities of artistic application, interpretation, and meaning. A select group of artists and artworks will expose us to visual strategies regarding belief, signifying objects, and sacred space. The observations and selected artworks used to illustrate the questions and issues presented in this essay were drawn from ongoing research projects in the investigation of the role of sacred texts and the impact of spirituality in the aesthetic life of contemporary art and visual culture of America. The works of Willie Birch, Allyson Smith, Elizabeth Talford Scott, Aminah Lynn Robinson, Joan Gaither, and Douglas Smith reflect a varied range of aesthetic orientation, spiritual worldviews, and political sensibilities. These artists provide the scholarly community and the public audience with artistic creations that challenge the visualizing potential of signifying upon the world’s dominant religions. In this essay, the artistic metaphors of texture, text, and testament stem from the impact that sacred texts (i.e., the Talmud, the Qur’an, the I Ching, and most especially the Bible) have had on the inspiration and historical production of artworks . The impact of the Bible in the West, and more specifically within the visual culture of America, has forced a too-narrow perspective on the intent and subtexts of the artist-artmaker. New directions and revision are crucial to new meanings or readings. How has the artist used the Bible or other sacred texts as a catalyst to interpret and express their individual creativity, spirituality, and personhood? Biblical scholar Vincent Wimbush challenges prevailing assumptions regarding the impact of such texts: “Insofar as the Bible is recognized as rather important in helping to accord legitimacy to the public religion in the United States, and insofar as the Bible continues to this day to be engaged by elites and nonelites alike, through the prism of American myth, the very meaning and agenda of and approaches to biblical interpretation for our times must change dramatically.”4 It is within this spectrum of change that the mechanisms of artistic textures, symbolic sacred texts, and signifying testaments are important strategies to facilitate the understanding and meaning of this very humanistic and aesthetic phenomenon of scripturally signifying artworks. Texture, Text, and Testament 169 The twentieth century and the first phase of the twenty-first century have witnessed modernist artmaking processes and production in rapid states of evolution and change. Intellectual, conceptual...