Holy Virgin Mary By Chris Ofili example essay topic

What a sensation was made about the Sensation exhibition in the Brooklyn Museum of Art. The focus of Mayor Giuliani's outcry was the piece "The Holy Virgin Mary" by Chris Ofili. Funny, he didn't give attention to some of the other outrageous works including the pubescent female mannequins studded with erect penises, vaginas, and anuses, fused together in various postures of sexual coupling, or the portrait of a child molester and murder made from what appears like child hand prints or bisected animals in plexiglass tanks full of formaldehyde. Would it ever have made headlines with a different title, like "Afro-lady"?

I don't think so. I guess targeting religion gets a little too personal. Giuliani said, "You don't have the right to government subsidy for desecrating somebody else's religion. If you are a government-subsidized enterprise, then you can't do things that desecrate the most personal and deeply held views of people in society". You would think that the government paid these artists, right? It turns out that the show consisted of Charles Saatchi's privately owned collection VIEWED in a public museum.

So what does that mean to you? Well, when I found out that tidbit of information, it didn't seem so offensive anymore. Taxpayers didn't pay these young British artists to create controversial pieces. Taxpayers fund the museum itself to stay open.

Museums have a variety of exhibitions all year. What is wrong with having one displaying a private collection? This is a common thing with museums. Otherwise, how would the public ever get to view extensive artistic compilations of the wealthy?

Some collections are beautiful, others perturbing. But, who draws this line? Who gets to decide? The individual. If you do not want to submit your eyes to horrendous, offensive creations, then don't!

It's interesting to note what happened to the art world after Duchamp revolutionized art into meaninglessness. Artists seem to be exempt from the moral laws that are binding to ordinary people. Everything is O.K. under art's magic umbrella: rotting corpses with snails crawling over them, kicking little girls in the head, rape and murder recreations, women defecating. Where does it stop? What is art and what is porn? What is art and what is disgusting?

Where is the line? There isn't one anymore. The effect of Duchamp's pranks was to point out that anything could be art. All it took was getting people to agree to call something art. Duchamp threw them a urinal and they critiqued its aesthetic value. Robert Mapplethorpe's notorious photographs of the sa do-masochistic homosexual underground also dramatizes this point.

Let us pray. I mean, let us explore "The Holy Virgin Mary" in greater detail. From an objective point of view, what does it consist of? It is a colorful canvas incorporating paper collage, colored pushpins, foil, paint, glitter and elephant manure. Geometric shapes suggest a face and torso while the canvas is enhanced with thousands of tiny colored dots formed from drops of paint and glitter, slightly reminiscent of pointillist impressionism. The beads of paint give a Byzantine mosaic effect.

Small cutouts of vaginas and buttocks from pornographic magazines, mostly too small to distinguish, swarm her like flies. The Virgin Mary is depicted as a broad featured black woman in a blue dress. The pachyderm is placed on the figure's right side. H, what does it all mean?

Let's take a look at the meaning and use of elephant dung. Dung is used in other art pieces; as a matter of fact there is an African mask in the Brooklyn museum made of wood, honey, metal, and dung. Chris Ofili has another piece called "Afrodizzia" with two balls of dung with the names Miles Davis and Cassius Clay written on them as a tribute. You could say that dung is Chris Ofili's signature piece in many of his works. In Africa, pachyderm is a vital source of fuel for some cultures. Dung suggests fertility.

It's also used like plaster in constructing homes where trees are scarce. It would not be unlikely for some villagers to place more value on elephant dung than gold. If you think about it, many African cultures had no use for gold until the Europeans came along. But in America, dung is a bad, nasty thing.

We even have proper scooters for our house pets' excretions on public property. No one should have to deal with that! No, no one wants to see poop! We use gold to gild halos on our saints.

Poop? How atrocious! You can't use feces in art! But, how many people know that artists used human urine as a fixative in pigments of religious works such as the Last Supper and the ceilings of the Vatican? How many know that Old Master painters used mummy brown, yep you guessed it, a pigment consisting of pulverized Egyptian mummies? No one complains about shadows in 18th century paintings of the Virgin being made out of dead people.

As for the porn pictures, they suggest putt i just as the Virgin Mary's symbology reflects fertility. So what's the big deal? Do you think people get too focused on the medium instead of the message? Does it matter what material the artist is using to get the message across?

What is acceptable? The norm would be oil, different types of earth, egg, rock and wood. Let's take a look at a little history in medieval art. There was a movement towards the end of the first millennium called Iconoclasm. This factor hated images and icons which were believed to be endowed with mysterious powers that could work miracles by intervention from the saints.

This Iconoclastic Controversy defined and declined the creation of art in the Byzantine Empire for over a century. It caused a split in the church since Iconoclasts wanted to destroy natural looking images, while others wanted to retain them. It forced a new movement in art in which the meaning was much more important than the accurate description of reality. Most of the two dimensional art of the Byzantine were mosaics.

Artists used egg tempera, combining gold to create brilliant backgrounds to highlight the forms. A lot of the medieval paintings were ugly with a strong spirit of devotion evoking religious sentiment. They were angular, flat, simple, used golds and browns, and the Virgin always wore a blue robe. Medieval painters were more interested in exploring the meaning of their subject than in painting naturalistic images. You could definitely say that description fits The Holy Virgin Mary by Chris Ofili perfectly. This is deliberately provocative and intends to jolt viewers into an expanded frame of reference, and perhaps even toward illumination.

In this sense, it relates to the medieval aesthetic of ugliness in which visual dissonance and distortion were used in art to urge the viewer to move beyond the superficial material plane to a higher level of spiritual contemplation. The Virgin is no stranger to controversy. Because we know so little about the historical woman Mary and nothing of her appearance, opponents of religious art in the early Christian church argued that any image of 'Mary' bore no relation to reality, but instead resembled a pagan idol. A writer at the court of Charlemagne attacked the adoration of imagery by pointing to the problem of accurately identifying a statue of a beautiful woman with a child on her lap. Was it the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus? Venus and Cupid?

Alcmene and Hercules? Should one venerate the statue as a sacred Christian image or destroy it as a hated idol? Another notable case is Caravaggio's Death of the Virgin, painted in 1605-1606, but rejected for its lack of demureness. It was rumored that the figure of Mary had been based on a whore who may have been the artist's lover. Did you know another name for the Virgin Mary is Our Lady of Africa and Our Lady of All Nations? One of the fascinating things about the representation of Mary is its variety and ability to express a range of religious and cultural meanings.

The Virgin initially appears as a humble, generic mother in the Roman catacombs as early as the mid-third century. Then she is transformed into an exalted queen of heaven following the 431 proclamation at the Council of Ephesus that she was the Mother of God. With the explosive growth of her cult in the 12th and 13th centuries, Mary became the focus of popular veneration as the beautiful and loving mother to humanity, our merciful intercessor to God. The evolving theology of Mary continues to spawn new subjects such as the Annunciation, Immaculate Conception, Ascension. Her image has spread throughout non-western cultures where she has been portrayed to indigenous artistic styles and traditions.

So what is wrong with different cultures having a different interpretation for her? Catholics treat the Blessed Virgin as an almost divine being in her own right, as if she had some glory, some power, some majesty of her own that placed her on a level with Christ himself. It forgets that Mary's chief glory is in her nothingness, in the fact of being the "handmaid of the Lord", as one who is becoming the Mother of God acted simply in loving submission to His comm an, in the pure obedience of faith. She is blessed in all her human and womanly limitations as one who has believe and allowed herself to be the perfect instrument of God. You could say that Ofili is playing with the ideas of blasphemy and worship, race and religion, toying in a gently ironic way with the space between public outrage and private expression to make his own spiritual statement. Francis Bacon's Catholic bashing pictures could be considered much more blasphemous.

Ofili wanted the pachyderm to be disturbing. He plays with white audience's assumptions about the black culture. One man's blasphemy is another man's religion. This could look like the cheerful mother goddess of an imaginary folk religion. Art is self-evaluation, it is humanistic self-expression. Christian art stresses an objective frame of reference: communication, use, and the ablest possible expression.

Modern art stresses self-expression. Between the two there is a vast difference. Christian self-realization has reference to the objective world of God's creation and His law-word. Humanistic self-expression has autonomy as its goal.

Christian self-realization is set within the framework of. Humanism in effect denies the need for communication. In no other civilization than in the Christian world has art gained a higher status and function. Without the presuppositions of the God of Scripture, there can be no art. It brings common self-realization under God. High realization of a common life and experience is the greatness of truly Christian art.

It is a media of communication, communion, and an enhanced common life. Does The Holy Virgin Mary make you feel this way? From the artist: The paintings themselves are very delicate abstractions and I wanted to bring their beauty and decorative ness together with the ugliness of dung so people can't ever really feel comfortable with it. It's what people really want from black artists. We " re the voodoo king, the voodoo queen, the witch doctor, the drug dealer. I'm giving them all of that.

I don't feel as thought I have to defend it. The people who are attacking this painting are attacking their own interpretation, not mine. You never know what's going to offend people. Dan the Offended: Three words: Demeaning, degrading, and offensive. If words such as these enter your mind for even a second, then it is clearly unacceptable to support these self proclaimed "artists".

I find this offensive to not just Catholics but human beings as a whole. Shock factor doesn't equate to talent. Common decency and respect is crucial to the peaceful coexistence of the human race. Don't they get it? Or do they even care? Ernie for Expression: Anything covered in excrement has a good chance of offending the majority especially when it deliberately desecrates something with is considered to be 'holy' to a large group of people.

The First Amendment does not limit freedom of expression to only tasteful expression. Free expression is great. So is free enterprise. I don't want think I should be forced to pay for this, the Mayor should pull funding. Fred for Free Expression: I don't see it as a challenge between art and tastelessness. It is expression, pure and simple.

Freedom of speech man, man... that's what it's all about. If you don't want to see it, don't go to the exhibit. People said the same thing about Mapplethorpe. People say the same thing about Marilyn Manson. Censorship sucks.

Chastity the Christian: I believe that the line cannot be drawn because one person's threshold for obscenity is always going to be different than another's. I'd like to add that I'm a Christian and the idea of elephant dung on the Virgin Mary is repulsive, but I live in a free society where I am free to go or not go to see this piece of crap. I personally find it offensive but I don't feel my views should legislate another person's 'expression'. God bless this guy who calls himself an artist..