#iconophobia

[exploremovies]

Iconophobia or Academiaphobia

The first class on visual anthropology, I was worried . Coming from Cultural Heritage Studies, experienced in documentary movie making I am started to doubt myself on my capacity to learn the new perspective on how you can produce and view movies. I am always afraid of academia, from one side it expands understanding of this world, from another it just limits it with the theoretical frames. And here we go first reading is Lycien Taylor text on “Iconophobia”, I was on another side “Academiaphobia”. Going through the text I started to understand that I am more protecting filmmakers here, even if it is ethnographic filmmakers. For example “Visuality itself becomes merely ancillary, illustrative rather than constitutive of anthropological knowledge.” My argument here is why the ethnographical movie perceived so superficial, and cannot compete with written text? It‘s the question of what filmmaker can miss in his or her work what anthropologists would observe?! Also, who are ethnographical filmmakers in a filmmaking scene are they academics or filmmakers? Why anthropologists afraid of visual evidence, as the documentary? Is it because when observed characters see the camera it turns to reenactment? It’s it like this only when they see a camera, or it is human nature that we change our attitude when someone observes us?! Or iconophobia evoked by fear that the director shows only what he or she wants to show? Why we are not considering that anthropological text can do the same? Even worse, reinterpret what he or she observed in his/ her way or capacity of knowledge in this field? There are too many questions why maybe because I am not an anthropologist and it’s hard for me to understand their iconophobic point. Or maybe they just afraid that someone who uses film as can reveal that they were wrong on some points? But with this sense, I also came up with more why questions. Why anthropology does not describe the feelings of people who observed, feelings towards being observed? Remembering myself now when I perfectly know than someone staring at me even if not directly to understand who I am. My attitude will change depending on who is this person and what I want this person to think about me. Is it the same with an anthropologist who spends years in his/she fieldwork to write a new masterpiece?! How objective can be this observation and framing of one who probably knows nothing about others, especially do not know how they feel about it. Yes, you can depict, grasp some way of living, tradition, social roles and ect. but how you can be sure that you get it right?! The example of "Them and Me", Stéphane Breton brings us to the other side of the anthropologist world, but we still do know how "They" really feel about it. Another point on the text: “Film, Hastrup goes on to say, consists of no more than concrete images of what-once-was, while text transcends the particular and conveys a more comprehensive truth, the truth of the "ethnographic present." It does not mean that the film does not provide us with the truth, maybe it is just limited by viewer knowledge, movie perception, and reinterpretation. It is limited with time and space, but it is can be true within its frames. It also can open the doors for the viewer to question what was not shown and described or how it was shown and described. So it gives more space for reflection. My last point will be on:” To me, the most striking quality of these examples is the extraordinary anxiety the academic authors evince toward images, especially film image. The fear that films will somehow destroy or discredit their anthropological makers and viewers.” For me this anxiety can come from two points: 1. Is it only about the truthfulness of the movie? How true is it in comparison with academic text? 2. Is it anxiety to reveal that Accademia also can be wrong and we do not need someone’s imposed knowledge on our way of living with theoretical restrictions and frames?!

First reading of the semester, too many questions without answers. Do anthropologists have the same questions, or its only me “outsider” pulling out my insecurities here?

[malliemcnamara-blog]

What is an iconoclasm and how does it happen?

Iconoclasm is the destruction of religious icons or monuments under religious or political motives. Some scholars, like Madeline H. Caviness, see a link between iconophobia and iconoclasm. Iconophobia, according to Caviness, is the fear of religious images and it interacts with iconoclasm as it creates a parallel between the powers granted to icons by their believers. The fears that fuel iconophobia and the consequent iconoclasms that have occurred as a result clearly demonstrate a cycle of violence. This violence often includes the barbaric raiding and destruction of both the places of worship of an icon-observant faith, and the icons in question. At the root of the relationship between iconophobia and the violence of an iconoclasm is the confusion of an image or icon for the person or entity that it represents, and the meaning and power that the icon possesses. In other words, iconophobes take great issue with worshiping icons because it implies that the icon itself is an embodiment of the holy person or entity and therefore carries a supernatural power.

[shitredditrocks]

Vorkreist - Iconophobia

"Iconophobia" by Vorkreist

posted in r/metal

[disgorgedintotalrecall-blog]

Sally Promey, “Pictorial Ambivalence and American Protestantism” (2001)

Art and religion don’t mix. Protestants don’t have pictures. These cultural tropes have organized scholarly work in Americanist art history and religious studies for much of these disciplines’ histories. Sally Promey, however, tells a markedly different story in her essay “Pictorial Ambivalence and American Protestantism.” The spectrum of visual experience and practice amongst Protestants, she argues, is far broader than these pervasive generalizations suggest. “At almost any point in American history,” she insists, “a range of Protestant pictorial expressions and stances toward art and visual culture can be found” (191-92). This is not to say that narratives of Protestant iconophobia are false—but it is to say that they are partial.

Promey’s essay is a plea for the historical particular. “Relationships between religion and pictures,” she counsels, “happen in specific and not in general… the most illuminating questions and answers on this subject will invariably be the most densely particular and thoughtfully historical” (194). Protestant practices are and have always been multiple and they are not easily generalized. Pilgrim origin myths notwithstanding, America religion has been comprised of many constituencies since the beginning. In early America, we are better off talking about Protestantisms than Protestantism; today, the need to look beyond any single historical frame or interpretative lens is even more apparent. (It is evident that Promey continues to pursue in this essay her interest in pluralism that she began to probe in her 1999 book Painting Religion in Public.)

Promey shows the range of the Protestant pictorial practices by discussing, at a brisk pace, several historical “snapshots.” She begins, naturally, with the Reformation. Martin Luther and Andreas von Karlstadt split famously on the image issue in 1521; being the hotter sort of reformer, Karlstadt sought to purge all pictures from churches while the moderate Luther acknowledged their function as pedagogical and devotional aids while opposing their idolatrous use. Reformers like Calvin, Zwingli, and the early puritan William Perkins rejected religious images in churches but tolerated them in domestic settings. In fact, seventeenth-century English puritans enjoyed a rich domestic religious visual culture, including portraits, emblem books, prints, pamphlets, and embroidery. Indeed, it is already apparent that the assumption that the continental and English reformers “categorized all pictures as alternatively dangerous or useless has been grossly overstated” (197).

Protestant pictorial practices thrived on the other side of the Atlantic in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Though the fine arts did not immediately develop in the early American wilderness, the visual and sensual universe of its inhabitants was robust. Puritans were not nearly as grimly austere as we assume them to be. Their most famous theologian, Jonathan Edwards, embraced the sensory experience of the natural world, in which he thought God revealed divine grace. Other puritans proved themselves to be capable limners (portrait painters), and intricate gravestone carvers of skeletons and skulls, soul effigies, and even portraits. Promey also points out that the seventeenth and eighteenth century colonial meetinghouses of various Protestant groups were not the stark white boxes commonly presumed. She cites archival evidence of exteriors and interiors painted in raucously polychromatic yellows, blues, greens, reds, oranges, grays, whites, browns, and pinks.

Religious visual culture saturated the nineteenth century. The religious art of the middle third of the century, of course, was essentially landscape art. Influenced by the Emerson and Ruskin, landscape painters such as the Episcopalian Thomas Cole and the Swedenborgian George Inness regarded nature as “God’s second book.” Cole meant for his paintings to evoke divine communion; Inness sought to reveal "spiritual correspondences” between this world and the next. Promey also discusses the very influential Congregationalist minister Horace Bushnell, associated with the Christian Nuture movement, who insisted that household visual culture has a moral effect on children. A household’s art and decoration, he insisted, must show elevated taste, beauty, and republican virtue. (This was no minor matter, for salvation of children could be at stake.) Shakers, too, were prolific image-makers in the mid-nineteenth century; they focused on visionary, even esoteric, themes and “the objects of spiritual sight ” (210).  (Promey’s first book, from 1993, is on the visual culture of Shakers, called Spiritual Spectacles: Vision and Image in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Shakerism.)

New relations between art and religion arose in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For a segment of cultural literati (influenced by eighteenth-century philosophy and nineteenth-century evolutionary theory), comprising the likes of Matthew Arnold, Isabella Stewart Gardner, and George Santayana, “art ‘became’ religion, with art’s visual forms constituting a kind of transcendent and even redemptive ‘soul language’” (211-12). In addition, some Protestant artists made free use of religious iconography, such as John Singer Sargent in his Triumph of Religion mural cycle at the Boston Public Library. Still other Protestant educators, such as those in the Protestant Religious Education Association, embraced mass reproduction of fine arts images in the picture study movement, intended as a “ministry of pictures” to educate the heart (214).

In the middle of the twentieth century, liberal Protestants of the National Council of Churches launched a class-conscious campaign to align liberal religion with high culture. They sought to distinguish themselves from the mass culture of evangelicals, defined in its most lowbrow form by Walter Sallman’s omnipresent Head of Christ. Leading the effort was the Presbyterian Alfred Barr, Jr., who not only served as the chief officer of the National Council of Church’s Art Commission, but was the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art. Images like Sallman’s, Barr insisted, must be squashed. They “corrupt the religious feeling of children and nourish the complacency and sentimentality of their elders” (219). Liberal Protestants found Abstract Expressionism to be much more amenable to their interests (though by the 1950s, they were coming a bit late to the party, as it were).

Promey’s whirlwind historical tour—from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries—very convincingly disabuses the hackneyed historical tropes of Protestant iconoclasm. Given Promey’s interest in multiplicity and inclusivity, however, I wondered why she tended to draw exclusively from imagistic examples that could be classified as fine art—or at least those things that might be shown in a museum or could be described as “serious.” The explosion of visual print culture in the nineteenth century, meticulously documented by David Morgan in his 1999 book Protestants and Pictures, is never discussed. She mentions twentieth-century mass materials only in the context of Alfred Barr’s crusade against them. Is this a concession to art historical clubbishness or respectability?

One very minor last point. I am still left puzzling, as I was after Painting Religion in Public, about Promey’s seeming enthusiastic embrace of “pluralism.” Promey is absolutely right that “from the beginning, American religion has been made up of many constituencies,” but presumably, some constituencies had more power and public representation than others. Is pluralism (like, say, “multiculturalism”) really all its cracked up to be? I’m a total neophyte to the debate on religious pluralism, but at this early point, I’d just like to flag her perspective on the issue. For now, I’ll leave the analysis to smarter people like Courtney Bender, who critiques the pluralist trope in a fascinating post on The Immanent Frame.