THE COVENANT: An Agreement between the Church Artist and the Faithful
by Anthony Visco
When people ask me what kind of sculpture I make I tell them I make statues that old ladies kiss. I say this for two reasons: one, because old ladies do kiss my statues and two, because it spares me form any “figure vs. non figure”, contempary vs traditional art argument. I never say I’m “figurative”. I never say I’m “classical and I’m not academic or radical “Trad Cat”.
by Anthony Visco
When people ask me what kind of sculpture I make I tell them I make statues that old ladies kiss. I say this for two reasons: one, because old ladies do kiss my statues and two, because it spares me form any “figure vs. non figure”, contempary vs traditional art argument. I never say I’m “figurative”. I never say I’m “classical and I’m not academic or radical “Trad Cat”.
I could say that one of the most important decisions I ever made in my career was to stop making art about art, art for other artists, or art for galleries or art to be collected by museums. I realized that the work most important to me were those commissioned to reflect the beliefs of the viewer; in other words, sacred or devotional art. If the objective of representational art is to exalt and console, then I was attracted to paintings and statues that held an agreement of sorts, a covenant as it were, between artist and viewer and their beliefs. It always appeared the best or strongest of these works were those that maintained this covenant as if it existed before the works were ever made. I came to believe that when the goals of the work do not meet the beliefs of the viewers, the covenant is nullified. I thus decided that I wanted my work to come under this “the covenant”.
As those us educated in art schools of the Sixties we all witnessed the wholesale destruction of beauty, of all representational art both secular and sacred, in painting and sculpture and architecture. As a result, the reciprocity between our origins and our beliefs seemed all but absent as if a covenant that once was, had been broken or as some would suggest a covenant that perhaps never existed. This destruction of beauty, conscious or unconscious, then and now, presents certain and profound questions not only of aesthetics but also of our beliefs if we are to continue making sculpture into the 21st C. Some of these questions can be asked and hopefully answered here in this forum.
1. First of all, can and did sacred art produce a covenant?
2. Does this covenant exist before the art is ever made? If so, how does it exist?
3. What does covenant mean here and how does it differ from the modernist “give and take” between artist, art object and viewer?
4. Can there be a covenant without a value?
5. Did “figurative art” indeed break the covenant and if so how so?
6. How do we restore the covenant?
As for restoring the covenant, we must first all congratulate ourselves for having survived modernism. It is by no strange chance that we find ourselves here in this place dedicated to the art of the nineteenth century, perhaps the last group of artists who saw the marriage of art and craft, content and context as being at the heart of their vocation. But if we as representational artists of devotional or sacred art are to serve the faithful in the 21st C we must begin our conversation as we cross the desert of modernity.
Now as this season of Lent is upon us and our Passover approaches, I invite you to join me in this conversation. Together we are leaving the dry desert we must congratulate ouselves for having survived modernism in the hope that in our travels across the barren waste we may have find some answers to these questions.
