Enculturation: Marguerite Helmers on Popular Icons

Popular Icons and Contemporary Memory: An Apology, Year 2001

Marguerite Helmers

continued . . .

Of course, the resurfacing of the photograph on Lollie McLain's website—identified as a devotional space—gives further, sacred meanings to the image. While the World Wide Web is not a ratified sacred space, it is used by members of the Church and members of the general public to present religious information. Thus, through the process of assembly and assigning messages to cyberspace, the computer becomes something of a contemporary shrine. Several female anthropologists have, in recent years, studied the construction and meaning of altar spaces and the reverential meaning assigned to everyday material objects in contemporary American culture. Foremost among them is Kay Turner, who fuses feminist theory with studies of ratified religious practices. She notes that altars and shrines constructed in the home from personal objects represent women's role in the family and community, "a sense of connectedness and communally shared symbols":

Whether it is the labor of sustaining family ties, promoting the tenets of faith, or providing and embellished, beautiful environment, in the home the work of art is "the work of kinship." (qtd. in McMann 48)

Turner is careful to locate her own reading of contemporary shrines in the historical importance of shrines and icons to the women of the early church. She notes that early Christian women could appeal to images outside of the church hierarchy, which was a male-dominated sphere. The internet of the present day has been called a great democratic space, and if this conception is dependent on economics, it is still true that the internet is counter-hegemonic. Today, "altars, like prayers, are mediators, collaborative forms crafted to reach across the abyss between known and unknown" (Cash 56). Thus, any material object, "a stone, a photograph, an old shoe-can become a shrine when it is displayed in a way that evokes inspiration, memory, respect, or reverence" (McMann 9). I have written elsewhere about the power of the word and image of Diana to bring women together in online communities. The image of Diana, translated into a memorial space online, takes on a dialogic function, expressing the desires of the web page designer and evoking a response in the viewer. This dialogy is the essential movement of response that is retained from the Orthodox icons of the Christian Church.

The Orthodox Church, which venerates icons of Christ, the Theotokos (Mother of God), and the saints and patriarchs promotes a specific view of icons which is based on theology and on the experience of the viewer. The Western Church, never comfortable with the idea of the worship of images, has sought to reduce the power of the image in church and society, and thus the rhetorical potential of the icon is lost to many of us. While the Orthodox Church may object to my secularization of the theology of the icon, and while I make no audacious claims to attempt to rescue the subject of Orthodox icons for a Western audience, I would like to reinfuse the study of popular cultural icons with the spirit that is manifest in the traditional icons of the East.

The two main points are that the icon is invested with a transcendental spirit and that the viewer does not stop the gaze at the icon, but extends the gaze through the image to an inner, inscrutable ousia (essence). Western modes of viewing representations separate self from object in a much more stringent manner than Eastern worship. The eye stops at the painting to take in elements of form, design, texture, and color. The frame (to be read as a noun) "frames" (to be read as a verb) our response, serving to identify that within the frame as an object. The response is aesthetic, founded on several centuries of practiced, promulgated art criticism that enjoins the viewer to be disinterested. [3] Art historian James Elkins points out that the history of art commences at the point that the sacred is removed from within the work: "[In the] humanist definition of art . . . the new presence of the work succeeds the former presence of the sacred in the work (n3. 3). For this reason, many Westerners approach the painted icons of the Russian and Greek Church from either an anthropological or art historical perspective, classifying them as instances of the Byzantine School, a step toward the representational painting exemplified by Giotto, Raphael, and Rembrandt. The achievement of the West has been to usurp creation, to take what was originally only a quality of God and give this to humans (to artists and thinkers). In the Western Tradition, creativity is the great domain and highly valued aspect of human life. The eastern church, on the other hand, vales "likeness" and "imitation" in images. The icon is a person, is Truth; the image in Western art is a representation. The Orthodox iconodule (he who creates the icon) would argue that the icon is representational, for the purpose is not to represent the outer flesh of the mortal man, but the inner spirit of the subject.

Figure 2, Raphael Madonna dell Granduca (1505), Pitti Palace, Florence

Figure 3, Simon Ushakov, Our Lady of Kykkos (1688)

Unlike the fleshy child and worldly mother painted by Raphael, the Eastern Orthodox icon offers a reality of the spirit (Ouspensky 184). Thus reverence for the image of Christ is ontologically the same as reverence for the embodied Jesus. The image of the human does not meet the nature of the Divine. The image is flat, secular. The icon, on the other hand, embodies two realities, the divine and the material. It is a reality because it is a manifestation of the reality of God meeting with the reality of human nature. Representations are merely copies, and they are always limited and mediated. St. Theodore established an analogy: If Christ is the image of the Father (John 14:7), then the image / icon of Christ is the same as the prototype.

The Orthodox Church arrived at this point after several Church councils and doctrinal disputes. The eighth century Council of Nicea proved the most heated in the debate over worship of icons, and resulted in the division of East from West and the establishment of the papacy in Rome. The incarnation of Jesus Christ unites the Holy Trinity with human nature. The flesh is material, and through the flesh (image) the spirit (invisible) is made material. Giving his body (material / image) to the disciples, Christ makes them both flesh and spirit. "God had a single essence (ousia) which remained incomprehensible to us-but three expressions (hypostases) which made him known" (Armstrong 115).

In certain early Christian circles, hypostasis was substituted by prosopon, which "could refer to the expression on a person's face which was an outward depiction of his state of mind; it was also used to denote a role that he had consciously adopted or a character that he intended to act" (Armstrong 116). Consequently, it "meant the exterior expression of somebody's inner nature" (Armstrong 116). The importance of this idea, as it relates to classical icons and contemporary icons is that "hypostases are only partial and incomplete glimpses of" the inner nature, whether that inner nature is the essence of the Divine or the true personality of the beloved. Furthermore, icons are outside time for the viewers, whereas paintings of religious subjects, such as those by Raphael, Leonardo, and Giotto, can be located in time by material aspects embedded in their text, such as clothing and setting. From an art historical perspective, it is important to date the icon as a painting, locating it in the progress of art, but in the study—or more precisely, the veneration—of icons, it is not at issue when the image was created. Nor is it viewed as outside time, but is always occupying a continuous present with the viewer. This timelessness is the Truth.

Writing from the perspective of post-war French theory, both Guy DeBord and Jean Baudrillard agree that, in modern societies, the image is more powerful than any reality. Citing Feurbach's Essence of Christianity at the beginning of The Society of the Spectacle, DeBord announces his thesis that images have become that which lies outside reality. The truth is everyday, the ordinary business of life:

But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence . . . illusion only is sacred, truth profane." (Feurbach, qtd. De Bord 11)

This point is foundational for studies of contemporary cultural icons, for the iconic persona becomes an icon once the truth of the biological body—the vagaries, foibles, and frailties—are forgotten. "Reality is irrelevant," comments Jill Chancey on the work of Baudrillard and DeBord (164). Diana is remembered less for her life as a princess and mother than for her iconic poses, those copies of the original that are readily identifiable as her "shy Di" postures: "head slightly turned down, tilted to right or left, eyes looking up from that tilted face, and a frequently closed-lipped, but always quite practiced, smile" (168). This standard posture (prosopon) that looks at the spectator from hundreds of photographs carries the essence of the Diana of memory (ousia). She is virginal, innocent, and honest.

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