Slow Read: Week 12
Redeeming Vision
Redeeming Vision got to hang out with the scar of Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth this summer. Thanks to Sara Duke for this thoughtful photo!
When Rupture is an Invitation
We’re at the end, friends! I’ve been so encouraged by your response to this book and your embrace of this gentle crawl through Redeeming Vision. I was hoping that maybe 30 or so folks would sign up, and we far surpassed that. I even got to meet a few of you while I traveled this fall and it was such a delight. So thank you!
We’ve looked at a lot of things so far. We’ve studied a wooden sculpture of a Cuba ruler, a gestural painting of a woman knitting, a length of silk with a literal scrolling landscape, a precisely painted grid, a glimmering mosaic, an ancient marble sculpture, and an iconic black and white photograph. We’ve looked at portraits, landscapes, genre scenes, and narrative images. We’ve seen examples of non-objective art and paintings that focus on the minutest details of our observable world. And every time, we’ve sought to look with love, paying attention to the object, the artist’s body, and our own. We’ve considered different ways that looking can be generative, how we can “make” lament or curiosity or doxology or confession from the things that we see.
John Choate, “Tom Torlino—Navajo. As he entered the school in 1882. As he appeared three years later” in Souvenir of the Carlisle Indian School (Carlisle, PA: J. N. Choate, 1902).
Courtesy of Dickinson College Archives & Special Collections.
Most books on art and faith have terms like “beauty” or “transcendence” in the title or subtitle. And those were some initial suggestions when I was first working with my publisher’s marketing team. But I knew that I wanted to end the book with two decidedly un-beautiful objects: a complicated set of photographs and a crack in the ground. These works do not set out to provide a transcendent aesthetic experience. In fact, John Choate’s photographs of Hastiin To’Haali (Tom Torlino), a young Diné man, was intended to dehumanize, to turn a person into a project.
One response might be to say, “That’s bad art” or “That’s not art at all,” and leave it at that. But if we say, “This isn’t worth looking at,” then are we not still participating in Hastiin To’Haali’s erasure?
We need another way to look at something broken.
Anders Rasmussen, photograph of Doris Salcedo’s installation Shibboleth, 2007, Tate Modern Museum, London, England. Courtesy of CC BY-SA 2.0 https://www.flickr.com/photos/andersrasmussen/2288786124/sizes/l/
And so I keep coming back, again and again, to Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth. (Once, someone asked a mutual acquaintance, “Wait, is Elissa Weichbrodt the one who always talks about the crack in the ground?” And I receive that.) Viewers’ different responses to Shibboleth can serve as a model for our own practices of looking.
Do we ignore the crack…and get hurt in the process when we trip over it?
Do we fixate on the seeming impossibility of healing and end up in despair? Is it the “wound that can’t heal” as a Guardian columnist wrote?
Or do we get down on our hands and knees and investigate the rupture? Do we walk its length and inspect its depth? Do we give it our attention as a means of understanding with our whole selves?
Loz Pycock, photograph of people interacting with Shibboleth. Courtesy of CC BY-SA 2.0.
What does it mean to look this way, with redeeming vision, at Choate’s photographs?
You cannot simply look at the images of Torlino and know everything there is to know about his life, or the Carlisle Indian School, or the longer history of cultural and physical violence against Native communities in this country. But we can say, “I see the imago Dei in you, Hastiin To’Haali. John Choate that image bearing could only look one way, but I see your dignity in the before, not just the after.” And the friction between how we expect to engage “before and after” images and what we behold here can be an entry point to our own curiosity and care, our own research and yes, repair.
Shibboleth filled, photo by Christiana Fitzpatrick
Will you persist in this practice of redeeming vision? Will you look at artworks and visual culture not with a disinterested, objective eye but as an embodied creature full of love for God and your neighbor and willing to be transformed? When we do this, when we make with our viewing, we live into our calling as Christ followers, offering faint echoes of the coming restoration.
May we see Jesus making all things new (Isa. 43:19).
Thank you for reading slowly with me. I hope that it really is just the beginning of looking at art and images—even the ones we don’t like—in generative and redeeming ways.
If you’d like to support my work, there are a few ways you can do so. First, if you found the book helpful, would you consider leaving a review on Amazon and/or Goodreads? Even a short review is welcome! Reviews help other people find the book. And second, you can follow me on Instagram (@elissabrodt) and share posts that you find to be meaningful.
I hope you’ll stick around at The Loving Look and keep looking with curiosity and care.
