Cover
story
Artist
searches world for new mega-symbols
By PAMELA SCHAEFFER
NCR Staff Sonoma, Calif.
Gregor T. Goethals, artist, author,
educator and now art director and graphic designer for the American Bible
Societys new media project, has spent the better part of her life
zigging and zagging, as she puts it, between philosophy, theology
and art.
A Yale- and Harvard-educated professor and dean of graduate
studies at the Rhode Island School of Design for 29 years, Goethals has long
been interested in the role of the artist in a technological society and the
way images function in a technological, consumer-oriented age. Among her
accomplishments is a book called The TV Ritual: Worship at the Video
Altar (Beacon Press, 1981).
Goethals interest in theology and art evolved from her
intellectual awakening in college, at Louisiana State University -- where, at
first, she went to party, she said, and then encountered the renowned political
philosopher Eric Voegelin. Her interest also evolved as a kind of
resistance against highly sentimental, often trite art that is considered by
some people to be religious symbolism.
Im essentially a populist, she said. But I
would like to see more options in religious art than currently exist.
So when the American Bible Society began looking around for art
consultants for its forays into new media, Goethals was a likely choice.
Reared in Monroe, La., as a Baptist, she gravitated to the
Episcopal church and then to Catholicism as an adult. Her artistic
sensibilities gave her a strong preference for a symbol-rich
material Christianity over symbol-deprived Protestant churches.
I was drawn to Catholicism by my love of stuff, she said, although
she equally values a lesson from her early training in Bible-belt
Christianity: its sense that the world is not ours.
Pushing boundaries
At first as Goethals worked for the Bible society she fulfilled
the need for an art historian -- someone to research how artists had treated
various biblical subjects in the past. Equally at home in theology -- Goethals
holds a bachelor of divinity from Yale, along with a masters in art, and
a Ph.D. in philosophy of religion from Harvard, working along the way with such
giants in American religion as H. Richard Niebuhr and Robert Bellah -- she
discovered fascinating links between the evolution of theology and the
popularity of particular images. For example, while working on A Father
and Two Sons, she discovered that the parable -- all parables -- were
popular subjects for artists in regions imbued with the Protestant spirit. A
fundamental doctrine of the Reformation was, after all, primacy of the word of
God.
Whats so interesting is today to study art history you
have to know philosophy and theology, she said. When I was in
school, there was academic imperialism. You were expected to have a narrow
focus -- a dictum she ignored.
Since 1992, when Goethals work with the Bible society in new
media began, her role has shifted from research to production. Her personal
life underwent some major shifts as well. After retiring from academia in 1995,
she moved cross-country to a hillside home in Californias Sonoma Valley,
overlooking a neighbors vineyard. Four of her five weekdays are largely
consumed with Bible society work, she said. Her role -- drawing on her range of
creative and analytical skills -- is to use mind, camera and brush (and the
skills of techies on the team) to develop symbols and images -- so-called
mega-symbols, she said -- that unify the videos, the Web pages and the
CD-ROMs.
Along with other members of the new media translation team,
Goethals is pushing the boundaries of religious symbolism.
For The Visit, the story of Marys visit to
Elizabeth, a unifying symbol became the nautilus, the chambered, spiral shell
that Goethals sees as a symbol of life and growth, an expression of
the mathematical spiral found in all living forms.
For A Father and Two Sons, Goethals said she looked
for some set of symbols that would hold the separate parts together
and settled on the notion of place -- the places where people gathered in the
ancient world and where they gather today. I thought about the places
where stories were told. In the ancient world, it was the marketplace.
For todays teenagers, it is often the malls. She brought together
photographs shed taken of sites in the ancient world -- places in Israel,
Greece and Rome -- and photographs shed taken of contemporary malls in a
variety of U.S. cities. If you look at the CD-ROM, youll see
compilations of various sites, which serve as a metaphor to hold
all of the pieces together, she said.
Matter counts
For an upcoming production of John 20, the story of the
Resurrection, the team of scholar-consultants decided some of the key
metaphysical themes could be expressed visually through lightness and
darkness, spaces and voids, openings and closings and garden. On a trip
to Barcelona, Spain, for a conference last fall she stayed an extra week,
taking 400 photographs of the work of Spanish Christian architect Antoni Gaudi.
(For more on Gaudi, whose beatification cause is being advanced by members of
the Spanish hierarchy, see www.gaudi.tm/).
Goethals is gratified to find that scholars today are realizing
that theology and philosophy permeate everything. A book like Colleen
McDannells Material Christianity [Yale, 1996] would have been
totally impossible a generation ago, she said. It was an aberration
then for artists to read in theology.
Losses in Goethals personal life a couple of
years ago -- the death of a beloved dog, her companion on her cross-country
journey and a fall that left her with a broken hip (now healed), have served to
intensify her appreciation of stuff -- of matter, she said. In
contrast to the traditional sense that materiality becomes less important as
spirituality grows, Goethals said her recent goal has been to immerse herself
in matter more deeply.
This new stage is transforming her art.
When Goethals isnt working on Bible society projects, she is
working on paintings intended to show the radiance of matter, its
penetration by Spirit. Matter is all we have as a vehicle for
Spirit, she said.
National Catholic Reporter, May 14,
1999
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