When I was five years old I had the privilege of living in India for a year. My father received a Fulbright Scholarship to further his understanding of religious practice in India. During this year our family traveled to various religious sites throughout the country. While my father was hard at work taking pictures, interviewing religious thinkers, spiritual leaders and practitioners, my siblings and I were exploring the buildings and having cultural encounters of our own. The year had a profound impact on my view of the world. At a very young age I realized that there were people in the world that did not look like me or behave like me. I found this experience exhilarating.
I enjoyed being immersed in something so mysterious and different.
Sadly, most of us spend our time collecting information and experiences that reinforce our limited understanding of the world. Where has our curiosity and wonder about the “other” gone? Many disregard the “other” and often are dismissive, cruel and distrustful of those who look different, hold different views or engage in different practices. We have become a Facebook society that rushes to “like” or “unlike” before engaging in an earnest attempt to understand one another. Great art offers an occasion to see the world in a different way — to momentarily peek into someone else’s mind and experience the world from an alternate, perhaps unexpected, point of view.
Sister Wendy Beckett, a British hermit, consecrated virgin and art historian, became well known through a series of documentaries produced by the BBC in the late 1990s. She was filmed walking around museums and commenting on masterworks. During one episode she was asked to comment on the
American photographer Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ. Serrano’s took a series of photographs of a crucifix submerged in a jar of urine. As you can imagine, this work created quite a controversy, and to have a nun comment on this piece made for good television.
Her response to the work was surprising and incredibly insightful. She dismissed the work, not because it offended her deeply held beliefs, but because it was “comfortable art” — art that did not challenge the observer. She explained that people essentially have one of two reactions to the work. The first is that the photograph is sacrilegious and offensive. The second is that the work is a legitimate statement of anger, perhaps protest, against the Catholic Church or Christian faith. Regardless, one leaves the piece confident in their position, comforted and reinsured in their convictions. They leave the work never having been challenged or even tempted to reconsider their point of view. Grabbing a headline does not make great art, and fortunately, there is much more to life than our personal “comfort.”