Michael Jackson: Idol or Icon? 8 comments

By Caroline Langston

After four days of wall-to-wall Michael Jackson coverage, with no letup in sight, if there is one thing I’m thoroughly sick of hearing, it’s the obligatory reference to Jackson as a “pop icon.” If my unscientific survey is any indication, the term “icon” is now used far more often than “idol” to describe celebrity figures.

It’s probably a sore point with other Orthodox Christians, as well, for whom the term “icon” has a special and restricted meaning, and refers to the religious art works—depictions of Biblical figures, saints, and most of all, Jesus Christ and his mother Mary, whom we term the Theotokos or God-bearer—that line the walls of our churches. Expansive, often wildly colored, possessing their own vocabulary of design conventions that strictly guide the presentation of such elements as Christ’s eyes and the color of Mary’s robes, icons had their origins, in part, in the need to instruct the illiterate in the tenets of the faith.

But they are no mere illustrations: they are the “existential link between the worshipper and God,” to use Anthony Coniaris’ phrase from his “Orthodoxy 101” guide Introducing the Orthodox Church. In the Orthodox understanding, icons do not merely depict transcendent realities, but actually make them truly, physically present. They are “windows into Heaven,” to use a common, if overly saccharine phrase. They serve to remind us that the boundaries of space and time are porous.

What, then, by contrast, does the term “icon” mean in contemporary usage, and how does it relate, or not, to the ancient understanding? (Which, I might add, is not only a Christian understanding, as I discovered when visiting the Buddhist temples at Sarnath in India.)

The most basic, K-car definition of “icon” in the dictionary is “[a]n image; a representation,” or alternately, a symbol.

Back when I lived in Houston, there was a popular stationery store called “Iconography,” which sold high-end cards and paper, most of them decorated with architectural detailing, images of Virginia Woolf, ironic phrases, and so forth. Perhaps I’m reaching too far back into my superficial graduate school reading of Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” but the current understanding of “icon” seems to rest upon the very reproducibility and ubiquity of the image in question (and to what end those reproduced images are used), rather than the image or reality—or Image and Reality, as we Orthodox would put it—that lies behind it.

In Benjamin’s view—and I will confess to consulting Wikipedia here to refresh my memory, so correct me if I’m wrong—art in the age of mechanical reproduction had the capacity to become unmoored from its religious or ecstatic origins, and thus more purely function as an expression of politics. Think of Soviet constructivist posters, or, more positively, that famous “Hope” image of Barack Obama from the 2008 campaign.

Now how does all this relate to Michael Jackson? As we’ve heard incessantly over the past few days, the talent and achievements of Michael Jackson are evident, whatever one thinks of his music (and I have never been a fan, overmuch). With his musicianship and skill in dance, and the way that his talents touched masses of people (you should have seen the manic fan crowds of 1983), Jackson can be viewed, if not an icon, exactly, then at least as a kind of magical figure or shaman.

Furthermore, as a white Mississippian, I did find something amazing and miraculous in the way that songs from Thriller were equally likely to be played on 94.7 WTYX, the Jackson Top 40 station, as they were on the funk station, 99.7 WJMI.

Perhaps the problem of Michael Jackson began at that point when the real person of Michael Jackson, the one made in the image of God, became subsumed into the mass-produced consumer (consumption, you remember, is also political) reproduction, the Michael Jackson Industry. The one, incidentally, from whom the spark of inspiration, post-Thriller, seemed to have departed.

I look at Jackson’s bizarre attempts to change everything about himself—his race, his appearance—and I think of the ways that each of us tries to flee who we really are, and the ways we hide from the Divine Image, the icon, in ourselves. There is so much that is so bizarre about Jackson’s end, but it is challenging and sobering for me to remember this essential kinship. Memory eternal.