The Weirdness of Modern Faith; Or, Quantum Christianity in the Images of Melissa Weinman

Randall Kenan

WESTERN civilization, it seems to me, stands by two great heritages. One is the scientific spirit of adventure—the adventure into the unknown, an unknown which must be recognized as being unknown in order to be explored; the demand that the unanswerable mysteries of the universe remain unanswered; the attitude that all is uncertain; ...the humility of the intellect. The other great heritage is Christian ethics—the basis of action in love, the brotherhood of all men, the value of the individual—the humility of the spirit. These two heritages are logically, thoroughly consistent. But logic is not all; one needs one’s heart to follow an idea.
—Richard P. Feynman, “The Relation of Science and Religion”

ONCE, after seeing the paintings of Melissa Weinman, I said to her, “For some odd reason, your paintings remind me of the work of Melanie Klein.” The artist gave me a completely justified blank look, as I attempted to explain, in an admittedly confusing fashion, how the pioneer of child analysis construed an infant’s relationship to its mother; how she theorized that we first feel, being the little eating-machines that we are, hungry for love (milk); we then become self-aware, a horrifying, existential moment; and we then come to despise our own dependence and powerlessness, even transferring that self-hatred to the source of our joy, loathing our parent. In my mind, I was making some clumsy and grand leap from child psychology to fine art to man’s relationship with the Divine—agony to ecstasy; apostasy to sainthood. Perhaps my desire to make some connection to Kleinian thought had to do with the way Weinman composes her saints, and her fixation on the icons of Christianity, diffused through the prism of postmodernity. Perhaps it had to do with the quality of her figures’ limbs and flesh, hyper-real, hypersensitive, hyper-bruised. To be sure, that day I felt I made no sense, but Weinman’s paintings continue to make a humming sense to me.

Despite my failed attempt to tease Kleinian meanings from Weinman’s work, I retain an equal fascination with how she folds time in her compositions. In so many of her paintings, the initial response is that of the rote reaction to religious iconography: this is a saint experiencing her travail; this is a well-known figure at the moment of his metamorphosis. Yet within the span of a glance, our eye detects the flotsam or the jetsam of modern life, and the mind is set afloat. What time is it?

Weinman’s paintings provoke us on more than an aesthetic level. Like the Old Master, El Greco, she willfully engages the volatile figures of religion in a fashion that begs question and thought and feeling—though not always in that order. Hers is an oeuvre firmly rooted in the visual history of the Western tradition, yet wide-eyed in its engagement of her present day, and in so doing she accomplishes unusual tableaux that excite theological debate, regardless of the interpretation. Today some high-minded folk distrust representational art. They find themselves locked in the fifties’ fascination with expressionism or the seventies’ puppy love with minimalism. With Nietzschean certainty, they declare: representational art is dead, belonging to the Ages but not the Now.

Bravely Weinman’s work stands its ground, its feet firmly rooted in classical themes and subjects, its head openly defying notions of linear time. “The arrow of time,” says Umberto Eco, “is indeed an invention of Christianity.”

It is as if Weinman is challenging her viewer to re-think linear faith as our society now re-thinks linear time. These icons are just like us; they are us; their blood is wet; their feet hurt; their hearts break. Let your mind reach over time, she seems to goad us, and see them as they were, as they are, not as relics, but as human beings suffering the same woes as us.

We live in a weird time, and we need a weird art to help us penetrate a weird faith.

Take for instance the ebullient Saint Rita’s Sweet Dream [see Plate 1]. Saint Rita, known as the patron saint of impossible cases, asked in prayer, “Please let me suffer like you, Divine Savior.” Forthwith she was delivered one of the thorns from Christ’s crown during the crucifixion. The awful wound in her forehead never healed until her dying day. In Weinman’s painting, the jolly old gal sits in a rocker of the Ethan Allen type, rocking away, her hands raised as if in a samba, her eyes closed as if contemplating a sweet love. While around her a disembodied face and two disembodied hands—one holding a stick, one a belt—assail her, the bleeding wound shoots a pin-thin beam toward heaven. On the floor of this enigmatic scene, roses are strewn on a Persian carpet. This painting is at once historical and hysterical, calling up traditional images of the beatified while it subtly makes Rita a fleshly woman, despite her habit, capable of actual joy; not a dusty, humorless, calcified stick-figure demanding reverence.

But that is only one of Weinman’s trickster moves. Consider Saint Agatha’s Grief [see front cover]. At first one sees two women, modern women, wearing modern tank tops, standing back to back against a black background. The woman facing left is whole and at peace; the woman facing right is missing her breasts, blood spatters her white garment, and her visage is open-mouthed, closed-eyed, trancelike. Saint Agatha, beset by the man who would have had her, was sent to a brothel and then to a prison to break her will and faith. During her multiple tortures her breasts were cut off. (“Lord, my Creator, you have always protected me from the cradle; you have taken me from the love of the world and given me patience to suffer.”) The first thing one takes away from Weinman’s representation is the absolute lack of sentimentalism so often bound up with female persecution—her emphasis on before and after, the grimness, the actual blood, captures an immediate sense of violation. It resonates uncomfortably with modern associations of breast cancer and women surviving new, modern-day hells.

Though hardly straightforward in its effect, Saint Agatha’s Grief is much more direct than Saint Lucy: Patron Saint of Vision. This mystifying triptych is comprised of a) four carrots dangling from a rope, b) an eye chart along with a magnifying glass, and c) in the tallest, center panel, a young woman in white robes, her head tilted heavenward, holding a silver platter bearing two eyeballs. The painting, overt in its religious meaning, hollers with artificiality, with its overt symbolic nature: Decipher me. One wonders if a viewer who didn’t know of Saint Lucy—the patron saint of blindness, who was said to have had her eyes put out by the Emperor Diocletian—might still make historical sense of the perplexing symbol. The carrots (for good sight?) might even be seen as a macabre jest. Moreover, the bold inclusion—again—of a twentieth century artifact, the eye chart, taunting, almost wicked, takes us back to Weinman’s puckish play on time. Modern irony? Postmodern lexicon?

Equally discomforting is the image of Saint Sebastian [see Plate 2]. Often a source of homoerotic S&M fantasies (see Yukio Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask, or Derek Jarman’s incoherent 1975 film, Sebastian), Sebastian of Narbonne is portrayed almost without fail as a fine specimen of manhood, bound and pierced by the arrows of his fellow praetorian guardsmen, later to be miraculously healed of his wounds, only to be beaten to death after professing Christ. Weinman follows tradition. Her Saint Sebastian is a hunk in the throes of agony/ecstasy, yet he wears cut-off camouflage pants and boots that would make him right at home either in a discotheque or among soldiers between maneuvers. Once again she has dared us to re-envision an ancient Roman figure as one of us, as someone we might run into on a bus, or with whom we might have gone to school.

And in one of her most in-your-face, or even downright humorous paintings, Saint Clare—the founder of the Order of Poor Clares, a contemporary of Saint Francis, and the patron of sore eyes—is depicted as a young woman in a brown, Ann Claiborne-type frock, standing barefoot next to a lily [see Plate 3]. Behind her are two television screens: one shows a line of men about to execute another line of men, the other, a monkey-like creature behind bars. In her hand rests a miniature television, a burning candle on its screen. The painting is called Saint Clare: Patron Saint of Television. What is this Melissa Weinman woman up to? Introducing cathode ray tubes into the canonical retinue? Unmistakably modern, some might say postmodern, this confluence of images begs for examination, reexamination, interpretation and re-interpretation. The very stare of the woman’s eyes raises questions not so easily answered, questions about the nature of sight, questions about the seemingly simple juxtaposition of war and peace, complicated by the presence of the primate. And PETA will never be the same....

Study for Christ: Arms stretched, sinewy though not overbuilt. He wears a trimmed beard and closely cropped hair. Dark shaded eyes. Prominent nose. Powerful brow. Intense. Not a genteel fellow, by the look of him. He could be a biker or a welder or an auto mechanic, though we know he is a carpenter. Yet this Jesus could have been at a bar a few minutes before, or a truck stop, or a WTO protest rally.

Relentlessly modern. Relentlessly of our time.

Weinman’s Christ is not instantly a study in beatification, nor of Holiness, nor of conspicuous suffering. Not only is He in the world, but He looks of the world—one of the attributes of the Son of Man. Weinman does not dilly-dally with the ruggedness of Christ, she does not prettify him, or make him politically correct—to be sure, under the right circumstances you might cross the street to avoid encountering this fellow. Of her painting she once said, “[T]his Christ is strong and alive. I understand he was a man who meant business. I need Christ to be tough for me in this uncertain world.”

An uncertain world indeed. Made at the end of the twentieth century—a time fraught with fear of the possible Apocalypse, the End of Time; a time when the world’s largest superpower seemed to be losing its grip on its ability to police the world; when financial markets were going haywire; when the rich were becoming super rich and the poor super poor; when talk of clones and genetic engineering and international space stations and fire from the sky and babies born in test tubes was no longer the stuff of mere science fiction; when the weather itself seemed like one big El Niño about to wreck our concept of climate; when AIDS was poised to destroy the entire population of a continent—Weinman’s paintings are rife with a sense of uncertainty, of an impending doom. A terror is just down the corridor; a grimness pervades all; joy is hard-won; peace is rare.

Nowhere in Weinman’s work is this sense of crouching horror more evident than in her ominous triptych Tenebrae [see Plate 4]. It could be called Nuns on the Run. A threatening, dark sky. Clouds as thick as lamb’s wool. An English moor terrain, barren, dangerous. A large body of water—a lake?—laps menacingly at an unpleasant shore. The scene is punctuated by two telltale modern signs: orange traffic pylons and a wooden detour board. The sisters themselves, be they medieval or modern, wear looks of heart attack-approaching panic. Could the end of the world be more terrifying? How fit a mood for the service of Tenebrae, the time of shadows, as the lights of the followers of Jesus are extinguished, one by one, followed by the removal of the largest candle representing the Savior, then by a thunderous noise: the closing of the Tomb. A time of uncertainty indeed.

Equally disturbing, but outside the Saint cycle, is a painting of Daphne and Apollo. Just as with her other representations of iconic figures, Weinman modernizes them; she gives us an Apollo who could be running a decathlon, in skimpy shorts, and a Daphne in sportswoman’s gear; his lunge for her is at once athletic and sinister; her countenance evokes tremendous pity as her leg transforms into a tree trunk and her arm a tree limb, and the woods all gloomy and dark. We must still beware the love of the “gods”....

The Passion of Jesus. The Passion of the Saints. The Passion of our anxiety over the end of the world. We, helpless mortals, are ruled by passion, with its potential for self-destruction and external damnation; we are tethered between the good and the bad, in the fundamental tension at the center of the Judeo-Christian cosmology of ethics. Yet lurking throughout Weinman’s work is always the hint of joy: on the face of Saint Rita, in the peace of Saint Agatha, even in the ecstasy of Saint Sebastian. What is that defiance on the face of Jesus?

Of love, writer James Baldwin once said, it is “something active, something more like a fire, like the wind, something which can change you. I mean energy. I mean a passionate belief....” In the midst of those aforementioned traditional ethics is the concept of love, “Big Bad Love,” as novelist Larry Brown once called it. Weinman’s work is nothing like a saccharine Hallmark card—it is too intellectually challenging, too religiously aware, too philosophically profound—but somewhere in the harshness and unflinching glare is a deep conviction of transcendence. The very notions of saints and sainthood and beatification and overcoming travail imply it.

Another representation of passion is fire. In a recent series of paintings Weinman again evokes a quantum twist on an old idea. Rosefire (Gold) and Rosefire Altarpieces #1-4 are undulating still lives of roses, yellow and white and pink, rich with color. Their green stem-leaves seem to move, though somber, and now are set afire like the apostles at the Pentecost: this is the visitation of the Holy Spirit. Culturally unmistakable as a symbol of love, these holy roses in their thorny majesty give us pause; almost mundane in their traditional meaning, they are reinvented here, and the banal becomes a new puzzlement. As the series progresses, Weinman introduces geometric twists and distortions, divisions, bizarre alignments, all of which cause us to consider the pangs and twists, the tangles and quench of love, afresh, modern.

As Yogi Berra so aptly put it: “The future ain’t what it use to be.” And neither is the present. Melissa Weinman, in her time-bending, tradition-rearranging, postmodernism-revamping paintings, points toward a subtle though fundamental truth of faith: we must constantly update. As the “evidence of things unseen, and the substance of things yet to come,” that necessity would seem to be built-in, yet we often tend to forget how Time bears upon Faith, how the past informs the present as well as our concept of what lies ahead. Weinman’s work has a way of wriggling into our eyeballs and forcing us to see those homilies as thought-provoking mind-assaults. She plays with our passions; she teases our cultural preconceptions. Her paintings lead us at once in three directions: the appreciation of the aesthetically well-wrought; the knee-bowing response to the traditionally Holy; and the bewildering solar-plexus-flinch of ecstasy—be it Eros or Agape. Her depictions maintain an eeriness apposite to the Christian faith, a Calvinist acknowledgment of the sinful ways of the world, a Catholic embrace of iconography and historicity and ritual.

As in chaos theory, the seeming simplicity of these paintings is belied by an array of layers, by infinite sets of complexity; like quantum mechanics, her work regards time not as inviolate and linear, but as another medium to manipulate.

Perhaps that is what reminded me so of Melanie Klein’s work. It reminded me of the human’s gut reaction to the Divine, a sense of impotence in the face of the world’s woes, a sense of the body’s complex response to physical passion, a sense of reconciliation and realignment of the soul. We are Kleinian infants, hungry for the milk of love, yet resentful of our powerlessness, our impotence in the face of a bizarre and uncaring world. Paradoxically, the possibility of any coming peace lies in our hungry hearts.

Weinman’s paintings prove that representational work remains relevant, despite harangues to the contrary; they demonstrate paintings’ power to shake the soul and make it free. Or, as Robert Hughes once wrote of Caravaggio’s work, “Today it suggests how little, in art, can be more radical than a hunger for the real.” Like Heisenberg with his time-leaping electrons, Weinman seems to acknowledge a time-leaping faith with a profound uncertainty at its center. Some might lovingly call that mystery.

Visit Melissa Weinman as Image Artist of the Month for July '03

Issue #30 • Spring 2001