https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=oUcdDfmjoTQ
So when Julia asked me to do this talk, at first she wanted me to kind of talk about my work and talk about how I came to icon carving and how it works to be an icon carver. But I really wanted to talk about art in general and about the place of liturgical art, let’s say, and the history of art and how it fits in what’s going on in the world today. And so what I tried to do is I tried to fit those two things together. And so hopefully it won’t look like a strange collage, but it’ll hopefully kind of seamlessly flow together. The main reason, let’s say, why I became an icon carver, I would say, has to do with my own faith. It has to do with coming to a point where I had this ability, this creative impulse, and I was struggling through university and then through the beginning of trying to fit my work into contemporary art. I was struggling to get those two things to fit together and slowly discovering traditional art and discovering the icon and the whole liturgical tradition is, for me, was really a way to be able to join those things together. And be able to live my love of God and my faith in an integrated way in what I was doing. So that’s really like the main reason why I do that. But for this actual talk that won’t be the frame of the talk, I’m going to, let’s say the subtitle of my talk is going to be something like sacred art in secular terms. And what I’m going to try to do is I’m going to try to talk about sacred art within the context of the history of the development of art and why it actually makes sense that right now we are seeing in several countries around the world and in North America this resurgence of traditional art and of liturgical art. So like you were told, besides being an icon carver, I’m also the editor of the Orthodox Arts Journal. And so for those who want to know more about this and more about what’s kind of happening in the world of liturgical art seen from an Eastern point of view, but we also look at Western artists as well, but it’s kind of seen through that lens. I would suggest that you go online and just look it up. We have five years of articles and artist previews and all kinds of stuff. So there is right now this kind of strange resurgence of liturgical art. And a lot of people are kind of coming up at the same time and we were doing this on our own and discovering this language and discovering this worldview together, but all separately and slowly we started to realize that there was this community that existed virtually and we’re trying to kind of pull it together. And the work we’re doing for Orthodox Arts Journal has to do with that, has to do with how can we create a sense that this is actually something that’s happening. So I’m going to show you first a few examples of the artists that are moving right now and that are coming. And of course a lot of it is happening in Orthodox countries and so there’s a lot happening in Russia. And you can see some of these main artists, some that are really more traditional like Father Zenon here on the right. Father Zenon is one of the pillars, let’s say, of this renewal of iconography. Everything he does creates waves and people kind of follow in his steps. And then people who are more looking to how to integrate some ideas of modern and contemporary art within their icons like Maxim Sheshakov. So we see this happening in Romania. And here as well you can see those two poles, someone like Yon Popa who is integrating some ideas that come out of modernism, tonal colors in a more geometric presentation, and someone like Father Ilié who is really exploring the kind of luscious classical iconography that you would have seen in the Paleologian period in the high Byzantine times. One of the great countries that people don’t hear about that is experiencing a massive resurgence of liturgical art is in Georgia. And there their traditions run really, really deep and there are crazy things happening. Like look at that dome. That’s something that happened two years ago. And there’s dozens of these examples of churches being built with massive projects of liturgical restoration and diving into their traditional arts and rediscovering the basic languages. And the person who’s kind of leading the charges, this artist here, Amiran Goglidz, he started by restoring icons and then finally fused the best of Georgian art with the best of Byzantine and the best of Russian and the best of kind of Western medieval art, kind of brought it together to create a very coherent and flowing language that a lot of younger generation are following in his footsteps. And this idea of synthesis is something that you’re going to see all through the talk. Like a lot of the artists that are coming up, they’re trying to create a synthesis of languages of the past into something that is coherent but it is also taken into account like all the history at the same time. So it’s interesting that everybody’s coming to those approaches independently all over the world. So here are some examples of some Greek artists. Like someone like George Kordis right here on the right, I mean he is an absolute artistic master. He stands in a church that’s unpainted in front of a white apse, let’s say. And he stands on a scaffolding with a long stick and a piece of charcoal and he starts without a sketch and he just draws out the Virgin with her hands open in like half an hour and it’s there, it’s done. And he didn’t prepare, he didn’t do anything. He’s really a virtuoso. And here are a few examples of some Serbian artists. You can see in these ones, you can really see the desire to, in the icon of St. Paul. This is an icon of St. Paul when he was struck by the light while he was on his horse. And so you really get this sense of someone falling over. And he’s integrating a lot of modern ideas. You can see Matisse in his paintings. You can see some of the early geometric, like the kind of naive modernists coming out now into this language which is still coherent with the traditional language of the church. And so that’s one of the themes that you’ll see. One of the strong voices in the West, let’s say, like in Western Europe and in North America has been Aiden Hart. Aiden Hart is a British artist and he’s really a master artist and a master artisan. He does everything from painting icons to putting up mosaics to making doors, making altars. He’s really like a full-on liturgical artist. And he writes books and he teaches at the Prince’s School of Traditional Art. So he’s like this really central pillar of this kind of strange movement that’s moving up. And here in North America, well, you have people like Andrew Gould who is trying to create orthodox architecture that has an American flavor, let’s say. So he looks at traditional American architecture and then tries to see how the Byzantine layout of a church, how the traditional layout of a church can be fused with some American traditions. So you can really see that here in this church. And the cross here is something that Andrew and I did together. So I did the carvings and then he did all the design and all the framing. And so in North America, we have quite a few of these artists. And so here are three artists that you can look at at some other time. And you can see the different styles and the different approaches. Father Silouan, who really integrates a lot of contemporary art ideas. And then someone like Vladimir Grigorenko, who is in the footsteps of Father Zenon. He’s Russian, like very Russian. And then Anna Gureyev. Just a few examples of these artists. But there’s quite a lot happening. There’s a lot happening in music as well. Like there’s composers and musicians and choir directors that are taking, you know, the old tones and the old melodies and are kind of fusing them together, creating even new compositions that are in line with the traditional ones. So there’s this vibrant movement happening. I won’t talk a lot about music because I don’t know anything about music. Everything I’m going to talk about is going to be about visual art. But just that you know that it’s also happening in the world of music. So the question is what’s happening? Like what does this mean? Like does it even mean anything to see this vibrant resurgence of liturgical art? I mean I personally I believe it does. I believe that this resurgence of liturgical art was inevitable in the grand scheme of things. Like in the grand scheme of culture, let’s say. You see, the thing is that art is in trouble. Of all the stable notions that the contemporary world has deconstructed and diluted to the point of returning them to dust, art is possibly one of the first to see its fate sealed. Like if we’re struggling to know what a family is, what a man, what a woman, what spirituality is, if we’re struggling to know what’s up and what’s down, the history of art in the 19th and the 20th century has paved the way for the type of decomposition that we’re seeing now abroad out in society. So the history of modern art was presented to us as revolutions, as this brave questioning of authority, right? Each successive revolution replacing the other. From the classicists to the romantics, then the romanticists to the realists, to the impressionists, the cubist abstraction, then conceptual art. And all of this was seen as this constant kind of Marxist emancipation of art, where art would emerge free and without any religious, social, or aesthetic constraint. But what happened is that the end of this process gave us not this kind of a soaring cultural form that would act as a support for some secular utopia, let’s say. Rather than true liberty, it ended up with this libertine self-indulgence and self-importance. I mean, is there anybody in this room who could name the ten top contemporary artists today? Probably not. There are probably very few rooms that I could be in where people would even know who the top artists are in our world today. So we’re basically faced with the rotting corpse of a culture. And it’s not just the decomposition, because simultaneously and possibly because of this loss of actual value, loss of actual purpose in art, we have this huge complex of galleries and universities and museums and this severe bureaucracy of gatekeepers who control almost by fiat what it is that has value. And here value in the old sense of, let’s say, spiritual or moral or social authority has almost completely been replaced by subjective aesthetic experience, social tastes, and yes, value, but value in a monetary speculative sense, where art is viewed as a commodity to increase one’s financial standing, one’s social prestige, let’s say. Galleries will prop up artists and collectors, what they do is they outbid each other on purpose so that they can raise the value of their artist. So when you hear of a contemporary artist who sold a piece for like 25 million dollars, you have to understand that the people who collect that man’s work agreed in advance to outbid each other and then one of them buy the piece so that everybody’s work would now be worth more. So that can explain to you sometimes why you see these crazy things on the news, like some strange piece of art goes for 100 million dollars and you’re thinking how is that even possible? Well, it’s possible because when art is seen as merely a vehicle of financial speculation, then you can make it work that way if you want to. And in more socialist countries, these elite cliques of artists and socialists, they give each other grants and prizes to perpetuate their own, let’s say, fragile existence. So when you consider this somewhat inside joke of art, because it is in a way this inside joke that most of them don’t want you to know about, the loss of true value in art has led to this ironic nihilism, or something which is seen not only in the reduction of the work of art to just a mere object of financial speculation, but also you see it in the work itself. You see this kind of nihilistic chaos inside in the art that they are promoting. So they both of those things go together. And the nihilism is balanced by this finely tuned but implacable system of control, these galleries, these financial markets, and these museums. So it’s as if these two extremely pathological things coexist together. I mean, it’s as if a sculptor had created a statue which is so fragile that around it had to be built this entire system of protection and control just to prevent it from melting away. And here this work of art is a perfect example of that. This is a self-portrait by Mark Quinn. And what it is, it’s a casting of his own face, which is cast out of his own coagulated blood. And so in order for this sculpture to exist, it has to be sold with like a freezer that has to be plugged in all the time or else the sculpture is just going to vanish. And so one of his carving, one of his sculptures actually did melt away because the rumor is that it was in the house of some big art collector. And the rumor is that someone was coming to fix up the kitchen and just kind of unplug things to want to, you know, to kind of fix the wall and then the next day there was just like a pool of blood on the ground. So symbolism, yeah, symbolism happens, huh? It just does. There’s no way around it. So it doesn’t take long to realize that as a social, as an actual social manifestation, as an embodiment of our world, that a cultural forum so full of self-reference, of irony, you know, reduced to these aha moments. So did you get the joke? You can just read it. So it says sell the house, sell the car, sell the kids. And that’s 25 million. Yeah. So it’s created a language that is so ironic, but also at the same time so hermetic that it just can’t be sustained forever. It’s just impossible. It has to crumble. This illusion of progress in art that we saw at the beginning, this idea of this constant emancipation of artistic movements has basically now been turned into just fashion and basically just this desire to shock the art market, to create something that attracts attention like a celebrity who wants a scandal so that their work gathers attention. When someone like Marina Abramovic simulates human sacrifice and cannibalism, we can say that we’ve reached the nadir of the possible chaos engendered by the contemporary art movement. And then there’s this. This came just like a few weeks ago. I’ll let you read the headline on your own. It’s like just as in the time of Noah, I would say. So the decomposition, fragmentation and chaos is really an embodiment of our culture. And it shouldn’t be surprising that now it’s playing itself out in this polarization of society, in the fact that we’re looking around us and we see this fragmentation happening. It’s as if the art of the 70s, of the 80s, of the 90s were this promise of what was going to happen. And now we’re seeing it happen not only in the galleries, we’re seeing it happen in the street. I mean, who would have thought that the aesthetics of chaos framed in elite systems of control, you know, wouldn’t be so amusing when they played themselves out in the social realm. So now what do we do? So do we just take out our fiddles? Do we watch it burn and let out a mighty bellow of laughter? Well, that’s tempting. I’ve had my own moments of temptation to do that. Around 2001, I think it was, after entertaining my own possibility of a career in contemporary art, let’s say after I graduated from college, I’d taken a studio with some friends and those friends actually ended up becoming artists and are still in the art world in Montreal. But for myself, I came to the conclusion that I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it. Just to preserve my own humanity and possibly to preserve my faith especially, I just couldn’t. So I actually took a hammer to most of my work and I destroyed almost all of it. And I thought at the time that that was it. I was done. I would never look back. And I remember I told my wife at that time, it’s kind of a time of general crisis in my life, you can imagine, you start destroying things. Yeah, she’s not a good sign. But I told my wife, I said, that’s it, I’m done. I’m not ever going to be an artist again. I’m going to just get a job and work and just be a regular guy and that’s going to be it. I just remember she just laughed at me and she’s like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And she said, no, no, you’ll come back to it, don’t worry. I know you will. And then it’s funny because actually just about a year after I kind of destroyed all my work, I had already discovered medieval art and iconography. And I had already started to foresee the possibilities of that language. And I had started dabbling and carving at that time, it was about 2003. So this is like my third carving. And I remember when I did that, I made that carving, the priest, I wasn’t even orthodox yet, I was just a catechumen and the priest just said, keep going. But I didn’t actually. I’d seen the possibilities, but it just wasn’t yet. I wasn’t ready, I think. Life, things weren’t set up for me and nothing was, I had a lot of work to do, I think personally and in terms of becoming someone else, myself, before that was going to happen. And so after I did, actually like a few months after I made this carving, I moved to Africa. And we stayed there for seven years, my wife and I. And we worked with artisans while we were there. And I actually didn’t carve at all, the whole time I was in Africa. But it was interesting because working with artisans was really this eye-opening thing for me. It helped me to see and to understand and experience a different type of vision of fabricating objects, a different way to understand how objects exist in the world, how they’re anchored in everyday life, how they participate in everyday life. And so making a chair or making a cupboard or making something that is really just anchored in life, it was like the flip side of what I had learned in the contemporary art world. And I never became like a carpenter, I’m not that type of person. But to kind of live there, we were there for seven years, and to live that for that long really grounded my vision and helped to form the way I perceived, let’s say, what art could be. Already I had seen even the idea of the icon as a possibility too. It was just all still vague for me. So we returned to Canada in 2010 with our two children. And what’s weird is I didn’t know, I found this out very recently. Do you know who this is? This is Camille Paglia. And Camille Paglia is a radical feminist lesbian transgender activist. And in 2010, the very year that I returned from Africa, she wrote an essay called Religion and the Arts in America. And in that essay she explained this, quote, I would argue that the root to a renaissance of the American fine arts lies through religion. And even to make sure that she wasn’t totally contaminated by saying that herself, because it’s pretty crazy that someone like that would say that, she adds, she says, quote, let me make my premise clear, I am a professed atheist and a pro-choice libertarian democrat, unquote. She tells us that, quote, though I share the exasperation of my generation with the moralism and prudery of organized religion, I view each world religion, including Judeo-Christianity and Islam, as a complex symbol system, a metaphysical lens through which we can see the vastness and sublimity of the universe. Knowledge of the Bible, one of the West’s foundational texts, is dangerously waning among aspiring young artists and writers. When a society becomes all consumed in the provincial minutiae of partisan politics, as has happened in the US over the past 20 years, all perspective is lost, unquote. So if you’re surprised that an atheist, non-conforming marginal outlier would say something like this, you’re not done being surprised. We are in a strange time. We’ve come to the end of the possibilities that the revolutionary ideas could bring forth. We’ve come to the end of it. We’ve come to a world which is pretty much upside down. So we need to understand the situation we’re in to understand why someone like Paglia, or other outliers of today, other marginal people of today, are starting to say things like that. All of a sudden, we have these punks and these provocateurs that are saying conservative things, sometimes despite themselves. Look at this guy. I don’t know if you know this guy. His name is Gavin McGuinness. Gavin McGuinness is the founder of Vice. I just have to tell you the name of their news outlet. They call their news outlet Vice. There’s nothing else that I have to say about it. Today, he’s gone through this crazy movement, and he still sees himself as a punk, and as a provocateur, and as a marginal figure. He still has this kind of crass, vulgar way of speaking and of talking about the world, but now he’s there telling people to go to church. So there’s something that’s definitely happening. You see, in a revolutionary process, as you turn the world upside down, once the world is actually upside down, what’s left to do for those who are truly the outliers, those who truly question rules, who question the status quo? What do you do when questioning the status quo becomes a system? When that becomes the status quo itself, it’s an impossible reality. What does it mean to create huge, multi-million dollar state-funded museums to house art which supposedly questions tradition and authority? How exactly does that work? So in her essay, Paglia really intelligently points out that one of the examples of the bottoming out of art in the United States were a few scandals where the works of art that insulted Christianity, or works of art like that of Robert Mapplethorpe. I’m not going to show you these works of art. There’s no point in showing them. But in the 80s and in the 90s and in the early 2000s, there was a string of really horrific anti-Christian art that was being propped up, or just kind of decadent work. But she points out that when the work like that of Robert Mapplethorpe, who had this cold kind of sadomasochistic photography, and they tried to portray themselves as edgy and as rebellious, but when they’re completely institutionalized and they’re being funded by the state purse, like what does that mean? How ironic can you get? I mean, could you imagine my work being funded by the state? Could you imagine the riots if my work was funded by the state? So who’s edgier, right? Who’s more dangerous to the status quo? So Pagli also points out quite accurately that the progressive elites, they flaunt this anti-Christian art, images of Christ and his mother covered in urine and feces, like horrible stuff, all in the name of freedom of expression. Okay, that’s fine. But they don’t have the courage to even publish a cartoon of Mohammed. It shows that with Christianity on the decline in their culture, they’re only capable of acting out of condescending strength and not out of courage. There’s no courage left in these statements. Maybe there were a hundred years ago, but not anymore. We just have to look at all these university professors who are cowering before the politically correct Mobs, right? Present company excluded though. So what happens when the rebels have taken the cushy seat in the academy? Well, the first thing that happens is that there’s a need to perpetuate the increasingly dissonant notion that their ideologies are still subversive, right? That they’re still somehow the underdogs, even though their star artists and advocates are just these pampered socialites who move around in circles of elite power. To quote Paul Joseph Watson, you can’t be the counterculture and the dominant culture at the same time. So let’s take the case of this artist, Maurizian Catalan. I’ve showed you the image of one of his images, the upside down police that you saw. So when we read articles on him, right, we read these critics and they tell us that he has a subtle sense of the paradoxes of transgression, the limits of tolerance. Since the early 90s, his works have provoked and challenged the limits of contemporary value system through its use of irony and humor. It’s like there’s absolutely nothing subtle about this. Not only is there nothing subtle about this, there’s nothing intelligent about this either. All right. Enough of criticizing these people. Okay, so I’m going to go back to my own story. So in Africa, the last year, when I was in Africa, I discovered a way of making which was more grounded in life. A kind of humility and integrated living. In Congo, I learned about ancient African art. I learned about some of the powerful patterns used in this type of art. This is Cuba art. And they use these geometric patterns and they couple them with stories. And it acts as a kind of algebra, this algebraic language of symbols that is integrated into everyday life. So coming out of the kind of art school brain space, it was exactly what I needed. In our last year in Kenya, my wife, my children and I, we lived in the Kisi region of Kenya. In a small town without a refrigerator, without running water, on the top of a hill overlooking green vegetation. And it’s there that under the instruction of a soapstone carver, I learned to carve this stone that I carve still today that I fell in love with while I was there in Kenya. And the friends that I discovered there, they made me my first knife. You can see it down there in the corner. And it’s this grinded down file that they put together between two pieces of wood and they had wrapped it with a bicycle inner tube. So the bicycle inner tube is gone. I replaced it with duct tape, which is the our version of bicycle inner tube, I guess. So this true grounded skill of carving was really different from the do as you please and, you know, defended with unreadable theory experience of my university training. So after seven years, our family returned from Canada and I had a few boxes of soapstone that I brought with me and my carving knife. But I had the idea that I would probably be working in an office somewhere, you know, find some regular job once again. Just go back to regular life, be a normal person. That’s not I don’t think that’s going to happen anymore. And so through a series of surprising events, I became an artist once again. And a great part carving that beautiful stone that I discovered in Kenya. And without making a plan of it, really, I became a professional icon carver. And I by then, I had a very good career. And without making a plan of it, really, I became a professional icon carver. And I by then, I had come to the firm conclusion that the most complete solution out of the morass of contemporary art was to make liturgical art, to make liturgical art in a certain way. I come to the conclusion that we had to go medieval. We had to go medieval on these artists. So the idea is a lot of people, you know, they would have come back from Africa with this art that’s influenced by African art, let’s say. But for some strange reason for me, it was not the case. Seeing the traditional arts in Africa being slowly being drowned out by cell phones and Nike shoes and all that. In fact, gave me a desire to revive and to explore my own traditional art. I mean, I know that African voices are going to rise up and defend their language, defend their symbolic structures. And I can’t do that. And in a way, it would be silly for me to want to do that. And instead, learning about this made me want to explore my own, let’s say, history and my own liturgical art. So if you think of what I’m doing and you look at the other artists that I presented with you today before at the beginning, one of the things that joins us together is we really have this desire to go back, to go back into the past and to take the different languages that were developed, the traditional languages, this kind of algebra that was there, these relations of patterns that existed and fuse them together as much as possible and bring them together. But then why medieval, though? Why go medieval? First off, because one of the reasons is because the modern world sees the Middle Ages as like a kind of catch-all for everything they hate. It’s a kind of projection space for all their traditional languages. The modern world sees the Middle Ages as like a kind of catch-all for everything they hate. It’s a kind of projection space for all their demons. In our own homeschool group, I teach a history class with my kids and some of their friends. And it was really revealing for me to see a 12-year-old boy who, when he talks about the Middle Ages, when we started talking about the Middle Ages, he said that all he thinks about is mud. So it’s just muddy people, you know, just covered in mud. So I was pretty sure he got it from Monty Python. So I showed him this. How many times you hear someone say that something is medieval, right? That something they don’t agree with is stuck in the Middle Ages. So if you want to make waves, you know, such a demonized period of history can be pretty useful for someone who wants to shake the system, let’s say. But no, I’m exaggerating. That’s not really why I do this. Maybe a little. Not much. But the way we go back into medieval art is not with a kind of nostalgia. It’s not the way the Romantics looked at the Middle Ages. It’s not also the way the Renaissance looked at antiquity. It’s not this longing for a long lost past, you know, this idealization of a simpler time. A work is not about the Middle Ages, like a love song is about a romantic encounter. The return to the language of, let’s say, the first 1300 years of Christianity is our discovery to rediscover this profound web. A profound pattern of associations. A web of visual and semantic relationships which can bind us together. It’s to discover the full expansive version of what Poglia called, quote, a complex symbol system. A metaphysical lens through which we can see the vastness and sublimity of the universe, unquote. So we return to the icon, the return to liturgical art has actually more to do with, let’s say, how, for example, the Jews, the modern Jews, rediscovered, reinvented ancient Hebrew for the modern world. To rediscover this language which could bind together a people that had been broken and fragmented and spread all over. That’s the end game of what we’re trying to do. I think it’s important that that be clear. A lot of people won’t know what Poglia means by a complex symbol system, a metaphysical lens. And it is pretty complex. I can’t lay the whole thing out for you right now. I can’t lay out the whole vastness of this symbolic system. Luckily we had Jordan this morning kind of giving you some hints of how profound these patterns are and how deep they are in our biological being and how they are deeply in the way we encounter the world, how they participate in our consciousness. But what I want to do is I want to give you one little example. I want to take you on a little trip so that you can see one pattern. And it’s going to just be one thing, but hopefully it will help you to kind of plunge into what I’m trying to talk about. So this is an image of the Dormition. It’s a falling asleep of the Mother of God. So the scene is a funeral. The Mother of God is lying on her deathbed and around her are the apostles. At her head is St. Peter, who is on the right hand of Christ, who stands right there in the middle. At her feet is St. Paul. At the left hand of Christ. Above her, as I’ve said, is Christ, who appears in glory in a mandorla. That’s the shape with all the rays coming out of it. He appears in all his divine glory, surrounded by angels. And in his arms, he holds a little baby. Now the baby is the soul of Mary, which Christ is going to carry with him into heaven. Now that might seem pretty straightforward in terms of an image. Once you know what you’re looking at, it’s pretty clear. The funeral with all the apostles and the early bishops are there as well. And there’s this image version of her soul being brought into God. But there is a bit of strangeness about that image of Christ carrying a baby. Why is it represented that way? Why is Christ carrying a baby? So you see, to understand this image, you have to consider other images. You can’t understand this image in isolation. And you have to understand that there are other images that are implied, that are connected to this one. That’s what we mean when we talk about a symbol system. Which I’ve often called this web, or this mesh, that underlies this interrelated imagery. So of course the image of Christ carrying the soul of Mary is referring to an image that we all know very well. One of the basic images of Christianity. Which is of course the image of Mary carrying the Christ child. So there is a difference between the two if you look at both images. There is a pretty remarkable difference. And it’s that, notice that the soul of Mary is wrapped up like a mummy. So those are swaddling clothes. And swaddling clothes are not often used in iconography. But there is one place where they typically appear. Actually one almost exclusive place where they appear. And that is on Christ in the icon of the nativity. In the birth of Christ. So in this icon, the mother of God lies in a cave. And is surrounded by an ass and an ox. Christ is placed in the manger. Which is an animal food trough. And he is wrapped in swaddling clothes. Once again if you look carefully, you’ll notice that the manger in this image is a bit strange. Like why would a manger have ornaments on it for example? And the reason why this image is so strange. And the reason why the manger is strange is because this manger actually also refers to a tomb. To a sarcophagus, a casket. And the swaddling clothes are also an image of Christ’s shroud. So here is an image of the empty tomb of Christ after the resurrection. So in the icon of the nativity, the birth of Christ is also an entry into death. By taking on mortal flesh, his birth is already in many ways a dying. So if in this nativity icon, the birth of Christ is also a dying. In the dormition icon, the death of the mother of God is also a birth. So one side, the nativity, the icon of the mother and the son is the flip side of the other. The dormition. As the divine logos joins to his creation and to his church, so too creation, so too the church is joined to the logos. So you might wonder why I’m not strictly talking about Mary. I talk about the church. I talk about Christ. I talk about Mary. I talk about the church. I talk about creation. Well there’s something else that you need to know to understand the image of the dormition. And what you need to understand is what you need to know is you need to know how this image was represented in a church. In the actual church building. So one of the main traditions of the Orthodox church is that the image of the dormition, of the death, the image of the dormition of the death of Mary was placed on the western wall of the church. Right? So most of you would know this, but a traditional church is oriented from east to west. The altar area, the sanctuary, on the eastern side, the easternmost limit of the church is slightly elevated. And it’s accessible mostly to clergy. And it’s considered the most holy place. So to make an analogy with time, we could say that the sanctuary, or the eastern part of the church, which you see on top of the image, is the beginning of the church. The western wall of the church is where one leaves the church in order to go outside. To go outside is to go out into the chaos and the outer darkness. So the western wall of the church is the end of the church. Like the rising and the setting of the sun. In other traditions, instead of the dormition on the western wall, we actually place an image of the last judgment on the western wall. And so you can see this idea of the finality, the end of all things. So do you know what is the most eastern image we have? The one that’s up in the apps? Most of you will know. This is the image that we put up in the apps. So in the apps, in the most eastern side of the church, we have that image. So the two sides, these two sides become like mirrors of each other. And so the whole relationship between those two sides, between the Christ child appearing in the mother of God, and the mother of God appearing in the arms of the Christ child, really becomes like these two markers. These two markers of a space. The beginning and the end of a space. It’s both the possibility of God entering into the world and the possibility of man entering into God at the same time. You’ve seen this image before. You’ve seen this pattern, this relationship. We saw it actually this morning. This pattern here is exactly the same as this pattern. This pattern here is exactly the same as this pattern. So I wanted to give you a sense of how this is experienced, let’s say. The idea of entering into these patterns. Because when you stand in the middle of the church, it’s not just an idea. It’s not just a theory. You’re standing in the nave and you look to the east and you see Christ entering into the church, entering into ourselves. And then you turn to the west and you see the end. You see the falling asleep. The whole church gathered around the mother of God and at the same time the possibility of us entering into God. And so it’s not just a concept. It’s really entering into this metaphysical structure that Paglia talked about. Not just even mentally, physically being inside it and participating in it. And so when I started, I’m giving you the last story about when I started carving. I came back from Africa. I didn’t know what I was going to do. And I met my bishop. I showed him some pictures of my carvings. And he said, oh, would you be willing to make something for me? Would you be willing to make a panegia, which is a small miniature that he was going to wear around his neck? And I was like, I don’t know. I hadn’t done that before. I never tried. But he kind of insisted. So I said, okay, I’ll try. So I went home and I contacted this Serbian carver that I had met online. And I asked him, would you be willing to guide me through this? He said, yeah, of course. Yeah, I’ll help you out. And so I started to carve. And then he started criticizing. I would send him pictures of my carvings. You know, every few hours I just send him a picture of my carving. And then he’d come back and say, oh, my goodness, she looks like a cat or she looks like she’s on drugs. He was just ruthless. Serbians can be seriously ruthless. So he was just going into me and I was just working, working. It took several days to get this thing done. And, you know, so I take this thing and I wrap it in a piece of paper. And then I come to church on Sunday, on a Sunday that I knew my bishop was going to be there. And I come up to him. I’m nervous. And I give him this little wrapping. And I’m thinking about the process and how I did it. I hope I did okay. And I hope it’s good enough. And I hope that he’s going to like it. And that’s what I’m worried about. And he opens up the package. And he takes it out. And he bows and he crosses himself. And I was floored. Like I could have, it was like getting a baseball bat, you know, on the side of my head. I did not expect that at all. I should have expected it. I mean, I’ve seen it all. I’ve seen us venerate icons all the time. I should have expected. I didn’t expect it. And in that moment I realized I had to have, you know, it’s like it wasn’t my icon that did that. It wasn’t my carving. It was his entering into that world through an image of the mother of God. Entering into that metaphysical space where he embodies, where he’s inside that structure out of which he can view the vastness of the universe. He stepped into it. And I did. I had a little part to play in that moment. A little part to play. And I realized that, you know, Picasso, despite the fact that he can sell his works, are selling for 100 million of dollars, no one bows before his paintings. No one kisses his paintings. And so though my part in that is very little, I mean, it really is the mother of God to which he is showing his reverence, to be able to play that little part in actually participating in someone’s life in every day that he will wear that around his neck. And the weight of that icon will be the reminder of his responsibility, of the weight of the service that he’s giving to the church. To be able to participate in that just seemed like the most amazing thing. And the thing about the art of the icon is that the visual language of the icon is as subtle and as metaphysical as any visual language that was invented in the Renaissance or in modern art. It has a sublimity and a capacity to take you up into the highest heavens. But it is totally anchored in life. It is totally anchored in function. Those objects have functions. That cross that I made is taken out in a procession. That reliquary I made has relics of the saints inside them and people use them in their life. So liturgical art, that’s the way it is. The contemporary art of today, most of it, the language is so ironic and so detached and so hermetic that even if maybe it does touch something, it doesn’t touch the person. It doesn’t touch the person. It doesn’t touch the person. It doesn’t touch the person. It doesn’t touch the person. It doesn’t touch the person. It doesn’t touch the person. It doesn’t touch the person. It doesn’t touch the person. It doesn’t touch the person. It’s so hermetic that even if maybe it does touch something sublime, it pushes you away while it’s saying what it’s saying. Whereas the icon and liturgical art is meant to bring you inside that space that Paglia was talking about. And so hopefully that can help you to understand a little bit of what is driving this renewal. And I’m not saying that everybody should just make liturgical art. No, I don’t think so. If we recover the core, if we recover the language, if we recover this possibility of entering into that structure, not just in our minds, but living inside it, then all the other arts will become more beautiful, will become more anchored, will become more like a hierarchy, let’s say. They will flow out and then touch people in other ways. They can be movies, it can be music, it can be all kinds of things, but that if we can recover at least that language that unifies us, then it’s one of the possible solutions to the morass of contemporary art today. So thank you very much. Thank you very much. So I hope you enjoyed my talk on the truth in art. This talk was given as part of the conference I participated in in November 2017 with Jordan Peterson and several other speakers at the Northwest Catholic Family Education Conference. It was a great event. I’m going to put up another talk that was part of that event talking about sacred space, and hopefully I’ll be able to put up the question period as well where Jordan and I and the other speakers answer the question from the audience. I want to tell you that every year I give these icon carving workshops. They’re week long workshops, and we just set the dates for the workshop this year. And so there’s one in June, June 3rd to June 9th at St. Thomas Seminary in Bloomfield, Connecticut, and there’s one from September 2 to September 8th at the Diakona Retreat Center in Salem, South Carolina. And so those workshops, they’re for everybody. I really start people off at the basics. We work together, and it’s a great time because we spend all day carving and learning to carve. But then the evenings are free and we just sit around and we discuss and we get into really interesting discussions. And so the food is great. The atmosphere is very beautiful. And it’s just a great it’s a great time to get to know people. And so I want to invite everyone who’s kind of following me on YouTube. If you’d like to spend a week with me to talk about symbolism, to talk about orthodoxy, to talk about icons, and at the same time have fun carving a wooden icon, then I’m going to put the link in the description. It’s given by the Hexameron School of Liturgical Arts, and it’s also possible to take the course for credit with Pontifex University. And so all that information, I’m going to put in the links. And so look forward to seeing you soon. Thank you.