This article is republished, with permission, from James Wetzstein’s Substack page. The original post can be found here.
This past weekend’s controversy over the Paris Olympic Opening Ceremony’s alleged offense given to Jesus Christ and the Christian church is a striking example of how visual images are presented, interpreted, and re-interpreted depending on one’s frame of reference. The opening ceremonies in Paris were organized along the Seine River, with the athletes making their way to the Jardin des Tuileries in a series of boats. Along the banks were various performances and presentations relevant to the history and culture of France and the Olympic games. Among these was a performance that, at one point, presented a tableau of actors arranged and seated along one side of a long table. Though Thomas Jolly, the Paris Olympics artistic director, maintained that the image was intended as an homage to Dionysius, the Greek God of wine-making and ecstasy who “makes us aware of the absurdity of violence between human beings,”others saw the tableau as a satirical reenactment of Leonardo DaVinci’s Last Supper, a mural painted in the refectory of the Dominican convent, Santa Maria delle Grazie, in Milan, Italy.
I am writing a dissertation on the work of the American Liturgical artist Ernst Schwidder (1931-1998) and its reception by generations of church-goers who practice their faith in the presence of his art. Schwidder produced artwork, mostly sculptures in wood, for hundreds of churches across North America over his five-decade career. His work, especially that of his later career, is characterized by monochrome, streamlined renderings of the human form – most frequently the crucified Christ – that, upon closer inspection, reveal evidence of the carver’s hand along with Biblical texts formed in hand-carved letters. These texts are rarely simply labels for the images. Typically, they present an oblique commentary on the forms they accompany or the church’s liturgy.
Schwidder thought deeply about the meaning that was to be carried by his artwork. Late in his career, he wrote a self-published essay Ars Ecclesia that he may have used to introduce his way of thinking to prospective commissioning congregations. In it, he outlines a three-step interpretive process that I believe sheds light on how one group’s celebration of non-violence can be another’s example of blasphemy.
Schwidder’s first step is what he calls “Intuitive Response.” While acknowledging that our responses to visual stimuli are always culturally conditioned, Schwidder maintained that our first response to a work of art or other visual communication is on a subliminal level. Color and form, light and texture, and other aspects of the work provide signals that help us frame an initial response – perhaps just the response of commanding our attention. On a second level, one Schwidder called the “Identification of Images and Symbols,” we identify forms within the work and ascribe meaning to them based upon a shared tradition of symbolic meaning. The more one looks at art, the more one’s visual vocabulary develops as we become aware of how images and symbols are used in various traditions. Finally, however, the viewer will ascribe meaning to what they see. This Schwidder calls the “Interpretation of Images and Symbols.” He argues that the artist “must know how to allow for personal interpretation.” The viewer, he says, ascribes meaning to a work through their observation and consideration. Finally, Schwidder argues, becoming the authors of the work themselves.
Let’s take Schwidder’s three-step interpretive plan as a correct description of how we offer interpretive meaning to visual images. Doing so allows us to account for the distinctly different responses to Thomas Jolly’s Table Tableau along the Seine.
There seems to have been a consensus at the first level of Schwidder’s scheme. The performance was presented so that everyone recognized it as some sort of meaningful commentary occasioned by the Olympic celebration. Those viewing the performance on television were aided by the editorial decisions of the television producers as they made decisions about what to frame by the cameras and when to do so. This level of editing provides the viewer clues about the performance, especially in an open environment that lacks typical performance signaling cues such as dimming house lights and opening curtains.
At Schwidder’s second level, “the identification of images and symbols,” however, we begin to see our interpretive work diverging. For some, DaVinci’s Last Supper is so ubiquitous, both through countless well-intended reproductions in innumerable media as well as more satirical adaptations, that the sight of a group of people arranged along one side of a long table with one of the figures recognizably dominant and seated at the table’s center will be unambiguously read as a reference not simply to DaVinci’s 15th-century mural, but to the event of the Last Supper of Jesus itself, as recorded in the Gospels according to Matthew, Mark, and Luke, as well as Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians. That DaVinci’s presentation is historically inaccurate is irrelevant. Repeated presentation and interpretation of this image have rendered its meaning nearly automatic. So central is this particular identification of images and symbols that Erwin Panofsky (1892 – 1968), the ground-breaking art historian on whose work Schwidder may be consciously or unconsciously relying, identified the imagery and symbolism of DaVinci’s Last Supper, which he described as “13 men around a table” and ascribed to it “intrinsic meaning” within the context of a particular world-view. (Panofsky, 1972)
However, alternate frames of reference are also at play. Thomas Jolly and the International Olympic Committee maintain that the tableau was an homage to the myth of the Greek god Dionysius. While Jolly has not identified an antecedent artwork, others have. The Musée Magnin in Dijon, France, claimed that a work in their collection, The Feast of the Gods by the 17th-century Dutch painter Jan van Bijlert, was behind the tableau. The Dutch art historian Walther Schoonenberg agreed, writing that he was able to identify several Greek gods in the painting by their actors who presented their symbolic objects in the tableau.
One can see that depending on the frame of reference one chooses, the image’s meaning is unambiguously defined in one way or another. Those who see the table as primary don’t recognize this as anything but a take on DaVinci. Those who notice Apollo’s halo, Dionysus’s grapes, and Poseidon’s trident can’t imagine why anyone is upset. One might observe that there are more than Panofsky’s “13 men” around this table. One might also observe that Jolly and others should have, with Panofsky, noted the familiarity of DaVinci’s work and expected the interpretive blowback. They might also have noted the museum’s analysis that van Bijlert, painting the popular mythologic theme over a century after the Protestant Reformation in an environment where commissions from churches were nearly non-existent, was likely referencing DaVinci in his painting.
Once, however, the images and symbols have been assigned their meanings in Schwidder’s second stage, the third stage of interpretation is set. Yet, again, the viewers’ frame of reference is still of critical importance. If this is DaVinci’s Last Supper, then what happened along the Seine is, at best, silly and self-indulgent satire and, at worst, blasphemous. If it’s more like van Bijlert’s Feast, then it’s a party that, in hopes for world peace, might be taking itself too seriously. It is a testimony to the power of images and our associations with them that the meaning of the performance was judged to be self-evident by nearly everyone who saw it.
It seems, then, that as subjective as Schwidder’s third stage appears to be, the real potential and potential for trouble is how we regard the image relative to Schwidder’s second stage. What are the symbolic reference points with which a work is best associated? Especially in the context of cross-cultural experience – and I would argue that Americans watching a French work of performance art on television is a cross-cultural experience – care is best taken about immediately imposing one’s own set of interpretive definitions on a work of art, especially when such a move leads one to conclude that the artist intends to offend. A better approach would be to recognize the risk of misunderstanding, ask how one’s frame of reference might be out of step with the context, and then seek to discover what other frames of reference might be at play. In the case of the Paris performance, the fact that every other performance moment traded on French history should have invited viewers to question their assumption that a very Italian work of art was the point of reference. On the other hand, artists must know that they are not controlling the viewer’s interpretive work.