Spectrum of Desire Challenges the Narrative of Our Current Culture War @ The Met

 

Aquamanile in the Form of Aristotle and Phyllis
South Netherlandish
late 14th or early 15th century

 

text by Hank Manning

The Met Cloisters, a replica of a medieval castle atop a hill in Manhattan’s northernmost neighborhood, has collected more than fifty items from Western Europe, produced between the 13th and 15th centuries, to reanalyze them through modern queer theory. The collection—including statues, manuscripts, jewelry, and household items—reveals that, although the church wielded immense power during this period—and with this came restrictive laws on sex and marriage—gender fluidity, androgyny, and same-sex relations were neither hidden nor uniformly stigmatized in art. 

 

Christ and Saint John the Evangelist
German
1300-1320

 

Much of Spectrum of Desire’s art considers the complex ways in which artists have interpreted Jesus Christ’s gender and relationships. Christians’ relationship with Jesus is paramount, and artists often framed this in erotic terms. Nuns forsake romantic relations on Earth and instead devote themselves spiritually to Jesus. This takes on another dimension in the frequent portrayal of Jesus as a handsome baby. Men, too, form special relationships with the prophet, such as Saint John the Evangelist, depicted in a 14th-century German statue in which the two men pose like a married couple, with right hands joined and Jesus’s left hand hugging John’s shoulder. (In another piece, the Virgin Mary appears in a similar union with her cousin Elizabeth.) Artists considered the fluidity of Jesus’s gender. After all, why should an image of God, creator of all people, conform to only one gender? His wound on the crucifix often resembles a vulva; his suffering is compared to birthing pangs, and the entire experience is said to be the birth of a religion. 

Two Riddles of the Queen of Sheba
Upper Rhenish
circa 1490–1500

Artists of the time held broad perspectives on gender fluidity, even though they did not have anything approximating this modern term. At least thirty Christian saints changed their gender appearance, most from female to male. Considering how frequently God is depicted as a man, as well as the universal specter of patriarchy, it is not surprising that some considered it advantageous, maybe even a move closer to God, to become more masculine. Saint Wilgefortis begged God to make her less attractive, and God granted her request by giving her a beard. Saint Theodora of Alexandria became Theodore merely by changing her clothing and stated identity. Others believed that behavior, rather than appearance, determines gender. In Two Riddles of the Queen of Sheba, King Solomon explains that girls intrinsically catch apples in the laps of their dresses. 

In other cases, androgyny was encouraged. Thomas Aquinas argued that angels do not assume bodies and thus transcend traditional gender categories. To become more angelic, therefore, men could make their gender more ambiguous. Some theologians, including Saint Augustine, considered chastity more virtuous even than sex within a marriage. To encourage this, some men endured castration, becoming eunuchs who then developed more feminine features. The 1533 Book of Hours illustrates the baptism of an Ethiopian eunuch, a tale from the New Testament. 

 

Plate with Wife Beating Husband
Netherlandish
circa 1480

 

Gender role reversals were sometimes a source of humor or a warning of female power. Saint Jerome’s peers swapped his robes for a blue dress to publicly humiliate him. A copper water pitcher depicts a confident Phyllis on a confused Aristotle, grabbing his hair and sitting on his back as he crawls on all fours. A similar depiction on a Belgian plate shows a wife beating her husband’s exposed backside with a broom. 

Base for a Statuette
South Netherlandish
1470–80

To be sure, much European medieval art portrayed sex as a dangerous temptation. A French health guide from the 1440s shows a fully clothed couple in missionary position and warns that too much sex causes weak kidneys and bad breath. A South Netherlandish statue, from around 1470, posits that the original sin came from same-sex attraction: it shows Eve in the Garden of Eden lured by an anthropomorphized female snake named Lilith. Courtly art sometimes associated eroticism with humiliation and cruelty. In the fable of Febilla and Virgil, drawn on a 14th-century French ivory tablet, both suffer. After Febilla publicly mocks Virgil’s advances, the poet—here also a sorcerer—extinguishes all the fires in the city—except for a candle stuck up the genitals of Febilla, who must then allow the entire populace to rekindle their flames through her. Even with positive connotations, love and pain often went hand in hand in the medieval imagination, as in a depiction of Jesus as Cupid, slinging a “javelin of love” at devotees. 

Walking through the exhibition, it is readily clear that gender fluidity is neither a new invention nor inherently antithetical to Christianity. 700 years ago, although artists did not categorize their subjects as they do today, opinions on sex and gender were nonetheless varied and complex. While some today argue that gender re-assignment and fluidity are affronts to God’s will, many historic Christian saints saw these as ways to become closer to God. Philosophers and artists, whether aligned with the church or otherwise, presented equally wide-ranging perspectives on our relationships with our own identities, each other, and the divine. 

Spectrum of Desire: Love, Sex, and Gender in the Middle Ages is on view through March 29 at the Met Cloisters, 99 Margaret Corbin Drive, New York 

Mona Fastvold Chronicles an Enigmatic Mystic in The Testament of Ann Lee

The Testament of Ann Lee, Photograph courtesy Searchlight Pictures

text by Hank Manning

If humans, roughly half male and half female, were made in God’s image, and the first incarnation was a man, then the second must be a woman. Thus was the logic of the Shakers, a breakaway sect of Quakers that emerged in Manchester in the mid-1700s under the leadership of Ann Lee. In addition to their egalitarian gospel, they attracted derision for their charismatic, loud, and long-lasting style of worship—improvised dancing and singing that often continued for days until quashed by police. During her multiple prison stints, Lee organized her visions into a formal gospel and decided to move with her followers to colonial America.

The Testament of Ann Lee, a new film by Mona Fastvold, is in some ways a standard biopic of the putative prophet, portrayed by Amanda Seyfried. It depicts Lee’s life chronologically, nearly from cradle to grave, with heavy-handed narration by a tertiary character that can make Lee feel frustratingly unknowable despite the significant time viewers spend with her. The film takes inspiration from and highlights many of the Shakers’ great eccentricities—their hymns, dance, architecture, design, and progressive beliefs. What first registers as frenetic worship gradually enraptures viewers, becoming hypnotic by the film’s end. Lee herself is a remarkable figure for her ability to earn respect in a domain that almost invariably precluded female leadership, as well as for the prescience of her beliefs. In addition to gender equality, Shakers fiercely opposed slavery and war, encouraged simple living, and shared responsibilities on communal farms. It was Lee’s demand for celibacy (even in marriage) that pre-determined the early demise of the movement. She proclaimed it as God’s will after all four of her children died in early infancy. 

In their previous collaboration, Fastvold and her partner, Brady Corbet, wrote The Brutalist, which Corbet directed. Like Lee, Lazlo Toth, the titular architect, moved to America after facing religious persecution in Europe. Although the stories took place 200 years apart and Toth is a fictional character, they present similar narratives of America as a beacon of hope. Lee and Toth, a Holocaust survivor, both hope to reunite their families, practice their religion in peace, and achieve economic security. But as foreshadowed in a rather on-the-nose opening shot of the Statue of Liberty turned upside down, America ultimately fails to live up to its promise. 

The immigrants do find some success. Toth’s wife and niece join him as he reestablishes himself as a prolific architect. The Shakers find quality land for agriculture in upstate New York, grow their congregation through traveling preachers, and establish six Shaker villages. Nonetheless, Old World prejudices persist, and a sense of belonging remains elusive. Toth earns commissions but never the respect of his wealthy patron. He declares to his wife, “They do not want us here.” His niece, agreeing, continues her exodus to Israel. Lee likewise finds herself unwelcome, often the victim of violent mobs. Her strict beliefs continue to alienate her, as her husband and other early followers find celibacy untenable and depart. 

Both films feel, in some respects, like pieces of art created by the protagonists themselves, as if brutalism and Shakerism were film genres. Both protagonists teeter between heroes and anti-heroes, with audiences cheering for their success after persecution while also bristling at their bursts of anger, self-confidence, and rigidity. Their penchants for minimalist design—rectangular brutalist architecture and simple wood Shaker furniture—inspire expansive sets throughout. Daniel Blumberg, who won an Oscar for his horn-and-drum-focused score for The Brutalist, has now adapted Shaker hymns into a partial musical, at its most powerful as it accompanies the changing of seasons on their cross-Atlantic journey. Their hymn, “All is Summer,” convinces fellow travelers of their ability to tame the weather. 

In other aspects, the films are surprisingly maximalist. The Brutalist stretches on for three and a half hours, including a fifteen-minute intermission. The Testament of Ann Lee is no less expansive in spirit. Neither film is ever lacking in ambition, piling on period costumes, heavy dialect, and a determination to grapple with history, faith, gender, grief, migration, and power all at once, always with a sense of audacity that mirrors the uncompromising figures at their centers. But even these two, with their large ambitions, ultimately find themselves victims of circumstance. 

The film resists characterizing Ann Lee as either a progenitor of modern religious practice or merely an outlier within it. Many of her beliefs were shared with Quakers, whose practice has endured, while her own particular sect has nearly disappeared (today, the Shaker population has dwindled to just three practitioners). What the film ultimately withholds is a stable framework for interpretation: Lee is not a great woman of history, not merely an eccentric, and not reducible to an archetype. That ambiguity may be intentional. By refusing to resolve her into a legible category, The Testament of Ann Lee gestures towards a different truth—that history does not sort its figures neatly, and that our understanding of it is necessarily provisional and incomplete.

Gaël Turine: Voodoo

Voodoo originated in slavery and was declared the official religion of Haiti in 2003. The belief came into existence in the sixteenth century and is based upon a merging of the beliefs and practices belonging to the vodun cult from of West African Benin with the beliefs and practices associated with Roman Catholic Christianity. Voodoo was created by African slaves who were brought to Haiti in the 16th century and still followed their traditional African beliefs but were forced to convert to the religion of their slavers. From Haiti voodoo gradually spread to the United States and the Caribbean. Voodoo practitioners, who are commonly described as vodouisants, aim their prayers to a rather large number of spirits known as Loa, or Mistè. These spirits all have their own, distinct preferences and are honoured with specific rituals, symbols, dances and music. The Loa enable the vodouisants to contact the world of the dead, amongst whom deceased relatives and ancestors. This contact is highly important because respect for, and listening to what it is that these spirits and ancestors are conveying is absolutely quintessential if one wants to attain a better and more peaceful life on earth. Between 2005 and 2010 Turine took photographs of several ceremonies, pilgrimages and rituals connected with voodoo religion. These photographs are on display at the Kunsthal Museum in Rotterdam - in the Netherlands - until March 13th 2011. More info here.