21st Century Sculptural Reliquaries
What are we really talking about here?
Hopkins River Trade Reliquary, the earliest of these pieces is particularly dear to me – is this where the answer to this question lies?
It is clearly set up as a shrine which establishes the spiritual value and also the intrinsic value of the relics and their container too (see also 6. Baudin’s most recognizable “container” of his colonial prospecting relics). The ancient stone implements are “validated” by the recently crafted Diorite, made sculpturally beautiful at great effort by Paul with modern power tools, but placing them in what seems to be a triptych or altarpiece, against a background of glowing gold leaf. It is all about reverence.Reverence for the ancient artifacts and for the materials, and for the process of making, and for the recognition of all three.
In this reliquary – there are actual relics in this one, the ancient stone tools – but they have a relationship with their new versions, one that throws up the extraordinary skill of the ancient makers and also allows the artist, at least, to walk in their shoes and to honour them in a particularly intimate way.
But still and all, relics and reliquaries have another identity –
Any pre-Reformation, Christian society/polity/family worth its salt, aspired to own relics. Rome has St Peter, Venice St Mark, Santiago St James and England once had St Thomas A’Beckett. His extraordinary shrine was once the biggest pilgrim attraction in the British Isles! And relics/reliquaries were especially “hot” in the 9thcentury as the major draws for the burgeoning and hugely lucrative medieval tourist/pilgrimage inc.
I do need at this point to acknowledge Mt Ararat as another relic hotspot – how many slivers of the planks of Noah’s Ark, reputedly found there, and being of impeccable authenticity, have changed hands over the millennia??
Sadly, we appear to have no first class relics (flesh or bone etc), yes there are classifications, of Christ and His mother. I’m afraid the Shroud of Turin just doesn’t really cut it. They had both bodilyabsented themselves from this world. But, there was what would have been left of any good Jewish boy – his foreskin(s) ( multiples, apparently) revered in reliquaries in France and Middle Europe until the 20thcentury. The 20thcentury was the era in which many relics were outed – well described in the last chapter of Lampedusa’s novel, “The Leopard”, where the Sicilian princely collectors bitterly ditch the lot.
In the end, relics suggested fakery and crookery – though surprisingly many have endured and are displayed with an ecclesiastical straight face in numerous Catholic churches. The Santiago relic not only stretches credibility but has obvious, ongoing political overtones – St James is the Muslim slayer. And the process of what is called the Translation of relics – being made treasures of veneration, has a weird history of its own. Theft of potential relics was particularly desirable (???) It was called Sacra Furtiva – does this have any relevance to the collection of body parts and artifacts pursued with such dedication in the time of Baudin and his contemporaries and beyond? That said, the containers of relics – lost or extant – are still considered objects of virtue and are in themselves things of beauty, from huge, impressive altars to exquisite casings for powerful juju of one kind or another.
With my mother and aunt, I scoured Mount St Evan’s hospital in Melbourne sometime in the 1950s in search of the relic my great aunt Mary took with her when she was admitted. That she was already dead when we began our search should have alerted me to the limits of its power!
So any revisiting of relics and reliquaries has to acknowledge that the veneration they have attracted in the past is dubious at very best, blatantly dishonest at times, self-aggrandizing for the owner and even quite sinister. Not only was the merchandise shonky, but the beliefs that they enshrined were also.
Paul’s reliquaries, however, evoke a deeply serious sense of the past and the precious and what has been lost – from Thylacines, to archaic but highly developed skills, to romantic products of the Enlightenment, to whole cultures and populations – and they frame this with a rueful, playful skepticism. I leave you to explore the ordinary and extraordinary materials in these works, from carefully collected mineral specimens and fossils, to the gold leaf, to the, er, synthetic figures, and to the odd “vintage” representations of ancient culture. Two relics in one! And what are we to make of them?? The final syntheses of these materials conjure up the iconography, the charm and the challenge of earlier pieces. To me, they underline the foolishness of so much of the self-styled heroics of exploration in the face of an intractable and complex world of alien flora, fauna, geology, geography and spiritual life. Who were the martyrs? Baudin, La Perouse, D’Entrecasteaux – the Pakana? I look at Paul’s often whimsical sculptures – as many reliquaries were – with pure joy.
How can you not love Josephine’s kangaroos skulking between the Kimberley rocks? And what of the gold clad, indigenous boatman ferrying the pile of dead French sailors – to the next life?? Who are the survivors here? And Baudin’s wonderfully mysterious container vessel!
I visited “Baudin’s Art of Science” exhibition at the Canberra National Museum in April. In “Looking for Baudin” we have the new art of Science on so many levels – an art of regret, of celebration and of very complex thought and execution.
It was such a pleasure it is to see it in our national capital where complex thought is pretty thin on the ground – much better to bring it down to earth in sunny Ararat.
Patrice O’Shea 1 December 2018