Modern Idolatry: Grotesque ‘Golden Calf’ Statue Comes to Texas
The Witness sculpture is best understood as a modern-day golden calf, the idol Israelites worshiped at the foot of Mount Sinai, provoking the wrath of God.
Having vandalized, toppled, and destroyed beautiful works of art from a Miguel Cervantes statue spray-painted in San Francisco in 2020 to a General Lee Monument that was taken to an undisclosed location and melted down in 2023, the woke Left is looking to replace American public art with their own version of it. Lefties are supposed to be the creative types, what were they able to come up with?
Check out the 18-foot sculpture Witness by Shahzia Sikander, which is currently on display at the University of Houston. The outsized brass Barbie-like female hangs suspended in the air, perched on a structure resembling a brass cage crinoline. The skirt is adorned with sparkly mosaics spelling the word “air” in Urdu or “Eve” in Hebrew and Arabic.
Shahzia Sikander, Witness (2023), for Havah…to breathe, air, life, 2023
in Madison Square Park pic.twitter.com/75DHnQnWEB— Kiana F. (@m3ridiana) February 28, 2024
Sikander is either overthinking the symbolism or not fully thinking through it — her Barbie is footless and armless or, more precisely, has wire-like appendages in place of arms and feet. The official description of the monument notes that
arms and legs resembling intertwined roots. She is literally ungrounded, floating and resisting permanence, as she is part of a diaspora whose home is where she chooses. According to the artist, the form is self-rooted and “can carry its roots wherever it goes,” making it able to have roots across cultures, places and times.
Somehow, knowing what the artist attempts to express doesn’t help appreciating the piece. The exhibit is so odd that it’s bound to stimulate discussion, but being talked about is not a sufficient quality to be considered art. In any event, “wired monster doll” is a more straightforward description. Maybe one day, the giant can get her own horror film.
Witness is best understood as a modern-day golden calf, the idol Israelites worshiped at the foot of Mount Sinai, provoking the wrath of God. It stands in opposition to the Second Commandment “Thou shalt have no other gods before Me.”
Texas Right to Life called the installation a “Satanic abortion statue” because the artist felt that it somehow reflected her belief that abortion “rights” are under threat. Of course, Sikander had to somehow bring up ending babies’ lives to the floating dismembered 18-foot golden doll. The Texan writer Auguste Meyrat argued that this kind of public display exists mainly to mock Christians. It certainly is at odds with Judeo-Christian tradition.
Meyrat notes:
Although the description on the UH website claims, “The large-scale sculpture Witness (2023) is a grand allegorical female figure that allows for multiple meanings and possibilities,” the group Texas Right to Life has deemed it “satanic imagery to honor abortion and memorialize the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.” For her part, the artist Shahzia Sikander affirmed this interpretation in an official response, explaining that her work was intended to express justice for nonwhite women, protest the reversal of Roe v. Wade, and celebrate the pro-abortion Ginsburg.
Although her legs and chest are bare, Witness wears the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s trademark lace collar around her neck. At the time of the Supreme Court Justice’s passing, I wrote of the pagan cult formed around Ginsburg — a phenomenon that’s definitely not Jewish, but to which she herself didn’t object in her lifetime.
Since then, RBG merchandise was cleared from the discount shelves, but four years on, Sikander still remembers her. It’s as if the sculptor gave the most pagan treatment to the late Ginsburg to date by putting ram’s horns resembling braids on her head. According to the sculpture description, “Ram horns have significance in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as well as Central and South Asian beliefs, often associated with power and valor.” It might be so, but in the Jewish tradition, a gold-colored monumental figure with horns has negative connotations.
Meyrat picks up on Sikander’s ambition to create “anti-monuments.” He feels that she’s successful at that because the project is so ugly and offensive that it doesn’t express the values of the community where it’s displayed or bring people together.
Maybe so, but what is an anti-monument exactly? If it’s something unseemly, Marcel Duchamp already displayed a toilet — and who can compete with that? If it’s something not like a monument in its nature, why not just dig a hole in the ground? Instead, Sikander came up with a conspicuous figure, in other words, a monument — specifically a golden calf.
Why bring the golden calf to Texas? Not for some kind of transcendent experience of beauty, but as a wicked exercise of power. The socialist realism-sized gilded monstrosity is a perfect way of marking territory for the woke project. Of course Christians are incensed, they got the message. It serves earthly powers and is ungodly.
I am a big fan of modernist art and have nothing against female artists. I admire the Israeli painter Zoya Cherkassky-Nnadi, who creates primitivist paintings filled with uneasy nostalgia and heartfelt political commentary. The feelings she evokes are as tender as her lines are raw. But Cherkassky-Nnadi comes from a totally different art scene.
How it fits within the Western art heritage is not clear either. The Art bureaucracy must have been impressed with the Pakistani-American sculptor’s C.V. and liked the description of the project enough to finance it. However, the cornucopia of disjointed ideas behind the piece makes no sense, nor does it qualify for surrealist curious juxtaposition. Witness is not captivating nor emotionally compelling, only a mishmash of various woke notions.
The kind of public art we’ve been commissioning post-Black Lives Matter riots certainly isn’t in that league. The art establishment, the very people who ridicule the gold high tops Donald Trump sold at a fundraiser, are perfectly fine with shiny oversized representations of George Floyd, a career criminal who died while resisting arrest.
Contemporary public art is tacky and politicized. Our visual artists are not particularly innovative or expressive. What they are good at is serving power and using its verbal props — you want something about feminism and diaspora — they’ll come up with wire underskirts skirts and “roots” in place of feet. Arabic lettering is always a bonus. If they try harder, they’ll please their masters with concepts like “anti-monument.”
All of it is infinitely forgettable and their visual language simply doesn’t hold up. They don’t create a transcendent experience that brings us closer to the divine, only golden calves that do just the opposite.
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Comments
These grotesque monstrosities are victory arches. “See, Christian, what I have the power to erect in your midst!”
You love God? I can build an idol! You love beauty? My idol will celebrate it’s lack. And you can do nothing about it. That’s what they mean.
This clip seems appropriate. Edward G. Robinson as Nathan speaks for the idolators,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Id6oS3L-D9A
Well, we can do the same thing about it that they have done to our art. But we don’t because, when push comes to shove, we are better than they are.
….meh, I grew out of that occult fascination about time I graduated high school.
It is no longer edgy, but you do you.
“According to the artist, the form is self-rooted and “can carry its roots wherever it goes,” making it able to have roots across cultures, places and times.”
Now I really don’t understand. Those of us with arms and legs instead of swirly rooty things can even more easily carry those arms and legs with us wherever we go, even pack them inside a car or airplane, and use them wherever we end up. So we’re even more “self-rooted”, or something.
I am Groot… 🙂
lol but I love Groot!
Amd I LOVE Donald’s golden sneakers!
The artist is dumb.
Untalented
By the way, that’s a very white looking woman’s face
Arabic symbolism apparently took the place of elfin writing
Madonna’s looking pretty grim… 🙂
She fills in for the grim reaper sometimes.
It’s just ugly.
They should have used Scary Lucy,
https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2015/04/07/ap268251693498_sq-e81b6e4e6f1442cd46dc7f0e88f073aa7c5a82ed-s800-c85.jpg
It looks like a Hillary Clinton pants-suit to me.
Is it time to start publishing political cartoons, those that cut to the quick, desensitize them.
Boring
I suppose it’s too much to hope that a “misfire” from a space based laser melts this thing in the next Trump administration?
rUtH SeNt uS.
Degenerates co-opting Ginsberg’s legacy and creating a bizarre Tower of Babel ur-mythology about her harkens back to Nazi pagan occultism. Both draw from a strange smorgasbord of pagan figures, symbols and fantasy to create a false primordial history.
They’ve smeared RBG and then gilded the smear. Well done.
it might garner a few dollars at a garage sale but you’d just as likely have a helluva time giving the thing away
If you could hack it to rotate in the wind, it would make a helluva wicked scarecrow.
If you put a lamp under that skirt and slapped an Italian label on it (something like “Fra-gil-e”), I bet you could get some guys to buy it.
Not exactly what I think of as anatomically correct.
There was no DNA in Eden. No blood, no genetics, no birth, no death.
Then came Satan.
I’d love to hear the evidence behind this one.
Genesis. It’s the first book in the Old Testament. Created in HIS own image. Spirit beings. There was no birth, there was no death. Death, by definition, is separation from God. Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden, much as Lucifer was expelled from Heaven.
Why were they expelled? For denying God. How did they deny God? They trusted the deceiver instead of God.
Lucifer cannot create life. Even as a created being, Lucifer remains separated from God.
Nope. Adam and Eve had blood, DNA, genes, and children. Cain and Abel and their twin sisters were born in the Garden, on the sixth day, before the expulsion. Death is the only thing that came from the expulsion, and will therefore be abolished when that is corrected.
That all happened after they were expelled, separated, from God. The Old Testament spends a LOT of time dealing with blood, flesh, birth, death and failed attempts of humanity to compel God to “do something”.
God responded, many times. In the redux, you end up with The New Testament and a greatly simplified opportunity to be “reborn” despite having been born unto death.
As it were, no one really has choice beyond eternal life in Christ or keeping on doing what they have been doing.and getting what they have been getting–separation from God.
Sorry, no, it happened in the Garden, before the expulsion.
If you would like to try and convince me, I’ll read along with you. Workable backchannels are available instead of belaboring Bill’s traffic.
Was/were there any begotten creatures in Eden?
Recent events indicate that permission is not required to tear down statues, just a sufficient mob.
Woke trash art.
The workmanship is pretty good. The theme, not so much.
For a group which promotes the good, the beautiful, and the true through art, I recommend https://artrenewal.org/
It stands in opposition to the Second Commandment “Thou shalt have no other gods before Me.”
Ummm, that’s the FIRST Commandment.
The Second Commandment is not having idols (in Jewish and most Protestant countings) or not taking the name of the Lord in vain (Catholic and Reformed churches).
The OP is correct. The first commandment is “I am the Lord your God, Who took you out of the land of Egypt, from the slavehouse”. Everything from “You shall have no other gods” to the end of the paragraph is the second commandment.
Roots? Those look like tentacles to me. A feminized idol of HG Wells’ Martian invaders.
I don’t care what they do as long as NONE of my money is involved.
Birds will express my opinion of it every day.
“disjointed ideas behind the piece makes no sense,”
But you have made sense of it and therefore it is not very much disjointed, but instead the statue is a clear political vehicle.
5 minutes and 50 feet of det cord would provide a whole new definition of disjointed to this monstrosity.
Haha, yeah that could be a fun show to watch.