What is it about Latin American countries and the Blessed Virgin? First there was the Mexican Playboy featuring a sexy Mary on the cover. And now, according to Reuters, fashion designer Ricardo Oyarzun has “sparked outrage in Chile by dressing up models like the Virgin Mary — in some cases with ample, near-naked breasts.”
The designer defends his show:
“There is no pornography here, there’s no sex, there are no virgins menstruating or feeling each other up,” Oyarzun said ahead of the catwalk show set to be held at a Santiago nightclub later on Thursday. “This is artistic expression.”
On the other hand, a local Episcopal Conference condemned the show, but, interestingly, without ever using the word “sex”:
“We look on with special pain and deplore those acts which seek to tarnish manifestations of sincere love toward the Virgin Mary, which end up striking at the dignity of womankind by presenting her as an object of consumption,” Chile’s Episcopal Conference, which includes Catholic bishops, said in a statement.
Sexualizing the Virgin Mary seems to be the artistic expression du jour, but be warned, as in Oyarzun’s case, you may be the target of threatening phone calls and have your doorstep smeared with excrement. It is obviously not the most modest presentation of the Virgin Mary, and done in service of fashion, perhaps the intentions are less reverential than religious art and iconography. Still…
Without overthinking the role of nudity in art and whether that applies to fashion runway models as equally as it did in medieval or Renaissance times, and perhaps just for the sake of discussion, I wonder if every artistic depiction of breasts or any other kind of nudity is necessarily a “tarnishing of sincere love” and a “strike at the dignity of womankind by presenting her as an object of consumption.” Is the problem the nudity or the framing of a busty Virgin?
posted January 21, 2009 at 1:49 pm
Well Esther, how would you feel if someone depicted your own mother in such a way?
Latin America, being predominantly Catholic, has always had a special devotion to our Holy Mother, and unfortunately that makes her a target in the eyes of people like Oyarzun.
I wouldn’t expect you to understand this, seeing as how you’re Jewish and the Blessed Virgin Mother isn’t part of your faith, but that in of itself makes me wonder: why on earth are you posting about this? It’s like me commenting on contemporary Jewish culture, something I know next to nothing about.
You and Deepak Chopra need to start a club. He does (did) the same thing over in his blog. It’s both annoying and offensive.
posted January 21, 2009 at 2:35 pm
Actually, Lenoard Nimoy (yes, Mr. Spock, who is also an accomplished photographer) actually did something similar in a Jewish context, which he calls, “The Shekhina Project”. Shekhina in Jewish theology means “presence”, that is, the presence of God in the world. The noun is grammatically feminine in Hebrew, and in some strands of mystical Jewish thought, the Shekhina is personified as the feminine aspect of God.
It is in this context that Nimoy made nude and semi-nude pictures of women, some wearing tallitot (Jewish prayer shawls) and tefillin (phylacteries, the small boxes containing prayers which are strapped to the hand and forehead of men when in prayer).
I make no judgment either way on these or the Chilean models–I post them to provide extra context and to indicate that this is not necessarily something that happens only in Catholic contexts.