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Reliquaries are small boxes or chests in which objects of ritual or religious significance are kept and displayed. David Kooi elevates the standard reliquary box from mere container to make it an integral part of the work. Kooi's reliquaries possess an instant alien quality, as if they had materialized from an unknown, unseen world. They are charged with an eerie spirituality, their contents difficult to perceive completely. |
Artist Statement |
The "sacred" is that which deserves veneration because of rarity or because it is not readily accessible to the human senses. What is inside a reliquary or box is sacred or valuable, naturally, because it is covered by an outside, which conceals as well as protects. While the sacred item is tucked away, safe from the hazards of sunlight, rain, and other elements, the outside is hard at work keeping the sacred safe. The outside, in this model, is only valuable for what it contains; the outside is hollow and only has meaning when it is "filled"; the outside is form which is actualized by content. The containers themselves, however, are also valuable, if only because it is to them we give over care of our precious items. Reliquaries or boxes, then, not only make an object's value manifest, but they also endow value. They enclose the valuable object in a form which is itself already associated with a valuable purpose. When the content of a container cannot be seen, or when it is missing or absent, or when it is fragmented or degraded, the container itself becomes the focus of interest. The two forms of containers which have figured most prominently in my work are reliquaries and urns, and boxes. Reliquaries and urns are vessels that quite literally contain social and personal histories. Historically, reliquaries and urns have been used to enclose and commemorate-and thus to designate as sacred-the fragile remnants of saints and other religious personages. Reliquaries and urns often mimic the shape of the objects they contain or in shape reflect the purpose for which they are used, and they come, really, to be more important than what they contain. The exterior of the reliquary or urn comes to serve as a substitute for its contents, which, after all, would turn to dust or blacken with grime if they were left vulnerable to the curious hands of the devoted viewers. What merely serves the function of holding the beautiful, sacred object becomes itself a beautiful, sacred object. We do not even need to know the contents to be made aware of the significance-the sacred value-of a reliquary or urn. Reliquaries and urns are functional, but they function to disclose and protect-to hide, to shut away from view-what they ostensibly seek to glorify and proclaim. In my own work I have sought to exploit the problems that reliquaries and urns already pose. I revise the reliquary or urn by imposing on its surface images which relate to the object inside, but only in a way that requires more information to decipher them-information which is not actually provided. Likewise, the form of what I call a "photo reliquary" or a "elemental urn" most often does not mimic or recall the shape of the object inside. Unlike traditional reliquaries and urns, in which the outside at least provides strong hints for what is inside (but which, again, might never be seen), my reliquaries and urns leave the viewer wondering about where the story really lies: the elaborate hints the give are intriguing because they are also obscure. Like traditional reliquaries and urns, my works tease viewers into performing tricky interpretive acts: "Look at me," they seem to invite, but what that "me" might be is unclear. My reliquaries and urns appropriate the historically significant form of the reliquary and urn for a very specific personal purpose, a purpose which, nonetheless, is elusive. As reliquaries and urns, they share in this larger, time-won cultural significance, a significance which they aggressively attempt to shirk. Boxes figure prominently in my work as well. Unlike photo reliquaries, the boxes I make are highly impersonal. They are all roughly the same size and shape, are all constructed of the same materials, and are the end-results of the same basic process. Despite their similarities, the boxes are all wildly unique. Like the reliquaries, my boxes take a very familiar form and turn it inside out. The boxes I make might be able to hold things, but it is unlikely anyone would want them for this purpose. The boxes are small and thus are already limited in capacity. Jewelry or other small items might not be suitable to these boxes either, however, because the boxes often are quite porous: though they are composed of heavy, durable materials, they are full of holes and openings, and they are lined with fractures; jewelry, coins, or similarly sized objects probably would just fall out. The boxes have all been deliberately altered or damaged in some way-changes which make them useless, but which oddly enhance their beauty. The boxes all are the products of quite intricate work. Therefore, while the damage highlights the boxes' uselessness, the care with which the damage has been inflicted also points out how lovely the boxes in fact are. Our intuitions assert that it is the nature of the form that boxes must be useful for something, but my boxes have been deliberately made mostly non-functional in order to suggest how complex the distinction between function and beauty really is. After all, would a box that was useful but made out of everyday cardboard and left without any distinguishing features be less "artistic," less beautiful than the boxes I make? The gut-level answer is yes, but when pressed to answer why, most people would have to admit that this answer is highly arbitrary. I hope that my boxes, as well as my photo reliquaries, are ways of pressing people to ask themselves this very question: why? |
Exposing The Sacred |
Meantime, every day I pray -- O Lord Photo reliquaries interrogate the traditional concept of the reliquary by exploding the divisions between "inside" and "outside" and between "content" and "form" which are essential in constructing the identity of the sacred item. "Sacredness in the Western understanding means that which is deserving of veneration because of rarity or because it is not readily accessible to the human senses. Of course, that which is "sacred" is always defined in terms of what it is not, of what is its opposite, and the counterpart to the sacred is the "profane." What is inside a reliquary is precious, naturally, because it is covered by an outside, which conceals as well as protects. While the sacred item is tucked away, safe from the hazards of sunlight, rain, and other elements, the outside is hard at work keeping the sacred safe. The outside, in this model, is disposable; the outside is only valuable for what it contains; the outside is hollow and only has meaning when it is "filled"; the outside is form which is actualized by content.
From the viewpoint of centuries of Western Christian tradition, reliquaries reflect an obsession with defining the makeup of the human form: in this image, human bodies are the outside which protect the precious contents, the everlasting soul. Bodies, then, are the most fundamental reliquary of all: like a church or Cathedral, which is considered a shell which in its paltry way makes room for visits from the spirit of the Almighty, the body is supposed to be a cage of muscle and bone which, until it dies and rots away, houses the eternal soul. Rene Descartes, the seventeenth-century French philosopher and mathematician, likewise endorsed a distinction between the mind, that powerful tool of reason and logic, and the body, the brittle vessel in which the mind rests. Descartes went farther and threw a wrench into the gears of Western intellectual history when he suggested the possibility that human minds might not even be real at all: what, he asked, if our minds are disembodied organs floating in preservative liquid in a glass jar, and an Evil Genius with all the powers of God simply stimulates our mind and convinces us we have bodies when all that we are is hermetically sealed bubbles of gray matter? A version of Descartes and traditional Christianity's "mind-body," or mind-soul" dilemma (which I have recast in aesthetic terms as the conflict between form and content) is the modern-day obsession with the paranormal, with claims that the human mind is an untapped wellspring of energy, the "power" of which, as one popular program asserts in its advertisements, can be unlocked. In this view, the body is considered an almost useless appendage because, for example, the adherents of such approaches point out, the mind is actively dreaming even when the body is asleep, and electronic monitors demonstrate that the brains of people in comas are as busy as ever despite their bodies impotence. Photo reliquaries challenge and subvert these understandings by quite literally forcing the inside to the outside--by making that which would be hidden seen, by exposing the sacred. The images on the outside of the photo reliquaries initiate a collision of content and form: the sacred object resting inside is advertised on the packaging (and, in this way, photo reliquaries also poke fun at another contemporary obsession: the commercial viability of art). However, photo reliquaries are guilty of false advertising: the image on the outside is not an exact reproduction of that which one will find on the inside, but something that merely hints at the history or context of the sacred item. The outside tells a story about the inside, but not a complete story, and not one that is easy to read, for that matter. Or, is it really the other way around--the item on the inside ending up rather secondary to the fragmented and fascinating exterior? In this way, photo reliquaries force the viewer to consider what they should be focusing their attention on: should they even care about the so-called content, or is the outside--the form--more important and more interesting? By projecting images related to the sacred item onto the surface of the reliquary, photo reliquaries perform a strange alchemy on the traditional categories of "inside" and "outside," and "form" and "content." Those neat distinctions are of little use in describing the construction and effect of the reliquaries. Also inadequate are descriptions such as "traditional" versus "contemporary." These reliquaries, after all, use traditional materials and are hand-wrought, and they recall the history of reliquaries from the medieval age and beyond, but they are also witty, self-conscious musings on the nature of aesthetic representations and therefore break cleanly with the very traditional (serious) purpose of reliquaries as repositories of highly important items. The items in these reliquaries are meaningful--for example, a fractured human skull, and a dried seed pod from a distant country--but photo reliquaries argue that the outside holds meaning as well, and that the aesthetic experience involves a more complicated response than can be evaluated by the categories upon which traditional Western art criticism, influenced by traditional Western religion and intellectual beliefs, has depended. |