Theories of a Brown Monkey

20th March 2011

Post with 3 notes

Sacredness and Genitaliae

I was in an art gallery in one of those numerous malls in the country when I happen to walk into one exhibit with angels with their genitals covered by little pamphlets of the exhibit. I was curious, looked for the introduction of the exhibit and read up on an explanation by the head artist:

If I were to choose the best source of quotations for my dissertations, it would not be the Bible. It would be Webster and his masterpiece, the Dictionary of the American Language, or for that matter, dictionaries of other languages. It had always been quite revealing to me that a lot of conflicts had been waged due to misunderstanding caused primarily by the reinterpretation and misinterpretation of words invented at the start to mean something else before, now differently. Contextual meanings are bullshit. If we stick by the original intention of a word, based on how it was invented and defined at the very start, then such confusion would be minimized.

From Webster’s New World Dictionary (William Collins Publishers, Inc., 1980), please allow me to lift: sacrum noun, plural sacra or sacrums [from the Late Latin sacrum, … literally, sacred (bone) from the former use in sacrifices] a thick, triangular bone situated at the lower end of the spinal column, where it joins both hipbones to form the dorsal part of the pelvis: it is formed in man [politically correct: humans] of five fused sacral vertebrae.

From John C. Traupman’s Latin and English Dictionary (New York: Random House, Inc., 2007), please let me quote: sacrum sacri neuter noun holy object, sacred vessel; holy place, temple, sanctuary; religious rite, act of worship, religious service; festival; sacrifice; victim II neuter plural noun worship, religion; secret, mystery; inviolability; sacra facere to sacrifice; sine sacris hereditatis (fig) godsend, windfall.

What is Webster’s definition of “sacred”? sacred adjective 1. consecrated to or belonging to a god or deity; holy 2. of or connected with religion or religious rites [a sacred song] 3. regarded with the same respect and reverence accorded holy things; venerated; hallowed 4. set apart for, and dedicated to, some person, place, purpose, sentiment, etc. [sacred to his memory] 5. secured as by a religious feeling or sense of justice against any defamation, violation, or intrusion; inviolate – synonym see HOLY – sacredly adverb – sacredness noun.

And what is “sacred” in Latin? From Traupman, sacred adjective sacer sacra sacrum.

The dictionaries alone provide the foundation of my thesis.

The sacrum is at the dorsal (back) part of the body. On its front are the human genitals. In males, this is would be called properly the penis and its attachments. In females, this would be properly referred to as the vagina and its related accessories.

The area where all these are found is normally referred to as the sacral area. For obvious reasons, it would now be very clear that the most sacred of all human activities is coitus, or the intentional union of male and female genitalia (otherwise known colloquially as “fucking”, or for the prudish, “love making”) designed primarily to assist in the act of procreating other human beings on this planet. For this reason alone, I wonder what happened to its sacredness when some organized primitive religion took hold of the concept and completely reversed its original definition.

The Indians (specifically the Hindus), the Greeks, and the Romans, as well as other cultures, had a clearer understanding of the nature of procreation, deifying the penis in some instances and devoting temples for various positions of the sexual activity in celebration of the Kama Sutra. In Tibetan Buddhism alone, yab yum, or the union of wisdom and compassion, is presented in painting and sculpture featuring a holy man and his Shakti in complete embrace with their genitals unified.

What happened in Christianity and its art patrons, both secular and religious? Censorship was the name of the game. As early as the dark ages till now, cocks and cunts, now called dicks and pussies, have been artistically hidden via contorted poses and magical appearances of wind furled cloths trying very hard to conceal the genitalia.

I prepared the above dissertation for an anthology of paintings which I have titled Sacred Liberation. But with the exposition of one painting included in the exhibition Recycling Bubbles, which management chose to censor, I find this piece of literature applicable. Now, I have to hide the genitalium because management would not allow such exposure in their family friendly mall, nor would the gallery director allow such blatant male (or female) nudity in his territory.

The dark ages have extended their stay. I just wonder what kids do now while googling their assignments. I am sure they encounter much more than just small dicks.

Though I find such move of the management disappointing and the artists’ choice to compromise quite amusing since any good artist would die first before abandoning their work in such a manner to the whims of their patrons, I have to point out the simplistic items and etymological problem this essayist of ours assumed and built upon. Maybe it is just me, but I have a nagging feeling that the essayist basically misrepresented Christian and non-Christian aesthetics, but more about that later, let us focus on the words sacred and sacrum and see if his deconstruction are valid to build upon his criticisms.

So where does the word sacred came from? Well it is a word relatively new to the English language, around the 13th century as some etymologist would suppose, and this word was derived from the past participle and obsolete verb sacren, which in turn was derived from a much older French word sacrer which of course was derived from the Latin sacrare. And, no, it does not mean the base of the spine, but rather it means “to dedicate, to separate from the mundane, to make holy, to protect, to enclose”.

If one is familiar, even in a casual manner, with old religions from Greco-Roman-Egyptian polytheism, Gaelic, Germanic and Celtic druidism, Judaism, Vedic religions, Mahayana, etc., one would realize that mountains, groves, forests, caves, parts of temples, that they deemed holy make the access of unordained men and women to these sites simply unthinkable and taboo, and breaking it would be punishable by divine or human hands. These parts are holy and sacred and they are set apart, made exclusive, saved from the vulgar. And if one would not use Dan Brown as one’s historical source, one would realize that more often than not priests and priestesses within these sites don’t get jiggy and freaky in there rather they not only starve themselves from the basic drives of sex but also of human contact and food.

Last time I checked, if you’re hungry the last thing in your mind is to have sex.

However his play with the word of sacred associating it with the bone sacrum is witty though not exactly accurate. The word for that part of the body was coined in 1753 from the compound late Latin word os sacrum, or sacred bone. So, yeah, the Ancients did not really coined the word historically speaking, which pretty much explain why there is little indication of pornographic images in their temples. Actually all the record of sexy time we have of the ancients, at least for the Greeks, are seen in their mundane stuffs such as vases or walls in the bath houses. As pointed out by the date, we coined it lately and particularly by the medical institution since this particular bone was the part in the animal that was taken out to be offered to the gods since it is the seat of procreation.

So yeah, I guess he got that part right to some extent except that we named this bone not because having sex is sacred per se but rather ripping up your balls and offering it to the divine is. Ouch.

Another particular part I was left raising my eyebrows was the attempt to juxtapose non-Christian religions to Christianity and suggesting that the former build their religions and cultures on and around sex while the latter builds their religions and subsequently cultures on censorship and fear of the genitalia. Most likely he had not read any works by Foucault. The Greeks enjoyed their boy-loving most certainly, and particular Vedic schools formulated the Kama Sutra but to say that these religions see sex as the be all and end all of their culture is simply being naive.

The Greeks in particular saw sex as one of the many facet of living the good life with the good life being the cultivation of virtue such as moderation. The higher your post in society or the wiser you are seen, the more controlled you are with the basic faculties of hunger, anger and most certainly lust. We remember how Socrates rebuked his handsome student Alcibiades for his sexual advances to gain wisdom. We also remember an account how Cicero sneered at Roman senators for not paying attention in Republican affairs because they were drunk from orgies and always adjusting their sitting positions because their anuses were still sore. One would also notice, as pointed earlier, that pornographies adorn their cups, their gardens, their bath houses but never in their Senate halls or temples. One has to wonder if sex, at least for the Ancients, is indeed seen as something holy or something vulgar. If anything, at least for the Greeks, sex is something to be enjoyed certainly but it is something that has to be controlled.

Even the culture that produced the Kama Sutra views sex not something to anchor one’s existence or culture but rather it is a maya, an illusion, if not an outright distraction from one’s dharma on fulfilling the four stages of life. One good example is the Sun Temple Konark, we realize that from the outside it is adorned by statues displaying various sexual activities however when one looks beyond that and within the temple one witness the image of the asexual, the calmed, the divine. We see in this particular temple a juxtaposition of the vulgar world of pleasure and the sacredness and reality of Brahma. One would also notice that from the base we could see how animalistic sex with different acrobatics progresses, as it goes up, into more human, more intimate, more mild positions and when finally when one reaches the top we see a flat base which indicates a letting go of all desires, a freedom from it. The worshiper therefore must overcome the world of pleasure, let go of it to find the divine.

So how about Christianity? Surely their sex paranoia runs deep, right? Actually no. If anything, Christianity, at least the Roman rite, is particularly celebratory of the act of sex, provided that it is set apart, i.e. sacred, in other words within the sacrament of marriage and free from the valgur. One remembers how this religion vigorously denied forms of gnosticism that sought to demonize the sexual act as something corrupting. One also needs to look at Church-commissioned artworks featuring the penises of Adam, David and Christ. One must remember that the Church aesthetic and philosophical posture had always been a Greek-Judeo marriage of moderation and proper ends. So the Church’s treatment of the arts is judged by the standards set up by Christ in the lens of Plato and Aristotle and would tell us that, at least by Christian standards, it is proper that you do art on something sacred that happens to show a genital and not do art on a genital that happens to show something sacred.

Anyhow, I think the essayist’s poor attempt to criticize the management decision does not change my impression of them selling out. Despite the essayist’s apparent rage in his essay above, the fact remains that they still allowed this horrible compromise to their works happen, and I doubt that they are making a statement and most likely they swallowed the compromise in order to sell their work. And yes, I know it would be very lucrative since his pieces are huge (I mean the canvass not the dicks, I do know art collectors now buy by the inches, no pun intended) that they are rather willing to demean their craft with fig leafs made of pamphlets. Lastly, even though I do not know the whole story, I think the management’s decision is less about Christian aesthetic standards or bias against non-Christian aesthetic standards but more likely a manifestation of disciplinary powers?

Disciplini-wha?

Read Foucault and you’ll get my drift.

_______

Sining Kamalig an art gallery presents Enrico Manlapaz: SACRUM, an anthology of paintings which liberate the sacred, at the Inner Room of Sining Kamalig, Level 4, Gateway Mall, Araneta Center, Cubao, Quezon City.

The paintings were conceptualized and composed by Enrico Manlapaz, executed and painted by the following talented emerging artists: John Rex Cabaroc, Averil Paras, Kim Mark Oliveros, and Mark Anthony Bello.

The exhibition, which was formerly restricted from general public viewing may now be viewed under controlled conditions. The show runs from March 9 till 24, 2011 only. Mature audiences are invited. Entrance is free. Gallery hours are 12 noon to 9 pm daily. For further information, please text 0920-9537426 or email enricojlmanlapaz@gmail.com.

Tagged: Foucaultaestheticsartgenitalsgreekindianphilosophysacredsining kamaligart