The Working Week - Sunday Sermon
Hey, it’s Jesus, the bearded man in the red robe. His halo leaves little to doubt about his sainthood. In one of the watercolors Jack Bangerter assembled in his series Advent, Jesus reaches out to two skeletons, that in return stretch their boney hands to him, rendered in a style that emulates the simplistic approach of illustrations in children’s bibles. But is Jesus raising the dead, as in the biblical stories, or has he come back to raise the dead? Or is he simply shaking the hands of some skeletons, as if he was a rock star and these were his fans? In another painting Jesus seems to be explaining something to an even more bizarre group of listeners, consisting of two skeletons and three hermaphrodites. But what is Jesus sharing with them?
On a second note, he may just be shrugging. Maybe all he’s saying is something along the lines of: “I don’t know...” Bangerter’s work is informed by his religious upbringing in Idaho, as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, “a very community oriented religion”, as he describes it. Jesus thereby represents an idea of religious values deeply embedded in a community informing a culture with political consequences that influence every aspect of life.
In Bangerter’s works however, in spite of halo or robe, Jesus shows authority but hardly offers any orientation. He is recognizable, but not in a way that allows the viewer to decipher in terms of a concise iconology. As if he was a relative of the hermaphrodites, who physically embody ambiguousness as members of a third sex, escaping the binary system of gender. And the living skeletons seem to be at least as cheerful and alive as the others in
these works, as if they had escaped from a “dia de los muertos” representation.
If the “Advent” is a time of waiting, for Christmas, or the second coming of the Messiah, then Bangerter’s characters appear to wait for clarification, about themselves. This is where the viewer comes in - only he can connect the dots, if he wants the experience of Jack Bangerter’s work to amount to anything beyond being merely a rather hermetic illustration of an idiosyncratic narrative. In this sense, this is a very religious work, that believes in the best of the viewer, as much, as it appears to believe in the best of Jesus as a religious figure that can bring people together, if only to discuss what these paintings mean. But that’s a first step already.
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Andreas Schlaegel
artist and writer based in Berlin
