Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 28, 1993 TAG: 9303260387
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JERRIE PIKE SPECIAL TO THE ROANOKE TIMES & WORLD-NEWS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Most of these works have been hyper-crafted as combinations of richly painted and finished pictorial images surrounded by heavily carved frames into which the imagery of good and evil is extended. This show should be highly recommended. Its works, and the issues raised by them, are provocative.
Some knowledge of these subjects is necessary for the viewer's confidence. The Stations of the Cross have been important themes in Christian iconography for centuries.
Rutherfoord's Stations, except for XIII, are recognizably standardized: I - Jesus condemned to death; II - Receiving the cross to carry; III - Falling for the first time beneath the weight of the cross; IV - Jesus meeting his suffering mother; V - Simon of Cyrene helping Jesus to carry the cross; VI - Veronica wiping Jesus' face; VII - Falling for a second time; VIII - Speaking to the women of Jerusalem; IX - Falling for a third time; X - Jesus stripped of his garments; XI - Jesus being nailed to the cross; XII - Jesus' death on the cross; XIII - Taking Jesus' body down from the cross (his XIII is a combined image of the Madonna and child and the Pieta). Station XIV is the Entombment.
From an art historian's point of view, the key feature of this work is that it has been intentionally executed in a variety of historical styles, none of which is characteristic of contemporary art. Rutherfoord's fascination with the dramatic images of historical Christian art began with his interest in the work of the 16th-century German painter Matthais Grunewald, whose few works are masterpieces of Renaissance Christian expressionism.
A crucifix in the current exhibit displays the deep, gestural carving Rutherfoord has developed to convey the equivalent of Grunewald's style. Rutherfoord's Stations and altar pieces also borrow stylistic features from Byzantine art, the paintings of the medieval Italian artist Cimabue (active circa 1272-1302) and a number of others. If you own a basic survey textbook on the history of Western art, you can readily see some of these prototypes for yourself.
The art of the Christian church typically represented theological ideas through either symbolism or religious narration or a combination of the two. Rutherfoord's consistent preference for the symbolic mode suggests that he values the work's potential to initiate the viewer's emotional response.
Rutherfoord's painted images are often selectively cropped to focus on crisp details such as figures' heads. The best examples occur in the two large altar pieces based on Cimabue. The more unusual one shows the truncated head and torso of the crucified Christ, which departs from the more common full-length representation.
Among the Stations, his variant XIII is unique as a radical departure from the traditional Deposition. Instead, we see the most illusory of combined subjects, an iconographic "double-exposure." The Madonna enthroned holds the Christ child, rendered in a pale Byzantine-like manner to imitate those ethereal icons, then juxtaposed with a denser medieval style to render the body of the dead Christ, also resting across her lap. This way of combining images dramatizes Rutherfoord's apparent fascination with the hyper-realism of the imagery.
Bill Rutherfoord's work has developed from the paradigm of the university-educated artist (although he is more interested in art history than most). In this light, he may wish "The Blighted Chapel" to recall the ambient spirituality of the Mark Rothko chapel in Houston, or even the architectural transcendence of Le Corbusier's Notre-Dame-du-Haut in Ronchamp, France. And he certainly intends to provoke comparison with Barnett Newman's abstract formalist Stations of the Cross.
If these works are fair comparisons, then it is fair to say that Rutherfoord has replaced their exalted quietude with the transcendent anxiety generated by the overwhelming presence of gritty images. The only escape from this anxiety is the iconographer's handbook, which can be used to identify - intellectually - the symbols of spiritual quietude.
The appropriation of motifs, subjects and historical styles is a familiar aspect of some art of our own post-modern period. Here, however, the methods are bolder than those of most artists who do this because Rutherfoord has resisted the usual practice of inserting the identifiable historical image into a work of more contemporary style. Rutherfoord has elevated the appropriated style to a status superficially synonymous with his own autographic manner. This is a risky gambit, because it asks us to abandon the premium we place on the artist's autographic style per se, but it works as an intellectual challenge if we are willing to be flexible.
First, we must admit that we will simply learn nothing at all about this work, or about Bill Rutherfoord as an artist, by describing and analyzing color, line, space, and so on.
After all, is the choice of the color this artist's or Cimabue's? To consider the work in its totality, we must confront another issue. This work possesses a compelling desirability, but it also defines its own "critical resistance" by refusing to avail itself of the consumer culture for art and similar objects.
This raises issues of authenticity, historical value and aesthetic value in the visual arts and inhibits our ability to discern authentic work from pastiche, or even art from kitsch.
Rutherfoord asks, intentionally or not, whether such distinctions are always useful. Indeed, the work itself seems to prove that, for the ambient experience of art, such categorizations have little or no bearing on whether or not we are responsive to it, either through religious or human sentiment, or through the intellectual grasp of the critical issues that it raises.
The ambience of this exhibit is sufficiently powerful to entice us to "suspend disbelief" in many ways.
Is this a chapel or a gallery? Is this fine art in the contemporary tradition, or is this the panoply of magical devotional images of the late Middle Ages? Is this Cimabue or Rutherfoord? Our dilemma and our values, which we are willing to acknowledge only through radical confrontation, exist in what the art historian R.H. Gombrich called "the zone of fiction, which is also the zone of art."
Jerrie Pike is an art historian who teaches at Virginia Tech.
Bill Rutherfoord's "The Blighted Chapel" is on view at Roanoke College's Olin Gallery through April 11. 375-2354.
by CNB