Fishers of People

Paul Thek’s 1969 sculpture, Fishman, is a life-size latex cast of the artist’s body covered in fish. It was first exhibited hanging from a tree, suggesting that the human figure might be diving or swimming while being borne up by the fish. Later, the work was reinstalled in another exhibition—suspended high from the ceiling below the table on which it was first made—and was retitled Fishman in Excelsis Table.

Thek created Fishman after exhibiting, as The Tomb—Death of a Hippie (1967), an earlier cast of himself in a tomb. He viewed Fishman as a resurrection, describing it as ‘a figure this time not dead (Reborn! Reborn!)’ (Nagy 2010: 282).

The Ichthys symbol (or ‘Jesus fish’) was originally adopted by early Christians and has been used since as a sign to proclaim an affiliation with Christianity. Art critics viewing the first Fishman installation recognized these Christian associations and were disturbed by them, with one denouncing the installation as a ‘noxious bit of self-parading’ (Pincus-Witten 1969: 64; Zelevansky 2010: 26).

More positively, Fishman in Excelsis Table may help us to imagine the ultimate end of those who have been caught up in Christ, which is to be exalted through being made one with Christ in his resurrection. Thek wrote of having the ‘mind of a fish’, of jumping into the river of life, and painted divers doing just that. For him, the water is warm, and in this warmth we can find ourselves held aloft by the fish so that we fly (Wilson 2010: 116). 

Perhaps an invitation into the river of life—an immersion that is at the same time a raising up—is the core message of all those called by the Jesus fish, the Ichthys, to be ‘fishers of people’.

References

Nagy, Eleonara. 2010. ‘Delicate Matter: Two Conservation Case Studies on the Work of Paul Thek’, in Paul Thek, Diver: A Retrospective (New Haven: Yale University Press), pp.274–83

Pincus-Witten, Robert. 1969, ‘Joe Brainard and Paul Thek’, Artforum, 7.9: 64

Wilson, Ann. 2010. ‘Beatitudes: Remembering Paul Thek’, in Paul Thek, Diver: A Retrospective (New Haven: Yale University Press), pp. 116–19

Zelevansky, Lynn. 2010. ‘Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries: The Life and Art of Paul Thek’, in Paul Thek, Diver: A Retrospective (New Haven: Yale University Press), pp.10–27

Here, John Bellany shows us fishermen in Kinlochbervie, the most northerly port on the west coast of Scotland. Those gutting fish in the foreground are seated at a table as though at the Last Supper, while behind them a fisherman carries a yoke giving him ‘the appearance of being crucified’, and the boat on which he and others stand ‘is like the mythical boat used to ferry the dead across the river Styx to Hades’ (National Galleries of Scotland).

Bellany, who was himself born in a fishing village (Port Seton, near Edinburgh), paints a scene that would have been familiar to him, yet saturates it in the imagery of Christianity. He sees signs of faith in the fisher folk’s everyday work. And he implies that through such faith, the ordinary activities of these people who fish for fish can also become the activity of embodying the gospel, and thus transforming human lives and communities (‘fishing for people’). 

In Matthew 4:12–22 and Mark 1:14–20, we read how it was necessary for those responding to the call of Jesus to leave their physical nets, exchanging a literal sort of fishing for a metaphorical one. That call reflected the itinerant mission which would take them throughout Galilee and the surrounding countryside, culminating in Jerusalem with Jesus’s crucifixion. By the time Kinlochbervie was painted, however, the call to serve Jesus and his kingdom by ‘fishing for people’ could be incorporated into settled everyday life and pursued whilst also fishing for fish.

The change reflects the transitions of Jesus’s story, and where he is at work in the ongoing story of his followers. In the Gospel accounts, Jesus is consistently on the move and the task of his first disciples is to go ahead of him and announce the coming of God’s kingdom as he arrives (Luke 10:1–9). Following Jesus’s Ascension and the coming of his Spirit at Pentecost, his disciples instead find his Spirit within them, so he is with them wherever they are and whatever they are doing. His kingdom can come in the homes, the towns, and the workplaces of those he calls, without their having to leave. It is always, and intensely, ‘near’ (Matthew 4:17).

References

Updated before 2020. ‘John Bellany: Kinlochbervie’, National Galleries of Scotland, artwork label, available at https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/400 [accessed 5 February 2023]

A group of fish, whether of one or several species, that stay together for social reasons are known as a shoal, while a group swimming in the same direction in a coordinated manner is a school. In common usage, these terms are used quite loosely.

In Damien Hirst’s Isolated Elements Swimming in the Same Direction for the Purpose of Understanding (Left), fish of different species are swimming in a coordinated fashion ‘for the purpose of understanding’. They are thus, technically, ‘a school’.

Hirst uses repetition frequently in his works, often to indicate various sorts of conformity. The kind of understanding found through conformity is often that of a shared identity and sense of belonging, but the limits of such understanding can exclude what is novel, other, different, or imaginative.

At the point before they are called, the brothers encountered by Jesus in these passages (Matthew 4:12–22 and Mark 1:14–20) somewhat resemble the shoals or schools of fish that they were seeking to catch. As siblings working with their fathers, they are in groups where they, and those they know, have all done the same thing—fishing—for generations. As such, they are ‘all swimming in the same direction’.

The call of Jesus is a call to move in a different direction altogether, and in the pursuit of a new sort of understanding—although Jesus does helpfully make a connection for his hearers between his radical challenge to change and the life that these fishermen have lived up to that point. Jesus’s call involves leaving fathers, families, locality, boats, and nets in order to fish for people, not fish.

It is a call to a different sort of ‘school’; a different sort of pupillage—that of a disciple. How ready would we be to make such a change? How enmeshed are we in the established patterns of our lives? The speed with which Simon, Andrew, James, and John decide to follow Jesus suggests a readiness for a call beyond the conventional and familiar; from the known to the unknown.