The Value of Humans, Critters, And Stuff

Space Force Construction by Lyubov Popova

'Birds of No Nation' series by Shamsia Hassani

Leviticus 27

Commentaries by Petra Carlsson Redell

Works of art by Gad Weil, Lyubov Popova and Shamsia Hassani

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Not Ours to Sell

Commentary by Petra Carlsson Redell

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Agnes Denes’s (b.1931) Wheatfield, a Confrontation (1982) took six months to create—or to assist the process by which it created itself. She planted a two-acre field of golden wheat near Wall Street in Manhattan. In 2016, Gad Weil created a similar installation in Paris, planting wheat at Place Vendome. Two of the most hectic and expensive pieces of land in the world were filled with crops gently waving in the wind.

As part of the project in 1982, a questionnaire was composed, with questions concerning human values, the quality of life, and the future of humanity. The microfilm containing the answers was desiccated and placed in a steel capsule in a heavy lead box in nine feet of concrete. ‘The time capsule is to be opened in 2979, in the 30th century, a thousand years from the time of the burial’, Denes wrote.

Will our species still be around in 2979? It doesn’t look like it. Humanity currently appears to be the dinosaurs and also the meteor that killed them, all in one. At least, that will be true if we continue to ignore the last paragraph of Leviticus 27—the one where it all starts making sense.

By the end of the chapter, it is not so much about substituting holiness for money, but about what is holy to begin with.

All the tithe of the land, whether of the seed of the land or of the fruit of the trees, is the Lord’s; it is holy to the Lord ... And all the tithe of herds and flocks, every tenth animal of all that pass under the herdsman’s staff, shall be holy to the Lord. (Leviticus 27:30, 32)

In other words, we may use some, but not all. We may transfer some value from God to money, but not all. Because it is holy, and not ours to sell.

Participating Not Possessing

Commentary by Petra Carlsson Redell

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Valuation was part of the role of a priest as set down in Leviticus 27, and to be dependent on the priest’s valuation was to be dependent on the priest. This is a troubling notion. There was no choice in the matter: ‘Whatever value the priest then sets, that is what it will be’ (v.12).

The Russian prerevolution avantgarde were sick of valuers. They dreamt of a society where the value of possessions would not primarily be measured by abstract and artificial criteria, but valued for what they were: for their function, and for the life they enabled. Artists like Lyubov Popova (1889–1924) even imagined a society where the dynamic will of the material world itself would lead beyond monolithic abstractions (the absolute ideas of capitalists or other ideologues). And so she studied Byzantine iconography for inspiration (Popova 1990).

Popova and her circle called themselves not artists but constructors, because art cannot and should not lift itself above the world. Art is never abstract, never pure ideas, but always tangible. The artist is the material’s assistant: no more, no less. The mind of the artist is not that of some genius who is able to see (even invent) the radically new, but a combiner of already existing elements.

Popova’s Spatial Force Constructions share colours and form with early Russian iconography. However, instead of rendering the faces of the saints in figurative images, as is the custom in icon painting, Popova paints what she finds is paintable. That is to say, she paints what the surface and colour actually can present, not merely represent—namely, the very creativity of form, light, colour, and matter themselves.

To Popova, the artistic task is to contribute to the ongoing construction of reality. Not because we control it, but because we are part of it. Yet despite her modifications of traditional icons, there is a point of contact in her work with the wisdom of the iconographers: divine presence is never our possession, but it will be known in and not on the far side of materiality.

So, what would Popova say to the priest/valuer of Leviticus? Possibly: we are not dependent upon your valuation, Mr Priest, but on construction itself. On the divine creativity of matter.

References

Popova, Liubov. 1990. ‘On a precise criterion, on ballet steps, on deck equipment for warships, on Picasso’s latest portraits, and on the observation tower at the military Camouflage School at Kuntsevo (a few thoughts that came to mind during the vocal and ballet numbers at the Krivoi Dzhimmi Summer Theater in Moscow in the summer of 1922)’, in Liubov Popova, ed. by Dimitri V. Sarabianov and Natalia L. Adaskina, trans. by Marian Schwartz (New York: Harry N. Abrams Publishers), pp. 380–81

Aiming High

Commentary by Petra Carlsson Redell

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You would think that the Bible, of all books, would consider a life in the Temple a good thing—not something you would want to buy yourself out from. But in Leviticus 27:1–8 there is in fact a price list of what it costs to exit. The prices are the same as in the slave market at the time, and unaffordable to most (Bergsma 2007: 108).

If a young man or someone with power over him had promised his life to God and then needed to take the promise back by paying instead, that was especially costly. A woman cost much less to ‘buy back’, as did the very old and young.

The truth is that these women, children, and men were offered as slaves to the Temple, and the price list offered an escape, at least in theory (Kamionkowski 2018: 291).

To buy oneself free from being God’s slave: was that an early sign of a liberal world order providing a pathway to freedom? Was it the first substitution of capitalism for God? Is it the sign of the two paradigms being inevitably intertwined, or could we imagine life on this planet beyond either obedience to a stingy God or the ensnaring embrace of Mammon?

While still in Kabul, Shamsia Hassani (b.1988) had to spray fast. Kabul was and is a dangerous city, especially for women, and the religiously motivated critiques of her from traditionalists approaching her on the streets were harsh. She carefully planned and practised each composition in her studio before venturing out to spray a wall; she had no time to hesitate once she had made a start on it outdoors.

After the Taliban were pushed out of Kabul in 2004, Hassani did not find the situation in the country getting better. Women are not expected to paint, nor to be painted as liberated by the love of a guitar, as in this mural. Nor could they be shown with released hair (hair well on its way up to heaven).

‘Art can only change people’s minds, and then people’s minds can change the society. That is what I hope for’, Hassani says (Delgadillo 2016). So yes, she does imagine. Her spray paint expresses the transformative imagination of yet another revolutionary generation, one that does not settle for any greedy world order, whether divine or human.

References

Bergsma, John Sietze. 2007. The Jubilee from Leviticus to Qumran: A History of Interpretation (Leiden: Brill)

Delgadillo, Natalie. 2016. ‘This Feminist Street Artist Paints a Hopeful Image Over War-Torn Kabul, 29 February 2016, www.citylab.com, [accessed 28 May 2020]

Geranpayeh, Sarvy. 2019. ‘Meet Afghanistan’s First Female Graffiti Artist, who is risking it all for her murals, 14 April 2019’, www.thenational.ae, [accessed 28 May 2020]

Kamionkowski, S. Tamar. 2018. Leviticus, Wisdom Commentary (Collegeville: Liturgical Press), pp. 289–96

Singh, Devin. 2016. ‘Speculating the Subject of Money: Georg Simmel on Human Value’, Religions 80.7: 1–15

The Value of Earthly Life

Comparative commentary by Petra Carlsson Redell

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It is hard to uphold an idealized view of Temple life after having read Leviticus 27. The price list of humans, animals, houses, and land is something modern readers may find hard to engage with, and yet the chapter raises questions that are pivotal to our time. Is a young man more valuable than an old? Is a woman less valuable than a man? An infant less valuable than a grown-up? If not, how is that made visible in practical, societal life?

There is a straightforward explanation for why the price list was needed. An established religious tradition of votive offerings could include people being offered as servants to the Temple. For purity reasons, only priests could serve at the Temple, though, and this is why the human offerings had to be substituted for silver shekels. In practice, then, the price list itemizes the prices of votive offerings and is based on the market prices for slaves at the time.

A straightforward historical explanation, however, is not necessarily a theologically satisfactory explanation—at least from a Christian point of view. The facts of Leviticus 27 taken together—the established practice of offerings and the inclusion of humans among those offerings, with their valuation based on the slave-market—might question nothing less than the presence of an eternally compassionate God in the biblical text.

This exhibition aims, on the one hand, to throw light on this problem, and on the other, to indicate alternative pathways through this text.

The practical valuation of women is concretely addressed by Shamsia Hassani in her art as well as in her practice of it. As a Muslim woman graffiti artist in Afghanistan, Hassani has had to fight for her right to pursue her artistry. If your value in society is religiously legitimated, and based on your freedom and formal power, then a woman is worth less than a man in today’s Afghanistan. Faced with such a situation, Hassani’s art suggests that a different order is possible.

As a key voice in the Russian constructivist movement, Lyubov Popova was part of a nonobjective yet political artistic debate in the early twentieth century. While the constructivists in general distanced themselves from spiritual and religious interests, Popova was prepared to combine the spiritual and the political. In her Spatial Force Constructions, the forms out of which she constructs her compositions are frequently ray-like: elusive but transformative. Popova was convinced that the entire material world was one of constant construction, and that her task was to take part in, and assist, the ongoing construction of reality and society.

If Hassani addresses the valuation of women, Popova addresses the valuation of productivity and matter as such. She questions the habitual connection between the productivity of an object and its value. The connection is based on a separation between the valuer as subject and the valued as material object. To Popova, such an understanding of reality overlooks the transformative, even spiritual, character of the material world. Popova’s work, in other words, suggests a political yet spiritual evaluation of the material world that counters the price-list-valuation of Leviticus.

If both of the artworks mentioned above offer alternatives, or even counter-movements, to the biblical passage discussed, Gad Weil’s work is used to illuminate a more constructive aspect of Leviticus 27. By transforming a priceless piece of land into waving crops, his art created a paradox simply by letting wheat grow.

In fact, it is a paradox that even the meticulous price list of Leviticus has no means to handle:

If a man dedicates to the Lord part of the land which is his by inheritance, then your valuation shall be according to the seed for it; a sowing of a homer of barley shall be valued at fifty shekels of silver. (Leviticus 27:16)

But what if the price of the land does not correlate with its productivity value? What if soil prepared for agricultural cultivation just isn’t all that valuable anymore? What if value as such has got out of hand? Are we then free to sell the soil fast, take the small profit, and reclaim the land for more lucrative purposes?

No, not necessarily. The last paragraphs of the Leviticus chapter remind us of another ancient religious tradition, namely that of tithe. One tithe of what we get from the earth is holy and not ours to take, use, or sell. One tithe belongs to God and must be given back.

This exhibition, thus, uses a difficult Bible passage and three works of art to deal with troublesome issues relating to how we value humans, critters, and stuff, and to how that valuation affects our life on earth.

References

Carlsson Redell, Petra. 2020. Avantgarde Art and Radical Material Theology: A Manifesto (London: Routledge)

Kamionkowski, S. Tamar. 2018. Leviticus, Wisdom Commentary (Collegeville: Liturgical Press), pp. 289–96

Next exhibition: Numbers 11