Peter in the House of Cornelius

Flags are symbols that gather various associations into shared values and histories. But what happens when what a flag represents isn’t shared at all? When a flag perpetuates a story that needs to change? 

These were the kind of questions on Sonya Clark’s mind when she discovered the original Confederate truce flag in the National Museum of American History. She asked: 

Why do we know the Confederate Battle Flag instead of the Confederate Truce Flag that marked surrender, brokered peace, and was a promise of reconciliation? What would it mean to the psychology of this nation if the Truce Flag replaced the flag associated with hate and white supremacy? (Fabric Workshop 2019: 1)

Clark realized that many of today’s racial problems in the US come from a distorted story about the American past, and that perhaps by addressing the symbol of the flag, she might provoke others to imagine a different social fabric.

In Many, the artist invited museum staff to weave one hundred Confederate truce flags. It’s not enough for one person to learn a new story; Clark translated this history into an interactive project on a large scale in which people were invited to re-narrate this history for themselves. The change she sought pushed this act of weaving into the register of ritual—shared, embodied experiences to provoke transformation of the mind and heart.

At the beginning of Acts 11, the Apostle Peter is in a similar situation as the artist. When he returned to the church at Jerusalem, he returned to a community in conflict. Could uncircumcised people be part of the Way or not?

It wasn’t just arguing about a social symbol—their opinions on the symbol represented social commitments about who was in the community and who was out.

Peter, aware of these dynamics, translates what happened in the house of Cornelius into the ongoing history of his community. He interprets his journey to Caesarea in theological terms—‘the Spirit told me to go with them, making no distinction’ (11:12)—and helps his community interpret the conversion of outsiders through their shared memories of Pentecost: ‘Holy Spirit fell on them just as on us at the beginning’ (11:15).

Both artist and apostle are not only telling new stories about the past; they’re giving their listeners opportunities to interact with it, to tell the story of a more expansive community, and be changed in the process.

References

Fabric Workshop. 2020. Sonya Clark: Monumental Cloth, The Flag We Should Know (Philadelphia: Fabric Workshop and Museum)

Inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s readymades—and the way Duchamp and the artists he inspired named art for themselves—Mierle Laderman Ukeles nevertheless uncovered a problem. By elevating ordinary things to the status of art objects, such artists often obscured the social structures that make museums and galleries possible in the first place. 

So Ukeles reconceptualized her approach to art-making, and developed Maintenance Art. Maintenance Art unearths the systems that sustain the art world, and provokes consideration of the invisible labour that makes it possible. 

In I Make Maintenance Art One Hour Every Day (1976), Ukeles collaborated with over 300 maintenance workers at the original Whitney Museum. For more than five weeks, she asked custodians, plumbers, and other labourers to name an hour out of their work shift as a time when they were undertaking ‘maintenance art’, and to document these moments with a camera.

Ukeles was transferring her ‘naming authority’ as an artist to those without a voice, and by the end of the project, she covered a museum wall with documentation of these new artists. The resulting collage of images both uncovered and dignified an invisible working class that maintained the life of the museum as viewers walked through its halls.

Peter’s vision of a sheet unfurling above Joppa functions in a way that is comparable to Ukeles’s grid of images. Heaven opened to reveal a bounty of ‘unclean’ animals and, three times, a voice said ‘Rise, Peter; kill and eat … What God has cleansed, you must not call common’ (10:13, 15). If Jewish food codes can be interpreted as shaping who eats together as much as what is eaten, then Peter’s vision likewise presented him with more than just food. Like I Make Maintenance Art One Hour Every Day, it revealed a community of outsiders (those who eat unclean food) as those he must now accept. It provoked him to reorient his social values.

Ukeles wrote in her manifesto that she was ‘trying to listen to the hum of living’ (Ryan 2009). Maintenance Art, then, is the practice of a certain kind of vision—to see all people, especially those obscured by hierarchies and the built environment, as part of a shared life. Whether pondering Maintenance Art or receiving a mystical vision, we too are invited to change the way we see others. To join in a ‘hum of living’ that’s much larger than the social boundaries that can limit our worlds.

References

Ryan, Bartholomew. 2009. ‘Manifesto for Maintenance: A Conversation with Mierle Laderman Ukeles, 18 March 2009’, Art in America, available at https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/interviews/draft-mierle-interview-56056/ [accessed 14 October 2022]

Ukeles, Mierle Laderman. 2014. ‘Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969: Proposal for an Exhibition CARE’, in Feminist Art Manifestos: An Anthology, ed. by Katy Deepwell (London: KT Press)

The works in Sarah M. Rodriguez's Aggregate series are less depictions of landscapes and more the result of intimate collaboration with them. The artist hiked throughout Los Angeles, collecting dirt and clay and making plaster casts of animal prints she discovered. After months, she pressed them into a mixture of soil and resin. 

Where landscape painting traditions represent idyllic scenes and ignore the various biological sources of canvases, brushes, and pigments, these sculptures present the environment. Rodriguez’s Travertine Aggregate questions the assumption that artists stand outside the world to depict it and suggests that art emerges when artists open themselves to the agencies of others (Wright 2020). The deep-ecology philosopher Arne Naess would call this searching for the ‘ecological self’ (Naess 1995: 226), an identity based not apart from nature but entangled within it.

The trajectory of Peter’s changing sense of his leadership in Acts develops toward a similar insight. In the early chapters, Peter leads a fledging church; he helps them search for a new apostle (1:15) and defines their values as he confronts Ananias and Sapphira (5:1–11). He preaches with confidence at Pentecost (2:14) and on Solomon’s Portico (3:11–26), and he’s so ‘filled with the Holy Spirit’ (4:8) that some Jewish leaders recoil from his ‘boldness’ (4:13). His reputation as a healer spreads so wide that the lame begin to lay in his path so that ‘at least his shadow might fall on some of them’ (5:15).

But Acts 10 doesn’t begin with Peter’s leadership; instead, the centurion Cornelius, prompted by an angel, sends for him. Meanwhile, a vision leaves Peter ‘perplexed’ (10:17) and ‘pondering’ (10:19). And when Peter visits Cornelius’s house, he begins not with preaching but with questions: ‘what is the reason for your coming? … Why have you sent for me?’ (10:21, 29). Peter doesn’t lead, preach, or heal. Instead: he listens. God, through Cornelius and his household, invites Peter to journey past the threshold of his own agency.

Peter’s experience and the Travertine Aggregate have this risk in common: both artist and apostle begin their work not from their own designs but from attending to forces beyond their control. Rodriguez’s vision didn’t start with the self but instead emerged out of a dialogue with the land. Likewise, Peter didn’t bring good news to outsiders but rather discovered that it was already afoot, entangling communities together across their social boundaries.

References

Naess, Arne. 1995. ‘Self-realization: An Ecological Approach to Being in the World’, in Deep Ecology for the Twenty-First Century, ed. by G. Sessions (Boston: Shambhala)

Wright, Michael. 2020. ‘Personal interview with the artist, Los Angeles, January 2020’