Slaves and Masters, Rich and Poor

Like the identity of the author of 1 Timothy, the identity of Banksy is disputed and contested. And like the literary corpus attributed to Paul, this work from Banksy is palimpsestuous, having been annotated and overwritten and reinscribed several times over. In its first iteration, it was an image of Steve Jobs, the late founder of Apple, carrying only a knapsack and an early Macintosh computer. Later artists added words to the original artwork. In large letters, ‘London Calling’ quoted the title of an album by British rock band The Clash—itself a quotation from BBC radio broadcasts during World War 2. Here, perhaps, it served as a reference to London as a particular centre of economic wealth and one of the preferred destinations of migrants. And, over the centre of the image, were scrawled the words ‘because worthless’.

This work appeared in 2015, as a humanitarian crisis consumed Europe. Refugees from North Africa, Syria, and elsewhere in the Middle East desperately made their way toward Europe, seeking both political and economic safety. In response, debates exploded across the continent, sometimes centring on economy, sometimes on national, religious, and ethnic identity, and sometimes on the threat of terrorism.

Banksy created this work on a wall in the Calais migrant camp in France, and the meaning seems straightforward. Pointing to Jobs’s own roots as the child of immigrants to the United States, the artist is making the common observation that immigrants contribute much more to our societies than they require in resources. After all, there is a good chance that the device you are reading this on owes something to this son of migrants.

But the ‘because worthless’ of a later anonymous artist provokes a question: what is worth, and where does it come from? The implication of an image of Steve Jobs as a refugee is that refugees’ worth is tied to their utility as economic subjects and objects. Immigration fuels growth, and innovation comes from the mixing of a diversity of cultures. No prophet of postliberalism could disagree. But the later addition, ‘because worthless’, complicates things.

Likewise, this part of 1 Timothy is complicated, and even confused, about what makes human beings worth something. Is it being a docile and obedient slave? Is it contentment with one’s lot in life? Or a life of devotion to God?

References

Ellis-Peterson, Hannah. 2015. ‘Banksy Uses Steve Jobs Artwork to Highlight Refugee Crisis, 11 December 2015’, www.theguardian.com, [accessed 20 June 2019]

Ibrahim, Yasmin, and Anita Howarth. 2018. Calais and its Border Politics: From Control to Demolition (Abingdon and New York: Routledge)

Diego Rivera arrived in New York as the Great Depression lengthened and deepened, and what he encountered there informed and inflamed the leftist political leanings he had already developed in his native Mexico. In this mural, painted during his time in the city, Rivera captures and comments upon the instrumentalization of humanity, as the grandeur and built environment of the city is undergirded by the suffering of its inhabitants—suffering which itself rests on a bank vault, guarded and minded by the beneficiaries of capitalism.

As is common in the later writings of the New Testament, this part of 1 Timothy is keen to offer advice for the living of life. Especially prominent here is a warning against wealth and the desire for it, both as a personal principle (it plunges people into ruin and destruction) and as a force that works on an almost-cosmic scale (it is the root of all kinds of evil). Framed as advice to a young believer, from a beloved pastor–mentor to a protégé in the faith, the warning is clear: wealth has sundered many from their faith.

While Rivera’s painting is oriented vertically, with one scene atop another, it editorializes the horizontal—the relationships between persons, which are conditioned and severed by the vertical disparities of wealth. At the top, the city rises with its skyscrapers, and cranes imply that more are on the way. But in that urban landscape there are no persons; only in the bottom two-thirds of the image do we find any human beings, and they are diminutive ones.

In the middle register, in a scene that almost evokes a morgue, the anonymous sleeping bodies of the homeless are packed into a shelter as a policeman looks on. And at the bottom, the bankers and their customers are the only people with faces. Their features are indistinct, but they exude calm and self-satisfaction.

1 Timothy’s warning is more intelligible to the masses in the middle frame than it is to the wealthy at the bottom, but Rivera puts the root beneath the ground just as the epistle does—the root of evil sending up both the triumph of the city and the misery of its labourers.

References

Dickerman, Leah, Diego Rivera, and Anna Indych-López. 2011. Diego Rivera: Murals for the Museum of Modern Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art)

Few parts of the Bible have had direr consequences in human suffering than the ones that urge enslaved persons to respect and obey their masters. The costs of these verses are on display in this photograph from the period of the American Civil War, taken near the capital city of Washington. This image is haunted by the shades of Scripture in the practice of chattel slavery, and with the protests of enslaved persons who bore the weight of biblical interpretation that fastened them in chains.

In her old age, Nancy Ambrose, grandmother of theologian and philosopher Howard Thurman, refused to hear any writings attributed to the apostle Paul, because of passages like 1 Timothy 6:1–2 (Thurman 1949: 30). She had been enslaved as a girl on a plantation in Florida, and had heard the preachers brought in by the slaveholder to preach biblical obedience to earthly masters. It is not difficult to imagine similar voices interpreting Scripture in this ‘slave pen’, where biblical discourses of captivity and servitude would have been whispered by captives and proclaimed by captors.

Pictures from the early days of photography, like this one, often receive attention for their documentary quality. But even as this image documents, it also functions as art that troubles and vexes the viewer’s perspective, and provokes pathos. This image is a profound commentary on and indictment of the practice of slavery, obliterating any myths about happy slaves or kindly masters. An iron-barred and double-latched door frames an inner yard, where more doors lead to cells where enslaved persons were kept. The most meagre of windows provide the only access to the world outside.

The photograph also evokes other spaces of subjection and violence, authorized and undergirded by biblical interpretation: the Inquisition, the colonial barracks, the Middle Passage, the concentration camp, the prison. It reminds us that not all readings of the Bible are life-giving, and indeed many come at great human cost.

References

Powery, Emerson B., and Rodney S. Sadler. 2016. The Genesis of Liberation: Biblical Interpretation in the Antebellum Narratives of the Enslaved (Louisville: Westminster John Knox)

Thurman, Howard. 1949. Jesus and the Disinherited (Nashville: Abingdon-Cokesbury)