On Jan 20, 2009, at 10:47 AM, William Conger wrote:
Michael, you didn't convince me. Sentimentality needs to be more carefully defined.
I'm working toward that, but this reply may not be adequate or sufficient.
For instance, let's separate the raw emotion, whatever it is, from symbols intended to evoke that emotion. When I look back to snapshots of my kids when they very young, I am filled with sentimentality, a longing even. That can't be bad. Yet, with a bit of reflection I'm aware of the idea that photos always evoke a degree of melancholy, a degree of self pity, because they image the irrecoverable past. The self pity part, my irrecoverable past, is not good because it separates me from reality, not for creative purposes -- I mean not for the benefits of being better able to cope with reality -- but only for the sake of encasing me in self-pity masked as longing.
I believe there an inverse relationship in images between the degree of external fidelity (does it represent something with an acceptable degree of accuracy?) and its internal formal properties (is it well made?).
Photographs offer the greatest "fidelity" to the source, generally speaking. And more so in such things as family photos and snapshots of events, despite the formal defects in them (overexposure, blur, poor crops, etc.), because typically and almost invariably they are used to evoke the original moment, which is remembered with great emotion. The photo is a token of that moment. Some, of course, are fleeting--a picnic or a trip to St. Louis--while others are very powerfully embedded--honeymoon photos, images of a child's birth, etc. The sentiment is infused in the remembered moment, not the photo (which explains why snapshots of the wedding reception can be even more moving than the professional photographer's portfolio of images). I would say that your sense of melancholy or self-pity is a sentiment not connected with the image, but with the memory.
I can follow your religious examples but I am troubled by your assumption that the religious leaders had the deep psychological insight you ascribe to them. The increase in depictions of the crucifixion, for instance, began to increase during the years of the black plague, when everyone was distraught by the suddenness and overwhelming trauma of the disease. I'm not suggesting a direct connection but the concept of death was uppermost in peoples' minds and therefore was a timely subject in a wide variety of imagery, religious and otherwise.
I can't locate all my old books, such as Bede, which I think has some stuff about images in it. I'm digging through Beckwith and a few others on Medieval art right now, including, btw, Panokfsky, and I may dig out my old notes, too.
I do remember that it was accepted as a settled notion among art historians that Christian iconography went through several stages, and they reflected the view of the Church at the time leaders: the Good Shepherd was used almost from the beginning, during the catacombs and era of persecution, partly because the artists just took over the Roman pastoral iconography and partly because Jesus called himself the Good Shepherd. Then, after Constantine's adoption of Christianity, the representations took on several other images: Christ as Judge (the Pantocrator), popularized in the Byzantine church, and Christ victorious, shown on the cross alive with head upraised, i.e., not dead, not defeated by death. Some scenes, again Byzantine, showed the Harrowing of Hell, Christ defeating death by opening the graves of the dead. Only later in the middle ages, perhaps after the Black Death, as you mention, did the "Dead Christ" image become more popular, and took on the empathetic qualities to show the suffering faithful that Christ, too, underwent great suffering (as in the Eisenheim Altarpiece, which we discussed last year).
Consider the "sentimentalizing" of angels. We now think of them as adorable little putti, Renaissance figures updated in the Victorian era into quasi-eros figures, and since the mid-20th century, transmogrified into innocent spirits, especially of a dead person who accompanies us and saves us from harm. But they were originally "messengers" from God, not terribly warm and fuzzy. The angel who guarded the gate to Paradise after Adam and Eve left. The Three Heavenly Visitors. And of course, perhaps the most famous angelic conversation in Christianity: "Hello, Mary, your honor. Got an important message from the Creator. You're in line to have a baby. Don't worry, it'll be taken care of. One chance to say yes or no. Okay?"
As for the holy cards, baseball cards, pornography references, what they have in common is their functions in material culture. Perhaps we should ask what role sentimentality has in pervasive material culture. To what extent are the tropes of material culture signified by such items as you mention.
You touch on a very salient point. Not only is the image or word a thing "out there" and the meaning is a construct "in here," but all of our encounters take place in society, which forms a context of signification for every thing and action. Nowadays, for example, it's almost impossible to display a swastika without being overwhelmed by all of the notions, feelings, "meanings" of Nazi Germany, despite the fact that its ceremonial and social use among many cultures is ancient compared to the 20th century meaning that now blots out all others. National flags or specific symbolic images, likewise, are symbols fully embedded in a social context. Johns' "Flag" desentimentalized the symbolic quality of the image by treating it with dispassion.
Let's add Christmas cards, or greeting cards of all sorts, or even calling cards, business cards, anything that symbolizes some unity between the card and its owner or giver and recipient. It comes down to a matter of values, how one values oneself and another or others. Is that sentimentalism?
I'm glad you mentioned greeting cards, which I thought to include but didn't in my previous message. There is what I call a pervasive "Hallmark sentiment," which I can barely tolerate when I wish to send a card for some reason. It is the height of kitsch, the preformulated sentiment, just like the Bambi-fying of animals and Smurfification of childhood.
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