The Body as Belief: A Response to Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons' "Behold"
by Jaden Dejesus
In February of 2024, the Nasher Museum of Art opened an exhibition entitled Behold to the public. The exhibit showcased a selection of works from Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, the renowned Afro-Cuban multi-disciplinary artist – whose practice has been negotiating the threads that weave together art, identity, and spirituality for decades.
Towards the later end of a warm spring day, I had a chance to visit the exhibition here at the Nasher Museum on Duke’s main campus. There was a piece sprawled out at the entrance of the exhibit, lying widely, and unapologetically, it initiated viewers into the experiences to come. As I walked into the exhibit, I was alone, and it remained this way for some time. It was just me, and the guards. It was an ideal circumstance, giving me plenty of time to wait with each piece.
The language of celebration and solemnity are both perhaps fitting vocabularies for Campos-pons’s work. On the one hand, they are a vibrant and dynamic celebration of identity and divinity – the outpouring and indeed bursting energy of a vivid religious practice. Yet on the other, each piece carries with it some sense of a serious underpinning. Perhaps it is inherent to the nature of sacred things - pulling us both into ecstatic love, and the crippling realization of finitude.
Campos-Pons sees the eye of the artist as a tool, one that can be utilized to revolutionize the way we see and engage the world. Through her multi-media practice, she finds an avenue to present these transformative inquiries – through the use of color as symbol, photography as means, and ritualism as a constant motif. In this, Compos-Pons lives into her spirituality, through her practice, and makes the sacred seen.
I am reminded of what Christian theologian Linn Marie Tolstad once said about the work of theology. She says, “If theology were to tell the truth, it would speak of bodies, of flesh.” For Tolstad, doing the work of theology means to tell the bodied truth. In practice, transversely, Campos-Pons draws on performance and the tradition of procession to evoke a truthful and embodied artistic and spiritual practice. Yet, as we will see in a moment, this is beyond simply “art” about Santeria or identity. Campos-Pons, through her practice, is doing the work of theology, by attempting to tell the visceral bodied truth of her faith.
At many times, the threads of identity and spirituality were so thoroughly intertwined that to parse them as separate elements would be negligent to the work. Particularly, the work that I have in mind is her De Las Dos Aguas (Of the Two Waters) (2007).
De Las Dos Aguas (Of the Two Waters). 2007, Maria Magdelena Campos-Pons
This piece is a construction of several (Twelve) separate Polaroid photographs, coming together to form the final composition. The piece is large, taking up a majority of the wall – and the figures therein are near life size. Its composition consists of two central female figures of the Santeria pantheon (Yemaya and Oshun) as well as a group of human dolls held in a boat. Braided hair connects the figures, the figures to the boat, and the boat to a collection of peculiar brown paper bags. On each bag, the statement “this is not art” is printed. This is an important note that I will come back to shortly.
Visually, I could hardly help but be caught between these towering figures, my eyes dangling and joining the dolls in limbo. Through the tradition of color symbolism in Santeria, it seems that Campos-Pons’s spirituality and artistic practice were amenable to one another; with the result being a vivid celebration and suggestion of reverence. The crux of it though is that while the expression is shown in a gallery, it is first and foremost a sacred thing. Campos-Pons is aware of the limitations of art, (perhaps in particular, visual art) and reminds us of this through the stamps on the hanging bags. “This is not art” reads the small hanging bags. I do not think this is meant to be a tongue-in-cheek suggestion. It is a definite statement about what these two figures represent, and whose fate they hold in their hands.
I have come to learn that Campos-Pons has previously critiqued and advocated for new ways of understanding art that resist the voyeuristic and often racial tendencies of gallery and museum viewership. And it was in my experience that the work did not seem to be concerned with catering to these common tendencies. For Pons, there is something there that cannot be seen, cannot be named, not even through art. Yet it is through an artist’s eye that we are invited to come and see. I see Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons’s work, by and large as a dynamic comingling of the spiritual in art; but also, and in a very real way, a genuine example of how through attention and intention, artistic methodologies can engage with, participate in, and do the work of theology.
Jaden Dejesus Blango is a mixed media artist currently earning his Masters in Theological Studies from Duke University. His interests lie in the intersections between Philosophical Theology, Mysticism, Visual Art, and the Cognitive Psychology of Imagination.
