Ulysses Castellanos

To Drive The Nail of Terror Into The Hearts of The Backsliding Sinners

My new body of work is divided into four “cantos”: To Drive The Nail of Terror Into The Hearts of The Backsliding Sinners (large scale photographic ink jet prints, 2008), Demon Seed (found lithographs, 2008),The Sybil Pictures (India ink on wallpaper, 2008), and Screen Test 1965 (2008)

To Drive The Nail of Terror Into The Hearts of The Backsliding Sinners explores the tension that exists between the sacred and the profane in religious art. The images that I am working with are taken from 8 mm porno films that are projected using vintage equipment, and then photographed with an SLR film camera. The resulting images are then blown up to six feet by four feet, thus exposing the impurities in the original 8 mm film, so that the scratches, dirt and discoloration from the brittle celluloid (dating back to the 1970’s) become an intrinsic part of the composition.

Two disparate interests have inspired the work: The first was the controversy surrounding the nudity of the figures in Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment. The second is the” Fire and Brimstone” sermons of The Great Awakening period in the United States.

The Last Judgment, a fresco painted on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel, is among Michelangelo’s most famous works, but it became the center of a heated controversy when a cardinal by the name of Carafa accused Michelangelo of creating immoral and obscene images and painting these despicable depravities in the holy chapel of the Pope. The fresco depicts the second coming of Christ, and the apocalypse. The sinners are doomed to the eternal flames of hell and are summarily carried off by demons, whereas the saved are elevated to the heavens, where they shall live in eternal bliss among the prophets and saints of old. The many figures in the painting are in varying stages of nudity. Here and there a penis can be seen, as well as the naked breasts of the women.

The controversy surrounding The Last Judgment was so notorious and far reaching that it gave rise to “The Fig- Leaf Campaign”; a censorship campaign waged against Michelangelo that culminated in the painting-over of the genitals in the images of The Last Judgment.

There is a dichotomy present in representations of the nude in religious art: On the one hand, the Church has traditionally condemned nudity as carnal or sacrilegious, and on the other, Renaissance painters like Raphael, and Caravaggio ’s depictions of the nude body were considered to be acceptable by the Church, so long as the nudes were represented within a religious setting (i.e. a nude child as a young Jesus Christ, paintings of nude cherubs)

Thus, the nude to me is a heavily charged symbol for artistic transgression, and for the differences that exist between cultures, customs and mores.

As mentioned earlier, I am fascinated by the American “Great Awakening” period. Particularly by the “Fire and Brimstone” sermons that characterized the era, the most famous of which is Jonathan Edwards’ Sinners in The Hands of An Angry God, in which the preacher condemns the backsliding sinners, upon whom will be meted eternal torment in the flames of hell. Edwards repeats throughout the sermon his axiom that “There is nothing that keeps wicked men, at any moment, out of hell, but the mere pleasure of God”. In this statement is encapsulated the central belief of the Great Awakening. That hell is a real, functional place, and that but for the grace of God, we are all doomed to burn throughout eternity.

The message is one of redemption through terror. The eternal flames burn and scorch, but the fear of hell is greater than our base instincts. Salvation through fear is what the Great Awakening provided, as well as the gloating of the saved in the face of the eternal torment of the damned. According to the doctrine of the Great
Awakening, the pure should rejoice at the pain and suffering of the impure.

I have borrowed the titles of famous Great Awakening and Quaker sermons of the 1700’s and have applied these titles to my images. Thus, the series of nudes I have created sport titles such as “When There Was Silence in Heaven” and “But Now The Day of Trial is Come”. These titles lend an air of credibility to the images, which are presented as paintings rather than as photographs, in order to intensify their connection to Renaissance painting.

In my new photo-based works, I have created an inverse paradigm. I have attempted to elevate the depraved and sinful to the level of the sacred, by taking these pornographic images and removing the pornographic elements from them, so that they resemble paintings of nudes, rather than stills from French or Swedish porno. Essentially, what I have set out to do is to take images of naked people engaged in “illicit” sexual activities, and to totally remove the sex from these images. I have thus turned the naked into the nude.

Demon Seed (2008) consists of a series of “Dick and Jane” lithographs that have been corroded by mildew and age. Dating from the 1920’s, the pictures where found on the street in Parkdale, a neighborhood that in previous decades had been home to the rich and famous of Toronto, but which is now better known for being predominantly populated by lower income families and mental patients. The images of healthy clean fun, childhood games, and antiseptic rambonctiousness of the pictures are contrasted with the decay of the paper itself, and the decay alludes to the hypocrisy and dysfunctional nature of the culture that produced them.

The Sybil Pictures (2008) are a series of drawings on wallpaper that are based on the drawings that were created by the many personalities of Sybil Dorsett, the world’s most famous psychiatric patient. The character of Sybil was based on Shirley Ardell Mason, who suffered from multiple personality disorder. Over the years, Sybil made a number of paintings and drawings as the different individual personalities that her psyche manifested. The Sybil Pictures are a window into our culture’s psyche. Underneath the veneer of normalcy, darkness looms.

Screen Test 1965 (2008) is a silent black and white video shot with a vintage 1970’s Sony video camera, The video is based on the “screen tests” that Andy Warhol shot in the early to mid sixties. The Screen Tests were film portraits that Warhol shot of every notable person who visited The Factory. According to a story, Bob Dylan (who was a notorious enemy of Warhol) looked at the camera with disdain in his eyes. This was a particularly trying time for Dylan, who was undergoing a crisis of influence due to his recent shift to electric instruments, and a period of general depression and dissatisfaction. In this reenactment of Dylan’s Screen Test, the train wreck that was the singer’s mental state comes to the fore.
The vintage sixties video art look of the piece is attained by the use of antiquated equipment, adding to off-kilter portrait of depression and mental instability.

Ulisses Castellanos