One man’s treasure is another man’s junk.
There is no accounting for taste.
I have a statue of St. Joseph in my garden. I nestled it in the hedge, similar to how the French sometimes do in their formal gardens. The Japanese also fit sculpture or lanterns into the landscape so they blend in with the garden. My St. Joseph is a baroque stone carving, on a patinated concrete column. It is rather good devotional art - but not perfect - in fact, in the photo he looks kid of ugly.
I followed a thread on Spirit Daily about a couple who were asked to remove their statue of St. Francis from the common area of the condo they live in. Garden ornaments such as bird-feeders, birdbaths, and religious statuary are banned in the by-laws from common areas. I think that is reasonable. Most condos are like that, they wouldn’t allow pink flamingos either.
Reverse persecution - when you make us look at your bad art.
I doubt if the motivation is anti-religious, I think it is more likely a matter of aesthetic sensibilities, in an effort to preserve the integrity of the architecture and natural landscape of the complex. This is reasonable, given the variety of people’s taste in art and decor.
I worked in a Church Goods store that sold some pretty hideous religious garden ”sculpture”. One best seller series is manufactured by Space Age Plastics. The statues need to be filled with sand and are garishly painted in bright colors. Other companies produce concrete and resin statuary, which can be passable, yet are often sentimental and cute imitations of classical sculpture. Then of course there are those bathtub Virgins that every non-Catholic loves to make fun of.
Religious Disneyland.
It is bad art and it is usually displayed badly. Little plastic statues placed directly on the ground, with usually no elevation or design sense in the placement. It’s ugly. I know it expresses people’s devotion and that is nice, it’s still ugly.
In the northern suburbs of Minneapolis there is a large parish which has a private cemetery. The last time I was there people had placed innumerable ugly outdoor statues and religious artifacts, along with plastic floral arrangements on the graves of their loved ones. In addition, over the years several large stone statues have been placed around the park. It’s a mess - it looks like a carnival. Devotion is not always a guarantee of good art, design or taste.
I wonder how many Catholics who complain of modern church architecture and ugly tabernacles actually have plastic sand-filled devotional statues in their front yards?
October 9th, 2007 at 1:18 pm
My mom has a life-size concrete statue of the Immaculate Conception set into the brick wall that divides our back lawn from the rock garden closer to the house. She also has a few of those resin or stone angels made to sit on ledges. She keeps the plastic devotionals inside the house. Duh!
October 9th, 2007 at 1:45 pm
I currently don’t have any statues in my garden, but have asked for some for Christmas ;}
Seriously, it’s kind of hard to find a St. Fiacre statue. Growing up, my father had made a nice wooden holder for the Blessed Mother, like you see in the hills of Bavaria and alpine regions of Austria and Switzerland, that he had nestled in a pine tree. He was big into the Japanese garden stuff and liked that type of harmony and beauty, a carry over from his time in the South Pacific during WWII. When he passed away, I hauled a big, heavy, monster of a Japanese lantern from his yard and placed it in my own.
Now if I mix the lantern with St. Fiacre would that be a clash of styles?
October 9th, 2007 at 2:04 pm
*tarps over her sand-filled lawn art as she runs over here…
Actually, I love your St. Joseph. The uglier the better; for God’s sake, we can’t imagine that everyone was pristinely beautiful throughout Christ’s life, death, and resurrection! John the Baptist must’ve been hideous to many. All the better! And certainly we have found it to be true: what is essential is invisible to the eye.
But funny you should post just now on religious lawn art. Someone over on another street whose massive tree has been cut down, leaving a really tall stump on the hillside so that it looms well over a passerby, has placed a large-ish figurine of Mary atop it. Man, does it ever catch the eye, here in the coastal land of cold-shouldered politics. I’m certain some neighbors will have complained, but it is a riveting reminder. I’ll try to get a photo sometime and work it into a post.
October 9th, 2007 at 2:13 pm
Most statues use do to be painted and faded over time, hence the white albaster statues that are reproduced now. I’ll find some references for you, yes they looked garish.
October 9th, 2007 at 2:37 pm
I don’t know whether or not it was at the height of my paganism, but I was stationed in the Army in Germany for 30 months or so.
One of the nice things about being in Bavaria was that most farmers would construct a shrine on a pole someplace along a road on their farm. I suspect many stopped working for the Angelus several times a day.
While I never saw tourists stop, nor did I, it was one of the things that kept me Catholic, even when I wasn’t going to Church.
Another thing was the cross erected on the peaks of the half dozen mountains or so that I climbed (0), walked (1) or rode (5) to.
October 9th, 2007 at 4:35 pm
“The Bathtub Virgin”…Terry, you must have taken that picture in our town! (Well, what are people supposed to do with old bathtubs.) As for plastic flamingos, “getting flocked” is a popular fund raiser around here. You wake up in the morning to find a dozen or so plastic flamingos in your yard, and you have to pay to get rid of them.
October 9th, 2007 at 4:49 pm
Jeron,
A life-size concrete statue of the Immaculate Conception doesn’t sound very big
October 9th, 2007 at 6:10 pm
I love European wayside shrines.
I think Fiacre would work fine worked into the landscape on some sort of pedestal maybe. You can get some decent concrete and resin statues at Leaflet Missal. Bases and pedestals you have to get at a garden center. If anyone has $3000 Leaflet has a fabulous bronze St. Francis for sale - about 40″ tall. It is definitely not kitsch.
October 10th, 2007 at 12:18 pm
I wouldn’t call him ugly at all. Weathered, perhaps. Let’s reserve “ugly” for Elvis on black velvet and poker playing pooches.