The figure’s sculptor, Pakistani-American artist Shahzia Sikander, emphasized the political significance of her work. The Golden Woman wears a lace-collar version of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and she is meant to symbolize women’s power in a historically male-dominated legal world and to protest against the rule of law. Reversal of Roe v. Wade.
But the work is also clearly an attempt at a religious symbolism, one forged in the fading of spiritual traditions. It matches a similar statue of the same artist with the word “Havah”, evoking the Arabic and Hebrew names for Eve, and thus making a pro-feminist statement on the monotheistic tradition. . But the image of the court statue is also pantheistic, with roots and flowers evoking nature-spirit, “a wonderful hybrid of flora and fauna,” as one art critic has put it. And finally, it’s hard not to see the horn-like braids, veins that look a bit like tentacles, like a Christian appropriation of the demonic image in a Christian anti-political statue. conservative.
But none of these explanations is stable; like those who play with magic or experiment on the boundaries of consciousness, Sikander devised a religious symbolism that lacks stable religious significance, intentionally opening up for the viewer to convey, summon energy spirituality in a non-specific way.
To the strict materialist, everything I have just described makes sense as long as it is understood as dramatization, experiential hunting, artistic experimentation. Only when it becomes serious does it go against reason.
However, strict materialism is itself a strange superstition of late modern times, and the kind of experiment I am describing is actually much more than that. more rational than a life lived as if the universe were random and indifferent and humans were genetic machines with the illusion of self-consciousness.
Yes, a lot of New Age and woo-woo practices make no sense or just lead to pyramid schemes; there are traps for gullible people everywhere. But the basic pattern of human existence and experience, a beautifully ordered and mathematically ordered universe brings extraordinary secrets to human inquiry and provides every kind of wild spiritual experience even in our supposedly disillusioned age (and even sometimes professional skeptics), making general openness to metaphysical possibilities a basically reasonable defaults. And this is especially true if you have no theological tradition, no religious upbringing to structure your encounter with the mysteries of the universe – if you are starting afresh, like many people today.
But precisely because the attitude of spiritual experimentation is justified, it’s important to emphasize something taught by almost every horror film but nonetheless slips through a lot of American spirituality: the importance of really careful in your openness and not just taking the interests of the metaphysical realm for granted.
