Because of its slow pace, the gradual immolation of father and son didn’t make people anxious. It seemed as if father and son might be representatives of a past congregation who are reconciled to burn close to where the altar might have stood when the building functioned for the liturgy.
The old man seemed contented and happily resigned, while his stalwart son looked forward, almost confrontingly, and with a positive bearing, as if ready to march into the future. You sensed that they were getting to an age where the son might have taken over his father’s affairs.
The event cast the audience into a thrall of personal speculation.Credit:Christian Capurro
As an allegory, it’s touching for an artist to revisit the relationship between the divine Father and Son and to acknowledge that a part of the Father must pathetically die with the Son.
But it’s also theologically awesome. There are many amazing details of the Christian God, who is not only both the Father and the sacrificial Son but another person as well, namely the Holy Spirit.
All of these sacred entities existed from the beginning of time. They were not created, including the Son, because although a father is normally defined by siring a child, Jesus is explicitly the Word made flesh; and the Word was already there from the beginning. So the Son is not quite a son in the normal sense.
Since early times, Christians themselves puzzled over the mystery of the three coeternal persons. Augustine, for example, asked how the Trinity can be inseparable as one substance but also three distinct persons. On different occasions, each acts independently. Their identities cannot be collapsed into just one, even though they constitute one Divinity.
I don’t think that Deller necessarily has any theological answers but he provides a challenging angle on the way that fathers and sons—like mothers and daughters—are a bit interchangeable, because a father was always once a son and reproduces his dad’s image at each stage.
The audience who formed a changing vigil while the two archetypes went down from noon into the night may or may not have thought of the theological Son being inherent in the Father. But watching the simultaneous melt-down, everyone was recast with a common bond, where you realise that you reconstitute your parents till you, too, come to an end and thus push your parents further into the past.
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Father and Son review: Jeremy Deller’s pop-up installation burns bright
Source: Philippines Alive
