Inverting Sacrality: León Ferarri’s Rejection of a World with Hell
By Rada Georgieva
Leon Ferrari is the only twentieth century artist who dedicated a major part of his artistic oeuvre to deconstructing the relationship between the Christian notion of Hell and human violence. His work opposes the tendency to understand the post-war era as a period of desacralisation and predominant secularism. Examining the biblical notions of good and evil, Ferrari’s work sits in the gray area between artistic appropriation and blasphemy. In particular, it considers the Christian theme of just punishment for the sinful as an ideological basis for present-day warfare and military violence.
A concern with Biblical ethics was always integral to Ferrari’s thinking, as his early education at Catholic school ingrained forever in his mind the idea of Hell. It is the division between believers and sinners, and the consequent condemnation to eternal suffering of the latter group, that Ferrari considered as deeply flawed. The artist’s provocative approach to this issue incited a religious uproar, even attracting the attention of Pope Francis I. The pope addressed an open letter to Ferrari, dealing with what was perceived as an offense to ‘’our Lord Jesus and the Holy Virgin Mary’’ embodied in Ferrari’s works.
One of the works which sparked angry reactions from religious communities was his controversial The Western Christian Civilization (1965). This piece, first sculpted in wood and then painted, consists of a life-sized crucified Christ attached to an American bomber aircraft from the Vietnam War, creating a powerful association between military acts of violence purported by the allegedly righteous mission of defeating the evil of communism, and the Christian mission of defeating human vice. Thus, despite often being reduced to mere attacks on the Christian doctrine, Ferrari’s artworks voice a poignant and often unsettling critique of how religious power structures can inform a violation of basic human rights.
León Ferrari, La civilización occidental y cristiana (The Western Christian Civilization), 1965, plaster, wood, and oil
Ferrari found it incredibly difficult to accept the art world’s admiration for paintings of scenes such as the Last Judgement, which propagate a good versus evil dichotomy. One of Ferrari’s artworks which represents this problematic relationship is his Tostadora (2000), which is part of a series focused exclusively on parodying the Christian notion of the torture endured by sinners. Tostadora, meaning Toaster, features several small crucifixes of Christ emerging from a toaster, making an explicit reference to hellish fire. By ridiculing such a central biblical notion, the Tostadora points to a deconstruction of its absurdity, and implies a rejection of the Biblical notion of just punishment.
León Ferrari, Tostadora (Toaster) from the series Ideas para infijiernos (Thoughts on Hell) ,2000. Electric toaster and plastic Christs, 29 × 35 × 10 cm. Collection of Alicia and León Ferrari, Buenos Aires. Photo credit: FALFAA
This critical stance further encompasses some of Ferrari’s most striking works – most notably his political collages produced to illustrate the 1984 report exposing the Argentinian military regime’s violation of human rights (1976-83). The collages were intended to criticize the support that the Church granted to an incredibly bloody and repressive government, which proclaimed itself as ‘’Catholic’’. The report focused on the painful memory of the Argentinian dictatorship and the practice of ‘’forced disappearance’’ sanctioned by it during the suspension of democracy. This involved the systematic abduction, torture, murder and eradication of all traces of the corpses of people associated with activism against the regime. In fact, Ferrari’s own son was ‘’disappeared’’ in 1977, and it was only later that it was revealed that he had been shot by a military official. Thus, the 1984 report investigating this practice was of particular personal significance to Ferrari.
Ferarri’s collages illustrating this report, of which there are roughly eighty images, are entitled Never Again (1995-6). The collages juxtapose renowned artworks, which depict scenes from the Bible, with photojournalistic materials showing leaders of the Argentinian dictatorship, as well as Nazi and church officials. The cover of the first fascicule of Never Again features a reproduction of one of Gustav Doré’s renowned nineteenth-century engravings illustrating the Bible – titled The Great Flood – alongside a popular black and white photograph of the military junta leaders who seized power in 1976, pasted in the foreground. The upturned Argentinian coat of arms at the bottom of the collage functions as their pulpit. Doré’s engraving is an apocalyptic depiction of naked men, women, and children who grasp at one another in an attempt not to fall into the waves of the flood. It refers to Genesis 6:7. The original Doré engraving features an accompanying passage that refers to God’s will to destroy humankind, due to its sinful nature, as a just punishment.
León Ferrari, ‘The Deluge’ by Doré, 1860 + Military Junta, 1995–6. Photo credit: Public Records Office
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/ferrari-never-again-96188
The theme of the flood also evokes the recent revelation that the disappeared in Argentina were often thrown alive into the River Plate from military aircrafts. The generals depicted in the foreground of the picture have turned their backs on the suffering bodies in Doré’s flood narrative, while performing a rather static salute. Their salutes seem to be directed at the viewer, commanding our attention. Ferarri explicitly targets the mutually beneficial relationship between the Church and the dictatorship by addressing the issue of punishing the ‘’disobedient’’ both on an exegetical and political level. This link between religion and dictatorship is furthered by the fact that reactions against the regime were often proclaimed as ‘’immoral’’.
By decontextualizing the media used for his collages, Ferrari rejects the interpretation of the dictatorship as a unique transgression. Instead, he frames it as part of a larger world history of violence often justified in biblical terms. Moreover, by including popular Nazi photographs in the series, Ferrari’s collages are not simply bringing attention to human rights violation within a specifically Argentinian context, but rather emphasize the need to examine the ideological relationships which enabled such abuses of power in the first place. Ferarri’s collage titled Hitler with Children + Videla and Massera with Children, for instance, juxtaposes Nazi figures with Argentinian military officials. As a result, Ferrari’s work points to a deeply flawed and pervasive moral reasoning which he sees as integral to a Western mentality which was based on a friend/enemy spectre of righteousness.
León Ferrari, Hitler with Children + Videla and Massera with Children, 1995-6
Another thought provoking example from the Never Again series depicts scenes from Giotto’s Last Judgement, in which people are being tortured and hung by different body parts. Ferrari uses this image as the backdrop for a black and white photograph of the processing military Junta, led by the Vicar of the Armed Forces, bishop Tortolo. This forms a direct reference to the notion of Christian Hell, that notion to which Ferrari was so vehemently opposed. Ferrari even went as far as demanding that Pope John Paul II ‘’cancel immortality’’ and that the Holy See announce a millennial without Hell. Furthermore, this image recalls the aforementioned 1984 report, in which disappeared survivors were described as having been able to ‘’escape from hell’’. Thus, Ferrari creates a powerful association between the victims of human rights violations and the biblical vision of tortured sinners, in turn inspiring many later artistic interpretations.
León Ferrari, Videla, Massera and Agosti with Monsignor Tortolo, Vicar of the Armed Forces + ‘The Last Judgment’ by Giotto, Capella degli Scrovegni, Padua 1306, 1995-6. Photo credit: A. Kacero
Ferrari’s work illustrates a powerful critique of the Christian notion of Hell and its relationship to military violence. Ferarri himself stated that he thought of Never Again as an ‘’anthology of cruelty,’’ and an endeavor to prompt a reconsideration of deeply flawed and ingrained ideological systems. The use of recognizable artworks, many taken from the canon of Western art history, reveals an attempt to construct a critique of the relationship between Western Christianity and violence on a universal, rather than simply regional, level. Hence, Ferrari’s humanitarian rhetoric prompts a reconsideration not only of the role played by religion in socio-political and cultural power dynamics, but also of religion’s larger historical implications.
Bibliography:
Ezcurra, Mara Polgovsky. “Beyond Evil: Politics, Ethics, and Religion in León Ferrari’s Illustrated Nunca más.” Art Journal 77, no. 3 (2008): 20-47.
Estévez, Ruth, Augustin Díez Fischer and Miguel A. López. The words of others: León Ferrari and rhetoric in times of war = Palabras ajenas: León Ferrari y la retórica en tiempos de Guerra. Los Angeles: REDCAT/CalArts' Downtown Center for Contemporary Arts, 2017.
Porterfield, T. “León Ferrari’s Hell.” Religion and the Arts 17, no. 1-2 (2013): 98-112.