"ICON"this image has spurred
some debate over on
my betterhumans blogpredictably some visitors can't see beyond its gratuitousness....
"A crucifix in a toilet bowl isn't meaningful or funny, it's just a gratuitous insult to millions."
to which i replied....
it is a DOLL.
it is a plastic action man doll, with a beard.
the doll is attached to 2 pieces of wood that were formerly components of a wooden desk.
and.......
in response to any readers who share the belief that.... "the jesus-in-toilet pic should be taken down because of the offensive and immature nature of it. you will get nowhere if you show immaturity or actively try to offend." blah blah
some thoughts-
shit makes the flowers grow.
theres nothing fundamentally "wrong" about a toilet, nor what we do in toilets.
meanwhile toilets are connected to one another via the sewers. and thus they interconnect our homes. the sewer pipes are our roots deep underground and each of our homes is a sewer flower.
as for "immaturity or actively try to offend"
i am deeply offended when the pope publicly proclaims me to be "evil". and he has a bigger audience than me. (...
Pope calls for halt to 'evil' gay marriages...)
while the image's unsophisticatedness is only rivalled by the dimwitted thought patterns of many so called christians.
and when someone commented that...."A picture may be worth a thousand words... but that picture is worth about 2"...... i replied in more detail.......
some of us are visual people, some of us are word people.
and some are both.
but in this instance, for me the image IS the blog post.
the text is supplementary conceptual scaffolding. and i find a satisfying depth and richness in both.
meanwhile atheism isn't the only issue on offer here. though it is a vitally important one. it is about belief....
"belief is a tool for achieving effects; it is not an end in itself." said Peter Carroll
...and it contains the concept of representation, in a variety of dimensional formats...... 2D, 3D, language, aswell as mind space, and the dark sewer underworld.
plus most prominently it is about HUMAN BIOLOGICAL SPACE. that tiny room in my flat that is allocated purely for the act of shitting and pissing (and our negative associations with such biological necessities). toilets are important.
but perhaps one needs to be familiar with the comics on the wall to appreciate some of it. especially the glimpse of animal man when he meets his own author and discovers he exists only in 2D and only when he is read by someone.
as for the subject of "immaturity"....... that just seems like a conceptual strait-jacket, similar to the equally redundant concept of accusing someone of being "unprofessional". It is mostly used as an excuse to justify colluding with tradition and shepherding us along "the acceptable" well beaten paths only.
i am a 45 year old adult who relishes and celebrates both being and growing older. i also live in financial poverty, as a consequence of priorities and choices that i make. And rather than being creatively blocked by the abscence of money, rather than indulging in the futile frustration of believing that i need MORE material possessions to fulfill myself, i believe instead that it is important to work with and re-value what is freely or cheaply available in our individual manifest realities.
the image is a glimpse of my daily reality and the concepts i immerse myself in every day whilst shitting and pissing. it is important for all of us to share glimpses of our true realities with one another, rather than relying on the tired uniformity of some old best seller from the dark ages.
i also believe that a certain amount of roughness, unsophisticatedness and immediacy is an important element of photography in an otherwise super smooth and gloss saturated digital age.
and finally the notion of offence. its that old saying.... "one man's meat is another man's poison". aspects of my ordinairy daily reality may seem extraordinairy or disturbing to someone else. but i'm never going to allow that to shut me up.
full size image 144k
meanwhile...
"At least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols."
...said Aldous Huxley
and...
an old farmer named Hyrieus offered hospitality to 3 passing strangers who turned out to be the gods Zeus, Poseidon and Hermes.
in return, the gods offered to father a son for Hyrieus by urinating on the hide of the ox that they had just consumed. Hyrieus buried the hide and in due course a boy was born from it. Hyrieus named him Urion, after the mode of his conception.
