Page 303 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

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Fig. 14.2. Impossible Representation. Photograph by Birgit Meyer.

Jesus in Catholic and Protestant popular prayer books and illustrated New Tes-
taments. Around the image of Jesus there is some strange ethereal stuff, some-
thing like smoke, foam, or a cloud which is reminiscent of painted representa-
tions of divinity. Interestingly, however, here this substance seems to emanate
from the camera in operation, targeting and at the same time blurring the image
of Jesus.
While the man behind the camera is unable to see Jesus because the medium
blurs his image, the whole scene is clearly visible to the outside observer. Jesus’
partial invisibility is overcome, as it were, by the painting itself, which grants
the onlooker a full view on both sides of the smoke screen separating the me-
dium from the target of vision. The shop itself is a space where all sorts of
representations—photographs of persons like Ko¤ Annan, Nelson Mandela, the
former Ghanaian President J. J. Rawlings, and his successor John Agyekum
Kufuor, images from TV, posters, religious icons—are re-represented in the me-
dium of popular painting. Therefore this is a privileged location from which to
start a re®ection on how the accessibility of a new medium as video impinges
on practices of religious mediation, and gives rise to new forms of spectatorship.
Indeed, the picture offers a painted comment on the recent common use of
video ¤lms in order to depict the divine—and, of course, the demonic—for mass
spectatorship. Asked why he had painted this image, the young painter an-
swered ¤rmly and quickly: “I painted it because it is impossible.” Thus, he told
me, passers-by would be attracted to the shop just as we were; many people had
come and commented that by all means it was “impossible to make a video of
Jesus.”

292 Birgit Meyer