Page 304 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

The most intriguing part of the picture is the ethereal substance emanating
from the eye of the camera, which makes it impossible for the cameraman in
the picture to see Jesus but which appears to outside observers like a smoke
screen hiding, and at the same time hailing, the image of Jesus. Indeed, the
painting makes visible to observers what remains invisible from the perspec-
tive of the cameraman. To be in the picture, as a subject seeking to visualize the
divine, does not generate any true understanding of this practice of mediation;
understanding, the painting suggests, can only be achieved by observers posi-
tioned outside the picture (cf. Weber 1996, 86). 1
To me, the picture comments on—or at least can be made to speak to—the
question of Christianity in the era of electronic (and even digital) reproduc-
ibility, popularized through the easy accessibility of video technology. It makes
a painted statement about the aspirations and ®aws of video and the new prac-
tices of religious mediation and forms of spectatorship to which it gives rise.
Depicting the camera as a new technology colliding with the divine, the paint-
ing shows that the camera actually blurs, or even conceals, that which it sets out
to picture. Interesting in this context is the absence of any pastor or institution-
alized mediator. All that is, is the video-camera, engaged in a new way of medi-
ating Jesus—as opposed to the old medium of painting—and creating a new
form of public religiosity hovering around a camera-derived mysti¤cation.
In order to understand the role of new media in the public manifestation of
Pentecostalism in Ghana, it is useful to take as a point of departure the question
of technical reproducibility so brilliantly discussed by Walter Benjamin (1978).
To what extent is there an analogy between the fate of the work of art and
the seeming decline of its aura (but see chapter 12 in this volume) and the fate
of religion and the problem of mediating the divine through new audiovisual
technologies? In ways similar to the aura, understood as “the unique appearance
of distance” (Benjamin 1978), camera-mediated representations of the divine
seem to capture the divine in, or even as, an image, and yet at the same time fail
to make present or embody the divine. Although Benjamin insisted that it is
impossible to depict the aura as such, I suggest that in our painting the smoke
depicts the aura of the divine, thereby tying into old representations of divinity
marked by some cloudy substance around them. Of course, it is not visible as
such to the subject in the picture, who seems to witness “the appearance or ap-
parition of an irreducible separation” from the divine (Weber 1996, 87) but only
to the outside observer, who is made to see that the aura here actually is a prod-
uct of the camera, thus vesting divinity with its own mysti¤cations. In this sense
one may say that the picture condenses the full complexity of representing the
divine, as well as the demonic, in the era of the electronic or digital moving
image.
I have not portrayed this fabulous image as a prelude to an aesthetic analysis
con¤ned to the sphere of popular art (cf. Wolfe 2000), but because I read it as
a critical comment on the interplay of Pentecostalism, popular culture, and new
audiovisual technologies. The image speaks to representations of divinity and,
by implication, the demonic in Ghanaian (and Nigerian) video ¤lms, which

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