The System of Gowns
Stach Szabłowski

The project by Iwona Teodorczuk-Możdżyńska remains a painted system which serves as means of deconstructing and reconstructing a very different arrangement - the symbolic system of patriarchal cosmology personified, constructed and warded in the Latin culture by the Catholic Church.

 

Let us examine closely how the system is constructed and how it functions. It consists of a series of oil paintings. When it comes to geometry, it is based on an equilateral triangle. When it comes to form, it is stretched between abstraction and figuration; a single element of the system – each painting – may be considered abstract, but a combination of these elements displays a figurative character.

The system’s mechanics is based on multiplication and assemblage; its discursiveness is based on combinatorics.

The key colors of Teodorczuk-Możdżyńska’s system are: the bishop ruby kind of violet, cardinal purple and papal white. In the area of linguistics, its structure is built by the feminine forms of names describing the highest ranks in the hierarchy of the Catholic Church: popesses, cardinalesses, bishopesses.

From the political perspective, this system serves as instrument of critique aimed at men, every man who uses theological and metaphysical arguments in order to legitimize his power over women, to legitimize inequality. 

 

*

The system consists of two iconographical patterns repeated in four variants – on four different background colors (green, ochre, indigo, and blue – a mix of indigo and white). By arranging the painted triangular canvases one creates bigger, multi-module compositions which can be expanded in a similar manner to fractals – the only limitation being the number of existing paintings – modules.

One needs a minimum of four canvases in order to arrange a polyptych depicting three liturgical vestments: for a bishop, a cardinal, a pope. The artist, however, painted their versions cut for women – the abovementioned bishopesses, cardinalesses and popesses.

Who could wear these cassocks? Indeed, the question asked within the perspective of Teodorczuk-Możdżyńska’s project brings up the issue of ordaining women. Priestesses have been present in many polytheistic religions, yet in monotheism it is an axiological fundament not to allow women into priesthood. For monotheism is an essentially patriarchal concept, with the figure of the Father in its center. According to Christian beliefs, He has a Son and the Son has a mother; however, in the biblical narration her role is restricted to giving birth to Jesus and then nursing Him. Mary, mother of Jesus is celebrated as a mother only – she has no divine properties, since these are inherited by the Son from the Father. In consequence, men consider themselves the only mediating agents between God and the people, which grants them also all the power coming with the role.

Monotheism is a fine reflection of a patriarchal, hierarchic structure of historical societies in which it was born thousands of years ago. In ancient cultures, which developed the concept of monotheism, women were deprived of political votes. Thinking analogically then, should religions in the modern, democratic world reflect modern societies where women – normally at least – function politically as equal to men? And should the equal rights be respected when it comes to priesthood? The Catholic Church insists on women being kept aloof from this perspective. They explain the attitude with theological arguments. “Jesus chose men (viri) in order to create the collegium of Twelve Apostles – we can read under 1577 in the Catholic Church Catechism – and so did the Apostles when choosing their disciples who were to take over the mission. The Collegium of Bishops, with whom presbyters are united in priesthood, embodies and actualizes the collegium of Apostles until the second coming of Christ. The Church is attached to the choice made by the Lord himself. Thus, ordaining women is impossible.”

This attitude was confirmed by John Paul II in his “Ordinatio sacerdotalis” epistle from 1994. In this text the pope remarked that even Mary, mother of Jesus, who was of all women most worthy of priesthood, was not elevated to this sacred role by her son. In conclusion of his epistle, John Paul II wrote: “Therefore, in order to leave no doubt in the case, so essential, since it considers the very founding of Church by Christ, by the office I hold and the power to consolidate brothers (see Łk 22, 32) I declare that the Church has absolutely no authority to confer holy orders on women, and that this statement ought to be considered as final by all the followers of the Church.”

Is this then the end of discussion?

 

And why would women even wish to continue the discussion? Why would they desire to achieve some rank within the Catholic Church – an organization which misogyny seems hopelessly incurable? The Church freed of this disease would in fact be a very different institution. It would lose its gender; ordaining women it would not be able to sustain the image of the Absolute being a Father - the grandest masculine figure. Such a change would surely have grave political consequences.

Fear which is triggered by the very possibility of women’s priesthood among the brothers in Church is well reflected in the story of pope Joan - the only woman who is said to have mounted the Throne of Saint Peter. Historians are unable to exclude every possibility of the story being true, yet it seems even harder to prove that Joan existed. Still, she is claimed to have ruled the Church in the mid IX century, though first texts describing the event are three hundred years younger. To be honest, it is likely that the story of pope Joan is a myth, which in any case does not deprive it of symbolical significance.

 

It is said that Joan was born in year 818 in Mainz, when other sources indicate England as the country of her origin. Never mind. The important part begins with Joan attaining for herself men’s clothes and altering her identity in order to gain access to education. She studied in Athens, became acknowledged as a brilliant theologian, and as a consequence of the career she was promoted, became a cardinal; and finally, in 855, she was declared the pope. Under the name of John VIII she managed to hold the office successfully for over two years, and the pontificate would probably have lasted longer had she not become pregnant. Her fatal exposure took place in Lateran during a procession from St. Peter’s Basilica to St. John’s Basilica - when the labor unexpectedly (sic!) started. According to one version of the story, the outraged crowd lapidated the popess there and then; according to another, she died in labor in an alley leading from the Coliseum to St. Clemens’s Church, and was buried there. Both versions bear the same meaning: a woman can acquire a role which is reserved for men, she can equal them in education, excel them even in the field of theology, occur more clever; yet she shall always be betrayed by her sexuality, her body whose inexorable fate lies in giving birth to children.

 

Wilgefortis is a character in some ways complementary to that of pope Joan. The story of this apocryphal saint is not included within the official martyrology of the Catholic Church, still, it remains present as a tale in the tradition. According to the legend, Wilgefortis was a devoted Christian and a daughter to the king of Lusitania. Her father planned her marriage with a pagan prince. The girl, horrified by this perspective, prayed ardently, and was rescued: she grew a beard. The pagan prince gave the marriage up; though, her father was so enraged that he decided to crucify the insubordinate daughter. Iconography holds this story in the image of an androgynous, bearded person hanging on the cross, wearing a women’s gown. But is this attire really made for women? Some historians claim that the character of Wilgefortis has its origins in early medieval representations of Christ crucified in a liturgical vestment – such image of the Savior was to emphasize the sacerdotal aspect of His sacrifice. In time, the figure of crucified Jesus wearing solely a loincloth superseded the one wearing a gown – which soon was forgotten. According to one of the hypotheses, the genesis of Wilgefortis’s legend stems from this very obscurity: when these age-old representations of a crucified person – bearded, yet wearing a gown – were interpreted by modern scholars, the person was wrongly assumed to be a woman with facial growth. 

 

In fact, however, it is not the case whether Wilgefortis is Christ wrongly assumed to be a woman, or a woman possessing Christ’s attributes – a beard and a cross. In both instances the gender ambivalence of this figure remains to the same extent subversive in the face of the patriarchal order established by the religion; as the figure of Joan the popess personifies the fear of feminizing the Church’s hierarchy. Arguments put forward against women becoming priestesses are articulated within the theological discourse, but what lies behind them is naked biopolitics, the practice of power executed by men over women’s bodies. What would happen if these bodies were dressed in vestments reserved for bishops, cardinals, popes? It is worth noting that even though Iwona Teodorczuk-Możdżyńska entitled her project “bishopesses, cardinalesses, popesses”, she does not depict persons, but gowns which priestesses in these ranks would wear. Why then not envision a man attempting to wear a women’s version of a cassock? The idea of queering Church hierarchy emblems introduces the notion of cultural gender to the very center of the Catholic discourse. While the Church is constantly toiling to exclude this particular notion, keep it outside the closed system, leaving it to advance in the secular sphere, and calling it – depending on the season, or relevant poetics – “cultural neo-Marxism”, “civilization of death”, “gender ideology”, among other names. When it comes to the Church, its obstinacy in negating the existence of gender’s cultural dimension stems from the fact that institutionalized religion remains one of the most hardworking instances creating discourse where gender serves as a cultural construct. The patriarchal structure of this construction is concealed behind a metaphysical facade decorated with ornaments of theological elaborates and sophisms. And here we return to the previously stated question: Why, standing firmly on the secular side, should one bother to tackle the issue of women’s priesthood, when the very institution’s authority seems, to say the least, debatable? Why should one feminize from the inside a system that is fundamentally misogynistic – why not criticize it from the outside? Well, the thing is that starting out from the position of equality there is surely no use in dealing with the Church’s theological facade built of sophisms, but one cannot ignore the inequality thriving behind the facade. One needs to penetrate it, get inside; since biopolitical constructs remain the object of the polemics, these constructs grow over the facade, they move on infiltrating various areas of the secular world – from morals and ethics to politics and legislation.

 

What has been constructed can be deconstructed and reconstructed. It is the possibility that Iwona Teodorczuk-Możdżyńska chooses to reach for in her project. Her canvases - based on geometry and simplification – can be seen as stemming from the modernist tradition of painting; yet, at the same time, the artist is dialoguing with the form and symbols of sacral art. Soon this dialogue becomes polemics. An essence of sacral art is to represent order of reality which must be seen as objective and unchangeable. An artist creating sacral art does not construct the image of the universe, but attempts to reflect its structure claimed to have been created by an imagined, supernatural being. The works of Iwona Teodorczuk-Możdżyńska remain the antithesis of such art. They refer to the cultural construct of gender and they are themselves elements meant to construct various, ever new entities. The artist utilizes the technique of assembly – one of the most subversive techniques of modernism. It enables one to reconfigure the image of the world , and in consequence, change the reality reflected in this image. Equilateral triangle, being the shape of Teodorczuk-Możdżyńska’s canvases, is a male symbol when pointing upwards, but it becomes female when its tip points downwards. The painting multiplies itself like a virus infecting patriarchal structures with alternative possibilities. The oppressive stagnation of sacral art is confronted with the liberating mobility of images. One, two, three – we’re starting the game.

 

​

translated by Katarzyna Podpora