In the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, a red, white and blue portrait of President Obama hangs in the front hall. For months, people from around the world have sought to purchase an array of items with its image in order to show their support and connect with a watershed moment in history..
The popular artwork, rendered by the young artist Shepard Fairy (b. 1970), can be seen on everything from T-shirts to small tins of mints. Beyond a mere likeness of Obama with a pastiche of attractive colors, the portrait has demonstrated an iconic capacity similar to the graphic image of Cuban revolutionary Ernesto 'Che' Guevara.
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While Fairy's masterpiece signifies Obama's campaign themes of 'Hope' and 'Change', it also serves as a powerful representation of struggle, achievement, pride (especially for African-Americans) and the arrival of a new generation in American politics.
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Christian Icons and Iconoclasts
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If a picture is worth a thousand words, then an icon may be worth a million paragraphs. In a religious context, icons, particularly images of pagan deities and saints, have been the subject of significant controversy since time immemorial. In the second book of the Torah and/or Bible, the Second Commandment directly forbids the use of religious icons in stating, 'You shall not make for yourself any graven image or any likeness of what is in heaven above (Exodus 20:4).' As Jesus was also proclaimed to be both God and human by the Church at the Council of Nicaea (325AD), was an artistic representation of Jesus - or perhaps the Saints, who were mere men, be considered a 'graven image'? After the deaths of the Twelve Apostles, the Church not only allowed depictions of Jesus and his disciples but actually commissioned the construction of elaborate Christian icons in the form of sculptures, stained glass and murals. From the beginning, the Church hierarchy understood the power of iconic symbols upon the largely illiterate masses. A beautiful statue of the Virgin Mary could inspire and console women far more effectively than the words of a mass rendered by a male priest in Latin.
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By the 8th century, the Church, led by the Byzantine Emperor Leo III, began to rethink the legitimacy of religious icons. When the Christian armies of Europe went down to defeat against superior Muslim forces, Leo interpreted the outcome as a sign of God's disfavor with the veneration of icons in the Church - a practice similar to the pagan 'idolatry' frequently condemned in both the Old and New Testaments. As a result, Leo became an 'iconoclast' (an 'image-breaker') and took steps to purify the Church by removing the once sacred images.
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Although obeyed, Leo's order was anything but universally accepted. The Church hierarchy divided over the use of iconography, and Byzantium would be riven by the explosive issue for the next few centuries.
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Islamic Iconoclasm
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In 2000, the Taliban, a fundamentalist Islamic group who sought (and still seeks) to create a strict Islamic state in Afghanistan, dynamited the ancient Bamiyan Buddhas. These enormous mountain stone carvings were viewed as an existential threat to Taliban ideology, and the Islamic radicals, believing all non-Islamic symbols to be heretical, erased culture and history in an attempt to bring about Islamic absolutism to their land.
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It was not the first Muslim-inspired act of cultural destruction. From instructions in the Hadith, a collection of oral and subsequently written sayings from the prophet Muhammad, his first followers despoiled the statues and icons leftover from the pre-Islamic deities in Mecca in 632AD. Incidences of violent iconoclasm recurred and reached an apex when the nose of the Great Sphinx of Giza was destroyed by a Sufi Muslim in 1378AD.
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Icons and Reason
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Icons, whether political or religious, contain the power to move people beyond reason and into a wholly emotional realm. As such, societies must place images into context and be reminded of their often misleading and manipulative nature. Thomas Jefferson, who appears in a godlike form in the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, DC, has indeed earned a laudable historical reputation. However, visitors must remember the slaveholder behind the stone columns. In nations devoid of secular education based on reason, an iconic image can be a precursor to a cult of personality. The totalitarian regimes of Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin and Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran (1979-89) all relied on the emotive appeal of symbols (i.e. the swastika) and charismatic portraiture (i.e. a picture of Stalin as a father-figure) to control and coerce public opinion. When used in moderation, however, iconic symbols can be a positive expression of cultural identity.
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Hopefully, President Obama will be able to live up the expectations projected from his own iconic image over the next four or eight years.
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J Roquen