Keith McGowan: Art and Heresy: Breaking the image: a 12th-century Ai Weiwei?
My previous posts have set the scene in the part of West Sussex where the Sussex muralist worked and taught. By now you should have a pretty good idea where the three painted churches are, and a picture of the ways in which the area's Roman legacy was still very present in the early 1100's, when the frescos were being made.
We'll turn now to look in detail at the murals themselves. I'll begin with a sequence of posts focussing on a painting which is probably most emblematic of all the challenging images which survive from this artist's brush: Hardham's Deception of Eve and Adam. It was audacious when it was made: the artist's own Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, and every bit as much a slap in the face for traditional art lovers of its day as Ai Weiwei's 1995 provocative sequence of photos, which showcased the wilful destruction of a two-thousand-year-old vase.
Ai Weiwei's unsettling triptych still provokes discussion concerning the monetised value of art, authenticity, and respect for cultural heritage. It seems the Sussex muralist knew very well what they were doing with their own carefully judged swipe at convention in The Deception of Eve and Adam. Other of the Hardham murals suggest that the medieval painter was fully aware of the possible consequences for challenging the accepted idea of what a holy image must be.
