Borderline Antigone is a social practice art project co-authored by Julia Sushytska, Alisa Slaughter, Professor of Creative Writing, and Artist Prof. Marco Schindelmann. Borderline Antigone combines film, sound, writing, and scholarship. We revisit Sophocles’ famous tragedy to expose the ways in which Antigone fails to successfully confront state authorities. We invite our audience to consider how they inhabit social and political places, relate to authority, and feel about their commitments to family.

East Side Memories and Futures video was a part of an installation by
Borderline Antigone at the Riverside Art Museum
(June 28 – October 2, 2015).

Sushytska's latest video project, Icons, was filmed in the Summer of 2015 in Ukraine. In it an artist, an icon painter and restorer, and an art historian discuss the art of painting icons. The essay below elaborates the philosophical significance of icons and the process of painting them.

Icons: Creating a Different World

(This essay was commissioned by the Riverside Art Museum)

The word “icon” comes from the Greek word eikōn (εἰκών), and means likeness, image, representation, semblance, phantom, pattern, or archetype. Yet, the kind of paintings that became known as icons, and that are central to several religious traditions, such as Orthodox Christianity and Greek Catholicism, are neither representations, nor likenesses or semblances. They are, instead, artifacts or artificial organs that allow one to see the world differently than he or she ordinarily does. Icons use a specific set of techniques that help their viewer tear away from the habitual ways of experiencing the world. The range of topics depicted by icon painters is restricted to scenes from the lives of those who were able to break through their “natural” or “all too human” limitations: Jesus, Mary, and the saints. This is why icons do not strive to be naturalistic or realistic. Icons are windows into a world with a different set of laws and truths. 

Any painting, or any work of art, is supposed to help one transform his or her way of seeing and relating to the world. Any art work is not an imitation of objects or beings, but a creation or co-creation of them. This is especially true of icons that, traditionally, are painted according to an elaborate set of rules and require the artist to master both specific painting techniques and spiritual practices. The set of principles followed by traditional icons might not seem unusual to contemporary audiences familiar with recent developments in art, although they do contrast sharply with the main tenets of Western art of the Renaissance period. 

Icons use a specific method of inciting a viewer to see differently and this method can be traced back to the artistic practices of ancient Egypt, and, in particular, to the funeral masks that were painted on a sarcophagus that housed an embalmed body. This ancient artistic practice was carried over into the Hellenistic period, and the portraits that date back to that time where nothing other than funerary masks. They were often painted while the person was alive and aimed not so much to resemble this particular human being as to convey who he or she was once freed from weakness, shadow, or blemish of physical and spiritual kind. Throughout the centuries these portraits came to play a significant role within Christianity and acquired an elaborate symbolic meaning.

Icons do not use the linear perspective based on Euclidean geometry that dominated Western art during the Renaissance and that is still frequently assumed to be the only or the correct perspective. Instead, icons rely on what Pavel Florensky called the reverse, or perverse, perspective: an icon shows sides or parts of things that cannot be seen simultaneously. For instance, a face is painted together with the crown, temples, and ears; a profile is combined with a frontal view; the outlines of buildings diverge, instead of converging toward the horizon. Unlike traditional Western paintings, icons have more than one center: different parts of a building are drawn, as if viewed from separate angles, and sometimes as if each had its own horizon. The same principle is often applied to faces, hands, and feet. There can also be more than one source of light, while shadows are altogether absent. Colors or the folds of clothing need not correspond to anything actual and often look quite unnatural.

Faces, hands, and feet are usually rendered by a different artist than the one who paints clothing and architectural structures. A wooden board—as opposed to a canvas—on which icons are traditionally painted, is prepared by yet another artist, who creates a niche for the future image—a distant echo of a casket, but also, symbolically, a window into a differently ordered reality. Each icon is most frequently a creation of several artists and the personal style of a painter is not nearly as important as it is in Western art. 

These are merely some of the differences between traditional icons and the portraits by Renaissance artists. These differences might look like naive mistakes or might seem to indicate a lack of skill or training. Instead they belong to a distinct aesthetic approach. Icons are elaborate visual, conceptual, and spiritual riddles. They incite the viewer’s eye and his or her soul or mind to make the effort of “seeing” herself and other beings differently. Icon’s reverse perspective or several simultaneously coexisting points of view—something that reminds one of Picasso—helps the viewer to take a more active approach toward a painting. By struggling to resolve visual inconsistencies, the viewer becomes a co-creator of an art work. By seeing an object or a being simultaneously from several angles, he or she is encouraged to revise his or her understanding of this object or the world.

The act of painting an icon is, symbolically, the act of creating the world. The act of viewing an icon can amount to the same: icons are artistic creations that encourage the viewers to re-create themselves and the world around them. Icons can be best understood as an additional, artificial organ that expands human sensibility and thinking. This is especially true of the icons that are experienced as a part of a larger setting—inside a church and during a religious ritual that involves the other senses: I inhale the incense, hear and sing ancient chants, move my hands and the entire body while performing the sign of the cross or when bowing to the ground.

Julia Sushytska

See Pavel Florensky, “Obratnaia Perspektiva,” Filosofiia Russkogo Religioznogo Iskusstva XVI-XX vv. [“Reverse Perspective,” Philosophy of Russian Religious Art of XVI-XX Centuries], ed. N.K. Gavriushyna, 249. Florensky (1882-1937) was a prominent Russian philosopher and theologian of Armenian origin. His essay “Reverse Perspective” is available in English in Pavel Florensky, Beyond Vision: Essays on the Perception of Art, ed. Nicoletta Misler (London: Reaktion Books, 2002).