Article Sidebar
Article Details
The author(s) retain copyright on work published by AOSIS unless specified otherwise.
Licensing and publishing rights
Author(s) of work published by AOSIS are required to grant AOSIS the unlimited rights to publish the definitive work in any format, language and medium, for any lawful purpose. AOSIS requires journal authors to publish their work in open access under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence.
Read more here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
The authors retain the non-exclusive right to do anything they wish with the published article(s), provided attribution is given to the applicable journal with details of the original publication, as set out in the official citation of the article published in the journal. The retained right specifically includes the right to post the article on the authors’ or their institution’s websites or in institutional repositories.
Previously published work may have been published under a different licence. We advise the community that if they would like to reuse the work to consult the applicable licence at article level.
Main Article Content
God as burden: A theological reflection on art, death and God in the work of Joost Zwagerman
Abstract
In one of his essays on art, Dutch author and essayist Joost Zwagerman (1963–2015) reflects on the work of (Dutch) South African artist Marlene Dumas (1953). Zwagerman addresses in particular Dumas’ My Mother Before She Became My Mother (2010), painted 3 years after her mother died. In his reflections, Zwagerman proposes an interpretation of Dumas’ work. He suggests that Dumas, in her art, does not accept the omnipotence of death. Maybe against better judgement, but Dumas keeps creating images that not only illustrate the desire for meaning but also embody this desire. The image and the desire for meaning merge in Dumas’ paintings. The painting itself becomes an autonomous ‘desire machine’, according to Zwagerman. In this article, a (practical) theological reading of Zwagerman’s own posthumously published volume of poetry, ‘Wakend over God’ (2016), is presented, with a specific interest in art, death and God. The sacramental hermeneutics of Richard Kearney and the theopoetics of John Caputo are brought into the conversation to elicit the dimensions of faith and religion in Zwagerman’s own ‘desire machine’.
