Communal & contemplative art
A conversation with Kelly Latimore
Jacques Ellul and Bernard Charbonneau are known primarily for their extensive and heavy critiques of technology’s scope and power in the modern world. As a part of such critiques, they studied and were concerned by the ways modern technologies shaped the perception and production of art. As Ellul writes in What I Believe,
Technique produces [a] totalizing ideology, from which [people] can no longer be distant, simply because this process of symbolization and distancing which was once a specific and integral part of art, is now completely devalued and rendered meaningless, watered down, and even ridiculous by technological activity, which does not symbolize and is only efficacious.1
Ellul elaborates these critiques at length in books like Empire of Non-Sense and Humiliation of the Word. So, it's possible for many to conclude neither Ellul nor Charbonneau were engaged in art in general, and the art of their time in particular. But there is evidence to the contrary throughout their lives and work. For example, Ellul writes in Humiliation of the Word,
I am not trying to minimize the importance of the image. I mean only to specify its domain and understand its limits. The image is an admirable tool for understanding reality. In the social or political world, it can even be explosive and terribly efficacious... But an image is explosive only if the spectator knows what it represents and if it is taken for what it is: a faithful representation of reality."2
So, Ellul did engage with art, and did think it was possible for art to transform people and things—even to the point of being explosive! It is for that reason you will hear me say in this conversation with iconographer Kelly Latimore that I have a hunch Ellul would appreciate Latimore’s art (even though Ellul does come down quite strongly on iconography in his writing).
The question is, why do I have a such a hunch? As I think this conversation will make evident the further you get into it, Kelly Latimore’s iconography constitutes the faithful, transformative, and explosive representation of reality that Ellul called for.
Guest Bio
Kelly Latimore is an artist and iconographer from St. Louis, MO. He started painting icons in 2010 while a member of the Common Friars, a small monastic farming community in Athens, Ohio. Latimore’s icons often mix classic orthodox iconographic imagery with figures representing the marginalized and the oppressed among us here and now. Latimore’s icon “Refugees: La Sagrada Familia,” in which the flight to Egypt is interpreted as Latinx immigrants crossing the desert, adorns the cover of Pope Francis’s book “A Stranger and You Welcomed Me.” Latimore has also created a diverse array of icons of unexpected saints such as poet Mary Oliver, author James Baldwin, and TV host Mr. Rogers.
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Jacques Ellul, What I Believe, 165.
Jacques Ellul, Humiliation of the Word, 22.