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11/06/1999
The Holy Virgin Mary
Shame on Hillary Rodham Clinton and Rudolph Giuliani for
bashing the Brooklyn Museum and "Holy Virgin Mary" --
the work with elephant dung -- without having seen it.
New Yorker Art critic Peter Schjeldahl describes it as:
A gorgeous, sweet and respectful treatment of the
subject, rendering her as a sternly hieratic African
personage in petal-like blue robes. Much of the painting's
surface shimmers ecstatically with glitter in yellow resin.
Tiny collaged cutouts of bare bottoms from porn magazines
evoke putti, and allude to the element of fertility in
Mary's symbology, which Ofili did not invent. As for the
pachyderm product, it is one smallish, attached lump,
capped with what appears to be black-and-white beadwork
(in reality pushpin heads) in a design of concentric circles.
Elephant poop fturns out to be innocuous-looking stuff, not
unpleasant in color and almost decorative in texture (lots of
straw). "Holy Virgin Mary" can now be seen on the net --
Holy Virgin Mary
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