When Religious Art: The Resurrection(1) was published in 2021, it was already after the fact. had all but succeeded in, ‘bring[ing] the history and drama of religious belief back into the realm of visual art’(2) and her mission was complete; Religious Art: The Resurrection served as a retrospective, a reflection on the trials and tribulations of a young artist striving to serve Pear and God. However, an issue the publication singularly neglected to address was the future of both ’s and religious art – where now for an artist who has sipped from her holy grail, and for the movement that is this grail? With regard to this question, the new volume, Religious Art at a Crossroads succeeds where its predecessor failed. For fear of ruining an engrossing read, I shall not disclose the conclusions drawn.(3) I would, however, like to analyze the means by which the respective contributors reached their conclusions and the method by which editor, Ricardo Powell, coordinated the project to such great effect.

Undoubtedly, a crucial factor in the success of the book is its imaginative layout. The pages are split vertically down the middle, the left-hand side of each page dedicated to the story of and the right reserved for that of exciting new artist, Joy Allison, who recently inherited
’s mantle as ‘the artworld’s advocate for religion.’(4) Contrary to the opinion of a number of skeptics, this format is not merely a gimmick and does actually serve to support and enhance the various arguments presented within the book. It is necessary to note that each contributor was advised by Powell to construct their piece using this split-page format as opposed to producing two separate pieces of writing to be juxtaposed at the design stage of the book’s production. The result is that points presented on ’s side of the page bear a direct relationship to, and are directly influenced by, those on Allison’s side, and vice versa. At several points, the two columns cleverly converge as the conceptual or, indeed physical, paths of the two artists meet, a prime example being in the documentation of the artists’ respective contributions to Pear Art Fair 2023.

Powell is not only managing editor of the publication but also responsible for graphic design. When images are introduced to the equation, the result is quite impressive; they are also laid side by side and, when the conceptual narratives of respective images come together, Powell ingeniously creates a new hybrid image from the two originals.

Although the work of is a graphic designer’s delight, Powell has resisted the temptation of savage cropping and has – apart from the aforementioned instances of collage – allowed each work to breathe and speak for itself. Conversely, Allison’s practice is a graphic designer’s worst nightmare; she has ruled out all documentation of her work – no press releases, no photographs, no conventional sales contracts. Powell’s solution to this problem was quite straightforward; he produced faux-documentary images himself.

It would seem that, as Powell became engrossed with the project, Religious Art at a Crossroads became as much a testament to the respective practices of the featured artists and the writing of the various contributors as it was to the imaginative editorship of Powell, himself. It must be said that this is not necessarily a bad thing. Rather than ruthlessly bending the work of and Allison to his will, Powell has taken responsibility akin to that of a good curator, justly taking pride in spotting ability and fostering accomplishment but otherwise content to function as the probing but respectful ‘first viewer’ of the work, disinclined to interfere in an artist’s process except to the extent necessary to extract their best so that the subsequent dialog between their work and the public is of the highest and most open-ended order.

If Powell has, indeed, adopted this selfless stance then he is sailing dangerously close to the wind of apparent egocentricity. The very fact that his contribution to Religious Art at a Crossroads is deemed worthy of discussion in these pages confirms that, irrespective of his supposedly humble intentions, Powell has succeeded in opening up a dialog between his own work and the public. We are all familiar with the superstar curator epidemic that swept through the early 21st century artworld – who could forget second generation would-be world beaters like N.J.N. Moansheff thoughtlessly repeating at the top of their voices in public places obscure references made by groovy, trendsetting curators such as Boris Schitanluhr. Are we ready for the age of the superstar editor? If so, and Ricardo Powell proves to be the foremost of his kind, then you heard it first here and, without question, I have a lot to answer for.

Kelvin Cooper is on the advisory board of Pear Journal.

1. Linda Wertham and Samuel Callaway (eds.) Religious Art: The Resurrection, (Los Angeles: Pear Press, 2021).
2. Isabel Ovitz, ‘The Fall, Adam and Eve Tempted by the Pear’ in Pear: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, Issue 07, 2021, (Los Angeles: Pear Press, 2021), p. 54.
3. For the prospective reader who cannot bear the anticipation of discovering the fate of and the religious art movement she inspired, please continue reading and, in doing so, forfeit the right to be engrossed by the content of Religious Art at a Crossroads. For the purpose of my researching this review, Ricardo Powell provided me with the complete, unedited collection of documents submitted by various writers for inclusion in the publication. (This unedited edition will be published by Pear Press at an undisclosed date followed by the release of a super-unedited version at an even more undisclosed date).
On account of the fact that no-one reads the footnotes of magazines (and, as Marie Hourwich and Olga Zelman (secretly) fear, no-one reads magazines at all anymore), I feel comfortable in my immanent anti-disclosure or, I suppose, ‘closure’ of the details of Powell’s book. I trust, if anyone does happen to stumble across these notes (note: the very fact that this irreverent spree has made it onto the pages of this journal proves that not even their eminences Zelman et al. have taken the time to browse over it. [eds: We have read it; in fact irreverence is the new reverence, hence your spree must remain. We also feel it is consistent with your irreverent overindulgence in religious buzz words and, since style is the new content, we approve.] This sorry episode highlights our depressing post-(Alice)Beckettian era in which, alas, the publishing paradigm is no longer ‘consistency is paramount’ (A. Beckett, 2005) but quite the antithesis), my thoughts will prove nothing new to the reader whose P.O.E.P.S.® will, no doubt, be well attuned to the brainwaves of the most forward-thinking writers.
It is such instances of complete understanding – microcosms of utopia if you will – which lead me to believe that the advent of telepathy not only deems this journal moribund, but actually signals the beginning of the end of humanity. Pre-P.O.E.P.S civilization (like this journal) necessarily functioned on the principles of hierarchy whereby a small proportion of beings controlled the masses through a variety of means, not least the withholding of information. The practice of knowing, sharing and keeping secrets was one of the most refined instruments through which to constitute, protect and police the borders between the community who were in the know and the others who failed to understand – to separate those worthy of knowing from those unworthy of it, to confirm the inclusion of the initiated and enforce the exclusion of the uninitiated. This is why the practice of sharing secrets was a tool of power; in its subtlety lay its brutality. It may very well be that it was not just one tool among many but, in fact, the key to the essential principles of how societies were organized. Insofar as the integration into a community always had to be acquired through tests of proficiency in the codes of the respective community (whether talking money, art, sex, drugs or architecture) there are good reasons to assume that life in pre-P.O.E.P.S. culture meant membership to (possibly more than one) secret society. In the current proto-telepathic climate (whereby 57% of US citizens possess P.O.E.P.S® and 68% of citizens have the means to access P.O.E.P.S.®), membership to any one of these ‘secret’ societies is, essentially, free for all. Necessarily, such societies cease to be ‘secret’ and, hence, this most powerful of social tools, ‘secrecy,’ is deemed obsolete.
To shift the line of analysis from macro to micro, the advent of telepathy not only promises to obliterate worldwide social order, but also threatens to jeopardize meaningful interpersonal relationships on a domestic level. Post-digital artist, Marguerite Gruin, has been remarkably swift to pick up on this impending emotional catastrophe and highlight it through her work. Monument to Everyone Who Has Ever Loved is a simultaneously-projected triptych of recent Pear Productions® blockbuster holograms which isolates three classic ‘proposal’ scenes. In each sequence, a person is seen to go down on one knee and, at the moment one would expect them to utter words of heartfelt sincerity and for great drama to unfold, a slick edit takes the viewer to the moment when the respondent’s mouth begins to open and one would expect him/her to answer; at which point a long fade back to the suitor’s image is frozen to leave both partners’ mouth-gaping images hovering in a state of infinite stasis and metaphorical emotional death. The piece has been produced on digital hologramatic equipment as a nostalgic gesture which, given Gruin’s position in heralding a post-digital condition serves to highlight the transition to C-TAG technology (see M. Gruin, K. Partovi and C. Meyes (eds.), The Triple-Headed Phoenix: Rising from the Syllapura of Onitsed, (Los Angeles: Pear Press, 2023), pp. 341-350). A conceptual condition of this unique hologramatic piece of infinite duration is that it is projected only once (in Pear Museum, Los Angeles), with the ambition that the ontent will outlive the medium, whereby the stationary hologramatic pixels depicting the gazing lovers will become ingrained in the physical space they occupy before the Pear Digital Hologramy Matter® expires in c. March 2043.
4. Linda Wertham and Samuel Callaway (eds.), Religious Art: The Resurrection, (Los Angeles: Pear Press, 2021), p. 163.