Perfectly Expressed
The De Young has a sculpture done Al Farrow - The Spine and Tooth of Santo Guerro. He uses gun parts, bullets, human bone amongst other things to create his reliquaries. It is an amazing sculpture - violence, death, destruction are it's foundations even though these things violate the core principals of what the Christian church is suppose to imbue (he has done others of mosques and synagogues with the same effect).
By making something so beautiful (if viewed from afar) and something so cold and echoing of violence (up close) this particular reliquary manages to convey the hypocrisy of religion - it is hard to argue against the interconnect between religion and war/violence/intolerance. The hanging sculpture behind also was a nice commentary on religion and violence - it is created from the charred remains of a Montgomery church that was turned into a suspended square.
Comments
Mark and I visited the De Young a few weeks ago and I quite clearly remember the Church made out of bullets and machine gun barrels. Awesome. From a distance looks like a model church, as you approach you see it is made from gun parts and on even closer inspection when you peer inside you see the bones. The closer you investigate the church the more disturbing it gets.