Visual Church Critique in the Cathedral Treasury: Where Does Your Gold Come From, Madonna?

In the mighty pre-Romanesque UNESCO World Heritage Cathedral of Hildesheim stands the “Great Golden Madonna.” The 1,000-year-old wooden figure is said to be one of the oldest fully sculpted images of Mary; up to the 20th century it was carried in processions or displayed for veneration. It has been worn down to such an extent that its head with the distant, transcendent features had to be replaced several times. The Madonna is swathed in a garment of gold. Where did this gold come from? And the silver that was hung on her as jewelry up to the Baroque period?

Even holy revered objects found their way into the Hildesheim Cathedral Treasury through supply chains at some point. And one learns not only through Hubertus Heil’s Supply Chain Act that the way raw materials are distributed for the global market can be steeped in injustice. The church lords of history certainly knew this as well. Yet they could, through a politics of images, align the wrong flow of materials and the contempt for people and nature with a Christian ideology. Especially in the missionary enterprises of colonies with their rich natural treasures.

This is one of the interesting theses that Alice Creischer, a Berlin-based artist, and her colleague Andreas Siekmann have been pursuing for several years with their exhibition, publication, and archive project on the “Potosí Principle.” Potosí, the Bolivian city on a high plateau of the Altiplano with gigantic silver deposits, annexed to the Spanish Empire in 1545, from whose mines Christianized Indigenous people for centuries mined the precious metal for hungry Europe, perhaps also for the jewelry of the Hildesheim Madonna.

Creischer and Siekmann are now in turn plundering in the exhibition “The Circulation of Labor, Capital, and Life as a Supply Chain” in the Hildesheim Cathedral Museum the carefully spread-out church treasure there. Ideologically they plunder. With their quirky, meticulous art.

With Otto Neurath to Coltan

Through the halls of the old cathedral they lay out in an idiosyncratic system with chains of cut-out photocopies forming a parcours, from which graphics, historical photographs, and image reproductions hang. Between magnificent Renaissance tapestries lie image statistics in the style of Otto Neurath from Red Vienna; their figures depict in numbers the bloody conflicts in the Congo over the Coltan mined there: 1,900 tons of the rare mineral ore were exported in 2023 from the mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, primarily for digital technology and as fodder for the global stock markets.

In hushed scholarly rigor, freely following the art historian Aby Warburg and his legendary Mnemosyne Atlas, Creischer and Siekmann compare forms, schemes, and motifs across the images that have produced a history of church and economy. From an original gilded continent chandelier from the 12th century with Europe personified as a figure of war to the curious garment of a sable, on which the Rheinmetall stock curve is stitched.

The Great Golden Madonna also reappears. As a stump. It is the copy of its wooden core. Beside it stands another stump. The ceramic object by Argentine contemporary artist Sonia Abián is a singular model for the extractable silver mountain; Abián also sees in it a symbol of the woman as mother.

At the center is an unusual Hildesheim portrait of the sacraments from the late 16th century. With ornamental iron chains swinging across the painting, on the so-called Wrisberg epitaph the figure of the Catholic Church as a woman with a papal crown binds her subjects to herself. Above her is Jesus on the Cross. From his stigmata flows blood like a decorative fountain into the cups of the bound.

The Pressed Jesus

Jesus is pressed like a grape. In a copper engraving from the same period, Christ himself appears in the wine press. Suffering, exploitation, and yield become part of the church’s redemptive history in these images. From pressing Jesus to the technique of pressing and minting, to the depiction of silver mining in Potosí. The visual formula of Siekmann and Creischer is fascinating and wild, yet somehow coherent. And radical: the two undertake here the dismantling of the institution of the Church into a mere handmaid of capital.

The church, the Madonna, and extractivism—the motifs also appear today in the work of the French star artist Pierre Huyghe. Only a few more days remain in the Halle at the Berlin techno club Berghain for his film “Liminals” to be seen. On a huge screen—perfect image, perfect sound—he unfolds in the dark, beneath the monumental concrete ceilings of the cathedral-like space a AI-generated dystopian future panorama.

A ghostly female figure without a face but with a Cesarean scar, so to speak the post-apocalyptic Madonna, wanders through a desolate rock landscape. “Liminals” is expensive overwhelm aesthetics. The seductive film essentially compels one to submit to Huyghe’s grim apocalyptic scenario.

Artistically, this is a completely different method from that of Creischer or Siekmann in Hildesheim, though all of them nonetheless gnaw at the excesses of capitalism. But while Huyghe relies on a grand emotional effect, visitors in Hildesheim must work properly. That can do the fine arts some good. It sharpens the critical mind before one kneels before the aesthetic object, before a Madonna.