I read with more than extreme alarm Peggy Fletcher Stack’s report and Neylan McBaine’s editorial in the March 19 and 22 editions of the Salt Lake Tribune.
Prior to my retirement in 2010, I was the curator of the Utah Capitol during the multi-million-dollar
retrofitting, seismic upgrade and restoration efforts of that building. Part of my responsibilities was to see to the cleaning and restoration of stand-alone artwork and wall murals painted in some cases nearly contemporaneously with the murals in the temple.
I am compelled to make the following observations and declarations with a genuinely aching heart: In my capacity as curator I was tasked to research and write several “calls for proposals” to be sent to restoration specialists. While I warrant I do not know the particulars regarding the research prior to the decision to utterly disappear – using the word as an active verb – the LDS Church’s and community’s cultural, ritual, and religious history, apparently in the name of efficient crowd control, the women who wrote the articles are eminently believable. So I am left to be suspicious of the thoroughness of the conservators’ research.
In addition to McBaine’s comparisons to da Vinci’s “Last Supper,” I might add my reaction to seeing literally dozens of restored works of art in Italy that are centuries older than da Vinci’s in a country that understands the connections people have to their historical and religious underpinnings. Therefore, I am quite literally angry as well as broken-hearted.
Perhaps the church’s designers and conservation specialists could quell my wrath. (I’d be interested in knowing just who they are; I would sincerely wish for a pointed but polite conversation.) But the announcement that the destruction of these temples’ art is actually a work in progress leads me to imagine that those folks do not remember or were too young to know about the members’, let alone the community’s, despair when the St. George and Logan temples, in addition to the Colesville chapel’s destruction, happened. I am not so young!
I may be mistaken, but I believe it was Gertrude Stein who commented to her Salon members in turn-of-the- century Paris that “[a]rt isn’t everything; it’s just about everything.” Despite the fact that she was irreligious and even critical of religious observance, she understood what many of us do — that art explains, enhances, illuminates, preserves and surely reinforces our covenant-making experiences. A flat-screen, repetitive image (such as we see every day in this computer age) without living interaction is like taking a Zoom course on making pies over and over again without tasting the delicacy the instructor creates. We are left with incomplete knowledge born of the absence of all of our senses in the experience.
Judith E. McConkie, Salt Lake City
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