“The Devil Show”

Curious Matter gallerist Arthur Bruso shares his collection of infernal figurines.

Pleased to meet you.

The Devil is a thorny problem. Just by being around, he causes theological friction. If God is truly just, why does he allow the wicked Adversary to exist?  If Satan is a free agent, capable of upsetting the divine plan, then God cannot be all-powerful. If the Devil is under God’s control, but He is letting the tempter run around and corrupt souls, well, that’s not a very nice trick for the Big Guy to play on humanity, now, is it? Any way we look at it, the persistence of the Devil reflects poorly on God. 

Maybe that’s why we like him so much. Our arms may be too short to box with God, but the Devil always seems to be able to get away with it. When he thumbs his nose — and he always seems to have a big one to thumb — at celestial authority, he always seems to be doing it on behalf of those of us who haven’t found the Ground of Being to be particularly fertile. Even those who make it their business to condemn Lucifer respect him as a great rebel. Milton, a man of God, used his pen to cast  Satan into the pit, but was powerless to prevent him from ascending to the position of protagonist of Paradise Lost. 

Artists of all kinds have a hell of a time resisting the lure of the Adversary. So, apparently, do certain impish gallerists. Arthur Bruso of Curious Matter [272 5th St.] has an extensive collection of religious icons, artifacts, and memorabilia, and, like the writers of scripture and other vaudevillians, he’s put more than a few drops of diabolical serum in the font of holy water. More than fifty statuettes of the Devil are currently on display at the little gallery. These beasts have come up from hell only to languish in the limbo of thrift and curiosity shops. There they’ve hung, gathering dust, hoping, perhaps that an artist with angelic motivations might secure them, take them home, care for them, and let them bask in the gallery lights.  

Can this still be real, or just some crazy dream?

“The Devil Show” accompanies the release of A Slant of Shadow, a collection of Bruso’s critical essays. But the exhibition, as it turns out, is a treatise in itself. It’s a confession of the joy we take in crafting pictures of the Devil, engaging with him, thinking about who he might be and why he simply will not go away. Some of Bruso’s devils are charismatic; others are downright parodic. A few seem like they must be infernal subordinates of a greater evil — pitchfork-wielding punchcard employees, engaged in the slow climb up Hell’s torturous corporate ladder, like Wormwood in C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters, another classic of underworld literature. Others seem to recognize no boss but themselves. 

But these (mostly) crimson kings have a common trait. They’re completely self-possessed. The Devil, it appears, is a creature that knows damned well that he is the Devil. No anti-heroic ambivalence or delusions of moral complication from him; instead, all of these figures, down to the least of them, confront the viewer with a recognition of his own devilhood. The craftsmen who fashioned these figurines from rubber, metal, and clay were unanimous about that. These are not Devils in disguise. They wear their ill will proudly.

The red threat.

Why, then, are so many of them downright cute? Why aren’t we put off by the wide, crazed, staring eyes, the heavy brows and bared teeth, the horns and the faces, red as stop signs at a dangerous intersection? I believe it’s the honesty that is disarming — and maybe even endearing. These devils are not phonies. They seem like the sort of beasts who’d commit their fiendish acts without a trace of the wrangling or elaborate self-justifications that we so often get from our modern terrestrial adversaries. At a time when villains insist on wearing masks, the purity of the Devil’s malice feels like an act of mercy. They’re doing what few of our opponents seem to do anymore. They’re playing fair.

Friend of the Devil is a friend of mine.

And because they are fair — because their cards are on the table — they provide us with the faith that they can be beat. Bruso’s bestial menagerie is filled with faces of characters who look like they’d be true to their wicked word. From Mr. Applegate in Damn Yankees to Charlie Daniels’s country-famous golden fiddler, there’s a long tradition of this: devils who return to the Pit when they’ve been squarely out-foxed, or when they’ve lost on a legal stipulation. (Like good capitalists, Devils realize that the system they depend on will fall apart without solid contract law.) The Devil’s adherence to strict rules and recognizable iconography suggests that an orderly God is present, working behind the scenes, insisting on a visual code, making sure that the signage on the road to Hell is clear and legible. Should you take the Devil’s path, you can’t say you didn’t know what you were getting into.

As a gay artist raised in a Catholic family, Arthur Bruso’s relationship to demonology is complicated. In “So Far Away No One Will Notice,” his memoir, he writes about family members who treated him as the Devil’s own. There were probably dark nights when he suspected that they were right. But there were surely other moments when he saw the Adversary as a fellow dissenter from oppressive normalcy — even if Bruso did not condone the Devil’s methods. Here in Jersey City, Bruso and his partner Raymond E. Mingst are widely recognized as operators on the side of the angels.

The Devil's snare.

But just as Curious Matter never shows devotional art and religious paraphrenalia without a touch of irony,  “The Devil Show” puts the Prince of Darkness in in a complicated light. Bruso knows that if Lucifer served no human purpose, he'd be exiled to perdition and forgotten about. Instead, the Devil has glowered in the collective imagination for centuries, inspiring storytellers, craftsmen, philosophers, and artists of all kinds with his unalloyed, unapologetic badness. He's worked as hard, and proven as protean, as a symbolic being ever can. Even the saints must tip their caps to his persistence, and to the purity, integrity, and conceptual unity of his character. In a strange sort of way, he’s earned their admiration. Ours, too.

("The Devil Show" will be on view at Curious Matter from noon until 5 p.m. every Sunday.  That means you can go to church in the morning and catch up with the Devil immediately afterward. Since Satan is mercurial, the show will also be open at random times; check the Curious Matter Instagram page for diabolical specifics.)