Keep it Strange

It was a decade ago now that James Elkins wrote this:

 To fit in the art world, work with a religious theme has to fulfill several criteria. It has to demonstrate the artist has second thoughts about religion . . . . Ambiguity and self-critique have to be integral to the work. And it follows that irony must pervade the art, must be the air it breathes (On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art, Routledge, 2004).

But then he wrote this:

A few years ago I wrote a book called The Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art. It was motivated by the absence of what might be called committed religious art in the international art market....   The book has introduced me to a new world, because I now receive invitations to talk to Christian institutions.  In many cases I had not even been aware that those institutions existed - for example Westmont College in Santa Barbara, Lipscomb University in Nashvielle, and Biola University...   Getting to know some of the many careful and reflective people who write about religious art from outside academia has made me sensitive to the absence of personally engaged conversations about religion (as opposed to historiographic, philosophic, or sociological conversations) in academia.  The excellent scholars of religion who are themselves religious, and value their scholarship principally as a way to enrich their religious experience, have shown me a different way of reading art history (Idol Anxiety, Stanford University Press, 2011).

And now Jeffrey Kosky writes this:

In this book, I have tried to work against [the secularist] narrative and break the necessary condition between secularity and disenchantment.  My implicit contention has been that in denying themselves recourse to religious vocabulary or theological conceptuality, modern art critics give up what would be advantageous to a profound encounter with the works in question. Religion and theology has let me name what the art critic often names and addresses with only  limited vocabulary.  In this sense, it lets me prolong the encounter with the work of art, deepening the event of its coming intimately over me and bringing its strangeness to light (Arts of Wonder: Enchanting Secularity, University of Chicago Press, 2012).

Christopher Brewer points out a few things that Kosky missed, but either way, you might call this progress - in the complete opposite direction of the (by now nearly fossilized) secularization theory of yore.  The secret is out, even if a few folks have yet to get the message.

Still, notice that last line of Kosky's.  Encouraging as this all may be, I sure hope religious people retain their strangeness.

Of Beauty and Suicide Bombs

Below is a response I gave to Eleanor Heartney at CIVA's art and justice conference this weekend.  Thanks to some discussion that followed, I've developed it below.
 
We've been asked today if beauty can be used to obscure justice, and it has been suggested that there is not one way to bring art and justice together.  In response, I'd like to offer one recent place where beauty has - it seems to me - obscured justice, and to put forth that traditional religious imagery should also be considered an especially effective locus of justice.

The roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art is currently covered with blood. Which is to say, the installation by the Pakistani artist Imran Qureshi intentionally resembles the blood spattering that results from a suicide bomber’s detonation in a crowd. The work is a response to bombings in Lahore, Pakistan, where in the cool of a July evening as crowds gathered at a Sufi holy site, three suicide bombers - who considered said crowd insufficiently Islamic - killed themselves and fifty more, while maiming two hundred.

In the museum label, Metropolitan curators did not hesitate to mention the blood many of us saw similarly splattered on television screens after the Boston Marathon bombing.  Such a reference seemed acceptable because within Qureshi's blood is beauty.  Inspired by a Mughal miniturare, Qureshi has painted delicate foliage within the splatters.  I slipped up to the Met's roof the week that Qureshi’s installation opened, and had the exhibit essentially to myself.  It was beautiful, in a certain way.  I thought, what a perfect discussion point at an art and justice conference.  Theoretically, I supposed this could help someone work through such a catastrophe.  Had one witnessed the bombing, perhaps one avenue of healing the memory would be to confront it - to imagine it beautiful.  "Yes, these forms stem from the effects of violence,” says the artist, “but, at the same time, this is where a dialogue with life, with new beginnings and fresh hope starts."

Having now had time to think on it, I'm not so sure.  Yes, this is an attempt at overcoming brutality, but the beauty is comparatively mute. I tried a thought experiment.  What if my ten-month-old daughter had been killed in such a bombing?  Would I want to see any beauty in that blood?  Googling around about the exhibit, I came up with some photographs taken when Bono showed up at the opening, in which he prostrated himself with the artist for a zany, "so fantastic!" pose.  Again, had people I had loved fallen in such a suicide bombing, two prostrate bodies surrounded by red paint might have been a bit too reminiscent of the original event.  I also noticed that the roof garden’s Martini Bar is offering Gola Gonda, “Traditional Pakistani Shaved Ice with Choice of Pomegranate, Rosewater, or Mango Syrup over Vodka.”  Enjoy a Pakistani beverage as one meditates on the same country's sickening catastrophes?

Walid Raad at Documenta 13 (2012)

The more I considered Qureshi’s work, the more ingenious and bold it seemed to me, but also the more dissatisfying it became.  In the face of real evil, such muffled gestures of beauty seem powerless, perhaps even making the exhibit a case of false beauty.  Qureshi's adornment seems inadequate because it fails to fully grapple with, let alone counter the evil of the event that inspired it.  There are other artistic responses to violence that seem to understand exactly this.  Lebanese artist Walid Raad has intentionally responded to political tragedy with blank spaces, what has been called a “language of disappearance.”  His artistic reaction to Lebanese violence in one instance was nothing – a deliberate, focused silence.  

T.J. Clark

T.J. Clark made a similar point in a paper at the University of Chicago this last year.   In a talk on “Capitalism without Images,” the noted Marxist art historian surveyed the London riots and the fading Occupy movement, and appeared to conclude that the best response to the regime of advertising was no images at all.  Clark suggested that one cigarette advertisement was a warped image of the Annunciation, but he offered no real Annunciation in its place.  A wheatpasted anarchist tract on a telephone pole was all he could offer in response to visual injustice, which also seems (in my estimation) comparatively helpless.

Is there really justice in any of these responses – Qureshi’s hermatological ornamenent, the silence of Raad, or Clark's anarchist punt?  As I continued to reflect on what my response to losing a daughter in such a bombing would be, I’m afraid I began to sympathize with the motivation of those who resort not to art, but to violence.  If I had seen the blood of someone I love – a creature whose creation in the image of God I was particularly sensitive to – so casually spilled, I would be happy to put beauty aside and seek balance instead.  If the perpetrators were so numb to the significance of human life, an appropriate reminder might be for their blood or the blood of someone they loved to be spilt. This is justice: An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.  Such is the motivation of the main character in Homeland – the only just response to dead Iraqi children is dead Americans.

I know of no theology of suicide bombings.  It initially seems something foreign to Christian tradition, something for other religions to grapple with.  But just this morning, Andrew White, the Vicar of Baghdad, pleaded for prayers as scores were killed from two suicide bombs in Iraq.  Of course, it is a Christian issue, for the suicide bomb stands in our global culture today as the cross once did to first century Romans:  A foremost spectacle of gruesome "justice."  Far more shocking than any suicide bomb theology would be the idea that the Christian God is incapable of grappling with tragedy on this scale. But He is - and the first Christian thing to say about it is that Christ suffers with the victim of every such event.  The New Testament even leaves room for us to say he mysteriously is every victim.  "Whatsoever you have done unto the least of these you have done unto me."

Fra Angelico, Crucifixion at the Met, c. 1440, detail

But another way to understand suicide bombs requires falling into the well worn grooves of an old evangelical path, however unfashionable it might be.  The one who seeks justice is right.  The answer to evil and atrocity of a suicide bomber is not a vague gesture of beauty.  The answer is that innocent blood did have to be shed to make it right.  The divine response to the abyss of evil unleashed in by three suicide bombers is an even more devastating, atoning detonation.  “For this reason the Father loves me,” says Jesus, “because I lay down my life that I may take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord.”

But in this blast there was only one victim, who absorbs the impact for all of us, thereby exonerating multitudes of the guilty, even – should they ask forgiveness – the bombers themselves.  Why do bad things happen to good people?  R.C. Sproul’s answer:  “That only happened once, and he volunteered.”  And here, of course – only after innocent blood atones - is where beauty does properly come in: the beauty of every crucifix.  Because it alone fulfills the requirements of justice, only Jesus’s shed blood can be beautiful, and only in view of that blood can Qureshi's art be taken in.  Fortunately, such beauty is on offer in abundance at the Met in the countless crucifixes and passion scenes just beneath this provocative installation, images which will be there long after the current commision is replaced by something that goes better with rooftop Martinis. 

Why Not Just Pop It?

If Jeff Koons (left) was outdone by Paul McCarthy (right) in this year's Frieze fair, isn't that the next step?  I'll even volunteer.

Post-Secular Academia: A Present Reality

If you don't think academia has gone religious you either 1) haven't been there in a while, 2) are pretending to ignore such an obvious development or 3) are part of a religious subculture invested in the notion of "secular academia" as a foil that galvanizes institutional identity, justifies a lack of engagement, and rallies donors who don't know better.

But what about the rise of programs in secularism?  Doesn't this disprove academia's supposed "religious turn"?  Quite the opposite.  Previously, the entire university flew under the banner of secularism.  Now, the secular perspective has been historicized and relegated to one field among others (exactly what once happened to religion).  Needless to say, secularism continues to have a legitimate place in the modern university, but it now has to be chosen.  The title of one recent publication says it all: The American University in the Postsecular Age.  Indeed, new superstructures of post-secular discourse are being swiftly erected, as evidenced by the invigorating discussions on sites such as the Immanent Frame.

To offer more evidence for this phenomenon, I best limit myself to the field of my terminal credentials: art history.  The secular narrative of art history goes...  or better, went like this:  Art and religion were once inseparable, but as the modern world progressed, art and religion grew further apart.  This simplistic narrative has not disappeared, but it has been profoundly destabilized by countless recent publications.  I try to get the word out about this every year or so, but because the evidence is almost as overwhelming as the determination to ignore it, here we go again.

Consider a brief tour through some recent publications.  Strangely, even ostensibly Christian medieval art required a corrective, leading to The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages (2005), a research path continued, to choose just one example, by Translating Truth (2011).  Meyer Schapiro's secularizing read of Romanesque sculpture has been undone in the discipline's journal of record, to the frustration of many.  The theological turn in Byzantine art is most evidenced in the translation of Pavel Florensky, whose thought is developed (not just regurgitated) in Clemena Antonova's Space, Time, Presence in the Icon (2010).

The undoing of Jacob Burckhardt’s secular Renaissance has been going on for decades, resulting in Christianity and the Renaissance (1990) and a host of more recent specialized studies giving special attention to religion such as The Controversy of Renaissance Art (2011) or The Vision and the Visionary in Raphael (2011), among others. The Baroque and beyond has enjoyed an overhaul with The Sacred Image in the Age of Art (2011), Rembrandt’s Faith (2009), or Sacred Spain: Art and Belief in the Spanish World (2010).

Contrary to popular perceptions, religious art flourished in the age of Enlightenment, a fact thoroughly documented by Art and Religion in Eighteenth Century Europe (2009).  The suppressed religious art of Romanticism has been recovered as well, leading to Representing Belief: Religion, Art, and Society in Nineteenth Century France (1992), Painting the Sacred in the Age of Romanticism (2009), or Painting the Bible: Representation and Belief in Mid-Victorian Britain (2006).  My colleague Rick Gibson explains that the same thing has been going on in the literature of this era, as evidence by The Romantic Reformation (1997).  In the realm of American art, Sally Promey encapsulated her field when she wrote the seminal article, “The ‘Return’ of Religion in Scholarship of American Art” (2003), a direction pursued further, for example, by George Inness and the Science of Landscape (2007).

Even the most doggedly secular of these sub-disciplines – the dominant field of contemporary art – has confessed its secular predicament and called, however halfheartedly, for change, as evidenced by Re-Enchantment (2008).  The big bad October crowd, sometimes accused of ignoring religion, appear to be loosening their secular grip as well.  In the second volume of of Art Since 1900 (2011), Benjamin Buchloh refers to Bill Viola’s “reinvesting representation with mythological imagery, even religious experience…" and Hal Foster speaks of “cultic reenchantment." It would be easy to overplay such prose, but just as easy to ignore it.  The article that led to Antonova's book subtitled Seeing the World with the Eyes of God, interestingly enough, first appeared in October.  In short, the pomo reaction to dry formalism and hard-headed historicism has fizzled, and the ensuing vacuum is being at least partially filled with faith.

Again, none of this is to suggest that the secular take on art has evaporated, that this interest in religion is fully informed (let alone traditional), or that the authors of the above publications are necessarily religious themselves.  Indeed, many of the authors make no claim of belief whatsoever, even while they emphasize the faith of others in their scholarship.  But if we were to include those who do profess faith, the list of religiously-minded perspectives on art grows, I remind you, downright unmanageable. 

For those without the time to catch up on this growing reading list, a cross-section of the above developments are captured by Timothy Gorringe's Earthly Visions: Theology and the Challenges of Art (2011), reviewed by your scribe not long ago in First Things.  In an impressive display of academic Aikido, Gorringe does not ignore or refuse the secular, but offers a "positive appreciation of secularity...  [which is] part and parcel of Christian revelation."  If Gorringe is right, then saying (as a secular art historian of yore once did) that “religious tutelage had to be broken” for the still life or landscape genre to emerge, is like saying that Christ, because he employed chaff, fields and coins in his parables, was necessarily an atheist. Gorringe conceptualizes a domain - more terrifying to some than the apocalypse itself - where "the secular as an autonomous 'godless' sphere simply disappears."

Graduate methodology courses in humanities used to triumphantly culminate with gender, sexuality, and race. But the religious turn renders this crescendo penultimate, especially considering that feminism and multiculturalism have found a new - and arguably more lasting - warrant under religious sponsorship. As I suggested, all of this is especially inconvenient for the remaining secularists and, strangely enough, for religious folk committed to the old arrangement as well.  Academia going religious means that we religious people might no longer be able to justify ignoring it.  And yet, the "emic" (as opposed to "etic") approach from actual believers - and the debates that such approaches generate - can help ensure that this recent turn of academic fashion remains interesting enough to last.

ADDENDUM: Please don't neglect further methodological reflections, not to mention part deux.

The Next Andy Warhol: A Prevention Strategy

I just returned from an enriching symposium at Chicago's North Park University on the art of George Tooker, an artist who cannot have existed.  He maintained the figural tradition through modernism, carried the iconic mantle by painting in egg tempera, and after making it into the canon of twentieth century art, converted to Catholicism to create sincere religious art when that was not the done thing.   I suppose then that the symposium cannot have existed either, so maybe it never happened.  But I'm almost sure it did.

"When Faith Moves Mountains" (2002)

The first presenters, artists Dayton Castleman and Nneena Okore, departed from Tooker to discuss the political art of Ai Weiwei and El Anatsui.  Both employ workers in China and Africa for their respective projects, similar to Francis Alÿs' exhibition, When Faith Moves Mountains, which "employed" a team of South Americans who literally moved a massive dune in tandem with shovels.  Large scale social development projects are a fascinating art world turn, but a specter, it seems to me, looms over such ventures.  Just as Andy Warhol punctured High Modernist pieties by placing a regular consumer product - a Brillo Box - in an art gallery, so some Andy Warhol of the future is being invited to suggest that a regular consumer process has already realized such third world employment ideals.

It's called the clothing industry, and if you wear something produced by our globalized economy, you are a living participant in this impossibly colorful international flash mob, which transcends any gallery or museum space.  The difference, of course, is that the clothing industry employs the impoverished in a relatively sustained manner, versus the stunt economies of given artists who employ for as long as art world fancies can be sustained.  If you were trying to support a family in a third world economy, which would you prefer?  A job for two years working for a Tate Modern exhibition, and then nothing - or a job for generations working, however less glamorously, for Gap?   If that sounds like a provocation that punctures art world assumptions, it is: No more so than Warhol's Brillo Box.

Then again, perhaps we don't have to wait for that Andy Warhol, because he is me.  If the idea is all that matters, as James Franco's Museum of Invisible Art claims, then I have become the next Andy Warhol by writing that last paragraph.  All that remains is for you to send me hundreds of thousands of dollars for my "work."  Of course, that's ridiculous, and Franco's latest contribution to the art world is an imploding white dwarf in the celebrosphere, the reductio ad absurdum of the reductio ad absurdum of purely conceptual art.

Which is exactly what emerged in the last panel of the George Tooker symposium which explored craft and concept.  Art must be made, and it is the business of artists to master the intelligence of this production.  "The conflict of craft and concept," argued symposium participant and painter Joel Sheesley, "is only possible if the artist is numb to the conceptual intelligence that craft necessarily embodies."  In fact, it is just this emphasis on process and craft which rescues what is genuine (and there is much) in the art of Ai Weiwei and El Anatsui from the "Gap is art too" critique mentioned above.

So don't send me money.  Use it to buy art that matters, art with the courage to incarnate a concept, thereby avoiding the art heresies of immaterialized Docetism and contentless Arianism, as exemplified in the work of symposium participants such as Tim Lowly, Cherith Lundin, Kelly Vanderbrug, Laura Lasworth, not to mention Dayton, Nneena, and others.  Each continue to exhibit the neurologically verified intelligence of art for which there is no substitute. But you knew that.

The Unmappable Terrain of Christianity and Art

James Elkins, a prolific art historian at the Art Institute of Chicago, is our best cartographer of the unruly terrain of art history and contemporary art.  Due to his unusual productivity, his books tend to be reviewed in bulk - about five at a time.  Some reviewers are impressed by his baffling range, others are clearly disturbed that his books rarely bear the mark of focused specialization (though he can do that too). 

But what especially disturbs some about Elkins is his refusal to light a candle at the altar of critical theory, which - until quite recently - was a prerequisite for academic success.  The reason for Elkins' demurral appears to be his frustration with theory's essential sameness:  "The wilderness of writing on twentieth-century painting," Elkins explains, "is really an orderly place where the majority of judgments are received opinions, derived from a very small number of models" (159).  Elkins' non-conformity to such models once earned him the opprobium of an Art Bulletin reviewer, who compared Elkins to more fashionable art historians, Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois. 

Most important... is the fact that Krauss and Bois consistently deny the possibility that art can be anything more than its "base materiality." Their argument is strong and consistent: a picture of mold is a picture of mold. Elkins often implies that painting can be transcendent, can move beyond the messy stuff of oil paint itself in order to show something that is beyond the picture plane.  In comparison to Formless, Elkins's book is inconsistent and even sentimental.

A more clear indication of how carefully art historians patrol their disciplinary borders is difficult to find.  Elkins is chastised for trespassing on transcendent turf, a domain which the (supposedly adventurous) methodology of critical theory deemed off-limits.  Indeed, because Elkins' prose sometimes knocks on the door of the transcendent (albeit with protective gloves), it's not surprising that Elkins has found religion. By which I mean, he has found religion to be a subject worthy of art historical interest.  This started with On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art, and has progressed into the Art Seminar Series volume entitled Re-Enchantment, which explored the art world's attitude to religion by interviewing dozens of scholars and curators on the subject.  While not monolithic, the book frequently evidenced a younger generation complaining that old guard art historians such T.J. Clark or the much pilloried Michael Fried, don't take religion seriously enough.  

But Re-Enchantment just scratched the surface.  Decades of cultural investment by Christian academic institutions, programs, organizations, and journals have paid off, making the output of Christian perspectives on art criticism, production and history almost unmappable.  As I've remarked before, Catholics are enjoying the revival of Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson, backed by the historical studies of Murphy and Schloesser, and the philosophical work of Trapani.  The Orthodox are seeing the emergence of Pavel Florensky, the 20th century art historian, theologian, priest, scientist and martyr (silenced by the very revolutionaries after whom the art history's most influential journal, October, was named).  This revival is due to new translations of Florensky's art writings by Salmond, a biography by Pyman, and a compelling advance of his ideas by Antonova.  What's more, a surprising article from a former editor of Art Forum has suggested that Jacques Lacan - a darling of critical theory - may have obtained some of his best ideas from Florensky, who was translated into French just as Lacan was developing his notion of the gaze.  One couldn't make this stuff up. 

Protestants are also making a strong showing in the aesthetic arena that they have traditionally neglected.  William Dyrness' formidable historical survey of Reformed visual culture would have been enough, but his latest work, Poetic Theology, which could fairly be called a Summa of Protestant aesthetics, pushes the project well into the 21st century.  Dyrness drives the last nail in the aniconic coffin, and argues that Calvin's prohibitions agains images, or his insistence to keep churches locked, were temporary measures never meant to be permanent features of Protestant life.  Dyrness has the panache to distinguish Reformed aesthetics from its Catholic (Thomism) and Anglican (Radical Orthodoxy) alternatives, while still arguing for a symbolically rich, contemplative Protestantism, haunted by brokenness yet socially engaged.  Surprisingly, he succeeds.

This is not to posit the Reformed tradition as the right option, but simply to show the variety of them available for those people - Christian or not - who are interested in the light that Christianity can shed on art and art history.  Theory, you will recall - according to one of its best elucidators - is inherently and consistently suspicious of the visual.  Christianity, because of the visible God at the heart of its proclamation - is much less so (though, of course, not completely).  One doesn't need a Ph.D. in art history to know that Christianity has meant much for the history of art.  But one very well may need one to come up with an intellectual justification to continue to rule that not insignificant religion out.

Centripetally, books by Wuthnow, Dyrness and Taylor have attempted to understand and encourage the state of the arts in North American churches.  Centrifugally, Siedell remains a necessary prod to engage contemporary art on its own terms without striking a Tillichian bargain.  The Association of Scholars of Christianity in the History of Art (ASCHA) evidences the new seriousness with which Christianity is taken by art historians.  Likewise, new journals that show theologically informed engagement of art seem to emerge monthly.   Consider new journals such as Anamnesis, the frequently sharp and prolific output of Transpositions, Curator Magazine, the art coverage of the Other Journal and Comment, Dappled Things and Ruminate, ArtWay, Catapult, Liturgical Credo, Cresset, St. Katherine's Review, to say nothing of the more established venues such as Image or CIVA.

The aim here is not a narrowly "Christian" art world or "Christian" art history, but the better art production and truer study which comes from not ruling out a phenomenon as massive as global Christianity - which, furthermore, frequently doesn't behave.  Many of the organizations and publications listed above are (understandably) interested in an artistically sophisticated faith, and are consequently less than eager to draw attention to the Christian kitsch they seek to, wait for it...  leave behind. But the irony is that such kitsch - the visual religion of everyday believers - has now become a subject of serious academic investigation, as evidenced by the impressive infrastructure erected by David Morgan and the journal Material Religion.  This is nicely summarized by the fact that the notorious Thomas Kinkade is no longer as much mocked as seriously analyzed by art historians.  In short, kitsch counts. 

But nor is it everything.  Take for example, the effusion of studies on religion in the Renaissance since the seventies, or the publications showing how religion persisted through the early modern world, such as The Idol in an Age of Art, Rembrandt's Faith, Art and Religion in 18th Century Europe, or Painting the Sacred in the Age of Romanticism, not to mention calls for papers like Empowerment and the Sacred or Spiritual Matters.  Modernism is not unaffected as well, as evidenced by two impressive publications (Alter Icons and Avant-Garde Icon) and an upcoming conference regarding how Eastern Christian icons influenced modern art.  One could go on.

"With a few marginal exceptions," wrote James Elkins at the end of a Books and Culture exchange, "the exclusion [or religion by the art world]... is not owned, or owned up to, by anyone. That is why it is so difficult to imagine how this state of affairs can be changed, even though it is inevitable that it will, eventually, be changed." But Christian perspectives on art history and art production are emerging more quickly than anyone - so far as I know - can reasonably assess.  I tried to chronicle this a year ago, and have tried to update it here.  The difficulty of the task makes me feel that "eventually" might be just around the corner, if not already here. 

Update:  Here's a follow-up post.

The Supermodel of Sorrows

It's a strange day when Richard John Neuhaus gets quoted to resolve inter-evangelical disputes (upon which I do not care to comment) at The Huffington Post.  I also have a piece currently on offer at that venue comparing Francesco Vezzoli's "Sacrilegio" with the Museum of Biblical Art's Passion in Venice.  

Altar of (not to) Color

Pillar of Salt

Waiting for Emily

A friend suggests we need a new Emily Post to dictate manners for our web-washed lives, such as whether or not you can ignore facebook polls (yes), text in front of someone (with apologies), or look up something online to settle a factual matter at the dinner table (only as a last resort).  As it happens, Wired Magazine tried to be that new Emily Post last year in a print edition that survives online here.  The rule torrent at the bottom was helpful, but we wait for Emily still.

I bring this up to point you to The New Criterion this month (which is as much a moving target as October), where James Panero articulates some new rules regarding how the internet relates to cultural criticism.  For example, "An over-active online presence often brings out a writer's inner beast."  Panero's judicious conclusions hit home:

The vital art of today continues to emerge from studios and ateliers and urban spaces dense with artists, just as it did one hundred years ago in Montparnasse and fifty years ago in downtown Manhattan.  The job of a contemporary critic remains to seek out that vitality, tell us where to find it, and explore its strengths....   Art writers should use the internet to counteract the dematerializaiotn of a hyper-connected world, not encourage it...  The point of good art criticism, whether you read it in print or online, should be to turn off the computer, shut off the television, and enjoy art in the flesh.

To state what should be obvious, but has been obviously forgotten, the internet should facilitate friendships and cultural encounters, not replace them.

Art Errors Avoided

1.  Louis Menand is unimpressed by Steven Pinker's evolutionary aesthetics:

One suspects that enjoying Wagner, singing Wagner, anything to do with Wagner, is in gross excess of the requirements of natural selection. To say that music is the product of a gene for "art-making," naturally selected to impress potential mates—which is one of the things Pinker believes—is to say absolutely nothing about what makes any particular piece of music significant to human beings. No doubt Wagner wished to impress potential mates; who does not? It is a long way from there to "Parsifal" [hat tip, Begbie].

2.  Art critic Jed Perl has some words for excessively self-referential art historians:

I would not want to belittle the sophistication of Fried's thought. But if you can wade through the bewildering intricacy of his approach, with its tortuous expositions of passages from Hegel, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger, the argument turns out to be rather mundane....  I do not see the need for some "key” to the pictorial arts of the past two and a half centuries. And I do not see the need for an interpretation of recent photography that links it tightly to earlier developments in painting. It is a mistake to imagine that the finest thought is the most elaborate or labyrinthine thought...  I have heard people who know a great deal about painting and who know that Fried’s theories are suspect speak almost apologetically about their inability to get with his program. They worry that they are not smart enough to grapple with his ideas, when the truth may be that they are too smart to get tripped up by all his fancy footwork. 

3. and 4.  Bruce Herman, in this IAM interview, counters the idea that tradition can be advanced without having first been mastered, and that abstract painting is necessarily a subjective escape from objective reality.

5.  And, in a review of an art show at the Rubin concerning death across cultures, the The New York Times completely avoids caricaturing Christian theology:

Western works are morbidly preoccupied with the perishability of the body; Eastern works take a holistic, Buddhist view of death as a passage between states of being in nearly endless cycles of reincarnation...    A harsh dualism prevails on the Western side....  Such either-or starkness is foreign to the Eastern side.

Okay, but four out of five errors avoided is not bad.

Christ in the Concert Hall: A Hypothetical Controversy

Imagine, for a moment, that there was a great struggle in the ancient church regarding whether or not music was conducive with Christian worship.  Thankfully, church history records mercifully few instances of this particular debate, but imagine that there was a great one.  Then imagine that an entire wing of the church succeeded in outlawing music.  Imagine next that those who (rightfully) argued that music was consistent with Christianity triumphed, and that following that hard-won victory, an entire stream of Christianity - a very prominent one - arose around the victorious musicophiles, becoming in turn a tradition that emphasized music in a unique and unrivaled way.  This would all be quite natural, as often only when something is threatened do we realize how necessary it is.

Next, imagine that a 21st century music historian, seeking to shed new light on the importance of music in today's church and in the secular concert hall, wrote a book about music and Christianity entitled "Christ and the Concert Hall." The author, appropriately enough, found the aforementioned musically-focused ancient Christian tradition to be a dominant inspiration.  Finally, imagine that in a review of "Christ in the Concert Hall," a gifted musician/author came along and pointed out that the author focused on "only one current" within the diverse river of Christianity.  The reviewer then went on to criticize the author of "Christ in the Concert Hall" for not focusing on other aspects of Christian history. The reviewer, furthermore, seemed to charitably imply that the author was not enough of a Barthian (because the author used abstract principles) or not enough of an N.T. Wrightian futurist (because the author didn't focus enough on hope).  This review would, I hope you agree, be quite peculiar.  After all, when writing a book about music and Christianity, why wouldn't one bother to emphasize that great tradition of musically-focused Christian faith, drawing upon the resources which, in God's providence, that tradition alone could provide.

And yet, when the gifted musician/author Jeremy Begbie reviewed art historian Dan Siedell's book God in the Gallery in the current issue of Image, Begbie appeared - ever so subtly - to take issue that Dan Siedell, in a book about art, limited himself to "one particular current within the Nicene river, the Eastern Orthodox tradition... and the council of Niceae (787 CE), the conference which established the orthodoxy of icons."  Well of course he did!  Especially seeing that this tradition has a history of American neglect, Why wouldn't he?   No wonder Siedell, at his blog, seems a bit miffed about the limitations of the Reformed perspective on art and the necessity of engaging the untapped art historical resources of the Orthodox Church.

I certainly hope the Protestant aesthetic [band]wagons aren't going to circle on the issue of Christianity and art.  The Reformed, among others Protestants, have much to offer in this particular conversation.  They've been contributing, thankfully, for centuries, and especially so in the last few decades (thanks in no small part to Jeremy Begbie).  But the Orthodox have been doing likewise for far longer, and they're far more experienced, and successful, in this volatile arena.  To limit oneself to Protestant resources when it comes to art may bring a satisfying sense of intellectual consistency, but it is also to ensure things get very boring, very fast.  Not as boring, mind you, as when one limits oneself (as does most of the art world) to strictly secular resources, but still pretty boring.

[crossposted at evangel]

Does God have all the best art?

Shirley Dent responds to that question with a "Yes," adding "I detest the cynicism about humanity that clings to the conceptual nooks and crannies of secular, ironic, postmodern art." She declares the best art to be religious, even Christian. She lists some awful examples of contemporary art, and sounds the praises of a Christian altarpiece. Dent is not writing for a conservative religious publication, but participating in a forum sponsored by Britain's famously secular newspaper, The Guardian. Of course, Guardian readers will require from the author a few disclaimers lest she be deemed too religious herself, and here they are, three firm knocks on a wide open door:

1. no god of any shape, size or hue owns those great works.

2. Religious art may be framed by the iconography of a Christian tradition but its starting point is human.

3. This is not art simply in thrall to an abstract divine but art working through the Christian narrative to transfigure and transcend the confines of lives that were for the most part "nasty, brutish and short".

Somewhere, there may be a religious person who thinks (1) a god of some particular size, shape and hue "owns" an art collection, (2) Christian art just drops from the sky - no human participation is involved, and (3) Christians worship an "abstract divine" that has no bearing on the difficulties of human life. Wherever they are, they can consider themselves soundly refuted.

It's a shame that the irreligious ethos of Britain requires Dent to attach such tortured disclaimers to her straightforward and refreshing observations. There is, in fact, no contradiction between Christian faith and a thorough celebration of human dignity (with all the happy artistic consequences), for the best kind of humanism naturally springs from belief in the God who became human. As for contemporary art, yes, things are bad, and we should not hesitate to say as much. But for a more nuanced analysis, one might have better luck with conservative religious publications, or Dan Siedell's God in the Gallery.

Christ Dead in London

As I strolled through London thanks to a felix culpa of a missed flight connection, I saw a truck that had a grizzly close-up photograph of a bleeding, crucified Christ who looked out intently, accompanied by the words, "Look what he did for you! Don't go to hell!" It's just the kind of thing that the sophisticated Londoner would balk at - except that it isn't. The Sacred Made Real at the National Gallery made the truck - and even the inevitably two dimensional canvass of Mel Gibson - look somewhat tame. Though they couldn't have planned it, this exhibit turns out to be a sort of complement to the Vatican initiative to welcome Anglicans. It's as in-your-face Spanish Catholic as an exhibit can get, but rather than recoiling, onetime Cromwellian London - from the reviews I read - seems to love it.

It was difficult not to. If art shows got Oscars, this show would get one for lighting. Walking through the exhibit is like inhabiting a chiaroscuro dreamscape. These images hover on the edge of kitsch, nevertheless, they somehow avoid the charge, at certain points only barely. If, as Oscar Wilde remarked, sentimentality is having an emotion without paying for it, then these sculptures and paintings - despite potentially saccharine themes like Bernard of Clairvaux's erotic visions - definitely extract a fee.

In a brilliantly defiant essay to introduce an exhibition on crucifixes, Leon Wieseltier once remarked in admiration, as only an unbeliever can, "What would art have been without religious nonsense?" I imagine he, and many unbelieving viewers, might be brought to a similar place by this exhibit. But, Martin Gayford at the Telegraph issues an important reminder:

Christ Carrying the Cross (1619) by Montañés is still carried through the streets during Holy Week on the shoulders of 30 men.... the realism was not intended as an artistic sensation, but as an aid to the religious imagination.

In a meditation on Irving Kristol's passing in this month's First Things, Jody Bottum wrestles with the charge that Kristol saw religion as merely useful.

[Kristol] had an utter conviction of the social utility of Judeo-Christian religion, but the rebuttal of social utility arguments is easy: The good social effects of religion are not gained when people practice religion for the sake of its good social effects; those effects come, instead, only when people practice religion for the sake of itself.

Replace the word "social" in that paragraph with "artistic," and one has a gentle retort to those who, with alleged magnanimity, applaud the aesthetic utility of Christian faith.

Oh, Canada

That being both an "Oh" of both reverence and exasperation, the latter which I am permitted because I married a Canadian. The occasion for dual sentiment was a magnificent exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Had you asked me what the best landscape painting show I could imagine might be, and had I thought about it hard enough, I would have said a contextualized juxtaposition of America's Hudson River School with Canada's Group of Seven. And it is just this that Vancouver has amply provided in Expanding Horizons: Painting and Landscape Photography of American and Canadian Landscape 1860-1918. The exhibit was organized chronologically, beginning with an early innocence, followed by domination over nature, and then a return to that original innocence, which is where North America's best kept artistic secret, the Group of Seven, came in.

The Americans Georgia O'Keefe, Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, and John Singer Sargent all made dignified appearances in the show. But as an American, I can flat out admit that when one factors in Tom Thompson et alia, Canada far outpaces American landscape painting, and that's alright. Art is not a zero-sum game, and the paintings are there for the entire continent to discover and enjoy.

But then Canada had to get political, or rather, aggressively apolitical. To be fair, I should have expected this. At the impressive Anthropological Museum, a best case scenario of modern architecture, my co-traveler (and mega-blogger) Bill and I were struck with the oddness of the museum's commentary on Bill Reid's marvelous sculpture - carved from a solid block of Cedar - which is placed over previous defensive fortifications, fortifications which the exhibit referred to as "dubious," as if there was an inherent problem with Canadians trying to defend themselves during the Second World War. Such self-negating commentary was amplified at the landscape show.

While the American/Canadian juxtaposition was fascinating in and of itself, the curators decided to take the opportunity to unfurl that unofficial Canadian motto: "Not America." America, we learned, exploited their environment, and Canada (it was implied) wouldn't dare rearrange a distant Yukon stone. America, we learned, believed in Manifest Destiny, God and all that, as expressed, for example, in Moran's much-less-cheesy-in-the-original Mountain of the Holy Cross. Canada, the exhibit implied, had no such metaphysical ambitions, a move which requires ignoring, for example, the profoundly religious, admittedly theosophic, influence on the artists such as Lawren Harris.

If Canadians want to believe this about their history then so be it. They are at liberty to be wrong. Problem is, the City of Vancouver is not yet fully on board. Just as the visitor is about to leave the city through the main rail station, one sees this sculpture by Couer de Lion MacCarthy, commissioned by the Canadian Pacific Railway. It was built to commemorate the workers who gave their lives in World War I, men "called by King and Country," only to "pass out of sight of men by the path of duty and self-sacrifice that others might live in freedom," freedoms which Vancouverites, I can assure you, take full advantage.

Railroads realizing continental British ambitions, and then commissioning art about soldiers giving up their lives for Canadian sovereignty and liberty? It all sounds so less than dubious; so stridently Amer.... I can't bring myself to say it (lest an embarrassed Olympic Welcoming Committee tear the beautiful thing down). Can such ideals be abused? Of course they can, and have been. But to tell only the abusive side of the story is as revisionist as a history book subtitled "My country right or wrong." This is why public sculpture, such as America's own Augustus Saint Gaudens, is so important. It offsets the tyranny of the living, and permits the dead to get a word in edgewise.

But what about the aboriginal perspective? Don't get me started. Even First Nations artist Bill Reid is too much of a believer for the present generation. In the contemporary, supplemental installations at the Bill Reid Gallery, Reid's tour de force at the Anthropological Museum is mocked with a Campbell's soup can and chainsaw spinoff which are clever, but only clever. Reid's sculpture, on the other hand, was ambitious, serene, reflective of the finer First Nation ideals, and exponentially more difficult to create.

The Group of Seven were painting for Canada, not against America. Say what you will about the ideals - Royal or aboriginal - of previous generations. At least they gave us beautiful art. Conversely, my generation has given itself to one of the most seductive, ambitious ideals imaginable: The mistaken belief there are no ideals. Consequently, the art we have to offer is, far too often, parasitic at best.

update: Incidentally, to take this perspective further, the scholarship of Canadian historian George Rawlyk (not to mention Mark Noll) has done much to correct the Canadian tendency to edit out its own religious history.

Consummate, don't flirt

Not terribly surprising to see this kind of stuff coming from the contemporary art world. As I have plans to be in Manchester this summer during the "hermit's" tower enclosure, Ansuman Biswas should know that I will be the one shouting (charitably) from the street: "Why don't you just get it over with and convert to Christianity!"

In the words of Alain Besançon, artists today have "turned the amnesia regarding Christian disciplines and dogma to their advantage."

Balkanized Aesthetics

After surveying art world quirks, Bruce Herman makes an irenic point:

I think a lot of ink could be saved, and a lot of breath too, by simply accepting that the art culture around us is engaged in pursuing what is enjoyable to those who want to participate - and leave it at that.

Etienne Gilson makes the same observation, but from another angle:

Thanks to the fine arts, matter enters by anticipation into something like the state of glory promised to it by theologians at the end of time, when it will be thoroughly spiritualized. A universe having no other function than to be beautiful would be a glorious thing indeed. Those for whom that notion means nothing should not carp at others for dreaming about it and enjoying, in the beauty of works of art, a glimpse of it (33-34).

Both Herman and Gilson suggest that different art worlds, with their accompanying aesthetic languages, should live and let live.

(Those shocked to learn that N.T. Wright was not the first to exploit the new creation trope, deep breaths... deep breaths...)

Avant L'Avant Garde

Renegade band subverts "the system" by offering a free album? Kudos Radiohead, but the idea is three decades old.

"In 1979, after negotiating a release from his contract with Sparrow, Keith Green initiated a new policy of refusing to charge money for concerts or albums. Keith and Melody mortgaged their home to privately finance Green's next album, So You Wanna Go Back To Egypt. The album, which featured a guest appearance by Bob Dylan, was offered through mail-order and at concerts for a price determined by the purchaser" (wiki).

A key difference, of course, is that at the time of their magnanimity (which included concerts), Keith and Melody Green did not have a comfortable system-generated fortune to fall back on.

Of course, the brightest of self-professed revolutionaries can't help but realize they're more than fashionably late to the barricades. Pomo darling Georges Bataille, for example, pointed to the early Christian movement as a model which could prevent the perpetual compromising of the avant-garde. According to the New Left Review,

...in a lecture given before the Collège on March 19, 1938, Bataille proposed the primitive Christian sect as the exemplum of such a cell - one that had, in fact, revolutionized the world.

Granted Bataille had long renounced his Catholic faith and tried to revive a (now defunct) atheistic mysticism, but at least he was honest about the origins of genuine resistance.

Even more honest was Hugo Ball, who very much like one Salvador Dalí, abandoned the Dada movement that he so ardently co-founded, returning by 1920 with his wife Emmy to the Catholicism of Ball's youth. Hear the words of one of the twentieth century's most venerated subversives:

I have broken the oath of allegiance I once gave to the church. Of course, I was a child when I received the holy confirmation, but it was a special appeal to my judgment and self-preservation. Now I am seeking my way back to the church and a life full of mistakes lies between us (186).

And so Ball's resistance really began. Christianity: When you're serious enough about revolution to get metaphysical.

Art as Religion

It's a pleasure when a book one has enjoyed, thanks to the much-maligned blog medium, does not end. In his book God in the Gallery, Daniel Siedell - I have tried to argue previously - has effectively reframed the Christianity and art conversation. I've found the last several posts at Siedell's blog a helpful development of his argument. There may be many paths the religion and art conversation are treading, but I find this one the most interesting, and I intend to follow it.

Art and religion, Siedell suggests, are kin (though he downplays the consequent sibling rivalry). In her recent book, Seven Days in the Art World, sociologist Sarah Thornton agrees. She asserts that art today is based on a common belief that has "transformed contemporary art into a kind of alternative religion for atheists." One could summon a host of other book-length witnesses. There's Ziolkowski, Chai, and perhaps most famously Bell, to name just a few. The point of art-as-religion is not an accusation made by Christians. It is a fact asserted by the secular world. Nietzsche, as is so often the case, puts it best:

The feelings expelled from the sphere of religion by the Enlightenment throw themselves into art.

Strangely, but not unconvincingly, Siedell posits this as a basis for Christian engagement of the art world, not its critique. I imagine (read: hope) this will initially make some people nervous. Siedell wants Christians to understand the art world on its own terms - to immerse themselves in it, even should it be a parallel faith. Would he advise the same strategy to Christians dealing with more established religion such as Voodoo (the analogy is the art world's, not mine)? Would he advise Christians to have more faith in foreign deities to help them be effective believers in Christ? What about conversion from one religion to another? What about not serving two masters? These are the kind of questions that would be especially raised not just by conservative Christian colleges Siedell engages, but especially by the Russian Orthodox theologians whom he repeatedly invokes.

But to ask these questions, I think, is to misunderstand Siedell. He has already effectively fielded these objections in God in the Gallery. "The church's aesthetics and poetics," he suggest, "is the ground of all aesthetics and poetics." It seems to me that he has the kind of confidence in Christian faith that sees this other religion called "art" as a stimulant, but not very much of a threat. Therefore, one can participate in its rituals without risking some kind of spiritual promiscuity. This confidence, I think, is what makes his kind of engagement fruitful, and what keeps it from devolving into some kind of pluralistic compromise. Siedell's firm theological conviction, not wobbly doctrine, is what enables him to build a sturdy analogical bridge between the Christianity and the "religion" of art. What's more, this analogy makes practicing Christians naturally disposed toward intelligent participation in the art world - if only they would make the effort.

In his recent posts, Siedell worries that Christians will continue to refuse engagement of contemporary art. My fear, however, is different. I fear they will do so without a confidence similar to Siedell's. When Christianity lacks - as it generally does in this country - a coherent visual tradition, the ability to engage visual art with self-assurance is decreased. Therefore, the Christian art colleges described (decried?) by Siedell have a twofold task: They need both teach students to engage the contemporary art world on its own terms, and to restore a coherent Christian visual tradition, one that Siedell acknowledges the need for in his book by pointing to the importance of liturgical art. This is, of course, a lot to ask.

Crisis of Faith
While I hope it's clear I find Siedell convincing, I'd like to point out a potential pitfall on this path. If we take Siedell's art-as-religion analogy at face value, what happens when the new religion is on the rocks? Oddly enough, the lion's share of irreverence within the religion of art is not coming from present day Savonarolas, but from artists themselves. Martí nez Celaya, a contemporary artist focused upon Siedell's book, may be one of them. In a review I'm indebted to Siedell for sending along, Celaya explains

I'm not interested in luscious, sexy, virtuosic painting, but the destruction of the image, undermining the certainty of the image.

Elsewhere Celaya describes his aspiration to make paintings that fail.

You may read other things about [my] "October Cycle" but you shouldn't trust them including whatever I've said. The "October Cycle" is a failure, those of you who dislike this work already know that and those of you who like the work should see to quickly understand its futility (62).

That may be just theory speak, but I like to think it betrays something deeper: Celaya's lack of confidence in art as faith. Now of course there are those who wish to import that exact deconstructive tendency into Christianity, but that won't work. It has, after all, always been there, but in a much more interesting way.

So, what does the adherent of a more tested religion [Christianity] do when adherents of a parallel religion [art] have a crisis of faith? Is it too much for a Christian, working in Siedell's paradigm, to suggest a faith (their own) that affords something - someone - more worthy of confidence? Surely not. The art world is packed with those who lost their faith in Christianity, which is why Christian images haunt the art world. Conversion, however, is a two way street.

Siedell paints a sorry picture of Christian college art departments today, and perhaps he's right. We could all perhaps stand to give contemporary art more of a chance. But the sorriest picture of all would be this: Those same Christian art departments keeping a rival religion on life support despite continuing signals that, parts of it at least, may just want to die.

UPDATE: Dan Siedell has been kind enough to respond to this post at his blog.

Calling the Bluff, Raising the Stakes

Ted Prescott, a sculptor at Messiah College, illustrates an alternative Christian strategy for dealing with critical theory in the humanities:

Evidently we will always have theorists with us, like the poor. Unlike the poor, theorists seem to have plenty to eat. If works of art are food for theorists, it seems obvious that something happens to those works as they are broken down and reconstituted by theoretical digestion... My argument is not with theory or theorists. I have been engaged by my theoretical encounters... and have learned from them. My arguments is with the belief that theories legitimize art, reveal its meaning, and should discipline our perceptions. The best response to such totalizing belief is not more theory. It is art's "wild prayer of longing" (240-241).

That last quote is from W.H. Auden's For the Time Being. Apparently, Prescott is unfamiliar with the more common way for Christians to grapple with critical theory: Folding the hand, surrendering the chips.