Memento Mori in Contemporary Art

Theologies of Lament and Hope

Taylor Worley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429671050
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Theology

This book explores how four contemporary artists—Francis Bacon, Joseph Beuys, Robert Gober, and Damien Hirst—pursue the question of death through their fraught appropriations of Christian imagery. Each artist is shown to not only pose provocative theological questions, but also to question the abilities of theological speech to adequately address current attitudes to death.

When set within a broader theological context around the thought of death, Bacon's works invite fresh readings of the New Testament's narration of the betrayal of Christ, and Beuys' works can be appreciated for the ways they evoke Resurrection to envision possible futures for Germany in the aftermath of war. Gober's immaculate sculptures and installations serve to create alternative religious environments, and these places are both evocative of his Roman Catholic upbringing and virtually haunted by the ghosts of his excommunication from that past. Lastly and perhaps most problematically, Hirst has built his brand as an artist from making jokes about death.

By opening fresh arenas of dialogue and meaning-making in our society and culture today, the rich humanity of these artworks promises both renewed depths of meaning regarding our exit from this world as well as how we might live well within it for the time that we have. As such, it will be a vital resource for all scholars in Theology, the Visual Arts, Material Religion and Religious Studies.

1 Theology and contemporary art

Making dialogue possible

The prospects for dialogue between theology and contemporary art seem ever more promising, and yet lingering questions remain unanswered. The admixture of generative possibilities and potential pitfalls seems blatantly evident to many, but it is worth noting a few strikingly different perspectives on the current field. In his probing and provocative survey Art + Religion in the 21st Century, Aaron Rosen opens with this word of caution: “When you enter the world of art, you are, like it or not, entering the realm of religion.”¹ As he notes, that fact describes not only a distant setting in art history but also very much our own moment. Indeed, Rosen delights that, “Not only does the dialogue between art and religion appear to be deepening, the studies of both art and religion have undergone sizeable shifts in recent years, enabling us to approach the association differently from the past.”² Indeed, these observations begin to confirm what Graham Howes envisioned about a new model of interaction for art and religion some years ago. He contends that

the most appropriate role model for today’s artists is not necessarily to profess a specific confessional commitment, nor try to lift the current aesthetic taboo against explicit narrative content. It is, rather, to profess a self-guided religious imagination which no longer merely reflects existing religious tradition but creates and expresses new spiritual perceptions which we are all invited to share.³

While this broadening and deepening of contact between religion and art promises more than just controversy (but plenty of that too), it remains to be seen what role theology should play in the expanding conversation. Many are asking what the way forward looks like for Christian theology and its engagement with contemporary art and how theologians should conduct themselves accordingly. Ben Quash confirms this assessment from the outset of his recent volume Found Theology. He acknowledges some of the familiar criticisms and notes that

theology and the arts is frequently shallow because its practitioners employ relatively few critical tools, and because it is prone to the deployment of examples from the arts only when they are deemed useful for the illustration of a preconceived theological point.⁴

In light of such challenges, Quash adopts a pneumatological mode of exploration that seeks out “examples of the way that new times (new found things, or ‘findings’) properly stimulate new expressions of known and loved things, and sometimes change the way they are understood.”⁵ Found Theology, then, emerges as one example among a small class of works that not only meets such challenges directly but answers them so successfully as to enhance the dialogue for both respective quarters. In this way, we should not settle for easy, all-too-tidy arrangements for theology and the arts, especially where one becomes subservient to the other. Rather, we must struggle for a better dialogue and thus allow theology to flourish, as Jeremy Begbie casts it, in all its “peculiar orthodoxy.” He rightly notes that the arts deserve more than a domineering or, on the other hand, de-fanged account of doctrine as conversation partner.⁶ The scandalous claim that God has taken on flesh in the person of Jesus Christ and acted decisively for us all through his life, death, and resurrection does not foreclose artistic discovery but, in fact, quite the opposite. As Begbie relates, “In the artistic arena, the ramifications of this physically rooted hope are inexhaustible.”⁷ In this survey of theologies of death in contemporary art, then, we will see yet more examples where the simplistic categorization of art as religious protagonist or antagonist does not hold true. Instead, by paying attention to the subtle allusions and nuances of these works, we find whole bodies of art that expand our parameters for theology’s engagement with the visual, for each of the artists surveyed here displays a unique theological trajectory entirely their own. As such, these works provide a timely indictment of a distracted society’s absurd and devastating avoidance of death. In essence, this study risks close engagement with difficult artworks and holds out great expectation for fresh discoveries, akin to the hope of Quash’s project that we have been promised “abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine” (Eph. 3:20).⁸ Thus, these works of contemporary art because of rather than in spite of their fraught negotiations with Christian imagery become the venue for fresh appreciations for the still scandalous message that God in Christ has died on the cross in our place.

We will consider Francis Bacon’s Crucifixion imagery and Damien Hirst’s experimentation with vanitas forms and find arresting theological claims that would not be possible without the backdrop of a fragile, post-war Britain and the unsettled role of the church in it. Free to explore their own thoroughly religious questions – meaningless suffering and death’s inevitability, respectively – Bacon and Hirst’s works not only invite theological consideration but also confront it. Both the visceral distortions of humanity in Bacon’s canvases and the irrepressible sarcasm of Hirst’s conceptual exploits irritate the tidy theological niceties that tempt us to cover over the unspeakable horror of death. In the way that their works evade straightforward or uncomplicated theological assessment, Bacon and Hirst actually demonstrate the limits of theological speech and underscore the priority of silence. While many viewers may reject the personalities of the artists present in this work (i.e. Bacon’s existential angst or Hirst’s childish irreverence), the desperate questioning behind the façade of the artist-celebrity becomes for us a prophetic voice within the work that we can learn from and appreciate. In their own way, they demonstrate the theological value of contributions from outside the religious tradition.

In contrast, then, the two other artists in this study seek to work from within the Christian tradition rather than to attack it from the outside. With his explicit renunciation of traditional modes of religious imagery and his concerted attempt at a new formal vocabulary for art, Joseph Beuys provides not only the foundation for new movements in formalist and conceptual art but also the most unified effort at a Christian art of re-enchantment. With its invitation for art audiences to participate in the theatre of his artistic vision, Beuys’s art exemplifies the best of contemporary art’s engagement with everyday life. Unashamedly autobiographical in his approach, Beuys presents us with his own traumatized experience as a particular vehicle for accessing the cosmic healing of Christ’s presence in the world. With the exception of some uniquely antagonistic voices in postmodern criticism, his work has inspired not merely deep appreciation but diverse tangents of experimentation that continue to rework his conceptual armature for art. He thus remains a paradigm for religious art all to himself. His singular vision of art’s spirituality is often mimicked and imitated but never equalled. Similarly, the work of Robert Gober continues to frustrate whatever simple ideas both art critics and theologians have about the convergence of art and religious belief. Like in the case of Beuys, that convergence is always messier and more fascinating than observers seem to imagine. We find that what appears on the surface to be artistic violence towards religious tradition turns out to be something much more subtle and profound upon closer inspection. In deconstructing traditional images of Christ, Mary, and the saints, Gober’s “false blasphemy” recasts these Christian icons with playfulness, perversity, and poignancy. With Gober’s art, the work comes mediated idiosyncratically through the artist’s personal reservations and doubts about faith, and while these second thoughts can be found nestled within the cryptic mythology of references in Gober’s installations, they perform an essential function to the work’s integrity. The embedded nature of these doubts offers many different points of connection with viewers and guarantees a space for questioning the impressions and “ways of seeing” that inform not only the artist’s thoughts about the subject (i.e. Christ, Mary, or the saints) but also the viewer’s assumptions. Thus, his “false blasphemy” questions the validity of art and religious belief simultaneously, and this questioning creates the opportunity for us to adopt a critical distance on our religious and visual perceptions. Perhaps surprisingly, we discover that Robert Gober’s large-scale, immaculate installations are addressing the times in which we live by means of complicated negotiations with theological ideas and imagery. This strategy is no mere device. Gober’s works function as sensitive and astute critics of the faith, and the sober inquiry they sustain serves to deepen and solidify the weight of our ephemeral questions about death. In the way that Gober’s works stir up theological questions through seemingly innocuous and everyday objects, we are given the chance to take up the responsibility of these questions for ourselves.

The theological readings of death within these works demand our attention. And while it remains to be seen as to what consideration these theological insights might receive among the art-critical discourse, their work has enduring theological value. Without exposition of these theological considerations, the reception of Bacon, Beuys, Gober, and Hirst seems incomplete, and thus a strictly secular reading of their work remains insufficient. In contrast to the received canons of contemporary art, these specific works help to corrode modernism’s austere quest to avoid theology. Rather, they lay bare specifically theological questions, and for this reason, we must prioritize those ventures into the unknown territories that most threaten or put our theological assumptions at risk.⁹ In this respect, then, Francis Bacon and Robert Gober, for instance, deserve our attention more urgently than artists such as Stanley Spencer, Mark Rothko, or Antony Gormley. While the latter group represent a more natural study for theology, the group of artists engaging in theologies of death considered here offer a much greater opportunity for theology to understand itself anew in the process. More than that, this cast of contemporary artists invites theology to find common cause with those who want to deal directly with the thought of death and salvage real hope for our day.

The urgency of death

While Martin Heidegger was quick to dismiss the insights of theology and saw it as merely another “metaphysics of death,” theologians would do well to not return the favour.¹⁰ Bookended by two cataclysmic world wars and the new forms of mechanized death they had introduced, Heidegger’s concern for authenticity forged a new path for existentialism. In particular, it led him to disturb the cultural quietism of his age with the inescapable question of death. Indeed, Heidegger’s influential treatise Being and Time is at its core a profound meditation on authenticity as “being-towards-death.” Such authenticity, for Heidegger, is a hard-won resistance to our polite but poisoned denial of death. In fact, he describes at length the process by which the “they-self” (i.e. a mob mentality or group-think) succeeds in continually holding the thought of death in abeyance. He called this status quo the “constant tranquilization of death.” Unsettling such quietism accounts for much of Heidegger’s enduring importance, and the debilitating lack of concern over death that pervades our culture today suggests that Heidegger’s considerations of death are needed more urgently than ever. More recently, Marc Crépon has assessed the legacy of Heidegger’s unsettling of death in the work of subsequent thinkers like Sartre, Levinas, Ricœur, and Derrida.¹¹ With his survey of resonant voices, Crépon’s The Thought of Death and the Memory of War demonstrates how significant Heidegger’s essential claims about death were for the inheritors of his phenomenological perspective. Crépon’s own response to Heidegger, however, yields the most poignant reflections germane to this project. In the concluding essay of the work, Crépon addresses the discussion to the many images of death that populate our everyday visual landscape. Here, he questions the meaning of this condition and considers what possibilities exist for preserving any thought of death in a Heideggerian sense. Crépon reflects that when we are not able to definitively distinguish between the image of death in entertainment and the image of death as news what results is an overwhelming cultural and ethical disorientation. He elaborates on this notion of the blurred image of death:

And yet these artifactual images do not aim at creating new affects. They do not seek to act on or influence our relation to the world directly—even less our relation to death. They do not modify our memory in the slightest. On ...