God in the Gallery (Cultural Exegesis)

A Christian Embrace of Modern Art

Siedell, Daniel A., Johnston, Robert K., Dyrness, William

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781441201850
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Literatura y artes en el cristianismo

Is contemporary art a friend or foe of Christianity? Art historian, critic, and curator Daniel Siedell, addresses this question and presents a framework for interpreting art from a Christian worldview in God in the Gallery: A Christian Embrace of Modern Art. As such, it is an excellent companion to Francis Schaeffer's classic Art and the Bible. Divided into three parts--"Theology, " "History, " and "Practice"-- God in the Gallery demonstrates that art is in conversation with and not opposed to the Christian faith. In addition, this book is beautifully enhanced with images from such artists as Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock, Enrique Martínez Celaya, and others. Readers of this book will include professors, students, artists, and anyone interested in Christianity and culture.

1

Overture

Some of the most deep-seated pleasures of our natural selves . . . involve appetites that had to be educated. If these pleasures are rooted in crude instinct, they nonetheless grow in depth and power as we acquire hierarchies of discrimination, until second nature is nowhere separable from the first. Yet visual art—and abstract art most particularly—remains one of the last bastions of unashamed, unrepentant ignorance, where educated experience can still be equated with phony experience. . . . This syndrome becomes ever more acute as the tradition gets fatter and the works get leaner.

Kirk Varnedoe, Pictures of Nothing

Art is a deceptive cultural practice. On one hand, it is ubiquitous in popular culture. Art museums attract thousands of visitors, and local community arts projects abound. And with the current interest in the “creative class” and the “creative turn” in the corporate world, art, as a manifestation of creativity, is good for business.1 But it is rarely defined. We seem to know what art is when we see it; or, perhaps more accurately, we know what it isn’t. On the other hand, there are few cultural practices that have such a wide disparity and disconnection between the populace and the specialists, who are almost universally assumed to be irrelevant to understanding and appreciating art.2

Any talk of art’s complexity and difficulty seems to fly in the face of its accessible, fun, “child-friendly” nature, which is the message communicated by museums and local arts organizations. By and large, art’s popularity is derived primarily from its instrumentality as an economic tool for the chamber of commerce.

Art might be popular, but it is poorly understood, in large part because its historical and philosophical conditions are believed to be unnecessary for its appreciation. At the risk of being considered an elitist, I argue that such conditions must be understood. This popular understanding of art also manifests an arrogance that restricts art’s horizon, limiting it to a form of decoration, cultural symbolism, or the like. Viewing and understanding art, as much as practicing it, requires hard work and discipline. The common assumption that modern and contemporary artists ignore their audiences ignores this fact. Therefore, it is important to lay some initial groundwork before an exploration of modern and contemporary art can begin in earnest.

Modern Art as Museum Art

The arts are very much a part of the contemporary church. But when the arts are referred to or discussed, it is often in one of two ways. First is within the context of worship, that is, what kinds of art will be incorporated into a worship service. Most often, this has to do with artistic practices that have no direct resemblance to the subject of this book: music, banners, dance, film clips, film stills, graphic design, or clip art downloaded from the Internet. Outside the church, Christian attention to the arts has primarily to do with music and film, a concern, incidentally, that reflects their popularity and ubiquity in the larger culture. Although the kind of art I deal with influences these art forms, this book is not about them.

This book is about museum art.3 It is “high” or “fine” art. It is art made, as Nicholas Wolterstorff observes in Art in Action, for “contemplation.”4 This has made Christian commentators, particularly of the evangelical persuasion, nervous. It appears elitist. Huge swaths of visual images are ignored and subjugated to some practice that is considered higher, finer, and part of a practice of high culture that is enjoyed by very few. It is therefore neither populist nor democratic, which also violates key tenants of American religious experience. Even Wolterstorff restricts high art’s importance, emphasizing that it is just one of the many ways that art functions.

This reflects a societal bias as well. Absurd and scandalous works of art, inflated auction prices, public controversies such as the Sensations exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and an idealized and mystified lost “Golden Age” of the (pre-Reformation) past when high art was sponsored by the church and was accessible to the “average person,” conspire to reinforce a deeply negative and suspicious view of museum art produced since 1900. This need not be the case. It is perhaps worth mentioning that both Hitler and Stalin condemned modern art as “degenerate,” a fact that should provoke us to reflect on the origins of and reasons for our negative views of modern art.

The history and development of the art museum is an inextricable part of the history and development of modern and contemporary art. The public art museum developed as part of the political and cultural imperialism of France, England, and Germany in the early nineteenth century, when cultural artifacts from around the world were brought to these institutions for public display. What emerged was a distinctive tradition of experiencing them aesthetically, which de-emphasized the particularities and distinctives of history and culture that laid the groundwork for the development of modern art.5

This development evolved with, and in opposition to, the academy. As Egyptian, Assyrian, and Greek antiquities along with medieval altarpieces, icons, and Renaissance portraiture came to be interpreted within an internationalist, transhistorical modern aesthetic, a living tradition was established that was so powerful that the French realist Gustave Courbet could encourage art students to study with the “old masters” in the museums rather than with the faculty at the academy.6 This living tradition of museum art came to exert a shaping influence on emerging modern artists in the mid-nineteenth century, who self-consciously submitted to this living tradition as the interpretive framework for their artistic practice. Products of aesthetic work by artists participating in this living tradition are responses to and critiques of this tradition, extending it, deepening it. As T. S. Eliot remarked in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1917), the individual artist achieves his identity as an individual by participating in a historical tradition.7

Museum art, then, is a profoundly historical practice with a developed tradition, a living tradition of the dead rather than a dead tradition of the living, to paraphrase Jaroslav Pelikan’s famous description of the church’s Holy Tradition. That much of modern art appears to many museum- and gallery-goers as strange and arbitrary has much to do with not knowing the living tradition out of which such work emerges and into which artists, curators, and critics are baptized. That most are not a part of this living tradition does not invalidate its integrity. For example, that T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland or James Joyce’s Ulysses requires extensive notes to explain references and allusions does nothing to undermine the fact that Eliot and Joyce were working within a living tradition. It just so happens that this living tradition is not the one of most contemporary readers, neither in Eliot’s or Joyce’s time nor in our own.

Modern art’s profoundly historical character has given rise to important philosophical reflection on the nature of art. Philosopher Jerrold Levinson argues that art’s historicity is the defining and distinguishing characteristic of what art is and how it is identified.8 In addition to this historical aspect, two different and, at times, competing, ways of thinking about art have informed my own work as a curator, critic, and art historian: philosophical considerations and theological reflections.

Philosophical Considerations

Art is not only a cultural practice, it is also an institutional practice. Therefore, any discussion of art must take into account its institutional framework. Modern art’s primary institutional framework is the art museum. Modern art and its living tradition exists not only invisibly in the hearts and minds of its practitioners and participants but also embodied, mediated in and through its visible public institutions. And it is in fact this public or outward manifestation that produces the private and inward experience of art.9 What art is, then, is defined through a public network and not merely by private assertion or opinion.

Moreover, what art is cannot be derived exclusively from what it looks like—what philosopher George Dickie calls its “exhibited qualities”—because many examples of modern art look very similar, if not identical, to objects and images that are not considered art. Examining art’s institutional framework enables those qualities that are unexhibited to be more proactively constitutive of what art is. These unexhibited qualities are the attitudes, beliefs, intentions, assumptions, and practices that are absorbed in the very institutions that produce, shape, nourish, display, and interpret art. Moreover, it is these unexhibited qualities that connect artistic practice with other cultural practices. The Russian art historian, mathematician, Orthodox priest, and martyr Pavel Florensky observed that “for better or worse, the work of art is the center of an entire cluster of conditions, which alone make possible its existence as something artistic; outside of its constitutive conditions it simply does not exist as art.”10

An influential, albeit much criticized, definition of art is the institutional definition, whose primary adherent is George Dickie. He was influenced by Arthur Danto’s essay “The Artworld,” published in 1964. Danto’s essay was an attempt to reflect philosophically on a single problem: how could Andy Warhol’s plywood Brillo Box be understood as a work of art since it is virtually (visually) identical in every way to a simple cardboard Brillo box? “To see something as art,” Danto observes, “requires something the eye cannot decry—an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art:an art world.”11 The difference, for Danto and especially for Dickie, is that Warhol’s reliance on the familiarity of the ordinary object provides the interpretive ground for his hand-painted copy of the mass-produced original and becomes art when it is placed in a museum/gallery space that invites and provokes certain responses on the part of the viewer. The viewer, in short, responds to it as a work of art by contemplating its union of form and content, which Warhol produced, in a particular way and by reflecting on this experience as a distinctively aesthetic experience. For Danto, it is the presence of interpretation and theory that enables an object to become a work of art. For Dickie it is the museum/gallery space that enables this transformation. It is this space, as a literal and conceptual space, that shapes both artistic practice and audience response.12

Although Danto’s test cases were Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol, for Dickie it is Marcel Duchamp who is the prototype artist who reveals that art is an institutional practice. It is important for the purposes of this book that Warhol and Duchamp are the lenses through which Dickie and Danto view contemporary art, since these two artists are perhaps the most vilified by Christian commentators of any twentieth-century artists. This has much to do with the philosophy of art that many of these commentators utilize as well as the historical narratives of modern art that view Warhol and Duchamp in decidedly uncharitable ways. A more empathetic interpretation of both Warhol and Duchamp will acknowledge the importance of a robust living tradition of high art within which both artists worked, even while they critiqued and undermined certain of its aspects.13

That high art—museum art—has for over two centuries developed a living tradition that functions institutionally has important ramifications for Christian reflection on contemporary art. Museum art developed only with the emergence of museums. Thus art is but one manifestation and embodiment of a certain kind of aesthetic practice. Although this subject will be discussed in greater detail in chapter 2, it is important that modern art is not regarded merely as an abrogation of its divinely appointed place in the church. Human institutions are neither purely good nor purely bad. They are means by which human persons work out the cultural mandate in community (Gen. 1:28).

Modern art as an institutional and historical practice, defined in and through the museum, is no different. Not all products of modernity are theologically and spiritually suspect. The development of modern art offered a particular opportunity to address certain distinctive features of aesthetic practice and visual representation that were not given preeminence in other institutional manifestations of aesthetic practice, including the church.

A distinctive characteristic of modern art is the preeminent role aesthetic practice plays in the development of the self and its relationship to the world. This aspect of our humanity is given sharp focus and attention in and through the institution of high art. This aesthetic or stylistic aspect of our humanity has received broad-based attention from the church fathers, who understood individual Christians to be shaping themselves into icons of Christ through spiritual formation, to Jean-Paul Sartre’s belief that our lives, as products of our decisions, are works of art. This characteristic has also received considerable popular attention recently, in works such as Virginia Postrel’s The Substance of Style, and is confirmed through Robert Wuthnow’s sociological research on the role of the arts (very broadly speaking) as a practice that forms identity.14 The modern institution of high art draws particular attention to the role of aesthetic practice in human development, and as such, it has become, under the conditions of modernity, a significant framework for such reflection.

Institutional theories of art account for the role of museums and galleries, interpreters, and other non-aesthetic aspects of art that participate in constituting what art is, so that, to quote Danto, “nothing the Brillo people can make will be art while Warhol can do nothing but make art.”15 But institutional theories do not offer sufficient analysis of the mechanics of producing and experiencing art. This is perhaps not surprising, since theories of art most often have emerged as means to accommodate the most recent of artistic developments that challenge established philosophical frameworks for understanding art.16 Institutional theories emerged in an effort to comprehend and interpret the work of Warhol and Duchamp, two artists for whom it is said that art was often more interesting to think about than to look at.17

The institutional approach to art locates a break between the modern notion of high art as being true art and premodern visual representation—which functions within other institutional frameworks such as the church—as being something else. Given this, some will assume that the term “art” cannot be applied to premodern visual representation, that art is a modern, Western (i.e., Eurocentric) concept. Although such an institutional approach is helpful in clarifying and distinguishing important differences in visual practices, there is a certain intrinsic meaning in visual representation, or aesthetic embodiment, that a hard contextualism such as the institutional theory cannot recognize.

Philosopher Paul Crowther offers a complement to relativistic approaches to art, such as the institutional theory, that pay insufficient attention to what occurs cognitively in the process of producing and experiencing art. Influenced by the thoroughly embodied phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Crowther develops what he calls the “ecological theory of art,” which involves the development of the self through creative and imaginative interaction with the environment. Crowther addresses the important role that art plays in the growth of self-consciousness as the embodied self interacts with the world aesthetically. For Crowther, art possesses “phenomenological depth” because it has a “cognitive richness” since “we comprehend the world aesthetically, in ways that cannot be derived from other forms of knowledge and artifice.”18 Crowther observes that “it is th...