Contemporary Art and the Church

A Conversation Between Two Worlds

W. David O. Taylor, Taylor Worley, W. David O. Taylor, Taylor Worley

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780830850655
• eBook ISBN: 9780830890309
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Contemporary Art

The church and the contemporary art world often find themselves in an uneasy relationship in which misunderstanding and mistrust abound.

On one hand, the leaders of local congregations, seminaries, and other Christian ministries often don't know what to make of works by contemporary artists. Not only are these artists mostly unknown to church leaders, they and their work often lead them to regard the world of contemporary art with indifference, frustration, or even disdain.

On the other hand, many artists lack any meaningful experience with the contemporary church and are mostly ignorant of its mission. Not infrequently, these artists regard religion as irrelevant to their work, are disinclined to trust the church and its leaders, and have experienced personal rejection from these communities.

In response to this situation, the 2015 biennial conference of Christians in the Visual Arts (CIVA) facilitated a conversation between these two worlds. This volume gathers together essays and reflections by artists, theologians, and church leaders as they sought to explore misperceptions, create a hospitable space to learn from each other, and imagine the possibility of a renewed and mutually fruitful relationship. Contemporary Art and the Church seeks common ground for the common good of both the church and the contemporary art world.

The Studies in Theology and the Arts? series encourages Christians to thoughtfully engage with the relationship between their faith and artistic expression, with contributions from both theologians and artists on a range of artistic media including visual art, music, poetry, literature, film, and more.

Part I

Starting Points

1

A Conversation Between Contemporary Art and the Church

Wayne Roosa

The theme of CIVA’s 2015 conference was “Between Two Worlds: Contemporary Art and the Church.” That remains a complex topic. In order to scale it down, the title of this essay is “A Conversation Between Contemporary Art and the Church.” Both titles imply, at least to me, bringing three realms into conversation with one another: the world of contemporary art, the world of the church, and the world of whatever we mean (or want) by something between them.

People might not think of what is between two things as being a distinct or concrete realm, but since the word between invokes the relationship of two elements, and since relationship is where everything actually happens—where we really live and construct our meanings is in relationship—I will argue that what is between two things is an actual realm, and that conversation is mediator. The notion that “the between” is the actual medium by which we live and express ourselves is crucial, as demonstrated by Martin Buber’s emphasis on relationship in his work I and Thou and his great essay “Distance and Relation,” as well as in the aesthetic theory of Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics and its extensive influence, which has shifted much contemporary art from aesthetic object to active collaboration, social practice, and performance. Buber goes so far as to say that this is

the sediment of man’s relation to things. Art [and I will add, religion] is neither the impression of natural objectivity nor the expression of spiritual subjectivity, but it is the work and witness of the relation between the substantia humana and the substantia rerum [substance of things]; it is the realm of “the between” that has become a form.1

“That has become a form.” One manifestation of that form is the deep sense and power of conversation. The creative element, then, is how we stimulate and carry on that conversation.

As I say, this is a complex theme. It seems natural to begin such an address with definitions. What are we including and excluding when we talk about contemporary art and the church? And yet to begin with definitions risks foreclosing on the theme by defining camps that can tend toward a logic of exclusion versus inclusion. Both contemporary art and the church are difficult to define fully, fairly, and definitively, given the rich variety, the weird diversity, and the inner debates within each. So perhaps it is best—at least for the beginning—to assume that every reader has some working notion of each realm and focus our energies on the relation between them. To begin with definitions is to begin with boundaries, and thus with territories, and therefore by implication with ownership, orthodoxies, and even ideologies. It is to put ontology as the first order. To begin with relations, on the other hand, is to begin with persons acting and making in society with each other, to begin with their ideas and processes forging and discovering meaning. To begin with relations—conversation—is to put ethics, relations, and creative processes before ontology, giving priority less to being and more to love, justice, human and spiritual purpose, and not position.

So instead of definitions that stake out the boundaries for our thinking, let me offer four brief caveats that loosely orient our thinking toward conversation. First, we should not equate the two worlds involved, nor should we force this conversation. Contemporary art and the church are not synonymous. They are different spheres with different tasks. While they certainly overlap, they are categorically different. They are not different in the way that Presbyterians and Baptists are different, or in the way that abstraction and realism are different. Presbyterians and Baptists grow from the same soil of religion; abstraction and realism grow from the same soil of aesthetics. But art and church are different spheres with different roles, even though they intersect profoundly. I want my church to be a community of faith, worship, and service. I want it to respect and value art, but I do not want it to be an art community. Its constituencies and jobs are too diverse. In turn, I want my art community to respect and value the spiritual and theological, but I do not want it to be a surrogate church or a worship of aesthetics. It is not helpful to expect these different realms to fulfill each other’s purposes. When we do, their relationship becomes dysfunctional in ways similar to when the church and politics or the church and science get confused about their roles. What we are looking for are the points of legitimate and symbiotic intersection, some of which are rich and illuminating and some of which are testy and controversial. Either way, we are looking for a conversation and for what is required to allow or stimulate conversation. We do not want either sector to attempt to cartoon, colonize, ghettoize, appropriate, supplant, politicize, demonize, or scapegoat the other.

Second, as a historian I prefer concrete examples well met with abstract ideas and principles, as opposed to abstract principles proof-texted with examples. In a short essay addressing a big theme, the danger of using only a few concrete examples is that it seems to promote a specific canon or aesthetic, or to champion only a handful of artists working in this arena while ignoring many others. My few examples should not be interpreted as championing a narrow canon or a few select artists. Rather, understand it as the dilemma of time.

Third, because I am a historian I will try to acknowledge a broad spectrum regarding the challenge and ideal of a conversation between contemporary art and the church, even though my examples are few in number. Thus I will include the good, the bad, and the ugly, which is to say the celebratory, the transgressive, and the problematic.

And fourth, in many ways CIVA has been addressing our theme for some time. At the 2013 CIVA conference, themed “JUST Art,” much of the work we saw relating to justice, art, and social and religious and artistic communities could fit here. I want to reaffirm the last conference. And from that I make my first point: the arena of relational aesthetics and social practice within contemporary art most closely resembles what the church does, and therefore may be one of the better grounds of intersection for conversation.

Good Posture

A written essay often starts with an epigraph from some important person to set up the reader’s mind. My comments are also preceded by an epigraph of sorts. The authoritative source is my grandmother, and the epigraph is this: “Children, carry yourselves properly. No matter what anyone tells you, good posture is necessary for success.” What I have to say is as much about posture as it is about specific content, because conversation communicates as much through posture—not posturing—as through specific content. For, as with the symbiosis of form and content, or of love and truth, the way we carry ourselves relationally means as much as what we say propositionally. Relationship itself is as inherent to meaning as any content abstracted from relationships. Does content even exist apart from relationship? We are, after all, created creatures “in the image of.” One thinker who has helped me maintain my own personal conversation between contemporary art and the church is psychologist David Hawkinson, who insists that every time we ask, “Where is it written?” we also need to ask, “How is it written?”2 To that point, the conference planning committee quietly toned down our titles from the formal “Between Two Worlds” to the informal “A Conversation Between Two Worlds.” “Conversation” sounds less daunting and more friendly, conveying a posture of dialogue in company together, in good faith, rather than a stance of polemics or confrontation between realms.

But what kind of conversation are we talking about? One between acquaintances or one between strangers? Let’s admit from the beginning that these two worlds are, for the most part, strangers. Usually neither world is thinking about the other very much at all except when there is controversy. Contemporary art and the church are mostly strangers to each other, but they are strangers whose reputations and stereotypes have preceded them. Each party has heard about the other, and much of what each has heard is a weird mix of truth, hyperbole, and fiction. Each may hold an ill-informed cartoon of the other, yet cartoons do not come from nothing.

Contemporary art and the church have little overt overlap, although I suspect there are numerous interlopers who privately cross their borders on a regular basis but without integration. These are more like secret lovers leading a double life than they are like ambassadors, liaisons, or partners. These two worlds operate by very different perceptions of reality and uphold very different social narratives and certainly different historical metanarratives. Each has considerable misinformation about the other, even as many of the stereotypes of each are, for better or worse, accurate enough.

Despite their differences, these two worlds have strong structural parallels in their cultural tasks. Both are involved in making meaning, both create stable forms for expressing meaning, and both play a role in destabilizing forms and meanings through critical and prophetic roles. Both are involved in the dual activities of social critique and nurture, and embrace both prophetic and priestly agendas. The church casts these roles in terms of “sacred discontent,” and the contemporary art world casts them in terms of the avant-garde’s dissent and perennial quest for the new.3

To give just one example of these parallels: I would love to see a conversation between Old Testament scholars and postmodern deconstructionists that introduced the ancient Hebrew prophets to contemporary performance artists. What would Isaiah, who was ordered by Yahweh to preach naked for three years in order to expose Israel’s corrupt alliances with her enemies, talk about with Yayoi Kusama, whose troupe of performance artists danced naked in front of the New York Stock Exchange in order to expose the alliance between the government, weapons manufacturers, and the stock exchange during Vietnam? That would be a great conversation that, I suspect, would find both great agreement and profound differences. More importantly, the two parties would find much to talk about together.

In our religious tradition, the rhythm of sacred discontent looks like this: A culture knows God, receives blessing and success, but then corrupts that success and becomes self-serving and unjust. Prophets arise to deconstruct the corruption, call the culture back to faith, or warn of its consequent downfall. This pattern is repeated over and over in the biblical text, and its structural and moral parallel to the avant-garde’s rhythm is compelling. The modernist and postmodernist deconstruction of bourgeois power structures, class, race, and gender norms bears a similar pattern and intention.

The Old Testament prophets, fraught with sacred discontent, repeatedly carried out their critical deconstruction by performing a strange array of socially transgressive behaviors and symbolic acts in order to shock Israel into awareness. If these actions are brought into conversation with the no less strange and transgressive actions of contemporary performance artists fraught with an avant-garde discontent, powerful resonances would arise between the worlds of contemporary art and the church. Here is a case where the contemporary art world is not literate in what the religious text actually offers, while the church is pathetically illiterate about what contemporary performance art is saying. If these could be brought in parallel without ideological hostility, we might find a far more interesting and rich vein of human expression, struggle, and meaning than our current posture of opposition between all things theological and all things secular. The parallels between the rhythms of sacred discontent and avant-garde discontent are as instructive as their differences.4

A second conversation that would be most interesting is the structural parallel between the ways art and religion are situated in the world. On one hand, both worlds assume the ideal of spiritual or aesthetic beauty, contemplation, and freedom of the soul’s expression, uncorrupted by money and power. On the other hand, both worlds have evolved into complex institutions, sociologies, and systems of wealth, power, and privilege. Both struggle with the tension between the purity of their mission as creators and authenticators of meaning—maintaining uncorrupted spiritual or aesthetic values—and their mission of success via numbers, financial thriving, and survival—the garnering of stability and influence as guaranteed by status, money, and patronage. Both grapple with patrons who may be genuine and altruistic or arrogant and self-serving, whether economically, politically, or socially.

And yet, despite these similarities, these two worlds are almost unrecognizable to each other in terms of their respective language, codes, subject matter, reality paradigms, and identity-producing referents. If you doubt this, try the following thought experiment: on Sunday morning when you sit in church, pretend the art world crowd you were with at an opening in Chelsea the night before is sitting in the pew next to you. Try to hear the religious language of the church service through their ears, with its insider theological codes, its social assumptions, and the historical narrative by which it orders the world. To them this will be incredibly foreign, coded, like mythology or science fiction. Next imagine attending a gallery opening with some church members tagging along who do not know the art world. Perhaps the exhibition is Mike Kelley’s performance art, which merges food, excrement, and sex, or the sumptuous spectacle of Matthew Barney’s erotically charged The Cremaster Cycle.5 Or perhaps it is the pure abstract simplicity of Agnes Martin’s paintings or the conceptual elegance of Robert Irwin’s minimalist light sculptures. Try to see any of this work through the uninitiated eyes of church members and you will notice their genuine offense or sheer perplexity. And now imagine Barney’s films or Martin’s ephemeral pencil grid, with its pale bands of primary colors, exhibited in your church. Conversely, imagine the morning’s earnest sermon delivered in that Chelsea gallery, not as an ironic performance but as a sincere appeal. How is a conversation between these two worlds even possible? Where is the translator, the ambassador, the referee capable of mediating?

There are, of course, artists who know both worlds and have used art to do exactly this. I think of Jim Roche’s giant roadside Crosses, which uses the language of low wattage southern fundamentalist radio preachers in the context of blue chip galleries where the irony and the sincerity are so seamlessly blended with deadpan poignancy that one cannot be sure who is mocking or converting whom. Or I think of Brent...

Table of contents

• iii
• v
• vii
• ix
• 1Introduction
• 9
• Part I
• 111
• 33 2
• 37 3
• 47 4
• 55
• Part II
• 57 5
• 79 6
• 87 7
• 103 8
• 115
• Part III
• 1179
• 137 10
• 143 11
• 159 12
• 171
• 173 13
• 191 14
• 209 15
• 217 16
• Saving the World
• 231
• 239
• 241
• 243
• 245
• 246
• 248
• 249
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press