Who's Afraid of Modern Art?

Essays on Modern Art and Theology in Conversation

Siedell

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781630877910
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Modern art can be confusing and intimidating--even ugly and blasphemous. And yet curator and art critic Daniel A. Siedell finds something else, something much deeper that resonates with the human experience. With over thirty essays on such diverse artists as Andy Warhol, Thomas Kinkade, Diego Velazquez, Robyn O'Neil, Claudia Alvarez, and Andrei Rublev, Siedell offers a highly personal approach to modern art that is informed by nearly twenty years of experience as a museum curator, art historian, and educator. Siedell combines his experience in the contemporary art world with a theological perspective that serves to deepen the experience of art, allowing the work of art to work as art and not covert philosophy or theology, or visual illustrations of ideas, meanings, and worldviews. Who's Afraid of Modern Art? celebrates the surprising beauty of art that emerges from and embraces pain and suffering, if only we take the time to listen. Indeed, as Siedell reveals, a painting is much more than meets the eye. So, who's afraid of modern art? Siedell's answer might surprise you.

1

The Ear

The ear is the only organ of a Christian.

—Martin Luther

As all the Heavens were a Bell, And Being, but an Ear.

—Emily Dickinson

In the space between hearing and speaking, being judged and judging, we find ourselves in this world not in some harmony that has already been achieved, but in the midst of a battle of controversies and conflicting interpretations.

—Oswald Bayer

Hearing the Scream

On a recent visit to New York I went to see The Scream (1895), a little drawing in pastel by Edvard Munch on loan to the Museum of Modern Art from a private collector. It is one of four versions that the artist made of the famous subject, which consists of a genderless figure, standing on a bridge, holding its hairless head and screaming. The image of the silent scream has entered our popular visual culture, from coffee mugs to Macaulay Culkin’s trademark expression in the movie Home Alone.23 It hangs in a custom-built display wall in the center of a room, amidst other drawings, prints, and paintings by the Norwegian artist. Tourists crowd in front of the little pastel to pose in their version of the famous gesture.

It didn’t look like a masterpiece. It looked vulnerable and weak, suffocating amidst the spectacle it had caused, on display in a way it was never intended to be. And I thought of the artist, whose life was indelibly marked by the death of his older sister, Sophia, when he was a boy, who kept the chair she died in with him until the day he died, and who, late in life, painted full-length portraits of men he admired, calling them “guardians,” which he leaned up against walls in his house to protect him and keep him company during those long nights of sleeplessness. And I thought of the artist who said, “in my art I attempt to explain life and its meaning to myself.”24

And I thought of the disparity between this little picture’s notoriety and the artist’s pain, the spectacle of culture as entertainment and painting as a way for one man to live, or perhaps better put, for one man to remain alive.

The 120 Million-Dollar Question

This little pastel drawing that cowers embarrassingly in the middle of the room at MoMA last spring fetched the highest price ever paid for a work of art at public auction, nearly $120 million. The visitors came to gawk at that—to see what $120 million looked like. But The Scream raises a $120 million question. Is it worth it? Is any painting worth it, much less one that looks as poorly drawn and sloppily painted as this one?

Modern art is strange and intimidating, and it puts you on the spot. It appears to play by a different set of rules than the “art” we’re used to seeing. It hangs in art museums throughout the world, but we’re not quite sure how it got there, to be frank. Some of the most creative and progressive culture makers, including artists and curators in the art world, are still not quite sure what to make of it.

But before you follow the crowd out of the gallery, let’s linger a little while longer in front this odd little picture that has received so much attention.

Listening and Seeing

In an essay, “On Painting,” artist Enrique Martínez Celaya writes, “a painting often distracts us by what it looks like.”25 Is it possible that a painting, of all things, can be more than meets the eye? Martínez Celaya’s observation reflects an important biblical truth, one that Luther recovered from St. Paul: our eyes deceive us. We live by faith, not by sight (2 Cor 5: 7).

We are easily impressed with visual displays of power, wealth, and beauty, and we are eager to see God’s presence in them. The old Adam in us is a theologian of glory, who wants to see God fulfilling our desires, completing our natures, helping us ascend to his presence. But if our eyes deceive us, what are we to do in front of a painting?

Let me suggest that we follow Luther’s advice and listen. Luther claimed that the ears are the only organs of a Christian, for it is through the ears that we hear God’s promise, his promise to love us, to be with us, to never forsake us, to be for us in spite of what we see before our eyes and even in spite of his hiddenness—our inability to see God amidst suffering, pain, and injustice. By hearing God’s Word, we live by faith, not by sight. For Luther, this is what it means to be a theologian of the cross.26 But how do we listen to a painting?

To listen to a work of art requires a moment of passivity, of receptivity that allows the work of art to be active, to allow it to speak, like Rilke’s archaic Greek torso, to make a claim on us. A work of art has agency and to listen to it allows it, as literary critic George Steiner once said, to have the run of our inner chambers.

But we like our art—and our religion—visually pleasing. We like it practical, useful, maybe a little therapeutic. We want to be active, so we can use art and religion for our own purposes—to elevate, empower, and even entertain us. We want our Jesus, like our art, to help us succeed in our life projects, which, following St. Paul and Luther, are centered on securing our justification. We live our lives in search of what Hegel called “mutual recognition.” John Locke even claimed that “person” is a “forensic term,” that is, defined by public trial. Oswald Bayer observes:

Throughout our lives we continually seek to find excuses for the fact that we live as we do, that we are existent rather than nonexistent, and that we are as we are and not something different.27

And so we enlist art and religion into this project of self-justification, of self-recognition. You and I, if we’re honest with ourselves, gravitate toward a theology that resembles Joel Osteen and art that resembles a Thomas Kinkade painting much more closely than we care to admit. This is not because we’re ignorant about art and theology. It is because we’re human, and we believe we only need some help here and there. We’re drawn to what looks like piety, improvement, progress, and talent. We are drawn, like moths to the light, to what Luther called theologies of glory, those theologies that want to see God working visibly in ways we value (beauty, wealth, strength). And because it is so powerful visually, a painting is one of those cultural artifacts that is most susceptible to those seductions. Yet a painting is more than meets the eye. A painting is actually a silly thing. And it requires faith.

But Jesus tells us that we don’t need a little help. We need to be killed and then raised from the dead. Sometimes I think that one of art’s most important responsibilities is to kill us, to kill our confidence in ourselves and our understanding of the world.

Modern art contradicts most of our assumptions about art. It isn’t about heroes to emulate and challenge us, relaxing scenes with happy trees and quaint cottages to comfort us, outrageous images that entertain or scandalize us, or even expressions of an artist’s “world view.” And because it pushes against our expectations and assumptions, modern art can offer a fresh way of reflecting on how God is at work in the world through his two words, law and gospel, a word the kills and a word that makes alive, in surprising and often scandalous ways, even in the Museum of Modern Art.

Weak and Vulnerable

The artist Mark Rothko once said that it is a risky business to send a painting out into the world. And let’s be honest, smearing smelly pigment across a scrap of canvas with a brush is a rather strange endeavor. In spite of the fact that they hang in the Louvre and the Metropolitan Museum of Art or cost collectors millions of dollars, paintings—even the so-called masterpieces—are weak and vulnerable things, always seemingly subject to destruction, ridicule, misunderstanding—or, perhaps worst, neglect.

To devote one’s life to painting pictures at all is an absurd practice, one that seems to fly in the face of what the world finds important, relevant, or useful. It contradicts both non-Christian and Christian theologies of culture, which are often obsessed with consumption, education, redemption, or transformation (going from good to great)—theologies that work hard to make painting fit into the justifying, transactional power schemes that shape the world in which both Christians and non-Christians live and breathe and have their being. Paintings exist as contradictions to the conditional engine that drives the world.

Nature and the Modern Artist

Edvard Munch, like so many modern artists, understood an important theological point: nature is much more than meets the eye. In 1907 Munch wrote in his journal:

Nature is not only that which is visible to the eye. It is also the inner image of the mind. The images upon the reverse of the eye.28

This might come as a surprise, but modern artists rediscovered the awesome wonder of nature, a nature they observed from outside and felt within. One of the reasons that Munch despised academic painting—the pictures of nymphs, nudes, angels, and heroes that populated the salons and academies of his day—was its presentation of an overly explained, interpreted, and allegorized nature. For Munch, nature was mysterious, brilliantly opaque, dangerously viol...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Illustrations
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Who’s Afraid of Modern Art?
• Chapter 1: The Ear
• Chapter 2: The Audience
• Chapter 3: The Art World
• Chapter 4: The Artist
• Chapter 5: The Art
• Chapter 6: The Poetics of Modern Art
• Bibliography