Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
ISBN 978-3-0343-0750-5
Volume 26
PETER LANG
Oxford Bern Berlin Bruxelles Frankfurt am Main New York Wien
Rina Arya (ed.)
PETER LANG
Oxford Bern Berlin Bruxelles Frankfurt am Main New York Wien
Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.
Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche
Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the
Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISSN 1662-0364
ISBN 978-3-0343-0750-5 (print)
ISBN 978-3-0353-0444-2 (eBook)
Printed in Germany
Contents
Acknowledgements ix
Rina Arya
Introduction 1
Matthew Rowe
The Spiritual and the Aesthetic 11
Franco Cirulli
Friedrich Schlegel: On Painting and Transcendence 33
Nicholas Buxton
Creating the Sacred: Artist as Priest, Priest as Artist 49
Peter M. Doll
Immanence, Transcendence and Liturgical Space in a
Changing Church 69
Michael Evans
Out of Nothing: Painting and Spirituality 77
David Parker
Outsider Art and Alchemy 97
vi
Dino Alfier
Necessarily Selfless Action: An Enactment of Simone Weils
Notion of Attention as a Practice of Detachment through
Observational Drawing 113
Ayla Lepine
Installation as Encounter: Ernesto Neto, Do-Ho Suh and
Kathleen Herbert 131
Judith LeGrove
Fragile Visions: Reading and Re-Reading the Work of
Geoffrey Clarke 151
Maxine Walker
Painting the Question: Barnett Newmans Stations of the Cross 173
Rina Arya
Painting in a Godless World:
Contemplating the Spiritual in Francis Bacon 195
Harry Lesser
Spirituality and Modernism 217
David Jasper
The Spiritual in Contemporary Art 231
Index 251
Figures
Introduction
This book contains a series of thirteen papers that explore the relationship
between spirituality and contemporary art, and was the result of a fruitful
conference on the topic that took place in December 2010 at Liverpool
Cathedral. During this two-day event, artists, clergy, academics from
different disciplines, including theology and art history, and others came
together to discuss the relationship between spirituality and contemporary
art. Some responses were specifically about what was defined as the spiritual
aspects of an artists work, whilst others explored the various challenges of
thinking about the interrelationships that exist between spirituality and
everyday culture, with a focus on contemporary art. In summary outline,
the papers concerned the following themes: how and why does art convey
spirituality, and conversely, why and how is spirituality made manifest in
works of art? Some of these debates were couched in expressly theological
terms, while others were voiced outside of those spaces.
One of the objectives of the conference was to sharpen the focus on
what is meant by spiritual art, or indeed, what it means to describe an art-
work as being spiritual. Spirituality is a term that is widely employed in
discussions of contemporary art but without fleshing out what this means.
The term spirituality often refers to that which is beyond the material, the
conceptual and the rational. It is an umbrella term that refers to a series of
certain outlooks on life. It accommodates feelings that may involve meta-
physical beliefs, or that may be something that is present in ones life but
is undefined, often because it is difficult to articulate. The elasticity of the
term contributes to its convenience of use but also to its somewhat vague
and nebulous nature.
Spirituality refers to the deepest values and meanings by which people
seek to live. It is often used to refer to the path of the human spirit. Many
2 Rina Arya
combined with the specific features of the forms, such as the surfaces of
the canvas, for example. The medium and other features of presentation
are also significant in the dissemination of ideas about the artwork. Mark
Rothkos life-size paint-loaded canvases evoke a very different visceral
response to the slick video screens of Bill Violas installations, and this in
turn can have an effect on our spiritual responses towards the art.
In the context of this volume, spirituality is discussed in reference
to particular religious traditions and is also conceived of more broadly to
articulate personal beliefs or attitudes about life. The purpose ofthis volume
is to explore (without limiting) the application of the term spirituality
to contemporary art from a multidisciplinary perspective. This volume is
not comprehensive in its treatment of any single spiritual traditions rela-
tionship to the visual, nor is it specifically historical in its methodology. It
works on the premise that the spiritual in all religions (and indeed outside
of religions) has common features, is cross-cultural, and that these features
are rudimentary and primal to human existence.
***
What follows are summaries of each of the contributors papers that give
an overview of the lines of enquiry.
Matthew Rowe examines from the standpoint of analytical philosophy
the questions of whether, and if so, how, the spiritual is manifested in visual
art and whether there are any conditions that need to be met for a persons
experience of an artwork to be spiritual. The paper considers what the source
of the ascription of the term spiritual to an artwork might be, as well as
possible indicators and prohibitors of the spiritual in art, in order to suggest
some basic conditions for the spiritual in art and its experience. He makes
a distinction between a spiritual artwork and a spiritual experience of an
artwork and considers the possibility of a specifically stand-alone spiritual
experience of an artwork. One argument is that the term spiritual can be
applied to artworks as an aesthetic and value-conferring term and that
this aesthetic sense of the spiritual in art can potentially be recognized by
all audiences, whereas the stand-alone spiritual experience of an artwork
is reserved for those experiencing subjects that hold a metaphysics that
includes aspects of the religious/supernatural. The paper concludes that
4 Rina Arya
stations represent a stage in his own life. How Newman treats space in the
fourteen paintings and between the stations creates a sense of presence, and,
when interpreted both univalently and multivalently, aspects of spirituality
may emerge. Walker suggests that a deconstructive reading of Newmans
paintings on the moments before the Crucifixion performs a critique of
presence. That is to say, the distance between the object (Stations) in front
of which the contemplative viewer stands is deconstructed so that the walk
down the Via Dolorosa is not moving from one discrete sign to another,
but the total cry itself. The experience is not presence but one of absence,
the acoustic image remains unheard. The trace of the sound remains, the
zip remains; the closure is opened.
Rina Arya examines the special case that Francis Bacon represents in
the relationship between spirituality and contemporary art. She starts by
discussing why Bacons position in the history of western art is idiosyncratic.
There are a number of artists who draw on religious symbols and images
in their work for non-religious purposes. With Bacon it is the recurrence
of use, longevity and fervour of application that means that we should not
ignore his motivations for using religious symbols (his atheism notwith-
standing). The remainder of the paper documents and analyses his use of
the crucifixion throughout his career in order to determine the different
interpretations that can explain his fixation with that symbol. We learn that
whilst he was not a religious artist, his work presents interesting and sub-
versive ideas on religion. Fundamentally, his expression of life was spiritual,
in that he was concerned with ultimate reality in his articulation of the
corporeal body. The paradox is that he was dependent on a tradition that
he set out to reject, and in employing the crucifixion (and other Christian
symbols) he ends up rehabilitating the truth of the Passion of the Christ.
Harry Lesser argues that modernism, though anti-spiritual in its ideol-
ogy, in fact has made the expression of spirituality in the visual arts more
possible, by freeing artists from any obligation to naturalism. That natu-
ralism and the representation of spirituality are very much in tension is
argued with reference to both Christian and Jewish traditions, with exam-
ples from both Christian and Jewish painters. In the Christian tradition
the reason has been, presumably, that the spiritual and the physical have
been seen as not only different but antagonistic, with physical desires
Introduction 9
References
McGrath, A. (2004). The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the
Modern World. London: Rider.
Masuzawa, T. (1998). Culture, in M.C. Taylor (ed.). Critical Terms for Religious Terms
for Religious Studies. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, pp.7093.
Morgan, R.C. n.d., To Unknow What We Know: The Paintings of Jon Groom,
<http://www.jon-groom.com/essays/robert-c-morgan/> accessed 12 August 2011.
Weil, S. (1994). uvres compltes, Tome 6: Cahiers, Vol. 1 1933Septembre 1941.
A. Degrces, P. Kaplan, F. De Lussy, and M. Narcy (eds). Paris: Gallimard.
Matthew Rowe
Part 1
Introduction
What my friend meant by her spiritual experience was that the artworks
of Flavin had, for her, triggered an insight into her wider belief system that
included an element of metaphysical spirituality and had given her some
access to that belief system. That is something that I cannot have because
I lack the appropriate beliefs in a metaphysical spirituality. Yet, I still think
that some artworks are spiritual. What this means is that if I am to attrib-
ute spirituality to artworks, these attributions will not imply a belief in
a spirituality that forms no part of my metaphysics my attributions of
spirituality to artworks must come from within my metaphysics. However,
this is true for everyone, no matter what their metaphysics; it is simply the
case that our respective metaphysical belief systems are different.
So what do I think of when I do use and apply the idea of the spiritual
to artworks? The artworks to which I would apply this idea range across
art forms and centuries, from prayer incantations to abstract paintings.
So, it would be unfortunate if my lack of metaphysical beliefs in anything
supernatural meant that I could only apply the term figuratively or meta-
phorically to artworks.
When I am describing certain artworks as spiritual, it does not feel
as if I am using the term figuratively or metaphorically. Rather, it seems a
straightforwardly natural, if not plain accurate, term to apply to these art-
works, to describe some feature they possess. These are somewhat similar
to the descriptions mathematicians give when seeing a complex problem
resolve into a more profound simplicity, where this resolution reveals con-
nections that were not apparent in the framing of the original question. I
think of works where my definitions or characterizations of the spiritual
more generally beyond the corporeal or worldly, or beyond the con-
ceptual, or even beyond the rational or irrational or beyond the cogni-
tive might aptly apply. Also, spiritual artworks seem to have a spiritual
relationship to their own world or represent that world in such a way as
to make us reflect on our own spirituality, whatever that might be. Such
works suggest for me critical phrases such as an unfolding resistance to
a complete explanation or a concern with form and order that reaches
beyond the properties of the work itself ; or are artworks which suggest a
14 Matthew Rowe
2 Kant outlines his theory of the sublime in Sections 239 of Critique of the Power of
Judgement (1790).
The Spiritual and the Aesthetic 15
Part II
Since we recognize both (a) the commonplace idea that some artworks are
spiritual and (b) what we mean when we talk about a spiritual artwork,
we can extrapolate examples from artworks to draw up a list of properties
that could be candidates for indicators, if not guarantors of the spiritual.
Artworks have both manifest properties and non-manifest, relational
properties. Broadly speaking the manifest properties are those available to
The Spiritual and the Aesthetic 19
the senses i.e. subject matter, colours, size, etc., and the non-manifest,
relational properties are those that concern its manner of production
i.e. who made it, when was it made, its place in art history, etc. There is
no prima facie reason why the idea that an artwork is spiritual could not
come from either of these sources. However, this does rather complicate
matters if we are talking about spiritual as an aesthetic term, since these
non-manifest properties may rely on our knowledge about the artwork,
rather than our experience of an artwork. So, for instance, knowing that
an artist intended an artwork to be, or not be, spiritual, or that an artwork
was the result of a spiritual crisis, could be part of the set of reasons upon
which we might ascribe spirituality to an artwork.
There follows a list and brief description of the categories of manifest and
non-manifest properties that could indicate that an artwork is spiritual.
These categories relate to the tentative descriptions of the spiritual as an
aesthetic term provided above in Part I. This list is clearly not exhaustive,
but is illustrative, and the categories overlap with each other and in most
actual cases will be multiply present in any artwork, across any form or
within any genre within an art form.
That is, depicting or describing the human figure in such a way as to suggest
an overtly spiritual aspect, or which suggest an association with spiritual
properties and attributes as opposed to physical, worldly ones, such as,
within the visual arts, painting the Holy Family as if to reveal their divine
aspect rather than their human one.
(c) Style
That is, the way in which an artwork represents its content: for instance, a
landscape in which the application of paint is treated in a similar manner
for the landscape and figures, to suggest human existence situated as in
harmony within a much greater system, or a delicacy which suggests that
a material reality is suffused with a deeper non-corporeal reality.
(d) Complexity
That is, where the properties are arranged in some way to suggest either
the complexity in (d) or some kind of harmony, balance or some other
property associated with the spiritual. This may have been the source of
the attribution made by my friend when she spoke of Dan Flavin.
That is, where artworks contain, either overtly or somehow encoded, sym-
bolic forms, or allegorical meanings that are explicitly or implicitly spiritual
The Spiritual and the Aesthetic 21
(g) Materials
That is, where the actual material basis of an artwork has a spiritual or
religious aspect. Examples would include reliquaries, thrones or other
religious ceremonial artefacts.
This list shows indicators of the spiritual, properties that make it likely that
an artwork might be spiritual. I need to consider whether these categories
are, individually or collectively, necessary or sufficient to make an artwork
spiritual, to discover whether there are any guarantors for the spiritual in
art. My conclusion will be that each of these features alone can make an
artwork spiritual but that none of them individually can give that guarantee
that an artwork is spiritual.
This is because for each of these categories it is possible to find some
artwork that actually exists that possess those properties but which is not a
spiritual artwork (it might for instance be ironic). If this is disputed then
the weaker claim that it is possible to imagine and/or describe an artwork
that possesses these properties but which is not spiritual can suffice.6
Conversely, it is possible to conceptualize an artwork that did not
possess any of these appropriate properties and yet was spiritual. This is
both because the list is explicitly not exhaustive and also because as art has
expanded and evolved into new media and new forms, spiritual art has con-
tinually and consistently continued to be made for instance, in 1900 no
one would have thought that Flavins fluorescent tubes could be spiritual
artworks. So, in terms of materials and manifest properties it appears that
there is always the potential for surprising new sources of the spiritual in
art. Consequently we cannot rule out any art form or genre within any art
form which, purely by virtue of the properties or characteristics of that form
7 For an analysis of the impact of form and genre on aesthetic properties see Walton,
1970.
8 This is a conclusion shared with Kandinsky (1911) but via a very different route.
Kandinsky believed that all forms of art were capable of attaining the spiritual in art
and in saying so was making the spiritual an aesthetic property. His view, however, is
almost exclusively formal concerning the relationship between colour and shapes,
with symbolic overtones about the meanings of colours and their relationships with
each other.
24 Matthew Rowe
9 Judkins (2011, p.234) notes a similar phenomena: Wagners Ride of the Valkyries
barely survived Apocalypse Now without indelible association.
10 See Sibley (2001) for arguments that echo the positions set out here in respect of
aesthetic judgements.
The Spiritual and the Aesthetic 25
fault in the artwork that it is not robust enough and/or holds back on
its representation of its subjects.
Certainly these works, if they are successful, cannot be said to be spir-
itual. It indicates that the savagery of the satirical attack has been blunted
by a reluctance to go at its target in a full throttled way. Spiritual, in this
context, would be used almost as a synonym for enervated, anodyne or
insipid.
There is a sense in which this use of spiritual as a negative aesthetic
term, is somewhat metaphorical, and probably is a term of critical deri-
sion, akin to that when conceptual, or avowedly anti-aesthetic art is called
beautiful; where an aesthetic term that the genre of artwork on offer is
supposed to disown, remains embodied within that artwork. However,
it is clear that spiritual as an aesthetic term can also have a negative value
and indicate an aesthetic defect in a work.
It remains the case, however, that they can be described as spiritual.
The aesthetic term still applies to them, albeit in a different way to the
majority of other artworks described as spiritual it would not be said in
praise, thats all. So, these types of artworks that present a debased view of
human existence, or which attempt a joyful celebration of earthly pleasures,
cannot be beyond the scope of the spiritual in art. Spiritual as an aesthetic
term applies to them too, but it does so with negative force, to indicate
an aesthetic fault in the artwork. Of course, the counter-example artwork
response applies here too. Even if we push these examples to extremes to
consider things such as pornographic artworks there is always the pos-
sibility of an artwork, and a good artwork at that, turning out to be both
extreme in its presentation of the debased and potentially, at least spiritual.
Take for instance De Sades 120 Days of Sodom (1785) and Pasolinis (1975)
film of that book.
So are there any potential limits to the spiritual in art? Well, I think there
are two strands of artistic production that may provide our limits: one
has always been there, the other has emerged from modernism onwards.
The Spiritual and the Aesthetic 27
There are some artists and artworks that seem to celebrate human exist-
ence without any hint of anything further, where their gaze is purely on
the glory of earthly pleasures. This is echoed within popular culture in a
strand of purely commercial, purely catchy pop songs. These are works in
high and mass art which celebrate the brashness, triviality and artificiality
of contemporary life or the joys of consumerism, pornography and popular
marketing iconography and that could be said to deny any interpretative
depth to the represented content beyond the fact of representation.11
For these examples and kinds of artwork the spiritual seems to be
absent from their concerns and so judging them to be such would appear
to be bizarre to the extent that it would reflect on the critic and their
incapacity for aesthetic judgement, rather than on the artwork, and so be
dismissed as lacking any critical weight or validity. These might be works
where to seek to apply the spiritual would be a mistake as they are outside
of the reach of the aesthetic term.
However, these are existing artworks which are in fact not spiritual;
the work they do as artworks completely ignores this potential source of
aesthetic evaluation. They are none the worse because of this. All the values
they have otherwise remain intact. And, as was remarked above, many of
our aesthetic judgements need not, and do not, involve the spiritual.12 They
provide a practical limit to the spiritual in art from within the body of the
history of artistic practice.
On a wider point, the lack of the possibility of the spiritual may be
an indicator that a form of expression may be inherently lacking in artistic
worth. It may indicate an inability rather than an unwillingness to engage
with topics of a certain complexity, such as reflection on the human condi-
tion, which may be prompters of the spiritual in art. For Pop Art I would
say that these were examples of a deliberate unwillingness to engage with
11 Visual artists who do this might include Warhol, Lichtenstein, Koons or Murakami.
They are all examples of Pop Art, where the movement was expressly about, and
sought to comment upon, consumer culture.
12 On a different point I would say that this does not apply to Pop Art, which, as is
evinced by its flourishing and enduring as an art historical movement, retains fecun-
dity for artistic production.
28 Matthew Rowe
a suitable complexity. For some artworks for instance the Warhol silk-
screens of celebrities their deliberate eschewing of the spiritual or any
form of complexity or depth was a contributor to their artistic worth within
a form (visual art, or painting even) that previously standardly valued such
depth or complexity.
The second strand of artistic production that may provide a limit on
the spiritual in art is potentially more serious because it concerns artworks
that are perhaps unable to be spiritual conceptually as well as practically.
These are all artworks which explicitly seek to deny the possibility of their
aesthetic appreciation tout court: they do this through either
There certainly is a small subset of artworks that fit this bill artworks
where, in Binkleys (1977, p.269) words: When you look at the artwork
you learn nothing of artistic consequence which you dont already know
from the description. These are works for which the aesthetic as a whole
may be said to be irrelevant.
Indeed, for some of these works, they cannot be experienced since they
are a concept, or a proposition, or an invitation to a future action, now
reprinted as sentences in books or pamphlets. Some conceptual artworks
appear not to be material objects, but rather specifications of conditions
or propositions, works such as Henry Flynts 1961 piece, Concept Art: Work
such that no one knows what is going on; or Stanley Brauwns All the Shoe-
shops in Amsterdam. Others are artworks that require a cognitive response,
such as Art & Languages Art Language a book of theoretical essays about
the possibility and nature of art.
14 This might apply to Art & Languages works involving columns or designated spaces
of air and some of Yoko Onos works as well.
15 See Sibley (2001).
30 Matthew Rowe
Part III
Conclusion
In this essay, I have tried to argue firstly that there is an aesthetic, and
not a metaphysical basis to our judgements that artwork are spiritual and
secondly, that any positive tick box type account of the spiritual in art
based on a list of possessed manifest or non-manifest properties is neces-
sarily inadequate. The spiritual in art does not work this way. Spiritual and
non-spiritual artworks can therefore be found across all ranges of historical
and contemporary practice, excluding some of that very small category of
potentially non-aesthetic artworks.
Also, it falls out of this analysis that whether or not an artwork is
spiritual relies upon us making experience-based judgements about par-
ticular artworks, considered on their own terms. Also that it is illegitimate
to make generalizations from any one artwork to any other artwork that
shares the same property, that because one is spiritual, the other will be
too, and vice versa.
As such, the spiritual functions just as many other aesthetic terms
when applied to contemporary art, art of the past, or to non-art objects
where the answer to questions about whether an artwork has a particu-
lar aesthetic property is always dependent because making a judgement
from experience is the only method to answer such questions. The answer
depends upon what strikes you in your experience of that artwork. This
The Spiritual and the Aesthetic 31
16 Young (2001, pp.689) sets out an idea of illustrative demonstration, which is the
way that most artworks give knowledge they show us things that we recognize are
somehow right. This is contrasted with semantic demonstration which is giving
knowledge through an argument.
17 I am grateful to the editor, and to the participants at the Contemplations of the
Spiritual in Art conference held at Liverpool Anglican Cathedral in December 2010
for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper.
32 Matthew Rowe
References
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35, 26577.
Dickie, G. (1984). The Art Circle. New York: Haven Publications.
Judkins, J. (2011). Review: why Music Moves us by Jeanette Bicknell, British Journal
of Aesthetics, 51, 2324.
Kandinsky, W. (1977). Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Trans. M.T.H. Sadler. New
York: Dover [1911].
Kant, I. (2000). Critique of the Power of Judgement. Trans. P. Guyer & E. Matthews,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press [1790].
Nietzsche, F. (1993). The Birth ofTragedy. Trans. S. Whiteside. London: Penguin [1872].
Proust, M. (1922). Swanns Way. Trans. C.K.S. Moncrief and T. Kilmartin. New
York: Modern Library [1913].
Sade, Marquis de. (1966). 120 Days of Sodom. Trans. A. Wainhouse and R. Seaver.
New York: Grove Press [1785].
Sibley, F. (2001). General Criteria and Reasons in Aesthetics, in J. Benson, B. Redfern,
J.B. Cox (eds). Approach to Aesthetics: Collected Papers of Philosophical Aesthetics.
Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Walton, K. (1970). Categories of Art, Philosophical Review, 79, 33467.
Young, J. (2001). Art and Knowledge. London: Routledge.
Franco Cirulli
and suggesting that once outside the precincts of the museum praxis
must follow epiphany: you must change your life.
If Rilkes message ended here, however, his poem would hardly be
worthy of our attention it would justify Derridas equation of Western
aesthetics with anthropo-theologism. By looking at the beautiful God with
a human body, the spectator can feel exalted: she is a member of humanity,
the tip of the Great Chain of Being, the only place where Nature and God
intersect. Here the initial experience of inadequacy (you must change your
life) would then be handsomely offset by the feeling of belonging to an
exclusive club: thank God I am not an animal! In the end, the experience
of classical beauty is an experience of myself as plenary subject, that is, for a
scattering of moments, I take the perfection of the statue as a metaphor of
my own perfection: I feel ecstatically complete, with nothing left to desire.
But Rilke disturbs any such easy certainty. For one, is this really Apollo,
or Dionysus in disguise? Are we gazing at the benevolent God of order,
or at an archaic deity radiating the splendid, terrifying energy of a raw
Nature? The smile that Rilke descries on the torso is not that of benevo-
lence, but the delight of irrational libidinal energy (the smile run to the
dark center where procreation flared). Apollos stony body glisten[s] like a
wild beasts fur, and it is also (in a quasi-hallucinatory experience) from
all the borders of itself burst forth like a star: two emphatic rejections of
order and harmony.
This does not mean that Rilke reduces this encounter to a frighten-
ing peek into the long-forgotten abyss. There are rich ambiguities. Abysses
gape in ominous silence, but the torso addresses Rilke with an intimate you.
Granted, much depends on how we read the ensuing words: you must change
your life. Is this sybilline command a ruthless imperative, or an affectionate
summons? Rilkes visual experience of the torso seems to dramatize this
dilemma. The torso is as much about light as it is about darkness, nor is its
light just the aura of the terrifying. The internal sheen of the chest radiat-
ing outwardly seems threatening, but also gift-like. The torso evokes eyes
that are not only of assistance in the rapacious business of seduction, but
have themselves the seductive aspect of young apples. According to an old
adage, beauty puzzles us with a seeming fusion of the intimately familiar
with the genuinely new. It appears as a fragment of a long-forgotten past,
Friedrich Schlegel: On Painting and Transcendence 35
but also like a tessera that can transfigure the equally uncertain mosaic of
our future. In this respect, Rilkes encounter with an ancient sculptural
fragment is deeply revealing. It invites us to think whether beauty as such
is essentially fragmentary in meaning, even when (unlike a corroded torso)
it seems complete visually.
And yet, the poem that began with a collective profession of ignorance
(We cannot know) ends with a first-person summons (You must change your
life), an intimate connection between artwork and self. The very writing of
the poem shows us that Apollo has succeeded in casting a transformatory
spell: for one, Rilke is no longer the passive spectator. In the search for
greater clarity, the poet engages in a series of transfigurative acts. Notice
how Rilke brings the statue closer to the spectator through an explicitly
pictorial transfiguration: the conversion of marble into light, the sfumato
diaphanousness of the chest that allows that light to pour out, the transpar-
ent fall of the shoulders. Traditionally, it is to paintings that one ascribes
the unsettling capacity to look back at us. Rilkes torso becomes covered
with a thousand eyes isnt this a breach of the traditional fourth-wall of
sculpture, behind which the beautiful statue rested in a solipsistic sweet
reverie? Finally, notice how poetry becomes yet another, more comprehen-
sive layer: it is within and through the lines of his poem that Rilke carries
out his pictorial transfiguration of the sculptural artefact. In this way, Rilke
is telling us that the figurative beauty is not the passive recipient of our
transfiguring look it transforms us in return, inflecting our speech with
beauty. But not, again, the unproblematic beauty of a self-assured human-
ism. Rilkes Archaic Torso of Apollo leaves it open that beauty may be as
Rilke wrote in his First Duino Elegy the beginning of terror.
During his stay in Paris between 1802 and 1804, the perpetually penniless
Friedrich Schlegel was an assiduous guest at the Louvre, where he had a
chance to witness the extraordinary artistic riches generated by Napoleons
36 Franco Cirulli
1 For Hans Eichner, Schlegel never wrote more beautifully than he did in the best
pages of his Descriptions of Paintings (KA IV, XXII).
Friedrich Schlegel: On Painting and Transcendence 37
Several painters reproach this work, because all the crying figures around Christ are
all decidedly ugly, or at least with an ugly attitude (even if their form, abstracted
from such ugliness, is by no means ignoble). Such a screamingly loud pain, erupt-
ing from the deepest core of being with a truth that grips and unsettles, cannot but
deform those it possesses. But what other pain would be here more appropriate to
its subject? The painter took away the beauty from the crying ones, which he could
have very well have done, had he not (with his deep instinct) poured all the beauty
all over the corpse of the Savior. I have led several persons before this painting, who
after being initially repulsed by it all had to admit that the body of the Savior is
unspeakably beautiful, and that it could not be any more beautiful. And yet [they
had to admit that] it is a corpse, a corpse in every lineament but still ensouled by
beauty and painful nostalgia (Wehmut), a living picture of the loveliest death. How
truer this is [than to represent] Christs cadaver in a disgusting and repelling way,
and by way of compensation to prop next to it a Magdalene with a vain beauty
and equally vain tears. (Schlegel, 1959, pp.278)
Compensating this impoverishment of the body, the tradition rewards it with all
the pleasures of seduction, for the body of the Gaze is nothing other than a sexual
mask: the galleries of the West constantly display the Gaze of pleasure, as an archive
that is there to be cruised. (Bryson, 1983, p.164)
Any feeling of redeeming eternity we may get from looking at these artworks
is itself the satisfaction of a predatory look. By inviting sexual investment,
these beautiful bodies from a distant past give the spectator in the con-
centrated now of imagined sexual enjoyment the feeling of an extraor-
dinarily heightened self-presence. But such victory over time requires the
sexual consumption of the beautiful corporeality one has imaginatively
resuscitated.
However, Norman Bryson continues that the dubious nature of this
art lies not only in its tacit exploitation of the human body. The predatory
visuality inscribed in such art turns against following a Hegelian master-
slave dialectic against the viewer himself. This becomes particularly clear
whenever the representation of the body is at once beautiful and realistic. If
the body seems to be (thanks to the self-effacing brushwork of the Master)
compellingly there, the artwork as a culturally complex piece of labour
requiring the spectators careful analysis falls to the wayside. The libidinal
investment prompted by the bodys beauty completes my own unwitting
reification: I am turned into an it by the unthinking sexual consumption
of the represented object.
In my view, however, Schlegels approach has the merit of pre-empting
even this sort of objection, by hinging upon a very different model of
Friedrich Schlegel: On Painting and Transcendence 41
vision. This vision seeks to imaginatively animate the artwork, but not
for the sake of tapping into the libidinal current the still warm traces
of machistic and feminine allure inscribed in the canvas (Bryson, 1983,
p.164). Instead, the spectators sympathetic Belebung of the artwork seeks
to raise from an it to a Thou and by helping the artwork to its free-
dom, the spectator as well gains some sort of emancipation. This is how
Wilhelm Henrich Wackenroder (an author whose influence on Schlegel
was considerable) put the matter in 1797:
[Paintings] are not hanging there, so that our eye can see them; rather, so that one
can penetrate them (in sie hineingehe) with a sympathetic heart, and live and breathe
in them. A precious painting is not a paragraph of a textbook that I can discard as a
useless husk after having easily extracted the meaning of the words. Rather, by excep-
tional artworks the pleasure continues always, without interruption. We believe to
penetrate in them ever more deeply, and yet they stimulate our senses always afresh,
nor do we see any limit to the enjoyment of our soul. An eternal life-oil (Ein ewiges
brennendes Lebenshl) burns in them, which never extinguishes itself before our
eyes. (Wackenroder, 1991, p.108)
The main value of the painting consists besides the nave cheerfulness and serenity
of the beautiful expression eminently in the colors: so light, tender, airy, and clear
are this blue and red, and the complexion of the naked infant in between. And yet
despite this, not at all garish: so tenderly softened, so truly interfused, that one sees
it with tender allure, it as if through Loves serene, open eye. I never saw a picture
from this master in this manner, and of such gracefulness. (1959, p.82)
Schlegel begins by noticing the respective purity of the great masses of red
and blue offered by Marys garments. This is the radical unalloyed nature of
primary colours: red and blue are absolutely irreducible to each other. The
suggestion of chromatic purity is further underscored by the particularly
crisp (though by no means harsh) lines of the drapery. And yet, Schlegel
notices that these solid masses of mutually irreducible colours seem remark-
ably interfused. The ground of chromatic unity, however, is not itself vis-
ible. So what explains this beautiful harmony of colours? Schlegel gives us
42 Franco Cirulli
an important clue: the Carit gives us a picture of the world seen through
loves open eye. For Schlegel, love is the self s foundational yearning for
infinity, which is awakened by the encounter with other finite beings: love
divines that despite its discrete appearance each finite being is (just
like the self ), a fragment of an Ur-Ich, the archetypal divine unity (1972,
p.351). For Schlegel, the perception of beauty is nothing else than Liebes
spiritual intuition of an invisible kinship between self and other (as two
fragments of the same divine Ur-Ich) (1972, p.355). That is how Del Sartos
Carit objectifies love: it gives us chromatic masses that in the face of
their vivid mutual distinction seem to hang together remarkably well.
The invisibility of the ground of chromatic unity is also crucial: love is the
capacity to recognize the transcendent bond under the carapace of empiri-
cal difference (1972, p.351).
Against Wolterstorff, Schlegel is suggesting that figurative beauty can
intimate the divine. Against art historians like Bryson, he is hinting that
the encounter with figurative beauty can be the very opposite of a dehu-
manizing experience. If we put both elements together, we could say that
Friedrich Schlegel espouses an aesthetic figurative theo-humanism: the idea
that figurative art precisely qua fine art can work as a reconciliatory
site between man and God.
As we have seen, Schlegel construes figurative beauty as a possible vehi-
cle to the divine. For those of us with theological interests, is this a viable
option? We are all familiar with Adornos point: after the atrocities of the
Holocaust, the idea of an art that celebrates mans unique connection to
God has seemed to be self-indulgently nave, if not offensive. Paul Tillich,
a seminal figure in his cross-pollination of theology and aesthetics, shared
this view. Genuine religious art is disruptive: it registers as Tillich claimed
in 1965 experience of the absent God, i.e. it should epiphanically reveal
the current crisis of the sacred the result of Gods deliberate withdrawal, to
show us the bankruptcy of our own spirituality (Manning, 2009, 164). This
explains Tillichs dismissal of naturalized idealism, i.e. figurative art that
helping itself to classicizing forms of beauty suggests a mendaciously
harmonious relationship between man and God, even if in the shape of
a hopeful anticipation. It is precisely through their beautiful, harmoni-
ous humanity that Raphaels Madonnas are bereft of a genuine religious
Friedrich Schlegel: On Painting and Transcendence 43
content (Tillich, 1990, p.276). A preference for art like Raphaels betrays
bad faith, an unwillingness to see and face our real situation (Tillich, 1990,
p.277). It is because of its capacity to disrupt an illusory sense of ease that
De Chiricos Melancholy and Mystery of the Street is far more religious than
Raphaels Madonnas (Tillich, 1990, p.276).
Tillichs theological dismissal of Raphaels religious art is particularly
relevant for us, as it stands in glaring contrast with Schlegels celebration
of Raphael, as the epitome of an art that reconciles man with God through
beauty. I cannot do full justice to Tillichs important point in this context.
But as I see it it may be vitiated by its own mauvaise foi. Let me explain.
In his Sickness unto death, Soren Kierkegaard notices that to lament before
God ones irrecoverably bad sinfulness is to proudly imply that divine Grace
is powerless vis--vis oneself:
It is an effort to give stability and interest to sin as a power by deciding once and for
all that one will refuse to hear anything about repentance and grace [the sinners]
selfish self culminates in ambition. He has now in fact become the king, and yet,
in despairing over his sin and of the reality of repentance, of grace, he has also lost
himself. (Kierkegaard, 1980, p.110)
human space and time by the divine: isnt this a disruption of the ordinary?
To say that genuine religious content belongs only to artworks exposing
our well-deserved Gottverlassenheit; to deny that the Jardinires graceful
kenosis could be relevant for us, today: this could be a demonic humanism
wearing the mask of honest anti-humanism.
From Schlegels perspective, there was no doubt that figurative beauty had
theophanic potential. The question, rather, was this: was the nave beauty
of primitives like Beato Angelico more religiously compelling? Or was
it the case that at its best the classically inflected religious painting
of Raphael and Correggio could speak most powerfully about God? By
celebrating both, Schlegels Descriptions of Painting seems to suggest that
there is no real tension until, that is, 1804. In that year Schlegel ventures
out of Paris, and in the cathedral of Cologne undergoes what we could call
an aesthetic equivalent of St Pauls conversion on the way to Damascus.
The hieratic beauty of the Magi Altarpiece by Stephan Lochner moved
him deeply, so that he declared this to be the most complete, beautiful
religious painting ever wrought by human hands. How does this force us
to re-evaluate his previous paeans to Raphaels Jardiniere, or to Correggios
Deposition? Schlegel does not really offer concrete help here.
Hegel even more than Schlegel, an unabashed fan of the Italian
Renaissance is perhaps of more assistance here. He does indicate poten-
tially fatal difficulties in reconciling pagan aesthetics with Christianity.
At one level, the beauty of their figures symbolizes the innate (not God-
given) serenity of individuals leading harmonious lives: here beautiful
form proclaims innocence, cheerfulness, virginity, natural grace of dispo-
sition, nobility, imagination, and a richly loving soul (Hegel, 1975, p.873).
However, this intrinsic kalokagathia is also illuminated by a self-effacing
love for God: a more profound piety which soulfully animates the originally
Friedrich Schlegel: On Painting and Transcendence 45
the great italian painters seem to give us portraits; [but] the pictures they pro-
duce in the most exact portrayal of reality and character are pictures of another sun,
another spring; they are roses blossoming at the same time in heaven. So in beauty
itself their concern is not with beauty of form alone, not with that sensuous unity of
the soul with its body which is effused over the sensuous corporeal forms, but instead
with this trait of love and reconciliation in each figure, form, and individuality of
character. It is the butterfly, the Psyche, which in the sunlight of its heaven hovers
even over withered flowers. (1975, p.875)
Just as Raphael, the painter of loveliness, is unique among the Italians, so is this
painter unique among the Germans. The mother of God enthroned in the middle,
cloaked in an ermin, must remind anyone who sees her of Raphaels Madonna in
Friedrich Schlegel: On Painting and Transcendence 47
Dresden: the majestic grandeur of her slightly greater-then-life figure, the wholly
otherworldy ideal beauty of her face. Yet, the tilt of the head and the eye is closer
to the old Idea [] human hands cannot make anything more complete than this
painting. (Schlegel, 1959, p.140)
Sensuous beauty becomes complete by its vicinity to the old idea but
which idea? Schlegel gives us an all-important hint in the 1821 preface to
his Cologne travelogue:
In the West, we see the dawn of ancient art with the statues of Aegina. In the same
way, with Giotto in Italy and with the forerunners of van Eyck in Germany, there
was a new dawn for Christian painting. (Schlegel, 1959, p.115, note)
The enigmatic smile of the archaic Greek style is then the important pre-
cursor to Lochners Madonna. As we saw, Rilke decided to seek God in
the disturbing, risky encounter with the archaic Torso, waving off the
more licked contours of Greek high classicism. In 1821, Friedrich Schlegel
made retrospective sense of his aesthetic conversion by an appeal to the
same sculptural style: the Lochner Madonna spoke to him because just
as the Archaic Greek deities it smiled a promesse de bonheur which did
not collapse the sacred into the profane.
References
Bryson, N. (1983). Vision and Painting. The Logic of the Gaze. New Haven: Yale
University Press.
Hegel, G.W.F. (1975). Lectures on Fine Art, Vol. II. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kierkegaard, S. (1980). The Sickness Unto Death. Trans. E. and E. Hong. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Manning, R. (2009). Tillichs Theology of Art, in R. Manning (ed.). The Cambridge
Companion to Paul Tillich. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rilke, R.M. (1989). The Selected Poetry of R.M. Rilke. Trans. S. Mitchell. New York:
Vintage Books.
48 Franco Cirulli
In the beginning there was nothing. A blank canvas. Then out of nowhere
the voice of God spoke into the void and said: Let there be light (Genesis
1.3). And there was. Thus the world was brought into existence, determined,
not merely described, by words. By the word of the Lord the heavens were
made, and all their host by the breath of his mouth, says the Psalmist, for
he spoke and it came to be (Psalm 33.6, 9). With life-giving breath and
creative word, God calls the world into being out of chaos: he orders real-
ity makes what is the way it is with words. Words that form sentences,
sentences that become a story. Our story.
The original myth, the myth of our origin, is an account not so much
of how the physical universe came to be, but of how the brute fact of
human existence can be read as a meaningful and meaning-giving story.
With language one of the defining characteristics of our rational human
nature, the image of God within us according to the traditional view of
Christian theology the divine intelligence makes meaningful that which
would otherwise be meaningless. Language creates the world as we know
it from, and in response to, a reality that in itself is both everything and
nothing in particular an infinite possibility, the formless void (Genesis
1.2). Moreover, in what could well be the original version of the argument
from design, the creation reveals its creator: The heavens declare the glory
of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands (Psalm 19.1). Indeed,
God is not only the first artist, but also the first art critic. After each act of
creation, God regards his handiwork and pronounces an aesthetic judge-
ment: God saw all that he had made, and it was very good (Genesis 1.31).
These opening reflections show how closely and deeply the notions
of creativity and spirituality are related and embedded in our psyche. For
generations we have believed ourselves to be made in the image of a creator
50 Nicholas Buxton
The desire to take certain kinds of contemporary art as the core elements of a con-
temporary religion cannot be dismissed as an idiosyncrasy. It is a commonplace in
the discourse surrounding culture that art, along with sport, has taken the place of
organised religion in modern societies. (Smith, 2009, p.200)
painted only when commissioned were very different from Czanne for
whom painting was a vocation (Malraux, 1978, p.601, emphasis in origi-
nal). Indeed, Czanne was well known for his sacerdotal view of the art-
ists vocation, famously asking is art a priesthood that demands the pure
in heart who must belong to it entirely? (Austin, 2005, p.151). For both
artist and priest, therefore, vocation was and is commonly understood as
being a matter not of personal choice, but necessity a point also made
by Malraux (1978, p.317). Some contemporary artists evidently feel the
same way. When asked in an interview how she decided to become an
artist, Tracey Emin replied: I had no choice. It made its decision for me,
I didnt make that choice.1
In addition to this similarity regarding the notion of vocation, artist
and priest also have in common a role as mediators of human meaning.
Both use symbolism, narrative and image to point to a truth beyond the
medium. In what follows, I will explore artistic and liturgical contexts in
order to delineate the function that artists and priests share as mediators
of human meaning. In the course of doing so, I will look at selected works
of popular contemporary artists, such as Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst and
Mark Wallinger. Many other areas of comparison could have been consid-
ered: brevity permits only a preliminary sketch.
It has been observed that very little serious contemporary art is con-
ventionally religious, either in form or function. As James Elkins points
out, religion is seldom mentioned in the art world unless it is linked to
criticism, ironic distance or scandal (Elkins, 2004, p.15).2 Yet, at the same
time, it is interesting to note that art with no explicit religious content is
often talked about in terms that draw heavily on theological vocabulary.
Charles Saatchi instrumental in the rise of the so-called young British
artists (YBAs) of the nineties routinely described the principal works of
his collection as icons. Between 2003 and 2005 he showcased these works
1 Matthew Stadlen, On The Road With Tracey Emin, BBC News, 28 May 2011.
2 Examples of this would include Chris Ofili Holy Virgin Mary (1996), Andres Serrano
Piss Christ (1987), and most recently Banksy Cardinal Sin (2011).
Creating the Sacred: Artist as Priest, Priest as Artist 53
in his own gallery space at County Hall, London, like so many icons in
the chapels around the altar of a church (Smith, 2009, p.51).
Among the icons in the Saatchi collection is Tracey Emins Ive got
it all (2000), a photographic image of the artist reminiscent of the arche-
typal symbolism of the myth of Dane. Unlike traditional representations
of this popular story from Greek mythology, however, the shower of gold
comes not from outside the picture not from the gods but from the
artist/subject herself. It seems to be pouring out of her, as the wealth she
has generated, which she is simultaneously, by the action of her hands,
appropriating back into herself. The gesture could also be taken as a refer-
ence to masturbation, which is a frequent motif in her work, or simply as a
reflection on her knack for turning sex into cash. But the image does more
than merely comment on the artists personal circumstances. It speaks to
our contemporary culture of individualism and consumerism and even
the commodification of spirituality, with its discourses of self-help and
personal fulfilment. Emin has said that the image is ironic, because in spite
of having made it with her Vivienne Westwood dress and the piles of
foreign currency reflecting her status as an international celebrity artist
this superficial wealth masks an inner poverty. It is just money after all;
hardly the content of a rich inner life. As such, the image evokes the age-
old tension between material and spiritual wealth.3
It is unlikely that many people would think of Emin as a religious
artist, and yet, as Brown points out, Religion and spiritual belief have
often been invoked by Emin in her work (Brown, 2006, p.111). If one
understands spirituality to be about matters of ultimate concern, meaning
and value our existential reflection on the experience of being human
then it becomes more plausible to see her frankly confessional work in
such terms. She is unflinching in her self-examination, itself a fundamen-
tal component of the life of faith, and in her work she tackles the pain of
human existence, as well as narratives of personal growth and transcendence,
3 For example, Jesus instructs his followers to store up treasure in heaven, For where
your treasure is, there your heart will be also. The passage concludes with the une-
quivocal statement: You cannot serve God and money Matthew 6.1921, 24.
54 Nicholas Buxton
with searing honesty. Although Emins art invariably takes her own experi-
ence as its starting point, it is not merely solipsistic but goes beyond the
personal to address issues that may be common to many as her evident
popularity would seem to confirm. That she sees her work as an articula-
tion of explicitly spiritual themes should not really be surprising. She is
well known for her beliefs in reincarnation and spiritualism her mother
conducted sances and, while distancing herself from organised religion,
she enthusiastically identifies as a pantheist. Indeed in one interview she
said, evidently with some exasperation, Everyone focuses on the sexual-
ity of my work. Why doesnt anyone ask me about my thoughts on God?
(Vara, 2002, p.173). If nothing else, this suggests that the question would
have had some relevance to her.
If Emins work was simply an unmediated record of her mundane life
experiences it would be banal. What makes it art is its intentionality: it is
constructed. We should not be too easily taken in, therefore, by the nave
view expressed in the media, as well as by quite a number of people who
should know better, that her life is her art, with no mediation. In spite of
its autobiographical subject matter, Emins work is highly mediated and
draws self-consciously on a sophisticated palette of artistic and cultural
references, precedents and contexts. The artist, like a priest, weaves mean-
ing out of a symbolic language, operating within a tradition and at a criti-
cal or reflective distance from the truth or reality they seek to mediate. As
Michael Austin puts it, artists are a priesthood struggling, at much cost
to themselves, to mediate deep truths about the world in which they, and
we, live and work (Austin, 2008, p.181).
Emins 1999 Turner prize entry, My Bed, is a case in point. Ostensibly
an installation of an unmade bed, viewers automatically assumed that it
really was her bed, rather than an installation fabricated for exhibition in
a gallery. Responses from the public were typically literal-minded in their
understanding of the work: I wouldnt put my bed on display as a piece
of art I dont think theres anything artistic about being a messy person
(Merck, 2002, p.121). Critics, dealers and the artist herself insist that her
work is produced out of and inescapably refers back to the events of her
life (Cherry, 2002, p.143). This is obviously true up to a point, but at the
same time Tracey Emins unmade bed is most emphatically a bed that has
Creating the Sacred: Artist as Priest, Priest as Artist 55
purpose of religion is to change us, the way we see the world and live our
lives, and thus the role of the priest is to act, like an artist, as an agent of
that transformation. As with participation in religion, so experiencing art
may bring about transformation, if not salvation, in the one who experi-
ences it. Indeed, at least one of the purposes of art is to change the way
we look at things, the world or each other. Michael Mayne expresses this
well when he writes:
It was William Blake who saw the artist as one who conveys to others the perception
of things in their true essence and points to a divine reality beyond himself. A priest
as pastor tries to do the same, helping people to make sense of the raw material of
their lives by building on whatever glimpses they may have of goodness or beauty
or suffering or love. (Mayne, 1995, pp.910)
canvas for the priest, however, is everyday life itself, for he is charged with
the responsibility of managing the myth of our lives, helping us to relate
our personal story to some bigger story whose context gives it meaning.
In this, the principal art form of religion is the sacred drama of its ritual
life: the liturgy of the Church, whose purpose is to bring about personal
and social transformation.
Liturgy is an expression of faith as a way of living ritually; it creates
a pattern for life. In liturgy, the word of God is performed, acted out by
the company of people present. As David Stancliffe points out, liturgy is
a process of becoming what we are called in Christ to be (Stancliffe, 2010,
p.2). Through it, we become what we do. The purpose of liturgy (in the
Christian context) is to make the Word, made flesh in Jesus, incarnate in
the lives of those who participate in it. Similarly, Christopher Irvine takes
Tertullians famous expression that Christians are made, not born as the
starting point for his thesis that our being made Christian is the very
meaning of worship (Irvine, 2005, p.xv). In other words, the Christian is
formed becomes Christian by participation in the liturgical life of the
Church. The goal of the Christian life, he says, is to grow through prayer
and spiritual discipline into the likeness of God (Irvine, 2005, p.6). Irvine
goes on to draw an analogy between the artistic activity of rendering the
true form of things, and what he calls the art of God, whereby we are
formed in his image and likeness (Irvine, 2005, p.14). The art of God
then, is the reshaping of the human form to the likeness of Christ (Irvine,
2005, p.43). Whilst, strictly speaking, God is the artist and we, the raw
material, with the Church as his studio; nevertheless, the priest, as Gods
representative, shares in that creative work as the facilitator and curator
of Gods artistic activity. Liturgy is thus a catalyst for a spiritual reaction
between God and the human soul. The priest is simply the agent that sets
the reaction in motion. There is an interesting similarity here with the way
in which artists frequently talk of having a relatively passive role in the crea-
tive process, merely acting as the channel or means by which something
greater than or otherwise beyond themselves is unleashed. Marcel Duchamp
described the artist as a mediumistic being who is not conscious of what
he is doing or why he is doing it (Lebel, 1959, p.77). I have no doubt that
many artists would share this view.
58 Nicholas Buxton
5 For more on this particular aspect of the engagement between the Church and
contemporary culture, see Baker (2010).
Creating the Sacred: Artist as Priest, Priest as Artist 59
such language may suggest that the art in question is fulfilling a spiritual
function in the absence of a common religious narrative.
In spite of the almost complete absence of religious iconography in
modern art, contemporary art, by contrast, seems replete with religious
imagery, even if it is not intended to be religious art as such; that is to say,
art with a religiously didactic or devotional function.6 Damien Hirst is
arguably the most well known contemporary artist who deliberately uses
explicitly religious symbolism in order to reflect on fundamental themes
of human existence. This is evident in works such as St Bartholomew,
Exquisite Pain (2006), Hymn (1996) and Virgin Mother (2006), to name
but a few. Indeed, entire exhibitions, such as New Religion, his 2007 show
held in Wallspace, the exhibition venue in the church of All Hallows on
the Wall in the city of London, have explored religious themes and imagery.
Arguably more than any artist of his generation, says the publicity for
another 2007 show, Beyond Belief, Hirst is preoccupied by the Western
tradition of Christian iconography.7 Hirst is widely criticized for his brash
commercialism, and his work is frequently castigated for being banal and
meaningless, an impression he does little to contradict. His champions,
on the other hand, see it as nothing less than an art which will become
an alternative to religion (Stallabrass, 2006, p.22). But although it is
doubtful that Hirsts exploitation of religious imagery is motivated by
genuinely religious impulses making it difficult to argue that his work
can be described as religious that does not necessarily mean that such
imagery and symbolism loses its religious or spiritual significance for a
viewer inclined to see it that way.
Much of Hirsts work treads a fine line between crass and profound. A
good example would be For the Love of God (2007), a diamond-encrusted,
platinum cast of a human skull with a 50 million price tag, which was
the centrepiece of Beyond Belief. The piece evokes the traditional memento
mori, suggesting the futility of amassing wealth that ultimately we cannot
enjoy itself a common theme in religious discourse. It combines the
Whether or not artist and priest (or shaman), bear any more than a super-
ficial resemblance to each other, the notion that they do seems nevertheless
to have taken root in our contemporary cultural consciousness.
One of the most infamous of Damien Hirsts works, The Physical
Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991), consists of
a fourteen-foot tiger shark suspended in a tank of formaldehyde. Like
much of his oeuvre, the shark floats vaguely between the sublime and
the ridiculous. Yet at a purely visceral level, it is undoubtedly a powerful
image and seeing it is a memorable experience:
If you bend down and peer through its sharply jagged teeth, youll be looking past the
pure white mouth at the large black hole of its gullet. Its a reasonable visual metaphor
for the crossing-over that we think will never happen. (Smith, 2007)
8 Will Self, Lent Talks, BBC Radio 4, 24 February 2010. For a transcript of the broad-
cast see: <http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00qvpf0#broadcasts>.
Creating the Sacred: Artist as Priest, Priest as Artist 61
of life that is the very basis of those belief systems we call religions, deeply
concerned as they are with the imponderable questions of life and death,
supplying not dogmatic answers, but rather the means to live with the
questions that cannot be answered.
Like much contemporary art, Hirsts controversial shark provoked
hostile reactions from conservative critics who dismissed it on both aes-
thetic and conceptual grounds. This highlights a curious tension between
the ever-increasing popularity of contemporary art and the enduring fact
that it remains poorly understood or is perceived as being difficult. What,
therefore, can it mean to talk about Western art as the channel for human
self-understanding when so much of it is unintelligible to so many people,
conditioned as we are to think of art as basically representational and deco-
rative? The first thing to say is that although much modern and contem-
porary art does not conform to popular expectations of what art should
be or look like, that does not mean it is not art, or that it lacks meaning.
Yet, the fact that people continue to ask of contemporary art not only is
it art? but also what does it mean? is rather telling. It presupposes, first,
that the meaning is not self-evident perhaps because the art in question
does not have a readily accessible vocabulary and second, that it should
mean something. Art may be considered on some accounts to be an
end in itself but it is also, it seems, expected to convey an intelligible and
authoritative meaning. The viewer is seemingly reluctant to decide for him/
herself. This may be the residue of a pre-modern understanding of art as
illustration: the visual coding of a narrative derived from another source.
At the same time it supports the view that in the absence of a common
religious culture the narratives and symbolism of the Christian tradition
have effectively become a forgotten language art is becoming one of the
primary vehicles for the articulation of questions of human meaning and
value. Commenting on Francis Bacons approach to portraiture, Timothy
Gorringe says: They may not tell us much about their sitter but they
do tell us important, if rather negative, things about what it means to be
human (Gorringe, 2011, p.99).
The point of art like the point of religion is what it points to.
Art, especially abstract or conceptual art, engages with the fundamental
experience of being human. There may be a great deal of modern and
62 Nicholas Buxton
contemporary art that seems cynical and nihilistic perhaps even mean-
ingless but this then is simply a reflection of contemporary culture. On
this view, contemporary art continues to perform the traditional function
of art as mirror to society. It is presumably for this reason that Michael
Austin can say: Modern art, even the most despairing, even that art which
portrays man and his existence as absurd, may be fundamentally religious
(Austin, 2005, p.32). Art is the articulation of human meaning. Thus even
an apparently meaningless art reflecting a meaningless existence, is still in
some sense pointing towards a metaphysical or spiritual truth beyond itself.
Art, like religion, relies on faith modern and contemporary art espe-
cially and in this respect the art world mimics the relationship found
in religion between an elite of experts and a herd of followers. Art always
requires interpretation, and thus a priestly caste of interpreters schol-
ars, critics and curators just as religious texts and doctrines need to be
mediated by clergy and theologians. While it is true that conventional
representational art also requires interpretation, the casual viewer is at least
able to read it at a superficial level. This is often not the case with abstract or
conceptual art. The public have to take it on faith that a certain piece
of abstract or conceptual art does in fact represent or mean whatever it
is we are told it represents, when in fact this may be far from self-evident.
This applies even when we are told that it means whatever we want it
to mean! As with religion, there would appear to be an esoteric level of
understanding for the initiate, and a popular level of understanding or
misunderstanding for everyone else. Both artist and priest, therefore, act
as authorities: whether as guardians of orthodox doctrine or arbiters of
taste. Indeed they determine what counts as art or truth in the first place.
Art has thus become highly institutionalized, defined by the organs of the
art world: galleries, museums, critics and collectors.
In the late twentieth century, the gallery became a postmodern sacred
space the work displayed, the space itself and the viewers engagement
with it combining to become a liturgical act. For the artist, the gallery is
a blank canvas on which to project the activity of viewing art. And so as
art becomes liturgical, and engagement with it becomes for the viewer a
spiritual activity, so the artist assumes the sacerdotal role of priest. As the
artist is the priest of the gallery or museum, so the priest is curator of the
Creating the Sacred: Artist as Priest, Priest as Artist 63
sacred space of the church. This is true both in the mundane sense of exer-
cising a duty of care for the fabric of the building itself after all, churches
represent a vast heritage of art and culture and also in the stewardship of
the sacredness of a sacred space. Here the aesthetic and the spiritual meet,
and the priest responsible for this encounter is not only engaging in an
artistic activity by maintaining the aesthetic qualities of the building, but
also by cultivating a numinous atmosphere within it.9
Of course, the notion of curator goes further than that. It is no accident
that curator and curate derive from related etymological roots. A curator
is a keeper, custodian or caretaker; and so too is the priest as curate, stew-
ard of Gods mysteries, charged with the cure or care of souls. As such, the
priest stands at the juncture between the divine and human realms, between
matter and spirit; and much modern and contemporary art manifests this
same priestly function, becoming, as Siedell puts it, poignant altars to the
unknown god in aesthetic form (Siedell, 2008, p.34). The development of
abstraction in art in the early twentieth century saw the deliberate attempt
on the part of artists such as Kandinsky and Mondrian the latter deeply
committed to Theosophy to realize in a two-dimensional painted sur-
face an expression of unmediated spirit or truth (Hughes, 1991, p.202). If
an artist strives to mediate the deepest truths of human experience, then
this is an essentially spiritual, if not religious, activity. As sculptor Steve
Dilworth says: Ive never put the title shaman on myself, but I think
that all art is at heart shamanistic. It provides a bridge between the physi-
cal and the metaphysical (Gloucester Cathedral, 2010, p.4). The priest
too is a mediator, a bridge-maker, whose role is to mediate between the
human and the divine.
Mark Wallinger is another contemporary artist who frequently articu-
lates religious ideas and imagery in his work, one of the most obvious
examples being Ecce Homo (1999), dubbed the first public religious statue
in Britain since the Reformation. Wallingers use of religious imagery does
not come across as being so cynically exploitative as Hirsts, and although
he is not religious, he recognizes that the laws and values of British society
have been shaped by its Christian inheritance. He is an atheist, but in his
own words a Christian atheist, who moreover understands that within
the human organism is a fundamental desire for transcendent meaning
(Herbert, 2011, p.104). Wallinger makes art that self-consciously explores
religion as a human phenomenon. And although it is not intended to
function as religious art, that does not prevent it from provoking reli-
gious reflection. A number of his works evoke religious themes, such as
Angel (1997), and Threshold to the Kingdom (2000), a slow-motion video
of people coming through the door in the Arrivals Hall at London City
Airport literally the gateway to a kingdom with Gregorio Allegris
Miserere as the soundtrack.
Threshold is a particularly striking and reflective work. Airports are
liminal spaces they are neither here nor there, but represent a state of
limbo. Anyone familiar with international air travel will recognize the
experience of entering the Arrivals Hall, after what may have been a lengthy
and disorientating interlude of not being anywhere, removed from the
earth a period almost of suspended animation into a new and often
strange world. Sometimes we are greeted by familiar faces, or reunited with
loved ones; at other times we may be lost, bewildered and alone. In either
case, we experience a sudden transition, from one world to another. Even
without the music, this piece would have strong spiritual resonances, pro-
voking reflection on the fundamental existential themes of life and death.
It presents a powerful but more subtle metaphor for the crossing over
that Hirsts shark confronts us with so aggressively. However, in choos-
ing Allegris setting of Psalm 51 with its plaintive cry for mercy before
the ruler and judge of all Wallinger amplifies the feeling experienced by
travellers of being scrutinized and judged as they go through customs and
immigration. As well as the obvious metaphysical resonances, Threshold to
the Kingdom also presents an image of state religion, a fusion of political
and ecclesiastical authority, under the all-seeing eye of God or a CCTV
camera (Herbert, 2011, p.112).
As discourses of human meaning, art and religion function as vehicles
for the articulation of memory and hope, identity and purpose. It could be
argued, therefore, that whereas art once pointed to a transcendent meaning
Creating the Sacred: Artist as Priest, Priest as Artist 65
using the symbolism of Christian iconography, now the same basic human
urge to express what is most essential and paradoxically inexpressible about
being human is rendered instead with pickled sharks and soiled mattresses.
The symbols and metaphors have changed their outward appearance, but
their use and purpose remain much the same. Contemporary artists con-
tinue to wrestle with questions of human meaning and identity, with or
without reference to the Christian story that used to be the common cur-
rency of Western culture. As mediators of human meaning, they exercise a
sacramental role in the secular religion of contemporary everyday life that
Will Self labelled aesthetic humanism.
Analogously, the priests of traditional religious institutions exercise an
artistic role, by articulating narratives ofhuman meaning and personal trans-
formation through the sacred drama of liturgy, as curators of sacred space,
and as mediators of our relationship to a shared story that encompasses
our own. However, although art may function as an implicitly religious
activity for some people, and although others may think that religion is
essentially a cultural practice, religious believers would be likely to claim that
religion is different from art in certain important respects. Leslie Goode
argues that the artistic revelation differs from religious revelation in that
what it refers to could not be said to exist independently of the subjectiv-
ity through which it is expressed; its revelation is incapable of alternative
articulation, whereas the notion God, for example, transcends any given
experience of his presence (Goode, 2010, p.113). In other words, whereas
art might be defined not by art theory but rather by what artists do, religion
is surely the opposite. It is defined by doctrine and revelation, which in
turn refers to an objective truth independent of the believing subject. This
claim may be contested, yet it nevertheless represents the realist assump-
tions that the majority of religious believers take for granted. But what if
religion were a human creation? What if faith was understood as an act
of imagination precisely because it is a commitment made in the absence
of certain knowledge? What if priests were creators as well as curators of
religious tradition? Art, and culture in general, is a story we tell ourselves
about ourselves, the manifestation of our collective self-awareness. On this
view, culture and religion become virtually synonymous; or at most, two
ways of expressing the same basic human instincts.
66 Nicholas Buxton
Much more could be, and indeed has been, said about the spirituality
of art. Some would argue that art is inherently spiritual, and that making
it and viewing it are in their own ways spiritual activities. For some, it is
the only religion they have. But for all the intriguing analogies, the reli-
gion of art seems to offer a rather superficial substitute for a traditional
religious faith and practice, requiring of its adherents commitment and
sacrifice to something other than and beyond themselves. If the artist is
priest of the religion of art, it is in spite of certain superficial similarities
ultimately a vacuous religion predicated on emotional stimulation rather
than deep transformation.10 Art, it seems, offers a spiritual encounter
without any real engagement with the reality of either this world or any
other. Ultimately therefore, casting the artist in the role of priest, fruitful
though the metaphor may be for reflection on social and spiritual roles in
contemporary culture, ends up being superficial too. Both artist and priest
are undoubtedly mediators of narratives of human meaning and reflection
on the human condition, but there is a big difference between the spir-
itual discipline of self-examination, and the prevailing culture mirrored
in much contemporary art of narcissistic self-obsession. The artist does
not engage directly with the human reality that confronts the priest in his
ministry. To put it rather bluntly, an artist does not have difficult parish-
ioners to care for, with all the challenges that can present. Finally, religion,
by its nature and in spite of efforts to confine it to the private sphere is
essentially communal, with a tremendous power to shape lives and socie-
ties; whereas most contemporary Western art, both in its production and
consumption, is essentially individualistic and, for the most part, without
material consequence.
References
with language that is consciously richer and more poetic in order to recover
some of the memorability of the language of the Prayer Book indeed, the
collects are essentially those of the Prayer Book. The daily offices share the
shape of the Roman breviary; for many festivals the tradition of the last
Gospel has been revived. The medieval festivals of the agricultural year
have been restored, with provision for Plough Sunday, Rogationtide and
Lammastide joining that for Harvest Thanksgiving. Even small details like
the provision of rubrics in their traditional red rather than the blubrics
of the ASB mean that the books have a more traditional feel to them even
if they are printed in a modern sans serif typeface.
These developments are characteristic of the transition in our wider
society from a modernist viewpoint to a postmodern one. Modernity
has an unbounded confidence in the ultimate truth to be achieved by the
scientific method and human rationality. In every sphere of human life,
including the arts, progressive modernity entails the rejection of all that
is historic or traditional in favour of all that is rational, materialist, and
scientific, according to the assessment of experts. To take a characteristi-
cally blatant example of this, from the 1960s the centres of our cities and
towns were gutted because of the conviction that progress, as defined by
the motor car, demanded wider roads and multi-storey car parks in place
of historic street patterns and buildings built on a human scale. A belief
in the necessity of a rupture with the past, of a new beginning for modern
humanity, is characteristic of modernity.
The same modernist rules applied to the liturgical life of the church.
Those who characterized themselves as progressive insisted that the new
rite of the Eucharist had to be celebrated in a new way, entirely dissociated
from the traditional rite, and that historic churches needed to be reordered
so that this new rite could be celebrated properly. The needs of modern
people could not be served by what their ancestors had used for hundreds
of years previously. The same destructive architectural treatment was meted
out to church interiors as to town and city centres; they were reordered
in a way that blatantly ignored their historic forms and associations. Pope
Benedict has characterized this approach as a hermeneutic of rupture, of
an entire dissociation with what had gone before.
Immanence, Transcendence and Liturgical Space in a Changing Church 71
Even if the liturgical expression of modernity has passed its sell-by date, it
remains deeply entrenched in the life of our churches. Those seeking after
depth and transcendence have, perhaps not surprisingly, typically explored
non-liturgical directions. Three distinct phenomena of contemporary
church life draw explicitly on historic practices of the Church: the use of
icons, labyrinths and pilgrimage. Each in its own way is valued as a means
of entering a liminal place, a threshold that acts as a bridge between the
secular and the sacred, between time and eternity, between surface and
depth. Icons, with their inverse perspective, invite the beholder to enter
into the mystery of God as through a window. As John Baggley has written,
Icons form a door into the divine realm, a meeting point of divine grace
and human need; moreover, they are also a way by which we enter more
deeply into our own interior life (Baggley, 1995, p.4).
If praying with an icon is a means of entering another realm without
moving a step, the activity of walking the labyrinth provides an extended
liminal experience. In the Middle Ages labyrinths were frequently placed
in churches and cathedrals and they were most commonly associated with
the legend of the original labyrinth designed by Daedalus and the lair of the
Minotaur. The classical myth of Theseus braving the depths of the labyrinth
to slay the Minotaur and to free the Athenian captives was understood as
prefiguring the descent of Christ into hell to conquer Satan and set free
the souls imprisoned there (1 Peter 3. 1822), which is also a figure of the
descent and ascent of the believer with Christ in baptism (Romans 6. 34).
The labyrinth itself is only a compressed version of pilgrimage, where the
entire journey is a liminal zone between earth and heaven.
This questing after sacred places is by no means confined to these sorts
of practices. Many of you will have visited or know of the 2010 landmark
sculpture exhibition at Salisbury Cathedral, Liminality. The artists there
Immanence, Transcendence and Liturgical Space in a Changing Church 73
In recent years we have so focused on the aspect of the Eucharist as a sacred meal
that we have forgotten that Eucharistic theology is atonement theology because it
centres on the priestly Lord offering himself for sins. You cannot get to the notion
of atonement for sins from what is contained in Passover theology: Eucharistic the-
ology comes from the Day of Atonement, not from Passover. (McDade, 2005, p.6)
faith strengthened by being with her, praying with her, touching her shrine.
There has been for many years now a quiet movement of the restoration
of shrines and relics in British churches, and the practice of pilgrimage to
them, as to Compostela and Lourdes, is very much on the increase.
Modernism told us that Christians must choose to find God as imma-
nent in the midst of his people, for the transcendent was something that
scientific materialists could have nothing to do with. In truth this was a
false choice. Postmodernity has freed us from an either/or mentality. We
can be both/and. We can know both God immanent in the midst of his
people and experience his transcendence in journey and sacrament and
architecture. Now the insights that Christians have gained in the realms of
personal spirituality and through the various movements I have described
need to be applied to the communal worship of our parishes. In the same
way that over the last fifty years ancient and traditional churches have been
reordered to express an understanding of the Eucharist as communal meal,
so in this generation the challenge for our modern communal churches,
which strongly emphasize God immanent in the gathered community and
the meal, will be how they can adapt or reorder their spaces to express the
re-enchantment of our worship as sacrificial offering and pilgrim journey.
References
Baggley, J. (1995). Doors of Perception: Icons and their Spiritual Significance. Crestwood,
NY: St Vladimirs Seminary Press.
Debuyst, F. (1969). The Meaning of Religious Places in R. Lanier Hunt (ed.)
Revolution, Place, and Symbol: Journal of the First International Congress
on Religion, Architecture and the Visual Arts, New York City and Montreal,
August 26September 4, 1967. New York: International Congress on Religion,
Architecture and the Visual Arts, 1969.
Flanagan, K. (1991). Sociology and Liturgy: Re-presentations of the Holy. London:
Macmillan.
McDade, J. (2005). A Promise Fulfilled, a Ransom Paid, The Tablet, 8 October 2005,
67.
Michael Evans
Introduction
The roots of modern abstract painting began with artists such as Malevich,
Mondrian and Kandinsky and continued in the generation that followed,
artists such as Newman, Rothko, Motherwell and Reinhardt. Many of these
artists expressed the importance of religion or spirituality in the formula-
tion of their aesthetic. The critics Roger Lipsey, Maurice Tuchman, Robert
Rosenblum and John Golding address the spiritual roots or connections of
much modernist painting. Academics and critics such as Donald Kuspit,
James Elkins and Mark C. Taylor have explored how spiritually moti-
vated painting can operate in postmodern terms. However, at the height of
78 Michael Evans
I invited a couple of art historians whose positions against the inclusion of talk
about religion in talk about contemporary art are particularly severe and consistent
[] In different but very similar ways, they both said in so many words, although
one of them actually used the word that it would simply be too painful to sit at
a table at which people would talk about religion and art at the same time. (Elkins
and Morgan, 2009, p.110)
The size of the task becomes apparent. On the one hand secularists, ration-
alists and atheists do not wish to hear of the spiritual; it has been passed
beyond and is now either openly derided or ignored. On the other hand,
for the followers of organized religion any attempt to rework the concept
of the spiritual is often seen as a direct challenge to established and specific
religious belief systems. This is the difficulty of the task. However, there
are many who do not feel comfortable in either of these camps but who
quietly may recognize that spiritual experience may still be possible and
desirable (even essential) within a secular and even post-secular culture.
In spite of the divisions on the face of it, Elkins maintains that spirituality
underlies much art of the twentieth century. He observes that:
Out of Nothing: Painting and Spirituality 79
Religion is no longer an easy subject, and many artists do not link it directly with
themselves or their work. The buried spiritual content of modern and postmodern
art may be the great unexplored subject in contemporary art history. Still, any book
devoted to the subject is bound to fail because it would have to spell out so many
things that the artists do not even tell themselves. (Elkins, 2000, p.75)
Similar problems exists beyond the art world, and psychologist David Tacey
even goes as far as a cultural diagnosis, suggesting that as soon as anyone
touches on the numinous, a kind of spiritual complex is triggered in the
culture, which immediately sets up a resistance [] The egos anxiety trig-
gers an automatic defence reaction, activating forces of resistance. As with
any unconscious complex, the spiritual complex is triggered automatically
and is hard to detect (Tacey, in Casement and Tacey, 2006, p.219).
So the broader question is whether we are gripped by a spiritual com-
plex and, more specifically, returning to art, is the mere mention of the
spiritual in art still an embarrassment or is there a new openness to dis-
cuss such possibilities? Perhaps what has changed is the cultural climate
post-secularism allowing a gradual unfolding and exploration of issues
surrounding the spiritual. The art world now seems able at least in part to
again allow talk of the spiritual. This can be observed simply by looking
at examples of recent publications that address the topic such as James
Elkins and David Morgan, Re-enchantment (2009), and Mark C. Taylor,
Refiguring the Spiritual (2012). Interest even extends beyond academia to
Frieze magazine which dedicated an entire issue to the subject of religion
and spirituality in 2010 (Frieze, No. 135).
experience of being human, and can be viewed apart from religion. Atheist
writers, such as Andre Comte-Sponville, author of The Book of Atheist
Spirituality (2008), claim the possibility of spiritual experience saying:
we are finite beings who open on to infinity [] we are ephemeral beings who open
on to eternity, and relative beings who open on to the absolute. This openness is
the spirit itself. Metaphysics means thinking about these things; spirituality means
experiencing them, exercising them, living them.
This is what distinguishes spirituality from religion, which is merely one of its
possible forms [] All religions involve spirituality, at least to some extent, but all
forms of spirituality are not religious. (Comte-Sponville, 2008, p.136)
So we have seen that for some spirituality is not necessarily tied to religion
and at this point I would tentatively offer my own working definition of
what is meant by spiritual experience, which I define as an encounter with
a profound sense of meaningfulness without necessarily having a rational or
conceptual framework with which to define this experience. The disagreement
on spirituality between different approaches, psychological, theological
or even atheistic could be seen to surround the source of the experience
rather than the feeling, i.e. for the religious person there is often an exter-
nal power at work (even if felt within the subject) while for the atheist, or
some schools of psychology, the source of spiritual feeling does not need
an external entity.
Having now established some parameters for the term spiritual, I want
to examine how spirituality has been conceived of in modernist abstract
painting. Developments in much Western intellectual thought seem to
have been moving in a direction opposite to spiritual possibilities and in
many areas anything to do with spiritual experience has become deeply
problematic for contemporary Western intellectual culture. Donald Kuspit
82 Michael Evans
has observed the increasing difficulty for the spiritually motivated artist,
tracing a path from its early modernist roots:
Kuspit has written extensively on the subject of painting and spiritual expe-
rience, and identifies the problematics in the pursuit of spiritual possibilities
in abstract painting in the later modernist era. He believes that the spiritual
becomes increasingly difficult to achieve within painting and to reconcile
with an increasingly secular and materialistic society. Kuspit charts the
decline of the early fervour with which the pioneer abstractionists worked
in a spirit of active engagement and detects a fundamental shift in the emo-
tional tone of the whole project of transcendental abstraction. If Kuspit
is correct then the important issue for later abstract artists became self
preservation. The focus becomes survival, survival of a part of the psyche
or psychic experience which is under threat within an overtly materialist,
secular culture. His stark conclusion demonstrates how seriously he views
the change when he observes: Where Kandinsky and Mondrian wanted
to save materialistic society, Rothko and Motherwell wanted to save their
own souls (Kuspit, 2000, p.66). Thus.
Since the height of the Abstract Expressionist era spiritual concerns,
with the exception of some Neo-Expressionistists, have not been of much
concern to many contemporary artists. For most postmodern abstract paint-
ers it seemed an issue that was simply not worth investigating. However,
some painters continued to reflect on issues of this depth and both the
British painter Ian McKeever and the German artist Gerhard Richter
are examples of artists for whom spirituality is a concern. Richter gives a
strongly worded assertion of the religious nature of art, saying:
Out of Nothing: Painting and Spirituality 83
Art is not a substitute religion: it is a religion (in the true sense ofthe word: binding
back, binding to the unknowable, transcending reason, transcendent being) []
the Church is no longer adequate as a means of affording experience of the transcen-
dental, and of making religion real and so art has been transformed from a means
into the sole provider of religion: which means religion itself. (Richter, 1993, p.38)
It seems clear from this statement that the spiritual possibilities for art are
a serious consideration for Richter and yet the subject is little discussed in
the context of his work, where preference is given to more technical con-
cerns about the relationship between his painting and photography. Ian
McKeever acknowledges the problems that a spiritually motivated artist
may face but still insists on the importance of this type of experience to
the painter.
who could paint a crucifixion now and make it meaningful? It would either be crass
or it would be considered post-modernist. But actually one couldnt do it [] So this
whole area of being, the possibility of elevating ourselves, is to a large extent cut off
and one appears to be either pig-headed or nave even to be going back into it. But it is
the area I think painting can have an authentic voice in. (McKeever, 2000, pp.1011)
Here it becomes clear that there are indeed serious and critically acclaimed
artists who recognize and explore the importance of a spirituality in their
work and who also understand the difficulties in approaching the subject,
many of which were outlined by Elkins earlier in the paper. I want now to
move on to examine my own work that will provide the platform for a fur-
ther investigation into how a contemporary abstract painter can explore the
territory of spiritual experience and the problems which accompany this.
A Personal Perspective
Abstraction became for me what was left when I removed all other com-
ponents in which I did not believe perhaps a form of radical doubt. I
was painting at a time when every painter seemed to be acutely aware of
the Barthian notion of the death of the author that shifted the focus
from authorial intentionality to the readers interpretation, and given this
tendency, the use of process, in my case the tipping and pouring of paint
and the removal of the handmade painted gesture seemed appropriate.
Colour was later removed for two main reasons. First, there was no reason
for colour to be in the paintings if they had no external reference and using
only grey helped to avoid naturalistic associations. The second and more
subtle reason which took longer to emerge was that of the sense of strange-
ness achieved when the uncertain grey spaces of my paintings were created.
If colour was viewed as of the world then the possibility also existed that
to paint without colour made the paintings seem more remote to our
everyday experience, some other type of space or place (see Figure 1).
The death of the author might be said to fulfil much the same function in our day
as did the death of God for late nineteenth-century thought. Both deaths attest to
a departure of belief in authority, presence, intention, omniscience and creativity.
For a culture which thinks itself to have come too late for the Gods or for their
extermination, the figures of the author and the human subject are said to fill the
theological void, to take up the role of ensuring meaning in the absence of meta-
physical certainties. The author has thus become the object of a residual antitheol-
ogy. (Burke, 1992, pp.223)
The only art that seems appropriate to such an age [] is an anti-art or minimal art,
where minimalism refers [] to a widespread conviction that art can survive only
by a drastic restriction of its field of vision [] the survival strategy par excellence.
Even the [] embattled self-assertion [of Abstract Expressionism] a typical artistic
defence against an unreal environment has proved impossible to maintain. (Lasch,
1984, pp.1312)
Seen from this perspective, minimal or process-based art can arouse criti-
cal interest not only for what it does but also for what it does not do. It
becomes significant to ask what it is that the minimalist approach avoids
or rejects. Lasch believes late modernist art unmistakenly expresses the
numbed emotional aura of the age and goes further to suggest that the
aspect which is being avoided is as Carter Ratcliff writes in an essay on
Robert Morris: the stasis or numbness induced by the refusal to risk the
pains of self-revelation (Lasch, 1984, p.151). The counter-argument may
begin by suggesting that it cannot simply be taken for granted that the
86 Michael Evans
The problem is how to create essential silence in abstract art today. Abstract art must
pursue ever more complicated ways of becoming silent Touch itself exists under
enormous constraint; it often becomes increasingly inhibited [] Silence can be
understood as the eroded substance of the completely spiritual work of art. (quoted
in Tuchman, 1986, pp.31415)
Interestingly Gilbert-Rolfe uses the term blankness and even the choice
of word is indicative of a fundamental shift. The poetic and spiritual asso-
ciations of the term silence as used by Kuspit go on to become a more
existentially charged and problematic emptiness in Fuller but with Gilbert-
Rolfe we have arrived at a more neutral and pessimistic use of the term
blankness. The empty, silent or blank painting now has many problems
with which to contend. Here it may be timely to make one point which
redresses the balance in terms of emptiness. This focuses on the nature of
what is meant by empty, blank or silent. In a reference to discourses which
are often attracted to near nothingness as an indication of the limits of
language and thought William Franke makes an important point that the
silence we can talk about and objectively experience is relative. For silence
per se, without relation to any order of sound, cannot be perceived []
It is always some particular relation to Nothing that is experienced, never
the Nothing pure and simple (Franke, 2007a, p.46).
For the most part it would seem Gilbert-Rolfe is correct. However, it
may be that the inability of painting to ever actually achieve true emptiness
is crucial; this inability to achieve total emptiness does not necessarily mean
it cannot approach the idea of emptiness (which is unachievable anyway).
The situation of an apparent emptiness being presented within a paint-
ing only on further inspection to be seen to contain something, possibly
barely perceptible, hinting at the possibility of something or a relation
to nothing may indeed be where the spiritual charge of apparently empty
abstract painting is located. This places it in a different position from the
Out of Nothing: Painting and Spirituality 89
is situated, with the inclusion of form and mark within my work, allow-
ing a new and strange language to be built. It is in the unknown of the
not-yet-established language that the spiritual can be encountered, where
painting can again be (if only for a limited time) other.
The key issue here is that the artist is prepared to move beyond security
and that painting should exist in the gap between known and unknown.
There is not a rejection of all possibilities of recognition or form but
an acceptance that this must always remain only partial. Painting which
aspires to this rather than being formless would contain strange or elusive
form. This type of painting could not be called formless but neither could
it be pinned down to a stable reading or recognition. It would need to be
genuinely strange and captivating, closer to the numinous or qualities of
otherness that may take us back to the ideas ofOtto. It would create a sense
of exploring an uncharted territory yet feeling one may somehow know it.
God is not are finite and therefore knowable). It has been pointed out by
the writer Didier Maleuvre that the danger of negative theology is that it
is focused on the absence rather than the experience of God and that fun-
damentally the two types of thought are very different in intent.
The term apophasis used by writers such as Michael Sells and William
Franke provides more room for manoeuvre than the label of negative the-
ology. Apophasis can be seen at work within negative theology and also
within postmodern thought. Franke sees apophatic discourse as a form of
discourse that is always aware of its own limitations saying:
The traditional term for this sort of self-negating discourse as well as for the condi-
tion of no more discourse at all, upon which it converges is apophasis. In fact, a
total cessation of discourse may be considered the purest meaning of the term, but
in practice this state is approachable only through some deficient mode of discourse
that attenuates and takes back or cancels itself out. Thus apophasis can actually be
apprehended only in discourse in language insofar as it negates itself and tends
to disappear as language. The many different sorts of discourses that do this may be
considered together as apophatic discourse. (Franke, 2007a, p.1)
He believes that in order to sustain what one could describe as the true
content of religious experience the apophatic sense must be recovered:
Metaphysical statements inevitably mean something different from what they are
able to say; only by recovering the apophatic sense, or rather nonsense or more-than-
sense, behind these statements will we be able to see what made such traditions so
compelling for so long. (Franke, 2007a, p.12)
When applied to painting we see the potential that aphophasis has for
abstract artists. The tradition of aphophasis has been commonly connected
to discourses about the spiritual, the numinous or the sublime, and in using
it now it features as a way of thinking about how contemporary abstract art-
ists can approach the spiritual in a post-secular society. When artists state-
ments of McKeever and Richter, for example, are approached again from
the perspective of apophatic thought strong similarities can be seen. For
instance McKeever acknowledges the importance of the unknown, saying:
Out of Nothing: Painting and Spirituality 93
We now comment on everything; very little is left unsaid [] The mystery of the
unknown, on the other hand, is now more or less considered worthless. Yet, attempt-
ing at least to make ourselves partly sensitive to things we cannot know, is perhaps
one of the great freedoms still available to us [] Implicit in the unknown and what
we cannot know about paintings, is a stillness and a silence. (McKeever, 2005, p.61)
Richter seems to have similar interests concerning the unknown and its rela-
tionship with abstract painting. He goes further in discussing how abstract
art is able to depict subjects that were once depicted via religious imagery:
Abstract pictures [] make visible a reality that we can neither see nor describe []
We denote this reality in negative terms: the unknown, the incomprehensible, the
infinite. And for thousands of years we have been depicting it through images such
as heaven and hell, gods and devils.
In abstract painting we have found a better way of gaining access to the unvisu-
alizable, the incomprehensible; because abstract painting deploys the utmost visual
immediacy [] in order to depict nothing [] as a possible way to make the inex-
plicable more explicable, or at all events more accessible. (Richter, 1993, p.100)
The similarity of the language of both painters points to the apophatic tra-
dition: they want to use art in order to push the frontiers of thought and
understanding, in order to depict that which we do not know. Abstraction
becomes a way of accessing the unknown. It becomes a way of moving away
from the age-old practice of naturalism and representation. Richter once
asserted that it is still possible for one to paint like the German Romantic
painter Caspar David Friedrich in the present day. In response to this
McKeever stated that Yes, the artist can, but there is a distinct difference
between likeness and the real thing. The question for the painter, in our
contemporary world full of likenesses, is not how to make yet another like-
ness, but how to paint the real thing (McKeever, 2005, p.50). Painting the
real takes us beyond representational into abstract territory.
Tacey has also approached this issue of the real and of imitation,
observing that the dominant cultural style or literary mode of the post-
modern period is parody and imitation [] reproducing the known, sus-
pecting that this brings sentimental comfort or nostalgia (Tacey, 2007,
p.226). Tacey continues to speculate on the deeper issues at work behind
the desire to reproduce the already known concluding that:
94 Michael Evans
References
Burke, S. (1992). The Death and Return of the Author (Criticism and Subjectivity in
Barthes, Foucault and Derrida). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Casement, A. and D. Tacey (eds) (2006). The Idea of the Numinous (Contemporary
Jungian and Psychoanalytical Perspectives). London: Routledge.
Comte-Sponville, A. (2008). The Book of Atheist Spirituality. London: Bantam Press.
Elkins, J. (2000). What Painting Is. New York: Routledge.
Elkins, J. and D. Morgan (eds) (2008). Re-Enchantment (The Art Seminar; Vol. 7).
New York: Routledge.
Franke, W. (ed.) (2007a). On What Cannot Be Said (Apophatic Discourses in Philosophy,
Religion, Literature, and the Arts). Vol. 1, Classic Formulations. Notre Dame:
University of Notre Dame Press.
Franke, W. (ed.) (2007b). On What Cannot Be Said (Apophatic Discourses in
Philosophy, Religion, Literature, and the Arts). Vol. 2, Modern and Contemporary
Transformations. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.
Frieze: Journal of Contemporary Art & Culture (2010), Religion & Spirituality. Issue
No.135.
Fuller, P. (1983). Art and Psychoanalysis. London: Writers and Readers.
Gablik, S. (2002). The Reenchantment of Art. London: Thames and Hudson.
Gilbert-Rolfe, J. (1999). Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime. New York: Allworth
Press.
Krauss, R.E. (1985). The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths.
Cambridge: Massachusetts: MIT Press.
Kung, H. (1981). Art and the Question of Meaning. Trans. E. Quinn. London: SCM
Press.
Kuspit, D. (2000). The Rebirth of Painting in The Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Lasch, C. (1984). The Minimal Self. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
McKeever, I. (1996). Ian McKeever: Paintings 19901996. Nottingham: Angel Row
Gallery.
McKeever, I. (2000). Ian McKeever: Paintings and Works on Paper. London: Alan
Cristea Gallery.
McKeever, I. (2005). In Praise of Painting. Brighton: Centre for Contemporary Visual
Arts and the University of Brighton.
Otto, R. (1959). The Idea of the Holy [Das Heilige]. 14th edn. Trans. J.W. Harvey,
London: Pelican Books.
96 Michael Evans
Solve et Coagula
However abstruse and strange the language and imagery of the alche-
mists may seem to the uninitiated, they become vivid and alive as soon as
comparative research reveals the relationship of the symbols to processes
in the unconscious. These may be the material of dreams, spontaneous
fantasies, and delusional ideas on the one hand, and on the other hand
they can be observed in works of creative imagination and in the figura-
tive language of religion.
Jung, 1989, p.xvii
This essay discusses perceived connections between the art of alchemy and
the Outsider artist, both of which explore and express aspects of the spir-
itual. Throughout the paper the psychology of Carl Jung will be used to
frame the discussion in order to reveal psychological similarities between
the imagery, processes and practices of alchemy and that of Outsider art.
Fundamental to this exercise is the desire to articulate the psychological
value of different modes of perceiving the world in relation to both cultural
and a-cultural factors, and to explore Jungs unique contribution to our
understanding of art and culture within the modern era.1
In 1972 Roger Cardinal published Outsider Art, bringing to the
English-speaking public the strange and bizarre paintings, objects and
environments created by those untrained and unschooled artists and makers
1 Throughout this document I am using the terms modern and modernist non-
specifically to refer in general to the cultural condition of the West as represented
by the arts throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century.
98 David Parker
True art is never where it is expected to be: in the place where no one considers it,
nor names it. Art hates to be recognised and greeted by its name. It runs away imme-
diately. Art is a person in love with anonymity. As soon as its unmasked, as soon as
someone points the finger, it runs away. It leaves in its place a prize stooge wearing
on its back a great placard marked ART, which everybody immediately showers with
champagne, and which the lecturers lead from town to town with a ring through its
nose. (Dubuffet, 1992, p.595)
2 The term mainstream refers to the art made by artists who operate with a knowledge
and understanding of their work in relation to cultural precedents, most often having
been through formal learning of their craft and possessing a good understanding of
historical contexts.
Outsider Art and Alchemy 99
Alchemy as Process
3 In psychoanalytic terms affect is used as a general term for feelings and emotions. It
is used in relation to ideas and is seen as being attached to ideas in general (Rycroft,
1995, p.4). Here I am using the term to denote an emotional response to phenomena
that is not necessarily concerned with ideas as such, where idea is viewed as being
conceptually based. Rather, the reference is to a felt response that does not neces-
sarily have a rational basis or a clearly defined goal. The implication is that an affect
is aesthetically driven, creating a tension in the respondent that involves a symbolic
integration of the experience into the psychic structure.
Outsider Art and Alchemy 101
of Outsider Art might also echo similar psychological issues and condi-
tions to those of the alchemists. This assumption is based on perceived
similarities between both the Outsider artist and the alchemist given
that both practitioners appear to be primarily motivated by needs rooted
in the desire to engage with material and imagery emanating from power-
ful disturbances within the psyche.
My desire to make such a connection sprang essentially from a need to
try to understand intellectually why art considered as outside mainstream
practice held a particular fascination for me; also, to try to better under-
stand the possible motivating factors behind artists who do not necessarily
engage with the conventions of mainstream art practice or its cultural his-
tory and precedents, but who are clearly, and most definitely, not simply
recreational artists.4 In that respect, it seems to me that there are a number
of key elements detectable within Outsider Art that often parallel some
of the many features of alchemy but are not in any way directly connected
to an understanding or knowledge of alchemy as such. Broadly these can
be characterized as: a need to engage with, and express, imagery derived
from imaginative reverie; to work with a material/physical stimulus; to
express meaning by an often obscure, cryptic and idiosyncratic symbol-
ism; to practise their art regardless of social recognition or reward;5 to
reference or echo, sometimes overtly, sometimes covertly, religious/spir-
itual imagery and ideas; to produce imagery signalling a trans-cultural
dimension. It would seem that these six basic observations on some of the
characteristics and conditions pertaining to both activities illustrate some
important similarities.
6 It has long been recognized that the development of modern science has its roots in
the experiments conducted in alchemy. Some well known figures in the development
of modern science had a deep connection to alchemy not least of which we have
Sir Isaac Newton and the founder of modern chemistry Robert Boyle.
Outsider Art and Alchemy 103
within pre-modern culture (when both are being viewed as marginal prac-
tices7) a strong underlying relationship appears.
7 Fabricius notes that the alchemists originated in a pre-Christian cultural world and
occupied a marginal placed in society:
[T]hey occupied a strange position, religiously as well as scientifically. The alche-
mists were mystics without being orthodox Catholics, scientists without follow-
ing the learning of their time, artisans unwilling to teach others what they knew.
They were the sectarians, the problem-children of medieval society, and their
contemporaries were ever hesitant about deciding whether to regard them as
pure sages or sacrilegious imposters. (Fabricius, 1994, p.7)
104 David Parker
Key to this argument is the assumption that the psychological refers to all
mental phenomena experienced by an individual, embracing both positive
and negative feelings,8 and that the spiritual is both a fundamental and
potential aspect of this irrespective of whether consciously acknowledged
or not. It is also taken that such states, although of necessity highly indi-
vidualized and particular, do have properties that are of value beyond the
individual and that these properties both manifest and mediate themselves
through generic (archetypal) and culturally specific, symbolic structures.
On these terms, spiritual issues are psychological issues and vice versa
having the potential for both positive and negative outcomes. Also, such
issues are concerned with a primary need to acknowledge and address
the forces that both order and disorder an individuals sense of self in the
world. This paper maintains that a disordered self or ego is, sometimes,
and when entered into voluntarily, a necessary spiritual, psychological and
ultimately aesthetic experience and that such disordered states9 can help
to condition spiritual and creative growth. I suggest it is for this reason
that Outsider artists are intuitively driven to negotiate such psychological
conflicts through the medium of art creatively working through both
ordered and disordered states of mind in the quest for some aesthetic reso-
lution between conscious and unconscious phenomena. The issue then
becomes the extent to which this process is truly voluntary and therefore
an essentially therapeutic resolution. The same could be said regarding
the primary driving force behind the creative activities of the alchemist.
8 See Jungs comments on his meaning regarding the differences between feeling and
emotion as intended here ( Jung, 1978, p.49).
9 The idea of the disordering of the senses was of course also fundamental to the
surrealists aesthetic aim to reconnect art and life via a recognition of the essential
part played by the unconscious in human behaviour and values. Such disordering
was also central to the art of the French Symbolist poet Rimbaud.
Outsider Art and Alchemy 107
Jungs Dilemma
10 For examples, see the extraordinary work collected by Hans Prinzhorn and docu-
mented in his influential text on art and mental illness: Artistry of the Mentally Ill
(1995).
Outsider Art and Alchemy 109
the ability of Jung to negotiate that knife edge between a complete sur-
render to the unconscious and the ability to integrate the alchemical gold
of his visionary experiences into creatively conscious expression.
Jungs artwork in The Red Book borrows stylistically from ancient
illuminated manuscripts and it is clearly consciously designed to emulate
such prophetic texts. It can also be read as a document that aimed to illus-
trate his imaginative excursions into the underworld of the unconscious
in much the same way as the surviving alchemical texts chronicled simi-
lar experiences through the use of symbolic representation. Interestingly,
what we also find, in relation to both Jungs views on his art making and
the art-making practices of Outsider artists, is the unwillingness (in Jungs
case) or an innocent ignorance (in the latter case) to see their respective
art-making activities as art in any culturally inscribed sense. This of course
raises the question as to why such art has, over time, acquired a degree of
aesthetic value to culture over and above the framing of it as a diagnostic
tool. Likewise, the art of the alchemists, although implicitly referred to
as the art by its protagonists, always remained peripheral or outside any
broadly cultural context, following its own esoteric concerns in the path
towards the pearl of great wisdom or the philosophers stone.
By opening up pathways to the archetypal core hidden beneath, or
within, matter and form, both Outsider artist and alchemist stay true
to a fundamental quest regarding their drive towards psychological
transformation via aesthetic experience. Such a quest can be seen as one
highly individual, and esoteric, spiritual quest a quest which does not
demand cultural acceptance in order to be meaningful, but nevertheless
can be highly influential upon culture. Both Outsider artist and alche-
mist express their unique spiritual journeys into aspects of the uncon-
scious by symbolic images representing archetypal patterns of meaning
these meanings being deeply tied to their transformative functions.
The mysterious, cryptic imagery, expressed within both bear witness to
such possibilities.
110 David Parker
Conclusion
Throughout this paper, my aim has been to try to couch the activities of
both the Outsider artist and the alchemist within a broadly Jungian per-
spective on the psyche. It seems to me that a Jungian approach towards an
understanding of psyche provides us with a useful structure in which to
negotiate the complexity of meaning contained in each activity. From a
psychological perspective, Jungian theory is perhaps the most flexible and
creative in this regard. This is because a Jungian psychological approach
recognizes the crucial and valuable importance of the spiritual dimension
(however this may be expressed) to both activities. If an argument is to
be made for spiritually oriented aesthetic values as such, within an overtly
secularized culture, then a theoretical framework which helps identify pat-
terns of meaning within two highly particular, and yet, in some respects
not dissimilar, esoteric activities, could be helpful.
I drew a parallel between the Outsider artist and the alchemist, regard-
ing the two connecting strands, as I see it, of motivation and imagery. I
have not attempted to prove these connections by example such a short
exposition does not give sufficient time or space to explore this in depth.
However these initial thoughts open up some interesting theoretical avenues
regarding attempts to understand the fundamental part played by imagina-
tion in the desire to unify, through material and structural manipulation,
dualistic concepts of spirit and matter. Allied to this viewpoint, is the sig-
nificant part played by unconscious processes and their deeply collective
roots as regards their archetypal foundations.
References
Fabricius. J. (1994). Alchemy: The Medieval Alchemists and their Art. London: Diamond
Books.
Jung, C.G. (1963). Memories, Dreams, Reflections. A. Jaffe (ed.). Trans. R. and C.
Winston. London: Collins.
Jung. C.G. (1969). On the Nature of the Psyche, in H. Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler,
W. McGuire (eds). Collected Works of Carl Jung, Vol. 8. Trans. R.F.C. Hull.
Bollingen Series XX. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press [1947].
Jung, C.G. (1978). Man and His Symbols. London: Picador, [1964].
Jung, C.G. (1989) Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation and
Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy, in H. Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler,
W. McGuire (eds). Collected Works of Carl Jung, Vol. 9. Trans. R.F.C. Hull.
Bollingen Series XX. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, [1956].
Jung, C.G. (1991). Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, in H. Read, M. Fordham,
G. Adler, W. McGuire (eds). Collected Works of Carl Jung, Vol. 9. Trans. R.F.C.
Hull. Bollingen Series XX. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, [193454].
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Novus. S. Shamdasani (ed.). Trans. M. Kyburz, J. Peck and S. Shamdasani. New
York: W.W. Norton & Co.
McEvilley, T. (1992). Art and Otherness: Crisis in Cultural Identity. New York:
Documentext.
Parker, D. (2008). On Painting Substance and Psyche, in S. Rowland (ed.). Psyche
and the Arts: Jungian Approaches to Music, Architecture, Literature, Painting and
Film. London: Routledge, pp.4555.
Prinzhorn, H. (1995). Artistry of the Mentally Ill. New York: Springer-Verlag.
Rhodes, C. (2000). Outsider Art: Spontaneous Alternatives. London: Thames &
Hudson.
Rycroft, C. (1995). A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis. London: Penguin Books Ltd.
Dino Alfier
I have pointed to the distinction between Stoic and Epicurean reasons for
practising spiritual exercises i.e. ethical freedom and hedonism, respec-
tively in order to introduce Weils notion of attention and in order to
show that Weils practice of attention presents a great affinity with Stoic
spiritual exercises, with regard not only to aims but also to ethical rea-
sons. Even though Weil never wrote systematically on the correspond-
ence between her philosophy and Stoicism, there are several passages in
which she explicitly acknowledges her debt to the Stoics; for instance she
writes: The duty of acceptance with regard to the will of God, whatever
it may be, imposed itself on my mind as the first and most necessary of all,
the duty which one cannot abdicate without dishonouring oneself, after
having found it in Marcus Aurelius in the form of Stoic amor fati (Weil,
1966, p.40). Elsewhere she states that the reward for thinking about God
with sufficient attention and love is that we are forced to do his will. And,
reciprocally, the will of God is what we cannot not do once we have thought
about him with enough attention and love. Stoics: the good is what the
sage does (Weil, 1997, p.360).
As regards the aim ofWeilian attention, it is spiritual in the sense that it
aims at a profound change of perspective. Weil argues that the power we have
over how we perceive, or read reality is extremely limited: perceptions seize
us and are triggered without our participation, immediately and brutally. For
instance, Weil maintains, if in a certain situation we may necessarily perceive
a certain human being as someone we ought not to kill, in another situation
we may as necessarily perceive the very same human being as someone we
ought to kill (Weil, 2008, pp.747). But we do have a certain degree of con-
trol over how we read reality, Weil argues. Through a prolonged and attentive
apprenticeship, we can indirectly change our perceptions by modifying our
reading habit. She writes: One does not choose sensations, but, to a large
extent, one chooses that which one feels through them; not in a moment,
but through an apprenticeship. Indirectly and in time, the will, and above
all attention lead to a modification in reading (Weil, 1994, pp.41011).
118 Dino Alfier
Attentive intelligence alone has the power of carrying out the connections, and as
soon as that attention relaxes, the connections dissolve The necessary connections
which constitute the very reality of the world have no reality in themselves except as
the object of intellectual attention in action (Weil, 2005, p.188).
Any action which has really occurred can be reduced to a play of necessities, without
any residual part of the self (Weil, 1994, p.331).
There is no greater attitude ofhumility than that of silent and patient attending. [Note
that throughout her writings, Weil stresses the etymological affinity between attention
(likewise attention in French) and attending or waiting (attendre in French), often
using the two terms as synonyms.] The cry of pride is the future is mine, in some
form or another. Humility is the knowledge of the opposite truth. If only the present
is mine, I am nothing, for the present is nothing The whole ofthe carnal part of our
soul is oriented towards the future. Detachment is a death (Weil, 2006, pp.1259).
All true good entails contradictory conditions and is therefore impossible. He who
keeps his attention truly fixed on this impossibility and acts will do what is good
(Weil, 2002b, p.95).
Detachment is doing what one does, not in view of the good, but of necessity, and
having the good solely as an object of attention. (Weil, 2002b, p.256)
Necessarily Selfless Action 119
Weils claim that one ought to act of necessity and not in view of the good
may seem disconcerting from an ethical point of view. I have translated
Weils par ncessit as of necessity to suggest that here Weil does not mean
acting out of necessity as we may say, for instance, that someone stole
some bread out of the necessity to eat but acting with an awareness that
our actions are inscribed in the necessary order of the universe and reduce
to a play of necessities, as the Stoics also exhort. (I am not claiming that
of necessity is in general a more accurate translation of par ncessit than
out of necessity is par ncessit can mean either; rather my translation
is informed by my overall understanding of Weils philosophy.) We should
also keep in mind that, for Weil, the universe (in which necessity rules)
is secretly complicit with the good, but she warns against the danger of
taking our desires for the good (Weil, 1994, p.148). Thus when Weil writes
that the good is impossible, or that we must not act in view of the good,
I interpret these statements as admonitions to remain humble and not to
mistake the good with our desires, while at the same time attending to
the idea of the good (since losing sight of the good would lead to a purely
mechanistic view of reality a position that Weil rejects). This is the idea
that Weil expresses, for instance, in the following passage: It is sufficient
to note what is evident: namely, that all the goods here below, past, present
or future, real or imaginary, are finite and limited, and radically incapable
of satisfying the desire for an infinite and perfect good which perpetually
burns within us (Weil, 1994, p.277).
Before closing this section, and turning to my art project, I summarize
Weils view of attention: Weilian attention is akin to Stoic spiritual exercises
in the sense that the aim of attention is to attain a universal perspective
that acknowledges necessity in order to cultivate an ethical disposition of
detachment. It should be clear that, according to Hadots description of spir-
itual exercises, the qualifications spiritual and ethical overlap. Moreover,
as Hadot argues, there is a certain degree of continuity between Christian
and ancient spiritual practices (Hadot, 2004, p.242).
120 Dino Alfier
After the above considerations about universal necessity and the good, my
art project, which purports to be a response to my reading of Weils dis-
course on attention, will no doubt appear exceedingly crude, simple and
underdetermined with respect to the notions of necessity and detachment.
In this regard, firstly, I wish to give a candid representation of the place of
art in my study of Weils philosophy, and it would be misleading to portray
my artistic practice as fully and neatly overlaying theoretical findings, either
by inflating the practice or deflating the theory. Secondly, the sustained
effort on the project over an extended period of time, while at the same
time keeping my mind turned towards the ideas gleaned from reading
Weil, afforded insights which are sometimes difficult to express in words,
but some indication of which will be evident in the reflections that follow.
The project consisted of a series of portraits of artist Hephzibah
Rendle-Short, with whom I collaborated on a number of art projects. To
make these drawings, I used coloured felt-tip pens, and I switched to a
different pen every five minutes. I call this project an enactment of atten-
tion as a practice of detachment, and not an attentive practice of detach-
ment, because my intention was to make explicit the bearing of necessity
upon my drawing agency without pretending to any spiritual progress
on my part: the project merely afforded a space for reflection on Weilian
attention, and I did not pursue it long enough to even contemplate the
hope of spiritual progress.
Before considering the drawings to see how they convey necessity, a
preliminary clarification is required with regards to what kind of interpre-
tation of the drawings I believe I am giving. My intention in making the
drawings was rather vague: enacting attention as a practice of detachment
by representing necessity; but once the drawings were made, it became
possible to examine more analytically how necessity was represented in
the drawings recall the difference that I made earlier between drawing a
circle in darkness and later seeing the drawing. It is as if, after having drawn
Necessarily Selfless Action 121
For instance, the habit of drawing from left to right is very likely a conse-
quence of the culturally acquired manner of reading and writing; while the
habit of drawing the face first is a very common one which, I assume, is a
consequence of the fact that humans spend a lot of time looking at faces
(faces are psychologically highly charged). My activity as a drawing tutor
confirms that these are indeed very typical habits.
Thirdly, and lastly, mistakes, in the form of reassessments of previ-
ously made marks, are more explicit than they would be in a single-colour
drawing. For instance, in Figure 3, we can see that the single dark mark
representing the edge of the sitters right side of the forehead, cheekbone
and jaw (i.e. the mark to the viewers left) is intended as a rectification of a
series of lighter, and therefore earlier, marks depicting this same edge. (In
Figure 3 rectification is emphasized through tonal differentiation, but it is
clear that the chromatic differentiation ofthe original drawings is even more
emphatic in this respect.) Here the relevance of necessity is less obvious:
to interpret certain marks as a reassessment of mistaken marks implies the
postulate that there is an objective state of affairs that of necessity qualifies
the drawing marks that purport to represent it as either true or false the
remainder of the paper will expand on this.
Of the three observations I have made above i.e. chromatic and
temporal progression working against representational purpose, indica-
tion of habit, and evidence of mistakes it was the third that led back
to Weil. That is not to say, however, that the first two observations are
perfunctory, since they clarify by which means necessity was made more
explicit with a view to an enactment of attention as a practice of detach-
ment. Moreover, as I pointed out earlier, this paper is an account of my
reflection through art, and it would be disingenuous to pretend that I
knew from the very start what kind of questions would emerge from
considering the outcome of the art project. I now turn to Weils views on
contemplating our mistakes.
Necessarily Selfless Action 125
Czannes Ethics
***
Funding for this work was provided by the Arts and Humanities Research
Council.
References
All translations from French are by the author, unless otherwise stated.
Benesch, E. (2000). From the Incomplete to the Unfinished: Ralisation in the Work
of Paul Czanne, in F. Baumann, E. Benesch, W. Feilchenfeldt and K.A. Schrder
(eds). Czanne: FinishedUnfinished. Zrig: Hatje Cantz, pp.4162.
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Necessarily Selfless Action 129
Installation as Encounter:
Ernesto Neto, Do-Ho Suh and Kathleen Herbert
I think anyone who has left home and moved around understands the
act of crossing boundaries.
Do-Ho Suh in Corrin and Kwon, 2002, p.20
In 2004, Martin Warner wrote Known to the Senses, a book that connects
a deep investigation of sensory experience to the sequence of rituals and
Biblical events that comprise Holy Week. Noting that the senses can only
guide us so far in sacred experience, Warner uses hearing, touch, smell,
taste and sight as incarnational signs that may offer new forms of spiritual
knowledge. We may touch darkness, hear silence, or smell memory (Warner,
2004). My own work searches for these moments of meaningful sensory
encounter that point to the numinous and operate on the threshold of
spirituality in what has been increasingly described as a post-secular world.
This essay explores the work of Ernesto Neto, Do-Ho Suh and
Kathleen Herbert. Each has exhibited their work in the UK in recent
years, and each works in a variety of media. The work by Herbert I discuss
here are two films, Stable (2007) and De Magnete (20089). The Korean
artist Do-Ho Suhs work revolves around architecture and the tensions
between individual and collective identity. I am particularly interested
in his fabric architectural sculptures, which he began to produce after his
relocation to New York (Corrin and Kwon, 2002). Ernesto Neto works in
what could be described as a Brazilian sculptural tradition. Responsive to
multi-sensory immersive art that was first explored and theorized in the
1960s, Netos sculptural environments often contain aspects of touch and
132 Ayla Lepine
smell interaction for their audiences. Each artist emphasizes the importance
of contemplation in their work, but there is something different at stake
in how each project produces meaning and lays itself open to a visitors or
viewers interaction, perception and affiliation with the work.
For the past two decades, affect theory has helped to interlace different
strands of research in the humanities by negotiating and interpreting the
importance of emotion, experience and intensity. Affect itself can take
on an anthropomorphic quality, particularly when it is described in rela-
tion to forces that lie in internal regions beneath, alongside, or generally
other than conscious knowing, vital forces insisting beyond emotion
[driving] us toward movement, toward thought and extension, that can
likewise suspend us (as if in neutral) across a barely registering accretion
of force-relations, or that can even leave us overwhelmed by the worlds
apparent intractability (Gregg and Seigworth, 2010, p.1). The affective
principle of force-relations is a substantial element in my thinking about
how artwork by Ernesto Neto, Kathleen Herbert and Do-Ho Suh might
share threads of meaning and certain conditions in common. By affiliat-
ing the work of these three artists in relation to contemplation and in a
manner that places their art on the productive edges of spirituality, a web
of comparative possibilities can be established between this triad. This
text, like Suh and Netos architectural sculptures, erects semi-permeable
and semi-transparent boundaries between the discussions of each artist.
In each encounter with their work, the importance of relations between
bodies and the impact of the artwork upon the body of the viewer comes
to the fore.
Isobel Armstrong contends that bringing affect to bear in scholarship
does not have to instigate a rigid divide between subjectivity and rational-
ity. I am in agreement with Armstrongs position that: The task of a new
definition of close reading is to rethink the power of affect, feeling and
emotion in a cognitive space. The power of affect needs to be included
within a definition of thought and knowledge rather than theorized as
outside them, excluded from the rational (Armstrong, 2000, p.87). As
Armstrong explains, a strong binary between thinking and feeling can
alienate scholars from their chosen material, as we become located at a
distance from the object, text or experience that we simultaneously claim
Installation as Encounter 133
is open to analysis and which has made a particular and personal impact
upon the interpreter. If our account of site-specific artworks and acts of
participation that involve the body in multi-sensory ways is an account in
which we are, as Armstrong puts it outside, believing our subject to be
something external which has to be grasped or warded off (Armstrong,
2000, p.87) it will be substantially limited. Scholarship that claims to
explore the tensions and significances of art that relies on passing through
spatial thresholds, destabilizing our relationship to our environment, stimu-
lating us with diverse sensations, and extending our experience from the
immediacy of a gallery into an ineffable zone of spiritual encounter must
be responsive to the claims of affect theory in order to attempt a valuable
reading of what is at stake in artwork by Neto, Suh and Herbert. To the
best of my knowledge, none of the artists in this study have been discussed
in terms of spirituality. In making the decision to speak about these artists
and connect them in this way, I hope I do so in the spirit of Frank Burch
Browns claim that the art that has the greatest significance is not neces-
sarily the art of institutional religion but rather the art which happens to
discern what religion in its institutional or personal focus needs most to
see (Burch Brown, 1989, p.111).
Netos work invokes ideas about wonder, play, habitation and com-
munity, transforming gallery spaces into clusters of immersive experiences
where strangers are invited to encounter each other briefly yet meaning-
fully through shared sensory acts. Do-Ho Suh created a series of semi-
transparent soft sculptures based on architecture from his childhood and
his more recent past, the very details of which open them to viewers own
memories of home(s). Kathleen Herberts films transport audiences to
ambiguous places that question knowledge, reverence and spectatorship.
Each artist is committed to engaging with bodies in ways that demand deli-
cate and patient multi-sensorial encounter. Temporary, mutable, uncanny
effects of unexpected and fleeting habitation link the three artists work.
Conventional and traditional concepts of what constitutes a habitable space
and the displacing effect of site-specificity give way to new interpretations.
Prioritizing and manipulating mutability creates nothing less than spiritual
liminality, where the most important spaces are interstitial and in between.
Apparent divisions between sacred and secular experience are blurred and
134 Ayla Lepine
When a work reaches a maximum of intensity, when it has the best proportions and
has been made with the best quality of execution, which it has reached perfection,
a phenomenon takes place that we may call ineffable space. When this happens
these places start to radiate. They radiate in a physical way and determine what I call
ineffable space, that is to say, a space that does not depend on dimensions but on
the quality of its perfection. It belongs to the domain of the ineffable, of that which
cannot be said. (Wogenscky, 2006, p.81)
Room-like environments that the viewer can enter and walk around inside. Because
he increasingly favours fleshy colours for these tent-based sculptures, the sensation
of passing through a layer of skin to enter a fleshy organism is acute. Even more star-
tling is the feeling one has of being separated from the outside world once inside the
structures. (Van Noord and Wilson, 2000, p.13)
Installation as Encounter 137
God in the 1960s was crucial for her output, explaining that she wanted to
emphasize her belief that everyone is [a] creator (Clark in Krauss, 1997,
p.45). A series of manifesto-like staccato statements follows, including
Clarks proposition of precariousness as a new idea of existence against all
static crystallization within duration (Clark in Krauss, 1997, p.46). In the
same essay, she described a project she initiated in 1964 called Trailings.
The simplicity of the artworks materials, process and apparent aim was
directed towards a significant idea in her Neo-Concretist movement: the
merging of meaning with choice. She explained that Trailings could be
made to articulate choice, control and imagination for any participant:
I will give an absolute importance to the immanently inscribed act that the participant
will bring about Make yourself a Trailing: you take the band of paper wrapped
around a book, you cut it open, you twist it, and you glue it back together so as to
produce a Mobius strip. Then take a pair of scissors, stick one point into the surface
and cut continuously along the length of the strip. Take care not to converge with
the pre-existing cut which will cause the band to separate into two pieces. When
you have gone the circuit of the strip, its up to you whether to cut to the left or to
the right of the cut youve already made. The idea of choice is capital. The special
meaning of the experience is the act of doing it. The work is your act alone At
the end the path is so narrow that you cant open it further. Its the end of the trail.
(Clark in Krauss, 1997, p.39)
The transporting of the space in which I currently live into the space that I left behind
shows my desire to overcome or decrease the geographical and cultural distances
between the two spaces: the one from which I originated and the one where I am
now. The Perfect Home, when eventually complete [this was finished in 2004], will
combine all the fabric pieces that I have made into one large complex. My Korean
fabric house, New York apartment and even my studio are going to be connected
by way of a fabric corridor that has five doors. For example, you will be able to enter
my apartment and go into my Korean house through one of those doors. (Corrin
and Kwon, 2002, p.33)
ones body in the midst of a Suh sculpture. She puts Suhs work between the
outside of the inside and the inside of the outside (Rendell, 2010, p.216)
and attempts to negotiate the relationship between absence and presence
that is so palpable and so urgent in Suhs work.
Rendell reveals how she finds herself contemplating an absent archi-
tecture. The visitor who inhabits, even if only momentarily, Suhs sculp-
tures (and indeed Netos) is drawn into a realm of familiar-made-strange.
Inhabiting the work from the inside clothes the viewer in absent architec-
ture, occupying the work from the outside is to be faced by an impossible
object, one which decentres rather than recentres the viewer (Rendell,
2010, p.219). The ineffable, incomprehensible condition Rendell describes,
in which home is always a threshold state and the limits of the encounter
with the work can be conceptually projected out towards a transcendence
of the boundary of the gallery wall, is a condition of experimentally delicate
instability. We are on the unstable edges of the world, hoping that a muta-
ble wall membrane we recognize and yet do not know could point the way
home by simultaneously thrusting us into a past and beyond our present.
Film has this beautiful live quality, Herbert enthuses. It has to be looked
after. It gets damaged easily. Its like a breathing thing. Its affected by light.
By time. By dust, air, exposure. A film is like a creature. It needs protection
(Herbert, 2011). For the filmmaker Kathleen Herbert, film is alive. Film
itself has holy qualities.
Lygia Clarks powerful concept that choice is the capital was invoked
and, in a sense, tested within a project initiated by Herbert that allowed
horses to roam throughout Gloucester Cathedral one night in 2007. Upon
completing her MA at Goldsmiths, she applied to be an artist-in-residence
at Gloucester Cathedral in 2006. An interview I conducted with her in 2011
explored the project in terms of sacred space, challenging environments,
and her more recent work, De Magnete (see Figure 2).
Installation as Encounter 145
Like Suh, historic events and experiences are a starting point for
Herberts conceptual interpretations. Herbert began by observing. She
noticed the close relationship between enchantment and attachment: how
volunteers would clean the same monument regularly for decades, or how
visitors would usually gravitate towards the same spaces if they knew the
building and its sacred precincts well. She learned that horses had been
brought to the cathedral by Cromwells troops in the seventeenth century.
A document in Gloucesters Cathedral Library lists necessary repairs to
stonework and stained glass because of Cromwells horses. Herbert was
interested in this literal dehumanizing of the space an irreverent nega-
tion of the sites holiness and wondered if observing horses behaviour
in the cathedral might reposition viewers thinking about cathedral spaces
and their multiplicity of roles in numerous histories.
146 Ayla Lepine
Three horses were released into the cathedral overnight. Handlers were
hidden and all human presence was invisible. Herbert relied on lighting to
give the architecture a sense of no-particular-time to amplify the strange-
ness of the horses presence and avoid the banality of re-enactment. Horses
hooves on the stone floor echo through moments of the film. Animals
appear and disappear, led by their will. They make no distinction why
would they between altar, pillar, step and monument as elements within
the cathedral with different associations of cultural meaning. Questioning
the buildings meanings without undermining its sacred importance
indeed, the work requires the sacredness of the site to be of prime concern
for the viewer puts the viewer in a position of spiritual experimenta-
tion. As a horse looms into view, nuzzles a stone surface in the sanctuary,
or canters towards the west end of the nave, those spaces resonate with a
reconciliation between the seventeenth century past, its medieval founda-
tions, its present use, and its potential embodiment of a holy ethos for all
who enter, regardless of belief. On the subject of consecrated space and
the projects riskiness, Herbert remarked that I saw the space as being so
many different things simultaneously, and as a way to try and make people
understand that there were different ways of understanding that these spaces
are important but not so set apart. Jesus was born in a stable. Cathedrals
used to have animals in them (Herbert, 2011). Here again, language and
affect collide. The conflation of stable as a communal home for animals
and a description of solidity and safety complicate the works multiplicity
of meanings. The horses presence destabilizes received histories and cur-
rent understanding about what cathedral spaces can and should be for and
how they should be used. Herbert was also determined that the film would
suit gallery and other exhibition spaces and contends that the cathedral
itself was not well suited to viewing it. The feedback loop was too tight,
she explained (Herbert, 2011). The religious connotations of the cathedral
itself became intriguingly decentred in Stable:
I dont see Stable as a religious artwork on the one hand, but on the other it is impos-
sible to avoid. It unfolds in a cathedral. The initiation of the idea was from a way of
thinking about consecration and desecration, the history and politics ofCromwells
time, and the ritual and other-worldly aspects that came out of the work. I like my
work to walk a tightrope between the beautiful and the uneasy. Camera movements
Installation as Encounter 147
are steady and gliding. I am showing one thing but possibly indicating another. All
is not what it seems. I point to the uncanny and the mythical [] We are outsiders
looking in. (Herbert, 2011)
A Spiritual Home
Herbert, Suh and Netos artworks are connected by their delicate and care-
ful attention to time. In Netos case, it is the time spent in multisensory
encounter that seems most important. In Suhs, it is the accumulation of
past times in conjunction with the implicit lengths of time taken to pains-
takingly produce the architectural soft sculptures of interiors. In Herberts
films, both De Magnete and Stable, time is figured as duration, and there is
a palpable sense of expectation always conflated with the not-yet as view-
ers are drawn in to unexpected repositionings of spaces, whether forests
or cathedrals. In her recent response to Damien Hirsts vast retrospective
at Tate Modern, Marina Warner has astutely written:
The words tempus and temple share the same root; the connection suggests that
the function of a sacred space is to make time stop or stretch, or render its passage
palpable to the worshipper/visitor. Galleries and museums explicitly recall temples
in their architecture, and they can also double as national mausoleums: they func-
tion socially in comparable ways (temples for atheists), providing an occasion for
assembly, for communal experiences, for finding meanings. Above all, its striking how
crucial the idea of developing our sensitivity to time has become in contemporary
artists work. (Warner, 2012, p.16)
Installation as Encounter 149
To talk about affect is to talk about intensity and exchange. Affect exists
between bodies and is relational by nature. It is found in those resonances
that circulate about, between, and sometimes stick to bodies and worlds,
and in the very passages or variations between these intensities and reso-
nances themselves (Gregg and Seigworth, 2010, p.1). By concluding the
exploration of Neto, Suh and Herberts projects within the precincts of
Gloucester Cathedral, the question of spirituality as a potential mode of
apprehension for each of these artists works becomes clarified and refined.
Memory, embodiment and multisensorial interactivity become pathways
that interweave through contemporary sculpture and film that question
where and how we may find a spiritual home.
References
Fragile Visions:
Reading and Re-Reading the Work ofGeoffrey Clarke
At the 1952 Venice Biennale, the British Councils selection committee chose
to emphasize the work of eight young sculptors, Robert Adams, Kenneth
Armitage, Reg Butler, Lynn Chadwick, Geoffrey Clarke, Bernard Meadows,
154 Judith LeGrove
Eduardo Paolozzi and William Turnbull, with Henry Moore presiding out-
side the pavilion as a nurturing, paternal influence. Although the choice of
new sculpture indicated that Britain was creatively up-and-running after
the war, the British Councils display was finely tuned in terms of content
and presentation. The predominant impression was of linearity and nerv-
ousness: outlines glimpsed and captured in motion, rather than laboured
and contemplated at leisure. Materials, supporting these notions, bore their
own messages. Iron, transposed provocatively from utilitarian to fine art
material, was forged and welded into spikes, rods or sheets, contrasting with
the aura and tradition of bronze-casting, while resonating with the mate-
rials still recent use for sculpture by Picasso and Gonzlez. Plaster, fragile
and seemingly unfinished, further suggested Giacometti. Herbert Read,
author of the catalogue essay and at the time Britains most influential art
critic, wove a consummate tapestry around the sculpture, endowing it with
a collective despair but through this threading messages about its newness,
its Britishness yet lack of insularity (materializing T.S. Eliots iron waifs,
but having learnt from Picasso, Calder and Giacometti) and its location
within the discourses of European psychoanalysis which gained such cur-
rency during the post-war period (Read, 1952, p.4). Although the British
Council was ostensibly apolitical in its promotion of British culture abroad,
recent research indicates not only its awareness of the political function of
fine art through cultural exchange, but its proactive promotion of an inte-
grated Europe in order to combat new threats of communist encroachment.
This mission would become more overt in later Biennales, and indeed the
1954 British Pavilion included Reg Butlers winning submission for The
Unknown Political Prisoner Competition, an openly anti-totalitarian
even anti-communist project ( Jachec, 2006, p.28).
Clarkes work at the 1952 Venice Biennale exhibited a distinct identity.
Each sculpture represented the human figure, constructed from an assem-
blage of vertical iron rods. Figure, the tallest, wrapped these rods around a
linear core, from which protruded sensory rods. Family Group presented
a single-stemmed man, woman and two children. Lastly, Complexities of
Man elongated the figures frame horizontally, as a fence-like row of iron
rods capped with symbols and protuberances. Behind these sculptures
Fragile Visions 155
hung three coloured etchings, again linear in essence: Blue Head, Purple
Head and Landscape, Death of a Flower.
In many ways Clarkes work fitted the agenda implicit in Reads
poetic essay. The sculptures material presence conjured the legacy of war
through its excoriated patina and emaciated waifs, perhaps inciting solidar-
ity against future threat. Picasso was strongly referenced in the etchings,
and Giacometti in the reductive, cursive linearity of the iron. Furthermore,
psychological preoccupations, suggested by the figures split and probing
frames, were confirmed by Clarkes title Complexities of Man. Yet each of the
images included a clue to the artists underlying and continuing preoccupa-
tion. Completed just a year earlier, Clarkes student thesis, Exposition of a
Belief (1951), constituted a painstakingly crafted creed in which Man (a
part of nature) is subject to a supreme, divine force, with the artist capable
of influencing spiritual well-being through the use of symbolism (Clarke,
2012, pp.5962).1 The second section of the thesis was a prcis of Bunyans
Pilgrims Progress, itself a metaphor for a spiritual journey, while Clarkes
theories were clarified visually through monotype symbols and etchings
(including Blue Head and Purple Head). Clarke avoided reference to any
specific religion, although discussion of the cross and crucifix as symbols
suggests Christianity as his cultural heritage. God, or the singular guid-
ing presence, was described as the supreme force, and the term spiritual
used once only. By such labels Clarke denoted his field of enquiry: the
spiritual, for him, would reside not within the prescribed boundaries of
organized religion, but within a practice of private contemplation more
akin to notions of mysticism. And if the precise nature of this faith remains
hard to classify, it is because Clarke has preferred to articulate it visually
through his art, hoping that his symbols may be understood and appreci-
ated by believers of any faith.
1 The term man consciously follows the artists usage during the 1950s prior to con-
sciousness of inclusivity, where the term was used to describe abstractions or sym-
bols for humankind. Clarke observed while writing his thesis, These notes apply
to etchings etc. Symbols for Man (man including woman).
156 Judith LeGrove
mounts and white frames on white walls, and the works clustered in groups
by single artists. Clarkes Figure towered on an unnaturally high plinth,2
forming a vertical trio with the etchings Blue Head and Purple Head, and
flanking the horizontal trio of Death of a Flower and the two smaller iron
sculptures sharing a plinth. Taking a cue from Reads psychological coding
of the sculpture, David Hulks has recently posited the Venice Pavilion as
a sterile, modernist setting characteristic of the display of post-war sculp-
ture; an environment evoking the psychoanalytic or psychiatric clinic in
its offering up of dark, spiky, disorderly sculptures within a highly organ-
ized and controlled context. The artists of the period, Hulks suggests, were
not necessarily resistant to the agenda of this mode of display. Addressing
Clarkes Complexities of Man, Hulks ascribes further intentionality: that
the balls capping the sculptures iron rods represent Cold War suspicion of
free expression, preferring civilized restraint, and that Clarkes evident wish
[is] not just to illustrate mental divergence but rather to narrate it (Hulks,
2006, pp.97102). Although a plausible reading within the political and
cultural context of the sculpture, Hulks conflates his own interpretation
with creative intention. Ironically, on the same page is a photograph of
Complexities, in which the unmentioned (unmentionable?) symbol of the
cross signals Clarkes sphere of interest.
In 20023 Venices white cube display was recreated, so far as possible
with the works available, for Henry Moore and the Geometry of Fear,
whose catalogue sought to re-examine the ethos of Reads writing. Hyman
concluded, with Read (though notably not with Clement Greenberg),3
that the episode at Venice crowned Britains geometry of fear sculptors
as leaders of the international avant-garde. Hymans catalogue further, and
consciously, foregrounded Reads patina of pathos through close-up details
of surface texture (Hyman, 2003, p.10). While such analysis and display
have undoubtedly deepened understanding of the cultural and aesthetic
2 At Venice, Figure was mounted on a smooth, white wooden wedge, a substitute for
the coarse stone originally used by Clarke.
3 Clement Greenberg memorably described the renaissance of post-war British sculp-
ture as false: Moore is a minor artist Butler, Chadwick, Armitage are less than
minor (Greenberg, 1993, p.277).
Fragile Visions 159
(1) The lion of Judah (symbol of the Old Testament hope of the
Messiah)
(2) A star symbol (the morning or Christmas star, perhaps with
Sun of Righteousness or Seven Stars, giving a symbol of the
Incarnation)
(3) The orb and cross (the cross as central symbol of atonement, the
orb to maintain a royal connection)
(4) A last things symbol (combining Alpha and Omega, two-edged
sword, crown of gold and sickle, symbolizing the judgement and
second coming)
(5) The lamb and flag (symbolizing Christ in heaven in the Revelation)
or (6) The flying angel (proclaiming the everlasting gospel to the
nations).
Such a scheme, the vicar concluded, would include both history and the-
ology, while presenting the Christian cosmic world view reading from
left to right.5
The idea of bronze persisted until September 1959, when Clarke
revealed his idea instead for open-cast aluminium panels. In early December
5 Excerpt from the Vicars letter, sent by A.R. Twentyman to Clarke, 3 January 1958
(Clarke archive). The Vicar is not identified by name.
Fragile Visions 163
7 Steiners Grammars of Creation was one of the last books Clarke is known to have
read and admired before the deterioration of his eyesight.
8 This consciously simplistic use of language mirrored Sartres Search for the Absolute,
Barnett Newmans The First Man Was an Artist, as well as Clarkes thesis.
166 Judith LeGrove
details, such as the use of 21,000 pieces of mosaic, that Moorhouse based
his description at least in part on the contractors handout, itself based
on an explanation by Clarke. Yet the identification of a cross in a Physics
Building seems too startling to be repeated without question. What was
Clarke thinking of ?
The circumstances of the Liverpool commission become more intrigu-
ing the further they are probed. Spences building was named after the
scientist Sir James Chadwick (18911974), who constructed Britains first
cyclotron a circular particle accelerator at Liverpool between 1936 and
1939. At the outbreak of war research priorities changed and Chadwick,
asked to investigate the possibility of a nuclear bomb, decided to use the
Liverpool cyclotron for a feasibility study. The focus of nuclear research
168 Judith LeGrove
Visions in Flux
Clearly these case studies pose different issues. The works for the Venice
Biennale, originally presented within a mesh of institutional and political
intention, are perceived today for the most part as psychological representa-
tions ofCold War Angst; their spiritual symbolism unheeded. Square World,
the only example for an ecclesiastical site, can no longer be assessed in terms
of its original intention to provide a site of contemplation before entering
the church. The mosaic at Liverpool, conceived within the context of sci-
entific research, paradoxically appears to function as a work of spiritual or
moral symbolism. Each example speaks for the agency of its commissioner
or disseminator: the British Council for promoting home-grown talent
abroad, Basil Spence for successfully mediating between client and artist
170 Judith LeGrove
where the architects at Rubery had failed. Similarly, the success or failure
of each speaks eloquently of the boundaries within which contemporary
art and spiritual expression were deemed acceptable to co-exist. The gaze
or embodied eye of those reporting further inflects the narrative of
the time: Sylvia Sprigge, apparently preconditioned to object to modern
sculpture; the Church, fighting to retain a hold upon traditional forms of
symbolism; Geoffrey Moorhouse, by his own admission both pickled in
the Book of Common Prayer and drawn by the magnet of church affairs.
But rounding this picture is surely the voice of the artist.
Interviewed in 1958 in relation to the glass at Coventry Cathedral,
Clarke was asked whether his own very personal symbols were too esoteric
for a building that called for universal appreciation. His response was no,
that it was simply a question of revitalisation: that the Churchs once mean-
ingful symbols, now stale and unnoticed, could be revitalized by engaging
artists to create afresh (Wickham 1958). It might be argued that each ofthe
three examples described above is sufficiently unexpected, both in form
and context, to jolt the receptive viewer to attention; certainly, at Pangolin
London in early 2012 Clarkes Man prompted extensive comment from a
range of visitors (critics to sculptors), most united in a view of its form as
still fresh. And yet Clarke, now almost blind, is still engaged in trying to
formulate fresh symbols: spiritual symbols, without constraint of organ-
ized religion, to express his belief and engage others in contemplation.
The original version of this paper, presented at Liverpool in 2010, drew
attention to the material fragility of Clarkes work, citing instances where
it had been removed or destroyed, often by the agency of the Church,
its commissioner. Now, in 2012, this balance is to some extent redressed
by Coventrys fiftieth anniversary exhibition exploring the making and
meaning of the Cathedrals numerous artworks, as well as by the timely
restoration to public visibility of Clarkes long neglected undercroft cross.
The brochure for Journey into the Light promises a modern interpreta-
tion of how Coventrys artworks combine in a unique expression of the
Cathedrals spiritual personality and mission. Such language is a reminder
like the apparently gratuitous, emotive image of the artist devising sym-
bols in solitude that if spirituality is to be considered at all, it cannot be
addressed with the detachment of art history.
Fragile Visions 171
References
The majority of newspaper and journal articles listed below exist as unpaginated press
cuttings in the Geoffrey Clarke archive (Henry Moore Institute, Leeds).
Alloway, L. (1953). Britains New Iron Age, Art News (NY), 52:4, pp.1820, 6870.
Arya, R. (2011). Contemplations of the Spiritual in Visual Art, Journal for the Study
of Spirituality, 1:1, 7693.
Bachelard, G. (1994). The Poetics of Space. Trans. M. Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press.
Berger, J. (1952). Geoffrey Clarke and Peter Potworowski, at Gimpels, New Statesman,
5 April 1952.
Bielecka, P. (2012). Exorcising the Fear, in Exorcising the Fear: British Sculpture from
the 50s and 60s. Exhibition Catalogue. Pangolin London, pp.313.
Brown, A. (1997). The Neutron and the Bomb: A Biography of Sir James Chadwick.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Clarke, G. (2012). Exposition of a Belief , Royal College of Art thesis (1951), abridged
text in J. LeGrove. Geoffrey Clarke: A Sculptors Prints. Bristol: Sansom &
Company, pp.5962.
Foucault, M. (1991). Discipline and Punish. Trans. A. Sheridan. London: Penguin
Books.
Greenberg, C. (1993). Interview conducted by Edward Lucie-Smith, 1968, in J. OBrian
(ed.). The Collected Essays and Criticism, Vol. 4: Modernism with a Vengeance
19571969. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp.27782.
Gurian, E.H. (2005). Threshold fear, in S. MacLeod (ed.). Reshaping Museum Space:
Architecture, Design, Exhibitions. London: Routledge, pp.20314.
Hulks, D. (2006). The Dark Chaos of Subjectivisms: Splitting and the Geometry
of Fear, in B. Taylor (ed.). Sculpture and Psychoanalysis. Aldershot: Ashgate
Publishing Limited, pp.95114.
Hulks, D. (2009). Despair, or Defiance: the Double Inflection in Herbert Reads
Geometry of Fear, in M. Paraskos (ed.). Re-Reading Read: New Views on Herbert
Read. London: Freedom Press, pp.14451.
Hyman, J. (2003). Henry Moore and the Geometry of Fear, in Henry Moore and
the Geometry of Fear. Exhibition Catalogue. James Hyman Fine Art, pp.611.
Jachec, N. (2006). The New British Sculpture at the Venice Biennale: Europeanism
and its Limits, The British Art Journal, 7:1, 2532.
Koch, R. (1930). The Book of Signs. London: First Edition Club.
172 Judith LeGrove
Mans first expression, like his first dream, was an aesthetic one. Speech
was a poetic outcry rather than a demand for communication.
Newman, 1990d, p.156
1 1. Jesus is condemned to death; 2. Jesus takes up his cross; 3. Jesus falls the first time,
4. Jesus meets his mother; 5. Simon of Cyrene helps Jesus carry the cross; 6. Veronica
wipes the face of Jesus; 7. Jesus falls the second time; 8. Jesus meets the women of
Figure 1. Barnett Newman,
Fifth Station, 1962
Oil on canvas, 198.7 153 cm
Collection of Robert and
Jane Meyerhoff 1986.65.5
2012 Barnett Newman
Foundation / Artists Rights
Society (ARS), New York
Figure 2:
Giovanni Battista Tiepolo,
The Road to Calvary, after 1749
Oil on canvas, 49 86 cm
Foto Reali Archive (National
Gallery of Art, Department of
Image Collections)
Painting the Question: Barnett Newmans Stations of the Cross 175
For example, in Giovanni Tiepolos The Road to Calvary (after 1749) (Figure
2), the artist knew the fifth station must represent Simon helping the fallen
Christ bear the heavy cross.
A 1966 review in Time magazine contrasts Newmans work with art-
ists who have depicted the Passion of Christ:
[The] abstract painter [] must face the problem of portraying the progression
toward Calvary without the props of episodic, cartoon-strip clarity, and at the same
time depict its essential agony. Barnett Newman, 61, the most abstract of the U.S.
abstract expressionists, made the problem even harder: he resolved to limit himself
to his own astringent style, depicting Christs passage in stark vertical chords, using
only black and white on raw unprimed canvas [] I want to hold the emotion,
says Newman, rather than waste it on picturesque ecstasies. (29 April 1966, p.82)2
Whereas many artists painted a single piece depicting some aspect of the
Passion, Newman chose to paint all the stations, and as he says in ARTnews
(May 1966, pp.268, 57), fourteen together make clear the wholeness ofthe
single event: Just as the Passion is not a series of anecdotes but embodies
a single event, so these fourteen paintings, even though each one is whole
and separate in its immediacy [is] [] a single subject. How, then, do the
black and white lines on fourteen raw canvases depict or evoke any con-
templations of the spiritual?
In a 1967 response to Rev. Thomas F. Mathews talk on an inher-
ent religious sensibility in modern artists, Barnett Newman remarks I
find it sort of embarrassing to talk on the title Spiritual Dimensions of
Contemporary Art. I had no idea that the spirit could be so easily measured
Jerusalem; 9. Jesus falls a third time; 10. Jesus is stripped; 11. Jesus is nailed to the
cross; 12. Jesus dies on the cross; 13. Jesus is removed from the cross; 14. Jesus is laid
in the tomb.
2 Gnther Frg depicted the Stations of the Cross in gestural bronze panels in 1989.
According to the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, Frg is the first
artist on record to address Christs Crucifixion in abstract and expressively sculptural
terms, and thus lends a distance and a coolness to the subject that is more material
and intuitive than spiritual and narrative. See the following link, which was accessed
on 29 September 2011. <http://www.renaissancesociety.org/site/Exhibitions/Intro.
Gunther-Forg-Stations-of-the-Cross.600.html>.
176 Maxine Walker
I wonder who is holding the ruler? (1990h, p.286). Newmans The Stations
of the Cross: Lema Sabachthani has been described as univalent given its
modernist simplified values. As Donald Kuspit argues in A New Sacred
Space: Michael Somoroff s Illumination I, modernist painting entropically
tends toward simplified values as Barnett Newmans paintings make clear.
(Kuspit, n.d.) Painter Jon Groom points to the work of Barnett Newman
as having a kind of materiality and substance which implies more than it
actually is. Groom sees in Newmans paintings a manifestation of colour
that addresses both the human condition and the spirituality of mankind
and argues that the tension between the surface and the text in Newmans
Lema Sabachthani? creates a multivalence that evokes memory and emo-
tion (Morgan, n.d.).
Newman himself acknowledged that Lema Sebachthani described
his feelings when he painted Stations of the Cross each station a stage
in his own life for in other writings Newman declares his artistic pur-
pose as painting the essence of alienation and suffering. However, if each
of Newmans Stations exhibits a centre, that is, an orienting, balancing,
organizing a priori transcendentally conceived purpose which governs the
interpretation and meaning, then interpreted both univalently and mul-
tivalently aspects of spirituality may emerge because that centre encloses
the meaning the essentiality of human suffering.
This paper suggest that a deconstructive viewing and reading of
this twentieth-century artists paintings on the moments leading to the
Crucifixion performs a critique of such a priori conceptions; painting
the question denies presence and opens any closure that the question is
answered with certitude. A determinate and constituted reality has long
been considered in Western metaphysics as presence. To interpret Stations
in this traditional way is to view the original cry of the suffering as held
in the paintings even though the acoustic sound is unheard and absent.
Using Jacques Derridas deconstruction of the transcendental signified,
Newmans Stations are shown to be a system of signs [signifiers] that does
not and cannot fully represent the signified, the original cry, any more
than the Aramaic Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabachthani? can sign that cry. What
Newman sets out to accomplish in the Stations is possible because the cry
Painting the Question: Barnett Newmans Stations of the Cross 177
is absent. The trace of the cry remains the signifier the painting simul-
taneously differs and defers from the illusive signified.
This interpretative strategy of deconstruction, largely based on Jacques
Derridas corpus, opens the discourse on Stations of the Cross, discourse
which primarily noted the historical import of the paintings in the devel-
opment of twentieth-century Abstract Expressionism as well as suggested
that the Stations shadowed the suffering and displacements of World War
II. Considering Barnett Newmans own writings about art and specifi-
cally the Stations themselves, Richard Shiff in his introduction to Barnett
Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews evocatively points out that
Newmans language resembles that of his paintings, where, for example,
the presence of minor irregularities along the edge of a band of color forces
the viewer to reconsider the contrasting qualities of an opposing edge.
One element inflects another with surprising degree of complexity (1990,
p.xxiv). It is the contention of this paper that reconsidering how elements
inflect another deconstruction happens within the texts themselves, from
the inside, rather than from any external application of an interpretive
technique or formula. Deconstruction, in this singular moment, serves to
question Newmans work so that the question Lema Sabachthani? itself
disorients and unbalances any sense of fixed meaning.
When Newman participated in the First International Congress on
Religion, Architecture, and the Visual Arts in 1967, he commented on the
holy, the notion of sacred place and their relationship to art (1990h, p.289):
what matters to a true artist is that he distinguish between a place and no
place at all; and the greater the work of art, the greater will be this feel-
ing. And this feeling is the fundamental spiritual dimension. Concluding
a discussion with a Jesuit priest, Newman stated that his entire aesthetic
can be found in the Passover service: at the Passover Seder, the blessing is
made to distinguish between the profane and the sacred, between what
is holy and not holy. When the Passover falls on the Sabbath, the blessing
becomes Blessed be thou, O Lord, who distinguishes between what is
holy and what is holy. This is the artistic problem, and I think, the true
spiritual dimension (1990h, p.290).
Binary pairs, appearing in what is and is not holy, establishes a hierar-
chy which Derrida exposes as one sign having primacy over the other in an
178 Maxine Walker
attempt to fix and stabilize meaning. But, holy and holy show the capacity
of signs (and paintings) to be repeated in new situations and grafted into
new contexts, to say the same and not-the-same. This iterability, the inser-
tion of texts paintings, in this case in new spaces and places continually
produces both similar and different meanings from previous understand-
ings and perspectives. These Stations exist as differing signs but as noted
above are not that to what they refer, neither to any historical artistic prec-
edent nor to a metaphysical concept. The signs mean because they differ
from each other thereby opening a space from that which they represent.
These signs also defer by participating in temporality and thereby open-
ing up a temporal chain. The condition of distinction and delay, Derridas
diffrance (simultaneously spacing and temporalization), accounts for
meaning, i.e. the signified concept is never present in and of itself:
Newman says that from the beginning, he felt he would do a series but
he was not interested in a theme with variations nor in developing a
technical device over and over (Newman, 1990f, p.189). Newman felt
the Passion embodying a single event is whole and separate in its imme-
diacy, all form a complete statement of a single subject (1990f, p.190).
However, it is difficult not to view Stations as a traditional series, for
in December 1961, Newman exhibited the first station as a single work
Painting the Question: Barnett Newmans Stations of the Cross 179
3 Gray, 1961, pp.94100. Stations of the Cross were painted in the following chrono-
logical order: Stations 1 and 2, 1958; Stations 3 and 4, 1960; Stations 5 and 6, 1962;
Stations 79, 1964; Stations 1012, 1965; Stations 1314, 19656.
180 Maxine Walker
Sociologist Roy Boyne (2001, p.51) cogently points out that Newmans
ontological presence is anchored in the utter validity of the core self and
that the artists work is a preservation of subjectivity which is formative
of the humanities. However, what Boyne also implicitly reads in Newman
is that original man is the original voice. In citing Derridas critique of
the original voice, Boyne declares that Newman would have massively,
Mans first expression [] was an aesthetic one. Speech was a poetic outcry rather than
a demand for communication. Original man, shouting his consonants, did so in yells
of awe and anger at his tragic state, at his own self-awareness [] Mans first cry was
a song. Mans first address to a neighbor was a cry of power and solemn weakness, not
a request for a drink of water. (Newman, 1990d, p.158)
In order to think art in general, one thus accredits a series of oppositions (meaning
/ form, inside/outside, content/container, signified/signifier, represented/repre-
senter, etc.) which precisely structure the traditional interpretations of works of art.
One makes of art in general an object in which one claims to distinguish an inner
meaning, the invariant, and a multiplicity of external variations through which, as
through so many veils, one would try to see or restore the true, full originary mean-
ing. (Derrida 1987, p.22)
Neither did I have a preconceived idea that I would execute and then give a title
to. I wanted to hold the emotion, not waste it in picturesque ecstasies. The cry, the
unanswerable cry, is world without end. But a painting has to hold it, world without
end, in its limits. (Newman, 1990f, p.190)
Painting the Question: Barnett Newmans Stations of the Cross 183
Newmans feelings on his paintings and frames are evident in his Letter
to the editor of Times magazine and the new director of the Guggenheim
Museum after frames were stripped from artists works as Picasso, Braque,
Mir: This [action] is not a simple matter of display and decorative tech-
nique. I, as one of the first painters to reject the frame, feel that any pres-
entation of my own pictures in a frame would, in effect, mutilate them
(1954, 1990a, p.41). Newman in his vertical and rectangular paintings
devises an approach that avoids the opposition between the conventional
5 In The Truth of Painting, Derrida uses l. Kants term parergon [frame] to deconstruct
the distinction between inside and outside. Ergon is the meaning of the work of art,
the inside (Derrida, 1987, pp.45, 634). Derrida points out that this entails not only
knowing where the frame and work begin and end, but also knowing what one is
excluding as frame and outside the frame (Derrida, 1987, p.63). Derrida points out
that there is not only a limit, a separation between the frame and the work, but also
between the work and the wall: With respect to the work which can serve as a ground
for it [parergonal frame], it merges into the wall, and then gradually, into the general
text. With respect to the background [general text], it merges into the work, which
stands out against the general background (1987, p.61). The frame is not a unified
concept: the parergonal is neither the inside nor the outside of the frame; neither
the inside nor the outside of the work but both the inside and outside (Anderson,
n.d., p.3 of 7).
184 Maxine Walker
figure and ground, and between the canvas and the wall, an approach with
various interpretations. Ori Soltes puts it this way: Newmans large frame-
less paintings, with all the pigment extending to the edges of the paint-
ings, reorders the universe. Soltes positions Newman as a Jewish Abstract
Expressionist whose lines that slash vertically through the paintings draw
the eye and hold together the unity of the opposing sides of the composi-
tion; [the line] withdraws, emerges, emanates and expands out pushing
the color-field to the edge (2009, p.295).
In a centripetal direction from outside in, artist Frank Stella in
Working Space claims that the strength of Barnett Newmans painting
comes from the ability of stripes (or, zips, as Newman calls them,) to attach
themselves to and into the background. They [zip] the space together
(1986, p.123). Newmans black and white zips throughout Stations vary
in placement, width and appearance in the composition of each Station.
Some have brushings or vertical drips/specks. Sometimes they mirror
each other (Stations 7 and 8; the 10th Station with white zips are in the
same location as 7th and similar light brushings as Station 5) as if one
canvas is open to the other. In Station 13, there is an inversion of black
and white zips from Station 8, with a thicker right zip on 13. Station 14
uses two kinds of white paint for zips and includes no right-hand feature,
an emptiness that breaks from the right-hand elements of the others. The
fourteen Stations, the zips, call not to the centred Absolute but to each
other, within and without. Each Stations identity is constituted by its
differing from itself and others. In Newman and Derridas understanding,
a frame does not enhance and set off the central object without detract-
ing from it; the unopposed outside and inside, the frameless, opens the
closure of fixed meaning.
A generation earlier, Wassily Kandinsky wrestled with inner and outer
polarities in his art and came to the conclusion that there is a spiritual har-
mony, a divine life within so that one can paint music (Kandinsky, 1977,
p.xix). From a Derridean perspective, music itself is not that originary
centre. As Laurel Ralston, in her article, A Derridean Approach to Musical
Identity (2008, p.33) argues: in musical works it is philosophically dan-
gerous to proceed as though a works original identity are capable of being
fully determined and full restored (Ralston, 2008, p.33). Compositional
Painting the Question: Barnett Newmans Stations of the Cross 185
intention and performance, as Ralston points out, are the par excellence
of a past that has never been present. What Ralston says of music could
be said of the Stations: What can we say about a work that is never self-
identical but which takes its identity from its difference from and division
within itself ?6
The only things in the picture that count are the stripes.7
With regard to Stellas notion of splicing space by a zip, art critic Harold
Rosenberg suggests that zips are the transcendental self, and this suggestion
agrees with Newmans desire that his paintings have the impact of giving
someone, as it did [him], the feeling of his own totality, of his own sepa-
rateness, of his own individuality, and at the same time of his connection
to others (Newman, 1990g, pp.2578). The zip in this reading preserves
the transcendental dignity of the self with regards to signifying presence.
If so, are the zips either the expressive in a transcendental manner or the
material indicative as phenomenologist Edmund Husserl might divide
them? For Derrida, such a distinction is impossible as the indicative is
within (Stocker, 2007, pp.856). Roy Boyne helps here as he conjectures
that the lines [zips] enclose not because of their intrinsic properties but
their call to others (2001, p.61). Boyne is highlighting Derridas position
that lines will group together (differences) as a result of failed attempts to
re-establish lost language of the first moment (2001, p.60). The repetitions
of the zips classify them, a form of recognition but also a kind of enclosure.
Boyne says that to reverse this condition [enclosure by classification],
6 Ralston, 2008, p.34; the Time art critic describes Newmans striped Stations as
quivering with the vibrancy of lines of diffracted light seen through an electric arc
spectroscope (29 April 1966, p.82) a difference and division within light itself.
7 Quote is from Barnett Newmans response to a museum curator who commented
that Newmans Vir Heroicus Sublimis was merely about the relation of forms (cited
in Schor, 2005, p.151).
186 Maxine Walker
and privilege line as Makom, which is Hebrew for place God as place-
less place (Ofrat, 2001, p.64) was the goal of Barnett Newman, and his
desire was for something to jump from the white canvas once [a] line
has been inscribed there (Boyne, 2001, p.63). This is something akin to
Jean-Franois Lyotards description of Newmans zip descending like a
thunderbolt (1988, p.88).
As a reinvigoration of the mythos a conversation with the other
Roy Boyne suggests a reading for the zips responds to something neither
mute nor endowed with authority (2001, p.64). That Newman attempted
to establish a referential function, a metaphysical presence, has been noted
from early art critics on Newmans work, Thomas Hess and Clement
Greenberg, and observed again by Sarah K. Rich in The Proper Name
of Newmans Zip (Rich, 2005). Rich observes Newmans attempts to link
zip with a proper name, and thus a singular effect, but Rich rejects this
effort because the success of the name [zip] was dependent on its repeti-
tion in various contexts (Rich, 2005, p.108). Moreover, the intention of
offering a proper name as something unique is undercut (or deconstructed)
as Derrida noted in Of Grammatology: the proper name has never been,
as the unique appellation reserved for the presence of a unique being []
because the proper name was never possible except through its functioning
within a classification and therefore within a system of differences (Derrida,
1974, p.109). Rich concludes that [Newman] initially intended to convey
a metaphysical message through a vocabulary spoken in the new art world
[] [In] the end, Newman produced a term that compromised the very
operations of presence he valued (Rich, 2005, p.111). At the conclusion of
Richs rather dismissive treatment of Newmans attempts to differentiate
between stripe, band, line, in the perspective of structural linguistics, zip
becomes an empty category (2005, p.109). However, it is the absence of
presence in the zip that both differs and defers meaning: the zip implies
traces of presence, and the systematic play of difference delimits meaning
residing in the centre.
At this point, a question emerges whether the Stations can be exhib-
ited in any linear order to retain the play of difference and diffrance? In
a traditionally framed painting depicting a stop on the Via Dolorosa, the
object is usually centred in the foreground against a contextually obvious
Painting the Question: Barnett Newmans Stations of the Cross 187
Sign-ature/ Signature
Blessed be thou, O lord, who distinguishes between what is holy and what is holy.
Thats the problem, the artistic problem, and, I think, the true spiritual dimension.
(Newman to Rev. Thomas F. Mathews, 1969, 1990, p.286)
190 Maxine Walker
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Painting the Question: Barnett Newmans Stations of the Cross 193
length Bacons use of religious subject matter. His resolute atheism, which
he expressed unabashedly in conversations with interviewers, halted further
interrogation. His definitive statements and dogmatic views on religion
closed conversation rather than encouraged dialogue. Bacons unequivo-
cally atheistic stance is one of the reasons that many critics do not pursue
the subject of religion in his art.1 These critics willingly acknowledge the
plethora of religious symbols in Bacons work, but downplay the religious
aspects by acknowledging that Bacon was a very visually and culturally
attuned artist who responded to the post-war times that he lived in by
employing myths and symbols that resonated with him. These critics take
Bacons statements about religion at face value and disregard the religious
aspects as a pertinent or proper area of study. Such an approach, however,
is a gross misjudgement of the significance of the religious in Bacons art
and has led to a notable gap in criticism. My monograph Francis Bacon:
Painting in a Godless World goes some way to addressing the neglect of the
religious aspects in Bacon scholarship.
In this paper I want to ponder on what has been overlooked and to
consider the explanations for Bacons ongoing use of religious symbols by
focusing on his use of the crucifixion. By doing this I am not suggesting that
we should not take Bacons atheistic statements seriously. Indeed, Bacon
had interesting and incisive views about art and the world around him and
it would be remiss to disregard comments he made in interviews. However,
his statements should be approached with caution and not accepted, as
Ernst van Alphen suggests, as authoritative accounts of his work (van
Alphen, 1992, p.17). Instead, they should be considered in dialogue with
his paintings, where it becomes clear that Bacons art provokes questions
that are central in religious discourse, and the state of godlessness that
the human is in. Paul Tillich defines religion broadly as being ultimately
1 Martin Harrison states how critics have persisted in overlaying conscious or sub-
conscious religious motivations to many of his paintings; indeed, they continued to
dwell on his fascination with religious themes long after he had ceased to treat them
(Harrison, 2006, p.45). Andrew Brighton recalls how Bacon had vetoed a book (by
the picture editor and writer Bruce Bernard) that was on the subject of religion in
Bacons work when it was on the verge of publication (Brighton, 2001, p.28).
Painting in a Godless World 197
concerned about ones being, about ones self and ones world, about its
meaning and its estrangement and its finitude (Adams, 2001, p.311). These
concerns can be described as spiritual. Spirituality is a continuing concern
and commitment to questioning the nature and condition of humanity in
an ever-changing world. It is a quest to look beneath the surface of reality
to explore deeper issues about purpose and meaning; a concern with the
deepest values and meanings by which people seek to live (Sheldrake,
2007, pp.12). Bacons art enables the viewer to engage with spirituality
whether it be of a religious or non-religious kind. His work then elicits
religious dimensions.
The Crucifixion
(1988), four years before his death.2 Bacons dismissal of the symbol should
be regarded tentatively as it had clearly been resonant throughout his career.
Bacon catalogues a number of reasons for his interest in the crucifix-
ion, which range from the formal to the anthropological. He was inter-
ested in the aesthetic and formal possibilities that it held the position
of one figure being raised above the others gripped him. He enthused
how the very fact that the central figure is raised into a very pronounced
and isolated position which gives it, from a formal point of view, greater
possibilities than having all the different figures placed on the same level
(Sylvester, 1993, p.46) although he never actually depicted this particular
configuration in any of his own representations. From an anthropological
perspective the crucifixion gave him the scope to examine human behav-
iour in the extreme situation of torture (Sylvester, 1993, p.23). Bacon told
David Sylvester how he felt that the crucifixion is a magnificent armature
on which you can hang all types of feeling and sensation, adding that he
had not found another subject so far that has been as helpful for covering
certain areas of human feeling and behaviour (Sylvester, 1993, p.44). Paul
Moorhouse claimed that Bacon latched on to the cultural resonance of the
symbol: the image of the Crucifixion is so immediately recognizable that
the viewer is able to respond to the feelings it arouses and reflect on its
particular treatment without having to decode the narrative components
(Moorhouse, 1989, p.24).
Bacon did not use the crucifixion for explicitly theological reasons
but instead used it to explore ideas about the nature of human behaviour.
Anthropology investigates the behaviour of human beings, their behaviour
towards one another, and it elicits ideas about human suffering, empathy,
sacrifice, pain, humiliation, pity, loss and fear. Bacons interpretation of
anthropology is not incompatible with theology, and the components
that he uncovers can be found in the Christian story in the ninth hour
Christ experienced fear as he cried on the Cross, My God, my God, why
hast thou forsaken me? (Matthew 27.467). In his incarnated form Christ
experienced excruciating pain on the Cross and his followers experienced
sorrow after his death. The contemplation of suffering occurs in both the
Christian interpretation of the Crucifixion and in Bacons Crucifixions but
the main difference is that whilst in the former we contemplate Christs
suffering as a prelude to the suffering of others, in Bacons Crucifixions
there is no saviour and contemplation is oriented towards the suffering
of humanity.
Bacons interest in the crucifixion can also be couched in terms of his
overall interest in the human body. The crucifixion wounds and breaks the
body, pushing it to the limits of physical and psychological pain. Bacon also
conceived of the crucifixion metaphorically as demonstrating the pinning
down of a body, of fixing the body to a single representation. The death of
God, which was the cultural climate that he was working in, destroys the
possibility of reproductive mimesis and the inability to fix the body to a
single representation (van Alphen, 1992, p.93). Other motifs, such as the
hypodermic syringe, functioned in a similar way to the crucifixion in that
they pin that figure down to the surface (of a bed, for example) (Sylvester,
1993, p.78). Lying Figure with Hypodermic Syringe (1963) shows the syringe
piercing an outstretching arm. The vitality of Bacons bodies resist being
pinned down and break free of any artificial restraints. In that respect the
crucifixion (and its indices, such as the syringe) are used symbolically to
critique the predilection to mimetic representation.
figure on the cross, but is a depiction of a figure that has pulled himself
off the cross and is freestanding with the moulded skull beneath him. It
explores the fleshiness of the body more than the previous two contri-
butions and is the first instantiation of man as meat. From the ghostly
portrayal of the first Crucifixion (of 1933) to the more stolidly outlined
body in this example, Bacon was clearly in an experimental phase and was
working out the relationship between the body and its articulation on a
cross. A development of this process seems to have been worked out in
Wound for a Crucifixion (1934), which was destroyed by Bacon (Russell,
1993, p.17).
Crucifixion Triptychs
In total Bacon painted four triptychs of the Crucifixion that are character-
istically minatory. By adopting the triptych format Bacon was adhering to
the visual convention of presenting the Crucifixion narrative in triptych
form. Traditionally, the triptych is a three-panelled piece that covered the
altarpiece and displayed the Christian narrative. The central panel of the
triptych (as in the case of the Isenheim Altarpiece) was of the greatest sig-
nificance because it would be on show when the panels were shut. In that
respect the preceding panel led up to the central panel, which was usually
a depiction of the Crucifixion and the viewer would be able to follow the
narrative in a sequential or chronological order. However, Bacons use of the
triptych is not typical: first, there is no narrative sequence that the viewer
is able to follow and, second, the Crucifixion is either absent or modified
in an alternative form.
202 Rina Arya
Bacons first Crucifixion triptych is Three Studies for Figures at the Base
of a Crucifixion (c.1944). The work launched his career as a painter and
gave the British public a taste of his weltanschauung. Bacons work invites
comparisons with Graham Sutherlands Crucifixion (1946) which was com-
missioned for St Matthews Church in Northampton. Sutherland conveys
Christ dying a horrible death by being nailed to the Cross while wearing
a crown of thorns, in the manner of Grnewalds Christ in the Isenheim
Altarpiece. They have in common their use of the grotesque, the twisted
organic forms that Sutherland developed from his studies of nature and
which Bacon worked out in relation to Picassos studies. Sutherland uses the
gnarled and deformed nature of Christs body to emphasize his suffering,
and to depict Christs empathy for humanity. The grotesque was inversely
proportional to Christs glory. In Bacons portrayal, the grotesque is not
framed theologically but anthropologically it demonstrates the abject
nature of humanity. Bacon creates alien forms, embodiments of inhuman-
ity that provoke and agitate the viewer.
Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion features three
greyish grotesque forms that are in some respects human whilst in others
are unmistakably animal-like, particularly in their elongated necks that
operate as valves for release. These three figures are isolated in their respec-
tive panels and are each seated on a podium or stand. The orange and red
background is uniform and creates the impression that these figures are
occupying the same space. However, the three figures are oblivious to one
another and cry and grimace in pain. As the title suggests, they are at the
base of a crucifixion but while a crucifixion is mentioned in the title, it is
noticeably absent in the depiction. Furthermore, John Russells observa-
tion of the use of the indefinite article transforms the meaning of the
painting we are not looking at the Crucifixion of Christ but at a generic
unspecified crucifixion (Russell, 1993, p.11). This transforms the meaning
and intentions of the painting and the identity of the three figures becomes
unspecified, leaving the viewer perplexed by their identity. The inadvertent
Painting in a Godless World 203
allusion to the Crucifixion opens up the possibility that these three figures
are connected to the three mourners in the biblical tradition, which were
traditionally the Virgin, St John, and Mary Magdalene.5 Hugh Davies and
Sally Yard argue that the figure in the left-hand panel, with her bowed head
and crestfallen look, is a comprehensive mourner at the cross (Davies and
Yard 1986, p.16.) and could plausibly be described as a Magdalene figure.
There are other artistic precedents for the figures. The bowed shape of
the shoulders and downcast head bears similarities with Roy de Maistres
Crucifixion (1944) whilst the bandaged figure in the central panel is based
on Grnewalds Mocking of Christ (1503). As rich as these possibilities are
Bacons three figures are not easily identifiable and resist simple definition.
Ronald Alley and John Rothenstein trace the three figures back to Picassos
post-Cubist work, namely the Three Dancers of 1925.6 The distortion of
the human form that Bacon adopted from Picassos practice widened the
possibilities of expression and extended the range of human expression.
Bacon merged the human with the animal in order to explore the extremes
of human psychology. During experiences of extreme pain and suffering,
the human resorts to the position of the animal to release their urges. This
often takes the form of a cry or scream, expressions which Bacons three
figures are in the throes of. Dawn Ades observes how the figure in the
central panel, bearing gritted teeth, and the figure in the right-hand panel,
with open mouth, vent frustration that seems to stem from their inverted
positions in the genital region. The displacement of mouth or teeth to the
genital area contributes to the bestiality of the imagery (Ades, 1985, p.16.)
By merging the human and animal in these forms, Bacon conveys the
desperate nature of these creatures and uses these figures to represent the
dysfunctional nature of humanity. Their bestial outlets provide channels for
the ravening appetites of the figures, which are insatiable and destructive.
By widening his vocabulary of human and animal forms, Bacon articulates
three hideous-looking creatures that are actually antithetical in spirit to
the three mourners at the foot of the Cross.
5 Peppiatt comments how the original title for the work was, in fact, Figures at the
Foot of the Cross (Peppiatt, 1997, p.87).
6 Alley and Rothenstein, 1964, p.16. See also Davies in Chiappini, 1993, p.36.
204 Rina Arya
Bacon places all the three figures at the eye level of the viewer because he
is offering the viewer a reflection of themselves. This is what we as human-
ity have become. It is a post-Holocaust statement of humanity. We are
implicated in the brutality of the action that goes into the act of putting
to death. Therefore, in the context of Bacons image, the crucifixion is no
longer a spectacle in the sense of something that we stand back and think
about contemplatively or sadistically: we are actually implicit in the making
and complicit in the act itself. By deflecting the focal point on to us, Bacon
is intimating that in order to make sense of these creatures we have to place
ourselves at the centre of our interpretation of them. The generic nature of
this crucifixion is disquieting because we cannot sanction the brutality of
the act in theological (or eschatological) terms. Nor can we absolve our-
selves from the scene of this heinous crime; the deflection on to us means
that we are accountable. The ambiguity of the mannerisms of the figures
means that it is possible to flip their identity around and regard them not
as predators but as prey, as the hunted. They then become the victims of
atrocity and bear the scars of inhumanity. Whether as predator or prey,
crucifier or crucified, the figures are indisputably carriers of raw emotion
that cannot be tamed.
The Tate triptych was first exhibited at the Lefevre Gallery in London
in April 1945, a month before the end of the war in Europe but after the
newsreel footage ofthe concentration camps has been released. In this group
exhibition, which included the work of Graham Sutherland, Matthew
Smith and Henry Moore, Bacons contribution stood out in all its ghastli-
ness and repulsiveness. The public wanted to be soothed but Bacons work
did anything but this. He makes us culpable by implying that we are involved
in the brutal atrocities that have occurred not simply in wartime but in the
history of humanity itself. The religious allusions aroused by the title of
his work may have provided comfort and solace to a public who awaited
structural frameworks of hope, and which religion would have been able
to provide. But the lack of religious meaning would have jolted the sensi-
bilities of the viewers; there is no God and all the frames of reference that
once provided routine and contentment do so no longer. The three forms
do not refer to preternatural forms that exist in a fantastical realm but are
the remnants of humanity. The viewers come face to face with three forms
which they cannot explain and this is hugely dislocating. They represent
the monstrousness of the human condition.
206 Rina Arya
The impact that the Tate triptych had was monumental and in effect it
eclipsed the contributions of then better known artists, such as Sutherland
and Moore. Critics unanimously expressed the shock value this painting
had on the British public. John Russell conveys the impact the painting had:
Common to all three figures was a mindless voracity, an automatic unregulated glut-
tony, a ravening undifferentiated capacity for hatred. Each was as if cornered, and
only waiting for the chance to drag the observer down to its own level. They caused
a total consternation. We had no name for them, and no name for what we felt about
them. They were regarded as freaks, monsters irrelevant to the concerns of the day,
and the product of an imagination so eccentric as not to count in any possible per-
manent way. They were spectres at what we all hoped was going to be a feast, and
most people hoped that they would just be quietly put away. (Russell, 1993, pp.1011)
Fragment of a Crucifixion
Bacons Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (c.1944) was
followed by Fragment of a Crucifixion (1950) six years later. Fragment of a
Crucifixion is an exploration of the complexity of emotions evoked in the
event of a crucifixion. The painting consists of two figures a screaming
Painting in a Godless World 207
figure that adopts the pose of the crucified and a fragmented figure that
looms above the screaming figure. The influence of two earlier works is
discernible here. On a formal level we see the influence of Bacons Heads
series that he was engaged with in the 1940s, both in the scream of the
figure and in the outline of the frame. The biomorphic forms of both fig-
ures resemble the amalgamated human and animal forms in Three Studies
for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. The theme of predator and prey is
also developed here where the two figures could feasibly be considered to
occupy both roles as the direction of flight is ambiguous. One reading is
that one figure is screaming because it is has been pursued by the other
figure (the theme of the Furies persists). Reversing the roles, the fleeing
figure is now prey and escapes from the fierce creature that is chasing after it.
The frame structure in which the shrieking figure is situated deflects the
focus from the tau cross, which forms the vertical axis of the painting and
stretches across the backdrop of the painting. The figure is placed against
the cross. Extending this similarity and charting the actions sequentially it
is possible to construe the screaming figure as the crucified whilst the raised
figure is symbolic of the Ascension. Bacon transposes the Biblical story
against an incongruous modern background of figures and cars in motion
against the backdrop of a sea. The figures are oblivious to the crucifixion. In
the modern world the significance of the sacrifice of Christ goes unnoticed,
or in the death of God the purpose of the Crucifixion loses pertinence.
In his triptych Crucifixions of the 1960s Bacon problematized the role of
the Crucifixion by dehumanizing the crucified further.
in the central canvas [is] hardly less horrific than the upside-down human
carcass on the right (Shone, 1996, p.844). The mood of both paintings
is tense and angst-ridden. There is a feeling of imminent doom. Another
reading conceives of the crucifixion less as a subject area and more as a spe-
cific event that is explored in both triptychs. If we are taking the term the
crucifixion to refer to the method of execution where the body is tied or
hung on a cross and left to die, then there are two figures in either triptych
that match this description. In Three Studies for a Crucifixion, it is the third
figure that ungracefully slides down a waste chute. It has been slain, eviscer-
ated, with its ribcage exposed and its mouth open in agony; the moment of
death is imminent, if not already past. Bacon explicitly connects this figure
with Cimabues Crucifix (c.12878), and explains that I always think of
that as an image as a worm crawling down the cross. I did try to make
something of the feeling which Ive sometimes had from that picture of
this image just moving, undulating down the cross (Sylvester, 1993, p.14).
Although the description of undulation is an apt designation of what is
happening in the painting, the mood and context in comparison with
Cimabues serpentine form could not be more different. Where Cimabue
uses the sinuous line in order to naturalize the body ofChrist and to depict
his magnitude in suffering, Bacon uses the softening of line to convey the
animality of the carcass as it stealthily slides down the cross into a heap
of waste. The black amorphous shape in the foreground could be a ghoul
present at the moment of death or, to extend the association further, the
ghost of one of the three mourners in the Gospel, a Fury-figure. This is
not the death of a saviour or a martyr but that of a nobody. In Crucifixion
the central figure has been pinned with his bandaged arms down and his
elongated body raised in the air, with legs prised apart in plaster splints.
This time the crucified is more animal-like.
The animal natures of the crucified in both triptychs bring to mind
Christ as the sacrificial Lamb of God and the flayed carcasses in the work
of Rembrandt and Soutine. Norman Bryson encapsulates the complex
relationship between these two traditions. On a formalist level the works
have a great deal in common: the sense of the exposed spine and ribcage
the appalling colours of meat, red, brown and blue. However, the crucial
difference is that whilst Bacons meat is living flesh, Rembrandts is truly
210 Rina Arya
dead, a ruin (Bryson, 2003, p.51). Bacon is displaying the crucified figure
at the point of expiration, where we see the final gasp before life ceases,
which is a reminder of Angela Carters existentialist insight: at any moment
man can be transformed into meat (Carter, 1979, p.140). In Grnewalds
Crucifixion panel from the Isenheim Altarpiece, the final cry of Christ on
the Cross marks the holiest moment. However, in Bacon it becomes the
most abased moment, the cry into the abyss. The cry of agony in the cru-
cified figure in Three Studies for a Crucifixion recalls the twisted mouth of
Bacons Head 1 (19478), which is an amalgam of an animal and human
mouth what Lawrence Gowing described as the chattering teeth, like
the teeth of a hunted rodent, [that] break lose in their orifice (Gowing,
1989, p.14). The placement of the bodies on the vertical plane and their
inversion add to the gratuitousness of the portrayals and to the extent of
dehumanization.
Linda Nochlin discusses the significance of the placement of the axis
in visual representation and argues that the vertical plane is the axis of form
and beauty, whilst the horizontal plane generates different impressions. This
is pertinent in the discussion of Rembrandts The Slaughtered Ox (1655)
which is hung vertically.8 It has a grandeur and presence that endows it with
an air of solemnity, which Bryson argues is elegiac (Bryson, 2003, p.51).
We feel like we must be respectful in its presence, rather like the willowy
figure who peers from behind the ox and looks toward the viewer. She is in
a Chapel of Rest and respects the sanctity of the spiritual being. Kenneth
Craig comments on the curious ritual solemnity with which the butchers
carry out their task (Craig, 1983, p.236). Craig reflects on how the very
presentation of the ox provokes a kind of religious contemplation and
includes the lack of visual distractions, the simplicity of the composi-
tion and the quiet mood as features which contribute to the ambience
(Craig, 1983, p.238). In contrast the graceless figures in Three Studies for a
Crucifixion and Crucifixion do not fare well. Although in vertical articula-
tion, they come to rest on the horizontal plane, which renders them abject.
This is carried our more subtly in Three Studies for a Crucifixion where
the figure ungraciously oozes down to a pool on the floor, lying in what
supposes must be his own spilled viscera (Danto, 1995, p.101), whilst in
Crucifixion the figure is deliberately nailed to the horizontal axis on the
L-shaped board. Bacon further desublimates the figures by portraying them
upside down, as if to strip them of any dignity. This echoes the Crucifixion
of St Peter who was crucified upside down. The final damnation is the shift
from the crucified as human (in Three Studies for a Crucifixion) to animal
(Crucifixion).
Without prior knowledge ofthe title, the viewer could plausibly assume
that we are looking at a scene in an abattoir, but the title of Crucifixion
immediately connects the Crucifixion of Christ with the slaughtering of
an animal. The ramifications of this can be taken in two ways. Bacon is
polarizing the Christian narrative of hope, where the resurrection follows
death with the permanent death of the animal. He is showing the utter
baselessness of Christian belief in a godless world. Or else he is likening
the Crucifixion of Christ to the undignified slaughtering of an animal, and
the docility of the bodies in both triptychs to the Passion of Christ, thus
conveying the extent of Gods love.
self where we are confronted by our deeds and our private demons (our
Furies), which permeate the psyche. The potential of the crucifixion as
self-portrait was innovative but was certainly not new. For centuries art-
ists have gleaned the metaphoric possibilities of the crucifixion as a vehicle
for self-portraiture. Emily Bilski discusses the trope of Christ as a stand-in
for the struggles of the tortured artist (Bilski, 2008, p.364). In Chagalls
White Crucifixion (1938), the crucified Christ operates as a symbol of Jewish
suffering. In this example the Crucifixion is set against a backdrop of dis-
array. Jews flee in fear, homes are ransacked and a synagogue is in flames.
The crucified here serves not as symbol of Christianity but as a reminder
of Jewish suffering. The very deliberate displacement of the loincloth with
the tallit confirms the crucified as Jewish. Chagalls portrayal of the cruci-
fied conveys the universality of suffering.
Bacons self-portraits dated from the 1950s and continued until the end
of his career. His choice of himself as subject was out of a sense of necessity.
He told David Sylvester: Ive had nobody else left to paint but myself I
loathe my own face, and Ive done self-portraits because Ive had nobody
else to do (Sylvester, 1993, p.129). Bacon likened the painting of crucifix-
ions to the painting of self-portraits: Well, of course, youre working then
about your own feelings and sensations, really. You might say its almost
nearer to a self-portrait. You are working on all sorts of very private feelings
about behaviour and about the way life is (Sylvester, 1993, p.46). Michael
Peppiatt argues that, if one takes Bacons phrase, its almost nearer to a
self-portrait, at face value, what he was saying, quite literally, was that he
identified with Christ and, in some way that was never ever explained
that Bacon himself felt crucified (Peppiatt, 2008, p.104). Two images
visually bring together the notion of self-portraiture as Crucifixion. Four
Studies for a Self-Portrait (1967) comprises, as the title says, a tower of self-
portraits where the contours of the face continue like a sinuous shape that
snakes down the canvas. It resembles the crucified figure in Three Studies
for a Crucifixion (1962). Bacon used the crucifixion cathartically to exorcise
his own demons and confront his fears. The crucifixion as vehicle enabled
him to vent the violence of all the personal tragedies that he had suffered
in his life, such as the experience of rejection from his father.
Painting in a Godless World 213
References
This paper will argue that, although the ideology of the modernist move-
ment in art was opposed to spirituality, the effect of the movement has been
to produce a number of new ways in which the visual arts can represent
or transmit a sense of the spiritual. This is largely because a tension exists
between accurate representation of the physical world and expression of
spiritual ideas. Hence, simply by breaking away from realism, the modern-
ist movement created, unintentionally but powerfully, new opportunities
for expressing the spiritual.
To demonstrate this, I need to show that there is such a tension between
realist portrayal of the physical world and communicating a sense of its
spiritual dimension. Evidence of this can be found in both Christian and
Jewish traditions, and perhaps others. If we begin with Christian tradition,
and with its expression in European painting, a useful way of seeing the
tension is to consider the following quotation from what is still a very good
introduction to European art, by Eric Newton (1956, pp.267):
Imagine an artist commissioned to paint an altarpiece of a Madonna
and Child He has four tasks to perform
(1) He has to invent a set of shapes and colours which will express his
feeling about the Madonna and Child theme.
(2) He has to invent a set of shapes and colours which will (however
vaguely) remind the spectator of a woman holding a baby.
(3) He has to invent a set of shapes and colours which will fill the
required space pleasantly, and
(4) Having reconciled the conflicting claims of these three sets of
inventions, he has to translate them into pigment applied to a flat
surface.
218 Harry Lesser
Newton goes on to point out that task 2 is easy enough for any com-
petent painter, and the problem is to reconcile it with task 1, to paint a
picture of divine motherly tenderness, free from the bonds of space and
time, and also to paint a picture of two persons with particular features and
expressions, in a particular light and particular setting. Manifestly the thing
is impossible. A compromise must be found (1956, p.27). He goes on to
give four examples of different ways in which the compromise is reached,
of which the first and fourth are of particular interest, the second and the
third (to which reference will also be made) being stages between them.
The first is a Russian icon from the School of Rublev, which cheerfully
sacrifices visual truth about women and children to symbolic truth about
tenderness and divinity (1956, p.28). The fourth, Madonna and Child by
Tiepolo, is a charming portrait of a lovely signora and her exceptionally
fine child: though presented as a religious picture, it is in fact simply a
portrait (see also 1956, illustrations, pp.23).
What this suggests is that the expression of spirituality is not only
incompatible with extreme realism, but even with the aim of exactly repre-
senting what one sees physically. Since modernism has freed the artist from
the requirement to represent things exactly as they are or as near to that as
possible, modernism has recreated one of the conditions for representing or
expressing spirituality. This was not the intention of many of the modern-
ists, but it is a consequence of the way the movement has changed things.
However, Newtons claim that spirituality and realism are incompat-
ible unless there is at least a compromise is not indisputable. The opposite
view is expressed by Browning in the poem Fra Lippo Lippi. Browning
puts into the mouth of Lippi (14061469), whose realism did at the time
offend some churchmen, the following:
win European recognition. However, it may not be true of the very first
of them, Pissarro, for example, although the claim has been made that
he, along with Modigliani, Chagall and Soutine, did work which points
to a meeting between modern art and the Jewish condemnation of the
image (Sabil, 1950, quoted by Kochan, p.134). There are two reasons for
possibly excluding Pissarro. One is that, though by no means a self-hating
Jew or someone who denied his Jewishness, he was hostile to Judaism as a
religion, and perhaps to religion in general. This in itself, though, would
not show that he was not still influenced by religious ideas, especially if
the influence was unconscious: its being unconscious might make it all
the more powerful. A more important point is that representation of the
human form without detail is not a feature of his portraits but is found in
the numerous figures of people in his landscapes and country scenes, and
so could be explained simply as part of the technique of impressionism, of
painting what the eye actually sees before the brain works out in detail what
is actually there. Nevertheless, what he does in these paintings is consistent
with Jewish tradition, even if this is only a coincidence.
With Chagall we are on firmer ground. Both the dream-like quality of
many of his paintings and the influence of the intensely Jewish milieu of his
childhood are obvious. What may be less obvious is how closely these were
connected. The Judaism of nineteenth-century Russia, or rather of many
parts of it, including Chagalls native town of Vitebsk, was very influenced
by mystical ideas, and by a sense that not only was there a vast spiritual
world but that the physical world was very close to it and constantly, for
good or bad, influenced by it, to the point that a true understanding of
the physical world would require seeing it as part of the spiritual one. This
feeling has been expressed in arts other than painting. Thus Anskys play,
The Dybbuk, creates in literature this sense of the two worlds meeting, and
is a work that gives via literature a very similar feeling to that produced by
Chagalls pictures (Ansky, 1986).
This does not mean that the physical world is an illusion. But it does
mean that, for a painter coming from this tradition, to represent the physical
world exactly as it appears to the eye after close and detailed examination is
to leave out a very great deal. Hence the need to paint things as if in dreams,
to use colour in a way that is non-realistic but emotionally powerful, to show
224 Harry Lesser
things that if taken literally are impossible people flying, babies visible
in the womb, etc. all notable features of Chagalls paintings. Hence also
the need, not always but often, to distort in some way the human figure,
whether through the colouring, the impossible postures, the schematic
representation or the elongation of faces and/or bodies. And this is in line
both with Jewish tradition and with the modernist reaction against realism:
the meeting spoken of in the quotation above from Sabil.
In this connection Modigliani is particularly interesting. His back-
ground was Jewish, but not soaked in the religion in the way Chagalls had
been. His upbringing was not totally secular he had a bar mitzvah, and
he could sing the kaddish (the prayer for the dead) (Mann, 1980, p.10).
But by and large his concerns were not religious, and Judaism, it would
seem, had not played a large part in his early life: his religious education
was otherwise [i.e. apart from what he learned for his bar mitzvah] kept
to a minimum (Mann, 1980). Nevertheless his human figures and the
human figure was his main subject are nearly always distorted. This is
true of both his painting and his sculpture: the distortion is very often in
the form of elongation, of the face, the neck, the body or all of them, and
also in a kind of schematic rendering of the face, though not in a way that
fails to bring out its individuality. This distortion sometimes produces a
sinister effect, though more often a sense of a rich inner life. Both could
be considered as directing us towards the spiritual world: in Jewish tradi-
tion, as in others, this world contains demons as well as angels. Modigliani
probably did not believe in either angels or demons, but he may well have
believed that the human personality contains both, and that it was his
business to represent them.
Admittedly, one reason for Modiglianis style is the time at which
he lived and the milieu in which he worked. The general artistic mood
in Paris at the beginning of the twentieth century meant that a painter
might go in any of various directions, but they were all away from natu-
ralism. On Modigliani there was also the particular influence of the post-
impressionists, Czanne and Toulouse-Lautrec, and, as for others at that
time, the influence of African and Oceanic sculpture (Mann, 1980, p.65ff ).
Nevertheless, Modiglianis work, like Chagalls, is also in line with the
Jewish tradition of not representing the human form exactly. Indeed, in one
Spirituality and Modernism 225
fairly clearly exploring, to some degree, the inner life of his subjects, and
not his own. With Soutine, it is unclear whether the emotion belongs to
the sitter, the painter or both.
So in the Jewish entry into the European artistic tradition there are four
very different painters who have in common that they frequently paint the
human figure as distorted, or schematic, or lacking detail. Whether this is
connected with their background, and with the Jewish requirement to avoid
exact representation of human figures, is uncertain: very likely in the case
of Chagall; very possible with Modigliani and Soutine; perhaps unlikely
but not impossible with Pissarro. What can be said with more certainty is
that the distortion makes possible the creation of a sense of the spiritual
world (or of the spiritual dimension of the one world), so that the use of
modernist techniques impressionism, post-impressionism and expres-
sionism has resulted in new ways of conveying spirituality.
So far, I have discussed this in very general terms, being concerned
with the overall tension between spirituality and realism. But there are two
particular features of modernism which enable spirituality to be expressed,
apart from its general feature of freeing artists from the obligation to paint
exactly what is physically there. The first of these is the use of imagery
from dreams or generally from the artists imagination, as in the surrealist
movement. In Chagall, who in a way anticipated surrealism, this combines
with Jewish imagery and with imagery from the world of his childhood; in
Soutine it is more personal. But for both, though especially for Chagall, it
serves to express some aspect of spirituality, of emotions that go beyond the
purely physical, whether anguished (for Soutine) or wrapt (for Chagall).
Secondly, there is the connection between spirituality and movement.
This is complex, since there is also a spirituality connected with stillness
and calm. But, perhaps particularly, though by no means only, in Jewish
tradition, the spiritual world is a world of movement and development,
and, hopefully, of improvement. Idolatry is wrong because by worship-
ping the physical, i.e. what is impermanent and changing, it represents
the imperfect as perfect: things which are impermanent and constantly
changing need to develop, and are constantly threatened by the dangers of
corruption, whether physical or moral, are treated as ifthey were permanent
Spirituality and Modernism 227
References
Ansky, S. (1986). The Dybbuk, in J. Landis. Three Great Jewish Plays. New York:
Applause Theatre Book Publishers.
Browning, R. (1907). Poems, 18421864. London: Oxford University Press.
Cassou, J. (1965). Chagall. London: Thames and Hudson.
Spirituality and Modernism 229
This paper will visit four places in which the encounter between modern
and contemporary art and the spiritual may be found. First, the spiritual
and history, with a consideration of the work of Anselm Kiefer and Paul
Celan; second, the spiritual and place, discussing the sacred architecture of
Le Corbusier; third, the spiritual and community, reflecting on the art of
Stanley Spencer and the 1984 fire in York Minster; and finally, the spiritual
and the liturgical, with a reflection on the Rothko Chapel in Houston,
Texas. The paper concludes with a brief reference to the essay of Wassily
Kandinsky Concerning the Spiritual in Art.
This essay has its beginnings in certain elements of autobiographical
reflection. As an academic I am a professor of literature and theology. I
have also, for much longer than that, been an Anglican priest. Those two
elements of my life have not always existed comfortably beside each other,
but still never less than interestingly so in a confluence of what, in the
nineteenth century would have been called something like the critical spirit
and the will to believe and perhaps more than that. The origins of the
paper lie in a time in 2010 when I was also teaching as Changyang Chair
Professor in the School of Liberal Arts in Renmin University of China in
Beijing, and I now spend two months of each year there. In China, where
Christianity has always existed on the very edge of a far more ancient cul-
ture, the traditions of painting are fundamentally abstract, though never
absolutely so, for they are rooted in a particular relationship that is held
with nature and perhaps also the spiritual. In the words of one contempo-
rary Chinese art historian, Lin Ci:
[Ancient painting in China] was [] a combination or harmony between the natural
world and human emotion, a product of heaven (nature) and human. The effect
Chinese painters would like to illustrate in their paintings was not a visual effect of
232 David Jasper
colours and patterns as their Western counterparts would like to achieve [] What
they would like to achieve was a world in their minds of non materials. The natural
world was not an object for them to make a true copy of [but] it was rather elements
for them to build their own world. (Lin Ci, 2010, p.7)
After a detour into Western art and the spiritual I will return again to
China and its art at the end of this paper.
At times, it may be said, the quest for the spiritual is indeed an entirely
interior journey of the spirit, although through art one whose shape and
geography is built up from familiar materials to hand in the world around
us. In theistic traditions, perhaps, and clearly in contrast to those of China,
the quest has a rather different geography, often interior also, but also a quest
for the other which is transcendent, or a yearning for that which not of
this world but which frequently exists in uneasy and far from harmonious
tension with its observed materiality and the society of which we form a
part in our own minds and bodies. This I discovered for myself some twenty
years ago when I was involved as a theological commentator in the first
showing of the American video artist Bill Violas then highly controversial
video installation The Messenger in the sacred space of Durham Cathedral
the video being concerned with the figure of a naked man shown in a
place of Christian worship, for which the Cathedral was threatened with
prosecution for indecency.
A common experience I have in my life as an academic theologian who
is concerned with the creative arts is to be asked to comment or speak con-
cerning things for which I have few or even absolutely no academic quali-
fications. This is always an unnerving moment in a profession which tends
to pride itself on particular expertise and forms of specialist knowledge.
For example, I was invited some years ago by the Glasgow School of Art
to come and talk to art students who felt insistently drawn to speak of the
spiritual dimension in their work as young painters, sculptors, printmak-
ers, and so on but had no clear idea themselves what this really meant.
Very few of them were prepared to admit to any adherence to particular
religious beliefs themselves. Could I help them to set this in a context
or provide them with some kind of vocabulary that might help them to
articulate the spiritual dimension in their art? The last thing I felt drawn
The Spiritual in Contemporary Art 233
to do was to tell them that they were, it might perhaps be, Christians (or
indeed anything of a religious nature) though not themselves aware of
it. This would, anyway, have been wholly untrue for the most part. But
nevertheless the spiritual remained an insistent and even valid term for
them, and one to be contemplated.
In this short paper, I do not wish to revisit the familiar ground which
acknowledges the creative and ancient tension that exists between the
Judaeo-Christian tradition and art, with its complex debates and histories
at once, and sometimes at the same time, of iconoclasm and marvellous
creative invention. But I will visit, somewhat at random, four different
places, let us call them, in which the encounter between contemporary or
at least modern art and the spiritual may be discovered, bearing in mind
the capaciousness of those terms in human experience, and remembering
that the words which I write here, now in my home town of Glasgow,
have their origins in thoughts and writing pursued in the heart of modern
Beijing a stretch indeed across space and cultures for the mind and spirit
in humankind.
First, the spiritual and history: I begin with a painting of 1973 by the
German artist Anselm Kiefer, entitled Resurrexit. I link it in my mind with
the writings of the poet and holocaust survivor Paul Celan, which have
deeply influenced Kiefers art in many ways. In their work, both artist and
poet were engaged in the work of mourning, not precisely for lost friends
or particular severed relationships, but a deeper mourning of the soul.
Born into a Jewish family in Romania in 1920, Celan mourned for a lost
generation and a lost community, for the German language; the mourning
of one who barely survives (and finally commits suicide), articulating it at
an extreme of language in poetry of a steely fragility. Kiefer was born much
later, on 8 March 1945 in Donnaueschingen, Germany, and was brought up
as a Roman Catholic. His was the mourning of a German without any per-
sonal memory but still a profound awareness of the defeated, a nation still
overshadowed by Nazism and the Holocaust. For both Celan and Kiefer,
dialogue with the previous generation was blocked, either by erasure or
else forbidden their expression in art verbally or visually, if any form of
expression were still possible, was a coming to terms with the experience
of exclusion (Lauterwein, 2007, pp.201).
234 David Jasper
Ein Nichts
Waren wir, sind wir, werden
Wir bleiben, blhend:
Die Nichts-, die
Niemandsrose.
A nothing
we were, are, shall,
remain, flowering:
the nothing , the
no ones rose.] (Celan, 1990, pp.1745)
hidden things (Kiefer, 2006, p.134). Thus the artist calls us to stand before
and at the vanishing point: the gates of Auschwitz, the gates of heaven the
darkest of all entries into hidden things. In his work Die Himmelspalste
(The Heavenly Palaces) (2002), Kiefer draws us again to the same point
through the vision of an immense pillared hall, reminiscent of the vast
Nazi architecture of Albert Speer and Wilhelm Kreis, of which almost
nothing survives, to a distant point under a roof of stars. This with an irony
of reference that is necessarily present, perhaps, in every moment of true
worship as it sanctifies that which it destroys, the immediate inspiration
of the work is the ancient Jewish book, Sefer Hechaloth, which recounts
the mystical ascent by chariot through the seven heavenly palaces to the
palace where the wise are finally united with God.
Second, the spiritual and place: Maurice Blanchot asks us:
But where has art led us? To a time before the world, before the beginning. It has cast
us out of power to begin and to end; it has turned us toward the outside where there
is no intimacy, no place to rest. It has led us into the infinite migration of error. For
we seek arts essence, and it lies where the nontrue admits of nothing essential. We
appeal to arts sovereignty: it ruins the kingdom. It ruins the origins by returning to
it the errant immensity of directionless eternity. (Blanchot, 1982, p.244)
2 Glancey, 2002.
238 David Jasper
To the European mind the reverberant characteristics of the interior of the Gothic
cathedral are inextricably linked with a deep sense of the sacred and tend to evoke
strong associations with both the internal private space of contemplation and the
larger realm of the ineffable [] Cathedrals such as Chartres in France, embody con-
cepts derived from the rediscovery of the works of the ancient Greeks, particularly
those of Plato and Pythagoras and their theories of the correspondence between
the macrocosm and the microcosm, expressed in the language of sacred number,
proportion and harmony, and that manifest themselves in the science of sound and
music. These design concepts were not considered to be the work of man, or merely
functions of architectural practice, but represented the divine underlying principles
of the universe itself.4
and the stone rolled aside from the tomb of Christ. Within the walls the
community of the faithful were already absorbed in their task of clearing
away the still smoking wreckage, the work of restoration, without hesita-
tion beginning the task that was to renew the church in their day. Today
no hint of the fire remains.
I give you this image from life by way of illustration of the capacity of
art (and there was a strange artistry at work on that day in York Minster) to
capture those necessary, impossible and unbelievable moments of absolute
dereliction that prompt a resumption of business of life lived both here
and in eternity, moments of the devastating realization of the coincidentia
oppositorum and that exist in the midst of life every day. Superficially odd
and eccentric, Stanley Spencer captures the moment of deconstruction
at the heart of the artistic vision that alone is realized in its identification
with resurrection in the eternal everyday: a zero point and a moment, in
T.S.Eliots familiar words, sempiternal though sodden towards sundown
(T.S.Eliot, 1959, Little Gidding). And it is this unthinkable, at times unwel-
come, moment in modern and contemporary art that is articulated in its
way in the ancient liturgy of the Christian church at the opening utterance
by the gathered community of the Great Thanksgiving, the sursum corda, a
moment caught between time and eternity, between presence and absence,
an utterance of the one who are the manifold in unity.
Fourth, the spiritual and the liturgical: this final place might seem,
for some at least, an odd one for an essay on the spiritual in contempo-
rary art, but the liturgical must remain central, for the life of the spirit
can finally only be sustained in an attitude of worship and contempla-
tion, and it is this attitude that art calls forth in both its stillness and its
provocation both within and from the everyday in our history, our sense
of place and our membership of community. Nowhere in the art of the
twentieth century is this more profoundly known than in the fourteen
great canvasses of the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas, finally completed
and dedicated in 1971. Set next to Barnett Newmans memorial to Martin
Luther King, Broken Obelisk, the chapel stands to remind us, in the words
of Dominique de Menil, that the spiritual and the active life should remain
united (Hopps, 1997, p.314). Art, and above all religious art, rarely speaks
in a singular voice, and the Rothko Chapel finds voice in the unearthly
242 David Jasper
music of Morton Feldman it speaks and yet instils silence in our contem-
plation. Originally intended for a chapel for the University of St Thomas,
the Rothko Chapel and its murals now stands open for people of all faiths
and perhaps none. It is, above all, a place of contemplation, the textures
of the paintings drawing us on a journey that is deeply liturgical an act
that is at once solitary and communal to time and space that is utterly
interior and yet there also transcendent, to a presence that is quite absent.
Here we encounter Kafkas eternal outside, and Kiefers Zim Zum the
disappearing presence of the divine at the vanishing point, the sphere of
which the centre is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere. In the
pure interweaving of the spiritual and the physical we both lose and find
ourselves in the darkling plains of Rothkos paintings which open our eyes
so that finally we become one with what we see.
You see here how the language of the spiritual as it is prompted by
art participates at once in each particular religious tradition and yet is of
all and none just as in The Messenger of Bill Viola. And yet the silent
art of Rothko, like that of Kiefer, Viola, Le Corbusier, and even Spencer,
initiates conversations in words that are familiar to each of us, though they
are words that allow the unsayable to remain unsaid.7 Such a guarding of
silence is what makes them so profoundly liturgical, and why the various
and many artists with which this brief essay has been concerned engage in
exchanges with the sacred space of churches and chapels. Like the Great
Thanksgiving of the Christian Eucharist they begin with a movement
of the heart the sursum corda which is eternal and yet also rooted in
history: the artists of the New York School cannot be known apart from
their roots in the European tradition, especially of Dutch landscape; Viola
cannot be understood without recognizing his roots in the Renaissance;
Kiefer cannot be contemplated apart from his mourning for his people,
and for Celan; Spencer cannot be appreciated apart from his eccentric
participation in the daily life of Cookham, but behind that his experience
of the Great War which marks his obsession with the resurrection of the
body and his odd inflections of Christian belief; and York Minster stands
over its six hundred years still.
I began on a personal note, and I shall conclude on one. I have spoken
ofthe spiritual in the work ofEuropean and American artists and architects,
and largely, though not exclusively about, from within the Christian tradi-
tion and its liturgy. But words composed must also take their flavour from
their place of origin, and in this case it is China, where the thoughts for
this essay had their origins. Here the ashy, leaden presences of Kiefer and
the huge cliffs of the Rothko Chapel become also Chinese landscapes of
mountain and mist, of which the mist is somehow more material than the
rocks: expressionist landscapes of the soul that express their own tragedy,
apocalypse, burdens and hopes, rooted, like Kiefers art, in words the
ancient calligraphy without which there would be no Chinese painting. In
the work of the contemporary Chinese artist Ding Fang the Chinese tradi-
tion is transfigured into landscapes that are rougher and more tenacious in
texture, very similar, says Ding, to the bodies struggling to break free from
the shackles of chaos of Michelangelo.8 The spiritual in art, to borrow the
phrase of Kandinsky, is heard universally and yet to each in his or her own
language and tradition, in acts of memory, contemplation and anticipation.
In every age the artist is the first to know of the death of God, the disap-
pearance that is continually renewed and makes possible the sacramental
presence the small material substance that is art and allows our vision
to transcend the material in moments of faith and doubt, moments that
may usher in the darkness of Rothkos suicide in 1970, before the chapel
was completed, or else instances of resurrection as in the little world of
Cookham by the Thames. Their fragility and their persistence are caught
in the words of Wassily Kandinsky in the Introduction to Concerning the
Spiritual in Art:
8 How Can Anguish be so Sweet. A Conversation between Ding Fang and Zheng
Naiming, in, Ding Fang (2008), 6.
244 David Jasper
Only a feeble light glimmers like a tiny star in a vast gulf of darkness. This feeble
light is but a presentiment, and the soul, when it sees it, trembles in doubt whether
the light is not a dream and the gulf of darkness reality.9
And yet it is a dream of the artist that has not forgotten us and a light in
art that the darkness cannot finally comprehend (Kandinsky, 1910, p.12).
***
Substantially revised elements of this paper will be published in my forth-
coming book The Sacred Community (Baylor University Press, 2012). An
earlier form of it was also published as an article in Art and Christianity
Enquiry 65 (2011, pp.26).
References
Bachelard, G. (1994). The Poetics of Space. Trans. M. Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press.
Blanchot, M. (1982). The Space of Literature. Trans. A. Smock. Lincoln, Nebraska:
University of Nebraska Press.
Celan, P. (1990). Selected Poems. Trans. M. Hamburger. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Clark, T. (2002). Martin Heidegger. London: Routledge.
Ding Fang (2008). A Dirge for Mother Earth. Taipei.
Eliot, T.S. (1959). Four Quartets. London: Faber.
Glancey, J. (2002). Divine Inspiration, The Guardian, 14 January.
Hart, K. (2004). The Dark Gaze: Maurice Blanchot and the Sacred. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Jasper, D. (1984). York Minster, 9th July 1984, New Fire, 8, 19723.
Jeanneret, C.E., and Ozenfant, A. (1975), Aprs le cubisme. Turin: Bottega DErasmo.
Kandinsky, W. (1910). Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Trans. M.T.H. Sadler. New
York: Dover Publications.
Kiefer, A. (2006). Heaven and Earth. Organized by Michael Auping. Fort Worth:
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, in association with Prestel.
Michael Evans is Senior Lecturer and Course Leader for Fine Art at the
University of Northampton. He has recently completed his PhD at London
Metropolitan University, which explored the possibilities and problems for
spiritual experience in contemporary abstract painting. He has delivered
papers internationally on this subject in San Francisco, Cardiff and most
recently at Cornell University, a number of which have been published in
international journals. He is a founding member of the Psyche in the Arts
Research Network at the University of Northampton.
Vol. 3 G.F. Mitrano and Eric Jarosinski (eds): The Hand of the
Interpreter: Essays on Meaning after Theory
370 pages. 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-118-3
Vol. 4 Grace Brockington (ed.): Internationalism and the
Arts in Britain and Europe at the Fin de Sicle
368 pages. 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-128-2