The spritual in contemporary art: David Jasper considers history, place, community and liturgy in relation to the spiritual.
I am a university professor and an Anglican priest, two elements of my life that do not always exist comfortably. Yet interestingly, together they reside in a confluence of what might once have been called the critical spirit and the will to believe. When I wrote this essay I was teaching in Renmin University of China in Beijing. There, where Christianity has always existed on the edge of an ancient culture, the traditions of painting are fundamentally abstract, though never absolutely so, for they draw on a particular relationship with nature and the spiritual. In the words of one contemporary Chinese art historian, Lin Ci:[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 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.
I will return again to China and its art later.
At times the quest for the spiritual is an entirely interior journey, though through art one whose shape and geography is built from familiar materials to hand in the world. In theistic traditions, perhaps, and in contrast to those of China, the quest has a rather different geography that is born of a search for the transcendent, a yearning for that which is not of this world but which frequently exists in tension with its materiality and the society of which we form a part. This I discovered for myself some twenty years ago when I was involved as a theological commentator in the showing of the American video artist Bill Viola's then controversial video installation The Messenger in Durham Cathedral--the video being concerned with the figure of a naked man shown in a place of Christian worship for which we were threatened with prosecution for indecency.
A common and unnerving experience in my life as an academic theologian is to be asked to speak about things for which I have absolutely no academic qualifications. For example, I was invited some years ago to talk to art students who felt insistently drawn to speak of the spiritual dimension in their work as artists, but had no clear idea themselves what this really meant. Could I help them to set this in a context or provide them with some kind of vocabulary that might assist them to articulate this dimension in their art? The last thing I felt drawn to do was to suggest that they were Christians (or indeed anything of a 'religious' nature) though not themselves aware of it. This would, anyway, have been largely untrue. Yet the 'spiritual' remained an insistent term for them, and one to be contemplated.
In this essay I will visit, and somewhat at random, located as I am somewhere between Beijing and Liverpool (1), four different 'places' in which the encounter between contemporary art and the spiritual may be explored.
First, the spiritual and history: I begin with the German artist Anselm Kiefer and the Romanian poet and Holocaust survivor Paul Celan, who deeply influenced him. Both artist and poet were engaged in the work of mourning, not precisely for lost friends or severed relationships, but a deeper mourning of the soul. Born into a Jewish family in Bukovina in 1920, Celan mourned for a lost generation and for the German language; the mourning of one who barely survives, articulated in poetry of a steely fragility. Kiefer was born on 8th March, 1945 in Donnaueschingen, and was raised as a Roman Catholic. His was the mourning of one without personal memory but a profound awareness of a defeated nation overshadowed by Nazism and the Holocaust. For both men dialogue with the previous generation was blocked, by erasure or else forbidden their artistic expressions, if any form of expression were still possible, a coming to terms with the experience of exclusion.
The events of history with their devastating human cost bleached onto their beings as an indelible, thought-defying sensibility. For Celan and Kiefer there is the sense of an ending, but also a sense of beginning again. Kiefer explains the repetition of the image of his artist's palette in his paintings: 'The palette represents [he says] the idea of the artist connecting heaven and earth.' But that point of connection, which is also the vanishing point in perspective, recurs endlessly in his work as the point where thinking founders--vanishing in the railway tracks converging on Auschwitz or in the jagged, mysterious confluence of his 1990 work Zim-Zum.
'Zim Zum' is the name of the point in the Kabbalah at which God withdraws in order that the world may appear. In Kiefer's canvas, that point, in almost the dead centre of the picture, seems primarily to be a point of desertion. If it is a point of creation, then here also a wasted world flows both from and into the point of God's departure, disintegrating into a place of nothingness in which the viewer stands helplessly before the vanishing, perhaps dying God.
From the 12th Century in Europe it was said: Deus est spaera cuius centrum ubique ('God is the sphere of which the centre is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere'). But if God reveals himself at every point in the universe, we are also conscious of a presence which is at the same time an absence and we may no longer make any distinction between the transcendence of God and the disappearance of God. God disappears in and into Auschwitz. Thus, in Celan's 'Psalm', we sing the praises of the one who is Nothing:
Praise be your name, no one.
For your sake we shall flower. Towards you.
A nothing we were, are, shall, remain, flowering: the nothing--, the no one's rose.
Yet our uncomfortable reality is an experience of the absence of God, which is yet 'not nothing.' Creation and disintegration are opposites, yet they match one another in equal measure and therefore there is no interior to any possible reality but merely, as for Franz Kafka, 'only the outside, the glistening flow of the eternal outside.' The poet's hopelessness is matched only by his obsession with salvation--an obsession continually extinguished by despair--and yet he continues to write.
And so Celan writes after Auschwitz (despite Theodor Adorno), and Kiefer paints and constructs his works, often using lead (from the roof of Cologne Cathedral)--poisonous, impenetrable, impervious to light, yet the base metal of alchemy and the ancient quest for the secret of its transformation into gold. Kiefer also works in the medium of ash, especially in the series of paintings inspired by Celan's great poem 'Death Fugue', the ash from the ovens of the concentration camp linking the golden hair of the Aryan Margarete with the ashen hair of the Jewish Shulamith. For ash is but a trace of that of which nothing remains--the memorial, barely material, to that which is gone--a lost generation: 'Praise be your name, no one.' And so the blessing and praise remain in what does not remain. In Kiefer's art, the ash that is a mere trace is offered as a sacrament and memorial to the lost and forgotten and to those whom he had never known. In the ash there can be no re-membering in celebration, nor remembrance, but in Kiefer's canvasses the very vanishing point, the confluence of the railway tracks at the gate of oblivion, is an opening of another kind, as incomprehensible as the black holes into which all time and matter rushes. Kiefer says, 'I tell stories in my pictures to show what's behind the story. I make a hole and go through.' To pass through the non-space of the vanishing point, the beginning and end, is the reminder of the being of the sacramental moment and its oblivion. Within the Christian tradition there is but one moment of such true art, an utterance in the story which Kiefer's art dares to seek in what Celan calls the 'illegibility of this world.' That moment is Jesus' cry of dereliction from the cross--his interrogation of the absent deity, the necessary prelude to the recovery of any possible sacred community.
Kiefer describes the moment of creation and despair in this way: 'It is the artist's job to imagine the most impossible things. These are not answers. They are just possible entries into hidden things.' Thus the artist calls us to stand before the vanishing point: the gates of Auschwitz, the gates of heaven--the darkest of all entries into hidden things.
Second, the spiritual and place: Maurice Blanchot asks:
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 art's essence, and it lies where the nontrue admits of nothing essential. We appeal to art's sovereignty: it ruins the kingdom. It ruins the origins by returning to it the errant immensity of directionless eternity.
In The Space of Literature, Blanchot proposes a radical vision of the warfare between religion and the arts after modernity. Gripped by such a vision Kiefer spent a profoundly formative period of retreat in 1966 in the Dominican monastery of La Tourette, designed by Le Corbusier. In its vast space and deep asceticism, La Tourette has been described as 'one of the most haunting, numinous buildings of the twentieth century,' rooted in the monastic tradition and inescapably of its own time. Le Corbusier's sacred space continues to inform the art of Kiefer in its evocation of the simultaneously terrifying presence and absence of the divine, the necessary primal moment for any true sense of the sacred.
As Le Corbusier seeks the 'miracle of ineffable space' in his sacred buildings, following Pythagoras in noting that 'number is the base of all beauty,' Bill Viola has linked the medieval Gothic cathedral with the same tradition:
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 concepts 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.
Viola's Messenger was made specifically for Durham Cathedral, its contemporary video technology reaching out in conversation with the massive medieval technology of the building. From its place near the West door of the church, Viola's figure rises and sinks, expanding its presence into the space of the building without imposing on it any particular Christian theology or liturgy, but growing into the place as a possibility that symbolically embraces the sacred and becomes the context for a potential liturgical community. The Messenger engages the ancient architecture of the Cathedral with Viola's own contemporary sense of the sacred which is variously drawn from the mysticisms of both the East and the West, and the influence on him of sources as different as Jalaluddin Rumi, Chuang Tzu, St John of the Cross and Meister Eckhart. All these, even those outwith the Christian tradition, the Cathedral somehow 'knows' and it is upon this enriched spirituality that the liturgy of the church now feeds and grows. Thus sacred space grows outwards from the 'intimate immensity' of the work of art, and is not dictated to by the theological order of ancient liturgical practice. For, as Gaston Bachelard has observed, 'isn't imagination alone able to enlarge indefinitely the images of immensity,' and doesn't that immensity begin within ourselves? Prompted by the imagination of the artist, even through its abstractions and deconstructions, such immensity, in the meeting of finite and infinite, realises an expansion of being that too often life, and even the life of the church, only serves to arrest.
Into such immensity the Eucharist leads us, prompted by the ineffability of sacred spaces. As in the architecture of Le Corbusier, these are by no means always spaces of comfort, and their motion is centrifugal rather than centripetal (though these two may ultimately be one). Thus as Bachelard exclaims in a meditation on the two movements of concentration and dilation beyond all frontiers: 'Away with boundaries, those enemies of horizons! Let genuine distance appear!' Thus finitude meets infinity in a moment of eternity.
Third, the spiritual and community: moving to the action of community within the space of the sacred, I link two moments in the history of 20th-century art. The first lies between 1923 and 1927 during which Stanley Spencer created his most famous painting, the Resurrection: Cookham, in stark contrast to the art of Kiefer, and the second (a moment of divine art) the great fire in York Minster of 9 July 1984.
Spencer once described the village of Cookham where he lived as a 'village in heaven'. In his painting it is the villagers whom he knew who rise, without any decomposition, from their tombs, combining apocalyptic images from Matthew's Gospel with the everyday. In his art, which Spencer himself described as 'a wonderful desecration', two moments in time and eternity meet with a humorous surreality that invites contemplation of the spiritual precisely because our feet are left set firmly on the ground. Oddly it was this painting from the early modernism of Spencer that came to my mind as I stood in the transept of York Minster in 1984 as it lay open to the sky, its roof timbers a blackened mess on the floor, a moment of profound spirituality. For the Minster's transept was at once in ruins, an act of God, perhaps, yet its roof had been flung aside in glorious invitation, like the lids of the tombs in Cookham and the stone rolled aside from the tomb of Christ. Within the community of the faithful were already absorbed in their task of clearing away the wreckage, without hesitation beginning the task that was to renew their church.
I give you this image from life to illustrate the capacity of art (there was a strange artistry at work on that day in York Minster) to capture those necessary and impossible moments of dereliction that prompt a resumption of the business of life lived both here and in eternity. Spencer eccentrically captures the zero point of deconstruction at the heart of the artistic vision that is realised in its identification with resurrection in the eternal everyday. And it is this unthinkable, even unwelcome, moment in modern and contemporary art that is articulated in its way in Christian liturgy in the sursum corda of the Great Thanksgiving, a moment between time and eternity, presence and absence, uttered by the community who are the manifold in unity.
Fourth, the spiritual and the liturgical: this final place might seem an odd one for an essay on the spiritual in contemporary art, but the liturgical must remain central, for the life of the spirit can only be sustained through worship and contemplation, and it is this attitude that art demands in its stillness and 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 known than in the fourteen great canvasses of the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas. Set next to Barnett Newman's memorial to Martin Luther King, Broken Obelisk, the chapel reminds us of the unity of the spiritual and action in life. Art, and especially religious art, rarely speaks in a singular voice, and the Rothko Chapel finds voice in the unearthly music of Morton Feldman--it speaks and instils silent contemplation, The Chapel and its murals stand open for people of all faiths and none. The textures of the paintings draw us on a journey that is deeply liturgical, to time and space that is interior and yet also transcendent. Here we encounter the disappearing presence of the divine at the vanishing point, the sphere of which the centre is everywhere and the circumference nowhere. In an interweaving of the spiritual and the physical we lose and find ourselves in the darkling plains of Rothko's paintings which open our eyes so that finally we become one with what we see.
The language of the spiritual is prompted by art that participates at once in each religious tradition and yet is of all and none, and the silent art of Rothko, like that of Kiefer, Viola, Le Corbusier, and Spencer, initiates conversations in words that are familiar to each of us though allowing the unsayable to remain unsaid. Such a guarding of silence makes them profoundly liturgical in spaces that are sacred. Like the Great Thanksgiving of the Eucharist they begin with a movement of the heart which is eternal and yet rooted in history: the artists of the New York School cannot be known apart from their roots in the European tradition; Viola has his roots in the Renaissance and Kiefer in his mourning for his people; Spencer cannot be appreciated apart from his eccentric participation in the daily life of Cookham and his experience of the Great War; and York Minster stands over its 600 years still.
I have spoken of the spiritual in the work of these Western artists and architects, but in words that were largely written in China. Here their art merges with Chinese landscapes of mountain and a mist that is somehow more material than the rocks themselves: expressionist landscapes of the soul that express their own burdens and hopes, rooted also in words--the ancient art of calligraphy. In the work of the contemporary artist Ding Fang this delicate tradition is transfigured into landscapes that are rougher in texture, 'very similar,' says Ding, 'to the bodies struggling to break free from the shackles of chaos of Michelangelo.' The spiritual in art is heard universally and to each in his or her own language and tradition, in acts of memory and anticipation. The artist knows first of the death of God, the disappearance that is continually renewed and makes possible the sacramental presence that allows our vision to transcend the material in moments of faith and doubt. Their fragility and per Ding Fang Ode to the Land 1 1999-2001 sistence are caught in the words of Wassily Kandinsky in Concerning the Spiritual in Art:
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.
This is a dream of the artist that has not forgotten us and a light in art that the darkness cannot comprehend.
David Jasper is Professor of Literature and Theology at the University of Glasgow
1. This essay is take from a lecture given to the conference 'Contemplations of the Spiritual in Contemporary Art' at Liverpool Cathedral, December 2010.
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| Author: | Jasper, David |
|---|---|
| Publication: | Art and Christianity |
| Article Type: | Critical essay |
| Geographic Code: | 9CHIN |
| Date: | Mar 22, 2011 |
| Words: | 3293 |
| Previous Article: | Selected exhibitions. |
| Next Article: | The abject object: Mia M Mochizuki, winner of the ACE/Mercers' book award, on the mechanisms of iconoclasm. |
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