Unity and multiplicity

The latest edition of Art & Christianity is out and, along with many other interesting features, includes a report of the papers presented at the 2007 ACE International Conference in Cambridge.

In the magazine Graham Howes summarises my contribution, a paper entitled Allusive and Elusive, as follows:

"It was a London clergyman, however, Jonathan Evens, who, rather than demonizing ... Modernism and Postmodernism, or advocating ... the contemporary equivalent of Plato's guardians, saw the former, especially within the visual arts 'as progressing largely via deconstruction' where 'each successive movement identified a new individual element of of what had originally been a whole work of art and explored that fragment to its limits.' But he did not view this process as culturally or credally dysfunctional, but believed, with David Jones, that 'objects, images and words accrue meanings over the years that are more than the object as object or image as image. Therefore all things are signs re-presenting something else in another form'. Such a process, Evens argued, rather than weakening the links between art, faiths and culture, only served to strengthen these by lending them greater emotional and spiritual unity. His predicted outcome was indeed close to the 'unity in multiplicity and multiplicity in unity' which Samir Mahmoud had described to us as 'the essential characteristic of Islamic spirituality and the creative well-spring of its art'. Evens' more general and essentially creative conclusion was that in much 'Modern' art, as in much 'Postmodern' discussion of Biblical form and content, we now saw 'the holding together of fragments in ways that enable conversations to occur between these fragmentary ideas and images'. This, in his judgement, rendered the need for what he called 'a revival of religious and artistic languages that are "elusive, allusive, not didactic"' even more imperative."

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Anton Bruckner - Locus iste.