Responses to 'Airbrushed from Art History?'

I'm grateful for the encouraging messages that folk have sent in response to my recent email about the 'Airbrushed from Art History?' series of posts. I have also been encouraged to receive the first substantial comment on the series from Revd. Dr. Richard Davey, Anglican Chaplain at Nottingham Trent University. Richard writes:

"Thanks for asking for feedback on your project, which I have been following on your blog. I will happily help if I can. A few unformed thoughts have immediately come to mind whilst reading them.

You contradict yourself from the start. Christianity and religious influences have not been airbrushed from art history, as the books and exhibitions you cite demonstrate. What has happened, however, is that the recognition of these influences has come from a particularly secular and disengaged position. What makes us as people of faith uncomfortable is not that these influences have been airbrushed but that the interpretations of works which are informed by a position of faith, or employ christian iconography are largely made from a position of secular theology, which seems to offer a contradictory sensibility to the one the work itself seems to embody, or we feel before a work. The problem is not that Christianity has been airbrushed out but that it has been understood and read from outside the parameters of faith.

Theology has airbrushed art out of its history as well. There are any numbers of books including David Brown, George Pattison, Richard Harries etc., which engage with art and use images to offer insights and reflections on theology and biblical studies, But what they engage with is iconography, they do not allow the work of art to be a sensuous embodied thing which offers its own knowledge of the world; providing a natural theology that may not sit comfortably within the confines of theological method and praxis.

Both Dan Siedell, in his book 'God in the Gallery', and you, in this series of postings, are undertaking valuable work in reinvesting twentieth century art with a theological and spiritual meaning. On one level this is a deeply relevant and catholic approach - the embracing of the world as a sign of God's presence and being. But just as we need to be careful of approaches that read a secular theology into works that are informed by a metaphysical theology, so we need to beware of reading our own faith into works that are essentially 'secular' [whatever that means]. I think Siedell's 'iconographic' reading of modern art is valuable and fascinating, but I wonder if he has taken it too far?


It seems to me that the war is not about recognising religious influences in modern art, but about allowing those influences to have a proper theological interpretation, but then if the work is made by someone outside faith, or on the edge of faith, who is to say what the right interpretation is. Secular approaches may not allow the spiritual nuances of a work to be felt, but then again theology may not allow those nuances to be experienced either. This brings me back to the real problem, the lack of attention to the work of art itself as something made by an individual with their own subjective space within the world. The issue is not airbrushing, but respect - respect for the work of art as an object itself made by an embodied human being for embodied human beings.


Anyway, good luck with the project."

I'll respond shortly to the challenges that Richard helpfully poses to the basic assumptions underlying this series of posts.

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Woven Hand - Sparrow Falls.