Australia and Poland are two countries which have seen specific and successful initiatives to reconcile modern art and Christianity. Australia, through the initiation of the Blake Prize for Religious Art and Poland, through the idea of ‘sacrum’ in art.
Revd. Rod Pattenden, Chairperson of the Blake Society writes that:
“The Blake Prize is one of the more prestigious art prizes in Australia. Since 1951 the Blake Society has been awarding a prize for works of art that explore the subject of religious awareness and spirituality. In difference to art prizes that are awarded for distinct subject areas such as landscape or portraiture, the Blake has always invited a much more open, personal and idiosyncratic response, so much so that it has earned the criticism, ire and sometimes applause of critics and the public alike. After all, what is religious art?
First awarded in 1951 it has brought to the attention of the art world new and emerging artist as well as allowing for innovation and experimentation of expression. Senior artists like John Coburn, Eric Smith and Rod Milgate first came to attention through their winning entries for the Prize. In more recent years, the Blake has seen something of a revival of interest with increasing numbers of entries and a diversity of ideas being expressed in the works. Recent winners have included George Gittoes, Hilarie Mais and Rachel Ellis. The search for a visual means of expressing deeply held perceptions and beliefs is rewarded each year in an exhibition that begins its life in Sydney and then travels around Australia.”
Rosemary Crumlin is currently completing a book on the Blake Prize, Within, which covers the period from its beginning in 1950 to 2009; a period which has been of considerable significance in Australia. She writes that “its shifts and shaping have been influenced by perspectives and art movements beyond Australia.”
Pattenden notes that:
“The Prize was the brainchild of Richard Morley, a Jewish businessman, and Michael Scott, a Jesuit educationalist, who believed that such a Prize would provide contemporary works of art for the many new churches and synagogues being built in the post war suburban sprawl. While religious authorities were generally taken aback by the modern flavour of these new investigations, it was the artists who most welcomed the Blake as it allowed them to express more personal subject matter; in short, it rewarded innovation and daring. The Prize was named after the mystic artist and writer William Blake who is celebrated for his creative commitments rather than his adherence to any particular dogma.
Surprise is the more characteristic response to each year’s exhibition rather than a confirmation of any traditional iconography. In the search for fresh contemporary expressions of spirituality artists have continued to extend the envelope of the Blake to encompass a wide diversity of religious expression drawing on major religious traditions such as Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism and Judaism, as well as indigenous spirituality. The Blake has fostered this breadth of diversity and celebrated the various rich traditions that make up the landscape of belief in Australia.
More personal responses have also found their way into the Blake’s gamut with explorations of feminism and gender, connections with the natural world and the wider referencing of the political influences of war, ecology and globalisation. There is nothing the Blake doesn’t seem to cover even tolerating parody, irony and humour over against the usually serious face of organised religion. Each year there is much to be annoyed by, seduced by, or simply inspired by. It is a thoroughly ecumenical experience for the eyes!”
In 2002 Crumlin curated a retrospective of the Blake Prize. Her main purpose in the retrospective was to show, through the paintings, how society's views on spirituality had changed over half a century: "Initially, she says, "artists - and the Blake committee - took it for granted that 'religious' meant 'Christian' and that 'Christian' was to be equated with scriptural narratives". Today, artists and judges have a less restricted view of spirituality, encompassing not just other religions such as Judaism, Buddhism and Islam, but alternative faith systems, everything from "New Ageism" to Aboriginality."
Pattenden considers that:
“A Prize for Religious Art reminds us that the arts have a valuable role to play in a society as we explore the place of passion, love, belief and action. Learning to appreciate the diversity of belief allows more opportunity to act together with understanding and compassion. Art allows us to speculate on the mystery of life, while learning to appreciate the deeply held perceptions of people different to us without needing to agree with their ideas. Art has always had a close relationship to religious expression and exploration. It is a medium suited to exploring the many creative paths that people take on their life journey and honouring that diversity.”
The Prize is managed by the Blake Society, which is currently developing a Foundation to ensure the ongoing viability of the Prize. Its membership comes from a diverse range of professions and religious interests. The common goal of the Society is to affirm the ongoing and dynamic contribution of this cultural institution to Australian society and the arts.
By contrast to the positive embrace of the arts and religion that is seen in the Blake Prize, in Poland during the 1980’s, as martial law forced virtually the entire artistic community in Poland to boycott the official exhibition spaces, we see a similar embrace developing in response to this oppression, as the only other places which found widespread approval among independent artistic and intellectual groups were the churches. So, churches became where artistic meetings, shows and exhibitions were held with most significant Polish artists and art figures participating in them, and only a very few veering away from addressing religious themes.
Agnieska Gralinska-Toborek describes the first, and probably the most famous, of these exhibitions, which was organised in 1983 by Janusz Bogucki in the church of God's Mercy in Warsaw, as follows:
“Under the title The Sign of the Cross, it brought together over fifty artists and photographers, as well as actors, musicians, art theorists, and filmmakers, who took part in the meetings, lectures and concerts accompanying the exhibition. Popularising the idea of ‘art returning home’, i.e. coming back to the sacrum, [Janusz] Bogucki managed to convert to it many respected and important artists from the Polish avant-garde. The interior of the Gothic church, ruined during the Warsaw Uprising in 1944 and in the process of being laboriously rebuilt by the parishioners, played the function of an extraordinary gallery. Without interrupting the construction work, the artists used the space of the church and the vaults, including the elements of its architecture into their arrangements. They had to learn how to co-operate and talk with the parishioners, who felt themselves to be the owners of the place and were not always willing to accept the artists' ideas. It was a good preparation for further exhibitions organised by Bogucki, such as Apocalypse – The Light in the Darkness (1984) and Labyrinth – The Underground Space (1989).”
Janusz Bogucki (1916-1995), was an important Polish critic and art historian, who noted a tendency towards the spiritual in Polish avant-garde art which, in artists such as Jerzy Tchórzewski, Stefan Gierowski and Jerzy Bereś, arose from a need to achieve transcendence and was characterised by a search for the Absolute. The work of these and other artists was, for Bogucki, confirmation of his idea that art should turn to sacrum and he, therefore, invited them to take part in his church-based projects in the early 1980s.
Most significant Polish artists participated in these exhibitions, including the Gruppa artists. It was also in this period that the work of Jerzy Nowosielski revealed its full fascination with icon paintings through the publication of "Wokół ikony" / "Around the Icon" (1985) and later "Mój Chrystus" / "My Christ" (1993). Yet the spiritual expression was not, on the whole, extended into the next decade as, when the political turning-point came in 1989, the general adherence to links with the Church became, for many artists, “a good reason to break with it - and this was particularly true of radical circles - because it was regarded as a restraint not dissimilar to those imposed hitherto by the totalitarian regime.” A sense of sacrum continued only in a very minimal way in the work, for example, of Jerzy Kalina, Włodzimierz Pawlak, and Robert Rumas.
Gralinska-Toborek writes that Bogucki:
“based his vision of contemporary culture on the distinction between three artistic attitudes: EZO, POP and SACRUM. EZO corresponded to the egocentric attitude of the avant-garde presented thus far, its attachment to the sacrum of art. POP was a new attitude, ‘a total secularisation of art, its incorporation into the scientific, technological and administrative mechanisms of civilisation and mass culture.’ The tendency within POP was for practicality and pragmatism, characteristic of the civilization of haste and success. The third attitude, in which Bogucki placed his hopes, was SACRUM, an attempt at rediscovering the relation between the sacrum of art and the primal sacrum, manifested in reflection on the timeless and non-material meaning of human existence … Art should, first of all, reconstruct the universality of meanings in its language, overcome the alienation of the artist through communal activity, and finally save from insanity or exhaustion those artists who seek spiritual metamorphosis on their own, without God and thus without any preparation. In order to attain this goal, artists were to give up the basic assumptions of modernism: egocentrism and the cult of individuality in favour of humility, group work, combining creation with spiritual experience, and going back to original sources, especially Christian ones, to deepen their faith. Bogucki’s conception came into existence around the time that the views of critics of modernism reached Poland. Those critics saw the modernist desacralization of life and art as the source of spiritual and moral crises and
cultural nihilism. Such a claim was made, for example, by Daniel Bell, who described the period of modernism as a process of rationalisation in the technological and economic spheres of life, secularisation in politics, and de-sacralization in culture. He believed that the contemporary man suspended in a spiritual void could only be saved through religious rebirth. This concept of postmodernism received a warm welcome in Poland, and was popularised by Bogucki, who held similar beliefs.”
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Henryk Gorecki - Miserere.
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