The new blog on the updated Art and Sacred Places website highlights a post by Matthew Cain, on the Channel 4 News site, who thinks the Church might be starting to re-engage with art and artists. He had visited Salisbury Cathedral’s ‘Conflux’ exhibition of Sean Henry’s people sculptures which he thought to be a "terrific – and thought-provoking – show."
He concludes his post by saying:
"Sean Henry’s sculptures haven’t actually been commissioned by Salisbury Cathedral. Rather, the exhibition is bringing together much of the artist’s already-completed work. But other cathedrals – like Liverpool and Saint Paul’s – have recently begun to directly commission new work by the likes of Tracey Emin and Bill Viola. And it doesn’t look like any creative compromise is involved on the part of the artists.
So if the Church really is beginning to re-engage with art and artists, then I think that this should be welcomed."
Artist and priest, Mark Dean, acknowledges such commissions in an interview for the current edition of Art and Christianity but argues that "the Church should take more risks when commissioning art for cathedrals." He also notes that "right now the postmodern critical agenda is finding space for questions of faith and belief, but only as an individual lifestyle or consumer choice." Despite this, he considers that it is still "impossible to make orthodox Christian claims and remain critically valid."
One reason for this is that Christian Art "sounds like a restriction of both critical and creative freedom." He is more optimistic, however, about possibilities for a contemporary Christian Art:
"first, it was the prophetic tradition in Judaism that invented the critique of culture, and second, if we think that Christianity isn't about creative freedom, we need to think again - it is the Holy Spirit, who spoke through the prophets, who enables our creativity, and it is Christ who sets us free - why do we think art should be above this?"
Valerie Dillon, at the beginning of the film about Makoto Fujimura's Four Holy Gospels Project for Crossways, says: "There's a line in the contemporary art world ... you can paint and you can worship, but don't do them together. If you step over that line, you're, in essence, setting yourself up for crucifixion."
In the context of a film which argues that Fujimura is both a successful mainstream artist and an artist making orthodox Christian claims, this is a slightly odd beginning as Fujimura doesn't seem to have been crucified for doing both. However, it does perhaps reinforce Dean's statement above about the difficulty, if not impossibility, of making orthodox Christian claims while remaining critically valid and, therefore, serves to highlight Fujimura's very real achievements.
In my Airbrushed from Art History series I suggested that one of the reasons why the perception that Christianity and contemporary art do not mix persists is because the story of Christianity's engagement with modern and contemporary art has never been fully told and therefore art critics and emerging artists alike think that there are no role models to which they can point. This is why it is important to be able to point to the work of artists like Dean and Fujimura who, in very different ways, have critical validity and make orthodox Christian claims.
It is also why it is important to tell stories from the history of modern art about Christian enagement and to critically assess contemporary artistic expressions of faith. Art and Christianity regularly features articles which do both and the current edition is no different with articles by Joseph Masheck on the relationship between Ad Reinhardt and Thomas Merton and by Neal Brown on the spiritual in the work of Tracey Emin.
Masheck begins by recalling that abstract art "was engendered a century ago by a Russian Orthodox painter in Germany, Kandinsky; a Polish Catholic painter in Russia, Malevich; and a Dutch Reformed painter, Mondrian." Today, Masheck notes, "theosophy is invoked to substantiate spirituality in Kandinsky and others, but Christianity is overlooked." However, in Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky writes of "the receptivity of the canvas to the painter's approach in analogy the Annunciation," while, in a Soviet government publication of 1918, he declares that Christianity "lies at the root of the continuous, new revaluation of values, which eternally (and now, as always), slowly creates the future, and is the foundation of that inner spirituality which we are gradually able to discern in art, and which is occurring in a vigorous and revolutionary way." Malevich presented "his suprematist image as grounded in the anti-naturalistic schematic Orthodox icon, with its saintly aspirations to the Isaiahan Kingdom of Justice - for the Black Square was mounted across the corner of the room, like the most honored icon in a Russian Orthodox household."
When Masheck published for the first time, as editor-in-chief of Artforum, a small black painting that Reinhardt painted for Merton, he pointed up Reinhardt's Luthern background. This was later also noted by art critic Lucy Lippard who wrote that he was brought up as a Lutheran and a socialist. Merton noted in his journal in 1940: "Reinhardt sticks with the communists. Certainly understandable: a religious activity. He believes, as an article of faith, that 'society ought to be better', that the world ought to be somehow changed and redeemed.' Further: 'Reinhardt's abstract art is pure and religious. It flies away from all naturalism, from all representation to pure formal and intellectual values ... Reinhardt's abstract art is completely chaste, and full of love of form and very good indeed ... He's make a pretty good priest.'" In letters of 1956-57 Merton requested a 'cross painting' for his hermitage "and Reinhardt obliged with a small 'Latin'-cross work that Merton was pleased to liken to an icon."
Neal Brown writes that "Religious and spiritual belief have often been invoked by Tracey Emin in her work, which contains statements of personal alignment with a variety of concepts of spiritual, religious, magico-religious and supernatural power. Although her negotiations of faith vary in their directness of expression, there is an emphasis on ideas of affliction, death and afterlife, expressed through ceremonial, contemplative ritual ... In spite of her work being 'contemporary', it is unusually positive in its affirmation of spiritual and religious sentiment; it is not protectively oblique, enigmatic, abstracted or disguised, and it takes place against a more varied religious background than just the Judeo-Christian one ... The revealing of her spiritual self is consistent with Emin's confessional project - her positive faith perhaps requiring more fearlessness (due to a greater danger of rejection by contemporary art-critical orthodoxy) than any number of descriptions of existential despair, sex or drunkenness."
Brown's comment that Emin has showed greater fearlessness in the face of the contemporary art-critical orthodoxy by revealing her spiritual self than confessing to existential despair, sex or drunkenness, is revealing of the values and priorities of that group and accords with Dean's assertion that it is "impossible to make orthodox Christian claims and remain critically valid." Despite all this negativity, the examples given above and those documented in 'Airbrushed from art history' show that it can be done.
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Arcade Fire - Black Mirror.
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