Beyond 'Airbrushed from Art History' (4)

The latest Image Update features Daniel Siedell, among others:

"Daniel Siedell is a cultural ambassador for a new age. His 2008 book God in the Gallery: A Christian Embrace of Modern Art offered a suspension bridge over the old culture war-era chasm between Christians and the art world, inviting Christians to release the old understanding that contemporary culture is godless and destined for self-destruction, and suggesting instead that we can listen and learn from much new art. In an Image web interview, he said: “It is a cliché, but I would suggest that one must approach contemporary art with an open mind. There is an ethical component here. Attending to those details, looking closely, is a useful discipline for us as Christians, who are supposed to see Christ everywhere, especially in the faces of all people. If we dismiss artwork that is strange, unfamiliar, unconventional, if we are inattentive to visual details, how can we be attentive to those around us?” More than a critic, Siedell also participates in the making of art, and in making art accessible: for over ten years he has worked collaboratively with painter Enrique Martinez Celaya, whom he profiled for the current issue of Image. Siedell has recently set aside an academic career in order to head up Martinez Celaya’s Florida studio, Whale and Star, where he’ll work on a number of interdisciplinary projects involving books, lectures, music, artist workshops, and more."

Siedell writes: "Although he is not personally religious, Martínez Celaya has written in his sketchbook that “Art is either religion or it is nothing at all” and often quotes Wittgenstein’s observation that although he was not a religious man, he could not help but look at the world from a religious point of view. He takes the ethical dimension of artistic practice seriously. For Martínez Celaya to speak of art as religion is not an excuse for art to illustrate or promote religious faith or to indulge in self-referential talk of the spiritual, which, like Stepan Arkadyevitch’s newspaper and cigar in Anna Karenina, provides the pleasurable sensation of a slight fog in his brain. Rather, to push art toward religion is to move it away from the confines of white-walled galleries, their air thick with theory, where art is autonomous from the rest of life—and toward the bracing atmosphere and harsh light of the real world. It is the structural framework of religion, as a comprehensive worldview, that shapes Martínez Celaya’s understanding of artistic practice. Religion functions as a standard, a test. “I want painting to function in my life the way most people want religion to function in theirs,” he writes. When curator Klaus Ottmann placed The Boy Raising His Arm in Saint Mary’s Church in Limerick, Ireland, at the biennial A Sense of Place for OPEN ev+a 2007, Martínez Celaya regarded it as “a circumstance capable of generating new insights...[that] would recreate the work of art”."

Find out more about Siedell here or read his essay on the work of Enrique Martinez Celaya in Image issue 70. My review of God in the Gallery can be found by clicking here.

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Peter Case - Colours of Night.