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Showing posts with label humanism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label humanism. Show all posts

Saturday, 20 November 2021

Artlyst - Isamu Noguchi: Socially Engaged Art

My latest review for Artlyst is of Noguchi at Barbican Centre:

'Rarely exhibited archive materials and photographs offer illuminating insights into Noguchi’s life and highlight his humanist values. Less clearly articulated is the extent to which Noguchi engaged with spirituality in his practice. Embracing social, environmental, and spiritual consciousness, Noguchi thought art ‘comes from the awakening person’. Awakening is what we might call the spiritual or a linkage to something flowing very ‘rapidly through the air’. Artists are those who ‘come with less obstruction’ to this flow. To be open to flow, artists try to ‘overcome barriers’ such as ‘habit and convenience and fear and accommodation’ or ‘barriers of the self and what everyone thinks about art’. As such, Noguchi saw ‘no conflict between spirituality and modern art’ as art ‘opens another channel to our non-anthropomorphic deity’, the invocation still being to God. He did, however, view Zen as providing a more direct linkage [to art] than through other mystical forms’ with the spiritual being’ direct appreciation of the thing itself’. As a result, he believed ‘you can’t say whether art came from the spiritual or vice versa’.'

My other pieces for Artlyst are:

Interviews -
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Velvet Underground - Beginning to See the Light.
Posted by Jonathan Evens at 18:00 0 comments
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Monday, 17 May 2021

Artlyst: Marc Chagall’s Exquisite Stained Glass Window Commissions

My latest article for Artlyst is about 'Chagall. The Emissary of Light' at Centre Pompidou-Metz:

'‘Chagall. The Emissary of Light’ explores the importance of light and of stained-glass in his work by comparing preparatory drawings and finished windows, alongside a collection made up of paintings, sculptures, graphic works, and archives detailing the history of these commissions, his collaboration with master glassmakers and his free use of signs and symbols, in keeping with his humanist ideal of freedom and peace...

The exhibition enables the rediscovery of the significance of stained glass attained within an oeuvre that finds connections between art movements and techniques, the secular and sacred, Judaism and Christianity, shared and personal history, tradition and subversion, while remaining outside of any dogma. Above all else, for Chagall, stained-glass represents the best place for the apparition of invisible forces. As glass fuses with painting, joining forces with celestial beams and architecture, “something mystical … passes through the window”.'

My other pieces for Artlyst are:

Interviews -
Articles -
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Sister Irene O'Connor - Fire (Of God's Love).
Posted by Jonathan Evens at 21:19 0 comments
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Saturday, 26 December 2015

The Christmas Revolution

'Because the Christmas story has been told so often for so long, it’s easy even for Christians to forget how revolutionary Jesus’ birth was. The idea that God would become human and dwell among us, in circumstances both humble and humiliating, shattered previous assumptions. It was through this story of divine enfleshment that much of our humanistic tradition was born ...

We Christians would do well to remind ourselves of the true meaning of the incarnation. We are part of a great drama that God has chosen to be a participant in, not in the role of a conquering king but as a suffering servant, not with the intention to condemn the world but to redeem it. He saw the inestimable worth of human life, regardless of social status, wealth and worldly achievements, intelligence or national origin. So should we.' (Peter Wehner, NY Times)

For more on the revolutionary nature of the Christmas story, see my sermon on 'The Revolutionary Magnificat'.

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Bruce Cockburn, with Lou Reed & Roseanne Cash - Cry Of A Tiny Babe.
Posted by Jonathan Evens at 16:17 0 comments
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Sunday, 12 April 2015

Is There a Return of the Religious in Contemporary Art?

As well as significant series of posts on the engagement between Christianity and the Arts (see Airbrushed from Art History and Sabbatical Art Pilgrimage), this blog has tried to highlight places where discussion about faith and art has been occurring (see, for example, here, here, here, here and here).

A 2013 ArtMag article, as well as featuring some positive views, highlights some of the mindsets in the mainstream art world which continue to limit the engagement of faiths and arts:

Anselm Franke writes: 'There is an important movement of engaging with religious topics, but there is not a wave of religious or sacral art in contemporary art. That is an important difference ... The historical break with religion continues. We would not think of hanging something that someone prays to in a museum ... Faith is incompatible with art end even destroys the sovereignty of art and the kinds of experiences we are looking for when we frequent art spaces.'

Silvia Henke argues that 'Religious art is taboo! Religious art exists in churches, in historical museums, at most in museums for non-European art, or in the vicinity of mentally confused artists, but not in the white cubes of major art temples.'

While Beat Wyss suggests that 'artistic activity depends on the achievements of society, which I term the “four virtues of the art system”: 1) respect for the individual; 2) a valuing of work within society; 3) open practices in relation to exchange and trade; and 4) freedom of speech in the public realm.
If only one of these aspects is missing, then art is endangered or even rendered completely impossible. These societal achievements have evolved over centuries as the philosophy of Humanism developed into bourgeois economic ethics, the politics of legally constituted forms of democracy and onwards to colonial liberation movements.'

On this basis, modernism requires a complete break with religion because it is only humanism that can guarantee the freedom which art needs in order to genuinely be itself as opposed to dogmatic religiosity. 

Silvia Henke is constructive when she suggests that 'contemporary art to accept the long-standing diagnosis of Western society put forth by philosophers and sociologists of religion, namely: That it finds itself in a “post-secular” phase, a term which allows for critical self-reflection through religious thought, while considering the ubiquity of the religious in its various manifestations within the secularization process, through secular thought (Jürgen Habermas).'

She notes that in this context: 'Artistic works which precisely deal with religious form and meaning have the ability to mediate between blind faith and rational knowledge; they belong neither to a dogmatic religiosity that confuses belief with conviction, nor to a totally individualized “who cares how or what” religiousness, in which faith is an utterly private thing. When artistic works successfully translate sacred symbols into the language of secular art (masterfully done by Mark Wallinger), it happens not as blasphemy or a deconstruction of the religious but rather, in Jean-Luc Nancy’s sense, as “redeeming deconstruction.”'

All this means that research, such as that being undertaken or initiated by Ben Quash and Angus Pryor, is of real significance in understanding the complexities of the current relationship between faith and art.

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Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Oh My Lord.
Posted by Jonathan Evens at 21:47 0 comments
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