Art awakening humanity

Art awakening humanity was an afternoon of short talks and meditations organised by St Stephen Walbrook in partnership with Awakened Artists and Watkins Mind Body Spirit Magazine. The event included contributions from artists, collectors & spiritual teachers centered around the relationship between art and the spiritual dimension. Inspired by a recent interview with Eckhart Tolle in Mind Body Spirit Magazine, the afternoon offered a wide range of perspectives on our theme of art awakening humanity. Participants described the event as: "Wonderful, inspirational" and "Spiritually uplifting conference."

I began the afternoon with a brief outline overview of Modern Art & Spirituality. We then heard from Roseline de Thélin speaking on the theme of Art: language of the soul, with a key focus on art and wonder. De Thélin is an interdisciplinary visual artist as well as a creative coach and art therapist. The subject of Light has been central in her artistic and philosophical inquiry. Combining a diversity of digital and hands on media she produces pieces that play with illusion and perceptions. She is known for the unique work she developed with fiber optic, symbol of the endless possibilities carried by photons. Roseline facilitates Art Retreats that foster creative investigation, discovery, innovation and self-awareness.

Art historian Edward Lucie-Smith gave his Agnostic’s view of art and spirituality. Edward Lucie-Smith is an internationally known art critic and historian, who is also a published poet and a practicing photographer. He has published nearly two hundred books in all. He is generally regarded as the most prolific and the most widely published writer on contemporary art. A number of his art books are used as standard texts throughout the world. He has organised exhibitions in a number of galleries worldwide. He has also served on juries of the Cairo, Alexandria and Sharjah Biennials.

David Neita and Theresa Roberts discussed aspects of the Jamaican Spiritual which Theresa curated for St Stephen Walbrook in July. Theresa Roberts is an art collector specializing and promoting Jamaican Art and artists. She has held Jamaican Art exhibitions at various important venues in the UK including The House of Lords, Europe House, Cambridge University and this year St Stephen Walbrook. During the London Olympics Theresa held a combined Art and Fashion show at Jamaica House as part of the Independence Day celebrations. She showcases her collection of Jamaican art at her home of Hanover Grange in Montego Bay in Jamaica.

Jonathan Kearney showed examples of a wide range of digital art in discussing Art, Theology and The Digital. Kearney has extensive experience of exhibiting his work worldwide, with recent exhibitions having been seen in China, Brazil and London. For nine years, Kearney has pioneered the opportunity to study a Fine Art masters course online. This innovative approach to learning is backed by his research and experimentation, which shows how digital tools can enhance both learning and art practice. Jonathan is fascinated by the intersection of art, theology and the digital.

Mark Dean told his personal story of partial salvation through art before discussing The Esoteric In Art. Dean says, “As an artist I do not seek to make images of God but rather the representation of personhood; that is, the experience of being a person in a world where there is a God. This world is not easy, and there are experiences of trauma and isolation; but God (and thus the created world) is good, and so there is beauty and the hope of redemption.”

Jonathan Koestlé-Cate specifically probed the conference title for understanding in his presentation, utilising works by Bruce Nauman, Alice Neel, Jonathan Monk and Alejandro Tobon Rojas, in doing so. Koestlé-Cate says, “I have followed closely the church’s increasing willingness to work with contemporary artists and to deploy modern media within its spaces. I have since become a regular contributor to debates on the relationship of Christianity and the visual arts, taking a particular interest in the role of modern and contemporary art in ecclesiastical spaces, but also the wider presence of themes of religion, spirituality and the sacred within the art world more generally”.

Alexander de Cadenet shared an extract of his interview with Eckhart Tolle and spoke about the Awakened Artists Group before ending with a singing bowl meditation. De Cadenet says, "For me, art is way of exploring what gives life a deeper meaning and evolves in relation to my own life journey. Being an artist is about having a voice in the world, a pure and authentic voice in a challenging world. It is a way of sharing personal insights and encounters with the world, of exploring the mysteries of our existence and our place in the grand scheme. Art is the intersection between the formless dimension and the world of form, it embodies our connection to nature or the
intelligence that is responsible for our existences."

Exploring art and spirituality broadly is one of many ways in which St Stephen Walbrook, and the Church more widely, seek to support and strengthen the real relationship that exists between art and the spiritual.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Glenn Hansard - Time Will Be The Healer.

Art awakening humanity

Art awakening humanity is a conference organised by St Stephen Walbrook in partnership with Alexander de Cadenet and Watkins Mind Body Spirit Magazine that will explore the relationship between art and the spiritual dimension by taking words spoken by Eckhart Tolle in an interview with Mind Body Spirit Magazine as inspiration:

“Beauty arises when something more essential or deeper, something that underlies the world of sense perception shines through. It is what I call the ‘underlying Intelligence’ that is the organizing principle behind the world of form, a hidden harmony, as it were”.

”True art can play an important part in the awakening of humanity.”

The conference will be held in the context of an exhibition at St Stephen Walbrook of Alexander de Cadenet’s ‘Life-Burgers’, works which question the vanity of worldly existence and explores the “cultural hero system” proposed by philosopher Ernest Becker.

Presenters:

• Jonathan Evens - Modern art & spirituality – a brief survey
• David Cranswick - The role of integrity in traditional craft practices and the ancient cosmology of the pigments, metals and planets
• Edward Lucie-Smith - An agnostic’s view of art & spirituality
• Theresa Roberts – ‘Jamaican Spiritual’: spirituality in Jamaican art
• Jonathan Kearney – Art, theology & the digital: creating new understandings
• Mark Dean – Concerning the esoteric in art
• Jonathan Koestlé-Cate - Art & Church: ecclesiastical encounters with contemporary art
• Alexander de Cadenet - The Origin and the purpose of the Awakened Artists Group – a new group exploring the relationship between art and the spiritual dimension

To register for this stimulating conference, click here.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Gungor - Beautiful Things.

Review - Art and the Church: A Fractious Embrace

I have written a review for ArtWay of Jonathan Koestlé-Cate's excellent book, Art and the Church: A Fractious Embrace - Ecclesiastical Encounters with Contemporary Art.

In the review I say that: 'Art and the Church: A Fractious Embrace is a book made for these times, while opening up a broader discussion regarding language and concepts with relevance to encountering contemporary art in ecclesiastical contexts. The book is particularly pertinent because it accurately identifies the revival that is underway in encounters between the Church and contemporary art, while asking probing questions of the direction such encounters are currently taking. Koestlé-Cate’s informed suggestions of new conversation starters mean that this is a book to which those involved in these encounters will frequently return for renewed insight and challenge.'

Koestlé-Cate introduces a range of genuinely innovative and instructive concepts to the discussion of art and the Church, often drawn from his wide-ranging reading in other disciplines. In the spirit of reflection that he invokes, in the review I also suggest consideration be given to several counter-weights to some of the main planks of Koestlé-Cate's argument.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Late, Late Service - Agnus Dei.

Friedhelm Mennekes, Dom Sylvester Houédard, Mark Dean & Sister Corita Kent

Andy Crouch executive editor of CT, has written recently on the church's relationship to the arts claiming that faith and the Arts represents a fragile friendship: "Even as churches are more willing to engage the arts, artists who work at the highest levels of craft are engaging the church less readily."

My view is, increasingly, that that only seems to be the case because of a conspiracy of silence on both sides; a Church focused on contemporary engagement with the Arts either does not know, does not acknowledge or does not wish to learn from its recent history of engagement, while the contemporary art world maintains the outdated view that the Church, when acting as patron or curator, will inevitably seek to exercise the same level of control that was shown when it held the principal powers of patronage in the Western world.

Despite having for many years been fascinated by and having documented the relationship between faith and the Arts (see Airbrushed from Art History, Sabbatical Art Pilgrimage and Christianity and literature, for example), I am continually uncovering new (to me) examples of modern or contemporary engagements between the Arts and faith.

Jonathan Koestlé-Cate's book Art and the Church: A Fractious Embrace - Ecclesiastical Encounters with Contemporary Art provided the example of Friedhelm Mennekes, a Jesuit who, for over 30 years, has been involved with exhibitions at the crossroads between art and religion: 

"... he introduces works of art of our time into old and new churches – a gesture that elicits broad discussion. From one side he is praised and from another blamed, yet he steadfastly goes his way.

Mennekes has been engaged in many discussions with artists through exhibitions and lectures that address this vital relationship of creative expression and experienced religion, such as Donald Baechler, Joseph Beuys, Christian Boltanski, James Brown, James Lee Byars, Francis Bacon, Eduardo Chillida, Marlene Dumas, Jenny Holzer, Anish Kapoor, Barbara Kruger, Arnulf Rainer, David Salle, Cindy Sherman, Andreas Slominski, Antoni Tàpies, Rosemarie Trockel, and Bill Viola among others. Mennekes poses systematic questions, adressing individual works and also their vital relationship to the broader world of contemporary culture. He seeks structural correspondences and parallels that address our experience of a faith and doubts in organized religion as well as the secular worlds."

Similarly, work by the artist and arts chaplain, Mark Dean, has highlighted work by the late Benedictine priest, theologian and Concrete poet Dom Sylvester Houédard (aka dsh). Lucy Newman Cleeve writes:

"dsh understood his visual poems and ‘typestracts’ as “icons depicting sacred questions,” and Dean’s video works, which have been described by David Curtis as “votive offerings”, also function in the interrogative mode. In each case, there is a tacit acceptance that answers will not be forthcoming. For dsh, questions are met with mysteries, “to which the appropriate response can never be an ‘answer’ but has to be a growth of awareness and awe – gratitude, depth and pleasure.” This attitude of praise defines the creative act, but cannot necessarily be conveyed to the viewer who joins with the artist in constructing the meaning of the work …

dsh frequently affirmed the Dadaist principle that “the logos and the ikon are one.” Elsewhere, he wrote, “it is possible to think in images alone – in diagrams, models, gestures and muscular movements – as well as in words alone.” This recognition of the primacy of visual/tactile forms of language is also central to Dean’s work, in which the categories should also be extended to include music. In Dean’s work, the logos functions as a vessel or carrier of meaning, in much the same way as the ikon, whilst the juxtaposition of logos and ikon exponentially increase the possibilities of interpretation.

Dean’s work relies heavily upon the appropriation of, often iconic, film and video footage and music. It introduces visual and aural puns that behave as the generators and interrogators of meaning within the work, setting up a series of disputations between the different elements being sampled. Although the work is always carefully constructed, the reverberations and analogies created by placing potent symbols side by side are myriad. The screen becomes a crucible in which layers of meaning are compounded, burnt and refined."

The Henningham Family Press introduced me, some years ago, to the work of Sister Corita Kent (1918 – 1986), an activist nun who ran the art department at the Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles for over 20 years. Hazel Saunderson writes:

"... Sister Corita Kent's striking prints commanded me to revel both in the layered beauty of the printed word, and the direct messages they conveyed in pieces such as Life is Difficult (1965) and People Like Us Yes (1965).

So it was surprising to discover that although Sister Corita Kent was recognised by revolutionary design thinkers such as Buckminster Fuller, Charles and Ray Eames and Saul Bass, she was largely neglected by the art establishment at the time. However, this quirky 1960s pop artist’s list of admirers has continued to grow in time and the work crafted by the five contemporary artists (Ruth Ewan, Peter Davies, Ciara Phillips, Emily Floyd and Scott Myles) confirm that Kent’s lasting impression on art has remained, whilst the medium of printmaking has gained fresh appreciation in contemporary art."

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Mark Dean - Scorpio Rising 2.

Art and the Church: A Fractious Embrace

Jonathan Koestlé-Cate launched his book Art and the Church: A Fractious Embrace - Ecclesiastical Encounters with Contemporary Art at Southwark Cathedral on Tuesday with a conversation held with Revd Charles Pickstone.

The "book asks what conditions are favourable to enhancing and expanding the possibilities of church-based art, and how can these conditions be addressed? What viable language or strategies can be formulated to understand and analyse art's role within the church? Focusing on concepts drawn from anthropology, comparative religion, art theory, theology and philosophy, this book formulates a lexicon of terms built around the notion of encounter in order to review the effective uses and experience of contemporary art in churches. The author concludes with the prognosis that art for the church has reached a critical and decisive phase in its history, testing the assumption that contemporary art should be a taken-for-granted element of modern church life."

The conversation between Koestlé-Cate and Pickstone reviewed a selection of the artworks specifically explored and discussed in the book. The White Mass by James Lee Byars at Sankt Peter, Köln was held up as an exemplary temporary installation in an ecclesiastical context. The work "consisted of four pillars and a ring made of white marble, brightly lit by a 2000 watt bulb. The ring was set in the middle of the central aisle, with the pillars forming a square around it, which in turn echoed the rectangle formed by the central columns of the church. Each pillar had two letters carved at the top, which represented a different aspect of the questioning spirit of the work. During Mass the white-clad priest and his two acolytes interacted with the work in an orchestrated synthesis of performance and worship."

Fr Friedhelm Mennekes, the incumbent at Sankt Peter, Köln, "exemplifies a view at the other extreme to [Jacques] Maritain et al, declaring a fundamental distrust of the believing artist. Mennekes simply refuses to use Christian artists, since artistic vision, he cautions, is always in danger of being compromised, or taking second place to, Christian zeal. In this he follows [Père Marie-Alain] Couturier's lead."

This view has no time, therefore, for the approach of the Diocese of London's Capital Vision 2020 which aims to build a growing network of vibrant individuals from throughout the worlds of art and culture in London who can speak the language of creatives, engaging and taking the Church into that world and, as creative Christians, helping the Church resonate with its culture while still remaining countercultural disciples of Jesus Christ.

At the same time, the celebrations of the Mass during Byars' installation had much in common with the emphasis on decentralized leadership, congregational participation, multi-sensory experience, ritual and narrative form found in alternative worship. This was perhaps most the case in relation to the anarchic experiments in transformance art offered by the Belfast-based collective Ikon who challenged the distinction between theist and atheist, faith and no faith and whose main gathering employed a cocktail of live music, visual imagery, soundscapes, theatre, ritual and reflection in an attempt to open up the possibility of a theodramatic event. However, it is likely that even Ikon's inhabiting of a space on the outer edges of religious life would have been sufficiently detached from organised religion to escape Mennekes' hermeneutic of suspicion.

Koestlé-Cate writes that, "If a place for art that is not explicitly religious has been affirmed in the church today, an art that is cannot be proscriptively denied; if a place for Christian art or explicitly religious art is not denied, neither can it be prescriptively affirmed." The danger of this approach is that no-one, whether believing or non-believing artists, feels affirmed, and that was essentially the substance of the conversations that I was party to following the conversation between Pickstone and Koestle-Cate.

Their conversation moved on to discussion of the statue of Mary by David Wynne in the Lady Chapel of Ely Cathedral. In contrast with the approval given to The White Mass this was discussed as a lifeless commission which had rightly been savaged by Germaine Greer as 'bad' art.

The issue here is the basis on which such critiques and judgements are made. My perception is there are no shared objective criteria on which such judgements can be made and, as a result, are either entirely based on subjective criteria or on a consensus held by certain groups, generally those most responsible for promoting the work in the first place (i.e. gallery owners, curators and critics). In the case of Greer's critique, Wynne is part of the wrong group - the group favoured by the Prince of Wales - while Mennekes' measure is simply that non-believing artists are good and believing artists are bad.

Grayson Perry acknowledges in Playing to the Gallery that, within the art world, the rule by which people work is that of consensus plus time i.e. “If it's agreed amongst the tribe for a fairly sustained amount of time, then it becomes good taste.” This is, essentially, no different to the seeking after rules which Perry criticizes in the lower middle class: “good taste is just an illusion; it's just that they're obeying the rules of their tribe.” The reality is that many choose to work on the basis that, as artists, commissioners, critics, curators, gallery owners, historians or patrons, they know what good taste is because of consensus plus time. If one is in agreement with the consensus it is, of course, a safe place to be.

Koestlé-Cate's book is a substantive contribution to these debates and is of particular value because it explores what viable language or strategies can be formulated to understand and analyse art's role within the church. It may be, however, that what is revealed is that the language and strategies currently employed ultimately satisfy no one because they each privilege particular groups over others, as opposed to looking for the good in all.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Leonard Cohen - Almost Like The Blues.