Art and Religion at Biola; by Daniel A. Siedell

I just returned from a weekend symposium at Biola on art and religion.  (For the symposium overview and participants, see <www.Biola.edu/academics/undergrad/art/>.  I like Biola University a lot.  I like the campus; I like its proximity to Los Angeles; I like its spiritual direction; and I like the faculty and students.  It also embodies the strengths and weaknesses, the irreconcilable tensions, of a certain kind of conservative evangelicalism within which I lived my most formative years.  Eight years ago the Art Department invited me to give a series of lectures to their students.  It was instrumental in my development as a Christian and as a scholar. 

The symposium was shaped around art historian James Elkins’s little book, On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art (Routledge, 2004).  One of the most well-known and prolific art historians writing in English, Elkins, who professes no religious belief, offers an informative examination of the relationship of art and religion.  He concludes his study by observing:

I have tried to show why committed, engaged, ambitious, informed art does not mix with dedicated, serious, thoughtful, heartfelt religion.  Wherever the two meet, one wrecks the other…That is not to imply the two sides should maintain their mutual mistrust, but that the talk needs to be very slow and careful (115).

But despite this conclusion, Elkins, however, does not think that art and religion should go their separate ways.  He suggests that it is, on the contrary, “irresponsible not to keep trying” to develop a closer relationship (116).

Elkins seems dissatisfied with his own conclusions.  I find this one of the book’s chief virtues.  Art and religion do not mix.  However, we must continue to reflect on art and religion, together.  Elkins’ irenic approach offers a stiff challenge to those who claim to have it all figured out, who tie up too quickly and neatly the loose ends of both “art” and “religion.” Elkins simply cannot dismiss or disengage “art” from “religion” despite the fact that he cannot resolve their relationship in a way that he finds satisfying.  The two cultural practices, “art” and “religion,” are thus perpetually separated yet inextricably linked by that tiny conjunction, “and.”  Heeding Elkins’ warning, my remarks will be slow and careful and perhaps a bit too tentative for those who are anxious to formulate a definitive “Christian perspective” on Elkins or contemporary art.  But the stakes are too high.  My work as a critic, curator, and art historian is in large part predicated upon the meaning and significance of this tiny conjunction.

What cultural practices has Elkins connected with this tiny conjunction?  He defines religion as a “named, non-cultic, major system of belief” such as Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism, Islam, or Buddhism.  Elkins’ definition of religion is significant for two reasons.  First, it offers no value judgment.  It is clear that Elkins deeply respects religious belief and practice.  And in this he stands out in the contemporary art world, where most critics and art historians consider religious belief, consciously or not, to be merely a symptom of a lack of education, deficient thinking, or the result of unfortunate geographical location.  Moreover, Elkins also includes in his definition of religion what he calls their “trappings,” such as “rituals, liturgies, catechisms, calendars, holy days, and what have you.”  This is an important observation, for religion is not merely the sum total of beliefs or dogmas to which one must give mental assent.

Elkins’ definition of art is also important.  “Art is whatever is exhibited in galleries in major cities, bought by museums of contemporary art, shown in biennales and the Documenta, and written about in periodicals such as Artforum, October, Flash Art, Parkett, or Tema Celeste.”  Elkins’ frank assertion of high or museum art and its continued life through the narratives of modernism and postmodernism in artistic practice poses an immediate challenge to the evangelical community, which often dismisses modernist high art and the contemporary art world as elitist and anti-Christian.  In its place, it has tended to redefine “art” in one of three ways.  First, it identifies “authentic” art with the figurative style of the Renaissance and Baroque and transmitted through the academic tradition.  Second, it defines high art as liturgical art or art produced for the Church as patron.  These first two approaches result in an exaggerated and distorted attachment to a Golden Age, when high art and Christianity allegedly operated hand in glove and communicated seamlessly to their “audience.”  Third, it eschews fine art altogether and engages contemporary visual culture through film, music, and design.  The result is that discussions about “art and religion” from these perspectives redefine “art” in order to work more closely with what is already understood to be “religion.”  In other words, art is shaped to accommodate religion.  But Elkins’ approach, which emerges from the contemporary art world, not from a pre-determined religious commitment, bends neither “art” nor “religion,” and thus offers to the Christian community a different way to conceive of these practices.  Evangelicals simply cannot dismiss the history and development of modern art as irrelevant.  This approach keeps the contemporary embodiment of high art at arm’s length, to say the least.  The problem, particularly for art departments like Biola, is that contemporary artistic practice, as Elkins defines it, is not at arm’s length.  It is next door.  It is in the graduate programs, commercial galleries, and world-class museums only a few miles away. 

An important reason why art and religion, as Elkins defines them, do not mix is that each side has calcified a view of the other that ultimately insulates their most committed practitioners from recognizing deeper connections between them.  Each side regards the other to be important in theory but has, through corrupted contemporary practice, denigrated its true nature.  So, from the perspective of artistic practice, the cranky Christian Right and soppy televangelists have obscured the teachings of Jesus; and from the Christian perspective, the work of Jeff Koons, Damien Hurst, and the Chapman Brothers have made a mockery of the achievements of Raphael, Rembrandt, and Giotto.  Despite the significant grain of truth in each criticism, such perspectives tend to weaken the virtue of self-criticism, ignoring the log in one’s eye as one obsesses about the splinter of wood in the eye of the Other.  Elkins’ book is refreshingly free of such distortions. 

Elkins’ great strength as a scholar lies in his ability to develop taxonomies and other categories as a means to sort out, divide, and analyze complex problems.  This yields important and significant results when he explores art and religion.  However, I would like to push further, complicate things a bit by finessing Elkins’ definitions of religion and art, by looking at that tiny conjunction, “and,” that strange space between religion and art, which can seem as vast as Lessing’s ugly broad ditch.  My approach takes his two clean, tidy rooms, one labeled “art” and the other “religion,” and mess them up just a little bit.  Rather than see this tiny conjunction that keeps art and religion together yet perpetually apart, I consider it to be porous, to be a hallway that connects them.  It is a hallway that not only connects them, that enables movement from one to the other and back, but is also messy, where stuff from each of the rooms spills out.  Although I do considerable work in each of these rooms, most my time, however, seems to be spent in the cluttered hallway as I shuttle back and forth.

The porosity of this hallway is risky, however, as I have learned through my experience with artist Enrique Martínez Celaya.  As I approached his work from a distinctive Christian theological, philosophical, and aesthetic perspective, his work pushed back, not necessarily in resistance, but to exert pressure on my preconceived patterns of thought.  In important ways, looking at his pictures and reflecting on them over the last five years has played a role in my own religious development every bit as important as my reading of the Scriptures, study of the Fathers and church history, and involvement in spiritual practices.  This is all the more surprising because Martínez Celaya is not a religious believer despite the religiosity of his artistic practice.  His work embodies Wittgenstein’s enigmatic admission, “I am not a religious man but I cannot help seeing everything from a religious point of view.”  Rather than take as rigid and static a certain Christian worldview which one merely applies to contemporary art in order to decode the worldview of the artist, the integrity and aesthetic complexity of the work of art should at the very least be allowed to shape a more self-reflective and richly textured position.  But this also applies to artists, critics, and art historians who reveal a shocking lack of knowledge about religion in general and Christianity in particular even while their own practices are in perilously close proximity.  But both religion and art have their constituencies, their board members, patrons, colleagues, and the like that conspire against such messiness.  Both have their confessional watchdogs.  That is why my experience of this cluttered hallway, although exhilarating and productive, is also terrifying and sometimes lonely.  There are very few people in this hallway.  But, there are some.  I meet Martínez Celaya there.  And I also meet New York-based independent curator, philosopher, critic Klaus Ottmann, curator of the Site Santa Fe Biennial in 2006.  An avowed atheist who has told me unapologetically that art is his religion, Ottmann, Martinez Celaya, and I have had provocative discussions of our shared interest in Kierkegaard’s “Fear and Trembling,” Andrei Tarkovsky’s film, The Passion of Andrei Rublev, Pascal’s Pensées, and St. Augustine’s Confessions.  That the greatest icon painter in the history of the Church, an existentialist Lutheran philosopher’s text on Abraham and Isaac, private thoughts by a Catholic mathematician, and the conversion story of one of the greatest saints of the Latin Church could be the common ground for discussion with an agnostic Cuban-born artist, atheistic German-born critic, and a rather conservative Christian art historian from Nebraska has to speak to something significant.

Let me suggest that this tiny conjunction between art and religion, this cluttered and narrow hallway between their tidy rooms, is liturgical practice.  It is the liturgy that is the porosity between art and religion.  Both religion and art are embodied.  And the heart and soul of any religion is its liturgy.  Religion is not merely or simply “believed,” as if it is the sum total of our intellectual thoughts about it; it is practiced.  It is, literally, religion’s work.  It is art’s work as well. 

Sensitivity to the liturgical and sacramental dimension of contemporary artistic practice requires, however, that Christians practice a Christianity that is liturgical and sacramental.  Evangelicalism, however, is anti-liturgical and anti-sacramental and so it is largely insensitive to those aspects in contemporary artistic practice that might resonate most strongly with religious practice in general and Christian practice more specifically.  Contemporary art deserves a richer, fuller, deeper and more expansive Christianity, one that is nourished by a liturgical and sacramental worldview, which can experience, interpret, and find meaningful even something as strange as contemporary artistic practice.

St. Paul had a choice on Mars Hill.  He could easily have condemned as blasphemous those altars erected by the Greeks to the unknown god.  That seems to be the strategy in much reflection on contemporary art from a Christian perspective.  But St. Paul did not do that.  As he walked around those monuments and altars he creatively interpreted them to be, in fact, altars to the one true God, whom the Greeks honored without full knowledge.  St. Paul’s apologetic was to complete their knowledge, to fulfill it, not to destroy it.  That is the model for Christian work in the contemporary art world.  It is to show how and in what way contemporary artistic practice participates in, embodies, and points to religious truth, whether or not the artists themselves intend as much. 

The Russian Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann once said, echoing the Church Fathers, that to be a Christian means to see Christ everywhere. But we, as Christians, become comfortable seeing Christ where we expect to see him, where we want to see him.  But Christ is everywhere, even in the contemporary art world.  Do we have the courage and imagination to find Christ there, even if it risks messing up our own tidy artistic and religious rooms?

Christ is Risen!  Christos Anesti!

Comments

[millinerd]

He is risen indeed! Alethos anesti!

Thanks for this post Dan. Your Mars Hill analogy conveys a charitable, but not undemanding, view of contemporary art. The fact that you are willing, following Paul, to not merely revel in the unknown, but actually (with requisite humility) proclaim sets you apart from the LP paradigm of Christian art engagement that you so incisively criticized here before. That willingness also, I imagine, has a lot to do with why Elkins et. al. find you an interesting conversation partner.

Your hallway analogy brings to mind Lewis' famous use of it in Mere Christianity:

"But it is in the rooms, not in the hall, that there are fires and chairs and meals. The hall is a place to wait in, a place from which to try the various doors, not a place to live in."

I'd like to suggest that the hallway may be a place where art and religion can meet, but not remain. If your friend Klaus Ottman is right - that art can be a religion - then something may have to happen to art before it can participate in the liturgy of another religion. That is, it must be willing to bend the knee.

Likewise, perhaps a Christian icon need bend the knee to "Art" before it can be hung in a gallery!

[John]

Please check out these two related essays on Art & Religion.
The Rebirth of Sacred Art and Transcendental Realism

1. www.adidabiennale.org/curation/index.htm
2. http://global.adidam.org/books/transcendental-realism.html

[JP]

I think that your critique of much of contemporary Christianity's attitude toward art and some of your suggestions for improvement are true and valuable.

But as you point out, it is also very important to examine Elkins’ definition of art.

Elkins says (I'm quoting you) that “Art is whatever is exhibited in galleries in major cities, bought by museums of contemporary art, shown in biennales and the Documenta, and written about in periodicals such as Artforum, October, Flash Art, Parkett, or Tema Celeste.”

Now Elkins' definition may be a good definition of *contemporary* art, but it would be very unwise for anyone to uncritically accept it as a definition of Art, per se. This is so not merely for any and every religious community, but for everyone in the world who thinks at all about art, regardless of their religious beliefs.

I say this because Elkins' definition of art is at best foolishly parochial and unthinking, and at worst arrogantly self-serving (if not by him, then by many people in the contemporary art community). This shallow definition unthinkingly enthrones any artistic fad that merely happens, for whatever reason, to currently be in vogue, while it arrogantly defines out of existence or consideration all other art, no matter how brilliant, humane, or beautiful. As Chesterton says, it enthrones “that arrogant oligarchy that merely happens to be walking around”.

But by this definition all art that is not currently being displayed in a very limited number of periodicals or galleries “in major cities” is defined as “not art” - whether that art was by Michaelangelo, Monet, or the cave-painters of Lascaux. Clearly then, Elkins' definition is at best nonsense; at worst it is arrogant and perverse nonsense. (I hope for Elkins' sake that you misquoted him, and he actually said “contemporary art”, but in either case my point remains, since this and similar definitions have of course been foisted on the world by the Modernist art community for decades now.)

So your comment that Elkins' definition “poses an immediate challenge to the evangelical community, which often dismisses modernist high art and the contemporary art world as elitist and anti-Christian”, while certainly true, significantly misses the mark here, I respectfully submit. For one thing, Elkins' challenge is in no way restricted to the evangelical Christian community, but due to his definition it is a challenge to the entire worldwide community of artists, art lovers, and indeed all thinking people.

The fundamental problem with Elkins' challenge is precisely his definition, not anyone else's response to it. The problem with his definition is not that it is anti-Christian, nor that it is elitist (although it is), nor simply that it is wrong. The fundamental problem with Elkin's definition – like the majority of Modernists and Modernism – is that it is anti-rational and (when one actually examines it) anti-art.

[JP]

Re-reading my comments above, it seems to me that they might be read by others as being angry, indignant, or rude, so I want to correct that possible impression.

My intention was to politely, directly, but firmly register my strong disagreement with Elkins' *definition of art*, because I think his definition is seriously flawed, and that definitions in debates are very important. I was not agreeing or disagreeing with anything else in Daniel's comments.

I certainly agree that Christians should be respectfully conversing with contemporary artists about their art; we are to be "in the world", even while we should not be "of it". I also strongly agree that "Art" is not and should not be restricted to religious art.

But, as I said in my original comments, I think there is a lot more wrong with much of contemporary "art" than just it's being non-religious or anti-religious.

[abraham lemons]

Dan,
Paul's first reaction on Mars Hill was "paraxuno", provoked to anger because of all the idols. I don't think he was respecting their artwork, especially sculptures. God's attitude toward idols is well known and exhibited in the OT. (It's also clear that God appreciates great art as exhibited in His designs of the Tabernacle and Temple). On the other hand, he was specifically targeting the sculpture to a god that was unknown (their attempt to cover all the bets?) as it provided an entry point into their conversations. With all the respect due you, we have to be careful not to push the passage beyond what it actually conveys.