Glasnost continues

A decade ago in Seven Days in the Art World Sarah Thornton profiled art historian Thomas Crow in a book describing art as an "alternate religion for atheists." Today the same Thomas Crow, in his book No Idols: The Missing Theology of Art, demands that the "interdiction against theology" in art history and criticism be lifted.

Perhaps it's just me but I'm sensing a pattern here.

Don't miss the chance to see Crow in conversation with Ben Quash & James Elkins at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The event is entitled Idols & Taboos: Modern & Contemporary Art and Theology Today.

Where: Ballroom, MacLean Center, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 112 S. Michigan Ave, Chicago 60603 USA
When: Thursday May 23, 6-7:30pm

Art History & Prayer

Before the humanities, mad with science envy, gave up on point of view, one could get away with a lot. Here's Henry Adams describing the windows of Chartres Cathedral in 1904:

You had better stop here, once for all, unless you are willing to feel that Chartres was made what it is, not by artist, but by the Virgin.  If this imperial presence is stamped on the architecture and the sculpture with an energy not to be mistaken, it radiates through the glass with a light and colour that actually blind the true servant of Mary. One becomes, sometimes, a little incoherent in talking about it; one is ashamed to be as extravagant as one wants to be; one has no business to labour painfully to explain and prove to one's self what is as clear as the sun in the sky; one loses temper in reasoning about what can only be felt, and what ought to be felt instantly, as it was in the twelfth century, even by the truie qui file and the ane qui vielle. Any one should feel it that wishes; any one who does not wish to feel it can let it alone. Still, it may be that not one tourist in a hundred--perhaps not one in a thousand of the English-speaking race--does feel it, or can feel it even when explained to him, for we have lost many senses. 

Interestingly, Henri Nouwen gets at the same idea when describing not the Virgin at Chartres, but prayer to God in a common room:

The "first and final" movement is so central to our spiritual life that it is very hard to come in touch with it, to get a grasp on it, to get hold of it, or even - to put a finger on it. Not because this movement is vague or unreal, but because it is so close that it hardly allows the distance needed for articulation and understanding. Maybe this is the reason why the most profound realities of life are the most easiest victims of trivialization.  

Newspaper interview with monks who have given their life to prayer in silence and solitude out of burning love for God, usually boil down to silly stories about changes in regulations and seemingly strange customs. Questions about the "why" of love, marriage, the priesthood or any basic life decision usually lead to meaningless platitudes, a lot of stuttering and shaking of shoulders. Not that these questions are unimportant, but their answers are too deep and too close to our innermost being to be caught in human words.

Wonderfully, both Henries continued to articulate themselves despite the difficulties, to similar result. No wonder the Italian scholar Paolo Prodi recently remarked, in a high profile art history publication, that “there exists a relation between prayer and art that has not yet been explored. This is a task for future research."

Such research, which is well underway, might even have a point of view. 

Iconoclasm in the Age of Facebook

That art history is suppressed religious discourse is not a new idea.  "The familiar thesis of art as a secularized religion," wrote Joseph Koerner more than twenty years ago, "is a foundation of the historiography of painting as it developed in the discipline of art history since Romanticism"(148).  Or as James Elkins put it more recently, "some of the interpretive discourses in contemporary art history are implicitly religious… some of art history… is a shadow discourse.  It wants to say things about transcendence, the sacred, the spiritual, but in an academic setting – and for many reasons that continue to confuse and fascinate me, it feels it cannot." And so, resisting "several decades of sometimes ruthlessly secularized art criticism," Elkins demurs:

Getting to know some of the many careful and reflective people who write about religious art from outside academia has made me sensitive to the absence of personally engaged conversations about religion (as opposed to historiographic, philosophic, or sociological conversations) in academia.  The excellent scholars of religion who are themselves religious, and value their scholarship principally as a way to enrich their religious experience, have shown me a different way of reading art history.  To them, some texts in art history are indirect, in that they explore religious issues without identifying them as religious (133).

Elkins appears to suggest that discussion around the perennial topic of iconoclasm will be hamstrung until this is somehow acknowledged within academia as well.  And here is where Baylor's Natalie Carnes comes in.  Taking issue with two recent books (Simpson's Under the Hammer and Latour's On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods) Carnes offers a conceptual shift in what she calls a "Prelude to a Theology of Iconoclasm" (h/t Tanner Capps).

Iconophilia need not be sanitized of iconoclasm to be iconophilia.  Indeed, iconophilia may even require iconoclasm, inasmuch as loving an image qua image may fail to take seriously the particular claim an image makes on the beholder.  ...The iconophila in which there is no hidden heart of iconoclasm is an iconophilia without philos.  It is iconapatheia.

Carnes' point that iconoclasm and iconophilia coinhere has precedent.  Koerner elsewhere suggested that "In Christian thinking, every semblance hides a dissemblance and every dissemblance, a semblance"; and David Freedberg likewise observed that "the love and fear of images, as the Byzantine arguments show so clearly, are indeed two sides of one coin" (405).  But whereas Koerner and Freedberg observe this dynamic, Carnes offers the same insight in the context of a creative theological project - an "ecumenical theology of iconoclasm," which crosses into art history's forbidden territory, a world (foreclosed by Koerner) "beyond representation."  Wagering on transcendence, Carnes avoids the very quality that Elkins finds so dissatisfying in art history, the ineffectual attempt "to speak about religion while remaining appropriately secular."

In an age of adverstising - where so many images rely upon apathy (iconapatheia) but deserve active resistance (iconoclasm), does iconophilia less robust than the one proposed by Carnes stand a chance?  Michael Sandel sounds the alarm, lamenting that corporate images are creeping onto once inviolate spaces - fire-hydrants, ballpark bases, and even human foreheads.  Faced (or defaced) with this situation, the iconoclastic treatises of the Reformation, subsequently discarded by their confessional progeny for admittedly legitimate reasons, are ripe to be recovered - not as Christological statements (they're often wrong on that front), but as early versions of Adbusters.  But recast in the wider, irreducibly iconophile framework of ecumenical Christianity, such broadsides can also offer the one thing that Adbusters never has:  A solution.

Warburg's Wish

Legend has it that art historian Aby Warburg famously gave up a considerable inheritance to his younger brother on condition that said brother would buy him any book he ever wanted.  So the Warburg library was born.  Such a love of books makes it curious that Warburg dreamed of an art history without texts.  Because words are gifts as much as pictures, I'm skeptical of the project; but I will say that an image replication made by sophomore David Wainwright for my Art 101 class at Wheaton College this semester (using self portraits) outdoes many textual commentaries on Hieronymus Bosch that I've read.

Left: Bosch's Christ Carrying the Cross (1515) Right: David Wainwright's Wheaton College replication for Art 101 (2013)

Ruskin: Beauty: Justice

A student walks into my office and asks "What is beauty?"  I reached for Roger Scruton, but better perhaps to have reached for John Ruskin's Modern Painters.  

[Beauty] is either the record of conscience, printed in things external, or it is a symbolizing of Divine attributes in matter, or it is the felicity of living things, or the perfect fulfillment of their duties and functions.  In all cases it is something Divine, either the approving voice of God, the glorious symbol of him, the evidence of his kind presence, or the obedience to his will by him induced and supported (MP 2:378).

The typical objection to such exalted, theological takes on beauty is that they (presumably) neglect justice, and this critique has legitimate targets.  "Whatever the surrounding evil, for the artist the sun is always at the zenith," wrote the abolitionist Unitarian minister Moncure Conway.  "The reformer's zeal, much less his discontent, admirable elsewhere, is inconsistent with the repose of the spirit which wins beauty to the side of the artist."  So much for artistic justice.

But Ruskin was different, and to think his aesthetic ambitious were out of touch with the spirit of reform requires no knowledge of his writings whatsoever.  On the contrary, it was just this Ruskinian take on beauty that was used to attack frivolity.  As the unjustly forgotten Yale art historian and minister James Mason Hoppin put it.

Since [Ruskin’s] prophetic voice has been heard art has risen from its degraded position as the slave of luxury, as a bourgeois conventionality, as a mere decoration of life however brilliant, and its true nature is seen that it has a vital and eternal beauty belonging to divine things (The Early Renaissance, p. iv.)

Yes, this scrambles tired dichotomies.  Phil Ochs' admirable suggestion that "protest is your diamond duty...  ah, but in such an ugly time the true protest is beauty," is not some wisp of 60's inspiration, but a return to indigenous American Protestant aesthetic theory (whether Ochs realized this or not), and boy do we need it now.  American art history, fortunately, is far more deeply rooted in the other bearded London economic theorist than in that Jewish prophet who lost religion (to borrow Mackay's formulation), Karl Marx.  But don't tell that to anyone who cherishes the myth that things only got serious with Meyer Schapiro.

More Secrets of Art History Revealed!

Hugo Ball at Zurich's Cabaret Voltaire, 1916

If Preziosi only takes us to the frontier of post-secular art history, what would it mean for a younger generation to enter in?  Consider that supposed stronghold of religionless resistance, that well-defended fortress of secular subversion, forever issuing impious phalanxes of the atheistic avant-garde, the Dada.  Certainly they can be trusted to keep the cult out of culturati.  But in Leonard Aldea's hands (The Implicit Apophaticism of Dada Zurich: A Spiritual Quest by Means of Nihilist Procedures), Dada is less a vehicle for nihilism than a chapter in the history of apophatic theology. 

Just like apophatic theology, the apophatic art of the Dadaists defines its object of knowledge exclusively by saying what the object is not, never by stating what the object is. In doing so, each negative definition is a step forward toward that final affirmative statement, although it never carries positive information about it.

This is not a case of theology retreating to the tame suburbs of critical theory, instead it is the elevation of theory to a highrise loft in the City of God.  For theology is evidently the origin (paging Holsinger) and destination of theory's restless striving.  Dada's apophatic art, however, needs be nestled within a cataphatic, declarative moment (an essential lesson for theologians and artists alike).  Even Marcel Duchamp, suggests Aldea, was an inconsistent nihilist, for "he never actually stopped explaining that nothingness... never stopped using this very nothingness to create with."  To say nothing of the founder of Dada, Hugo Ball, whose diary for July 31, 1920 insists that “the great, universal blow against rationalism and dialectics, against the cult of knowledge and abstractions, is: the incarnation.”  Aldea sees Dadaism as not an attack on meaning, but "the bastion of human dignity in an age when humanity was extremely devalued and reduced to the empty carcasses of the many theoretical systems that saw their failure in the reality of the First World War." 

Once the nihilist stamp is removed from our perception of Dadaists, and their techniques are looked at and assessed from an apophatic perspective, future research into the intrinsic theology of this most prolific artistic movement can address a number of other, more in-depth questions. 

Aldea's article is just a beginning, and his thesis is confirmed - as he alludes but does not explore - with Ball's conversion with his wife Emmy (let's not forget her!) to Catholicism (a bit more on that from me here).  Aldea points to the need for further research, and indeed the most immediate necessity is for someone to increase the accessibility of Ball's writings on Byzantine saints (the original avant-garde) by translating Byzantinisches Christentum: Drei Heiligenleben (1923). Furthermore, if religion necessarily muffles resistance (as Preziosi assumes), then why does Ball's attack on German nationalism only increase after his conversion, as evidenced by his 1924 Die Folgen der Reformation (reminiscent, incidentally, of Brad Gregory's The Unintended Reformation). 

Some German theologians have made these connections already. Notably, however, Aldea concludes his exploration of Dada not by exposing art history's limitations, but theology's.

Almost a century after Dada appeared, modern scholarship has failed to investigate these intriguing connections between the art, theology and philosophy of the beginning of the twentieth century. Even more frustrating is that, outside the world of art historians, the theological and philosophical ideas behind Modern Art are still being read with the interpreting tools used for representational art, although we quite clearly deal with an entirely new phenomenon. Art is still expected to be, and interpreted as if it were, merely the visual reproduction of previously formulated theological or philosophical thought, and not a source of original thought in its own right. The Avant-garde brought to the foreground the discrimination between two theological methodologies, the written and the visual, and also the idea of a theology developed and expressed through the arts. The risk of such discrimination against Modern Art, especially among theologians, is that by our refusal to at least consider art as a proper methodology for original theological investigation, we may in fact reject an authentic source of revelation.

Which returns us to that previous question:  If (according to Preziosi) "Art [is] the very esperanto of European hegemony," then why perpetuate the odious oppression of art history?  Because while Preziosi is right to have exposed art history as a hegemonic tool of the West - it is not only that. Should the discipline reach back to its repressed origins far before the Enlightenment or Renaissance, the icon's role in resisting such a narrative emerges.  Art reveals itself as theology (paging Andreopoulos).  And while this may long have been so,  only recent developments in the (not hopelessly hegemonic) discipline of art history have permitted such ocular epistemology to unfurl.  Only with the grinding of this particular lens of investigation has art's theological dimensions to come more fully into focus.

This is where the "theology and art" genre - a laudable venture to be sure - goes wrong, with its chiefly philosophical, as oppose to art historical, conversation partners.  It frequently fails to familiarize itself (as do many visual theology enthusiasts) with the disciplinary vehicle that most privileges the noblest of the senses. How many theologians, for example, have even heard of Alois Riegl?

That said, the visual cannot remain disjoined from the verbal anymore than can apophatic from cataphatic theology. “The word and the image are one," wrote Hugo Ball, who knew his New Testament and ecumenical councils well enough to percieve Christ as both logos and eikon.  "Painting and composing poetry belong together. Christ is image and word. The word and the image are crucified.”  For this reason, as awkward as neologisms can be, we might call the territory being described here as theography, because in Byzantine Greek, the verb graphein encapsulates both writing and drawing.   Art history, an admittedly verbal discipline that nevertheless serves the visual, exploits this symbiotic insight.  There are innumerable theological questions that would be recast - if not resolved - through a rigorous, up to date art historical investigation alongside more routine verbal ventures. 

Theography, for lack of a better term, is not the only future of art history, but it is one of them - and to foreclose this possibility would be to artificially limit the interpretive dilation that critical theory and the visual culture debate of the nineties allowed.  If it can be done with Dada, it can be done with myriad artistic movements more.  Make no mistake, art's theological potentialities also mean that art has, does and will operate as very bad theology too.  But the grander point is that the secret of art history, or at least another of them, is that the discipline does not take its place under the queen of the sciences, but participates in her reign.

The Secret of Art History

Oh how that brief list of theologically inclined, post-secular art history could be expanded.  The second edition of the standard grad student intro to the discipline, now ends - you may be surprised to discover - on a decidedly religious note. "What has continually haunted the discourse of art history is its foundation role, beginning most forcefully in the Romantic era, as a secular theology or coy religiosity..."  Donald Preziosi (we assume the editor to be the author of the book's unattributed coda) concludes half a thousand pages of historiography by identifying:

[The] (re-)emergence of the problem of religion in art and art history...  There is a differential intricacy of and an obverse complementarity between artistry and religiosity, art and religion, which, pursued in all its implications, would necessarily lead to a fundamental recasting of our entire understanding of both art and religion: a recasting wherein both these nominally and institutionally distanced practices are more importantly understood as different perspective upon a common concern - the nature of representation or signification as such. 

This is evident enough.  Hence the inadequacy of art historical genealogies (like the one here being quoted!) that begin with Giorgio Vasari, or (even worse) Johann Joachim Winckelmann, instead of the iconoclastic controversy, not to mention the book of Exodus.  What is far less evident is the truth of Preziosi's metaphysical claim casually embedded in said coda in the form of an insistence that religion is pure construction without remainder.  "Religion," proclaims - no, preaches Preziosi, "is a mode of artistry which is in denial of (or is duplicitous regarding) the fabricatedness of its own inventions, commonly attributing that artifice to the 'design' of an immaterial, and (for sectarian believers) a pre-existent and originating force of being."  Faced with such a colonialist caricaturization, why not let the subaltern (a "religious" person like David Bentley Hart, for example) speak? 

Religion in the abstract does not actually exist, and almost no one (apart from politicians) would profess any allegiance to it.  Rather, there are a very great number of systems of belief and practice that, for the sake of convenience, we call 'religions,' though they could scarcely differ more from one another, and very few of them depend upon some fanciful notion [as Preziosi seems to assume] that religion itself is a miraculous exception to the rule of nature.  Christians, for instance, are not, properly speaking, believers in religion; rather, they believe that Jesus of Nazareth, crucified under Pontius Pilate, rose from the dead and is now, by the power of the Holy Spirit, present to his church as its Lord.  This is a claim that is at once historical and spiritual, and it has given rise to an incalculable diversity of natural expressions: moral, artistic, philosophical, social, legal, and religious.

So no, there is no necessary conflict between acknowledging fabrications and having faith, between, for example, knowing that the gospels were actually written (how could they not have been?) and believing that God speaks through them truthfully, or between acknowledging an icon was actually painted and that the dead saint that said icon refers to lives.  God, of course, is not a cause, not even a big cause - he is instead the premise of all causality, and his mysterious influence within the infinite network of causality that he inaugurated (even to the point of choosing a nation and donning human flesh) is called providence.  "He is in essence outside everything," writes Athanasius, "but inside everything by his own power." So until Preziosi can produce a satisfying explanation for why there is something rather than nothing (he is welcome to try), his instinctual assumption against the possibility of immateriality will be no different in kind that an assumption for it. 

This is not to dismiss Preziosi as much as to point out an unfortunate inconsistency.  He is, you see, one of the discipline's most deft deconstructors - a veritable suicide bomber embedded in one of art history's privileged professorial perches.  In what is surely one of the better sentences of art historical writing in the last two decades, he writes that "Art [is] the very esperanto of European hegemony."  Preziosi admits that "the brilliance of this colonization is quite breathtaking: there is no 'artistic tradition' anywhere in the world which today is not fabricated through historicism and essentialism of European museology and museography...."  Yes, art is hegemonic, and the world's teeming international network of monolithic museums prove it so.  "Art history makes colonial subjects of us all."

Why then continue to perform art history?  That's a good question for another post.  The point here is the unintentionally humorous one that an author who has (brilliantly, in my opinion) exposed art history's shallow roots in the stripped soil of the European Enlightenment, is tethered to that same Enlightenment's assumptions about "religion."  "The essential 'secret' of religion," writes Preziosi (wait for it... drum roll please...) "is that there really is no secret at all that is separate from its alleged 'expression.'"  But all this statement tells us, a statement so blithely broadbrush that the paint gets very thin indeed, is the essential secret of art history.  This being that that the discipline's colonialist, European (and yes, white male) Enlightenment secularity has gone so blissfully unquestioned that it has survived two decades of deconstruction without so much as a scratch.

Until now.  Hence the recent publication string that questions such secularism; and hence Preziosi's need to (grudgingly?) acknowledge religion in the sweetspot of the discipline's chief initiatory document (the grad school reader).  Donald Preziosi, then, is like a Moses of sorts.  He has traced art history's repressed consanguinity with religion, and has traveled far enough to see the mountains of post-secular art historical research.  The future (or at least one of them), he tells us, is in those hills.  And yet, Preziosi is sufficiently hindered with his discipline's secular presumptions to be able to enter that land himself.  As a result, even as he emblazons we religious people with a scarlet "R"...  we still thank him.

The Icon at Renaissance Ground Zero

If what I am saying (with qualifications) about academia's "religious turn" is correct, it would have to be demonstrable in one of my discipline's most central questions.  I attempt to make this case in a paper published in Art as Spiritual Perception.  Here's the abstract:

Attribution of Florence's Brancacci Chapel frescoes, a chief catalyst of Renaissance perspective, was once dubbed the most important question in the history of art.  An earlier study (1997) that traced the history of this connoisseur's dispute was so vexed by art historical contradictions that it concluded with fin de siècle subjectivist despair.  The latest study of the Chapel (2005), however, show a renewed interest in the sacred and liturgical dimensions of the structure, focusing especially on the Chapel's overlooked icon.  This both places an icon at ground zero of Renaissance perspective, and is further evidence for what has been called academia's "Religious Turn."

The book, full of similar essays that unearth art history's spiritual dimensions, is hard and rectangular, so by using it to stuff the stockings of all your loved ones (especially young children), you can save money.

How to Make History

One can smell 1990s academic prose, heavily seasoned with fin de siècle despair, from three book shelves away.  I was fortunate enough to go to graduate school when this kind of academic work had curdled.  People clearly wanted something new, and yet, the ladders used to attained academic posts of influence were built with such prose, so resistance was thin and scattered. Things change fast, however, and resistance is not so scattered anymore. One can find it books like this, or in this fantastic Festschrift for historian Caroline Walker Bynum, where Bruce Holsinger and Rachel Fulton Brown put it this way:

If (to generalize wildly) the ‘new cultural history’ of the 1980s and 1990s was taken up primarily with questions of representation and discourse and the ‘new cultural studies’ of the 1990s with questions of domination or power, the question now might seem to be, what kinds of issues and questions should govern the practice of "history in the comic mode."

 Post-ironic history in the comic mode, among other things, involves a refusal to

smirk at the past or to wink at the reader as if to say, "But we know this can't really be true."  Instead… [it is] to recognize at least implicitly (and, we could claim, more rigorously) that a hermeneutics of suspicion must always go hand –in-hand with what Paul Ricoeur has called a hermeneutics of the sacred: a fundamental trust and investment in what’s actually there, staring us in the eye, as an inextricable part of meaning and significance…

Because of the subject matter that Bynum investigates (Jesus as mother, the dietary practices of female saints, blood piety, material devotion), Bynum always seems to be part of the fashionable turns to the marginalized and grotesque, even while she transcends fashion by refusing to do history ironically.  Holsinger and Fulton try to isolate her method.  What they cannot find is a list of "musts" or "hot topics" or "regrettable lacunae in previous work" to be redressed.  The best formula they can identify is to "start with the text - or the image, or the statue, or the piece of music.  As you study to interpret it, pay attention above all to the things that surprise you and then see how they compare with the things that you expect."  Bynum became a trend setter exactly by refusing to set trends.  She just did the work, "seek[ing] out religiously grounded answers to religious questions, intellectually grounded answers to intellectual questions."

Ultimately, this kind of straightforwardness involves a degree of risk: 

The point of writing history is not...  somehow to cleanse ourselves, as it were, of the taint of the past- the humanist/Reformation/Enlightenment project of exposing the past as past and cordoning it off behind the fence of anachronism.  Rather, it is to allow ourselves still to be touched by the past....

Because Bynum claimed that "Every view of things that is not wonderful is false," Holsinger and Fulton insist that "Scholarly irony about the things that make us smile is out of place here. It is not possible to wonder ironically."  If avowedly Marxist historians (who will always be with us) are ever on the edge of ushering their students to a protest march, then medieval historians in the school of Bynum, regardless of their faith commitments, seem ever on the edge of having their students pray, or at least imagining what it'd be like to do so.

All this returns to mind the curious religious mood in the academy of late.  Fulton and Holsinger explain that the profession [history] "has taken its 'quantitative' turn, its 'cultural' or 'anthropological' turn, its 'feminist' turn, its 'linguistic' turn, its 'postmodern' turn, its 'postcolonial' turn, its second 'cultural' turn," and now, we could certainly add, its religious one.

But my colleague Tiffany Kriner has some pointed remarks in this respect.  In an article entitled Our turn now?, she ratchets up the aforementioned risk even higher, letting it get dangerously close to our carefully curated career trajectories.  She turns Girardian theory not on literary material, but on scholars themselves:  "Perhaps in light of Girard's understanding of Christ's nonviolent, nonsacrificial, nonrivaling love, Christians in literary [or, we could add, historical] study ought to give up the mimetic competition, or perhaps, turn from claiming the territory of 'the turn' toward something else."  Kriner argues for the most novel turn of all, a "turn from the trap of acquisitive mimesis in academic cultures."

Unless they straight up quit, however, Christians (of which I am one) still have to inhabit the academy.  Is it possible to do so while still taking up Kriner's challenge?  Perhaps so.  Even though none of us - individually or institutionally - will do it perfectly, the famous second century Letter to Diognetus affords an answer.  Here is an excerpt, with some translation tweaks of my own to accommodate the academic life:

For Christians are not distinguished from the rest of academia by country, language, or custom. For nowhere do they use methodologies of their own... nor do they practice an eccentric lifestyle.... But while they live in both Christian and secular universities, as each one’s lot was cast, and follow the local customs in dress and food and other aspects of life, at the same time they demonstrate the remarkable and admittedly unusual character of their own citizenship. They live in their own colleges, but only as aliens; they participate in everything as citizens, and endure everything as foreigners...  They are dishonored, yet they are glorified in their dishonor; they are slandered, yet they are vindicated. They are cursed, yet they bless; they are insulted, yet they offer respect...  In a word, what the soul is in a body, this the Christian is in the University.

Again, an impossible standard, but one worth advancing nonetheless.  That last sentence, it seems to me, even offers a reply to Marsden's well known book.  As Christians, it's too easy to overplay our distinction.  So long as guild standards are not gummed up with anti-religious prejudice (as they still sometimes are), we need those standards as much as anyone.  It may then be time, like Bynum, to simply do the work, to (in the case of historians) make history, while reneging the mimetic pressure that so frequently bedevils academic labor.   At the conclusion to his follow up to The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, Mark Noll argues that a besetting temptation for Christian scholars is to talk about how to engage the academy instead of actually doing it, like officials at a track meet perpetually calling the competitors to the starting line.  But the 90s are over, and the methodological openness of scholars like Bynum, Fulton and Holsinger gives us no excuse not to run. 

Post-Secular Academia: A Present Reality

If you don't think academia has gone religious you either 1) haven't been there in a while, 2) are pretending to ignore such an obvious development or 3) are part of a religious subculture invested in the notion of "secular academia" as a foil that galvanizes institutional identity, justifies a lack of engagement, and rallies donors who don't know better.

But what about the rise of programs in secularism?  Doesn't this disprove academia's supposed "religious turn"?  Quite the opposite.  Previously, the entire university flew under the banner of secularism.  Now, the secular perspective has been historicized and relegated to one field among others (exactly what once happened to religion).  Needless to say, secularism continues to have a legitimate place in the modern university, but it now has to be chosen.  The title of one recent publication says it all: The American University in the Postsecular Age.  Indeed, new superstructures of post-secular discourse are being swiftly erected, as evidenced by the invigorating discussions on sites such as the Immanent Frame.

To offer more evidence for this phenomenon, I best limit myself to the field of my terminal credentials: art history.  The secular narrative of art history goes...  or better, went like this:  Art and religion were once inseparable, but as the modern world progressed, art and religion grew further apart.  This simplistic narrative has not disappeared, but it has been profoundly destabilized by countless recent publications.  I try to get the word out about this every year or so, but because the evidence is almost as overwhelming as the determination to ignore it, here we go again.

Consider a brief tour through some recent publications.  Strangely, even ostensibly Christian medieval art required a corrective, leading to The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages (2005), a research path continued, to choose just one example, by Translating Truth (2011).  Meyer Schapiro's secularizing read of Romanesque sculpture has been undone in the discipline's journal of record, to the frustration of many.  The theological turn in Byzantine art is most evidenced in the translation of Pavel Florensky, whose thought is developed (not just regurgitated) in Clemena Antonova's Space, Time, Presence in the Icon (2010).

The undoing of Jacob Burckhardt’s secular Renaissance has been going on for decades, resulting in Christianity and the Renaissance (1990) and a host of more recent specialized studies giving special attention to religion such as The Controversy of Renaissance Art (2011) or The Vision and the Visionary in Raphael (2011), among others. The Baroque and beyond has enjoyed an overhaul with The Sacred Image in the Age of Art (2011), Rembrandt’s Faith (2009), or Sacred Spain: Art and Belief in the Spanish World (2010).

Contrary to popular perceptions, religious art flourished in the age of Enlightenment, a fact thoroughly documented by Art and Religion in Eighteenth Century Europe (2009).  The suppressed religious art of Romanticism has been recovered as well, leading to Representing Belief: Religion, Art, and Society in Nineteenth Century France (1992), Painting the Sacred in the Age of Romanticism (2009), or Painting the Bible: Representation and Belief in Mid-Victorian Britain (2006).  My colleague Rick Gibson explains that the same thing has been going on in the literature of this era, as evidence by The Romantic Reformation (1997).  In the realm of American art, Sally Promey encapsulated her field when she wrote the seminal article, “The ‘Return’ of Religion in Scholarship of American Art” (2003), a direction pursued further, for example, by George Inness and the Science of Landscape (2007).

Even the most doggedly secular of these sub-disciplines – the dominant field of contemporary art – has confessed its secular predicament and called, however halfheartedly, for change, as evidenced by Re-Enchantment (2008).  The big bad October crowd, sometimes accused of ignoring religion, appear to be loosening their secular grip as well.  In the second volume of of Art Since 1900 (2011), Benjamin Buchloh refers to Bill Viola’s “reinvesting representation with mythological imagery, even religious experience…" and Hal Foster speaks of “cultic reenchantment." It would be easy to overplay such prose, but just as easy to ignore it.  The article that led to Antonova's book subtitled Seeing the World with the Eyes of God, interestingly enough, first appeared in October.  In short, the pomo reaction to dry formalism and hard-headed historicism has fizzled, and the ensuing vacuum is being at least partially filled with faith.

Again, none of this is to suggest that the secular take on art has evaporated, that this interest in religion is fully informed (let alone traditional), or that the authors of the above publications are necessarily religious themselves.  Indeed, many of the authors make no claim of belief whatsoever, even while they emphasize the faith of others in their scholarship.  But if we were to include those who do profess faith, the list of religiously-minded perspectives on art grows, I remind you, downright unmanageable. 

For those without the time to catch up on this growing reading list, a cross-section of the above developments are captured by Timothy Gorringe's Earthly Visions: Theology and the Challenges of Art (2011), reviewed by your scribe not long ago in First Things.  In an impressive display of academic Aikido, Gorringe does not ignore or refuse the secular, but offers a "positive appreciation of secularity...  [which is] part and parcel of Christian revelation."  If Gorringe is right, then saying (as a secular art historian of yore once did) that “religious tutelage had to be broken” for the still life or landscape genre to emerge, is like saying that Christ, because he employed chaff, fields and coins in his parables, was necessarily an atheist. Gorringe conceptualizes a domain - more terrifying to some than the apocalypse itself - where "the secular as an autonomous 'godless' sphere simply disappears."

Graduate methodology courses in humanities used to triumphantly culminate with gender, sexuality, and race. But the religious turn renders this crescendo penultimate, especially considering that feminism and multiculturalism have found a new - and arguably more lasting - warrant under religious sponsorship. As I suggested, all of this is especially inconvenient for the remaining secularists and, strangely enough, for religious folk committed to the old arrangement as well.  Academia going religious means that we religious people might no longer be able to justify ignoring it.  And yet, the "emic" (as opposed to "etic") approach from actual believers - and the debates that such approaches generate - can help ensure that this recent turn of academic fashion remains interesting enough to last.

ADDENDUM: Please don't neglect further methodological reflections, not to mention part deux.

The Pro-Raphaelite Brotherhood

The way to correct an "art" (as oppose to icon) centered account of the history of images is not to denigrate the Renaissance, but to show how the icon pervaded it.  To give one of many examples of this scholarly strategy, here's Christian Kleinbub on Raphael:

Raphael's Transfiguration... does lead the viewer on a spiritual journey. The painting explicitly addresses the three varieties of vision that arise repeatedly in discussions of the contemplation of God.  The lower zone of the composition shows the struggle of external (corporeal) and internal (imaginary) vision in the confrontation of the apostles and the possessed boy's party, while the Tabor scene above shows the historical and imaginary vision of Christ himself, who satisfied the internal vision of the apostles below and also points beyond it....   Light falls on Christ's face from beyond the frame: it is the divine light of intellectual vision, the luce etterna of the Godhead...

Raphael's Transfiguration... in its sense of stillness, symmetrical setting, and iconic aspect, may well refer to traditional iconic images. The Renaissance viewer might even have assumed that the prominence of Christ's face carried a meaning like those more traditional works, referring like a symbol to the vision of the invisible God...

This devotional aspiration of Raphael's Transfiguration is remarkable in an age in which altarpieces were shedding some of the outward trappings of their more contemplative functions. Iconic altarpieces - where devotion of the kind described by [Nicholas of] Cusa might be centered and anticipated by static hierarchical forms - were being replaced by altarpieces that mainly depicted istoria comprising energetic narrative scenes.  Raphael, in fact, was one of the leaders of this movement, creating one of the first fully historiated altarpieces of the Renaissance in his Entombment...

But between Raphael's Transfiguration and almost all other Renaissance religious images lies an important difference, for Raphael's altarpiece does not simply invite but also describes the process by which the  mind is turned to internal vision of God.  Directly engaging the problem of how the icon can be used spiritually, it deploys its actors so that they do not merely play out their narrational roles but also enact  or figure  the very activity of contemplation in gestural terms...  The Transfiguration harmonized both narrative and iconic aspects of contemporary altarpieces, offering the marriage of the istoria, and all that the istoria stood for, to the spiritual function of the altarpiece through an unprecedented thematization of the stages of contemplative seeing.

That from Kleinbub's book Vision and the Visionary. The upshot is that the very thing the Pre-Raphaelites were looking for could be found...  in Raphael.

Ruskin to art history: "I am your father."

Art historian Henry Maguire on the persistence of John Ruskin:

Ruskin [through his interest in Byzantium] was a prophet of modernism, by which I mean the abstract, nonfigurative movements in twentieth-century art. But Ruskin, who was nothing if not full of contradictions, was at the same time a prophet of post-modernism. For Ruskin was above all else concerned with the moral dimension of art and its history, and, if there is one chord that unites postmodern discourses of art and art history, it is to give art and its criticism a grounding moral, or, as we would now say, ethical attitudes. Today both artists and historians of art are more engaged with political and social issues than was the previous generation. To many people now, modernist art an art history, with its emphasis on purely formal values, is at best irrelevant and lacking a social consciousness, and at worst playing into the hands of a corrupt and mercenary system of artists, connoisseurs, and dealers.

Hence the high modernist's luxuriance in form (which is bound for a comeback) is Ruskinian; and the more contextually-focused contemporary art historian's need to drive home some kind of multicultural moral may be inescapably Ruskinian as well.  Which is to say, the father of art history in the Anglophone (an important qualifier) world, who anticipated its many possible futures, was an evangelical (and a lifelong one at that).  Which is also to say, in art history, there is no scandal.

Such news felt strange at first, but I'm getting used to it.  For others, the reaction to such paternity has been something more like Luke's.

The Unmappable Terrain of Christianity and Art

James Elkins, a prolific art historian at the Art Institute of Chicago, is our best cartographer of the unruly terrain of art history and contemporary art.  Due to his unusual productivity, his books tend to be reviewed in bulk - about five at a time.  Some reviewers are impressed by his baffling range, others are clearly disturbed that his books rarely bear the mark of focused specialization (though he can do that too). 

But what especially disturbs some about Elkins is his refusal to light a candle at the altar of critical theory, which - until quite recently - was a prerequisite for academic success.  The reason for Elkins' demurral appears to be his frustration with theory's essential sameness:  "The wilderness of writing on twentieth-century painting," Elkins explains, "is really an orderly place where the majority of judgments are received opinions, derived from a very small number of models" (159).  Elkins' non-conformity to such models once earned him the opprobium of an Art Bulletin reviewer, who compared Elkins to more fashionable art historians, Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois. 

Most important... is the fact that Krauss and Bois consistently deny the possibility that art can be anything more than its "base materiality." Their argument is strong and consistent: a picture of mold is a picture of mold. Elkins often implies that painting can be transcendent, can move beyond the messy stuff of oil paint itself in order to show something that is beyond the picture plane.  In comparison to Formless, Elkins's book is inconsistent and even sentimental.

A more clear indication of how carefully art historians patrol their disciplinary borders is difficult to find.  Elkins is chastised for trespassing on transcendent turf, a domain which the (supposedly adventurous) methodology of critical theory deemed off-limits.  Indeed, because Elkins' prose sometimes knocks on the door of the transcendent (albeit with protective gloves), it's not surprising that Elkins has found religion. By which I mean, he has found religion to be a subject worthy of art historical interest.  This started with On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art, and has progressed into the Art Seminar Series volume entitled Re-Enchantment, which explored the art world's attitude to religion by interviewing dozens of scholars and curators on the subject.  While not monolithic, the book frequently evidenced a younger generation complaining that old guard art historians such T.J. Clark or the much pilloried Michael Fried, don't take religion seriously enough.  

But Re-Enchantment just scratched the surface.  Decades of cultural investment by Christian academic institutions, programs, organizations, and journals have paid off, making the output of Christian perspectives on art criticism, production and history almost unmappable.  As I've remarked before, Catholics are enjoying the revival of Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson, backed by the historical studies of Murphy and Schloesser, and the philosophical work of Trapani.  The Orthodox are seeing the emergence of Pavel Florensky, the 20th century art historian, theologian, priest, scientist and martyr (silenced by the very revolutionaries after whom the art history's most influential journal, October, was named).  This revival is due to new translations of Florensky's art writings by Salmond, a biography by Pyman, and a compelling advance of his ideas by Antonova.  What's more, a surprising article from a former editor of Art Forum has suggested that Jacques Lacan - a darling of critical theory - may have obtained some of his best ideas from Florensky, who was translated into French just as Lacan was developing his notion of the gaze.  One couldn't make this stuff up. 

Protestants are also making a strong showing in the aesthetic arena that they have traditionally neglected.  William Dyrness' formidable historical survey of Reformed visual culture would have been enough, but his latest work, Poetic Theology, which could fairly be called a Summa of Protestant aesthetics, pushes the project well into the 21st century.  Dyrness drives the last nail in the aniconic coffin, and argues that Calvin's prohibitions agains images, or his insistence to keep churches locked, were temporary measures never meant to be permanent features of Protestant life.  Dyrness has the panache to distinguish Reformed aesthetics from its Catholic (Thomism) and Anglican (Radical Orthodoxy) alternatives, while still arguing for a symbolically rich, contemplative Protestantism, haunted by brokenness yet socially engaged.  Surprisingly, he succeeds.

This is not to posit the Reformed tradition as the right option, but simply to show the variety of them available for those people - Christian or not - who are interested in the light that Christianity can shed on art and art history.  Theory, you will recall - according to one of its best elucidators - is inherently and consistently suspicious of the visual.  Christianity, because of the visible God at the heart of its proclamation - is much less so (though, of course, not completely).  One doesn't need a Ph.D. in art history to know that Christianity has meant much for the history of art.  But one very well may need one to come up with an intellectual justification to continue to rule that not insignificant religion out.

Centripetally, books by Wuthnow, Dyrness and Taylor have attempted to understand and encourage the state of the arts in North American churches.  Centrifugally, Siedell remains a necessary prod to engage contemporary art on its own terms without striking a Tillichian bargain.  The Association of Scholars of Christianity in the History of Art (ASCHA) evidences the new seriousness with which Christianity is taken by art historians.  Likewise, new journals that show theologically informed engagement of art seem to emerge monthly.   Consider new journals such as Anamnesis, the frequently sharp and prolific output of Transpositions, Curator Magazine, the art coverage of the Other Journal and Comment, Dappled Things and Ruminate, ArtWay, Catapult, Liturgical Credo, Cresset, St. Katherine's Review, to say nothing of the more established venues such as Image or CIVA.

The aim here is not a narrowly "Christian" art world or "Christian" art history, but the better art production and truer study which comes from not ruling out a phenomenon as massive as global Christianity - which, furthermore, frequently doesn't behave.  Many of the organizations and publications listed above are (understandably) interested in an artistically sophisticated faith, and are consequently less than eager to draw attention to the Christian kitsch they seek to, wait for it...  leave behind. But the irony is that such kitsch - the visual religion of everyday believers - has now become a subject of serious academic investigation, as evidenced by the impressive infrastructure erected by David Morgan and the journal Material Religion.  This is nicely summarized by the fact that the notorious Thomas Kinkade is no longer as much mocked as seriously analyzed by art historians.  In short, kitsch counts. 

But nor is it everything.  Take for example, the effusion of studies on religion in the Renaissance since the seventies, or the publications showing how religion persisted through the early modern world, such as The Idol in an Age of Art, Rembrandt's Faith, Art and Religion in 18th Century Europe, or Painting the Sacred in the Age of Romanticism, not to mention calls for papers like Empowerment and the Sacred or Spiritual Matters.  Modernism is not unaffected as well, as evidenced by two impressive publications (Alter Icons and Avant-Garde Icon) and an upcoming conference regarding how Eastern Christian icons influenced modern art.  One could go on.

"With a few marginal exceptions," wrote James Elkins at the end of a Books and Culture exchange, "the exclusion [or religion by the art world]... is not owned, or owned up to, by anyone. That is why it is so difficult to imagine how this state of affairs can be changed, even though it is inevitable that it will, eventually, be changed." But Christian perspectives on art history and art production are emerging more quickly than anyone - so far as I know - can reasonably assess.  I tried to chronicle this a year ago, and have tried to update it here.  The difficulty of the task makes me feel that "eventually" might be just around the corner, if not already here. 

Update:  Here's a follow-up post.

Religious Renaissance

This should be old news, but just a reminder from Alexander Nagel's Art Bulletin review of Jörg Traeger's Renaissance und Religion: Die Kunst des Glaubens im Zeitalter Raphaels:

Richard Trexler said it three decades ago: "The pagan Renaissance is no more." One hundred years of scholarship since Burckhardt had made it clear, Trexler declared, that "Renaissance man remained a Christian, even a pious one."' Since then sociohistorical and anthropological approaches to the Renaissance have only confirmed the pervasive presence of religious traditions and institutions in the life of the period. Historians have argued that traditional piety was vital and functional right up until the Reformation, revising the traditional view of a corrupt and disintegrating Christian culture begging to be cleared away.

[H]istorians of Renaissance art no longer chronicle the progress of art away from religion. Instead they show, over and over again-in studies of family chapels and confraternities, of political self-representation and civic ritual-the various ways in which art was embedded in the elaborate structures that joined religious, social, and political life.

Got that?

Critical Theory: Long in the Tooth

The extremely instructive Art Seminar series record discussions on the state of art history as a discipline.  Pick up any one of the seven volumes, and you'll immediately read in the uniform preface that theory lives!

People who would rather avoid problems of interpretation, at least in their more difficult forms, have sometimes hoped that 'theory' would prove to be a passing fad.  A simple test shows that is not the case. 

After a few handy graphs, it's proven.  Theory is forever.  I guess it really is simple:  If you think rigorously about interpretation, you must be into theory.  If not, you must be Roger Kimball. 

But - and this is very important - be sure not to continue reading past the preface.  On page ten of Volume 5, one encounters this from Rebecca Zorach (who gave a very fine lecture here last year).

It might also look like approaches driven by social and political issues - social history, feminism, postcolonial studies - are themselves getting a bit long in the tooth.  And I sense a certain impatience of late - not only in Renaissance art history but in other academic areas as well  - with the political.  We might feel irritated by what seems to be an austere moralism in feminist or postcolonial approaches; they might seem to threaten the pleasures we take in art. Or, on the other hand, we might feel exhausted by our own failures to use a politicized art history as a tool for substantive change.

But hasn't she seen the handy graphs?  Seriously though, good for the Art Seminar for permitting the questioning of its own premises. 

Advocates of critical theory continue to believe that those dissatisfied with it are necessarily "traditional" or "conservative."  But perhaps we're just bored (which is my interpretation of the empty chairs on the covers), and searching for new paradigms to help explain material that theory can't illuminate.  Aren't labels such as "traditional" and "conservative," furthermore, better applied to those defending the status quo?   From my vantage point, everyone is wondering what's next.  Maybe the place where the Art Seminar series ended up - a volume on religion (which I ransacked here) - provides a clue.

The Byzantinizing of America

In yet another piece on the decline of the humanities that he did so much to accelerate, Stanley Fish paraphrases the cutback mentality: “What can you say to the tax-payer who asks, ‘What good does a program in Byzantine art do me?’ Nothing.” Or you could say this:

America has had a longstanding fling with the Gothic and Romanesque, but there is good reason to think we’re in the midst of her belated affair with the other medieval style – the Byzantine. Need evidence? How much time do you have? It’s too easy to point to the countless Orthodox churches in the Byzantine style, so here are some Methodist, Presbyterian, and Catholic ones as well. More recently, consider the Museum of Russian Icons that sprung up in the bosom of New England, or the Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art & Culture that opened just this month.

Yes, Byzantine art is currently experiencing the benefits (and drawbacks) of being "so hot right now," and the fact that Fish repeatedly refers to its study as the quintessence of academic obscurity only tells us how much he is not. For example, last weekend, realizing I could not avail myself of all the opportunities to hear fascinating papers on the subject, I had to compromise, splitting my time between the Byzantine Studies Conference, and the Rubin Museum of Art icon symposium that compared Eastern Orthodox and Buddhist imagery.

At the Byzantine Studies conference, Yale’s Robert Nelson reminded us that at foundation of this country’s official art collection – the National Gallery of Art – lay two icons chosen for their Byzantine characteristics, the Kahn and Mellon Madonnas. At the Rubin Museum conference, two Russian Orthodox priests explained to a packed auditorium how post-Soviet Russia (not to mention the rest of the Orthodox world) is currently experiencing an extraordinary resurgence of icon and fresco painting, one that is naturally being reflected on this continent as well. Faced with incisive questions from New York Times Moscow correspondent Ellen Barry, Archpriest Igor Vyzhanov won over the room with witness and wit, as if Richard John Neuhaus had returned, this time with a thick Russian accent.

On the next day of the Rubin conference, Gary Vikan of Baltimore’s Walters Art Museum remarked how one of his Byzantine exhibitions resulted in a noteworthy conversion. When compared to Buddhist and Hindu iconography, the Christian icons, not surprisingly, emerged very metaphysically distinct. The Sepulchre is empty, the Stupa is not - and that has made all the difference.

Beyond museums and conferences, one could also point to practice, as evidenced by the yellow dots on this map for the Prosopon School of Iconology, a training center for the making of icons. There are numerous similar studios, such as Eileen McGuckin’s, and even indigenous American thaumaturgic icons such as the Virgin of Arizona. Still, can icons really be considered distinctly American? Recall those that were lifted from the ashes of lower Manhattan’s St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church in mid-September, 2001.

Glen Peers has suggested that the icon is a chief means of understanding American modern art, and the same goes for contemporary art. The ecumenical Christian endorsement of icons, wrote Jean Luc Marion, "formulates above all and - perhaps the only - alternative to the contemporary disaster of the image." The Renaissance-centered art history through which most of us learned about painting has long been undergoing serious revisions; and a chief way this is happening is by understanding the Renaissance’s closeted backstory, which is – you guessed it - Byzantine art. (This, you'll recall, is why there is a menacing cloud over Giorgio Vasari's Florence pictured above). Yes, icons can be faddish, especially when embraced by the theologically nescient - but understand the history of icons, and the superficiality dissolves.

So yes, there is good reason for a taxpayer to believe that Byzantine art is worth studying. What there is less justification for is the fishy thinking that generated the crisis in the humanities in the first place.

Art Errors Avoided

1.  Louis Menand is unimpressed by Steven Pinker's evolutionary aesthetics:

One suspects that enjoying Wagner, singing Wagner, anything to do with Wagner, is in gross excess of the requirements of natural selection. To say that music is the product of a gene for "art-making," naturally selected to impress potential mates—which is one of the things Pinker believes—is to say absolutely nothing about what makes any particular piece of music significant to human beings. No doubt Wagner wished to impress potential mates; who does not? It is a long way from there to "Parsifal" [hat tip, Begbie].

2.  Art critic Jed Perl has some words for excessively self-referential art historians:

I would not want to belittle the sophistication of Fried's thought. But if you can wade through the bewildering intricacy of his approach, with its tortuous expositions of passages from Hegel, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger, the argument turns out to be rather mundane....  I do not see the need for some "key” to the pictorial arts of the past two and a half centuries. And I do not see the need for an interpretation of recent photography that links it tightly to earlier developments in painting. It is a mistake to imagine that the finest thought is the most elaborate or labyrinthine thought...  I have heard people who know a great deal about painting and who know that Fried’s theories are suspect speak almost apologetically about their inability to get with his program. They worry that they are not smart enough to grapple with his ideas, when the truth may be that they are too smart to get tripped up by all his fancy footwork. 

3. and 4.  Bruce Herman, in this IAM interview, counters the idea that tradition can be advanced without having first been mastered, and that abstract painting is necessarily a subjective escape from objective reality.

5.  And, in a review of an art show at the Rubin concerning death across cultures, the The New York Times completely avoids caricaturing Christian theology:

Western works are morbidly preoccupied with the perishability of the body; Eastern works take a holistic, Buddhist view of death as a passage between states of being in nearly endless cycles of reincarnation...    A harsh dualism prevails on the Western side....  Such either-or starkness is foreign to the Eastern side.

Okay, but four out of five errors avoided is not bad.