Art and the Postsecular
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Art and the Postsecular This paper introduces
the notion of ‘postsecular’ as a way of negotiating the work of contemporary
and 20th century artists whose work has a spiritual content
or context. The rejection of spiritual language in art criticism,
and the history of its subjugation in the 20th century,
is traced to modernist imperatives that bracketed out its vital influence
on key artists. By bringing together a fragmented but growing recent
scholarship on art and the spiritual, and suggesting that this forms
part of a postsecular sensibility, a new and pluralist language of
the spirit can be articulated for the arts. Several modalities of
the spirit are presented as particularly useful for approaching contemporary
fine art practice, including the shamanic, the esoteric and the transcendent.
By avoiding the monolithic framework of understanding in old religion,
and exploring the broader implications of the ‘postsecular,’ a fine-grained
spiritual criticism of art can be constructed adequate to contemporary
fine art practice. Introduction Fine Art practice
in the early 21st century is profoundly shaped by revolutions
of thought with their origins in the early 20th century.
The radical art of that time increasingly took on the role of challenging
the norms of society, of questioning and subverting received assumptions
both in the socio-political sphere, and in regards to art itself.
The very scope of fine art is on the one hand immeasurably extended
by Duchamp’s legacy, yet on the other is curiously constrained by
the criterion of ‘social performativity’ : art must do good in the
world. The latter is generally framed by the legacy of the Frankfurt
School and the Marxist suspicion of art itself. Hence contemporary
fine art practice is often painfully self-critical and self-aware.
It is in this context that an older discourse within culture and the
arts is re-opened to consider its value to art practice: that which
has been largely denied by modernism, and only allowed to creep in
at the margins of postmodernity. Fine Art and a Lost Language of the Interior If we examine the
practice and reception of two contemporary fine artists, Bill Viola
and Anish Kapoor, we find a certain hesitancy of collective thought,
a certain poverty of critical language. This diffidence is focused
around the word ‘spiritual,’ used in both cases to hint at a quality
and a set of engagements in the work. This paper suggests that the
historical reasons for skirting around the word ‘spiritual’ (and what
it may denote) have lost their cogency, and we should reclaim this
discourse, both in general, and specifically for art. Historically
the notion of the spiritual became suspect after the Enlightenment,
and its eventual abandonment as a language of interiority left a vacuum,
into which rushed the psychology of Freud and Jung. If, however, we
deny the rejection of materiality by religion, and the rejection of
its so-called opposite, the spiritual, by modernity; if we allow the
joining of materiality / spirituality into a single whole again, then
we can regain a lost language of interiority, one that allows us to
speak without faltering on the work of such artists as Kapoor and
Viola. We suggest that the term ‘postsecular’ can be used to describe
such a discourse, one which moves beyond both secular reductionist
assumptions and presecular renunciative assumptions. Artist Susan
Shantz, Associate Professor for Sculpture at the University of Saskatchewan,
struggled to find such a language, as she tells us in her essay ‘(Dis)integration
as Theory and Method in an Artmaking Practice’. [1]
Shantz came from a Christian Mennonite background, but found that
‘the lack of space in which to speak about the “spiritual in art”
in the graduate program in studio art forced it into subjugation.’
[2]
Her exploration between the spaces of ‘old’ religion and postmodern
art practice has led to a typically postsecular position and language,
where the spiritual re-emerges from its subjugation with a fresh and
pluralistic articulation. She had found in the Mennonite tradition
of handicraft a physical impulse, now expressed as the gathering of
twigs, which took her through a journey of new spiritual understanding,
and at the same time towards a creativity that easily located itself
within contemporary art practice. To articulate her journey Shantz
has to use several distinct discourses of the spirit: in this paper
we identify two of them as shamanic
and transcendent. Before outlining
in more detail what this means, let us briefly look at Kapoor and
Viola, and the ways in which their work are – hesitantly – described
as ‘spiritual.’ Anish Kapoor Anish Kapoor was
born in Bombay in 1954 of an Indian father and a Jewish mother. These
facts speak not just to a richness of cultural heritage, but also
to a lineage of spiritual impulses belonging to the two root religions
of the world. In Kapoor’s 1000 Names series of 1979-80 we can immediately
spot the play of the Hindu in the pigment powders and the Judaic in
the interest in the names
(of God). We also discern the secular heritage of architectural and
biomorphic form: the organic shapes are not those of the shamanic
but of cultures that have built great temples and stared down microscopes.
Kapoor read C.G.Jung while at Hornsey and Chelsea schools of art,
and was drawn to the Duchamp of alchemical obsession. ‘Alchemical’
is a useful clue: it may be used as a shorthand in art criticism for
a discrete range of form and purpose, with their roots in the pebbles,
sticks and creatures of the shamanic world but abstracted through
agrarian polytheistic cultures into esoteric tradition. In fact Kapoor’s
work draws forth a criticism that stretches itself over an array of
spiritual heritages, a criticism as ‘spiritual literacy’ perhaps,
but in that awkward juxtaposition to the intensely secular mainstream
so often shown. Two commentators on Kapoor demonstrate this: Germano
Celant, [3]
originator of the term Arte Povera and curator of the New York Guggenheim,
and Homi K. Bhabha, [4]
leading postcolonial theorist, born into a Parsi community in Bombay
(Parsi being the community of contemporary Zoroastrians, that religion
living in the mid-point between East and West). Central to the discussion
of Kapoor in both cases is the idea of the void.
Viola’s exhibition
called ‘The Passions’ at the National Gallery in 2004 was accompanied
by a catalogue and an exhibition guide (leaflet). The catalogue is
edited by John Walsh, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum, and in
his introduction we approach Viola’s work through a criticism-as-spiritual-literacy,
alluded to above. It is an easy discussion of the world’s religious
and mystical traditions as Viola draws on them, a spiritual literacy
clearly shared by Walsh and Viola. Walsh records that Viola ‘broke
with the prevailing social ideals of art in the 1970s,’ quoting Viola:
‘For me, the shift from ideas about social perfection to the idea
of self-perfection was a big turning point.’ Walsh continues: ‘The
shift resulted in part from Viola’s study of ancient Hindu scriptures
and its ideal of perfecting the self, which transmitted through Buddhism,
had become the focus of the Zen thought and personal experience that
has informed his work.’ [5]
The exhibition guide on
the other hand made no assumptions of spiritual literacy in the British
public: it adopted a neutral art-historical tone. Classicism is certainly
one approach to Viola’s show, but that safely puts questions of the
spirit within the dead world of the (presecular) past instead of the
living and urgent (postsecular) present. Viola himself clearly wants
to foster an open spiritual literacy in his public: he instructed
the National Gallery to stock not just his exhibition catalogue and
closely related publications at the checkout, but a veritable cherry-picking
of the world’s spiritual literature.[6]
Yet his show leaves one with a question that is very postsecular:
what is the relationship between the emotional and the spiritual,
between emotional crisis and spiritual crisis? The shaman’s deeply
etched lines are the facial record of encounters with the abyss: can
Viola’s citizen-actors go beyond a rendition of secular emotions?
D.T.Suzuki, who
introduced Zen Buddhism to the West, has provided one of the gentlest
yet persistent and informed criticisms of Western culture and its
spiritual deficiencies. His genuine love of the West, combined with
his desire to share the best of Zen and Japanese culture [7],
gave him widespread appeal in the post-war period, and we know for
example that Ad Reinhardt attended his lectures in the 1950s. The
prevailing critical theories of modern art held Abstraction to be
a triumph of modernist rational thought; Mondrian as the herald of
geometric rationalism, and Kandinsky as the jazz-cool master of improvisation.
The Bauhaus had provided a critique of art in terms of the formalisms
of colour and shape, and in philosophy the work of Saussure and Levi-Strauss
promoted the Structuralist analysis, allowing the question of ‘content’
to be avoided. Maurice Tuchman, curator of The Spiritual in Art – Abstract Painting 1890-1985
(and editor of the exhibition catalogue by the same name) tells us
that the pioneering studies of Sixten Ringbom in the 1970s [8]
started a re-evaluation of these assumptions, and ‘by the late 1970s
numerous scholars had taken up the question of artists’ interest in
mysticism and the occult.’ [9] Many of those scholars contributed to the Tuchman
catalogue, including art historian Linda Dalrymple Henderson, whose
interests lie in the fourth dimension and its impact on abstract art
through the writings of Minkowsky, Einstein, Bragdon and Ouspensky.[10]
In 1986 the biographer
of art historian Ananda Coomaraswamy, Roger Lipsey, published the
first systematic account of the spiritual in 20th century
art, [11]
drawing as much from an understanding of Eastern spirituality as Western
religion. In 1992 Professor Mike Tucker at Brighton University published
Dreaming With Open Eyes: The Shamanic Spirit
in Twentieth-Century Art & Culture [12],
followed by an introduction to an Alan Davie retrospective in 1993
that brought out Davies’ links to shamanism.[13]
In 1995 Frances
Stonor Saunders, drawing on such material, presented the case for
the spiritual origins of modernism in a Channel Four documentary called
Hidden Hands, commissioned by Waldemar Januszczak.[14]
Tuchman, in his 1986 catalogue essay, traces the fluctuating fortunes
of the spiritual critique in modern art. Apparently the influences
of esoteric groups like Theosophy, Anthroposophy, Mazdaznan and Gurdjieff
/ Bennett / Ouspensky on Mondrian, Kandinsky, Malevich and others
was well reflected in art histories up to the 1930s.[15]
However the association of mystical and esoteric beliefs in the 1930s
and 40s with the Nazis – who drew on variants of Theosophical beliefs
to support the theory of Aryan supremacy – led to an increasing suspicion
regarding the spiritual in general, and so the word became an unhelpful
association for an artist, particularly in the US. Alfred Barr, director
of the Museum of Modern Art, took art history into a different direction,
ignoring the obvious spiritual influences on abstraction and focussing
instead on aesthetic formalisms as a genealogy of influence, or on
the process of painting. Clement Greenberg inherited and extended this
approach in respect of the American Abstract Expressionists, and for
decades since then art history has reflected this emphasis (Sally
J. Morgan usefully recapitulates some of this history in a 2003 JVAP
paper [16]).
The Hidden Hands programme
set out to debunk the rationalist view of modern art, drawing on extensive
material showing the origins of abstract art in esoteric and mystical
thinking. In the same year
(1995) art historian Peg Weiss published Kandinsky
and Old Russia: Artist as Ethnographer and Shaman. [17]
This work seems to have been written and researched quite independently
of Tucker’s authoritative analysis of shamanism in 20th
century arts and culture. 1995 also saw the hosting of a panel session,
The Subjugation of the Spiritual in Art, by the College Art Association
in Texas, leading to the publication of essays edited by Dawn Perlmutter
and Debra Koppman entitled Reclaiming
the Spiritual in Art in 1999 (containing Susan Shantz’s paper).
[18] In 1999 the Tate
Britain presented The Spiritual
in 20th C Art, a lecture series by art historian Sarah
O’Brien Twohig, and in 2000 John Golding published Paths
to the Absolute, which explicitly recognises the spiritual influences
on Mondrian, Malevich, Kandinsky, Pollock, Newman, Rothko and Still,
while avoiding overtly spiritual language [19].
In 2001 the group Poeisis presented The
S Word discussion forum at the ICA, bringing art, science and
the spiritual together, through thinkers like Don Cupitt (Sea of Faith)
Satish Kumar (editor of the nature and spirituality journal Resurgence),
Margaret Boden (writer on AI and creativity) and Rupert Sheldrake
(radical biologist). In 2002 Lynn Gamwell published Exploring
the Invisible - Art, Science and the Spiritual, which brings out
the important third strand, science, and its relation to art and the
esoteric [20].
(This three-way analysis is prefigured in an ISEA conference paper
in 1997 [21]
and a Leonardo article in
1998.[22])
2004 saw Bill Viola’s The Passions
exhibition at the National Gallery, raising questions about the relationship
between the spiritual and the emotional.
One should be cautious
in advocating yet another ‘post’ in our vocabulary, but the term ‘postsecular’
seems to capture something in the zeitgeist not reached by other terms.
It can be simply defined as a renewed openness to the spiritual, though
one is obliged to immediately acknowledge the problematics of that
word, particularly in the context of contemporary fine art. Many favour
alternatives such as ‘non-materialist’, or ‘non-reductionist’, which
demonstrate a perception that the secular world has drawn its boundaries
too tight, and at the same time that we often couch what is missing
in the negative. Professor Michael
Tucker (Brighton University) puts it well: …
ours is the first culture to proclaim with hubristic certainty that
history and politics together constitute the sole ground of our being,
and that any sense of the ‘vertical’ or ‘cosmic’ dimension in life
is but a reactionary remnant from the irrationalities of pre-Enlightenment
thought. [23] Tucker points out
that Marxist- and Durkheimian-inspired sociology dominate discussion
of cultural issues in art (the JVAP essay by Malcolm Miles on Mel
Chin and PLATFORM [24]
might serve as an example). Art that is not dedicated to the overthrow
of capitalism or to the more recent imperative of saving the environment
is suspect, but in real life art goes about its business on a thousand
imperatives. This is not a plea to abandon any existing imperative
or critique, but simply to let one more into the fold: a recognition
of what Tucker has called the ‘vertical,’ or, to use the term that
causes much nervousness, the spiritual. The term postsecular
suggests a critique of secularism, along with a three-way historical
perspective. The logic of the sequence: presecular, secular, postecular
suggests two important and novel analyses. One looks at evidence for
the postsecular, and the other examines the origins of the secular
mind. We will follow this logic here by firstly examining evidence
for the postsecular, drawing on seven different fields; then briefly
outlining the origins of the secular mind; then returning to the implications
of the postsecular for art; and finishing with the implications of
art education for spiritual education. Contemporary Postsecular Contexts If we take a provisional
definition of the postsecular as ‘a renewed openness to questions
of the spirit,’ then we can search for it in a wide variety of fields
including the visual arts. We suggest that evidence can be found in
seven different contemporary contexts: physics, consciousness studies,
transpersonal psychology, postmodernism, the arts, environmental issues,
and the New Age. These overlap somewhat, but provide useful approximate
boundaries. We find in each of these that a language of the spiritual
(or a non-materialist, non-reductionist inclination) emerges differently,
and on different timescales throughout the 20th century.
Consciousness studies as a discipline is the most recent (and has
impacted on the mainstream through David Lodge’s novel Thinks …[25]),
but its origins are unimaginable without the new sciences of quantum
theory, relativity and chaos theory. There is not space here to rehearse
these issues, other than to say that the publication in the 1970s
of Capra’s Tao of Physics [26],
and Zukav’s Dancing Wu Li Masters
[27]
flag the hypothetical start of the postsecular sensibility. Though
the birth of quantum theory took place in scientific discoveries in
the late 19th century, it created little cultural impact
until these texts. The fact that the 1970s brought forth both key
works on art and the spiritual and the pioneering comparisons between
physics and Eastern mysticism lends some credence to the idea that
we can date the beginnings of the postsecular era to that decade. We can briefly
run through the seven postsecular contexts to show how the spiritual
emerges in each. [1] The results from physics have arguably had more
impact on culture than on the other sciences (biology remains notably
the most reductionist with its pursuit of genetic determinism). Positivism
is loosening its grip on the academy, assailed by the indeterminacy
of quantum theory. [2] Consciousness studies has a strongly reductionist
side drawing from neuroscience, yet its journals are full of articles
on Buddhist insights for example. [3] Transpersonal psychology has
its birth with Freud: alongside his fiercely reductionist and anti-religious
materialism, there developed the archetypal psychology of Jung and
the spiritual psychology of Roberto Assagioli, both early disciples
of the new psychoanalysis. Transpersonal psychology became an international
movement in the 1960s due to the work of Maslow and Grof; and its
practitioners, who believe that a psychology of health must include
the spiritual, are beginning to be accepted in mainstream psychiatry.
[4] Postmodernism, in rejecting the shibboleths of modernism, also
permits a scepticism towards the assumptions of atheism, while retaining
a deep Continental hostility towards metaphysics (read ‘religion’).
Within this it is fashionable to be receptive towards the ‘negative
theology’ – that part of the Christian tradition exemplified by mystics
like Eckhart and the author of The
Cloud of Unknowing. [5] The visual arts have also demonstrated
this ambivalence through the 20th century: on the one hand
rejecting the perceived authoritarianism of mainstream religion, while
retaining an interest in the spiritual. Brancusi at the start of the
20th century and Viola at the end both drew inspiration
from Buddhism for example: Matisse considered himself to be ‘something
of a Buddhist.’ [28]
[6] Environmentalists from founding-figure John Muir in the mid-19th
century to contemporary eco-philosophers at the start of the 21st
century have presented Nature in lyrical, even mystical terms that
compare with the writings of Zen and Taoism. [7] Lastly, the New Age
as a term encompasses the projection of the Romantic impulse (as originating
in Blake for example) into the late 20th century, an impulse
rejecting industrial capital, yet retaining to itself a spirituality
independent of church. Evidence from these
seven postsecular contexts might suggest, singly, that the spiritual
holds some currency in contemporary society. The question we are open
to here is that, taken together, does the evidence from these seven
contexts suggest a wholesale shift in culture? Varieties of Spiritual Impulse A book-length analysis
covering both the history of Eastern and Western spiritual development
is required to adequately treat this subject, but for now we want
to take two points from this brief introduction: firstly that the
secular rejection of the spiritual arises from a series of historical
accidents in the West, principally the absolutism of its dominant
religions, and secondly that we have as a result no detailed contemporary
articulation of the spiritual impulse. The persecution of what Christianity
refers to as ‘paganism’ not only created the impression of its profound
error, but also that there was any singular entity to so name and
vilify in the first place. Both the word ‘pagan’ and the word ‘heathen’
have an etymology meaning ‘of the countryside’ and demonstrate nothing
else than the prejudice of the city-dweller towards rural forms of
spirituality, particularly shamanism. In fact the Mediterranean at
the time of Christ was home to a vast range of spiritual forms, as
we still see today in the spiritual heritage of India. These can be
understood or taxonomised as a limited number of fundamental spiritual
impulses, though expressed in a larger number of outward forms. There
is not space to even begin this analysis here, so we will focus on
just two forms: the shamanic
impulse as expressed for example in Native American culture, and the
transcendent impulse as expressed for example
in the Christian tradition of the via
negativa (the negative theology). Both of these impulses are of
interest to modern art because we can trace the workings of them in
American Abstract Expressionism. Shamanism We now turn to
American Abstract Expressionism as a case study within which to demonstrate
just what the postsecular critique offers to perhaps an already over-theorised
moment in 20th century art. The influence of Theosophy
and Anthroposophy on Mondrian and Kandinsky can be understood in terms
of a direct relationship between the iconography of the occult and
abstraction of form as carrier of occult meaning, treated at length
in the Tuchman catalogue. This iconography draws in part on a tradition
of esoteric illustration going back to the Renaissance, and to experiments
in art and imagery by the Theosophists and Anthroposophists. All of
this is ignored however by Peg Weiss in her detailed exposition of
the shamanic influence on Kandinsky, showing perhaps that scholarship
around art and the spiritual is fragmented, and also that the whole
language of the occult is distrusted (as detailed earlier). For similar reasons
the American painters after the 1930s did not draw directly from occultism,
yet they were exposed to a wide range of such spiritual influences.
These operated alongside ideas in psychology and philosophy, all of
which, including the spiritual, generally originated in Europe. Theosophy
was international, but its offshoot, Anthroposophy, firmly central
European, while so were the pioneering psychoanalysts, Freud and Jung,
and the philosophers read by the American painters. Uniquely American
however was the heritage of vast horizons, physically in landscape,
poetically in Walt Whitman, and heroically in the work of Joseph Campbell.
Also present was a key spiritual influence impossible in Europe: the
near-vanquished but ubiquitous inner life of the Native American.
This culture was being re-examined in the light of a diminishing Christian
hegemony of thought. Christianity’s insistence on the ‘savage’ and
‘idolatrous’ incalcitrance of the native rang less strident in the
mid-20th century, and painters in particular had anyway
rejected Church dogma. A landmark exhibition at the Museum of Modern
Art in 1941, Indian Art of the United States, impacted powerfully on the painters
of that time, prepared for it conceptually by the work of C.J.Jung,
and subsequently reinforced in its mythic dimension by Joseph Campbell’s
The Hero with a Thousand Faces in 1949. The influence of
Native American art on the Abstract Expressionists is well documented,
for example in the Tuchman catalogue through an essay by Jackson Rushing
[29],
by Tucker in Dreaming With Open
Eyes, and by Golding in Paths
to the Absolute. (Interestingly Lipsey’s chapter on the spirituality
of the Abstract Expressionists [30]
is oblivious to the shamanic, demonstrating again the fragmentation
of this field of scholarship.) Early works by Pollock, Rothko, Gottlieb,
Still and Newman show the shamanic influence, while the British painter
Alan Davie, following these American painters, retained the direct
shamanic influence throughout his career. What was not possible in
the period from the 1940s to the 1960s was to understand this influence
in cultural terms, as other than an exoticism. All this was to change in the
1960s with the emergence of transpersonal anthropology, catalysed
by a chance remark from a professor of anthropology to a young Master’s
student. He told the class that anyone who researched the indigenous
peoples of the area would automatically receive a grade ‘A,’ resulting
in the disappearance and eventual return of Carlos Castaneda in 1967
with the draft of his famous New Age novel: The Teachings of Don Juan.[31]
The shockwaves split the American Anthropological Association, creating
the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness in 1974 and a whole
new awareness of the shamanic heritage of North America. It became
popularised rather than ignored; trivialised rather than reviled.
However the serious art historians like Weiss and Tucker parallel
the serious anthropologists since Castaneda: the world-view of the
shaman is no longer that of the exotic ‘other’ but one to be honoured
or even revered. (In the environmental movement the shamanic worldview
is considered by some to be central to the re-engagement with Nature
necessary for our very survival.) The shamanic can
re-assert itself in contemporary culture to the degree that Christian
prejudice against it recedes and acceptance of indigenous cultures
grows. But stacked against it are all the cultural forces that subscribe
in one way or another to the idea of progress.
Progress as technology, progress as spiritual or political philosophy
in Hegel and Marx, progress in Darwinian terms, all of these newcomers
to Western thought chemically bond themselves to the ancient Western
teleologies of the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Against the written
Word of the progressive the shamanic is irredeemably visual, oral
and ahistorical in its culture. But it is precisely the timeless dimension
of shamanism that leads scholars like Rushing, Tucker and Weiss to
assert its deep significance for art in the 20th century. So what does it
mean to look at the art of indigenous peoples (as a source for many
early pioneers of Abstract Art in the 20th century) through
the lens of the shamanic as opposed to the primitive? It is Jung that gives us the
language to explore this: the language of individuation.
Miró, Kandinsky, Pollock and Rothko do not represent the fanfare of
rationalist modernism, but responses to the crises
of modernism: crises produced by the terrifying alienation of the
loss of ‘God,’ industrial-scale warfare, and the severing of ties
to the earth. With Freud and Jung the ‘savage’ – in different ways
– became the source of self and healing. The shaman becomes iconic
of the ‘individuated’ human, one who has attained mastery over life
and death by working through a personal crisis or ‘dark night of the
soul.’ Jackson Pollock
read esoteric works like Blavatsky’s Secret
Doctrine when young, and attended lectures by Jiddu Krishnamurti:
his instinctive search for a language of interiority had found inspiration
in these sources. Later, suffering from bouts of alcoholism and violence,
Pollock entered into psychoanalysis. Joseph Henderson, Pollock’s Jungian
analyst in the late 1930s, persuaded Pollock to search into his unconscious,
and to learn from Native American art. He did so on the basis of two
of Jung’s dictums: that all genuine art originates in the unconscious,
and that colonising people inherit the racial memory of the natives
they displace – the latter implying to Henderson that native imagery
was already in Pollock’s
unconscious [32].
But Pollock had been exposed to the Native American spirit as a child,
and through the twelve volume set of the Annual
Report of the Bureau of American Enthnology, bought in the 1930s.
These influences show explicitly in works like Guardians
of the Secret (1943) and Totem
Lesson I and II (1944/45). Peg Weiss details
for us Kandinsky’s ethnographic researches in the 1890s; Tucker recounts
Miró’s conviction that the land around the Catalonian farm of his
father was the cure for his nervous breakdown; Rushing reports on
Pollock’s Native American sources. All three artists went through
personal crises reflected in their art, and in each case we can understand
their journeys in shamanic terms. In the language of the first half
of the 20th century however, the term used was ‘primitive’
– an awkward admission of sources that could at best be justified
in psychoanalytical terms. In the last 20-30 years however, in what
we call the emerging postsecular era, the acceptance of ‘shamanic’
as a better, unpatronising descriptor opens up a new analysis of abstraction
in painting.
The discovery of
shamanism by the secular mind has resulted in the subsuming of all
other spiritual impulses and phenomena to it by some of its theorists.
This not only strains the definition of shamanic, but also invites
a scepticism to the spiritual in general. Instead, by articulating
spiritual difference, we can not only locate the shamanic within a
broader spectrum of spiritual impulse, but also provide a schematic
for analysing abstraction. We have already hinted at the evolution
from the shamanic to the esoteric in iconographic terms (as they work
out in Kandinsky for example), but we now introduce a second major
spiritual impulse: the transcendent.
Susan Sontag, cited in a monograph on Ad Reinhardt, puts it well: As the activity of the mystic must
end in a via negativa, a
theology of God’s absence, a craving for the cloud of unknowingness
beyond knowledge and for the silence beyond speech, so art must tend
toward anti-art, the elimination of the “subject” (the “object,” the
“image”), the substitution of chance for intention, and the pursuit
of silence … Therefore, art becomes estimated as something to be overthrown.
A new element enters the art-work and becomes constitutive of it:
the appeal (tacit or overt) for its own abolition, and, ultimately
of art itself. [33] This passage hints
at how the transcendent spiritual impulse informs the abstraction
of the mature works of the American Abstract Expressionists, and at
the same time it demonstrates the limits of shamanism for theorising
abstraction. While Miró and Alan Davie, and perhaps also Kandinksy,
pursue imagery throughout their mature period that contains within
it shamanic purpose and iconography, Pollock, Rothko and Newman leave
it behind in their later work. Their visual language is no longer
bound to the world of earth, spirit and animals, but has begun a process
of erasure, with many parallels and often explicit reference to the
via negativa. While this term in Christianity means a route to ‘God’
through the negation of attributes, related non-theistic concepts
are found in many other traditions: ‘sunyatta’ or emptiness in Buddhism
for example (the ‘void’ in reference to Kapoor). Essential to Abstract
Expressionism is an erasure of reference and a movement towards a
transcendence that is both the destination of the shamanic and the
start of a different language of spirit. While it is de
rigueur for Continental philosophers, particularly the French,
to oppose mainstream Christian thought, it is relatively acceptable
to explore the negative theology (via
negativa). This is because it eliminates the bugbear of the philosophers,
the anthropomorphic ‘God’ and leaves instead a principle to which
a vector of transcendence can be ascribed. Derrida contemplates these
issues in Violence and Metaphysics, complaining predictably
that the negative theology is ‘still a theology.’ [34]
Yet he is intrigued by the transcendent language, in this case of
Meister Eckhart, and in Levinas. The Rothko room at the Tate has long
been the most visible cultural icon of transcendence, that word being
the natural response even for the most secular of minds, and the work
in fact also one of the most popular in modern art for theologians. Susan Shantz demonstrates
another journey between the shamanic and the transcendent, having
discovered one of the great Christian texts of the via
negativa, the Cloud of Unknowing,
yet obliged by the impulses of art, feminism, and creativity to engage
with the materiality of her environment. She cites the alchemical,
as does Kapoor, to be the spiritual expression of this engagement,
yet her twigs hint at the shamanic. If we look for
a ‘violence’ that might fuel Derrida’s forensics, then we don’t have
to look further than that meted out to the shamanic by the Judaeo-Christian
tradition [35].
It is not surprising then that the anthropologists and practitioners
of shamanism in turn reject Christian spirituality, even its own marginalised
via negativa. But the spiritual history
of the East, prior to the arrival of Islam, is one of pluralism, traditions
in which the meaning and connotation of ‘heretic’ are almost unknown.
Hence the unthinkable in the West is manifest not just once in the
East but several times: we find a meeting
between the shamanic and the transcendent in the Tibetan and Mongolian
Buddhist traditions, and within the inscrutability of Taoism (though
is not suggested that within the iconography of Tibetan Buddhism for
example we would find a direct parallel with Abstract Expressionism).
The destruction by the Taliban of the Bamiyan Buddhas in 2001 was
a reminder that monotheism has its roots in the persecution of idolaters,
and that the cultural expression of this violence was and remains
acts of iconoclasm (as Iain Biggs so eloquently reminds us in his
valedictory JVAP editorial [36]).
In its positive aspect however it becomes – ironically – the via negativa, and in modern art perhaps
its greatest expression was with Barnett Newman.
If the concept
of the postsecular opens up questions of the spirit that have taken
a cultural backseat for the last two or three centuries, then those
questions are obviously inflected by the intervening cultural shifts.
Art, though it may not have overthrown capitalism or secured us against
environmental catastrophe, has been at the forefront of those shifts.
Which are? Pluralism. Or différance if you prefer (although these
are not elidable, they hint at the same avoidance of the monolithic
and the totalising). We suggest then that questions of the spirit
for the postsecular era are framed by a pluralism, one that can be
informed both by the secular culture of the West and the spiritual
culture of the East. The different modalities of the spirit introduced
here, the esoteric, the shamanic and the transcendent (three out of
many), all find adherents who wish to subsume all other modalities
to themselves. (This totalising impulse in Western thought is found
for example with Joseph Campbell who appears to conflate all spiritual
modalities to the mythical.
[37])
By resisting this we find a language which begins to do justice to
the complexities of the spiritual influence on Abstraction in 20th
century art. This starts by reframing the ‘primitive’ as the ‘shamanic,’
an act that redeems our patronising past within a present dialogue
of equals. Art education,
in turn, can inform the spiritual. Although Tucker rightly suggests
that Marxist and Deconstructionist theorising has dominated art college
teaching, in practice the open-ended nature of art has allowed art
education to absorb more directly the notions of student-centred learning
than say, physics or maths. In this environment, students are expected
to construct their own project and to search out the contextual material
for it. The art instructor, while operating out of their personal
and varied theorising, and within a certain framework of permitted
art modalities, acts as facilitator:
sensitive to the students’ impulses artistically and culturally. In
a postsecular era that sensitivity will include the spiritual, not
exclude it, while in turn the spiritual will look at art education
and say: ‘here is good practice.’ Art and the Spiritual: a Bibliography Henderson, Linda Dalrymple: The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art, Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1983 Gamwell, Lynn, Exploring
the Invisible: Art, Science and the Spiritual, Princeton and Oxford:
Princeton University Press, 2002 Golding, John, Paths
to the Absolute – Mondrian, Malevich, Kandinsky, Pollock, Newman,
Rothko, Still, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press,
2000 King, Mike, 'Concerning the Spiritual in 20th C Art
and Science' Leonardo, Vol.
31, No.1, pp. 21-31, 1998 King, Mike, 'Concerning the Spiritual in Cyberspace',
in Roetto, Michael (Ed.), Seventh
International Symposium on Electronic Art, Rotterdam: ISEA96 Foundation,
1997. p. 31-36 Lipsey, Roger, An
Art of Our Own - The Spiritual in Twentieth-Century Art, Boston
and Shaftesbury: Shambhala, 1988 Perlmutter, Dawn, and Koppman, Debra (Eds.), Reclaiming the Spiritual in Art: Contemporary
Cross-Cultural Perspectives, Albany: State University of New York
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Genesis of Abstract Painting, Abo (Finland): Acta Academiae Aboensis,
1970 Tuchman, Maurice (Ed.), The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985, New York, London,
Paris: Abbeville Press Publishers (Los Angeles County Museum of Art),
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Aquarian/HarperSanFrancisco, 1992 Tucker, Michael (Ed.), Alan Davie – The Quest for the Miraculous, Brighton: University of
Brighton Gallery (Lund Humphries), 1993 Weiss, Peg, Kandinsky
and Old Russia: The Artist as Ethnographer and Shaman, New Haven
and London: Yale University Press, 1995 References(Books and papers
not referring to the above bibliography are cited in full.) [1] Perlmutter and Koppman (1999), p. 61-72 [2] Perlmutter and Koppman (1999), p. 64 [3] Celant, Germano, Anish Kapoor, Milan: Charta, 1998 [4] Bhabha, H. and Tazzi, O. Anish Kapoor, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California
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association with The National Gallery, London, 2003, p. 25 [6] Viola’s original booklist in spreadsheet form was
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1993 [8] Ringbom (1970) [9] Tuchman (1986), p.13 [10] Henderson (1983) [11] Tuchman (1986) [12] Tucker (1992) [13] Tucker (1993) [14] Saunder, Frances Stonor, Hidden Hands, London: Channel 4 Television, 1995 [15] Tuchman (1986), p.17 [16] Morgan, Sally J., ‘Beautiful
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135-144 [17] Weiss (1995) [18] Perlmutter and Koppman (1999) [19] Golding (2000) [20] Gamwell (2002) [21] King (1997) [22] King (1998) [23] Tucker (1993), p.10 [24] Miles, Malcolm, ‘Viral Art – strategies for a new
democracy,’ in Journal of
Visual Art Practice, Vol. 1 No. 2, 2001, pp 71-79 [25] Lodge, David, Thinks
…, London: Penguin, 2001 [26] Capra, Fritjof, The Tao of Physics, London: Flamingo, 1992 (3rd edition) [27] Zukav, Gary, The
Dancing Wu Li Masters, London: Fontana, 1979 [28] Lipsey (1988), p. 256 [29] Tuchman (1986) p.273 [30] Lipsey (1988), pp. 299-326 [31] Castaneda, Carlos, The Teachings of Don Juan, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970 [32] Naifeh, S. and Smith, G.W., Jackson Pollock – An American Saga, London: Pimlico, 1992, p. 337 [33] Susan Sontag, Newsweek,
1965, cited in Lippard, Lucy R., Ad
Reinhardt, New York: Abrams, 1981, p.174. [34] Derrida, Jacques, Writing and Difference, London and New York: Routledge, 1978, p. 183 [35] See for example the account in Brody, Hugh, The Other Side of Eden – Hunters, Farmers,
and the Shaping of the World, New York: North Point Press, 2000 [36] Biggs, Iain, Editorial,
Journal of Visual Art Practice,
Vol. 2 No. 3, 2003, p. 117 [37] Campbell, Joseph, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University
Press, 1973, p. 3
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