Writer of Fancy: The Playful Piety of Jane Austen

Solomon Among the Postmoderns

The Baptized Body

1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary

The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter

A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons

Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature

Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen

The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism

A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel

Against Christianity

From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution

Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy

Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper

A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament

Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature

Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays

Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life

The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church

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Art: Reverse perspective

In his history of iconoclasm (The Forbidden Image), Alain Besancon describes some of the artistic features of Russian iconography: “Nature is stylized in such a way that trees, rocks, and houses defy gravity.  The buildings are not represented within a unified space: each floats in its own perspective.  The colors have a symbolic value.  Light casts no shadows. The perspective is generally reverse: the line of force extends from the icon toward the beholder’s eye.  Through the icon, the truths of faith radiate toward the person contemplating it.  The vanishing point thus moves toward him.”

Art: Impressionism and Urban Renewal

In 1859, Baron George-Eugene Haussmann, Prefect of the Seine, began overhauling Paris.  The ultimate result was a masterpiece of urban rationality - straight streets, buildings of the same height, squares, a mappable city.

On the way to clarity, though, the city was “rendered illegible,” according to art historian T. J. Clark.  He adds that Paris was depicted in the media as “parade, phantasmagoria, dream, dumbshow, mirage, masquerade.  Traditional ironies at the expense of the metropolis mingled with new metaphors of specifically visual untruth.  They were intended to stress the sheer ostentation and flimsiness of the new streets and apartment blocks, and beyond that to indicate the more and more intrusive machinery of illusion built into the city and determining its use.”

Margin Jay suggests that this urban reconstruction “was soon registered in the Impressionist demolition of three-dimensional space.”

Art: Sacred and architecture

I have some reservations about what Philip Bess means by “the sacred” and “response to the sacred,” but his applications to architecture are very intriguing (Till We Have Build Jerusalem; ISI, 2006).  When people encounter “the sacred,” he says, they respond with sacrifice, prohibition, obedience.  Architecture is one form of response to the sacred (altars built where theophanies take place, eg), and architecture as a response to the sacred embodies these values: Verticality, light and shadow as a symbol of the “immateriality of the sacred,” “delight in craftsmanship” as an expression of the inherent goodness and sacramental potential of creation, employment of mathematic or geometric structures, unity, hierarchy.

Even much modern architecture was a recognizable response to the sacred, even though these features of sacred architecture are increasingly detached from specific religious intention:

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Art: Portal of art

In a paper on the chiastic structure of Midsummer Night’s Dream, a student, Jason Helsel, suggests that two scenes with the mechanicals “serve as a link or portal between the city and the forest.” Nicely put; the path from the city of law and justice to the magical world of the fairies lies through art, and theatrical art at that. Theatrical art is also the passage in the other direction, bringing us from the world of miracle to the quotidian world of the city. More abstractly, art serves as a contact point with a transcendent realm, and also mediates that transcedence back to social life.  It’s no accident that Bottom, the leading figure in the theatrical troupe, is the one who has a bottomless dream, a fleeting contact with what eye cannot hear and ear cannot see.

As always, Shakespeare’s theater is about theater, it is meta-theatrical.

Art: Aesthetic Autonomy

Taruskin also gives a new summary of the artistic theory behind many of the lamentations of classical music’s collapse, which he traces from Mendelssohn through Kant to Schopenhaur and Adorno: “The main tenet of the creed is the defense of the autonomy of the human subject as manifested in art that is created out of a purely aesthetic, hence disinterested, impulse.  Such art is without utilitarian purpose (although, as Kant famously insisted, it is ‘purposive’), but it serves as the symbolic embodiment of human freedom and as the vehicle of transcendent metaphysical experience.”  Taruskin calls this “the most asocial definition of artistic value ever promulgated, since it leaves artists “responsible to themselves alone” so they can “provide a model of human self-realization.  All social demands on the artist - whether made by church, state, or paying public - and all social or commercial mediation are inimical to the authenticity of the creative product.”

This belief in the “transcendent human value of creative labor has always invested German romantic aesthetics with the trappings of a secular or humanistic religion.”  As such, it was seen as a “counterforce to the instrumentalizing and rationalizing tendencies of ‘administered’ capitalist society, which turns human subjects into objects of economic exploitation.”

Art: Mystical modernism

Painter Wassily Kadinsky complained about the materialism of modern life: “Only just now awakening after years of materialism, our soul is infected with the despair born of unbelief, of lack of purpose and aim.  The nightmare of materialism, which turned life into an evil, senseless game, is not yet passed; it still darkens the awakening soul.”

Kadinsky’s solution was to move toward abstraction.  As Begbie explains, “Physical forms must be isolated from their everyday contexts and treated with a high level of abstraction so that their inner nonphysical meaning may shine forth, so that their physicality and particularity can be transcended. . . . Reality’s deepest life can be expressed only if we relinquish the desire to depict objects, to represent the material world in its external, perceivable features.”

Here is modernist abstraction, motivated not by “rationalism” but by a mystical desire to transcend and surpass the material world.

Art: Sacred Spring

Robert Weldon Whalen, Sacred Spring: God and the Birth of Modernism in Fin de Siecle Vienna. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007. Hardback, 339 pp. $25.00.

Sacred Spring is part travelogue, part intellectual history, part art and music criticism. Whalen’s thesis is that Viennese modernism, the source of so much of the intellectual history of the modern West, not only can but must be read as a religiously inspired movement.

To make his case, Whalen, the Carolyn G. and Sam H. McMahon Jr. Professor of History of Queens University in Charlotte, North Carolina, defines religion in brought terms.

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Art: Water

Perhaps a history of modern aesthetic sensibilities could be written as a history of water. Consider: The shimmering liquity of some Romantic music (eg, Tchaikovsky), the muted submergence of Debussey, Monet’s obsession with the play of light on water.

Or maybe romanticism as inspired by a lunar aesthetics.

Or maybe both, moon and water together.

Art: Genius critics

Artists never accepted the attribution of genius as readily as theorists and bourgeois admirers applied it. Artists knew too much about the recalcitrantly physical qualities of words, paint, stone, ink, and sounds for that. Artists are as interested in technique as in inspirations.

But for Kant genius was the criterion of artistic value, and from the beginning, the genius of the artist had to be matched by the genius of the observer and critic. How, after all, could the work of genius be known? Only if it provided “to pleasure and contemplation an inexhaustible object of lingering attention and interpretation” (Gadamer).

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Art: Museums, Agents of relativism

Aesthetic consciousness - the capacity to abstract the aesthetic component in all perception, so as to view everything “aesthetically” - also implies, Gadamer argues, a particular notion of simultaneity. Because it abstracts the aesthetic value of the work, and downplays or ignores all other aspects of an aesthetic object, the work is removed from its place in the world, its relation to the artist, its location in a tradition of art. It is valued only for itself, not as an item in a context.

This is different from the unavoidable simultaneity of architecture; we don’t tear down decade- or century-old buildings when we build a new one. Buildings of different eras occupy the same street, square, campus. But the simultaneity of aesthetic consciousness depends on “consciousness of historical relativity of taste.” What matters for aesthetic experience is not the particular style or the taste exhibited by works of earlier ages. What matters is the work’s aesthetic dimension, and particularly its intention to be aesthetic rather than practical.

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Art: Art and appearance

After Kant, and especially after Kant’s romantic disciples, art came to be viewed as a matter of beautiful appearance, consciously defined in contrast to practical reality. This had not always been the Western conception of art. Gadamer comments, “Traditionally the purpose of ‘art,’ which also includes all conscious transformation of nature for human use, was to supplement and fill the gaps left open by nature. And ‘the fine arts,’ as long as they are seen in this framework, are a perfecting of reality, not appearances that mask, veil, or transfigure it.” A painting or poem, in this view, does not hide reality but reveals its true character. Once art is seen as appearance, however, it floats free of reality, and becomes an autonomous realm of its own.

Art: Classical and other bodies

Peter Stallybrass and Allon White (The Politics and Poetics of Transgression) summarize a point from Bakhtin: “Bakhtin was struck by the compelling difference between the human body as represented in popular festivity and the body as represented in classical statuary in the Renaissance. He noticed how the two forms of iconography ‘embodied’ utterly contrary registers of being. To begin with, the classical statue was always mounted on a plinth which meant that it was elevated, static and monumental. In the one simply face of the plinth or pedestal the classical body signalled a whole different somatic conception from that of the grotesque body which was usually multiple (Bosch, Bruegel), teeming, always already part of a throng. . . .

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Art: Noah and the Sinners

At the end of his intriguing discussion of Gericault’s painting Scene of Shipwreck, Julian Barnes gives a brief summary of the fortunes of Noah in Western art, which he says change significantly after the Sistine Chapel: “In the Sistine Chapel the Ark (now looking more like a floating bandstand than a ship) for the first time loses its compositional pre-eminence; here it is pushed right to the back of the scene. What fills the foreground are the anguished figures of those doomed antediluvians left to perish when the chosen Noah and his family were saved. The emphasis is on the lost, the abandoned, the discarded sinners, God’s detritus. (Should we allow ourswelves to postulate Michaelangelo the rationalist, moved by pity to subtle condemnation of God’s heartlessness? Or Michaelangelo the pious, fulfilling his papal contract and showing us what might happen if we failed to mend our ways? Perhaps the decision was purely aesthetic - the artist preferring the contorted bodies of the damned to yet another dutiful representation of yet another wooden Ark.) . . .

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Art: More on Postmodern aestheticization

Featherstone: “one of the characteristics of postmodern art in the 1960s was its attack on institutionalized art: on the museums and galleries, the critical academic hierarchies of taste, and the consecration of works of art as clearly demarcated objects of display. This attack on autonomous, institutionalized art was itself not new . . . it occurred with the historical avant-garde of the 1920s with its rejection of Aestheticism. In this context it is interesting to note that in the 1960s there was a revival of interest in the Dada and Surrealist Movements and in particular the work of Marcel Duchamp. . . . In the 1960s we have similar and perhaps more extreme attempts to break down the barriers between art and everyday life, to resist art becoming a museum commodity-object. Here we think of the ‘happenings’ and landscape art devised by Christo, the Bulgarian-American artist, whose ‘events’ included wrapping part of the Australian coast and draping an enormous curtain over a Colorado valley.”

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Art: Postmodern architecture

Charles Jencks lamented in his Language of Postmodern Architecture that the term had been used in ways opposite to his own usage: “When I first wrote the book in 1975 and 1976 the word and concept of Post-Modernism had only been used with any frequency in literary criticism. Most perturbing, as I later realized it had been used to mean ‘Ultra-Modern,’ referring to the extremist novels of William Burroughs and a philosophy of nihilism and anti-convention. While I was aware of these writings of Ihab Hassan and others, I used the term to mean the opposite of all this: the end of avant-garde extremism, the partial return to tradition and the central role of communicating with the public - and architecture is the public art.”

Art: Modernism and Postmodernism in Art

The Modernday Dictionary of Deceived Ideas offers this definition of postmodernism “This word has no meaning. Use it as often as possible.”

Mike Featherstone, who quotes this dictionary, offers a more serious discussion of what postmodernism means when applied to artistic movemements. He gives this summary of the sensibility of modernism: “The basic features of modernism [ie, the high modernism of Joyce, Eliot, Picasso, Stravinsky] can be summarized as: an aesthetic of self-consciousness and reflexiveness; a rejection of narrative structure in favour of simultaneity and montage; an exploration of the paradoxical, ambiguous and uncertain open-ended nature of reality; and a rejection of the notion of an integrated personality in favour of an emphasis upon the de-structured, de-humanized subject.” Featherstone understatedly notes that “one of the problems with trying to understand postmodernism in the arts is that many of these features are appropriated into various definitions of postmodernism.”

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Art: “Natural” architecture

In an overview of the architectural work of Santiago Calatrava, Sara Williams Goldhagen (TNR January 23) cautions against the chimera of architecture grounded in “nature”: “Maybe the first architects needed to pay obeisance to nature’s designs, but that primal moment is long gone. Architecture - and ‘nature’ too - is a human construct. Whether or not designers need to acknowledge their buildings’ physical and material properties (and for reasons too complex to lay out here, I believe they do), they violate the essence of the art when they fail to design buildings and cities that reflect, accommodate, and symbolize who we are, how we live, and how we think we might or should live. . . . Shaping his architecture around long-established verities about the biological and natural grounds of the human condition, Santiago Calatrava seems to be afflicted with multiple blind spots that prohibit him from taking on architecture’s highly complex intrinsic and non-naturalistic challenges. Whatever its debts to our biological being, human civilization is cultural, social, political, and more. And its embodiment in our buildings, our landscapes, and our cities should say so.”

Art: Allegory with Venus and Cupid

In his book, Erotic Faith, Robert M. Polhemus offers an intriguing analysis of Bronzino’s Allegory with Venus and Cupid. The allegory suggests that “worship of Venus . . . blinds one to the menace of time and death.” Seeking sexual fulfillment means “betraying self, God, and humankind as a whole . . . To deify seductive eroticism and give way to the moment is to court destruction and set loose anarchy.”

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Art: Audubon

There’s a fascinating review of Richard Rhodes’ recent biography of Audubon in the Dec 6 issue of The Weekly Standard. The reviewer has this to say about the “pervasive strangeness” of Audubon’s art: “Audubon’s most powerful compositions (with few exceptions, such as the regal wild turkey cock and the incomparable bursting galaxy of Carolina parakeets) are his depictions are avian predators and their prey. There is something undeniably grotesque and slightly distorted about these paintings, particularly the raptors. His peregrine falcons are wild-eyed, winged hounds of hell, dripping with blood from the ripped breast of their prey and staring out at the observer in impersonal defiance. His red-tailed hawks are splay-footed demons, harrowing and upstaging the purported subject of his bob white quail painting. His golden eagle hovers uncannily in mid-air on folded wings, one of its talons gratuitously piercing the bleeding eye of the white arctic hare in its grip. His snowy owls are moonlight apparitions rather than real birds. Even his Canada goose, among the more bovine of our water-fowl, has an oddly contorted neck, which, with its long, protruding pink tongue, gives it a serpentine look, while its mate, half-concealed in the dark of a cave-like bower, seems to be piercing the abdomen of the other’s belly with its beak.” Audubon thus “brought European Gothicism to American art as Poe brought it to American literature. For all their astounding and accurate detail and ‘lifelike’ poses, they seem otherworldly, and that is perhaps their greatest achievement.” I would never have put Poe and Audubon in the same category, but once the comparison is suggested, it’s hard to resist.

Art: Perl on Contemporary Painters

Jed Perl, art critic for the New Republic, has a rant about John Currin and other contemporary painters in the Feb 16 issue of TNR. Scathing is too weak for this review. He says that Currin produces trash, and incompetent trash at that. Currin believes in nothing other than his own self-promotion. And he is only one of a “band of sleazeball figure painters” that are rising in reputation today, rising because of a nefarious alliance of art critics, promoters, and artists-on-the-take. A taste will suffice: Viewers who credit Currin as an important painter “are simply not accepting the evidence of their eyes. They are instead looking for rationalizations for Currin’s glassy surfaces, weird passages of impastoed paint, fakey feathery brushwork, and violations of anatomy, which may be conscious stylizations but are more likely signs of plain incompetence. Formally, Currin does not have strategies; he has twitches. And the attitude that he takes toward the aging matrons and the snub-nosed lads and lassies whom he paints feel slapdash, perfunctory. You are left wondering whether Currin love or hates these people. My guess is that he doesn’t know or care.”

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