Daniel A. Siedell, Art Historian

Rescuing Formalism

Any intellectual position that becomes too easy to dismiss poses a problem, whether it is in religion, politics, or culture. Such dismissals end up transforming serious intellectual positions, such as liberalism and conservatism, into caricatures to which only the silliest of ideologues could hold. This does violence to the integrity of these ideas and those that are or have been deluded enough to hold them.

This is precisely what has happened to formalism and its unsavory co-conspirators "autonomy," "disinterestedness," and "art for art's sake" in art and aesthetics. Formalism holds that art is a self-contained entity sealed off from other objects in the world and that the experience of art is to be distinguished from other experiences in the world. A painting's meaning, then, is determined through its internal structure, that is, the line, forms, and color that comprise it. The eighteenth century German philosopher Immanuel Kant is usually credited (or blamed) for developing the philosophical foundation for this position in Critique of Judgment (1790) and Clement Greenberg, the most influential art critic of the twentieth century and apologist for Abstract Expressionism in the 1940s, applied its principles in developing his own distinctive history of modern art. Despite the power of their thought and influence, both Kant and Greenberg are nowadays invoked by right-thinking critics, art historians, and curators (especially curators) only to be dismissed and to serve as foils for the more enlightened and progressive approaches to art, approaches which affirms its participation in a broader, less "elitist" contexts, whether the artist's intentional and biographical context, historical and social context, or the viewer's own interpretive context.

Although I too am critical of Kantian and Greenbergian excesses and distortions, I have recently come to acknowledge the importance of what I would call a pragmatic, or "soft," formalism. A work of art's value cannot be reduced to what exists outside it, whether that is what the work depicts, the intentions of its maker, its historical, social and political context, or the intentions of its viewers. The work of art has some internal meaning. It is a tense and dynamic hypostatic union between form and content, between its presence as an artifact and its capacity to reference the world of meaning and experience outside it. This means that even though a painting may depict a vase of flowers, a sunset, or a human figure it always remains a flat artifact, albeit a painted one. This is not merely Kantian or Greenbergian theory. This is the essence of painting, including cave paintings and icons.

A soft or pragmatic formalism that recognizes the internal formal mechanics of painting helps keep the attention focused first and last on the painting itself and on the painting as a painted artifact.  Deprived of this tether, many critics move a little too quickly from a painting's form to its content and then from the painting itself to its myriad of contexts. Without a basic formalist vocabulary that can account for the union of form and content, that union that makes a work of art a work of art, and which can offer an analysis of the mechanics of how a painting works, then there remains in the end little reason to pay much attention to the object at all. The critic must tarry in the between of form and content.  Although his critical insights brought him into this between, Greenberg feared it and moved too quickly to the terra firma of pure form. (Philosopher William Desmond suggests that Kant too found himself in the between, the between of self and Other which terrified him and so his philosophical system is in fact an ingenious fortress to protect him from the between.)

Critics of Greenbergian formalism tend to err in the opposite direction. They dissolve this between by rushing to the safe havens of content, imagery, and context. This is often what those scholars and critics who are interested in art's religious and spiritual meaning do.They will extract an image from a painting, like a cross (or, in my own case, a chocolate Easter bunny), and perform an iconographical analysis. The problem is that such analysis doesn't actually require the particularity of that cross and its function in that painting. It thus becomes merely a visual catalyst for religious and spiritual reflection that exists outside the work. We thus can find ourselves in the uncomfortable position in which the work of art is actually powerless to do anything except move us toward something else, toward religious or spiritual meaning, for example, that exists outside or beyond the work.

Many critics who eschew formalism have immense trouble standing in front of a painting and talking about how it actually works as a painting—not as a visual illustration of the artist’s intentions, or as a door that opens onto political, social, or religious "content" but its internal mechanics as a painted artifact. When I am in an artist's studio and she asks me what I think of that unfinished painting leaning against the wall, he is not asking me to riff on the iconographical meaning of the tree, seascape, or figure.  She is not asking me to reflect on her intentions or biography or to explore the institutional, social, and political contexts that determined its making. She is asking me whether the painting, as a painted artifact, actually works. Does this line work there? Does this color work there? If this sounds too "formalist," then the baby has indeed been thrown out with the bathwater. The relationship between form and content, between presence and reference should never be ignored or dissolved. The responsibility of the critic is to keep alive the movement from one to the other and back again, which ultimately reveals what is truly remarkable about painting. This does not mean that the artist's intentions, historical and social context, and the viewer's "horizon of expectation" are in any way denied. It is, however, to assert that they proceed from and return to the dynamic between of the artifact's form and content. And I am convinced that it is in this between that a painting's distinctive embodiment of transcendence, where its particular religious and spiritual presence, is found. And this requires the critical language of formalism.

God in the Gallery and James K.A. Smith

James K. A. Smith's "Overture: In Praise of Elitism" has started off the symposium on God in the Gallery over at the church and postmodern culture: a conversation. Read it here. 

Report from CIVA

I just posted a piece on my experience at the CIVA conference over at James K.A. Smith's church and postmodern culture: conversation blog site, sponsored by Baker Academic. Read it here.

Join God in the Gallery in Colorado Springs

I will be speaking at Ad LIB 2009 at the Franciscan Retreat Center in Colorado Springs, a conversation on Christianity and art from 11-13 September. AD LIB is a fellowship of Christians in the literary, visual, and performance arts, meeting annually to pursue our faith and vocation as Christians and artists. It promises to be an enjoyable weekend. Read about the program and register here.

Bad Time for Poetry

Artist Enrique Martínez Celaya has ended his blog, Bad Time for Poetry, after nearly two years. He plans to publish the posts and selected comments by readers in book form, available this fall from the University of Nebraska Press. Read my short preface to his collection here (click on 'blog' under 'exchange').

Sasha and the grace of God

Our family cat Sasha died today. She was twenty years old. I spent most of my time at the CIVA conference this past week on the verge of tears. My wife got her only two months after we met, while I was in graduate school in New York. Neither my wife and I nor our children can imagine our family without her. She was with us when we got married nearly eighteen years ago, when my wife's father died of lymphoma in his mid-forties, when each of our three children were brought home from the hospital, when my grandmother died after a long and difficult period in a nursing home, when I struggled through graduate school and we moved from apartment to apartment in Iowa City and then in Lincoln, Nebraska. She was with us during every peak and valley of our family life. She has been a living, seven pound furry sacrament of God's presence in our home.

Yet she is more. She participated in my salvation. If, by God's mercy, I endure to the end and am raised to new life to be a new creation in Christ, it will be in part through Sasha. Although I have professed a faith in Christ since I was old enough to profess anything, I disliked animals, especially cats, even mocking those whose lives seemed excessively attached to such unimportant beasts. And my dislike and disregard, I am ashamed to admit, was embodied at times in some pretty poor treatment toward animals. She slowly but surely converted my heart and taught me to see God's love in little animals. And so she offered me an opportunity to undo my insensitivity toward nature, toward animals by loving and caring for her each day for two decades. Through her I became gentler and kinder, took notice of small details around me. And when she and I would spend our early mornings together I gradually became aware that I was enjoying the foretaste of a harmony between humanity and the animal kingdom prophesied by Isaiah.

She was not like most cats. She loved human companionship. She would come when we called her and delighted in searching out laps, whether it was my youngest son's at 6:00 am when he would get up early to do his devotions or my wife's when she threw herself onto the couch or bed after a long day of work. The hearts of our children were formed through her, through her need for our presence, her delight in our comfort, and the stillness and quiet that a purring cat can create. Even to the very end, she delighted in our presence, responded to our touch, purring away in contentment while her body wasted away, since she had stopped eating over a week ago. She survived only on a bit of water and our attention. The final days of her life have made it clear that God made her for us and for our salvation. She revealed to us something mysterious and gigantic and utterly wonderful about God's love in our home. Where is this mysterious, gigantic, and utterly wonderful love of God? Sleeping on the couch.

Yet there is more. When, out of spiritual desperation, I began to establish an early morning rule of prayer, she was delighted. She would wake me five minutes before my alarm every morning, pestering me with her loud Siamese meow until I relented. And so she quite literally helped me to pray. She sat on my lap while I prayed, while I confessed my sin and begged forgiveness, and while I read the Scriptures. The moment I sat down in my office chair, she was up on my lap. It is no wonder that the hagiographies of the saints of the Latin and Greek Church include miraculous relationships with animals as a foretaste of the peaceable kingdom to come. I had my own miraculous relationship. My own foretaste.

During the last few years, our youngest son would ask the inevitable question: will Sasha be in heaven? Will we see her again? And while I often rolled my eyes at those who believed that there was some kind of dog and cat heaven, his question, I became convinced, was not about Sasha, but about God's love. It was about his love for my son and his love for this cat. And so I began to think more deeply. I told him that, perhaps, when Christ returned, those animals still alive would be part of the new creation, the New Jerusalem, a part of Christ "making all things new." And so he (and I) prayed for Christ's return in part for that reason. When we looked at her we didn't merely see an example of "natural theology" or "common grace." We saw eschatological potential. We knew she did not have long to live and so Christ's return took on an added urgency. And this is the attitude, as disciples of Christ, that we are supposed to have. We are to be alert, to be awake, eagerly awaiting the Master's return. That Sasha was the means by which we remained awake is itself a remarkable and unexpected gift from God.

Sasha's death has also made the curse of death a tangible reality for our family. We live in a broken world and death is the evidence of such brokenness. Our sin affects the entire world, which, St. Paul tells us, groans for redemption. Our experience of Sasha's death is such a groaning. Death is not natural. Whether it's the death of a young child due to cancer or a car accident, a grandmother who dies at ninety, or a beloved cat who has lived twenty years, death is never natural and the time is never right. It always seems like a tear in the fabric of the cosmos, something sudden, something radically abnormal. 

And that has forced me to push further in my thinking about this little cat. She is not merely God's presence in the world, as part of our delight in God's creation, something for our enjoyment here and now. She is a means for our salvation. Christ is known, in some small way, through her. And that makes me think that there might be a future for her.

I find that hope in the contours and trajectory of the Scriptures, which reveal the limitless surprises of God's grace. And I am heartened that it caught C.S. Lewis's attention as well, whose love of his life, Joy, had a house full of cats. Here is what he suggests. The very reason for creation itself is the overflowing of love that sloshes over the limits of the Trinitarian relationship of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The world is brought into this relationship, borne out of and sustained by divine love through the incarnation of the Son. It is God's love that saves. And Lewis speculates that it might be our love that saves the animals, namely, those domesticated animals that are the beneficiaries of our Christ-centered love. Our pets, Lewis suggests, grow into something more as they participate in our love, a love grounded in and through God's love, which is Christ. And that love, because it is God-like, is life-creating. And so, perhaps when Christ returns, and, according to Revelation of St. John, "makes all things new," animals who have been shaped in and through this human love will participate in what is made new.

That God's love and my salvation might be seen in the life of a house cat seems silly. Yet God continually surprises his people, surprises them by showing saving grace to the Gentiles, the sick, the despised, the prostitutes, the outcasts. We find Christ where we least expect him, among the poor and needy. Is it possible that our love, through Christ, can slosh over its limits and drench the creation and  douse the animal world? Is it possible our beloved pets, on which we lavish such extravagant love, those animals that rely on us for their existence yet end up blessing us richly, will play a role when our love is perfected at the end? Lewis's imagination at least gives me space to imagine something wonderfully immense, anticipate something wonderfully surprising like that.

One of the prayers I prayed daily as Sasha sat on my lap included this line: "In unforeseen events, let me not forget that all are sent by You." Each day for twenty years, Sasha was one of God's "unforeseen events" in my daily life. At some point I began to sense this and it has grown stronger during the last few years. God's saving presence is everywhere, not only in nature, as embodied through a house cat, but through culture, as embodied in music, art, poetry. If it is Christ that holds "all things together," than surely paintings, poems, and little house cats are, in some way, held together in and through Christ. It seems remarkable that God has often spoke to me, shaped and challenged me, through poems, paintings, and a house cat during these last twenty years. 

If there is a destiny for the animals we love, it is due to the cosmic impact of Christ, something about which St. Maximus the Confessor often wrote. What I know is that a dimension of the mystery of God's love was revealed in and through my relationship with her. And that my experience of God's love, through Christ, is so much bigger than it was before she entered my life. If I awoke in the middle of the night, one of my favorite habits was to gently reach over to touch my wife and to thank God for her. And then I would reach over just a little further to touch Sasha, sleeping contently in the crook of my wife's leg, she would look up and give a purr. And it all seemed to make sense, my place in this world. God brought both of them into my life twenty years ago. In spite of my selfishness, callousness, and arrogance, my wife and Sasha, along with our children, are icons of God's love. And they have made me a better person, a better disciple of Jesus. And I need them all for my salvation. If God uses a little house cat to speak to me, what else is God bringing (has brought and will bring) to me each and every day for my salvation? I would love to say that it is my spiritual sensitivity and theological sophistication that has enabled me to grasp God's presence in and through Sasha. But that wouldn't fit the examples in Scripture of the Lord's use of animals. He seems to save them for the particularly thick and stubborn, like a Jonah who was swallowed by a giant fish or a Baalam, whose beloved donkey spoke the word of the Lord to him and opened his eyes.

Whatever God chooses to do with our love for her at the end, I know that she had a divine purpose in my salvation. And I am not embarrassed to admit that. I can rest assured that my love for her, as love, will be redeemed, fulfilled in the end. And that through her my family and I have come to know a little something more about the grace of God. And that is enough for now.   

Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God!  How unsearchable his judgments,     and his paths beyond tracing out!...For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him     be the glory forever!  Amen. (Rom. 11: 33; 36)

Great Culture?

I just returned from a thoroughly enjoyable experience at the CIVA conference hosted by Bethel University. Among my responsibilities was to offer some remarks on the theme of the conference, which was Culture? What follows are the remarks I read. 

Most Christian commentary on culture reminds me of the scene in Moliére's Tartuffe when Monsieur Jourdain discovers, much to his delight, that he has been speaking prose all his life and didn't even know it. Yes, we North American Christians have indeed been making culture all along. But is it great culture? What follows are three very short vignettes that may serve as icons for us to contemplate as we reflect on art and culture at this conference.

It was Aleksandr Tvardovsky's habit to lounge about his apartment in his bathrobe while he read from some of the piles of manuscripts that littered his living quarters. As editor of the liberal magazine Novy Mir in the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War, Tvardovsky was well known as a poet as well as a staunch defender of his literary magazine's independence. One morning he came upon a manuscript. After reading the first few lines he stopped, put it down, took a shower, shaved, put on his best clothes, and drove to his office, where he finished reading it. What was the manuscript? It was, “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who wrote it in secret in the late 1950s.Tvardovsky was so moved by it that he convinced Khrushchev to publish it and it appeared in Novy Mir in serial form in 1962. Due in part to Tvardovsky's support, Solzhenitsyn a few years later will win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

It is easy to see how Solzhenitsyn is the hero of the story. He risked his life, not only by committing his words to paper but sending them out into public. But we must not forget the editor. Tvardovsky recognized the greatness of the manuscript and, at significant personal risk, fought with the State and its censors for its publication. He lived surrounded by culture, by manuscripts written by intelligent and creative writers. Yet it took him just a few minutes to realize that in Solzhenitsyn he was reading something great. We need Solzhenitsyns who will have the courage not merely to write for the dresser drawer, as the Russians called it, but for the public. But we also need Tvardovskys who can recognize great artistic and cultural achievements amidst the clutter of cultured mediocrity that saturates our lives. Are we capable even of recognizing great art, great culture?

Through a particular poem, which has been called a “sixteen line death sentence,” Osip Mandelstam caught the attention of Stalin in the early 1930s, which, on the whole, was never a good thing.  As Mandelstam himself once said, the Russians alone take their poets seriously. They kill them.  Mandelstam’s devoted wife memorized all of her husband’s poetry in order to preserve it from the death and destruction she feared would be immanent. She would be proved right only a few years later. Her experience and interpretation of the events surrounding her husband’s life and death are recounted in two moving memoirs, Hope against Hope and Hope Abandoned. 

Do we have the courage, when we do recognize great culture, and great art, to sacrifice our own careers, our comforts, our own positions of authority and power, much less our very lives to preserve it? As we reflect on art and culture these next few days, we must remind ourselves that there is a cost to producing great art and great culture. Are we, as members of CIVA, content to make “good enough” culture, “fashionable” art in order to further our careers and comfort, content simply to be known as "culture makers," happy to know that we have been producing "culture" all along?"

The production of great culture, great art, cannot be separated from the risk of failure. Most writers, musicians, poets, and artists do not produce great art, great culture, even if they enjoy successful careers. And even those poets, artists, and musicians who have, do not produce it very often. Do we have the courage to fail, to push ourselves to the point of failure, to assume we probably will fail to produce great art, great culture and still try? Or, are we content to publish essays and give talks on beauty and transcendence, yet produce art and culture only good enough to get tenure, only good enough to get published or get work exhibited, only good enough to be invited to speak at conferences like this? In other words, produce culture only good enough to affirm the status quo. Do we have the courage to produce culture that transcends those rules, which perhaps even changes the rules of the game, or render conventions irrelevant?

Herman Melville died convinced that Moby-Dick was a failure. And most of the literary critics of his time agreed with him. As we curry the favor of contemporary critics and book reviewers, bristle at negative reviews or fawn over those who praise us, it would be a useful exercise to read those initial reviews of Moby-Dick. And what should strike us is how profoundly irrelevant and dated they now seem yet how relevant and contemporary Moby-Dick remains. Do we have the courage to try and produce great art, great culture that becomes more powerful in the future, something that might last, something that might increase in value? Do we really want to produce art and culture that twenty years from now will seem so dated, so small, so inconsequential, so "of the period?" The storage rooms of art museums are full of such works. Is that what we should teach our artists to aspire to, having their own corner of a crowded art museum storage room, happy to have been included in this or that museum's permanent collection?

It is the ambition to produce something that will transcend the moment in the face of its improbability that brings great culture, great art. Do we have the courage to die believing we have failed? Melville sacrificed his life for the service of producing a great work of art.  And we are the beneficiaries of his sacrifice. Perhaps we have lost the ability to recognize great art and lost the nerve to preserve great culture because, ultimately, we have lost the nerve to risk failure. We have certainly not heeded Samuel Beckett’s advice:  “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail better.” Perhaps we no longer believe that producing great art, great culture is worth the sacrifice and the risk. And perhaps, even more terrifying, we no longer believe that great art, great culture actually exist. And so we become content with merely getting our bit of notoriety now while we can enjoy it. But Melville certainly was a believer in great art and he believed it was worth the risk, which might be why Christ haunts his novel at every turn, making Moby-Dick one of the most powerfully Christian novels ever written. 

This should be of grave concern for those who claim to be a disciple of Christ, for whom the powers of this world and its seductions are to be resisted, not embraced. Let me suggest that neither “Christianity” nor “culture" per se make modern society uncomfortable. It is the self-sacrificial and uncompromising pursuit of greatness and quality in these practices, a life singularly devoted to them, which condemns the virtues of contemporary professional and personal life: compromise, mediocrity, and personal comfort that makes modern society uncomfortable. Be a Christian, but don't take it too seriously or your fellow church members might take you for a narrow-minded fundamentalist, legalist, or "liberal."  (The stories of the saints we venerate share a common trait: they seem perpetually in conflict and tension with their contemporary Church.) Be an artist, but don't take it too seriously or your faculty colleagues will chide you for being arrogant, delusional, or not a "team player." (Do we really think that a Solzhenitsyn, a Mandelstam, a Melville could get tenure today in any English department?)

Our Protestant heritage in North America has conditioned us to fear and thus condemn monasticism and asceticism as hopelessly unrealistic in the "real world." Yet such criticism reveals a failure of nerve.  We use Luther's slogan, "simultaneously sanctified and sinner," in order to absolve us of the responsibility to be better than a mediocre Christian. Has our pathological fear of being accused of being an anti-intellectual fundamentalist and thus risk being denied a seat at the table of contemporary cultural discourse blinded us to the simple fact that if we take the Gospels seriously at all, we have to admit that we cannot have both Christ and the world? Are we now too sophisticated, too enlightened, too iconoclastic to believe in the myths of great art, great culture, even the possibility of a great life devoted to Christ? We're not humble. We're cowards. 

Are we willing to risk our lives, our careers, our reputations within CIVA and outside in the secular world of culture, to be a great disciple of Christ? Are we willing to risk our lives to make great art and culture, even at the expense of our standing in our Christian and secular communities? Let CIVA be the only place in culture where our self-sacrificial devotion to Christ will be the engine that drives our self-sacrificial devotion to produce great art, great culture even if it puts us at odds with the Christian and cultural establishments, with our local churches, art departments, and the like. And it surely will.

Yet we will fail. And fail again. But let us fail here, at CIVA, together. For it is our failures that will be of more use to God than our self-serving “successes” and our self-defined attempts to “redeem culture,” which often amount to little more than professional opportunism. For as the Desert Fathers knew well enough, the greatest work of culture that we can produce, the greatest masterpiece we can make, is our own self as an icon of the living God.

Let me close with a story from the Sayings of the Desert Fathers.

   

Abba Lot went to see Abba Joseph and said to him, 'Abba as far as I can I say my little office, I fast a little, I pray and meditate, I live in peace and as far as I can, I purify my thoughts. What else can I     do?' then the old man stood up and stretched his hands towards heaven. His fingers became like ten     lamps of fire and he said to him, 'If you will, you can become all flame.'

God in the Gallery goes to CIVA

Later this week I will be attending the 2009 Biennial Conference of Christians in the Visual Arts (CIVA), an international organization celebrating its thirtieth anniversary, which will be hosted by Bethel University in St. Paul, Minnesota.  Along with theologian Miroslav Volf, art historian Adrienne Chaplin, and artist Makoto Fujimora, I will be serving as a plenary speaker. The conference theme is Culture? and so my brief plenary remarks will address this theme (I plan to post all or parts of my remarks upon my return.) I will also be participating in a Q&A session about God in the Gallery as well as participating in one of artist Kevin Hamilton's sessions that will address the recent "Younger than Jesus" exhibition, the inaugural triennial organized by the New Museum in New York. Also, artist Matt Drissell will make a presentation on God in the Gallery and the recent work of critic/art historian Donald B. Kuspit. What makes this presentation interesting is that I studied with Kuspit at SUNY-Stony Brook. Although I was interested in Kuspit's interest in art and spirituality, he and I never discussed the subject. Yet, as I begin to develop my next book-length project, a follow up to God in the Gallery, I am relying heavily on his approach to painting (as well as on Clement Greenberg's). So, I am intrigued that Prof. Drissell has put the two of us together.

And finally, I served as the "curator" or "juror" of the CIVA exhibition and selected twenty-five works by fourteen artists to be on view at one of the art department gallery spaces. On the surface this does not seem such a big deal. But an important aspect of God in the Gallery is my ambivalence toward the notion of the "Christian artist" who produces "Christian art." And so the process of selecting artists and artwork for the exhibition offered an opportunity for me to reflect on this problematic manifestation of the relationship between art and religion.

I include below my curatorial statement. 

Cultural practice is the means by which we nourish, elaborate, and fulfill our human nature. Created by God as unfinished projects we strain to become other than what we are. Art helps us as we strain. It cultivates in us the discontent that marks us as human beings with a telos, with a goal, which is communion with God. If we, as disciples of Jesus, truly believe that "in him all things hold together" (Col. 1: 17), we must also believe that he holds together all forms of cultural practice, including modern and contemporary art, even if it does not explicitly address him or is made by those who do not follow him.

These fourteen artists know that art is not merely a certain kind of image or message but is a particular medium-based practice that has a history and tradition in which they must participate and through which their work develops meaning. Content is thus inseparable from form. "A Christian," Father Alexander Schmemann once said, "is one who sees Christ everywhere." And art, because it is a means by which we make finer and finer visual distinctions, trains us to see Christ not only in the world's content but also in its form.

Christ is the power that lies behind these twenty-five works and Christ is what holds them together.

 

God in the Gallery and IAM, part II

Part II of my podcast interview with Christy Tennant of IAM is available. Listen to it here.

God in the Gallery and IAM

Christy Tennant, of IAM (International Arts Movement), recently interviewed me about God in the Gallery. Listen to part one of the two-part podcast interview here.