jonathan

This brief profile actually began as an inquiry into some remarkable positions that have been circulating of late within contemporary art criticism and practice. Art historians situate the seeds of the contemporary avant garde with the Italian Futurists and their neo-Nietzschean rantings about the death of art, death of God, death of death, the praise of modern warfare and pure destruction. The Futurists inaugurated the contemporary era, the opening of the last century, with a blast of utter offense and abjection. Indeed, the catchphrase for this manner of work is ‘abject art’. Abject artists and their artworks puncture every decade of this century and the last — Dada, Surrealism, Bauhaus performance, the Black Mountain school, post-war New York happenings, Yves Klein, Pierro Manzoni and Marcel Duschamp’s post-metaphysical objects, punk rock, the UCLA school of performance, Paul McCarthy’s orific obsessions, Mike Kelley’s janitorial perversions, the Chapman brothers’ rediscovery of polymorphous sexuality, Damien Hirst’s decaying corpses — even MTV’s Jackass has posed deep problems for contemporary artists. What to do in the gallery when everyone’s doing it on MTV? Scrotal references, scatological themes, body fluids of every color, the abjection of the flesh, the piercing and the stigmatization the flesh, the preponderance of nose rings and tattos always, and programmatically so, framed in the small of the back. The banality of deviance, the commodification of rebellion is currently in a high pitch. Horkheimer and Adorno are silently present in this brief study as we attempt to find out what’s so fine about fine art and explore the deposit of the arts that we inherit from the history of aesthetics. The Frankfurt Schüle are wonderfully instructive in this area, particularly in the area of decoding body piercing formations, tattoo iconography and television scatology but we turn from these pressing issues of tattoos and piercings to deal with other matters, ancient theological matters, in an attempt to piece together something of a historical perspective on all this abjection in culture, as well as how to find the spiritual in art during a time of the banality of abjection in culture. So what is left of the spiritual in fine arts when all the abjection, stigmatization and degeneracy they represented for at least the last century has been co-opted by MTV, and when the ‘EXTREME!’ has become simply banal? Perhaps we can start decoding this with a few extreme examples of our own — we theologians and artists together. Three things stand out when one pictures the last century’s art. First, the jarring noise of the Italian and Russian Futurists, Constructivists and Dadaists prophecied and then reflected the brutality and complete destruction that was World War I, supposedly the war to end all wars, and quickly followed by another one twice as lethal. Also, the Surrealists between and after the two world wars offered a similar perspective, that of nihilism, meaninglessness and death. Second, after the two world wars the Vienna Actionists, profoundly effected by their government’s involvement in genocide and radical aggression, posed a return to abject art but this time with a particular emphasis on religious iconography. Hermann Nitsch came to exemplify this Actionist conflation of abjection and religion, eventually hosting magnificent events at his castle in Prinzendorf that included mock-crucifixions, truckloads of food dumped into the courtyard, excessive drinking and animal sacrifices. The events are more of a persistent reflection on the horrific mystery of religion and myth than a modernist attempt to destroy religious contemplation. It is with the Actionists that the post-war contemporary fixation on the abject and the religious returns, bringing us to our third moment in contemporary art and the impetus for this study. Paul McCarthy, Mike Kelly (U.C.L.A.), the Chapman Brothers and Damien Hirst (Goldsmiths) each produce works that continue the themes of abjection that retain similarities to, and betray a deep influence by, the Futurists, Dadaists, Surrealists and, notably, the Vienna Actionists. It would appear from their work that they are much closer to the pre-war groups, critiquing religion, reveling in the sick joke, preferring an anti-intellectual celebration of excess. However — and this is where they are so close to the religiosity of the Vienna Actionists and what is so striking from a theological perspective — just as one regards their work and sees nothing but the abovementioned and the dark punchline of the sick joke, their written work and their interviews are comprised of deeply theological themes such as God, transcendence, death, sin, redemption, sexuality, and, most profoundly for the mystic, a vision of divinity in the abjection of this world, an attempt to perceive God in everything, an attempt to rescuscitate beauty through ugliness, sublimity through mere beauty and prettiness. Setting off from this contemporary perspective it seemed imperative to seek out moments in the history of aesthetics that would assist us in understanding the perspective of this rather small strain of contemporary, and justly adding the modifier ‘mystical’, art. Can this recent abject mystical art contribute to the edification of contemporary Christianity? Are there moments of consonance in the history of theology with contemporary abject art? Of contemporary abject art with moments in historical theology? Perhaps it is this return to religious mystery in contemporary artists — while remaining ‘EXTREME!’ in relation with their MTV cohorts — that sets off artists from the cable entertainment Jackass? Perhaps this is the difference between a real transcendence of the self toward God and transcendence simply for transcendence sake that Laurence Paul Hemming talks about in his critique of postmodern philosophy? And most importantly, how have the theological-aesthetic ideas of beauty, sublimity and ugliness evolved in western thought before aesthetics had even been categorized and placed as a subset of metaphysics? In examining these and other persistent questions it is prudent to note something about aesthetics, namely that it is a modern invention and that when one queries ancient aesthetics one is often in territory that appears to be little connected to aesthetics and crosses into the realm of mysticism. Just as McCarthy, Kelley, the Chapmans and Hirst appear to be trafficking nothing in theology yet quickly betray their theological core, so too do philosphers and theologians merely appear to discuss metaphysics and ontology when in fact their arguments are quickly betrayed as theories of divine, theological aesthetics when carefully observed. This is the core of this study — by incessantly invoking theological themes in the biographical details of their work and in their written work, the Chapmans, Kelley, Hirst, and McCarthy all demand a theological reading of their work. While it would be a stretch at the least, and impossible at most, to attempt to read their work as “Christian” art, they nevertheless clearly ask for a theological analysis of their work and so we come to analogues in the history of aesthetics — themes of negative theology, ugliness as an incarnational aesthetic, and the critical reinterpretation of Greek aesthetics by Christian aesthetics. While we contemporary theologians and critics cannot make the case for contemporary art as “Christian” we can find useful ways of seeing contemporary art in these themes, themes that inform a recontextualized reading of contemporary art and contemporary artists who also insipire recontextualized readings of the history of theology and aesthetics. What we conclude with in this study are new ways of reading art that are informed by homologous themes in the history of aesthetics and theology, and new ways of reading theology and aesthetics that are informed and challenged by contemporary artists. Heidegger, our patient corrective, reminds us that the beautiful/sublime divide is a modernist phenomenon, as inaugurated by Burke, Addison, Kant, but what is more is that he reminds us that “aesthetics”, like ““logic,” “ethics,” and “physics” begin[s] to flourish only when original thinking comes to an end.” The present essay is divided into four sections of a history that seeks to think around, under, about the abject in the moment of the experience of the divine in art. The trajectory is that of the reception of the beautiful and the sublime in Hellenistic Greek thought through early Christianity and the eventual constitution of incarnational thought that revaluates Greek metaphysics, particularly in the Council of Chalcedon. Following the Council of Chalcedon the ultimate development of this Christian incarnational thought reaches a zenith in the iconoclastic controversy and the radical affirmation of divine presence through image. Longinus and Plotinus’ Hellenistic Platonism frames the origin of the discussion on beauty and sublimity as they relate to the divine. Longinus in particular exaggerates the agonistically aesthetic as what both evokes and invokes the divine — a stark departure from Plato’s mimetic aesthetic theory in which the representatively aesthetic is at a distant remove from the divine, and that the beautiful and the Good refer to the divine. Plotinus reinforces Longinus’ insistence on the aesthetic primacy in the union with divinity, or the One. Both reinforce the basic metaphysical separation in Platonism of matter and the divine, of beings and Being, things and God. It is this “cleft in Being” that Christian aesthetics confronts. It is not until Christian thought moves to fully incarnational thought that Platonic metaphysics is confronted, well after Origen and Augustine’s Platonic overtones. Augustine abides in the paradox of Christianity in distinction with Platonism. He still emphasizes the metaphysical “cleft in Being” yet represents some of the earliest thought on the reversal of this very problem. The incarnation represents a reversal, a paradoxical inversion of Longinus’ seeking out of the divine in the ‘high and the vaunted’. After Christ one is perhaps best left seeking divinity in the low, the small, the utterly human. It is not with Longinus’ sublime that God strikes us like a thunderbolt, but rather in the merely beautiful, the simply beautiful. Further, it is no longer Plato’s mathematical or formal beauty but the beauty of the low, the human, the incarnated divine. This reversal of Platonism is the opening of Christian aesthetics to the abject — through reinterpreting the beautiful and sublime this movement allows later theologians to deepen this trajectory to address divinity in suffering. Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite further develops the Christian aesthetic reception of Platonic metaphysics. While there is a strong tendency toward apophaticism and metaphysical negativity in Plato, Hellenistic neo-Platonism and early Christian thought that is appropriated by Pseudo-Dionysius and developed to a high degree, he also develops an incarnational aesthetics through his discourses on cataphaticism. In the Celestial Hierarchies he furthers the idea that the divine is sought out in the low and the abject. He argues that the beautiful (and thus the ‘Good’) object may indeed be a hindrance to spiritual contemplation because the beautiful object may actually be transformed into an idol, being both beautiful in itself and also reinforcing the desires of the viewer. In its beauty the object detracts from the contemplation of the divine, by objectively being beautiful in itself and subjectively by reinforcing the desires of the viewer for thingly beauty that is self-contained. What is proposed to replace the beautiful idol is that which is ‘ugly’ and ‘discordant’ according to Pseudo-Dionysius. His later apologist, John of Scythopolis, emphasizes the passion, and shows the strongly Chalcedonian character of Dionyius. His insistence on the Christological and trinitarian aspects of the Areopagite’s thought was an attempt to bolster his reception as a ‘Christian’ thinker and not merely a late Platonist with little to add to the Christian experience. Within this proof of Dionysius’ Christology is also a broader affirmation that his aesthetic thought, utilized later in the iconoclastic controversy, was also a decided break from Platonic aesthetics. John of Damascus appropriated a great deal of Pseudo-Dionysius’ work in his reflections on apophatic-cataphatic theology as well as on the aesthetic implications of his thought. Against the iconoclasts he not only defended the veneration of icons but placed aesthetic matters at the center of theological discourse. For Pseudo-Dionysius and John of Damascus their aesthetic theories go beyond the neo-Platonic conception of the beautiful and the sublime, arguing that the path of salvation can be pursued purely through aesthetics, even through representational aesthetics. Following John of Damascus’ aesthetics, his metaphysics moves beyond the mimetic function that beauty served in Platonic metaphysics which posited a transitory reflection of the divine within the beautiful or the Good. John proposes instead an identity of image and the divine using incarnational thought. The divine is present in the world because of the incarnation and thus any cleft in being that separates humanity from the divine is joined. Because God became the image of God in the person of Jesus, present as the symbolic flesh as well as present as God’s actual self, we can thus share in the experience of the present God through the contemplation of other material aesthetic images. John of Damascus’ method of worship is tied to his delineation of idolatry from iconophilia. Briefly put, the icon is to be vernerated, not worshipped. In this position it is the opposite of the idol, which demands idolatrous worship or the self-reaffirmation of one’s desires and will. Jean-Luc Marion elaborates on this distinction in four points. First, the icon refuses to be a mirror of our will as an idol does, and in truth it rends apart the viewer’s will. Second, the icon liberates Platonic dualism via three methods by alternately sustaining this dualism, reversing it (as seen in the incarnational reversing of Platonic dualism), and offering a third option in the contemplation of the ‘other’ outside of one’s self-will and outside of one’s ability to appropriate the other as a mere thing. Third, through veneration and contemplation the icon is a dual act of the viewer gazing at the divine and the divine gazing at the viewer. In refusing to be a mirror the icon opens the viewer to the ‘other’ in God and also as God present in the world as the other. By breaking the unity of the viewer the icon rends apart the self’s will-to-power. Fourth, the icon defers its veneration because of its impoverishment and its stigmatic nature. In the brokenness of the icon it is the most divine and at the furthest remove from idolatry; the divine resides in the brokenness of the rended viewer who is thus at the furthest remove from being a self-willing idolator. Readily apparent in John of Damascus’ writings is an application of Christology to aesthetics. In Christ’s death the prohibition concerning idolatry is fulfilled; Christ, because of his stigmatic quality, is in principle no longer able to be made an idol of God and is thus the icon of God. In Christ’s brokenness the divine breaks through and we see the invisible God showing forth in the bloody spaces of the empty stigmata. It is through rupture and the stigma, in Christ and in ourselves, that divinity shows forth and in this manner God’s invisibility becomes visually present through the rended empty spaces through our own bodies, hands and sides. Just as the icon is a faulty medium to mimetically reproduce the divine and is thus ‘broken’, so too is Christ a broken failure, but it is in that empty space of failure that the divine appears. Marion posits two models for the contemplation of this divine presence: Thomas and the centurion. Both witnessed divinity at that moment when Jesus was stigmatized to the furthest degree, witnessing to his divinity only when he had already been destroyed. In the rending of Christ and the perceiving subject, in the discontinuity of all parties — divinity and humanity — Marion claims that John of Damascus’ incarnational aesthetics are an overcoming of Platonic metaphysics. To conclude this trajectory from Platonic metaphysics to Christian aesthetics the recurrent themes are: First, that of the Christian sustaining of Platonic conceptions of the human and the divine, that there is a cleft in being that separates the merely human from the divine as we will see specifically in patristic thought. Second, the incarnation directly reverses or inverts the Platonic metaphysics of separation by making the divine present and accessible in the materially human as well as in things, not through them to a separate divinity as Plato held. Third, the disruption of the viewer and the primary ur-disruption that is Christ that opens us up to an ‘other’ whose very existence is a play with our own identity and difference. Each of these metaphysical and soteriological events has a corresponding aesthetic implicatio. Indeed, John of Damascus argues that aesthetics precedes the metaphysical and soteriological. These implications for aesthetics according to John are as such: First, that the Christian ‘beautiful’ and the Good are sustained as the signifier of the divine just as in Platonic aesthetics. Second, that the conception of the beautiful is also reversed so that it is a distraction for one’s contemplation of the divine and that specifically the ‘ugly’ and the ‘discordant’ are perhaps more edificatory. Third, that Christian aesthetics posits an ‘other’ that takes and develops from these prior formulations a new incomprehensible beauty that is both beautiful and ugly. It is in this final edificatory ugliness that we experience the sublime excess of Christian aesthetics that moves beyond the preceding categories that it had developed upon. Returning to contemporary art and the preponderance of abjection, what appears as ugly art may actually be edificatory for a Christian audience by serving the same function in the visual sphere that apophatic-cataphatic theology does in the literate sphere. In the development from a Platonic metaphysical aesthetics to a Christian incarnational aesthetics the argument develops for a consonance and homology between Christian aesthetics and contemporary abject art. The present study begins with the inauguration of the discourse on the beautiful and the sublime, tracing the development through Christian aesthetics into more foreign waters than Platonism had proposed, and concluding with contemporary readings of iconography and iconophilia from contemporary interlocutors. The case has been made for the scope of the present study, yet a further case already informs this one, namely that of confronting contemporary abject art with the results of this study. Just as McCarthy, Kelley, the Chapmans and Hirst challenge their viewers to read them theologically, even if in very surprisingly recontextualized, and of course contemporary, ways, they also present a challenge to theologians to read theology in the recontextualizing light of contemporary art as well. And neither party is unscathed in this multifarious exchange. In an era of the banality of rebellion in popular culture it is important to answer the question of what is so fine about the fine arts. In contemplating Mike Kelley’s collections of dirty and broken children’s toys as art, Jason Rhoades’ accumulations of trash as sculptural installations in a gallery, or Damien Hirst’s cynical attempt to make the most expensive work of art ever , it is clear that the explicit loss of faith in these works is grounds for an analysis of these works in light of the move from Platonic metaphysics to the suffering of the incarnation — not only because the artists themselves make that specific challenge to interpret their works in that manner , but also because even when the challenge is not explicit this theological trajectory is an interpretive key for contemporary art and culture. As will become clearer, particularly with Marion’s discussion of the idol and the icon, it is evident that these contemporary artists are attempting to make icons amidst a world filled with idols of every sort. It is in the exhaustion of encountering so many idols that the artists realize that they cannot make another beautiful object, or that they can as with Hirst’s work in progress, For the Love of God, but even then only with the most cynical of intentions in order to supply the prospective buyer with their very own fine art idol. This study stops short of an exhaustive critique of contemporary art, aiming instead to lay the groundwork for a future critique. The aim of this study is to establish a trajectory of thought that may add to the study of contemporary art, filling in gaps in theological knowledge for critics and art historians when confronted with these themes in contemporary art. A more exhaustive critique of specific artists and works is forthcoming after this profile.