1st AAR Session (3/11/10): Religion and the Arts

(Religion and the Arts Session)

Kiki Smith's Immortal Creature: Sacramental Poetics at the Limits of Mortality -- Beatrice Marovich
(originally titled "Kiki Smith's Explosive Creature", changed by presenter)

After noting the title change of the talk, Ms. Marovich passed around photocopies of Kiki Smith's print "Immortal (Monkey)". She reflected on the possible meanings of this dried-up, dead and bound creature with a rope around its neck, and the way in which the title defied the image. In some manner, the juxtaposition of the title and the image force death and eternal life to associate with each other. She drew some visual parallels between a possible crucifixion image, and a possible Madonna/Child image (referring to the almond shape of the monkey), though there are many other possible parallels. (Someone in the audience later suggested the rope might be like an umbilical cord, for instance).

Smith as an artist is involved with imitation and fabrication. Ms. Marovich suggests in her paper that Smith's intentions could be read as sacramental poetics. ("Sacramental" referring to the idea that it "does not contain what it expresses, and at the same time contains more than it expresses"). So-called secular culture is often thinly-disguised sacramental culture. The "tight weave" between mortal and immortal, the fact of death pointing to the end of death itself, is a conflict that theologians have spent centuries trying to explain. Kiki Smith herself is not religious--she had a Catholic upbringing that has clearly influenced her work, but she is known for being iconoclastic. Her sculpture became more politicized in the 1980s. Her images are disturbing--dead bodies, human and animal bodies merging, human "insides"--bones and muscle only. She felt that what "leaked" from the body was as important as the body itself, and this is reflected in her work. At a Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition that included dead bodies of animals (birds, I think) strewn around the floor in deliberate positions, critic Hirsch noted that their placement was important, implying an immortality without transcending the body. The body "transubstantiates" into something immortal, and the Eucharistic metaphor is not lost.

Smith talks more in recent times about her Catholic influences. She is very influenced by Thomas Aquinas's writing on matter and spirit. She does not like strict lines being drawn between the sacred and profane, and Smith's representation of the Virgin Mary as just muscle and bone is an example. It points to divine realms in dead bodies.


In Excess: Jean-Luc Marion, Bill Viola, and the Theological Sublime -- Ronald Bernier

Mr. Bernier showed a series of stills from art installations by Bill Viola. The first was called "Room for Saint John of the Cross". The installation shows a small lit room inside of a larger darkened room. Inside the lit room, there is a table with a pitcher of water, a glass, and a video monitor showing an image of a mountain. Outside the room, behind the installation, there is a larger projection of the mountain. There is a difference between the mountain images--the larger projection is taken with a hand-held camera that is shaky, and you can hear the roar of the wind. The smaller projection in the room is unmoving, with no wind sounds. The sound you do hear is that of a recorded loop of John of the Cross's love poetry in Spanish. It is known that St. John wrote his fervent, ecstatic poetry while in prison. One gets the sense of the pleasure/pain paradox that is the sublime.

Viola's work is based on the theological Via Negativa--the works of Meister Eckhart, Pseudo-Dionysus, St. John of the Cross, and St. Teresa of Avila. The "way of negation" is so-called because it only describes what God is Not--there is no way to describe what God Is. The only known attribute of God is unknowability. (I think that this is much like the Eastern Vedantic conception of God--God is not a Being, God is "No-Thing"). Mr. Bernier relates this to the ideas of Jean-Luc Marion, and his notion of "God Without Being". He also notes that this is philosophically like Kant's notion of the Divine. To refer to God as "good", "wise" or "powerful" is misleading--God is not these things in the way that humans understand them. Language is inadequate, and to limit God to language is almost blasphemous. (I found myself thinking of Islamic fundamentalists. Islam is a religion that rejects images of Allah for this very reason, yet the fundamentalists believe that they can kill or maim others who don't follow "God's will". If you say "God likes this," or "God doesn't like that," that is no different than creating an idolatrous image. That has always struck me as a contradiction.)

According to Kant, the "sublime" in Nature is seen in Nature's ability to represent to us things that cannot be known. It makes us feel very small in the universe--an "existential vertigo". The consolation is knowing that something greater transcends our human limitations, and offers hope of union with this mysterious "Other". With this thought, we moved to looking at stills of a video installation called "The Passions of Bill Viola," 20 video pieces connected by actors demonstrating extreme emotions. 4 groups of 5 figures look at sorrow, pain, anger, fear, and joy. In Viola's "Quintet of the Silent", parallels could be drawn with Bosch's painting "Christ Mocked". Viola feels his video installations draw out what is implied by these Renaissance works, but not shown.

Marion distinguishes between the idol and the icon. Put simply, the icon and the idol are the same at first--they both point to something "other"--but the pointer becomes an "idol" when one gets too attached to the pointer, and doesn't look at where it's pointing. The "intention of the human gaze" is what makes the difference. Bill Viola's video work "Observance" shows actors moving forward with exaggerated facial expressions, getting in line and rushing forward to touch some thing that is unseen to the viewer, yet in the viewer's space. This is a perfect illustration of the pointer, without having a visible object to become an idol.

Bernier's last thought is on Derrida and the postmoderns--the idea of the inadequacy of language that makes all hermeneutics idolatrous. Marion suggests that we should try to say something about the "un-sayable"--there is room for God to show Himself.

(Here is Viola's "Quintet of the Astonished" from the Passions)

Manipulating Religious Reception in Contemporary Art -- Jonathan Yegge

Mr. Yegge looks at the works of the Chapman Brothers and their fascination with death. The Chapman Brothers' art demonstrates 3 themes: Sex as leading to death, abhorrence with beauty, and the celebration of Hell as divine. Yegge cites Goya's "Great Deeds Against the Dead" as an influence (and the model for an installation), as well as others. Their writings suggest that they are very influenced by the "Death of God" theology, and Yegge notes 3 themes in their writing, addressing each.

1. Critique of Onto-theology. Criticism of the idea that the Good, Beauty, or Truth are things. They also take the stance of Via Negativa, and write extensively on the Death of God. To the Chapman Brothers, it is the artist who makes God real again after His death.

2. Incarnation. The Chapman Brothers emphasize the humiliation of the Word in Incarnation. Rather than ascending to holiness, God debases himself to humanity and dies at the hands of humans. Note is made of the Roman Centurion at the Cross, who sees God in Jesus at the moment he is the most pathetic. They deviate from Piety, but not into Gnosticism--the Gnostic reviles the flesh, while the Chapmans embrace the physical.

3. Engage Classical Theory of Beauty. The Chapmans engage with Beauty by deviating from it. Radical beauty contains all the elements of the Kantian sublime. The teleological end to Beauty is Death. There is a "sweetness" to "burst out" without going all the way to Death, yielding to the excessive violence of Desire. This emphasizes the difference between Eastern "negative" theological thought and Western--in the West, specifically in Medieval Christian mysticism, there is a separateness maintained when the human unites with God. In the Eastern sense, we are but "a drop of water in the ocean". The separateness is not there. In the Chapman Brothers' artwork, the Western separateness is manifest.

Yegge also discusses "shock" as the creator of sacred things. "Erotic" union with God can only be achieved when one is "shocked" into "sacred" time. The Chapman Brothers' idea is that one must create horrific art to sustain great art, in this way of thinking.

Sin, the "Fall", sacrilege, transgression--all of these ideas emerge in the Chapmans' work. It is an embodiment of Nietschze's idea--since we create God, God is only the mirror of our own deviations from divinity. Their work is an interpretation of medieval mysticism.