Art and religion share a long and fruitful history, but the
relationship between the two has become strained, despite the fact they
each ask the same age-old questions.
THESE DAYS it seems we’re all
looking for transcendence. Whether it is religious in origin or brought
on by meditation, travel, a trip to the cinema, music, a glorious sunset
or reading the latest new-age spiritual book, the need for the
experience of being transported from your daily self to a higher plane
has never been stronger. So why is it that art and religion appear never
to have been farther apart?
It’s a contemporary cliche that art
galleries are the new cathedrals, and there are parallels between the
two: you are expected to spend your time in each in hushed reverence,
awaiting revelation and, in the best of each, being moved as much by the
beauty as by the messages conveyed. Before mass literacy there was an
obvious role for both art and architecture to tell a story visually.
The
gargoyles on churches warned of devils and demons, and carved angels
told of heaven and salvation. Inside, the stories of the lives of
saints, and of the birth, miracles and the crucifixion of Christ,
unfolded in frescoes, paintings, sculpture and vividly glowing stained
glass.
Standing, agnostically, in churches today, I am often moved
to an almost physical desire for belief, brought on by the harmony of
space and light and the beauty of the imagery. The religious art that
has been removed to galleries retains its beauty but loses much of its
power in its new context.
I was forcibly reminded of this on a recent
trip to Zurich, where, in the Grossmünster, the city’s main church, the
German artist Sigmar Polke had created a series of such stunning windows
that I was once again awakened to the idea that there must be more to
the world, and to being, than mere flesh and blood.
Polke’s
windows, one of the last commissions the artist completed before his
death, in 2010, are made from geodes, thin slices of coloured agates.
Instead of relating a narrative Polke’s seven windows speak of power,
glory, eternity and haunting, shimmering beauty, all of which equates to
some of the many manifestations of God in Renaissance religious art.
Across the river, in the Fraumünster, five stained-glass windows by Marc
Chagall, installed in 1970, are very beautiful. But their literal
interpretations of biblical stories lack the stunning abstract power of
the Polkes, which cause the mind to wander and wonder.
Nevertheless,
both prove that the church can still be a relevant commissioner and
that contemporary artists can make powerful works under its patronage.
In a smaller project at the Church of St-Martin-in-the-Fields, in
Trafalgar Square in London, the artists Shirazeh Houshiary and Pip Horne
created a window above the altar that subtly shifts the axes of the
panes to form a space through which, one imagines, the Spirit may, or
may not, emerge.
Nearby, at St Paul’s Cathedral, a project by the
video artist Bill Viola is about to be installed. Viola’s work, which
has deep spiritual and religious overtones, has often been shown in
Ireland.
Speaking of the Viola commission, Canon Martin Warner,
treasurer of St Paul’s, reinforces the connection between gallery and
church by citing the success of his near neighbour Tate Modern.
“The
huge numbers of people that visit Tate, on the opposite side of the
Millennium Bridge from us, are an indication of that fascination with . .
. how you can express what is intangible but real and that comes very
close to what Christian faith is all about.”
He adds: “Art today
captures people’s imagination in a way that perhaps narrative discourse
doesn’t.”
As organised religion has lost its monopoly on
spirituality, art also appears in religious contexts unconnected with
any particular church. The Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas, completed in
1971, was designed around 14 of Mark Rothko’s abstract paintings,
specifically commissioned for the project.
Its patrons, John and
Dominique de Menil, conceived of it as a multidenominational space, “an
intimate sanctuary available to people of every belief”.
Equally,
there are works that are inspired by religious forms but are unconnected
to any church or religious place, such as Francis Bacon’s series based
on Velázquez’s painting of Pope Julius and Antony Gormley’s cruciform
figures on Derry’s city walls.
There is also his massive
Angel of the North , outside Gateshead. Inside the church, Gormley has just unveiled a new work for Canterbury Cathedral:
Transport is the two-metre outline of a figure, made from old
iron nails taken from the repaired church roof.
It is suspended above
the former site of the tomb of Archbishop Thomas à Becket, who was
murdered in 1170.
Christian themes have been taken up across
contemporary art history by artists across all disciplines and art
forms. Salvador Dalí’s
Christ of St John of the Cross , now in the Kelvingrove Museum,
in Glasgow, is a rare “God’s eye” view of the Crucifixion, looking down
from above.
The sculptors Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and Elizabeth
Frink all undertook church commissions. In Ireland, Mainie Jellet, Evie
Hone, Sarah Purser and, more recently, James Scanlon, Imogen Stuart,
Patrick Pye, John Byrne and Hughie O’Donoghue have addressed how to look
at God and religious narratives with the eyes of a 20th-century artist.
Sometimes the art is controversial, whether deliberately or unintentionally. Chris Ofili’s
Holy Virgin Mary, which appeared in Charles Saatchi’s Sensation
exhibition, created a storm of publicity at the Brooklyn Museum in
1999, and almost caused the museum’s closure.
The painting features a
black Madonna, surrounded by tiny angels made from pornography- magazine
clippings, all standing on two pedestals of elephant dung.
The furore
at the time made it clear that one of the reasons the relationship
between art and religion is strained is that contemporary art requires
robust discussion, criticism and comment to thrive, while religion at
its core is about faith and acceptance and would seem to reject these
practices.
Some artists take this as an invitation to throw down a
deliberate challenge – such as the British artist Sarah Lucas’s
Crucifixion scene made from cigarettes – but others have a subtler
message, which isn’t always fully appreciated.
An instance of this came
when Les Levine showed his
Blame God billboard project at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, and at
sites around the city in 1986. Levine, an American artist, who is to
show at Imma this year, had made billboards depicting sectarian and
other forms of violence, carrying texts saying “Hate God”, “Blame God”
and “Kill God”.
The artist’s argument – that to kill, hate and blame
others was to deny God’s love and so kill, hate and blame God Himself –
was either too much of a sophistry or too much of a provocation for
many, who leafleted and picketed the gallery and called for the
exhibition’s closure.
Christian art has been at the mercy of the
changing social forces that have swept the world. The rise of
Protestantism at the beginning of the 16th century led to a hostility to
the visual arts, answering Calvin’s creed that “for anyone to arrive at
God the Creator, he needs only Scripture as his Guide and Teacher”.
The
Catholic Church countered with the Council of Trent in 1563, which led
to the Baroque, though its declaration that architecture, sculpture and
painting were all integral to ensuring “the people be instructed and
confirmed in the habit of remembering, and continually revolving in mind
the articles of faith”.
Much later, the Arts and Crafts movement saw
the glory of God in work and nature, and as modernism evolved it tried
to exclude Him altogether.
While John Updike calls modern art “a
religion assembled from the fragments of our daily life”, religious art
reflects an assemblage of the fragments of the vicissitudes of religion
itself.
In the conclusion to his book
On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art James
Elkins writes: “I have tried to show why committed, engaged, ambitious,
informed art does not mix with dedicated, serious, thoughtful, heartfelt
religion. Wherever the two meet, one wrecks the other. Modern
spirituality and contemporary art are rum companions: either the art is
loose and unambitious, or the religion is one-dimensional and
unpersuasive.”
Elkins was at University College Cork, as professor
of the history of art, when the book was published, in 2004.
The Polke
windows had not yet been created to refute his argument, although I’m
inclined to think the Honan Chapel on his own campus (which I mention in
the panel above) ought to have changed his mind.
Art in the
service of religion is an increasingly narrow branch of contemporary
practice, although churches continue to commission in different ways,
and for different reasons.
Yet, looking at the work of today’s artists,
many are still raising age-old questions: why are we here and what does
it mean?
And as much contemporary art also gives rise to a feeling of
connecting to something greater than this life, one can start to wonder
whether the two might have more in common than we first thought.