Michelli, "Art and Spirituality," cont'd
Keeping in mind the recent nature of our modern understandings of beauty as the indulgence of personal taste (a mere 200 years), and good as the alleviation of suffering, we can address Reverend Brewster's remarks on spiritual art. He addresses the art of a conflicted world. We have mental and emotional freedoms which were denied to our forebears but we live in a more catastrophically fearful place than has ever been known before. For more than a century, mechanized industry has rendered our daily life stressful and threatens ever more obviously the life-sustaining power of our environment. For nearly as long, mechanized weapons have escalated until we have the power to destroy not just a town or even a country, but the entire planet. And every day the national news reminds us that this power has been abrogated increasingly ruthlessly by a few foreign and possibly insane individuals who hold us all to ransom. Add to that every-day social injustices, and you can see that we are paying a very high emotional price for our apparent freedom.
Brewster's review of a two-piece exhibition articulates a typical spiritual response to contemporary life. The exhibition consisted of a small Buddha statue and a female nude by Giacometti. (The statue in the exhibition was similar to this one, although Giacometti's more typical figures are less obviously human). For Brewster and other visitors to the exhibition, the meditative Buddha gave a sense of God's spirit, despite the fact that it pertained to a different culture and religion than his own. He also noted his own hunger for such images. In the stressful angst-ridden modern world, this need for spiritual peace makes sense, and we find similarly gentle images abounding in this century's liturgical art: open hands, expressionless faces, images rendered in smooth curves, pastel colours and minimal detail.
Significantly, though, Brewster had nothing to say about the Giacometti, whose works strike many as perplexing and ugly. Ugly art is often considered unspiritual, and we have seen that logical historical reasons underlie this view. Indeed, Brewster's silence about the Giacometti in the context of a discussion on spiritual art implies that he too considered the work unspiritual.
Yet the typical Giacometti nude is actually a very spiritual image exactly suited to its original context of a recently-ended mechanized war such as no one had ever endured before. The wraith-thin, barely gendered figures express the shattered soul emerging from sustained horror, shocked and betrayed almost to insanity, and retaining only the slenderest thread of humanity. Also relevant, that horror was faced with courage for the good of the free world. And the goodness was chosen in spite of its immediately attendant bitterness, because it was worth it, and not because it offered escape or consolation.
This kind of spiritual choice typically demands complementary spiritual art. We can parallel it in the plague crosses of the Middle Ages, but let's stay with the recent present. In the wake of that war, there were several attempts to create relevant contemporary places of worship by commissioning the greatest artists of the day. Significantly, almost all those artists tried to refuse the commissions. At Coventry, Ronchamp, and Assy, the artists had to be hounded for months to get them to serve a God who seemed either not to exist or to have definitively abandoned us. When they finally agreed to the commissions, many chose to invoke the image of the suffering Christ. From that mid-century period, we have more thorny crowns, nails, and flogged Christs than any other religious image. Apocalyptic angels are torn and agonized and bishop's thrones (on the left in this image) are like clouds of shrapnel. The reassurance of this art is not comfort but endorsement. Christ's suffering, knowingly undertaken for the good of the world, parallels the suffering of humanity in mechanized war. He, like us, chose good in spite of its attendant evil, and the tortured bodies are testament to this.
One piece from this context is particularly moving for me. Germaine Richier accepted a commission to produce the cross for the high altar at Assy. Her style is very like Giacometti's. Her Christ lacks feet (it originally lacked hands too). It lacks a face. It looks as if it has been burned at the stake or trodden on a landmine. Here it is. It caused such controversy that it was removed for a while until the comments of one of the parishioners got into the press. He said, "I want to say this to the artist: thank you - here at last is a Christ I can pray before."
