Academics from East Coast Universities who speak of cultural “exile” to the Midwest are deluded. A carefully planned and executed trip to New York can include more art in 36 hours than the average New Yorker absorbs in a year, or—in many unfortunate cases—a lifetime. The opportunity to do just this, in conjunction with an essential conference at Yale, gave me a chance to make good on this claim. A flight from Chicago, due to a routing quirk, gave me what was easily the best view of Manhattan I have had—or likely ever will have. For the first time that city in which so many memories reside seemed demystified: it looked like a toy. Times Square’s pulsating, optocratic light, its wattage waxing stronger every year, prompted a question: Was it a dazzling sign of precious economic vitality, or (as the early Christians might have insisted), the beating, bloodless heart of a new whore of Babylon? Or both?
As I walked into my hospitable friend’s East Village apartment, I was greeted by three handsome volumes of Lenin alongside the architectural manifestos of Christopher Alexander and—most important—classics of Christian spirituality. David swims among the twentysomething Ivy League graduates living in Manhattan who are faithful, serious Catholics. He also sometimes serves as a consultant on Wall Street. Well read in Marxism, he described his lunch break conversations in Zucotti Park over the last year. He offered the most incisive analysis of the Occupy Movement I’ve heard: “At its peak,” he told me, “this was nowhere near the Sixties, and all of that was co-opted by capitalism.” The truest resistance, we both agreed, is the Mass. Call it the liturgical consummation of hipsterdom.
My walk uptown the next morning included a brief stop at Father Richard John Neuhaus’ old parish, the Church of the Immaculate Conception, where the East Village, both geographically and spiritually, seems to culminate. Some years ago, visiting my sister at NYU or merely out on a youthful romp, I had wandered into that church. I noticed the fabricated cave—the “Lourdes Grotto” in the back of the church, made to look like the actual cave in France, complete with a hovering statue of Mary. It was one of those moments when an evangelical, taken by surprise, warms to Catholic culture. The next time I was there it was for Father Neuhaus’ funeral, during which I began to realize that the commanding intellectual I had come to know was foremost an ordinary parish priest. And now, back again, recalling the title of his last book, American Babylon, I headed uptown.
My first stop was the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and for good reason. If you think you’ve been to the Met, but you haven’t visited it in the last year, you need to think again. The painting galleries of the American wing, the last in a series of major unveilings, were only recently opened, bringing a carefully executed 25-year plan to completion. Leutze’s monumental Crossing of the Delaware has found its permanent home, and Thomas Cole’s Oxbow (the theology of Jonathan Edwards on canvas) has the pride of place it deserves. The last year has been—as Michael J. Lewis puts it—an annus mirabilis for American art, marked by the new American wings of Boston’s Museum of Fine Art, Arkansas’ Crystal Bridges Museum, and now this. Amazing to think than in the early 20th century, the Met was still debating as to whether American art was worthy of being collected at all.
It’s not entirely fair that the Whitney Biennial—that showcase of American art that began in 1932—had to compete with the Metropolitan American wing this year, but it did, and comparing the two exhibits would be cruel. How can the gulag concrete stairways of the Whitney compare to the sunlit courtyard and glorious ironwork staircases of the Met’s new American wing? They can’t. Consequently, I tried to cleanse my mind and judge the Whitney on its own terms. But I couldn’t, and multiple allusions to previous moments in European and American art history seemed to suggest that the Whitney couldn’t either.
I’ve had a long journey with contemporary art, slowly maturing beyond instinctive suspicions into (what I believe to be) selective but sincere admiration, based mostly on innumerable visits over the last decade to the Chelsea galleries. Still, the Whitney disappointed, as it did in 2010. I’d like to praise the 2012 Biennial’s multiple examples of “found art,” descendants of Marcel Duchamp’s In Advance of the Broken Arm (1915), now on permanent display on the Whitney’s fifth floor. But seeing that the exhibition space in front of Midtown’s Flatiron building currently has a more effective example of the same genre (brought to you, in that case, by a cell phone company), the Whitney’s place at the supposed cutting edge was seriously dulled.
It’s clever, I suppose, that one artist brought in a piece of Detroit’s decaying detritus, another assembled and projected handmade slides, or that yet another unearthed a hybrid liquid/solid substance called Ferrofluids used in the creation of hard drives and in aerospace engineering. But, but, but … In the latter case, though the signature with expired credit card was an amusing twist, could not the artist have done something a little more artful than click on some fans and throw the stuff he found on a tarp? Likewise, do weed whacker handles rolled in oatmeal really make someone “a poet of humble things”? I would say that the Whitney has given up on skill and craft (just when some of the most interesting art theorists are again calling for its necessity), but I don’t need to say it because the Whitney says it for me. One piece was constructed with what the artist described as “extraneous, doggedly ‘wasted’ labor,” and the result was intentionally ugly so that the piece could be deemed aesthetically useless as well. I dare the artist to be consistent enough not to make “use” of his art by refraining from adding his Whitney Biennial appearance on his curriculum vitae. Sadly enough, such antics rob the spotlight from the Whitney’s several moments of genuine aesthetic merit, such as the infolded pastel sculptures of Vincent Fecteau, only a few feet away from the waving white flag of artistic surrender just described.
Even Werner Herzog’s Hearsay of the Soul, which I very much wanted to like, seemed half-baked, a hastily assembled video of two men playing (admittedly beautiful) music with some art historical images hastily tossed in. The sum was no greater than the more effective parts. Couldn’t someone have at least fact-checked the exhibition label, which curiously claims that Akhenaten (who died around 1336 BC) preceded monotheism by 1000 years? Then there was the mannequin boy with a demonic puppet shrieking a script that could have been lifted from Bride of Chucky. By expanding its borders into poetry and performance, art becomes—more frequently than not—a cover for bad poetry and bad performance. Unfair as comparisons may be, I succumb: At the Met, the words of the poet William Cullen Bryant accompany the Hudson River School paintings: “Within the natural processes of decay and regeneration God’s architecture reigns over all.” At the Whitney, my guide told me that one series of paintings was based on Poussin’s Four Seasons, but “the iconography of the deity was replaced by commerce.” I’m not dumb enough to think the artist is necessarily endorsing the chilling eclipse of natural seasons with economic ones. But I’m also not dumb enough to think she offers anything approaching a solution.
On an even more sober note, American art lovers visiting the Whitney this year were treated to a profoundly sad display, complete with graphic photographs, of a man—Forrest Bess—so confused and afflicted about gender that, after fortifying himself with alcohol, he tried to make himself a woman. I noticed that the children’s audio guide, available for free at the front desk, contained no entry for this particular section. How thoughtful. Bess, the catalog tells us, “held a deep and sincere belief that this surgery and the balancing of the male and female within himself was the key to regeneration and eternal life.” I suppose this section’s curator, Robert Gober, whom anyone familiar with contemporary art has long been aware of, feels he may be unearthing an ignored reality, daring to suggest that our male/female distinctions are untenable, that in fact we resemble the hybrid Ferrofluids in the same show. What he actually reveals, I’m afraid, is the (dead) end of an ideology—not the construct of “male” or “female,” but the construct of “gender fluidity” itself. Bess, diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, died in a mental hospital. Gober, I’m guessing, wouldn’t begrudge my choice not to gawk, but to grieve.
I did just that on a walk toward the district of Chelsea, which—for now—remains the gallery hotspot. I explored the newly constructed Highline, a magnificent stroke of urban planning that consists of a park on an elevated railway line that has finally stitched this sprawling gallery cluster together. But the telltale signs of gentrification have been increasing, restaurants abound like never before, and even the subway is being extended. The Chelsea I knew as a graduate student is gone. To recalibrate, I visited with the remaining Occupiers (having now moved to Union Square). The “Occupy University” session I attended consisted of eight thoughtful adults in one of the most civil and extended conversations I’ve had in some time: we discussed horizontal pedagogy, phenomenological reduction, and the nature of samba (really). I give my Up Twinkles to this good-natured gathering; but Down Twinkles, I’m afraid, to some of the more bellicose Occupy literature I had a chance to peruse.
The next morning involved a trip to the Onassis Center, which boasts a potent little show on the transformation of the ancient world into a Christian one. Shortly thereafter, I witnessed the opposite, making one last stop downtown to see a venerable Gothic church being turned—as you read this—into a shopping boutique, complete with trendy unisex restrooms. Just as early Christians kept the images of Aphrodite but carved a cross on her forehead, so we now keep the external forms of Christian faith, but fill it with consumerist stuffing: Gothic architecture’s final phase. Optocracy wins. It was enough to despair, had I not serendipitously slipped into the Romanesque façade of a sister church, where I heard someone passionately preach the gospel to a packed house on a Friday morning. (Michael Horton, visiting New York for the Mockingbird conference.)
If the predicament of contemporary art at the Whitney was disappointing, one road to renewal is through resourcing Modern art historically. This was on offer in a conference at Yale that explored the connections between the Byzantine aesthetic and Modernism. These connections are enormous. “The modern artist,” insisted Matisse after a trip to Russia, “should pursue the harmony of colors found in these icons.” Yet until recently, partly due to a suspicion of religion, these connections have been ignored, accounting for the buzz surrounding this academic gathering. Several publications in the last year, in step with academia’s religious turn, have unearthed the connections between Modernism and the Christian icon, and if the vigor of Yale conference is any indication, there will be many more. It would have been difficult to predict, only ten years ago, how much interest there would be in this topic.
The first evening began with a casual address from the godmother of critical theory, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who holds Columbia’s highest faculty rank: University Professor. It is indeed an interesting time when one of the founders of post-foundationalism opens a conference by remarking, “As I grow older, the self-declared idea of being theoretical seems more and more foolish.” Next came the keynote from Marie-José Mondzain. Mondzain has been a force in French circles for some time, but a translation of her provocative book Image, Icon and Economy has made her more frequently and fashionably quoted on the American scene. Mondzain claims that the entire visual regime of our current capitalist “optocracy” (the term is hers) owes its origins to the Byzantine iconophile arguments of the 9th century, some of which she has beautifully translated.
I was initially hostile to Mondzain’s work when I encountered it before its translation. It is, after all, laced with severe invective against Christianity, past and present. But walking through Times Square one late afternoon, I came to agree with her. We do live in an ever more brazen optocracy. However, whereas Mondzain sees Christianity as colluding with that regime, it is actually the only possible means of resisting it, as her countrymen such as George Bataille (also an atheist) understood very well.
Mondzain the provocateur did not disappoint. The Christian icon, she declared, “shows the path of meaning for all cinematographic enterprises.” But such insights were coupled with explicit disclaimers: “The incarnation is not a divine or religious matter.” Hers is, quite simply, a vigorous and accurate Christian semiology with a pungent but nevertheless thin veneer of atheism. To toy with a famous phrase, Mondzain’s is an aroma in the empty bottle of secularism. But we are indebted to her for diagnosing our condition, even if she cannot offer the cure.
Such remarks were in the context of a daring but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to say that the Christian Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky did not make religious films. This interpretation is possible only because Tarkovsky’s irreducibly religious perspective is not artificially imposed on his films. But Mondzain did just what Tarkovsky does not—she aggressively sealed off any wider horizon of meaning. And with every Tarkovsky clip she played, the seals leaked. It is a further sign that academia has indeed become religious when the religion of irreligion, precisely because it has lost its hegemony, does not hesitate to preach.
It would take far too long to relay the richness of this conference. There were, after all, many modern recoveries of the art of the Byzantine Empire. For the Bloomsbury group, it served as an excuse for hedonism and indulgence; but for artists like Maurice Denis, icons were the consummate Christian art. Many gems were expertly unearthed, including Marshall McLuhan’s Byzantine connection, the Oxford Movement’s Byzantine side, Rudolph Steiner’s unacknowledged debt to Byzantium, not to mention André Bazin’s deeply influential Catholic film theory. But whatever form it took, Byzantium’s influence—through its icons—in inspiring Modernism is undeniable, from the great Russian exhibition of 1913 to the Hagia Sophia mosaic copies displayed at the Met just before New York Modernism peaked. Is Modern art consequently indebted to the abstract aesthetic of the Christian East? It’s a complicated question, but the short answer is yes.
One paper in particular left a lasting impression: an analysis of the career of Louise Ciccone (a.k.a. “Madonna”), with at least a gesture of comparison to Byzantium’s Virgin Mary. Ciccone’s role in Desperately Seeking Susan, timed with her singing success, skyrocketed her to a fame which was then exploited by a photographer who sold earlier nude images of Ciccone to the highest pornographic bidder (Playboy). After this narrative, the paper concluded with an image of a Byzantine Virgin Mary next to a suggestive nude photograph of the material girl.
As so often happens, microphone roulette kept me from being able to ask my question, but it was (if I may say so) a good one, and so I ask it here. If Marie-José Mondzain suggests, as she does, that “There is no difference between submitting to a church council and CNN,” then is there also no difference between someone looking at the nude Madonna and the same person being looked at by the chaste Byzantine Madonna and her merciful son, being called to repent? I’ll never know how that would have gone over, but—from what I know of my colleagues—it would have been reasonably received. The question was, of course, rhetorical, for post-secular feminists such as Sarah Jane Boss have brilliantly elucidated how medieval Madonnas are the antidotes to contemporary porn. Indeed, Christian visual culture, instantiated—as so many modern artists intuitively grasped—in the icon, is the answer to the Times Square optocracy, which has given us, I’m afraid, the Madonna we deserve.
Matthew J. Milliner (PhD, Princeton University) is assistant professor of art history at Wheaton College. He blogs at millinerd.com.
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