This is the text of the seminar I gave at this year's General Assembly. You really need to see it with pictures. May I suggest opening a separate window and going to the General Assembly Visuals so you can click along? Or, click on the links to see the full-size image. Just remember to come back.
Introduction
We divide art by time. If you’ve ever taken a class in art appreciation or been on a tour in an art museum, chances are you did so in chronological order. For many of you, everything seems to be making sense until you walk into the room labeled “Modern: 1945-1970.” Perhaps you cope; “At least the colors are interesting,” you say, heading into the next gallery. But in the room marked “Contemporary,” things are even more unsettling. There is a pile of candy in the corner, a collage of magazines and prescription drugs on the wall, and a sculpture of the Pink Panther embracing a buxom blonde. Time seems to have warped, leaving little connection between these works and the paintings of waterlilies three rooms back.
Yet, before we can begin to unpack and tussle with the artworks that are being made today, we actually need to understand a few things about the past. Our emerging generation has often been accused of being a-historical, of lacking a knowledge of the past, and of being incapable of placing situations into broader historical streams. On the other hand, the church herself has a tenuous relationship with time. We tend to be enamored with the transcendent; time is something to be tolerated for now and escaped or overcome with death or the kingdom’s return. Still, despite both our own and our culture’s misgivings, time is good. Time is necessary. In fact, embracing a theologically sound and academically humble view of history may in fact be the lynchpin that enables us to meaningfully interpret and judge contemporary art.
Mark Tansey, A Brief History of Modernist Painting
In this discussion, history is vital for two main reasons. First, a broad, biblical understanding of history’s metanarrative allows us to interpret, judge, and appreciate art in relationship to the eschaton. Second, history gives us the cultural context of art, allowing us to judge art first according to the terms of its own historical moment and then again in relationship to the history of images.
Hard Knocks of a Metanarrative
Ask any good Presbyterian for a meta-framework of history and the answer will likely be: Creation, Fall, Redemption, Consummation. And yet, we generally conceive of history as a linear progression with causality running forwards: what happened today is caused by what happened a few days before that. While history is in fact the unfolding of God’s sovereign plan for this world, it seems to make theological sense to understand causality as actually running backwards. What happens today, what happened yesterday, what happened two thousand years ago, is a direct result of the consummation that is yet to come. Dr. Louis Voskuil, professor emeritus at Covenant College, suggests this understanding when he writes: “Meaning in history, for the Christian, depends on a reality, perceived by faith, beyond history as well as in history.” Thus, as Christians, we possess rare hope, confident that creation’s existence through time (history) and productivity in time (art) is meaningful, directional, and ultimately worthy of study.
This eschaton-driven view of time is inextricably tied with a robust understanding of the implications of the Incarnation. In his essay “Traditional Christianity and the Possibility of Historical Knowledge,” historian Mark Noll suggests that Christianity seems to teach that “God intends historical understanding to be relative to specific times, places, and circumstances” as illustrated by Christ’s incarnation at a very specific point in human history. Christ submitted Himself to the constraints of a single culture. Though the record of His life, death, and resurrection is enmeshed with cultural particularities, the redeeming power of His work has universal and timeless application. This “dignity of particularities” frees the Christian scholar from the burden of imagined objectivity; being a finite, culturally relative being does not in itself discount her from pointing to truth. Scholar Mark Katerberg, too, emphasizes the importance of the Incarnation in his essay “Is There Such a Thing as ‘Christian’ History?” suggesting that, as finite beings, we were created to interpret, not to transcend.
Though perhaps initially disconcerting, this inextricable bond to culture, when soaked in an understanding of the Incarnation, transforms into a means of service. This connection engenders humility by forcing us to identify with the struggles and pains of our culture. Solidarity is not created through a narrative of a shared past but instead admitted as an inescapable facet of living as finite beings in culture. Art is made in time, responding to events in time. Are we willing to be tied to today’s culture, a nation that is cynical, critical, political, and, above all, uneasy? An Incarnational understanding of history and culture leaves us in a somewhat uncomfortable state but with a very clear mandate for self-denying compassion. This mandate extends even to the world of contemporary art.
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This application of the metanarrative also plays a key, practical role in the act of interpretation and criticism of contemporary art. First, though, we consider history’s second contribution: providing a double context for discussion.
History as Soil, not Mirror
Our reformed, intellectual community is fairly comfortable with the idea that artworks are intrinsically tied to worldview. In the landscapes of Dutch Baroque artists like Jacob van Ruysdale, we unpack an understanding of reality that simultaneously affirms creation while acknowledging the fall. Conversely, we point to Picasso’s fractured paintings as mirrors of a modernist worldview that is hopeless and broken. As such, we tend to enjoy paintings that we perceive as affirming our own life and worldview. We prefer Ruysdale to Picasso.
A seemingly minor, but important, distinction to make, however, is the difference between art reflecting a worldview and art emerging from a worldview and culture. A worldview, a culture, actually dictates a specific idea of what art’s function should be. Art exists in its particular form because of how its moment defines the role of art. This could, of course, be an entirely different conversation. For example, though, the medievals conceived of art’s function as either decorative or instructional. They did not paint still lifes or landscapes because their worldview had no room for art to be primarily about beauty or realism. Thus art, through history, has been at times didactic, at times meant for beauty, at times meant to be decorative, to express, to incite change. The evolving purpose of art over the last thirty years has significantly shaped the form.
History as Counterpoint
Although the function of much contemporary art is vastly divergent from works of the past – and although many works today float between different conceptions of function – many of the same themes and genres persist. An artist today who takes a photograph of herself adds to the immense, evolving genre of self-portraiture. An artist who suspends basketballs in liquid-filled tanks is still participating in the age-old tradition of still-life. Images and objects have histories, and relating contemporary works to pieces from history provides another valuable context for interpretation.
Artworks, then, are not illustrations of the development of philosophy and religion over the ages. They are artifacts themselves, demanding to be understood first in their cultural context and in relationship to the history of images. Knowing that most contemporary art functions as a challenge or an instrument for change should color the kinds of questions we ask when approaching a piece for the first time. Similarly, knowing that artworks today are still working either within or purposefully against traditional themes and genres should encourage us to connect the unfamiliar and unsettling to images that we already know.
Interpretation Applied: Kiki Smith's My Blue Lake
Perhaps this is best illustrated by unpacking a relatively well-known and respected contemporary work: Kiki Smith’s 1995 print My Blue Lake. In this work, a photogravure and monoprint, Smith uses a peculiar form of photography to create an eerie self-portrait.
Kiki Smith, My Blue Lake
Description
We begin by looking. What do we see? It’s a person. A woman. Her skin is tinged with blue; her hair is a rusty red. Her expression is vacant. Her skin is covered in wavy blue brushstrokes. She looks fat. No, obese. Although her features are neat and proportional, her cheeks are pulled out into wide, wobbling jowls. Her chin is absorbed into her neck, and fleshly, indistinguishable body parts appear squashed, pressed against invisible glass. Something seems “wrong,” though. The obesity is unnatural; we can see each of her ears as full and flat organs. She has been distorted, forcibly stretched and flattened. She is a grotesque cartoon of a person.
We might be tempted here to call the piece a failure. It is weird. Bizarre. It is definitely not my top choice for hanging in the living room by the baby grand. Now, though, we pause. Because of its place in history, and its literal home in the “Contemporary” gallery, we can safely assume that the piece is meant to function at least partly as a prod, a question mark, a vehicle for change. Thus, the artist has not failed simply because her work is uncomfortable. At the same time, by virtue of the usage of photography, there is also a functional concern for some level of realism – or at least realism obviously altered. We ask, instead, why has she depicted a person – herself – in such a garish, ugly fashion?
Comparison
Other images in history provide a helpful context for further interpretation. This is a picture of a person, and the photographic quality suggests that this is the image of a real – not imagined – person. The title, My Blue Lake, intimates that this is, in fact, a portrait of the artist herself. As a portrait, the piece exists in an old and revered genre.
The harsh naturalism and vacant expression on this woman’s face first reminds me of Francisco Goya’s The Family of Charles IV, painted from1800–1801. Instead of flattering his subjects, Goya paints them with unrelenting realism. Only a couple of the family members are actually engaged with the painter’s gaze. One of the ladies is turning away from the viewer, seemingly distracted by something in the background, while other relatives stare vacantly to the side. The elderly woman in the left hand corner has a crazed look about her. Goya painted as he saw, despite the inelegant result. This is not a flattering portrait. This is mimesis with commentary. While not aiming for strict realism, it is obvious that Smith is steering away from self-flattery.
As such, My Blue Lake stands in sharp contrast to Durer’s well-known Self-Portrait. This painting connects to another cultural image: our western conception of Jesus. The work has generally been read as a clear idealization of self, with Durer, for debatable reasons, connecting his own image with Christ. Specific interpretation aside, Durer’s piece is indicative of the tendency to use self-portraiture to express an idea of self, whatever that opinion may be. What does Kiki Smith’s My Blue Lake suggest about her self-perception?
Another image – and this one from general culture, not art history -- that resonates with My Blue Lake is a Mercator projection of the world. Much has been made about both the geographic and political implications of the oddly proportioned projection. There is something inherently awkward in taking something round and trying to flatten it. Forcing the three-dimensional to become two-dimensional is unnatural and almost violent.
Process
Learning more about Smith’s process further contributes to this reading. She used a peripheral camera – a camera which creates a rectilinear image of a cylindrical object – to photograph herself. She then used the photographic negative to create a photogravure plate from which she printed colored monoprints. She did, almost literally, peel herself off her skeletal structure and make herself a flat, 2-dimensional image.
Now these threads of questions and influences come together to form an interpretation. What meaning is embodied here?
Reading
To me, it is particularly intriguing to read the portrait in a close relationship to the Mercator map for two reasons. First, given the title, My Blue Lake, Smith seems to have actually transformed herself into a topographical form. Her wobbly blue body and face become water, and her curving masses of textured hair become the surrounding land. In doing so, she emphasizes the sheer physicality of the human body. In a culture that is fixated with making the body smaller and smaller – Banana Republic just started selling size 00 jeans – Smith obstinately portrays herself as huge and as real as a mass of water and land.
Second, the Mercator projection illuminates some of the danger of flattening the three-dimensional form. As we all know, this projection makes for an absolutely gigantic and completely non-proportional Greenland. Imposed two-dimensionality results in false, and even grotesque, perceptions of reality. Could Smith be quietly critiquing the glossy, airbrushed presentations of celebrities – particularly female beauties – rampant in our culture? Are these slick, flawless people real? What has been compromised in their literal and metaphorical two-dimensionality? Smith questions our adoration of such a reduction of personhood. This, she says, with her stretched, structure-less form, is what happens when we disown the wholeness of ourselves. The portrait is thus both exposing of our failures and revelatory of our own vulnerability. This is not a picture of the heroic human. It is the absurd, the broken being.
Metanarrative Applied; Redemption Realized
And here is where our metanarrative becomes a practical tool of judgment and appreciation. Christians can take a devastating critique of self and society, such as My Blue Lake, and set it into the frame of theology. By common grace, Smith seems to be affirming the goodness of being a flesh-and-bone human. She recognizes the rightness of creation. We were made with bodies, moving, round, weighty bodies, a created work that God pronounced “good.”
Smith also comments incisively on the effects of the Fall. Although she cannot account for it, she recognizes our sinful dissatisfaction with our bodies and our fascination with two-dimensional celebrities. Her work emphasizes the grotesqueness, the actual violence of rejecting our created selves. This is where Smith leaves us: uneasy, and weak. The work is not inherently a beautiful – and aesthetically pleasing -- one, nor is it one that dictates hope. But we, as Christians, can push this further.
You see, this depiction of self – this flattened, distorted woman with her skin peeled off her frame – is me. The Bible tells me, and I often disbelieve, that this is the kind of woman Jesus came to save; not the perfectly proportioned Venus, not the transcendent Damozel, but the ugly, the weak, the sick. And in this light, doesn’t redemption looks sweeter? Venus does not need Jesus. But this woman does. The body is redeemed, not just the soul.
Kiki Smith, My Blue Lake
Conclusion
For the church in particular, a thoughtfully-complex understanding of the unfolding of time forces theology into the sphere of everyday reality. Affirming a meaningful and hopeful direction for every moment at all points in time mixes our too-often separate spheres of personal narratives and world events. God is more truly represented as the God who transcends time while working within it. An art criticism that understands “making” as a legitimate response to God’s own particular actions in time can provide new ways of applying a theologically dynamic view of the past, present, and future. Interacting with contemporary art can encourage anticipation in the church for the day when we will see clearly instead of through a glass dimly, and respond appropriately, not clumsily.
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