Renewed Visibility

The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art, Jonathan A. Anderson (Notre Dame Press)

Former Downing Street spin doctor Alastair Campbell is reputed to have said “We don’t do God” when his boss, the then-Prime Minister Tony Blair, was asked about his faith. Although he was using the phrase as a way to shut down an over-running interview, his words were symptomatic of a reluctance, at that time, to speak about religion in politics, despite many politicians being motivated by their faith.

A similar reluctance characterised modern art throughout much of the twentieth century. Many modern artists engaged with religion in and through their work but art critics and art historians routinely overlooked or ignored those aspects of the work when writing about it. They did so because of a secularisation agenda that overrode reflection on key elements of the art that artists were creating.

In Modern Art and the Life of a Culture, Jonathan A. Anderson, together with William Dyrness, recovered some of the religious influences explored in the work of key modern artists by writing an alternative history of modern art. Now, with The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art, Anderson has addressed the central issue, which is the way in which art critics and historians have written about modern and contemporary art.

His book is a game-changer, not just because he comprehensively documents the gap between artists’ work and the limiting ways in which they have been critiqued, understood and described, but also because he summarises the more recent changing response from critics, curators and historians to artists engaging with religion and sets out effective frameworks for considering such work going forward.

Examples of art criticism from 1979 and 2004 serve to unpack the secularisation agenda that has limited response to art throughout much of modernism. From 1979, Anderson notes how art critic and theorist Rosalind Krauss argued that secularism had triumphed in discussion of modern art to the point that it had become “indescribably embarrassing to mention art and spirit in the same sentence”. In response, Anderson summarises examples of exhibitions, art criticism, theological writing and sociocultural events that run counter to this argument. Then, in 2004, this phenomenon was rigorously examined by art historian James Elkins in his book On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art. Anderson’s book is a dialogue with Elkins’ significant tome.

Anderson notes that the problem Elkins identifies is “not a lack of religiously meaningful artworks but a lack of compelling, well-informed writing about artworks that ably engages the theological intelligibility of this work”. The remainder of his book sets out to address this problem.

He begins by mapping the greater visibility of religion as found in contemporary art since 2004, which has gone hand-in-hand with an increased willingness to discuss the place of religion in art. His survey enables identification of various disciplinary intersections, four levels of inquiry, a set of critical focal points, and four interpretive horizons. Each of these form part of a wider framework enabling compelling and well-informed writing about religiously meaningful artworks. The interpretive horizons he identifies each represent a general structure of concerns and pre-understandings within which the other facets he identifies function.

As a result, it is these interpretive horizons – art and religion within Anthropological, Political, Spiritual, and Theological Horizons – that he explores in more significant detail. His chapter on these Four Horizons is central to the book, its argument, and Anderson’s ideas for compelling, well-informed writing about artworks that ably engage with the theological intelligibility of the artworks themselves. In this chapter, he identifies best practice in relation to writings that fit within each of the four interpretive horizons before, finally, focusing down still further in later chapters to explore in greater detail what characterises well-informed writing within the Theological Horizon.

Alongside his setting out of the theory of these frameworks for compelling and well-informed writing, he also offers an example of such writing by using the four Interpretive Horizons to discuss Altar by the Belgian artist Kris Martin. Martin’s sculptural work is a full-scale steel model of the frame of the Ghent altarpiece by Hubert and Jan van Eyck, which is only ever installed in outdoor contexts. Anderson’s discussion of this work and the histories in which it is embedded serves as an example of the kind of critical engagement, including theological reasonings, with works of art for which this book as a whole is calling.

This book, which has already been called “a bombshell on the playground of the art historians and art critics”, sets out a compelling case for histories of modern and contemporary art “to be reread and rewritten in ways that understand religion and theology more seriously”. It effectively clears space for and reshapes the basis on which such work can and should be done in future. As a result, the place of religion in contemporary art is no longer strange, as it has a renewed visibility and one that can receive informed attention.

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 Jonathan Evens

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