The Artistic Sphere: The Arts in Neo-Calvinist Perspective
The words of Calvinists like Kuyper on the one hand, and secular “formalists” like Greenberg on the other, can sometimes seem interchangeable. However, Kuyper and Greenberg would certainly have disagreed concerning the “area of competence” contained in the “Artistic Sphere.” For Kuyper (and for Rookmaaker, who worked out Kuyper’s ideas through art criticism) the artist was like a “true seer” who accurately recorded the God-made glory of Creation. Thinkers like Whistler and Greenberg, however, didn’t spread the net so wide. Mindful of the composite nature of traditional, pictorial art (often beholden in its subject matter to other “spheres” like history, theology, geology, and anatomy), they went several steps further. Their uncompromising efforts to define an “artistic sphere” that was truly itself, with its own self-contained set of rules, resulted in conceptual purification of such refined austerity that it often alienated those outside the “Art World.”
Greenberg and Whistler were “purifiers” who pushed their cleansing logic to its inevitable conclusion. So, arguably, were the other great modernists criticized by Hans Rookmaaker, including Monet and Gauguin. Viewed superficially, these champions of abstraction seem to have little in common with Calvinists who preferred 17th-century Dutch landscape painting. However, it is precisely a thrust toward conceptual “purification” that neo-Calvinism and secular formalism share, in essence if not in degree. For both neo-Calvinism and formalist “modernism” are intrinsically, well, modern. That is, their quests for clean, new theoretical grounds of human activity are testimony to their shared roots in early modern European history.
The word “culture” is anchored in the notion of “cultivation,” which itself implies rootedness, gradualism, organicism, generational continuity, “depth” and embeddedness. Modernity, on the other hand, is practically defined by its interruption of this continuity. Indeed, many modern nation builders understood that traditional culture posed a major challenge to the adoption of new, more enlightened, ideals. The starry-eyed architects of early modern “utopian” communities, religious or otherwise, knew the same. This, indeed, is why some of Europe’s most zealous religious reformers struck out for the “tabula rasa” of the so-called New World. This is why the intellectual masterminds of the French Revolution devised a “Cult of Reason” to forcefully replace the existing Catholic-agrarian folk culture. And this is why Mao Zedong found it necessary to launch a history-erasing “Cultural Revolution” in Communist China.
The “Cult of Reason” and the “Cultural Revolution” are, of course, extreme examples of “modernist” purification, but they can help us understand why the visual culture we call “modern” is of a markedly different character than anything humans produced in the thousands of years that came before. With the modern world there came abstract art, critical theory, and absurdism. With the modern world there came unbelievably rapid stylistic flux yielding myriad other “isms” (e.g., Impressionism, Cubism) replacing each other on a regular basis. These movements were, in part, attempts to apply top-down philosophical reasoning to aesthetic experience in the same way top-down reasoning had already been applied in religion (e.g., the radical reforms of Calvin) and politics (e.g., the establishment of French and North American democracies). They were also attempts to discover a domain for “Art” that could weather the turbulence of revolutions, wars, and world-changing technologies. Above all, these modernist “isms” (of which Hans Rookmaaker was not generally fond) were attempts to keep “doing culture” while explicitly rejecting millennia of cultivation. Where continuity had been interrupted, or even declared anathema, new, “pure” grounds were always posited, until they, too, were declared corrupt or obsolete.
I think the word “Art” was only, ever, a useful abstraction cobbled from a desire to compete with the past—and surpass it. “Certain things existed,” the modern theorists of “Art” said, “and they were desirable. How do we name them and manufacture them—and even outdo them?” In this effort to name, analyze, and surpass, many things informally called the “arts” (that is, the “skill sets”) of, say, tempera painting, stone carving, and metalworking all became “Art”—decontextualized, mythologized, and reified. Originally, these craft forms had been products of “corrupt,” context-bound, traditional cultivation; for modernity, they had to be distilled into something purified, rule-based, and new. And amazingly, just as their own distillation may have been caused by religious division and the need to extirpate traditions, they themselves became the seeds of new religions! For in their search for transcendent, ahistorical grounds for beauty, modern art movements like Orphism and Surrealism (among many others) actually became new belief systems, complete with theologies, dogmas, and spiritual practices. This is because—I believe—the composite, provisional, multi-faceted nature of the thing we call “Art” must, in the end, re-root itself or die. Bucking against the limits of its purely conceptual existence, it longs to return to the soil of holistic human striving from which it, Golem-like, was once formed.
That is why my favorite essay in The Artistic Sphere is by the philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff. In his chapter “Rethinking Art,” Wolterstorff argues that capital-A “Art,” as we think of it, doesn’t really, in fact, exist. Instead, it is the product of an Enlightenment-era “grand narrative” that elevated objects of contemplation as lodestars amidst the turmoil of early modernity. By extracting these “disinterested” objects of contemplation from the fabric of daily life, early modern elites created a realm of aspiration and escape that helped them navigate rapid social change. They then encoded this realm into an infrastructure of museums, academies, and institutes designed to produce and perpetuate even more objects of “disinterested” contemplation. Today, however, this Enlightenment-era initiative no longer seems so compelling, and the many other uses of “Art” are reemerging. These include political statement-making, public commemoration, cathartic expression, and more. Wolterstorff, therefore, encourages us to free ourselves from a “grand narrative” that privileges a disinterested, sequestered “Art” so that we can understand and embrace the other contexts in which aesthetic reasoning can be fruitfully deployed (214–224).
For me, Wolterstorff is moving in a healthy direction. Certainly, the walled-off, commodified, prestige-centered “Art World” as we know it is shifting and perhaps crumbling. Objects created for sacred or memorial purposes are being repatriated to their original contexts. Meanwhile folk, traditional, and craft-based practices are gaining renewed esteem. The artificiality of the “Art” construct is increasingly recognized, and this means that “makers”—people driven to create—are both considering new outlets for their energy and shrugging off oppressive regimes of ranking and conceptual boundary-drawing. What do these broad, secular trends mean for the existence of a Calvinist “Aesthetic Sphere”?
Among the authors in this book, Wolterstorff certainly seems most poised to answer this question. But I feel he may be kicking the problem down the road. Toward the end of his essay, amidst a discussion of his book Art Rethought,1 Wolterstorff seems to replace one, large, top-down construct (i.e., capital A “Art”) with several smaller ones, including “art-reflexive art” and “polemical art” (221–222). This goes a long way toward acknowledging the power of context, but I fear such conceptual slicing only delays the inevitable. Is it productive, for example, to separate “polemical art” from “polemics,” full stop? And if we do, are we resurrecting a shadow definition of “Art” with a capital “A”? Perhaps I should read Wolterstorff’s book to find out.
For me, the venerated art historian Ernst Gombrich hit the nail on the head when he declared, “There is really no such thing as Art. There are only artists.”2 In the end, I believe, there are no transcendent spheres of formal achievement that descend to give meaning and shape to our actions. Instead, there is a world of individuals made in the image of God, endowed with inborn energies and charisms that can be applied in myriad creative, historically contingent ways. As an “art historian,” I investigate how these energies are expressed visually, impacting our experience as sighted beings, replete with a specific visual psychology and visually-configured way of parsing meaning. And as a Christian “art historian,” I examine how these dynamics of visual experience interface with the metaphors of Scripture (invoking light, sight, visions, mirrors, suns, stars, and crystal seas) to coax us holistically and completely toward union with God, the source and summit of our being. For me, “Art with a capital A” was a temporary experiment in human visual communication that has seen its day. But humans everywhere still use (and always have used) visual means to navigate reality.
Metaphor is the bread and butter of theology. God is greater than our concepts, and all the cultivation in the world, drawing on millennia of deep, lived understanding about the physics of Creation, the phenomenology of human experience and the mysteries of the creative gesture, will never be enough to “capture” Him in his fullness. An empathetic re-engagement with ancient traditions, however, can help us expand our spiritual lexicon in our quest to deeply know and enjoy the Maker and Sustainer of All. Insofar as the Neo-Calvinist tradition charted in The Artistic Sphere sloughs off regimes of distillation, purification, and the reification of mere concepts, it promises rapprochement with jettisoned traditions and cultural reunification of the Christian—and human—family. This will yield, from the grassroots up, greater ecumenical understanding. For I believe that a reclaimed embeddedness in nature, tradition, history, and cultivation, with the metaphors and rhythms that emanate therefrom, can help all of us come onto the same page—a Scriptural page! By this means, we can renew the global Body of Christ in our turbulent, questioning, questing postmodern world.
