Contemplations of the Spiritual in Art (Cultural Interactions: Studies in the Relationship Between the Arts). Edited by Rina Arya.

Abstract

Around the time of the conference held in Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral, Contemplations of the Spiritual in Contemporary Art, of which this book is a partial record, there had been something of a resurgence of interest in the nature of the church’s relationship with the arts. Similar events ran in Durham and Salisbury, while the Society for Theology chose Theology and the Arts as its conference theme that year. At these events art was discussed in its relation to theology, or its potential role within, or as, liturgy, or else ideas were mooted more generally concerning the place of the church in modern culture and the viability of contemporary visual arts as a medium for forms of spirituality. At Liverpool it was this last tricky theme that provided substance for debate among the assembled artists, clergy and academics. Spirituality entered the language of modern art through abstraction, and above all that progenitor of modern abstraction, Kandinsky. For Kandinsky abstract painting was a ‘mystical-spiritual enterprise’, independent of religious practices and belief—a mode of transcendence reliant upon sensation not symbolism (D. Kuspit, ‘Abstract Painting and the Spiritual Unconscious’ in S. Newton and B. Taylor (eds), Painting, Sculpture and the Spiritual Dimension (London: Oneiros Books, 2003), p. 78). In Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky’s famous text on the subject, the spiritual in art is whatever feeds the inner life of the spirit, rather than something that points to some kind of divine reality. Indeed, from Kandinsky onwards, common consensus on the nature of ‘the spiritual’ in art has stressed its distinction from anything we might call ‘the religious’. As such, spirituality may be aligned with religion, but not wholly and not necessarily. In more recent decades, the notion that spirituality might act as a foil or even a proxy for religious belief was revived by the groundbreaking exhibition, The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985. In an essay written for the exhibition catalogue Donald Kuspit opened with the blunt assertion that ‘[t]he “spiritual” is a problem concept in contemporary art’. Comparing Kandinsky’s identification of the spiritual in art with more modern formulations he suggested that ‘[t]oday art does not seem so mighty an element in spiritual life, and spiritual life does not seem so evident in art or in general’ (D. Kuspit, ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Contemporary Art’ in M. Tuchman (ed.), The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985 (Los Angeles, California: Los Angeles County Museum of Art and New York: Abbeville Press, 1986), p. 313). Arguably, nearly 30 years on, we might still accede to Kuspit’s first statement yet contest the second. The importance of art to ‘spiritual life’, and vice versa, seems remarkably undiminished. The testimony of the aforementioned conferences as well as the persistent presence of religious and spiritual themes within the contemporary art world, however shallowly understood or banally expressed, would seem to corroborate this suspicion.