On the sacred in art
I perceive of the sacred as a means by which man may ponder infinity; a means by which he may handle the secret character of the world, the desert of ignorance that surrounds the finiteness of our knowledge, no matter how extensive that knowledge. The sacred does not, of course, exist in terms of physical science, in the sense that it is not visible and directly recognizable to all. Sacredness is not a state of the world, but a way in which man stands before it, a perception that requires deference, in other words, a perception that requires that one be open, in such a way that, by sacrificing his self-sufficiency and his material certainty, he is able to form a relationship with the other, the foreign. It is the consciousness of this relationship with the world that I perceive of as sacredness. This relationship transforms community into civilization. And that civilization is man’s utmost achievement. It is, however, an ability we easily renounce. Dedicated to the daily grind and the immediate consumption of the material world, we allow various religious and authoritarian mechanisms to manage it to their advantage and to monopolise it with some form of validity.
The concept of referring to images that represent gods, saints or symbols of them and are of a votive character (temples or shrines), as sacred, has prevailed. We contrast these images with secular and profane painting, as well as with pagan images and ‘’idols’’, namely votive statues. It is easier for us to discern the sacred in images than in statues. A painting does not carry the materiality of a statue and, in a certain way, it beckons the immaterial. It substitutes the third dimension with another one, a more indefinable one, which allows also for handling and interpretations. Painting is a human device through which man may exceed the unrepresentable aspect of his environment and his inner world and represent them It is through his familiarization with light and colour that every painter’s technique is highlighted, depending, of course, on his natural gift and the meticulousness of his practice. The accommodation of the call for entertainment, instruction, faith or some display of power, ascertain its immediate social usefulness. But, just like language itself, no matter how well it is spoken or communicated, is not poetry, so painting itself, is not necessarily anything more than a pleasurable pastime or an effective activity. However, the appreciation and respect we give to it, for centuries now, attests to the fact that we expect more from it. Not sacredness necessarily, but definitely something that exceeds its materiality. And this is of course where the most challenging questions arise. This ‘’other feeling’’, which may be the requirement, is not necessarily an effect of art. We still collectively confess to painting’s capacity as a breathing space, an exit from the living contract, though, nowadays, through an exhausting generalization, anything can be considered and become accepted as art, relativizing or obliterating the concept of the common criterion. Regardless, however, of all the modernizations, painting continues to captivate. Of course, it no longer carries a wider functional role, like votive images did. It no longer accommodates public ceremonies, like ancient art did. At one time, by cancelling out place and time and representing gods and virtues, it most probably functioned as a self-evident raft of a transcendental experience or of a heightened social meaning, when people searched for happiness in this way. Today, as a society, we search for happiness elsewhere and modern art reflects that change. Our preoccupation with the attainable leads us away from the vision of the impossible, from the expectationof utopia.In the absence of god everything is possible, everything has some form of significance, but nothing has enduring meaning. This awkward dilemma depresses the happiness of the modern world. The struggle of the conscience of painting to understand the necessity of art, beyond technique and its immediate usefulness, requires a different spirit and a different way of pondering. Man perceives of the world poetically, a fact that stands within his life without, of course, defining either the world or man or poetry. The meaning cannot be defined in art either: it can only carry us away in the form of a silent gift, like a poem and like a miracle. In its most illuminating works, painting reveals itself as a spirit-bearing form. As a reward for our manual devotion, we are rewarded a non-handmade meaning. Yet, that does not sound like an Embodiment. But, in this case, embodiment is related to art, and not to Theology. Could this, though, be a common problem? A question that strikes to the very foundation arises. If that which is born from flesh is itself flesh and that which is born from spirit is itself spirit, then how does embodiment come about? As an iconolatry of the flesh or as an iconolatry of the spirit? The iconolater’s position is founded on the conviction of the embodiment. But the ancient Greeks, who did not witness the Embodiment, read it convinsingly and with greater certainty than the agiographers of the images, for all the latter’s connection to theology. In considering an attic tombstone and a smooth polished image, one wonders in which of the two the indwelling of divinity within bodies has been evoked more effectively.
From olden times, people (cities) name and depict gods and heroes. The plastic representation of the gods depends on the city’s perception of them. Greece, just like Egypt and Mesopotamia before it, gave form to its gods. Here, it was not a case of God creating the world. Here, the world created the gods. From Chaos came forth Erebus and black Night, and from their union Aether and Day were borne. In this state of innocence, where greek religious art moves towards its culmination, an equally religious section of Hellenism, Philosophy, begins to contemplate the issue of representation, to measure its agreement and its disagreement with the idea citizens had regarding the divine and the acceptable forms of representing it. Thus, starting from Philosophy, a cycle of iconoclastic contemplation opened up.
From teratomorphous mythology we move on to Homer and an anthropomorphic perception of divinity, and from the natural perception of the presocratic philosophers we reach the deep delving or the exaltation of Plato, who sets standards regarding the social necessity of art. The descendants present two contradicting imperatives, that the gaze ought to be turned to divinity, as this is the only thing worth contemplating, and that to represent that divinity is futile, sacrilegious, foolish. But wasn’t than when religious images were destroyed? Philosophy was not unanimous; besides it was not a select movement, it did not have such influence on the life of the city. And so the city continued to produce images of theomorphic humans and anthropomorphic gods. The embodiment or, more fittingly, the indwelling of the divine within the human form thrived in a singular way within the context of Greek art. The artist is the mediator, the officiate-creator, the priest and the theologian. The art-work is the mystery of this mediation, the platform of the god that shares the world with men, and the artist is the city’s creator that gives form to that common conviction. That perfect moment, which almost every subsequent age has yearned for, does not last long. Parthenonian art had already frozen by the 4th century, and though it is often repeated, ceaselessly imitated throughout the Hellenistic and the Roman period, it no longer thrives, with very few exceptions. A crisis of the city, no doubt, but also a spiritual crisis which is also related to the idea of the body. Philip commissioned his statue to be placed alongside the gods and was mortaly wounded on the same day. In the case of Alexander, in his Hellenistic world, the votive image of the monarch was a necessity. This tradition continued into the Roman period with the ever-present image of the emperor.
Arrogance and hubris do not deify man, they alienate him from the divine. In the multinational universe, the human body becomes perishable again, it is subjected to death, old age, fatigue, sleep; it is not a real body. Only the gods, being immortal, possess a body that is complete, whole, final and archetypal. Art no longer educates civilians in virtue and beauty; it spreads everywhere and decorates public spaces as well as private mansions, in accordance with the wishes of the powerful and the affluent. Plinius and his contemporary scholars look down dismissively on the art of their time. They call it Ars moriendi. A dying art, finished. But painting still possesses something secret. In Egypt, some ‘’provincial’’ funeral portraits (Fayum), had already started gazing at the eternity they yearned for with wide-open eyes.
After Christ appeared in Israel, and the Empire, and then the Roman state, were conquered by Christian religion, two worlds met. In the Old Testament there is once again a fundamental contradiction. The existence of God’s image is confirmed (man was created in the image and the likeness of God), on the one hand, but on the other, the representation of God was absolutely prohibited. The sacred can be decorated but cannot be represented. The muslim interpretation is also connected to this Hebrew tradition. They both dismiss images as unworthy of their object. But, in the New Testament, Christ, being God, is also a visible man who says: ‘’ …ye neither know me, nor my father’’. Ever since then, an extensive amount of patristic literature emerged, in which some individuals hint at the reasons for a future iconoclasm, while others set out the foundations, not merely of iconophily, but also of a metaphysical interpretation of sacred and secular art. The arguments of the iconoclasts seem to have been rather powerful and plausible, as, it took the efforts of two generations of theologists, through slaughters and immense destruction, for them to be subverted. The victory of the images, in 843, was most probably an unstable victory, rather than a triumph. The images were re-installed in the temples, but they were no longer the same. The dogmatic prompt of divine majesty epitomized a certain spirituality, but limited the artists’ freedon and the fear of transgression led to repetition and typolatry. And, while the disregard of perspective or the reversal of its rules, splendidly presented the intention of spirituality, the uncompromising adherence to reversal did not always lead to more spiritual painting, norr did it thrive in more spiritual societies. The first cycle of iconoclasm ended with the progressive weakening of ancient pictorial art and the consolidation of Byantine style. Images were by then considered sacred, rather than simple paintings of sacred form. The rule, of course, in cases were it is not practiced by able hands and inspired gazes, turns into a spiritual handicap. But the primordial spirit of painting, safeguarded in the deep, flourishes and hopes. In the ultimate shocks, where the empire collapses, before the Fall, the Byzantine style will offer up its masterpieces, fitting the land of the living within the land of that which cannot be contained. Through this late glow (in the Chora monastery, in Protato), the passage towards the grand Renaissance opened up; at a different place now and with other terms.
The Catholic Church, more moderate in its metaphysical perception of the image, did not consider it a fraud, like Plato does, nor an idol, like the apophatic East does, nor did it, of course consider it futile and useless. On the contrary, taking full advantage of the capacity of the image to dominate and to ignite reverence, the Catholic Church made wide use of it in its pastoral work. Through it it completely renovated European civilization and its art shone the whole world over. But this triumph of the Renaissance was once again undermined by theologians and philosophers, beginning a new cycle of iconoclasm. Calvin, Pascal, Kant, Hegel, who sets out the argument, definitively, that ‘thought has ceased to ascribe the function of the tangible representation of the sacred to art’.
Times change. New horizons and countless opportunities are opening up. The shadows that pop up from everywhere, hurried and subversive, in the twilight of the dawning of the New Years, have yet to be defined. They shake up the autarchy of the established principles and pursue changes in every direction. New and constantly newer ideologies and trends confuse religious and secular perception; mysterious national and international alchemies envision progress and the future as sustainable development. The masses of nations are galloping to the forefront of History. –Isms and totalitarianisms are hatched and invented. Everything is increasing in numbers. Even iconoclastic contemplation, in this case, does not destroy images, rather it multiplies them and breaks them up into trends, flows and individualisms. Manifestos and works everywhere.
Human art and human contemplation almost always emerge through subversions and adulterations. Names and functions change easily; essences find changes challenging.
In the past, prior to the requirements of art being substituted by rhythm and harmonies, we used to refer to the presentation of deities, heroes or saints in statues or images, about representation (and worship) of virtue and beauty. In times so imbued by the emptiness of aesthetic analyses, we once again seek meaning beyond technique and decoration, in symbolism, romanticism, in the artist’s expression or in man’s obvious need to create, in primitivism, futurism, the subtractive, the aniconic. When Malevich exhibited the black square high up, in the red corner, when he substituted the iconostasis with the October revolution, he wrote: ‘’God has not fallen’’. But, within the context of the absence of God held by modernist thought, he could not represent his need, in any other way than the squared darkness of agnosia. By rejecting the Church as incapable of representing God and form as incapable of expressing the absolute, he was on the way to rediscovering–though he was most probably unaware of this—the classic argument of iconoclasm. The attempt against form, the clash with the ‘object’, have carved an unhealed incision. And the same applies to all the attempts, the clashes, the –isms and the deconstructions, which are unwillingly carried away, faster and faster, to a bottom-less waterfall of constant cancellations.
In today’s society, the image itself, emancipated by the original, becomes an original. Free from the obligation to function as a representation and to participate in a dialogue with nature and divinity, the absolute image, iconic or not, is put forward as an object of worship and is glorified in museums, where we come together to consume the artist’s authenticity, and not only that of his works, but that of the development of his self as an artwork.
Lately, we indifferently consent to everything and lock ourselves deeper and deeper in the insulation of artificial reality. We spend our values on the present; we no longer answer to eternity. The legalization of the individualistic arbitrariness of the artist has substituted the consciousness of community, trapping art in a form of self-confinement and robbing any higher essence it may be able to approach of collective meaning.
The challenge of representation, for those that struggle, remains an erudite one, as it always was, for that matter. It involves palimpsest questions. Is the dark empty? What do we see in the light? Is representation the presentation of a stance of some other substance? Is representation a manifestation of the unseen? What is manifest and how is this represented? Can man also depict something beyond the obvious, can he depict the absolute? Can God also be presented as an image or is God only an idea? Does virtue have a face or is it only a meaning? Is a being a body or a sign? Is the spirit that gives soul to human matter of this world or another one? Does the act of worship progress towards the ideal or does it merely remain upon the image? Does art also contain a spirit or is it merely decorative? Does it mobilize or does it stultify? Does it maintain the status quo or does it subvert people’s perception? Is it a lever for civilization or a tool of manipulation? A get-away raft or a centripetal accumulation? Which art creates the former and which the latter? Which art serves a purpose, and which purpose, and whose purpose?
