The utopia of culture
For as long as I’ve been engaged with painting, I have found that more and more difficulties, problems and questions arise. The question of how to paint can be answered in part with talent, in part with experience or patience, in part with rivalry and the example of older painters. But questions about what and why a painter paints remain unraveled, even if I decide to gloss over them. And since the future gives no answers before it arrives, I often resort to the past for help. I don’t always find answers on these journeys back in time, but I always discover that also in the past people were tormented by similar questions. And I believe that such confirmations liberate us from strictures of time and space that define the present in terms of a particular individual. Such confirmations help us to embrace our shared fate and inspire us to recognize ourselves in the wider community to which we belong, but also link us to the distant past which each person brings back to life through his or her powers of memory. No human being lives in static isolation; individual existence is better imagined as both linear and circular, moving backwards and forwards in time as well as outwards and inwards in relation to the community. We exist in relation to each other, in association with each other, and we are in constant communion with the world, with eternity, infinity, utopia and, sometimes, with the realization of utopia.
The environment of aggressive consumerism in which we live is dominated by a mechanism of unbelievable scope and persistence. It is a coercive mechanism that keeps us constantly up-to-date about anything new, about the latest word in technology, science, art, culture and fashion. It imposes on us a way of living and thinking that we feel obliged to adopt so as to appear modern. The past is systematically pushed aside as no longer up to dealing with the needs we face today. Development and culture are aligned along a linear course of human construction oriented toward unending progress. It is as if what is “new and improved” is always there just ahead of us. And even now when those who were busy planning our future seem to have failed in their predictions, that doesn’t keep them from offering new plans for new developments still in the future. While progress is a potential and conditional symptom of human life, it cannot be the goal. After all, the foundation of culture is in its past, not its future. And thousands of years of human civilization have not managed to improve on the criteria on which we base our values, or on our deepest needs and our existential questions.
In recent times the highly-publicized “crisis” has served as a pretext to put forward the economy as the sole measure and criterion by which we live. Information is manipulated in a way that identifies us, as a community, with the market that the information serves. But nature, not finance, gives magnitude to human life. And nature has nothing to do with deductibles and bankruptcies. What we recognize – always in retrospect – as Culture or Art naturally reflects something from the age that produced it, but it does not weigh in terms of contemporary fashion.
In English, the word “culture” is derived from the verb “to cultivate” and is applied literally to the soil and figuratively to the mind – in both cases culture has to do with activity in a particular place and with interactions in that place. Another closely related word is civilization, rooted in the notion of the Latin civis, “citizen” and civitas, “city”, again underlining the relationship between communal life and place. The Greek word translated into English as both culture and civilization is politismos, intimately related in its meaning and etymology to the words for city (polis) and citizens (polites). Here too politismos has to do with place and the interaction of human beings. It is not individually possessed, but jointly contracted. A community emerges by agreeing to live in a particular place, to communicate in a particular language and through a particular culture; in other words, a community emerges through the realization of a hierarchy of its needs and values. Consequently we ourselves and the values we create as a community in a particular place are our culture and at every moment we “produce” culture. Every moment in time participates in eternity. The question is what does this culture “promote”? What meaning does it give to our lives and to the lives of others, and where is it leading us? And who is to judge it, and in what capacity?
Is culture the life and preferred form of entertainment of the average city-dweller? The sights and sounds he experiences? Or perhaps is it the harvest reaped from the cultivation of the sublime and the good, the embodiment of spirit as manifest in the social existence of each of us? Is culture the development and fashionable technological accessories of the “advanced” societies, or is it the unhurried smile and open-ended hospitality of someone who might receive you in some unsuspected place? Is culture the promotion and sale of cultural heritage, or it is pride, faith and knowledge that one is participating in the continuation of culture? Is culture a human environment, or perhaps a communal ideal? Is it a seasonal phenomenon that can be manipulated according to the circumstances? Or is it an experience of unwavering quality?
My belief is that culture is the awareness of what is holy and sacred for the community. It is the active understanding of eternity in our everyday lives, and the only relationship we can have with culture is one that exists through participation and continuation.
And utopia? We shouldn’t deceive ourselves, it is not distant and unapproachable. Utopia is the world nearest to each human being. Utopia is that non-place which opens out within us; it is created and exists inside us. The human being inhabits the world poetically and is always dreaming. And this dream is realized through culture. Culture lends a name and a place, it gives flesh and bones to the highest quests of every human society. It transcends consumer conformity and links us with truth and eternity, values outside time and space that have had a place in all periods of human existence. We don’t admire Praxiteles, Panselinos, Hokusai or Rembrandt because of the period in which they lived, but for their work which managed to transcend their historical period and continues to be productive even in our own day. The longevity of their offerings constitutes unending praise of the human ability to approach the beautiful. I draw examples here from representational art simply because it closest to me, but these examples are meant to speak for the whole of culture not just the visual arts.
As for the question of whether our art and culture have meaning and, if so, what it is –at stake is not exactly works of art, morality, love or bravery, but rather our very selves and our hopes as individuals and, above all, as a community. To treat of that which is exalted, beautiful or good may be a responsibility and indeed virtue of the individual, but these things are esteemed only in collective consciousness of social goods.
And what I consider to be the greatest cultural problem today is not the lack of culture, but our impaired ability to recognize what culture is. Plugged into an electrical socket, modern man finds it increasingly hard to discern the difference between culture and technology. The theoretical grandeur of individual self-consciousness proclaimed by Enlightenment modernism is not the same thing as the artificial self-sufficiency of today’s individualism, which cannot for one second exist independent from its technological comforts.
But culture cannot be promoted like an industrialized product. When it is promoted in this way the results are illusory and disappear with the next change in fashion. Culture is discernable and flourishes in societies that have pride in their past and are able to aim high. In such exalted aspirations people locate the values they recognize as paradigmatic. Such sublime places reflect the utopia within us and it is this utopia for which our culture yearns. The perception by human communities of the sublime and the essential, and the way they hierarchize their values, is usually found condensed in the concept of sacredness. In my everyday activity as a painter I seek out the elements which form the component parts of culture (what is culture, worship, cultivation, the realization of beauty?). In this learning process one necessarily meets with existential impasses, the sense of our finite nature and the unyielding boundaries which limit our powers. The consciousness of these limitations forces us to contemplate infinity and eternity, to transcend the void by realizing in a particular place that which is without place, utopia. The whole venture challenges us to recapture the meaning of the sacred.
The most persuasive testimony I can think of to support the utopian view of culture arose from my struggle to understand the reasons why we attribute such great importance to art. I am speaking especially about painting since it concerns me as part of my everyday life. This effort led me to inquire about the meaning of what is sublime and along this path I encountered the extreme expression of the sublime, namely the sacred. It involves both faith in the sacred and its denial. I will turn next to this way of thinking about the human ability to represent the utopia of the sublime which embraces both the creation of icons and their destruction.
(What follows is my introduction to a discussion about the sacred in art at the Benaki Museum in December 2010.)
We usually use the word “sacred” to describe images that represent gods, saints or their symbols and play a role in worship (in holy places or on icon screens). We contrast these with secular or profane painting and with pagan images and “idols”, the word we use to refer to non-Christian statues designed for cultic use. It is easier for us to see the holy in icons than in statues. Painting lacks the materiality of the statue and we perceive it as a sort of nod towards the intangible. It replaces the third dimension with another, vaguer dimension that is more susceptible to manipulation and interpretation.
Painting is an artifice devised by humankind in order to get beyond what cannot be represented in the world around him and in his inner world in order to portray those very things. Each painter’s familiarity with light and color is revealed, according to his portion of talent and effort, in his technique. The immediate usefulness of painting at the community level is shown through its power to entertain, educate, inspire faith or make a show of strength. Just as language on its own, however well it is spoken or used to communicate, isn’t necessarily poetry, likewise, painting on its own is not necessarily anything more than a nice hobby or a productive activity. But the honor and respect attributed to painting over the ages does show that we expect something more from it. If not the sacred, at least something that transcends the materiality of painting itself. And here difficult questions arise.
This “different feeling” which we might be after is not necessarily a consequence of art. We even admit painting as a sort of escape from everyday affairs although today thanks to a debilitating tendency towards generalization anything can be proposed and accepted as art. The result is a relativizing and canceling out of any sense of common criteria. Despite all the innovations, however, painting continues to seduce. Generally speaking, painting is no longer called upon to serve a function such as icons play in religious devotion. Painting no longer has a place in public rituals as did art in antiquity. Once, it might transcend time and place and depict gods and virtues. It was taken to be a way towards transcendental experience, or a means of conveying an elevated social message, for it was in such ways that people sought happiness. Today, as a society, we seek happiness elsewhere and contemporary art reflects this change. Our fixation on what is attainable distances us from dreaming of the impossible and aspiring to utopia. In the absence of God everything is possible, everything has some value, but nothing has a lasting meaning. This awkward dilemma hangs over the happiness of the modern world.
The struggle of the artistic consciousness to understand the necessity of art beyond its technical and immediate usefulness demands a different spirit and mode of thought. The human being understands the world in a poetic spirit. This is an indissoluble part of his life, but does not of course define either the world or Man or poetry. Art is not hemmed in either, but it transports us like a poem and a miracle through grace alone. In the most brilliant works, painting takes the form of a vehicle of the spirit, like a gift in return for manual dedication it reciprocates by infusing our lives with meaning. But doesn’t this sound like Incarnation? Except that in this case the incarnation is a matter of art not theology.
But isn’t the problem the same in both cases? The question arises from a deep source. If flesh is from flesh and spirit from spirit, how is incarnation brought about? Do we worship the image through the flesh or through the spirit? The position in favor of icons is supported by a belief in the Incarnation. But the ancient Greeks, who were not witnesses to the Incarnation, interpreted it more persuasively and more confidently than icon painters, despite their theology. Between an Attic grave stele and a smooth, glossy icon, which has managed to render the in-dwelling of divinity in the flesh?
From time immemorial people (cities) named and represented gods and heroes. The plastic representation of the gods depended on the way the city conceived of them. In Greece, as previously in Egypt and Mesopotamia, gods were given form. Here God did not create the world. The world produced the gods. From Chaos was born Erebos and black Night and from their mingling were born Ether and Day. Greek religious art developed in this state of innocence toward its perfection and those who made up the philosophical strand within Greek religion began contemplating the problem of representation, weighing up their agreement and disagreement with other citizens’ notions of the divine and what were then deemed as acceptable forms for representing it. Thus, starting from philosophy, a cycle of iconoclastic thinking began.
From mythology and its monsters we travel with Homer to an anthropomorphic conception of divinity, and from the physical orientation of the Presocratics we reach the deepening, or elevating, perceptions of Plato who defines terms for the social necessity of art. Our ancestors laid down two opposing imperatives: that the gaze should be turned towards the divine as the only thing worth looking at, on the one hand, and, on the other, that to represent the divine is vain, sacrilegious and senseless.
But they did not destroy the images. Philosophers were not of one accord. Philosophy was in any case an eclectic movement without great influence on life in the city. And so the city went on producing images of humans in the form of gods and gods in the form of humans. The incarnation or, rather, in-dwelling of the divine in human form thrived in a unique manner in Greek art. The artist was the mediator, officiant-demiurge, priest and theologian. The work was the sacrament of this mediation, the epiphany of god shared with humankind in the world and the artist was the instrument of the city that gave form to this shared belief. This perfect moment which nearly all subsequent ages have yearned for did not last long. The art of the Parthenon was frozen already in the fourth century and although it was constantly repeated and copied throughout the Hellenistic and Roman world, it never again flourished except for a very few exceptions. It was a crisis of the city to be sure, but also a spiritual crisis which touched on ideas about the body too. Philip erected his statue amidst the gods and was promptly struck a mortal blow. With Alexander the image of the monarch as object of worship was imposed throughout what was by then the Hellenistic world. This tradition would continue into the Roman period with the omnipresent image of the emperor.
Arrogance and hybris do not project man into view, they alienate him from the divine. In the multi-ethnic world the human body once again became corruptible, subject to death, aging, exhaustion, sleep. It was not a true body. Only the gods, immortal beings, possessed a perfected body, whole, definitive and archetypal. Art no longer taught citizens virtue and beauty, it spread everywhere and adorned both public spaces and private residences in accordance with the desires of power and money. Pliny and contemporary writers had contempt for the art of their age. Ars moriens they called it: dying art, spent art.
But painting still retained a secret. In Egypt certain “provincial” funerary portraits were still gazing with wide-open eyes into the eternity they were anticipating.
With the appearance of Christ in Israel and the conquest of the Empire and then the Roman State by the Christian religion, two worlds met. In the Old Testament we find once again the fundamental opposition. The existence of God’s image was confirmed (in the image and likeness of God was man made) but an absolute ban on depicting God was imposed. The sacred is adorned but not depicted. The Islamic understanding of the image is also related to this Jewish tradition. Both reject images of the divine as unworthy of their subject. In the New Testament, however, Christ, being God, was also a visible man who declared “…if you did know me, you would know my Father as well”. The verb in Greek means both to “see” and to see with the mind’s eye, in other words, to “know”, which is the meaning with which this passage has been translated in the English biblical tradition. On account of the multi-valence of the verb an enormous patristic literature grew up in which some discerned the justification for future iconoclasm, while others read Christ’s words as the basis not only for support of images, but for a metaphysical interpretation of sacred and secular art.
The iconoclasts’ arguments seem to have been strong and plausible since it took two generations of theologians to defeat them, amidst massacres and unbelievable destruction. The victory of the icons in 843 was more an unstable compromise than a triumph. Icons were reinstated in churches, but they were not like the old ones. Dogmatic assertion of the divine nature in Christ conveyed a spiritual stance, but restricted artists’ freedom, while fear of theological transgression led to slavish copying and worship of mere form. And although neglect of perspective and the reversal of its laws conveyed an atmosphere of spirituality very effectively, such reversal taken to extremes did not always result in a more spiritual style of painting, nor did it flourish in more allegedly spiritual milieux.
The first cycle of iconoclasm ended with the progressive weakening of ancient iconographic art and the consolidation of Byzantine style. Icons were now understood as holy and not simply painted representations of holy figures. And of course the rule, if not exercised by worthy hands and an inspired gaze, proved to be a spiritual infirmity. But the original spirit of painting, protected in some deep recess, blossoms and hopes. On the verge of the empire’s collapse, just before the Fall of Constantinople, Byzantine style produced its masterpieces, fitting the space inhabited by living beings within the space belonging to that which cannot be hemmed in by space. This final burst of brilliance at the Chora Monastery, at the Protaton, opened the way to the great Renaissance that would take place in another place and in other terms.
The Catholic Church was more moderate in its metaphysical understanding of the image. It did not consider the image a source either of deception like Plato, or idolatry like the apophatic East, nor did it consider images vain and useless. To the contrary, the Catholic Church exploited the capacity of images to reinforce and encourage piety and they were widely used in pastoral work. Thanks to religious images, European culture was definitively renewed and European art reached worldwide acclaim. But theologians and philosophers would undermine the triumph of the Renaissance too by initiating a second cycle of iconoclasm. Enter Calvin, Pascal, Kant and Hegel, who wrote that “thought ceased to recognize in art the function of the perceptible representation of the divine”.
Times are changing. New horizons open and many new opportunities arise.
Even the elusive shadows that appear everywhere dart about and trip over each other in the dawning light of the modern era. They disturb the self-sufficiency of the inherited authorities and assert changes in every direction. New and ever newer ideologies and trends confuse religious and secular understanding, mysterious national and international alchemies envision progress and the future as sustainable development. The masses gallop onto the stage of history. Totalitarianisms and other
-isms are incubated and invented. Everything increases. Even iconoclastic thinking does not destroy images this time, but multiplies them and breaks them down into fashions, trends and individual tastes. Manifestos and art works abound.
Art and human thought are almost always accompanied by topplings and interminglings. Names and uses change easily, but not essences. In the past, before the problems of art were replaced by rhythms and harmonies we used to speak about the epiphany of gods, heroes and saints in statues or icons in order to make present (and worship) virtue and beauty. In periods saturated with the vacuity of aesthetic analyses we are searching anew for meaning beyond technique and decoration in symbolism, romanticism, the artist’s expression or the simple human need to create, in primitivism, futurism, abstraction, aniconism. When Malevich exhibited his black square high up in its red corner replacing the traditional Orthodox icon corner with the October Revolution he wrote “God is Not Overthrown”. But in the face of the obvious absence of god in modern thought, he could only represent what he needed to represent through the squared darkness of ignorance. By denying the Church’s ability to represent God and form’s ability to express the absolute, he rediscovered, perhaps through ignorance, the classical argument of iconoclasm.
The assault against form and the “subject /object” rupture have cut an open wound. But all assaults and ruptures, all -isms and deconstructions drift swiftly of their own accord towards a fathomless cascade of constant nullifications.
In our day the image, emancipated from the prototype, becomes a prototype itself. Discharged from the obligation to function as a representation and in relationship to nature or divinity, this image, now an absolute unto itself, whether iconic or not, is offered as an object for worship and glorified in museums where we gather to consume the artist’s authenticity – and not only his works, but also the artist’s development of himself as a work.
Finally, we acquiesce indifferently to everything and shut ourselves up ever increasingly in the insulated artificiality of the reality around us. We cash in our stocks in the present, no longer reckoning for eternity. The artist’s arbitrary individualism has been legitimized and has replaced the collective consciousness of the community. Art has thus been entrapped in self-imprisonment and deprived from any collective significance by which it could have reached a higher purpose.
For those who still worry over it, the problem of representation is still a serious one, as it always has been. The questions still exist, piled up layer after layer, like a palimpsest. Is the darkness empty? What do we see in the darkness? Is representational art a re-presentation of a presence which is present? Can someone represent something beyond what is visible, picture the absolute? Can God be represented in image and likeness or only as idea? Has God an appearance or only meaning and virtue? Is being a body or a sign? Is it of this or another world the spirit which gives life to human matter? Does worship pass through the prototype or does it remain at the level of the particular image? Can art be spiritual, or is it simply decorative? Does it activate or induce indolence? Does it maintain the status quo or overturn how we perceive the world? Is it a civilizing lever or a tool for manipulation? A plan for escape or a way of pulling everything into the center? Which sort of art does the one, which the other? Which serves what goal, and for whom?
