Episode 11 Transcript

Ryan: So Jonathan Anderson, you are associate professor of art at Biola University, but currently on leave to finish up a PhD at King’s College London. Theology PhD, right?

Jonathan: Theology, yeah. Theology and Religious studies. But theology.

Ryan: And the arts.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Ryan: And you're a working artist, as well. You're a painter. You've done sound art – sound art you've done?

Jonathan: Some, not a lot.

Ryan: All right. You think more a painter than – 

Jonathan: Yeah, I'm a painter.

Ryan: All right.

Jonathan: Bit of sculpture here and there, but painter.

Ryan:  Good. So you're putting together being a practitioner of the art, being a critic, art critic, art historian. So you're also a specialist in modernism and then art theory through a theological tradition. That's fantastic. Okay.

Jonathan: Sounds like too many hats to be wearing all at once, doesn't it?

Ryan: I don't know. Well, I mean, this is how it has to work, right?

Jonathan: Yeah, yeah, that's right. When you're given certain questions and certain problems that you don't know how to address, or at least for me, then I shift and I guess I keep shifting to try to address those questions.

Ryan: In my experience, many Christians are nostalgic about the institutional support that the Church used to be able to provide to the visual arts in say, the great Renaissance masters, right, sponsored by the Church in many cases. Now, for literature, at least the major institutional supporter of the literary arts is the university. And to a certain extent, that is also the case for the visual arts. And people within the visual arts and the literary arts uncomfortable about the setting. So they feel like it can have a homogenizing narrowing effect in that the dependence on the institution can create just the kinds of hierarchies that a politically active art is trying to move beyond.

So what can the contemporary art world learn from the history of Christian patronage of the arts, as a place to start?

Jonathan: Yeah. Yeah. It's a good cluster of questions really. Well, on the first point about patronage, I think the art world is – it's a little different than the literary world in the sense that the university provides the context for the research of art, primarily, so art history and theory and so on. The academic discourse about the visual arts very much happens in the universities and is fueled and funded by the universities and the various journals and so forth that come out of the universities. But the art itself, the art world itself has this massive market, the art market, that is funded not by the universities or patronized by the universities, but much more by museums and private foundations, huge collectors. The Pinault Foundation or the Prada Foundation or the Broad or so on and so forth. These massively wealthy foundations really are driving what is happening. They are the primary patrons of what's happening in the art world, even more than the universities.

In fact, the universities in some sense see it as part of their duty to critique and put a check on that. So even though all of the artists –  

Ryan: So the university institute would be the more benign institution here.

Jonathan: In some sense, at least in the creation of and circulation of art, though the study, the discourse of art is still very much located in universities and in art institutes and so forth.

And that is an interesting relationship really because what's happening in the art market is very much framed intellectually and so forth by what's going on in the university. But the two are in conflict and competition all the time as well.

Ryan: So when you analogize to, say, Renaissance art, Renaissance European art, there's one way of thinking about that relationship of patronage with a very powerful institution that would say that it's precisely this tension that made Renaissance art the creative powerhouse that it was.

Jonathan: Exactly.

Ryan: So there are limitations and there are traditions in place. There are these, not guardrails, but these constraints, these passageways, and it's only within those constraints that that creativity can flourish.

But I don't get the sense that that's an argument that's being made in art theory today about the contemporary relationship between individual artists and wealthy institutions.

Jonathan: That it is productive. It's generative.

Ryan: Or are there people making that argument?

Jonathan: Yeah. And, I mean, I think yes and no. That on the one hand, the contemporary art market is extremely generative. I mean, there are so many artists working and there are so many things going on that the narrative of art in some ways has scattered; it has pluralized so much because there's so much going on.

On the other hand, there is a pretty strong critique to be made that that market context builds its own ideology into the art. So that there is a lot of money wrapped up in the arts, today, in the visual arts. So much so that a lot of theorists are talking about the “financialization” of art, where art is an investment. It's a very lucrative investment today. And those interests are shaping who is getting paid attention to and what gets made and so forth.

So I want to say this is probably the most artistically generative time ever in some ways, but it makes some things much more difficult also.

Ryan: Like what?

Jonathan: Well, to return to your question, the Church as patron is much more difficult. And I think art within a liturgical setting or with those overtly religious interests or concerns is much more difficult today, perhaps; certainly then the time of the Renaissance that you're referring to, where there was a massive Church patronage. Today there's, I think, very little of that. It has very much been displaced to the university as the site for the discourse, university of museums, and to the art market as the economic engine that patronizes as.

Ryan: So the most natural pathway for a Christian artist would be to work within the art market.

Jonathan: Yeah. Right.

Ryan: The contemporary commercialization.

Jonathan: Right. Yeah.

Ryan: And are there Christian artists doing that?

Jonathan: Sure. Yeah. And on your question of the nostalgia that some Christians feel for a previous Church patronage: I mean, I'm all for that. I think there is space for artists, Christian artists, to be working for churches and to be patronized by churches. I think that's happening a lot more in the last ten years or so. And that's great. But there are also artists, Christian artists, Muslim artists, Jewish artists so on, who are making really good and really smart work in the contemporary art world. And there's just so much to explore there and so much to do.

Ryan: That's great.

Jonathan: I mean, one that kind pluralism that is going on affords lots of opportunities, makes some things difficult, that affords lots of opportunities. Did that answer your question?

Ryan: Yeah, I think, yeah. So the pluralism is helpful because you've co-authored this book with the theologian, William Dyrness, Modern Art and the Life of a Culture: the Religious Impulses of Modernism. And the movements that you discuss in there aren't really characterized by pluralism so much, right? So, to read a little excerpt from here. This is an art critic and himself a painter himself, Allan Kaprow, a painter.

Jonathan: A painter and a performance artist.

Ryan: So writing on Jackson Pollock, while Jackson Pollock was active, he says,

Pollock, as I see him, left us at the point where we must become preoccupied with and even dazzled by the space and objects of our everyday life. Either our bodies, clothes, rooms, or if need be the vastness of 42nd Street. Not satisfied with the suggestion through paint of our senses, we shall utilize as artistic media the specific substances of sight, sound movements, people, odors, touch. Objects of every sort are materials for the new art: paint, chairs, food, electric and neon lights, smoke, water, old socks, a dog, movies, a thousand other things that will be discovered by the present generation of artists.

And in his essay on Pollock, he explains how we get here, which is that on a Pollock canvas, you see the painter in action, but where the canvas ends, we have to assume that the painter's action continues beyond the canvas. And what does it continue into? It continues into everyday life. And that's where we encounter the dogs and the chairs and the foods and so on. And the sense of American modernism that I get is a fairly unified rediscovery of the everyday as not only materials for, but venue for, the fine arts.

Something different is going on with the pluralism of contemporary art, right? Like, we're not just being sent out beyond the canvas into the every day.How would you characterize that difference?

Jonathan: Oh, we, I think that gets even more exaggerated in contemporary art. That it's, I think in some ways what Kaprow's describing here is the shift from modern art to contemporary art, is this open field where the artistic medium is no longer closed, right? So not just paint on canvas, but dogs and 42nd Street and socks and everything. The medium is no longer closed. And in some ways, the ways that we regard the artwork or whatever is made is then really open. There's not a – in the way that there were certain ways of reading art that naturally pushed toward Pollock. And this was a progression as articulated by Clement Greenberg and others. How this makes sense as a next logical step. What Kaprow’s proposing is a sort of scattering of that argument into it multiple different art forms and ways of making sense of art.

So I think in some ways I can see how that would feel like a closing of art, like an abandoning of the artistic traditions. You could take Kaprow to be saying that. An abandoning of the great tradition, an abandoning of painting, an abandoning of earlier ideals. But I think there's still continuity, but an opening of that discourse from modernism into contemporary.

Ryan: Okay. So, I mean, I know very little and I have very little experience of contemporary art, and most of what I get is just through whatever comes through the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh. But one form or movement within contemporary art that I have found myself just really resonating with is installation art that involves either video or audio or both. And there seems to be a lot of this these days.

My first experience with this kind of installation art was interesting, like anachronic modernism where it was this Janet Cardiff installation. At PS1 in Brooklyn. This was a long time ago, probably fifteen years ago, where she had taken Thomas Tallis's “Spem in Alium, Motet for Forty Voices” –

Jonathan: Which is wonderful.

Ryan:  - and she had recorded each singer's voice and then, and isolated it, and then plays, and then sets up a speaker for each of the forty singers in a room, in a circle. And you go in there and you're hearing “Spem in Alium” filling the room, but then you can approach each individual speaker and hear the exact part that that singer's singing. And it seems to me there that we're not being sent out into the everyday world to see it anew and to experience an epiphany of it manifesting itself to us; we're actually being invited into what Charles Taylor would call “higher times.” There's this experiential dimension that's not the everyday.

And just to go a little bit further, to think about what happens when you leave the canvas or the fresco in late medieval religious art that we encounter in situ, in a church” it's a means for meditation. It has a liturgical context. What it's inviting the viewer into in that liturgical context is actually an elevated “higher time” that in the Catholic tradition is going to be integrated with the Eucharist. And so you're invited into the space.

And so I'm sensing this impulse in at least this certain strain of contemporary art. And I'm wondering if you can place that and do you see that as a kind of departure from the impulses of modernism to return to this world?

Jonathan: Yeah. That's a really interesting question. Well, I think the idea of the museum, of the gallery and by extension, the museum, particularly the modern and contemporary museum, where it's stuff that's being made now goes into a museum, which is a departure from what the museum used to be for, which was saving or retaining the past, what the muses had produced in the past. Whereas today, contemporary, we have modern art museums, contemporary art museums, that I think the way to understand those is as a setting aside a space for heightened attention to something and that what gets attended to is all sorts of things. But one of the lineages that comes out of Kaprow and others that has been really influential is that you're setting aside space and time for heightened attention to the things of everyday life, sometimes to things that are not of everyday life. It can be of transformation of everyday life, everyday materials.

And that does have – well, I'll say it two ways. It does have resonance with the cathedral in some ways. It's not entirely wrong that a lot of art theorists have referred to the modern museum as a temple or as a secular cathedral, because it does have some ability, it has some similarity in the sense of, it is a special set aside space for a certain kind of attending, maybe even a certain kind of worship sometimes, right? I mean, I don't put a whole lot of stock in the modern museum as a cathedral, but at least there's as a set aside space where something else happens, a higher time, a higher space, a heightened attention, at any rate.

Now, what happens in that space… Sometimes it is supposed to send you back into your everyday life, looking at it differently, thinking about it differently, whether that is visually, aesthetically, or politically, socially, to be attuned differently to the world around you, the social relationships, the visual relationships.

Ryan: Can you give like an example of that working, that you feel that worked?

Jonathan: Well, I mean, a lot of art – well, we'll take Warhol since I'm talking about Warhol tomorrow and have been thinking about Warhol even though he's not working right now. Essentially what he was doing was plucking images, especially images, sometimes objects out of circulation and reprocessing them, re-presenting them and putting them on display. Essentially what he's doing with the Marilyn Monroe images is lifting them out of the magazine circulation and mimicking the mass reproduction of them. So they flatten and he puts it on a canvas in the museum space as a demonstration of this image reproduction malfunctioning, flattening, evacuating the person in that image, maybe, we might say, presenting her as a commodity, which is what the images of Marilyn Monroe, the photo where she's appears singular in the magazine, what Warhol puts on display is that photo as a sort of commodity packaged for consumption. She's a consumer product. And that's a haunting. I mean, once that settles in and once his sort of repetition, cruel repetition of Marylin, once that settles in, you return to all of the magazine photos differently. I do. I have a really heightened sensitivity to the ways that images of people are packaged for consumption and that changes the way that I participate in those and consume those.

And that happens in all sorts of ways. That's a negative, critical way of doing it. But there are also positive, constructive ways of artists. Hey, well, the example you mentioned, Janet Cardiff “Spem in Alium.” I mean, she is taking something that does exist in the world, speakers, an old score, and presenting it in a space that's set aside for attending to this chorus of voices coming not from the chapel choir stalls, but from speakers. The same kind of speakers that surround us all the time.

Ryan: So the way that you just described Warhol's Marylin images, those were done literally in the wake of her suicide, right?

Jonathan: Yeah.

Ryan: And it makes me think of this book by Amy Knight Powell, Depositions. I don't know if you know this. She's an art historian and it's a book that's equally about medieval art as it is about contemporary art. And one of the things that – the deposition as a medieval motif is the painting of the dead Christ, the dead Christ, often being taken off the Pross and lying in Pieta, lying in Mary's arms. But she says that this is what sort of all art in a museum is, it's dead. Like it's being presented as dead. And that's what happened. It seems like that's what you're saying, Warhol's bringing about the truth of the death of Marilyn Monroe by this artistic reproduction.

So I guess what that helps me to fine tune in what I'm trying to ask is what really grabs me about these particular kinds of contemporary artists that they don't seem to be made for the museum and they seem to either want to recognize the artificiality of the museum or to draw us beyond.

And I think of a lot of ecological art, right? There's a lot of ecological participatory installation art. I mean there's Andy Goldsworthy, who does these incredible sculptures from nature in nature. I've only seen images of them, but the idea is that the photograph is only part of this. And you're in nature. Ragnar Kjartansson, this Icelandic artist who does, he did big an installation a few years ago in Pittsburgh at the Carnegie and he's playing music in a band.

Jonathan: Oh, I love that work!

Ryan: Do you know this?

Jonathan: Yeah, yeah.

Ryan: But what you're being drawn into is not his band. You're being drawn into this vast Icelandic landscape behind him. And I was trans – I didn't feel like I was in museum anymore. And that seems to me to be different both from commercial museum art, like Jeff Koons or something like that, right, and different from this modernist impulse to send us back into the everyday. I don't know. Is that different? Is that distinct? Or do you see this as sort of part and parcel of the same?

Jonathan: Yeah. I mean, I see them all as in conversation with each other, but they're maybe in disagreement with each other. Maybe there's continuity between them, but all in conversation. Because they're all using the – well, not all – no, yeah, all of those examples are using the museum or the exhibition space to create an orientation toward things that you wouldn't have otherwise, right, whether that translates back into the street or whether it takes you out of the street, so to speak.

Like with Goldsworthy, I mean, those are amazing works, but nobody has seen them. I mean, some of them, a few of them are in stone and have survived, but all the ones in leaves, made out of leaves or ice or whatever, the photograph is all that anyone has ever seen other than Goldsworthy and a handful of other people as photographers or whatever. But seeing those photographs in the museum or in a book, they jolt enough. Maybe they take you out of everyday life. Maybe they send you back into the landscape with a different sensitivity to it, orientation toward it.

Ryan: So it is this framing of attention that remains continuous throughout this tradition.

Jonathan: I think so. And that's why it's that framing of attention. That's why I have a really open, loose definition of art. Because I think the art isn't in the objects that are presented. The art is in what those objects do to someone attending to them. So in other words, art is a kind of action. It's a good art is that which is “arting” as a verb. And that verb, that “arting,” is whatever generates a heightened attentiveness to the life we're living. I think that is good art.

So there can be really fantastically crafted things that no one attends to and they are not “arting” well. And there can be urinals, taken out of circulation and put on a pedestal that start raising for people really difficult questions about “What do we mean by art?” “What is the value that we attribute to these objects?” And if the thing is generating those kinds of questions, then it is doing art at a high level.

Ryan: So interesting. What you just said, you could substitute poetry in there and this would be Kevin Hart's theory of poetry. But what he goes one step further, and that is to say that what phenomenology seeks to do, it's poetry that's doing it. It's art that's doing it.

Jonathan: Yeah. That's interesting.

Ryan: And to think in terms of phenomenology, then, it strikes me that that is a pretty radically different understanding of what art does than the modernist understanding. And I would make the contrast, or – I'm speculating here. I want to hear you think. – make the contrast between epiphany and theophany.

Here’s the quintessential modernist definition of epiphany, and it's Stephen Daedalus, James Joyce's alter ego. So he says,

You know what Aquinas says: The three things requisite for beauty are, integrity, a wholeness, symmetry, and radiance… For a long time I couldn’t make out what Aquinas meant… but I have solved it. Radiance, claritas is quidditas [whatness]…First we recognise that the object is one integral thing, then we recognise that it is an organised composite structure, a thing in fact: finally, when the relation of the parts is exquisite, when the parts are adjusted to the special point, we recognise that it is that thing which it is. The soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance. The soul of the commonest object seems to us radiant. The object achieves its epiphany.

You could read this in two ways. One, you could read it phenomenologically, but the way that Joyce takes it and the way that the modernist tradition takes it is that it's all about our recognition. So we recognize that. Once we recognize that this, and then the next step is our recognizing the next step. And so epiphany is very much about attuning the subject's attention in such a way that it enables epiphany to happen. And, then the subject recognizes something about the subject. You recognizing something about yourself. Whereas Jean-Luc Marion, his counter narrative here would be that you are being recognized, that each of the steps is what he calls counter experience.

And so I guess maybe that's what I feel like I'm experiencing when I go to the Ragnar Kjartansson exhibit, like, “I'm not doing this. It's being done to me.” And it seems like that's what you just expressed.

Jonathan: Yeah. That's interesting. Say a bit more about being recognized. So in, in the first version, it's the art happens when the subject recognizes the world giving itself in some full way. In the second one, it's the subject being recognized, say a bit more about that.

Ryan: Well, I mean, Marion goes to the theology of icons where, as I understand it, Eastern icon painting typically reverses perspective. And the point of perspective –

Jonathan: Yeah, the vanishing point.

Ryan: The vanishing point is back in the painting rather, or – wait, how does it work?

Jonathan: It’s in the viewer's space rather than far away.

Ryan: Yeah. Right. So that's the reversal.

Jonathan: Yeah. That's interesting. Fascinating question. I mean, I guess maybe this is sloppy or too synthetic, but I want to somehow say yes to both of those. Is that okay?

I mean, so I think that that what you read from Joyce, I know what that experience is. And I think that is a big part of art for me is, is a recognition, sometimes all at once, sometimes over a long period of time, sometimes with learning that facilitates it, sometimes without the learning. That there are these experiences of the sheer, wonderful givenness of something; that it's just a miracle, for lack of a better word, that this is here in exactly this way and that I am structured to receive it. And it just feels like gift. The world is gift. This thing is gift. And it's usually some sort of thing, some sort of particular experience that happens in these places that are set aside for heightened attention. Not always, but that it happens in these places and it suddenly opens up a larger recognition, a larger sense of gratitude toward things. Sometimes a larger critical attitude towards things, as with Warhol, sometimes it just elicits some kind of a yes from me, an affirmation. I'm thankful for this.

And I think that's what Joyce is getting at there and that a number of artists – I mean, Kandinsky basically talks exactly in that way, right? He has these experiences of the button in the puddle that is just the sheer wonderful givenness of the thing.

So I want to affirm that and affirm all of that and say that that's a really valuable way of thinking about a lot of what's going on in contemporary art and has huge potential. But I'm a theist. I feel like that that recognition of the givenness of the world is also a recognition of a giving and that I'm being recognized, seen, given to in some sort of way that maybe speaks of the Marion experience to some extent. But not everyone has that.

Ryan: So there's an impulse within contemporary poetry and I think in contemporary art to say that experience of givenness is apolitical. It's not bad. It can be a good preparation for political action, but art can do more. And art can be – What's a good example of successful political, contemporary art? Is there one?

Jonathan: Oh man. Yeah.

Ryan: Can it be successful?

Jonathan: Can it be successful? Yes. And there's, I mean, art today is so political. The bad and the good art is so political. I think where art is really successfully political and social, at least for me, is…

Well, to take one example, there's always a politics of vision, right? That when you're looking at another person, image of another person that is politically charged always because there are others, you are in relation to another in some sort of way. And that other person is framed, presented, and that presentation of another is intrinsically political, not necessarily bad, like oppressive politics, but there is a power dynamic being exercised between the beholder and the beheld.

And that I think a lot of contemporary artists are using that or taking that starting point and shifting the ways that we behold other people, usually with the arts, in the visual arts, doing it in a way that is askew. So, something you're used to seeing and that would otherwise be more or less transparent giving of an image of another person becomes interrupted or skewed so that you become attentive to the way that the thing is being presented.

Ryan: What would be an example?

Jonathan: Well, I mean, Warhol is like the grandfather of all this, right?

Ryan: But current art, right?

Jonathan: Current art. What would be a good example?

Ryan: Like if I go to the Whitney Biennial or the Venice Biennale, what am I going to see this doing?

Jonathan: Well, Venice, yes. Good. So Venice Biennale, of course – the thing that leaps immediately to mind, and there are loads of others that we could include, but the one that for some reason leaps to mind is right at the beginning of the Arsenale in the Venice Biennale, this last one, Christian Marclay, had a work called, I forget what it's called, “50 War Movies” or something, and it is all of these war movies that are set inside of each other, all running at once with all of the sound running at once. And where you have a single image, a single film moving, I would be sucked into the narrative and involved in the narrative, afraid of what's happening, concerned for the people involved and so on. I would be in the narrative. But once you superimpose all of those on top of one another all at once, with all of the sound, it just looks like a field of violence and sounds like a field of violence. And starts to settle in – I mean, we already knew this, but it is a visceral demonstration of it – our entertainment is very violent.

Why? What is that about? What does that serve? What power does that serve? What ways does it shape us and shape our orientation toward other people, other countries, other whatever?

And that's one example that leaps immediately to mind. And that's not a picturing of people as I was describing before, but a presentation of the world. Even if it's an entertainment world, it's a presentation that is politically charged, and he presents it in a way that sort of jolts the movie screens.

Ryan: So, H. R. Rookmaaker wrote this, a reformed art critic, Dutch reformed, he wrote this book, Modern Art and the Death of a Culture. Your book is titled “Modernist Art and the Life of a Culture.” Who would be Rookmaaker’s great like artist? Rembrandt? Who's the great reformed artist for Rookmaaker?

Jonathan: Yeah, Rembrandt he cites approvingly on several occasions. Lots of Dutch masters. But also through, I mean, he talks very supportively of George Rouault, who's 20th century and so on.

Ryan: So Rookmaaker believed that modernist art was the death of a culture because it's losing the form of man, right? What you just described seems to me – Rookmaaker would probably hate it – but it seems to me to be capturing the form of man. What would be a reformed theological appreciation of this video work at the Biennale?

Jonathan: Well, reform…

Ryan: Or could you make one? Could you mount one using Rookmaaker’s own intellectual and theological resources?

Jonathan: Yeah. That's interesting. Sure. I think Rookmaaker’s concern with modern art is at least two twofold. One is that it is dehumanizing, that it estranges the person from his or herself and estranges us from each other by fracturing, violating the image and so on. It doesn't present affirmative images of others and of ourselves. So he's concerned that it is dehumanizing in a lot of ways, and he's concerned that it is disorienting, epistemologically disorienting, that it undercuts truth claims and beauty claims and all sorts of things.

I think with Marclay's video that I just described, in a way that could be dehumanizing and it's estranging, but in another way it's a parody of that. I mean, it's obviously meant to be affirmative. Even if it's a negative print, it shows us a field of violence, maybe manipulative entertainment, that is toxic, is showing us something that's toxic. The point of that is to register in ourselves, I think, something more affirmative, humanly affirmative and more orienting. There's a “no” that cries out.

Ryan: I mean, it seems like you could say the exact same thing of “Guernica.” And Rookmaaker hated “Guernica.”

Jonathan: Yeah. And this is where I just disagree with Rookmaaker. I think his art history is bad, but I think what he's objecting to, that it modern art is dehumanizing and is disorienting, those come from his very affirmative reformed theology. That creation is good, the world is good. Every single person is made in the image of God. All of those things that are affirmations that I would affirm.

The way that he sees modern art working is too, I think is too negative. He maybe overlooks in a work, maybe would overlook in a work like, well I think he does overlook it in “Guernica,” but would overlook it in Marclay as well, that sometimes the negative, the negative print, what Warhol is doing, which he didn't care for, what Picasso is doing a lot, but not always, is deeply human and deeply orienting, but it's by way of trying to jolt what is out of alignment, what is wrong. It's triggering a “no” and the no is always tied to a “yes.”

Ryan: So I mean, it strikes me that to the extent that when contemporary art is predicated on a recognition of what we must say “no” to, that it's going beyond the reframing of attention. And it's going beyond it in a way that –  I mean, so come at aesthetics from another angle, right, which isn't about framing of attention and opening of experience and so on – For Hans Urs von Balthasar, what is beauty? Christ is the form of beauty.

It strikes me that Roomaaker would've liked this. But when you begin from that point, that's a pretty narrow beginning because A) you have to be prepared to recognize Christ as beauty. You have to be prepared to recognize the Cross as beauty. It requires this complete conversion and sanctification of the aesthetic sense.

When you reappraise war art like this, are you coming at it from a Christological kind of aesthetic? Is that how you're getting there, by narrowing? I mean, presumably Christian Marclay's not a Christian. So he would have other reasons for thinking about suffering injustice.

Jonathan: Yeah. That's right.

Well with a Christological approach to art, you have Christ as beauty and as the most glorious, the heaviest thing, the most important thing in existence. But you also have a crucified criminal on the margins of the empire.

Ryan: Right. The emptiest thing.

Jonathan: The emptiest thing. Exactly.

Ryan: The extreme of kenosis.

Jonathan: Exactly. Yeah. So that structure of the fullness of things and the emptiest of things being held together in Christ, that gives us quite a range to work with. That may be too sloppy, right?

Ryan: Yeah. Okay. So you're pushing back against my saying that to begin from there narrows things. It's actually as capacious as it could possibly be.

Jonathan: I think it's the most capacious way of thinking about existence. And includes the concerns of Christian Marclay. Not to just baptize everything that's happening in the modern art museum or the Venice Biennale or whatever. There are tremendous problems or tremendous violences and abuses. But I think a Christological approach to the art is so capacious that I can find so much in common.

And I know distinctions are really important, and separations, but commonness is important to me, commonness in conversation. And in meaning, I think there's just something – in the person of Christ, there's something that we all share.

Ryan: Yes. So in the book, you and your co-author, you lay out two prior understandings of secularism. One, according to Charles Taylor's theory, one is secularism as the distinction between private and public. The other is a kind of institutional opposition between church and state. Right? Exercise. And then, but you say –

Jonathan: And the decay of belief. Right.

Ryan: But then Taylor says that the one that most gets at the current late modern experience of the secular is this, what do you call “Secular 3,” which is that the experience, even if you are devoutly religious, is that you are born into a world in which every belief is in question and pluralism is the primary experience. So it strikes me that then to work as an artist consciously within the Christian tradition, under the conditions of Secularism 3, is very different from working as a Christian artist in modernity, like even after the church patron is gone and everything.

Can you give some examples of artists who seem to seem to grasp that this is a characteristic of faith in a secular age, in their working, in that tradition, in that way, trying to draw on the Christian traditions?

Jonathan: Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, I think this way of understanding – as a preface to my answer – this way of understanding secular secularity is really helpful to me, and it is really descriptive of what is going on in the arts today and well beyond the arts. That I don't think what we get is a decline of belief of religion. There isn't a death of religion. There is just a fragilization of religion and of faith. And that doesn't mean that all of us are fragile in our beliefs, but it does mean that whatever beliefs we hold, we have to hold while looking over our shoulder at a vast number of other options. Every position is contested.

Ryan: That's a great way of putting it.

Jonathan: And that is the condition of secularity. And that doesn't mean, like I say, a decline of belief, but of one of mixed, contested belief. And I think that is really descriptive of what's going on in contemporary arts. That it is not a galloping secularism. It is a discourse of contestability, contested beliefs, with a strong interest and longing for belief in one way or another.

And that takes all sorts of different forms. So the art world is full of people, full of people, who have left one religion or another, left the Church or are really nervous to identify with it. And that doesn't mean a death of belief, but it means it's this kind of fragilization. And the way that those artists work through that is really interesting to me and really theologically charged. There's so much theology going on in contemporary art, but it's –

Ryan: What's an example? Who would come to mind and what kind of work they doing?

Jonathan: Who would come to mind? Yes. So a few artists I'm writing about right now and thinking about – and in bringing them up, because of this condition of fragile belief, I won't attribute any sort of clear faith to them, right? But they're doing work that is theologically very significant, I think. –

One artist that I'm working on is named Kris Martin. He's Belgian. And he was raised outside of Ghent in Belgium and was raised Catholic and was an altar boy. And his work is really a very careful, very smart, I think, meditation on human fragility, but also fragility of belief.

So one of his famous works is called “Altar” and it is the frame of the Ghent altarpiece in steel. So it's an empty frame. And it is always placed outside, so it's never in a museum. What you see through it – in other words, it's always a window. You're always looking at the world in front of you through the framework of the altar piece. And maybe we could read it as an evacuation of belief. Maybe we could read it as still a surviving aperture of the Ghent altarpiece, that you look through it. And the Ghent altarpiece is specifically about the redemption of all things, the redemption of the world. And so much of his work is about that: artifacts from Christian history that are put on display in one way or another, usually very simple, as raising all sorts of questions about contemporary theology, contemporary Catholicism.

There's another artist I'm writing about, who, named Andrea Büttner, who's German, who's very interested in Franciscan theologies of poverty. She's very interested in Thérèse of Lisieux and her notion of the “Little Way.” She collaborates with monastic communities and nuns and makes, has this work that is it just marvelous meditation on a kind of poverty, a kind of openhandedness, where one find one finds herself in deficit before others, before God, before the world, and sees that deficit as something positive and affirmative. To find one self in deficit is not bad.

Ryan: So you've just described a couple of artists whose art is, you don't need to know anything about them, but you look at it and it's posing questions about religion and secularity.

It strikes me though, that there are many other contemporary artists for whom the critical argument depends a good bit on biography, and modernist artists, too. I mean, it seems to me that Andy Warhol's religious paintings, even his religious paintings, we would interpret those very differently if we didn't know that he was raised in the Byzantine Catholic Church and that he went to Mass multiple times a week, especially in his later life, when he was painting these. Is this a characteristic of the age of Secularity 3, that artist biography becomes an essential aspect of thinking about religious art – or, art in general?

Jonathan: Yeah, it's a great question. On the one hand, yes, biography becomes more important because the iconographies become less secure, right? So if you go into a 15th century or 16th century church, you don't really have to know much about the artists that made them. It might help a bit here and there. Like to know what Michelangelo was up to and what he was thinking, who he was talking to, what he was reading helps charge things up a little bit. But the iconography is stable enough that there are other precedents that you can read it with, so to speak. Whereas once the iconographies become contested and loosened and disappear in a lot of instances, or become tied up in other contexts, like with Warhol's “Last Supper”: there's a stable iconography that is in a different context that makes it really unstable, right?

So where do you go? How do you stabilize that? Where do you go to stabilize the meaning?

Ryan: So thinking through artistic tradition is not going to get you very far when you get into the context of…

Jonathan: It could. I mean, on one hand, if Warhol adopts an image from, or adapts an image from Leonardo, which is actually a few steps removed, but when he adapts that, the Leonardo doesn't just go away and “The Last Supper” doesn't just go away. That stays in place and needs to be accounted for and needs to be accounted for in stronger ways than it has in the literature on Warhol, I think.

But there are other contexts. And so it comes into this constellation. I think about interpreting art as a, kind of, there are constellation of things that create context for the work, and those different constellations can take priority or be in play, some can be ignored and so on. And artist biography is one of those constellations, and, you're right, with modernity, the artist biography becomes more and more important. Or if not the artist biography, the artwork's biography, the backstory. Knowing that the artist took this from this thing and did this to it, like Kris Martin that I talked about: you have to know backstory for so much of his work because, he's doing something and you have to know what that story is. And then the works starts to do something.

But artist's biography is only one of those points in the constellation and sometimes not even the most important. So, I mean, artist biography will tell you a lot, but we can't put too much stock in it. It's more a question of how the work – ultimately all arguments have to be made from how the work works in some kind of a context.

So with Warhol, I mean, yes, he's from Byzantine Catholic upbringing, but man, that doesn't resolve things because there's so much else going on in his work and in his life and the way he speaks. And you can't ever take him at face value.

Ryan: So to take another example, I don't know if you're familiar with this artist, Matt Clayburn, contemporary painter. He has a very specific iconography that he sticks to which are these concentric arches made of broad bands of color. And he does this in all kinds of scales. He has probably painted 5,000 concentric arches by now, and he's exhibited all over the country and collected in a lot of museums and private collections.

It just so happens that I know biographically that, that he's not just a practicing Christian, but a very thoughtful and well-informed one. And so when I see those arches: first of all, I love them. They really speak to me and I want to dwell in that. I want to be brought into this arch. But for me that it is that little absent box in Andrei Rublev's icon of the Trinity, right? I mean clearly that's what he's doing. But if I didn't know this biographically, I would probably still like these, but I would think of them – to me it would speak to me more in the way that, like, I enjoy yoga and feel like it brings me into a nice space.

Jonathan: Yeah, yeah, yeah. What's going on there – and they're yeah, those are great paintings. And I'm with you: making that association suddenly causes them to really resonate, really do something else. And I'm okay with the fact that those are meaningful to me in that way, even if I have to know some backstory to get there. And, also, even if another critic next to me could say, “That's not what those paintings are about. Those paintings are about X, Y, Z.” And we could argue about that. I'm okay with that being a kind of soft reference, that becomes harder because you actually can appeal to the artist and say there's something going on in the artist that causes me to put more interpretive weight in this direction. Even if it's not final. His paintings never fully resolve into “this has to be Rublev's Trinity” or they never fully resolve. They always stay open. And that’s okay.

I don't know. How do you feel about that openness, interpretive openness?

Ryan: Oh, I mean, I feel great about it. For me, it's like this interesting counterfactual. Like, would I love them as much if I didn't know that. But then –

Jonathan: And it's okay to say “No, I wouldn't.”

Ryan: Yeah. Right. I mean, it may be the case.

But to just switch gears on the same thing though. What do you make of the iterability of his ouvre? Oh, I mean, since he made this switch – he used to be a portrait painter. And since he made the switch. This, as far as I can tell, this is what he does. And each painting then is in iteration on the same form. And where does that iterability of presence. Like, Warhol's iterability is about in part a commentary on the evacuation of presence of images. And yet this is sort of the opposite.

Jonathan: Yeah, the opposite. That's really interesting. That's a really interesting reading of his work.

I mean, I haven't spent enough time with his work and no time with him, so, I'd really like to talk to him actually. So I'm not quite sure. But the iterability could signify multiple things. I mean, on the one hand, there could be some sort of a problem that he's just working out, whether that's a formal problem or a conceptual problem where one gives way to the next, gives way to the next. It could be this way. It could be that there are just multiple of these passageways multiplying the passageways, so to speak, is important, for one reason or another.

That kind of system that he has of the reiterating stripes has long precedence in contemporary art as well back to Frank Stella and Sol LeWitt, where there is a kind of formula that's set up or a rule that's set up at the beginning and the painter – So there's a conceptual starting point. And there's also a formal starting point, a sort of system. And you embark on each painting with those two things in place. It's a passageway and there's a formula for how the stripes will proceed. It can be an open formula, but there's a kind of plan. And then each painting is a process of working those out, and you sort of arrive at something and then you do it again.

So it's maybe less a matter of “I want a lot of these,” for a whole show or something as much as it could be a doing it again, speaking again, let's think through this passageway, through this visual formula, formal system, and do it again and see how it turns out doing.

Ryan: And would you say, practically and theoretically, that's distinct from what Warhol's doing in a lot of his repetitions?

Jonathan: With Warhol, that's pretty similar. That he has this conceptual rule and formal rule, and he just keeps running thing or he kept running things through those systems. It's the portrait of a dead celebrity painted in these lipstick and peroxide colors or in white or whatever and run it through this reiterative process.

So in some ways it's conceptually similar, but you're exactly right that I think they do something different. Warhol’s is about a kind of violence of repetition, whereas Clayburn seems to be a recitation. It's repetition as a meditative, recitation, a slow, I don't know, prayer could be. Because there are lots of ways to repeat things. Sometimes they're violent and emptying, sometimes they're ennobling and filling.

Ryan: What is the theology of spatial relations? You've taught, of course, by this title.

Jonathan: Oh, yes, yes. A fascinating class. So what we did for that class was we went historically and read various cosmologies, either by philosophers or scientists, that were putting forward a spatial model for understanding existence. And then we looked at artworks from similar time periods or that had some kind of correspondence. So the basic idea was that we think in spatial terms about all sorts of things. We talk about human relations in spatial terms: “we are very close,” “we've grown distant,” and “she's smothering me,” whatever. They're very spatial. We talk about economics in terms of bubbles and collapses and rises and falls, and we think of those things as very spatial and we position ourselves in the world in one way or another, spatially. And there have been all these wonderful spatial models for that, whether “What is the cosmos? Is it like a fabric? Is it a series of concentric circles and so on, or concentric spheres?”

So we would read those things and then think about art, visual arts as a way of working through spatial thinking in a really tactile way. So the big question of the course was something like “Is art, visual art, deeply important to us not just in terms of the symbolic functions it has, but in the way that it presents a world as a spatially coherent and organized system.” So the space of an icon is a different world than the space of a chateau or the space of a baroque hole in the ceiling or than a cubist painting. And those are all, at a really foundational level, maybe, ways of thinking our way around in the world.

So it was trying to read art in those ways: setting aside some of the symbolic functions and just reading the spatial structure and coordinates of artwork. It was a fascinating class.

Ryan: I bet it was.

Jonathan: Fascinating. I learned so much from it. I never wrote much from it, which I need to at some point.

Ryan: But it strikes me that your own painting is dealing very much was spatiality in your thinking through philosophical concepts of space and dwelling in your painting. Were you painting at the same time as this class?

Jonathan: Yep. Mm-hmm. And painting some of my most important paintings during that time as well.

Ryan: What do you think is your most important painting?

Jonathan: Oh, I think the “Impasse” series is pretty central to my thinking about as my thinking as an artist that can't always be mapped onto my thinking as a writer or whatever.

Ryan: And you can see some of these on your website. They're images and in many cases it's a realistic painting of some kind of access point or passageway or doorway. And then in front of it, there's either an intradiegetic obstacle, like a traffic barrier or there's an extradiegetic obstacle like a big swab of paint.

Jonathan: That is a wonderful description of them, yeah.

That series started with this… I was doing hallways and passageways that were, because it's a representational painting, opening into something. So you look at paint on canvas, and you think “hallway,” “doorway,” “passageway,” because of how it's handled, that the space opens up beyond the surface of the paint.

And I was interested in giving spaces where you didn't have a clear place to go. So there was this experience of opening and closing at the same time, or offering and withholding, which is maybe partly just my youthful longing. But also was I was reading lots of Heidegger and, so on and, Derrida at the time. And I was interested in language and materiality as legitimately offering and withholding because it couldn't deliver full presence of something. So these paintings are always a mud on canvas that legitimately offer another space, a hallway in Spain, a chapel in Italy, whatever I was painting, but also don’t ever – can't fully deliver those things.

So that's how I started where there were obstacles, as you say, in the painting. And then I increasingly started investigating the painting itself, the surface itself, as doing both of those things.

So I would do things like – well the first was, I decided, I did a painting of a chapel called “Curtains,” where it was this space, but was also was a chapel with a gate that was under renovation. So there was a makeshift curtain, strung up behind the gate, and you look over the curtain and there's nothing to see there. The crucifix had been taken down. There's light shining in from a window that's really lovely, but you can't actually see through the window. So there’s this kind of place to go, and it just wasn't done as a painting. So I decided to do the same painting again at a smaller scale and bolt the two paintings together as one thing. And as you look at it, each of the paintings offers that space, but because there are two, you're constantly shuttling between them. It's like saying something very deliberately and then saying it again in exactly the same way. And once you repeat yourself like that, once you repeat yourself like that, once you repeat yourself like that, it draws attention to the language, to the meaning. And I was interested in affirming both of those things.

So then, as you said, there are globs of paint that also, part of that series, where I would put down a brushstroke on a panel usually as a first interaction with this surface, and then paint a representational scene around that glob of paint. So even though it looks like a defaced representational painting, it's actually just one layer of paint with two really different sort of rationales for handling the paint. One as “mark on surface,” one as representational space. And from there it goes into the construction series and so forth. But it's that same idea of spaces that offer and withhold, give and obstruct.

Ryan: It’s really profound. And it sums up, I mean, for our listeners, go to the website, look at these, because meditating on these paintings, I think, sums up a lot of what we've talked about.

Just to close, who's your go-to contemporary artist? Who do you keep returning to?

Jonathan: That's a good question. Well, at the moment, because of my writing, I keep returning, I'm writing about them because I can't get them out of my head: Kris Martin, Andrea Büttner. But I've already mentioned them.

An LA-based artist named Tim Hawkinson. I've been interested in him for ages. And his work has been poorly written about, I think. And I have a book in me that is about his work and he just never goes away for me. So I keep returning to his work, which I think is very profound, very playful and lighthearted and profound.

Let's see, depending on the issue or my mood or something, if it's lamentation, Doris Salcedo is just wonderful. Teresa Margolles. Those artists are doing lamentation in a very profound way. Let's see, I really like an artist that I've written some about, a guy named Francis Alÿs who works in Mexico City. I think he's doing some really interesting, important work. That's a short list.

Ryan: Jonathan Anderson, thank you very much.

Jonathan: This has been a real pleasure.