In some ways, Chapter 5 of Siedell’s God in the Gallery, entitled “Art Criticism” is prescriptively central to the book. One of Siedell’s foremost desires for concrete change involves replacing the Schaefferian and Rookmakerian vision of the Christian artist with a robust general engagement by Christians of art as it is. He argues that we must cease to treat contemporary art as an evil or apostate aspect of human life that needs to be replaced by a revolution of “Christian art”; instead, we should draw upon the resources of “Nicene Christianity,” upon the resources of liturgy and especially of sacrament, to show that Christianity offers the best explanation for the way art revolutionizes our own inner lives.
To me, this suggest two models of engagement. On one hand, we could engage contemporary art by writing and speaking about our own experience of it. The mode of experiencing the physical world, for a Christian formed by the liturgy of sacrament and community and by the Biblical narrative, is successfully sacramental. God’s grace does actually reach down, the transcendent through the immanent, to grip and change our hearts—and this can occur even through contemporary art. On the other hand, Siedell argues that contemporary art itself functions with a version of liturgical sacramentality informing the art world’s expectations for it. These expectations are predominantly that art can transform one’s life. Plenty both of artists and committed art-viewers who may be alienated from Christianity as such, still reserve a place for the spiritual power of art. This context opens up the possibility of a new kind of analysis—let us call it liturgical analysis—which investigates the sacramental aspirations, the transformative hopes, implicit in contemporary art. Christians possess a unique resource for this kind of analysis: the well-developed framework of Nicene Christianity.
Thus far Siedell. His are unquestionably exciting and provocative ideas. Applications of his insights are diverse and urgent.
One very small (but important) example of the utility of these insights is taking place even now here at Dordt College.
I edit a campus cultural rag called the Canon. Beginning with our next issue, we are expanding the Canon to include art criticism of art produced and exhibited on campus. Only we face a difficulty: none of my writers are professional art historians or academic art critics. We struggled with what role exactly our criticism should play on campus—apart from the lame point that there isn’t any right now so we’d be filling a gap. (Actually, I wish more critics of just about everything would ask themselves why they write the criticism they do…) But having discussed it among ourselves, we’re now pretty well ready to sign onto Siedell’s movement. The benefits appear to be (1. the hard work of initiation into the artworld in order to properly understand the iconic significance of art on our campus; (2. the elevation of our artists themselves, who have been confronted with the Rookmakerian paradigm (if they’ve thought about their philosophy of art at all) or else the rather ill-expressed and unhelpful opinions of Seerveld regarding “allusivity.” We can help these artists to take their own art seriously by taking it seriously ourselves. The plan is as follows: to pick, each of us, two pieces of art exhibited on campus which particularly grip us. Then to spend half and hour in front of each, just looking, allowing the pictures to work upon us as they will. Afterward we will encapsulate the reflections of this half hour in a 500 word review of each piece. We have the explicit goal of writing about our experience of these pieces of art—which means that our writing will be worthwhile precisely in proportion to the degree that we invest ourselves in the works themselves.
Thus one practical result of Siedell’s book. More theoretical reflections to come.
