All over the media, bookshops, coffee houses, blogs and personal talks we are lately assaulted with talks of crisis, apocalypse and imminent destruction. Everything from ultra-orthodox predictions to Cameron’s controversial Avatar seems to be trumpeting the advent of the last judgment, in a more or less religiously connoted sense. And in spite of Fran Kermode’s brilliant remark regarding the presence of apocalyptic feeling in all centuries, societies and contexts, the postmodern crisis of identity seems to be one of unprecedented heights and implications. So what is it that actually triggered the feeling of crisis, the almost unshatterable certainty that everything is bound to come to an end, that we have finally hit rock bottom? Answers to this dilemma are various and manifold, ranging from socio-political to environmentalist, religious and psychological. The more pragmatic of us would even say, why bother trying to make out the reasons instead of dealing with the issue head-on? Obviously, because at least since the birth of epistemology we are painfully aware of the limits of our own knowledge. Problem solving often appears far easier to us than it actually is, thus, an even brief retrospective into the past might often turn out unexpectedly productive. The postmodern crisis, in all its more or less destructive aspects, is naturally linked to the changes and shifts of mentality and world order commonly associated with the end of the 19th century and the advent of industrialized society. Freud, Nietzsche, Klimt, Schopenhauer, or D.H. Lawrence were among the many who identified and warned about the crisis already at the offset of the 20th century. The common denominator of all of their discourses was the modern world’s iconoclasm and its renouncing of formerly established values. Even though neither Freud nor Lawrence were believers, they repeatedly stressed the impact that the end of the religios paradigm would have on collective and individual consciousness. The present crisis is not even a crisis in itself, it is the natural and well-prepared outcome of a trashing of idols which is at least two centuries old. But let us briefly commit to mind the major landmarks of Western culture on its way towards the apocalypse are presently witnessing.
Western art, although we love to conceive of it as going back to the antique Greek and Roman models, is to a great extent the product and outcome of the 15th and 16th century religious and artistic paradigm. Much of what postmodern iconoclasm has so deliberately done away with in recent years is the heritage of altar painting dating back to the early Quattrocento. In the attempt to put beauty in the foreground of religious experience, Renaissance masters endulged in a transition from the Gothic polyptych to a single-panel (pala) visual representation, thereby making complex special sequences comprehensible even to the undiscerning eye. The underlying point was, of course, making it easier on the common church-goer to relate to concepts otherwise out of his reach – or, to put it differently, to materialize the immaterial. A beautiful Madonna was always partially meant to arouse the male “auditorium”, who in the next second would be reminded of the gravity of his sin (lust, blasphemy) and would be much more enclined towards repentance, be it in form of personal prayer or absolution papers.
Pierro della Francesca, Madonna della Misericordia. Pierro based his vision on the Medieval privilege that victims of persecution enjoyed in seeking help with high-ranking women: they could be granted asylum “under her cloak”. Beauty of body and beauty of spirit are thus reunited in this altar painting, one of Pierro’s semina works. Medieval and Renaissance sense of beauty was always morally correlated. In absence of beauty of the soul, there could be no beauty of the body.
By nurturing the eye, the Church nurtured the soul. External beauty led to internal one, or at least paved the way to it (with more or less good intentions). It is interesting to note how beauty and morality are intimately correlated in medieval, as well as Renaissance art, whereas ugliness (quite superficially defined and insufficiently treated during much of the period – the first more or less comprehensive treaty on ugliness is produced 1853 by Karl Rosenkrantz) is associated to filth, immorality and later on even withcraft. An even brief look at the depiction of witches during the height of religious persecution and witch hunting proves how even otherwise unquestionable physical attributes turn into grotesque and obscenity. Beauty in the absence of truth, virtue and faith becomes nothing more than moral abjection.
Hans Baldung Grien, Witch and Dragon. The seeming physical beauty of the fallen woman (a subject very dear to Western art well into the fin de siecle period) is disrupted by the vulgarity and obscenity of the scene – beauty is subdued by filth, and falls prey to it.
What classicism hails as the inherent harmony and balance of Greek and Roman sculpture is actually nothing more than an illusion. The antique Greeks were not interested in any kind of correspondence between inner and outer beauty – most Greek gods are cruel, merciless and vindicative – and, what is even more, it seems like the more beautiful they are, the greater cruelties they are capable of.
Titian, Flaying of Marsyas. The satyr Marsyas was punished for competing in an artistic contest against Apollo by being skinned alive. The subject was very popular among Renaissance painters, as it enabled them to combine the expressiveness and brutality of a torture scene with the depiction of Apollo’s supernatural beauty.
Ideological correspondence between beauty and goodness is an invention of the Medieval and Renaissance paradigms. The idolizing of beauty was thus an idolizing of spirituality in disguise, meant to further enforce the power and authority of the Church and its key principles.
However, no matter how skeptical we might be towards the religious paradigm, one of its main merits was undoubtedly the Meccenas role it played in furthering, encouraging and promoting true art and beauty. We do not only owe Michelangelo’s cupola of the Sixtine Chapel or Raphael’s Madonna della Seglia to church and its influential benefactors, but also much more “mundane” and carnal chefs d’ouvre, like Titian’s Danae, commissioned by Cardinal Farnese, who described it as “a naked woman which slips the devil himself underneath your skin”.
Titian, Danae. Church officials of the 16th century were among the most ardent admirers and promoters of art.
Thirsty for novelty and always hailing the revolutionary and innovative, Western art has, nevertheless, rapidly abandoned its love for correspondence, turning towards a much more telluric approach to beauty and art. From Aristotle’s concept of mimesis (art as imitating nature), fin de siecle theory has developed a world-view based rather on life’s imitating art, to paraphrase the words of one of the movement’s most prominent representatives, Oscar Wilde. We need only consider the moral filth and physical deliciousness of one like Dorian Gray, or Klimt’s erotically loaded portraits of high society beauties to realize that already by the end of the 19th century the correspondence theory had been jettisoned altogether, making room for what would become modernism and avant-garde, with all the inherent cultural and social shock that went along with it.
Gustav Klimt, Portrait of Adele Bloch Bauer, sold for a record $135 million in 2006.
Amedeo Modigliani, Red Nude. Modigliani was one of the main precursors to postmodernist erasing of formerly established aesthetique criteria.
Bu not even the most outraged and scandalized 1900 damsel would have been able to predict the turn that things were to take in the not so far away future. Not even the most pornographic of Modigliani’s nudes or Odd Nerdrum’s grotesques could equal the level of relativization of values achieved by “high” postmodernity and its ambiguity regarding the distinction between canonic and popular art. If a della Francesca or Mantegna searched God in visualization, postmodernism replaces God with visualization. And because most of us are endowed with working visual organs, it is the eye and the eye alone which becomes the ultimate judge of beauty or lack of it. Nice is what nice appears, with all the terrible subjectivity that goes along with it. We have spent far too much time depicting beautiful naked women, and hey, what’s the use of that nowadays if we have Hef and Playboy? Why should we paint a chair as it is, if we can place a pair of dirty underwear on it and thus turn it into nonconformist art? Why should we still resort to mythology and theology if a big bang of the type of a balloon exploding in a crowded McDonald’s does just fine? Why should we carve in stone if we can bottle shit?
Pietro Manzoni, well-known and acclaimed postmodern artist, famous for his bottling of human feces.
2007 exhibition by the Costa Rican artist Habacuc, featuring crack cocaine in an incense burner, a musical loop of “Himno de Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional” playing backwards, words spelled out with pieces of dog food and a stray dog left to starve tied to a wall.
Innovation is necessary, just as is rebirth. Novelty is progress, but only as long as the two words are not devoid of meaning. And in postmodernism meaning is a politically incorrect term. It goes against our sense of individuality, agnosticism, skepticism and our most priced and cherished illusion, freedom. Which leaves us with one single painful consideration: what Western art actually is, is a long and heterogeneous movement from altar paintings to bottled feces. From God to shit. This is what we are and what we have turned the world around us into, for the sake of liberation and freedom of expression. And now we are sitting amidst the ruins of our former idols, which for the sake of convenience we have turned into a public toilet, contemplating our own ruin. Maybe the next generations will achieve the remarkable performance of not only contemplating, but also loving their own destruction.
MEAN, sorry AMEN to that.
