The Work of Art: Rethinking the Elementary Forms of Religious Life

The Work of Art

INSURRECTIONS:     Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture

INSURRECTIONS: CRITICAL STUDIES IN RELIGION, POLITICS, AND CULTURE

Slavoj Žižek, Clayton Crockett, Creston Davis, Jeffrey W. Robbins, Editors

The intersection of religion, politics, and culture is one of the most discussed areas in theory today. It also has the deepest and most wide-ranging impact on the world. Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture will bring the tools of philosophy and critical theory to the political implications of the religious turn. The series will address a range of religious traditions and political viewpoints in the United States, Europe, and other parts of the world. Without advocating any specific religious or theological stance, the series aims nonetheless to be faithful to the radical emancipatory potential of religion.

For a complete list of books in the series, see Series List

The Work of Art

RETHINKING THE ELEMENTARY FORMS OF RELIGIOUS LIFE

MICHAEL JACKSON

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS    New York

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

PUBLISHERS SINCE 1893

NEW YORK     CHICHESTER, WEST SUSSEX

CUP.COLUMBIA.EDU

Copyright © 2016 Columbia University Press

The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart from The Great Fires: Poems, 1982–1992 by Jack Gilbert, copyright © 1994 by Jack Gilbert. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

All rights reserved.

E-ISBN 978-0-231-54199-2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Jackson, Michael, 1940–author.

Title: The work of art: rethinking the elementary forms of religious life / Michael Jackson.

Description: New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. | Series: Insurrections: critical studies in religion, politics, and culture | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016012706 | ISBN 9780231178181 (cloth: alk. paper) | ISBN 9780231541992 (e-book).

Subjects: LCSH: Art and religion.

Classification: LCC N72. R4 J33 2016 | DDC 201/.67—dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016012706

Cover Designer: Catherine Casalino

Cover Image: View of Wood Line by Andy Goldsworthy © James Forbes/Snapwire/Corbis

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at cup-ebook@columbia.edu.

In loving memory of Emily V. Jackson

FRONTISPIECE. Emily V. Jackson in her studio, Auckland, New Zealand, February 1984.

When an art product once attains classical status, it somehow becomes isolated from the human conditions under which it was brought into being and from the human consequences it engenders in actual life-experience…. A primary task is thus imposed on [us]…to restore continuity between the refined and intensified forms of experience that are works of art and the everyday events, doings, and sufferings that are universally recognized to constitute experience.

John Dewey, Art as Experience

Art…is the realm of between which has become a form. Consider great nude sculptures of the ages: none of them is to be understood properly either from the givenness of the human body or from the will to expression of an inner state, but solely from the relational event which takes place between two entities which have gone apart from one another, the withdrawn body and the withdrawing soul.

Martin Buber, The Life of Dialogue

CONTENTS

Preamble

PART 1

Worlds Within and Worlds Without

Melbourne Now

The Elementary Forms of Religious Life

Art as Religion

The Interplay of Coming Out and Going In

Consciousness

From Joyce to Beuys

Production and Reproduction

Axes of Bias

A Visit to the Kunstmuseum Basel

PART 2

The Life and Times of Paddy Jupurrula Nelson

Ecstatic Professions

Art and Adversity: Ian Fairweather and the Solitude of Art

Transplantations: The Art of Simryn Gill

My Brother’s Keeper: The Art of Susan Norrie

Heroic Failure: The Art of Sidney Nolan

Une Vie Brève, Mais Intense

The Pare Revisited

A Man of Constant Sorrow: The Existential Art of Colin McCahon

PART 3

Landscape and Nature Morte: The Art of Paul Cézanne

Art and the Unspeakable

Marina Abramović and the Shadows of Intersubjectivity

Exodus

Making It Otherwise

Art and the Everyday

The Work of Art and the Arts of Life

Notes

Acknowledgments

Permissions

Index

LIST OF FIGURES

Frontispiece. Emily V. Jackson in her studio, Auckland, New Zealand, February 1984

Figure 1. Lirrara, Pat Lowe, 1990

Figure 2. Sled, Joseph Beuys, 1969

Figure 3. The Storm, Edvard Munch, 1893

Figure 4. Die Sturzbäche des Lauentales im Vorfrühling, Caspar Wolf, 1774/1777

Figure 5. Self Portrait, Vincent Van Gogh, 1889

Figure 6. Door 8: Yarlakurlu (Big Yam), Paddy Jupurrula Nelson, 1983

Figure 7. Sermon, Jerry Jangala, 1991

Figure 8. Pieta, Michelangelo, 1498–1499

Figure 9. Monastery, Ian Fairweather, 1961

Figure 10. Forking Tongues, Simryn Gill, 1992

Figure 11. Forest, Simryn Gill, 1996–1998

Figure 12. Pearls, Simryn Gill, Sydney, 2003

Figure 13. Convict and Mrs Fraser, Sidney Nolan, 1957

Figure 14. Lightsource, Philip Clairmont, 1978

Figure 15. Staircase Night Triptych, Philip Clairmont, 1978

Figure 16. Pare, British Museum, London

Figure 17. Pare, University Museum, Philadelphia

Figure 18. Parihaka Triptych, Colin McCahon, 1972

Figure 19. Urewera Mural, Colin McCahon, 1975

Figure 20. Large Pine Tree and Red Earth, Paul Cezanne, 1890–1895

Figure 21. The House with the Cracked Walls, Paul Cezanne, 1892–1894

Figure 22. The Artist is Present, Marina Abramović, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2010

Figure 23. Shoah, Carola Faller-Barris, 2005

Figure 24. Untitled, Carola Faller-Barris, 2014

Figure 25. Human Being, Li Wei, 2008

Figure 26. Up-On-The-Downs, Grahame Sydney, 2006

Figure 27. Christ Mocked (The Crowning with Thorns), Hieronymous Bosch, circa 1510

Figure 28. Christ Bearing the Cross, Titian, 1560

PREAMBLE

PAINTING RUNS IN MY FAMILY, BUT NOT RELIGION. MY MOTHER’S maternal uncle, Walter Tempest, was a late nineteenth-century watercolorist and member of the British Royal Academy, and my mother was an acclaimed painter of abstract landscapes. In my early twenties I vacillated between painting and writing before deciding on anthropology as my vocation. In recent years my daughters have excelled in the arts I chose not to pursue. Heidi Jackson exhibits regularly in Sydney and teaches art for a living, while Freya Jackson, now studying art in college, already promises to follow in her sister’s and grandmother’s footsteps. Where some people bear witness to a religious tradition, sustained over many generations, I marvel at the artistic trait that has given my family a very present help in times of trouble. My mother’s accidented landscapes often appear to be outward expressions of her inward struggle with the pain of rheumatoid arthritis.¹ The death of Heidi’s mother when she was thirteen, and her attenuated ties with her homeland following our decision to embark on a new life in Australia, undoubtedly found expression in Heidi’s New Zealand landscapes. And Freya frequently turned to painting and drawing when overwhelmed by the confusions of her adolescent years.

In writing about art, I have drawn inspiration from my family history as well as from my ethnographic fieldwork in West Africa and Central Australia, focusing not on art as an expression of individual genius or as an aesthetic,² but rather on the work of art, where work is to be read as a verb rather than a noun and understood as as a techné for making one’s life more individually and socially viable.³ Art opens up an artificial—one might say a ritual or utopian—space for trying to get around or beyond the mundane difficulties that beset us and the misfortunes that befall us.⁴ As John Dewey put it, Art is thus prefigured in the very process of living.⁵ Or, in the words of Jim Carrey, Painting is a way I free myself from concern…putting something out there rather than having it in here.⁶

Crucial to this point of view is the pragmatist assumption that art (ars) and techné are intimately linked, and that the work of art is a matter of making, acting, and doing before it is a form of knowledge, an object of contemplation, or a thing of beauty.⁷ As William James noted, what really exists is not things made but things in the making.⁸ As such, art and craft must be placed on a par. The creation of an efficient tool may contribute as much to our well-being as the creation of a religious icon or statue, a prayer wheel, a mask, or a musical instrument. Nor is the work of art simply a way of expressing inner experience; rather, it is a way of processing experience and working it through; not necessarily a means of changing the world, but an oblique way of changing our perception of the world, particularly when it becomes too much for us to manage by direct or mundane means. It is because the work of art makes our lives more viable that art or craft objects are often regarded as participating in our lives as social beings,⁹ though the contrary is also the case, since the human body is commonly likened to a container such as a house, a suit of clothing, a cooking pot, a drinking vessel, that can be opened or closed, picked up or discarded, go to rack and ruin or be repaired.

Elements of these metonyms and metaphors find expression in Alfred Gell’s view that art objects are the equivalent of persons, or more precisely, social agents that mediate agonistic exchanges and manipulate social relations within a system of action, intended to change the world rather than encode symbolic propositions about it.¹⁰ But while I share Gell’s fascination with how art objects transform experience—bedazzling, intimidating, or mystifying us—my focus is less on outward effects than on the dynamic interplay of subjective and objective dimensions of reality. Art emerges in the space between oneself, standing apart from others (eigenwelt), and oneself as a participant in a world shared with many others (mitwelt).

Philip Bromberg’s insights into dissociation are relevant here. Repudiating the common assumption that dissociation is necessarily a sign of mental disorder, Bromberg emphasizes the creative value of dissociation in managing unbearable experiences by shifting one’s focus to something outside oneself, something that can be regarded as objective rather than subjective, not-me rather than me.¹¹ Though there is a danger that this defensive strategy can estrange us from the very reality we are struggling to come to grips with, it provides the possibility of seeing one’s own world from the inside out, not from within but from somewhere other or elsewhere, thereby offering one some purchase on experiences that seemed both unthinkable and unendurable.

This risk that we may lose our reason in the process of recovering our footing reminds us that the human condition is inescapably liminal. In D. W. Winnicott’s terms, art and religion are transitional phenomenon, emerging in the space between self and other and constituting a third part of the life of a human being, a part that we cannot ignore…an intermediate area of experiencing, to which inner reality and external life both contribute. It is an area that is not challenged, because no claim is made on its behalf except that it shall exist as a resting-place for the individual engaged in the perpetual human task of keeping inner and outer reality separate but interrelated.¹²

Rather than identify religion with belief and liturgy, I prefer to focus on the existential situations in which divinities and spiritual entities as well as ideas about ultimate reality, fate, and natural justice come into play as potential means whereby human beings gain some purchase on shattering experiences and regain some measure of comprehension and control over their lives. Limit experiences, however, do not necessarily bring us to religion, as my own family history makes clear. Nor do post-Enlightenment notions of religion necessarily illuminate the African and Aboriginal lifeworlds I have described in my ethnographies. Nor are spiritual resources the only resources available to us in crisis, despite our tendency to use a quasi-theological language in recounting experiences that confounded us. For these reasons, many of the forms of life we refer to as cultural—including religion, art, ritual, ideology, and belief—may be construed as ways of circumventing and even subverting the world as we find it,¹³ ways of affirming another nature,¹⁴ ways of living by other means. As Louise Bourgeois put it, Art comes from life…. Art is not about art. Art is about life.¹⁵

To explore this point of view, I have divided this book into three parts. Part 1 introduces my ethnographic and intersubjective methodology and adduces perspicacious examples to illustrate my key themes: the dialectic of inner and outer; the shape-shifting character of consciousness; the relation of art, ritual, storytelling, and religion; and the symbolic links between natality and creativity. Part 2 focuses on several antipodean artists whose work has engaged my interest for many years, while part 3 explores the works and lives of several European and American painters, performance artists, photographers, sculptors, and graphic artists whose work speaks just as compellingly to my central themes.

PART 1

Worlds Within and Worlds Without

IN DECEMBER 2013, WHILE PARTICIPATING IN AN ETHNOGRAPHIC workshop in Melbourne, Australia, on the subject of spaces outside of domestication, I found time to reacquaint myself with the city in which I had lived almost fifty years before. During my rambles around inner-city neighborhoods, my mind would become so clouded by memories that I felt as though I was uncannily living the phenomenon on which our workshop was focused. One morning, for example, I recognized the dilapidated green and cream tram grinding up LaTrobe Street as a last survivor of the fleet that plied the city thoroughfares in 1963 when I lived in Melbourne and worked for the Aboriginal Welfare Board. And when, in the course of a long walk through Fitzroy, I found myself outside the corner pub where I had been arrested, together with several Aboriginal drinking mates, and thrown into the Fitzroy Police Station cells for the night, I felt like a survivor myself—as estranged from the young welfare worker I had once been as from that moment in history when Aboriginals were persecuted, stigmatized, and denied basic civil rights. Brought before a magistrates court and charged with being drunk and disorderly, I took the advice of my Aboriginal mates, for whom this legalized degradation ritual was all too familiar, and pleaded guilty. Discharged, we gathered in a nearby park before going our separate ways, the Aboriginal men to cadge a meal and their welfare officer to tender his resignation to the Aboriginal Welfare Board. One of my companions clapped me on the back. You’ve got a conviction now, he said, as if I had earned a badge of honor. The double meaning of the word was not lost on me. It placed me solidly with them. It guaranteed I would be dismissed from a job that made me complicit in state policies I found abhorrent—removing Aboriginal children from allegedly dysfunctional families and fostering them in white bourgeois homes, breaking up Aboriginal camps and settling selected families in state houses (pepper-potting), giving tacit consent to police infringements of basic human rights. My resignation (another double entendre) presaged my departure from Australia and the second phase of my life in welfare—among the homeless in London—followed by a year in the Congo where I happened to discover my vocation as an anthropologist.

Though now a stranger to the person I once was, I still recognize him, and regard him with immense compassion—wishing I could alleviate his loneliness and resolve the dilemmas that haunted his years in welfare and community development—his struggle to reconcile an urge to improve people’s lives with an equally strong desire to understand them. Both impulses are modes of domestication, of imposing on the radically other some kind of order—in the first case administrative, in the second academic. Even now, as I remember the demoralizing circumstances in which Aboriginal people lived in Victoria in 1963—in makeshift shanties (humpies) on rubbish dumps or riverbanks, in one-room bean picker’s huts or shanties in sawmilling towns, in trashed state houses or railway workers cottages—I wonder how best one may do justice to people condemned to the social margins or draw a clear line between the destructive and creative strategies they deploy in resisting the domesticating apparatus of the state.

This mysterious interplay between the world within and the world without has preoccupied me for many years and constitutes the main theme of this book—namely how material impoverishment, social injustice, and psychic wounds often undermine our capacity to live as we wish, though they seldom preclude the possibility of finding ways of getting around or going beyond the limiting conditions with which we contend. For Maurice Merleau-Ponty, this integration of subjective and objective perspectives implies a balancing act, comparable to the way we move around an art gallery so that we neither view a painting from so close that it becomes a blur nor from so far away that it loses its detail and allure. To achieve this optimal distance, we must do justice to what is in the background as well as the foreground, while recognizing that one of these perspectives is liable at any moment to switch places with the other.¹

Focusing on the transitional space between interiority and exteriority, I explore art as a technique, inextricably connected to storytelling, play, dreaming, and ritual, whereby we work out vital relationships between inner desires and external determinants.² The primordial human need to see oneself from without—whether in the face of a significant other, in the surface of a mirror, or in one’s handprint on a rock face—also finds expression in forms of empathy and mimicry whereby one sees the world from the standpoint of another or simply comes to see it otherwise. What we call imagining has its origin in this intersubjective transference that may result in a hunter’s identification with the animal he has killed, a conviction that material objects can act like persons, a belief that ideas can capture the essence of reality, or a fascination with recurring natural patterns. If leaving the imprint of one’s hand on the wall of a Paleolithic cave initiates the evolution of art, then surely painting, inscribing, and adorning the surfaces of one’s own body are analogous practices—techniques whereby subjective imperatives are modeled as objective designs.

This process of alter-ation or existential transfiguration involves endless essays in striking a balance between being an actor and being acted upon. It begins with imitating the voice of another and culminates in finding one’s own voice and it may be discerned in initiation ritual as well as in everyday life when the world comes to be experienced as my world, when what is determined from without is transformed into something felt to be determined from within, when givenness is experienced as choice, and a situation that befell me or held me in thrall is reconstrued as a situation I reproduce in my own time and on my own terms. Rather than suffering our situations in solitude and silence, art, ritual, and storytelling enable us to change the ways that our situations appear to us; we thereby come to feel that we possess some degree of free will, that the future is open rather than closed to us, and that our existence matters. In effect, we give birth to ourselves as proactive rather than merely passive participants in a shared world. A singularly moving example of this transformative process is Henri Matisse’s cut-paper collages. In 1939–40 a series of catastrophes overwhelmed Matisse: his wife left him, France was occupied, and the seventy-one-year old artist underwent several surgeries for duodenal cancer that left him a semi-invalid, bedridden or confined to a wheelchair. Yet out of these dark years issued some of Matisse’s most luminous work. For Richard Lacayo, that work was therapeutic. Having endured so much at the hands of his doctors, was he drawn unconsciously to cut paper as a way to sublimate the pain of his surgeries, to gain control over the very idea of cutting? Now he was the one wielding the sharp edges, using them to produce movement and vitality instead of surrendering it, taking an instrument of pain and turning it into an instrument of pleasure?³

Art, sociality, and religion involve a negotiation between accepting at face value the social situations, aesthetic styles, normative values, and raw materials that are given to us and actively making something uniquely satisfying to ourselves out of these givens. Inasmuch as every act—whether of parenting, painting, paper cutting, praying, or parlaying—brings something new into the world—even if that newness consists in little more than a changed sense of our own place within it—a mystery always attaches to such acts, for they can never be reduced to the conventions, experiences, and materials on which they were predicated or to the effects they have in the world into which they pass. Like a sacrifice to the ancestors, an appeal to a divinity, a ritual to bring rain, a magnanimous gesture, or a conscientious act of parenting, the origins and effects of a work of art cannot be fully fathomed. Only one thing is sure—the human imperative to live in the world as if it were in some sense singularly one’s own, even though it is never entirely one’s own creation and is held in common with countless others.

Eugenio Montale observes that art has two lives—somewhat like the antenatal and postnatal existence of an individual. While the first life of art unfolds between the maker and the object made, the second life of art begins when the artwork passes out of its creator’s hands and enters the public realm. There it acquires a variety of meanings that reflect the relationship between the artwork and the consumer whose subjective preoccupations and susceptibility to public opinion will only accidentally converge with the meanings the art had for its original maker. For Montale,

This second moment, of common consumption and even misunderstanding, is what interests me most in art. Paradoxically, one could say that music, painting, and poetry begin to be understood when they are presented, but they do not truly live if they lack the capacity to continue to exercise their powers beyond that moment, freeing themselves, mirroring themselves in that particular situation of life which made them possible. To enjoy a work of art or its moment, in short, is to discover it outside its context; only in that instant does the circle of understanding close and art become one with life as all the romantics dreamed.⁴

While sympathetic to Montale (whose perspective helps explain why I interleave biographical and reflexive passages throughout this book), my focus is the indeterminate relationship between the two lives of art. This means showing that the unsharable feeling which each of us has of the pinch of his individual destiny as he privately feels it rolling out on fortune’s wheel is,⁵ despite appearances, connected to widely shared preoccupations and recurring existential questions, so that in visiting an art museum one will be struck by the intense concern with the afterlife in the funerary art of dynastic Egypt or Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China; the yearning for consolation that informs the depictions of the virgin in medieval art; the preoccupation with generative power in the images of predatory animals, jinn, and ancestors in African carvings; and the search for novelty, distraction, innovation, and individual branding in contemporary Euro-American art. This sense of a common humanity, abiding over many millennia, finding expression in diverse forms of art and transcending radical cultural differences, is, in my view, as significant as the identifications that separate and divide us.

Melbourne Now

I have written elsewhere of the power of stories to transform our experience of being-in-the-world and of how storytelling, dreaming, and art making may be compared with the essays and explanatory models we produce in the academy—all imaginative and ingenious ways in which we rework events that have befallen or overwhelmed us and thereby recover a sense of our capacity to act on that which acts upon us.⁶ Even before we assign different names to these expressive forms (art, ritual, narrative, science, religion, philosophy), or decide the truth or worth of any one of them, they have answered one of the deepest human imperatives—to translate inner experience into some outward form. As André Aciman asks, What’s in me that keeps wanting something out there? and What’s out there that keeps beckoning something in me? Writing of his beloved New York City, he touches on the curious intersubjectivity in which we find ourselves through our relations with those we love, or with a favorite writer, an heirloom, a home place, a landscape, a religion, a work of art. Suddenly, writes Aciman, I realize what this is all about…the miracle of intimacy with a place that may be more in us that it is out there on the pavement, because there may be more of us projected on every one of its streets than there is of the city itself.⁷

Obviously, cities are not the only objects in relationship to which we define ourselves.

In the course of a long walk across Melbourne, in which I continued to ponder the oblique relationship between that which weighs on our minds or dwells in our hearts and that which finds expression in a physical gesture, a spoken or written word, a worldview, or an objet trouvé, I found myself outside the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, where an exhibition called Melbourne Now had recently opened.

I was immediately enthralled by the work of several contemporary Aboriginal artists, including one from Gippsland—the region where I had been based as a welfare worker fifty years ago. Though the surname of this artist was unfamiliar to me, I imagined that his grandparents might have been among the young adults who, from the late 1950s, left the Lake Tyers Aboriginal Reserve and sought ways of supporting themselves and their families in the inhospitable and violent world of white Australia.⁸

Two things struck me forcibly about the Aboriginal artworks in the Melbourne Now exhibition. First, they were stunning testimonies to the human capacity to reinvent tradition—and double-cross history. Raymond Young’s earthenware shields, for instance, draw on photographs of Kunnai shields from the early years of contact in southeast Victoria to mediate what the artist describes as a recovery of his grandmother’s and father’s culture. This process, he said, changed my life. For a moment I wasn’t in prison, I was with my mob.

But this paranomic ability to renegotiate the past and shield the future involves deliberately conjuring traumatic scenes of terror, death, and violation.⁹ You create make-believe landscapes out of horrible situations—police raids in the dead of night, the abuse of passers-by, poverty, homelessness, displacement—writes Destiny Deacon.¹⁰ For Young, the power of art enables one to connect with powerful forebears who survived such traumas and thereby strengthen one’s own capacity to face the uncertainty of the future. This was harrowingly conveyed by Ricardo Idagi’s sculpture, entitled False Existence Appearing Real.¹¹ The sculpture is a bust of the artist, grimacing. On his head is a galah, holding a plastic mirror from which hangs a small silver bell. Here is Idagi’s description of the work in question:

These works are an attempt to come face to face