As part of the conference planning, co-organizers Katie Bond Pretti and AnnaLiisa Ollila Gison have written short texts that help frame their approach towards and understanding of conference themes.
The following blog posts represent these individual reflections.
The Superpower of a Painting is Invisibility
I move gingerly around the paintings I own because I know they are looking at me as closely as I am looking at them. There is a constant exchange of emotion between us, between the three of us: the artist I need never meet, the painting in its own right, and me, the one who loves it and can no longer live independent of it. The triangle of exchange alters, is fluid, is subtle, is profound and is one of those unverifiable facts that anyone who cares for painting soon discovers. The picture on my wall, art object and art process, is a living line of movement, a wave of colour that repercusses in my body, colouring it, colouring the new present, the future, and even the past which cannot now be considered outside the light of the painting. I think of something I did, the picture catches me, adds to the thought, changes the meaning of thought and past. The totality of the picture comments on the totality of what I am.1
The presence of a piece of art, a painting for instance, possesses something greater and more powerful than its appearance alone. Surely the formal qualities that comprise it are its most prominent, most readily noticed features. But, as Jeanette Winterson articulates, there is a “totality” of a painting that includes non-physical aspects that communicate directly with unseen elements of its viewer. Parts of the observer that are not the eyes participate in an exchange with the art object in a phenomenon that some liken to a spiritual experience.
Winterson, a celebrated author of contemporary fiction, shares her personal relationship with visual art. Hers, as that of a writer, is a relationship reliant on translated understanding; her natural creative language is words, not colours and forms. Perhaps it is her innate sensitivity, as an artist in her own right, that gives her such powers of observation. Or, perhaps, it is not observation, but a willingness to consider the presence of something intangible in a painting, something invisible that acts upon a viewer’s invisible parts.
The possibility of such an exchange, the transmission of affect, is a concept familiar to others who are immersed in the creative process. In Against Interpretation, another celebrated writer, Susan Sontag, refers to the connection between one's senses and one’s environment in a call to expose the negative effects of this reciprocal relationship.
Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. … Think of the sheer multiplication of works of art available to every one of us, superadded to the conflicting tastes and odors and sights of the urban environment that bombard our senses.2
Whether or not we see (or sense) it, we are constantly being affected.
At first it seems like Sontag suggests that we fight sensory fire with sensory fire when she says, “What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more”3. Upon careful consideration, however, her remedy for sensory overload induced ignorance of experience is intention. If we intentionally observe (and absorb) we may be able to hone our skills of observation (and absorption), and thus (re)gain some control over our lived and felt experience.
We are, after all, sensory creatures. We presently navigate a time when sociocultural unrest is amplified by news and social media, which is complicated by innumerable other external sources of stress on the body. Whether one’s personal history and emotional disposition predisposes their physiological response to the cumulative stimuli of the average day as anxiety or numbness, a balance needs to be struck. If it’s possible to learn how to mitigate our emotional response to external factors that are beyond our control (or even beyond our perception) by intentionally experiencing and savouring our reaction to a piece of art, a painting could be good medicine.
k.b.p.
1 Winterson, Jeanette. Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery (Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 1995), 19.
2 Sontag, 13.
3 Sontag, 14.
What is the Spiritual?
What is the spiritual? It is an incursion from above or deep within to which the ordinary human being in each of us can only surrender. … the spiritual is a dramatic shift in experience and an undoing of what we take to be ourselves.1
In our own society, the term spirituality has taken on numerous connotations both within and apart from organized religion. Some people feel that spirituality is the more encompassing concept while religion is a subset; others feel that religion is the overarching term with spirituality being a subset. Some feel that the term spirituality has been so stretched out and bounced around by pop culture and the media that it has lost any substantive meaning. Still others feel that spirituality simply exceeds any definition.2
An evolutional perspective of the spiritual, which suggests that spirituality emerges from certain features spanning from psychosomatic to metaphysical realms, stresses the impact of multilevel parameters whereby the spiritual is shaped. Both the fact that certain theories consider the spiritual as an innate quality of the psyche related to the potential for something higher, deeper, bigger, or future (eschatological) and the fact that aspects of the spiritual are manifested within the sociocultural realm suggest, and to some extent verify, the evolutional perspective of the spiritual. Just as the cognitive function is the unquestionable ground for the development of self-consciousness, so psychic facts are indispensable material and essential events for spiritual experience and evolution. However, as self-consciousness cannot be reduced to cognitive functions, as it incorporates dynamics from the external world, so can spiritual experience not be reduced to psychological facts insofar as it interrelates with the socio-cultural and the metaphysical.3
When one asks the question, “What is the spiritual?”, answers received can range from historical precedent, to references to religious doctrine, to deeply personal and unique sentiment, to non-verbal eyerolls. Spirituality as a concept is elusive and polarizing. Describing the spiritual in art is even more of a paradox.
In Carl Jung and Maximus the Confessor on Psychic Development: The Dynamics Between the ‘Psychological’ and the ‘Spiritual’, G. C. Tympas outlines what he calls an “evolutional perspective” on the epistemology of spirituality. Being emergent from several ontological realms, “namely the bodily, the psychic, the interpersonal-social, the cultural, and the metaphysical,” he suggests that the spiritual is so difficult to universally define because it is “multifaceted” - it “can be considered as a dynamic, constantly evolving ... property that might ‘emerge’ from elements stemming from” these ontologies.4 This description – constantly evolving, emerging from the collected ontologies of the bodily, the psychic, the interpersonal-social, the cultural, and the metaphysical – could be extended to characterize spiritual art.
In Encountering the Spiritual in Contemporary Art, Leesa K. Fanning presents her reader with an extensive volume of examples of how the spiritual is manifest in contemporary art (as of the year 2018) from a curator’s point of view. For Fanning,
... spirituality represents and encompasses a broad spectrum of possibilities: compassion; considerations of living well in our complicated world; the search for ultimate meaning, truth, or reality; questions of being and belief; the mystery of life and death; a sense that all things are interconnected; ritual practice signifying life-changing events; mind-altering transformation; and … [it] is a direct and immediate experience involving felt bodily experience.5
Though expressed using a different vocabulary, Fanning’s definition parallels that of Tympas. Two points of view from individuals with different educational backgrounds and current motivations inadvertently connect in the discussion of the spiritual in art.
In his text, while discussing the definition of the spiritual as “multifaceted”, Tympas identifies its potential role in the healing process. In doing so, he includes the spiritual in art as a specific point of convergence between the psychological, the spiritual, and mental health.
Healing comprises a fascinating area, where ontological and religious doctrines have been set aside, but the spiritual and the psychological can act on a more common ground. Healing is, however, not the only place where these two aspects intercept.6
Fanning might agree and assert that art can be one of those such places.
Tympas is a researcher with degrees in medicine, theology, and psychoanalysis who might seem to be an unlikely proponent for the healing capabilities of art. However, reframing his argument to centre around art instead of healing, it follows that, once “ontological and religious doctrines have been set aside” to make space for spiritual and psychological influences, the “multifaceted” quality of spiritual art can be more readily appreciated.
According to Tympas, there is a “polarity” that exists between those who investigate spirituality via “the internal (psychic) and external (socio-cultural and/or metaphysical) perspectives.”7 A similar polarity exists in the investigation of spiritual art. Those who refuse to acknowledge an unseen (“internal”) communicative power of a painting, or song, or choreographed movement of a body will limit their discussion to formal (“external”) qualities. If the presence of the spiritual in art were to be discussed using Tympas’ evolutional perspective, perhaps those who position their argument at either pole of opinion could see that they are having the same conversation.
k.b.p.
1 Lipsey, Roger. The Spiritual in Twentieth-Century Art, (Dover Publications, 1988), 10.
2 Spretnak, Charlene. The Spiritual Dynamic in Modern Art: Art History Reconsidered, 1800 to the Present, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 14.
3 Tympas, G. C., Carl Jung and Maximus the Confessor on Psychic Development: The Dynamics Between the ‘Psychological’ and the ‘Spiritual’, (Routledge, 2014), 32.
4 Tympas, 18.
5 Fanning, Leesa K., Encountering the Spiritual in Contemporary Art, (The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2018), 32.
6 Tympas, Carl Jung and Maximus the Confessor on Psychic Development, 36.
7 Tympas, 18.