Sacramental Art

Sacramental Art May 5, 2016

Nearly everything about modern art “can be empirically explained by examining style, iconography and patronage,” writes Richard Nelson (The Spirit of Secular Art). What cannot be explained is the prestige of art, and this eludes because it is reliant on intuitions that artists dismiss as archaic and outmoded. The magic and prestige of art rests on the deployment of sacramental motifs and instincts. Despite the efforts of artists to liberate art from liturgy, it remains the case that “Art is intrinsically cultish” (1.1), and so Nelson focuses on the “re-spiritualizing of art, the induction of sacramental status upon art in the very process of art becoming secular” (1.13).

Nelson goes so far as to assert that the sacramental basis of art is essential to the development of modern art: “Art as we know it today could not have occurred without a sacred backdrop. Structures of a sacramental kind created the very preconditions of prestige in secular art and installed certain assumptions within it. Secularization in art does not simply mean abjuring religion. It means abstracting the sacred; it means commuting certain rituals – which, from epoch to epoch, have become historically exhausted – to a synthetic and autonomous spirituality which we call art. In this way, the sacramental element in art did not suddenly vanish but was transformed into secular guises of immense authority and influence, to the point that they are essential in the very definition of art. For two millennia, art has been eluding a liturgical role of one kind or another to achieve that freedom and autonomy which are axiomatic in art today. The sacramental status from the past is not dispensed with: it goes somewhere, whence it crucially informs the essence of art as an especially meaningful commodity. The sacramental component of art lies dormant and hidden in secular production; but it is all the more deeply embedded in the definition of art for its magic combination of spiritual prestige and philosophical evasiveness” (1.2).

It is “not a case of art retaining the spiritual, as if art were somehow a more conservative institution holding out with heroic tenacity against the onslaught of atheist materialism.” Instead, the sacramental is deliberate and “strategic”: “It is cultivated as an essential component of secularization, because the value of art in a secular context depends on the prestige of poetically rearranging the sacramental roots of artistic expression. The sacramental element is not a hardy left-over, an enduring relic which nobly survives in the production of newer artists. More often than not, the secular rearrangements of the sacramental roots of art depend on the new art rejecting tradition. There is little question of artworks somehow carrying an ancestral spirituality which is preserved inside them like a ruin abiding in barbarous times. Artworks actively and structurally exploit a sacramental tradition for their sense of spiritual value; they may even unscrupulously reconstrue religious ideas to flatter their own secular purposes. It may be that artworks paradoxically act as the nostalgic repository of spirituality in a world which has fewer and fewer sacramental vessels, but this guardianship of holy ideas does not proceed from piety for a religious past so much as an inherent reliance on the outdated privileges of the sacramental” (1.4-5).

Nelson doesn’t use the word in a strict sense, which implies a “mechanical” operation. Rather, he uses the term to describe “holy practices . . . plain and humble action in which a sacred secret inheres.” He worries that the technical uses of the term might distract from his usage, but he argues that the value of Christian usage is that it refers to a “ritual expression of spiritual elevation by means of the sensual. The sacraments in all traditions involve the body. A gesture is performed of a corporal nature: one is washed or asperged or anointed or given to eat or drink; and the sensory experience in the body is an integral part of the ceremony” (1.5-6).

Nelson sees an analogy between the relation of sacrifice to the Eucharist and the relation of art to sacrament: “A sacramental action is not mysterious because it mechanically mimics an earlier sacrificial event but because it enshrines the spiritual justification of the sacrifice while removing it from the local circumstances in which it took place. The sacrament makes the sacrifice transferable and lifts it onto a supposedly universal plane, stripped of the contingencies of the original event.” Though the sacrament is abstracted from its original setting in the sacrifice of Christ, it is not abstract, but “involves the tangible and sensory intervention of actions in or upon your body.” Thus, “the sacraments are both abstract and immediate: they happen in a direct contact with your body but their meaning is exalted by virtue of mystically relaying the powers of an earlier sacrifice.” What he describes as a “paradoxical dual nature of the sacramental order” forms a “spiritualized corporality” that in turn becomes “the fundamental paradigm of art”: “autonomous art stands in the same relation to sacrament as sacrament stands in relation to sacrifice,” a bodily reality abstracted from the original sacramental setting but bearing the prestige and power of that setting (1.7-8).

Sacramental “spiritualized corporeality” thus serves as the condition of the possibility of modern art: “Before art became an institution of autonomous visual objects in galleries, there was already a paradigm of a spiritual uplifting through codified physical actions. This paradigm is the mysterious enactment of sacramental rites which are both corporal and abstract, corporal in their means and abstract in their agency. The preconditions of art did not have to be invented by artists. They were already established before artists were invited to contribute to the definition of the sacred and ages before anyone might have considered that art contains something mysterious in its own right” (1.8).

Nelson thinks Walter Benjamin’s famous account of the desacralization of art through mechanical reproduction confused. Benjamin recognizes that art was originally embedded in magical or religious ritual, but also roots the desacralization of art in the decline of uniqueness. It’s not clear what gives art its “aura” in Benjamin’s account – the ritual setting or the one-offness: “ritual is turned into a secular form of the sacred; on the other hand, it loses its aura and is a desacralized form of exhibitable exchange value” (1.11). Nelson suggest that Benjamin’s evidence can be turned to support conclusions opposite to those he reaches: “For example: ‘When the age of mechanical reproduction separated art from its basis in the cult, the semblance of its autonomy disappeared forever.’ It seems more plausible to argue that the artwork, having lost its dependency upon holy institutions, has now been liberated and has therefore won its autonomy in aesthetic terms (if not exactly in market terms)” (1.11).

Benjamin approaches the point Nelson elaborates. He “comes close to explaining the debt to the sacred owed by the secular, when he talks about the parasitic existence of art in relation to ritual.” Yet that parasitic relation isn’t the center of his story; rather, Benjamin’s “the discourse is how technological reproducibility emancipates art from such a parasitic condition. It is not really an explanation of how secular art borrows or colonizes or transforms the sacred” (1.11).


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