(published March 2011 in a-n magazine)<\/p>\n
\u201cThe artist is an exile from the city. He has renounced his ties with friends and family, church and country. In isolation, he seeks to cultivate the traditions and techniques of his craft, to recreate life artificially through the medium of words\u2026 In the days of decadent Rome, a mind like Augustine\u2019s could take refuge in the Christian conception of a City of God. With the modern intellectual, art has taken the place of religion. He feels the need to create a city of art…\u201d 1<\/sup><\/p>\n This high-modernist conception of art as the new religion appears to have been confirmed in our post-modern culture, if Sunday attendances at Tate Modern are anything to go by. Even before it opened, Andrew Marr prophesied in the Observer that, \u2018If modern art is the new British religion, the Tate’s Bankside gallery will be its St Paul’s\u2019, while Nicholas Serota elsewhere described the building as a \u2018magnificent cathedral\u2019 (it is worth noting here that \u2018cathedral\u2019 is technically not an architectural term, but ecclesiastical, from the Latin cathedra, meaning \u2018seat\u2019 of the Bishop; sure enough, Andrew Marr goes on to refer to Serota as the \u2018art-bishop\u2019). 2<\/sup><\/p>\n Where did this idea come from? The pioneers of modernist abstraction \u2013 Malevich, Mondrian, and Kandinsky – were all associated with Theosophy, an esoteric system founded in 1875 by Madame Blavatsky, which mixed elements of Eastern mysticism and Western scientism to form \u201ca scientific religion and a religious science\u201d3<\/sup> which was \u201cnot a religion in the ordinary sense\u201d and \u201cnot a Church in any sense\u201d. Mondrian joined the Dutch Theosophical Society in 1909, just before his move into abstraction, and his theory of this work clearly reflects Theosophist ideas. It was not only Theosophical theory that was influential, however; it is instructive to compare Charles Leadbeater and Annie Besant\u2019s\u00a0Thought Forms\u00a0\u2013 paintings of auras and other supposed spiritual emanations \u2013 published in 1901, with Malevich\u2019s Suprematist paintings of 1915. Kandinsky\u2019s manifesto\u00a0Concerning the Spiritual in Art\u00a0of 1911 drew heavily on Theosophical ideas of synaesthesia, and again, his paintings of this period look very similar to so-called \u201cthought forms built by music\u201d wherein \u201csound produces form as well as colour\u2026 clearly visible and intelligible to those who have eyes to see\u201d.<\/p>\n Combining Western notions of evolution with Eastern transcendentalism, Theosophy proposed that the human race was about to progress from the material to the immaterial, or spiritual dimension. However, in order to move into this \u2018New Age\u2019, humanity must become attuned to a different mode of perception. For the avant-garde, \u2018non-objective\u2019 abstraction was the way this was to be achieved, and in the process, a new status for artists was established. The introduction to the first English translation (1914) of Kandinsky\u2019s book made this explicit: \u2018Modern artists are beginning to realise their social duties. They are the spiritual teachers of the world\u2026\u2019 4<\/sup><\/p>\n The World War of 1914-18 brought such optimistic notions of modernist progress into grave doubt; nonetheless, a century later it may still appear that the contemporary arts are a more progressive force than traditional religion, given recent attempts to ban books (eg Salman Rushdie\u2019s\u00a0The Satanic Verses) and close down exhibitions (eg Chris Ofili\u2019s\u00a0Virgin Mary) on religious grounds. However, there is another side to this question of authoritarian control.<\/p>\n In 1995, the Irish poet Eavan Boland wrote that \u201cover the last century, while the relation between literature and religion has failed, the rise of the religion of literature, the hubris of the imagination and its sanctity has been an undercurrent of a great deal of the analysis and discussion of art.\u201d5<\/sup><\/p>\n She traces this back to Matthew Arnold\u2019s \u2018argument that the imagination is a sacramental force and that the poem can usurp some of the functions of religion… In a time of lost power it makes a claim for increased privileges for the artist. The irony of this is that it brings us back to something more primitive again. To invest, as Arnold does, the imagination with sacramental force restores to poetry not its religious force, but its magical function\u2026 the old status of arbiter of reality.\u2019<\/p>\n What constitutes this reality? In terms of art, the modernist notion of progress is, in its Theosophist origins, actually based on the old Gnostic heresy that the material world is a dirty and unworthy place, one that we need to escape from into the \u2018spiritual\u2019 realm – with the means provided by gnosis. However, my religion tells me that the created world is not bad, but fallen, and it is not esoteric knowledge that will save us, but God, in person.<\/p>\n As a practising artist and a practising Christian, I believe that the Spirit of God is involved with all human activity, including art; I have experienced the fruit of this relationship in my own practice, and in the work of others. However, the idea that artists have some special access to the \u2018spiritual\u2019 is rotten. Art is not the new religion; religion is \u2013 or should be \u2013 the new religion. What art is \u2013 or could be \u2013 remains (thank God) an open question.<\/p>\n Mark Dean<\/p>\n This excerpt is taken from a paper delivered by the artist on 3 February 2011 as part of Beaconsfield’s Art & Compromise lecture series and to coincide with Mark Dean’s solo exhibition, The Beginning of the End.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" (published March 2011 in a-n magazine) \u201cThe artist is an exile from the city. He has renounced his ties with friends and family, church and country. In isolation, he seeks to cultivate the traditions and techniques of his craft, to recreate life artificially through the medium of words\u2026 In the days of decadent Rome, a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":"","_wp_rev_ctl_limit":""},"class_list":["post-3059","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tailbiter.com\/art\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3059","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tailbiter.com\/art\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tailbiter.com\/art\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tailbiter.com\/art\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tailbiter.com\/art\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3059"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tailbiter.com\/art\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3059\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tailbiter.com\/art\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3059"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}1 Harry Levin, James Joyce: a Critical Introduction, 1941
\n2 A Marr, The Cathedral of Cool, London: The Observer, Sunday April 9 2000
\n3 William Q Judge, Ocean of Theosophy, 1893
\n4\u00a0M Sandler, Translator\u2019s Introduction to W. Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, New York: Dover, 1977
\n5\u00a0E Boland, When The Spirit Moves, The New York Review of Books, Volume 42, Number 1, January 12, 1995<\/span><\/h5>\n