When one is just beginning as an artist it seems too
confining to be classified as belonging to some already well in place group.
And yet, very rarely any artist would be so unique that a separate cubicle in
art taxonomy would have to be made-just for one. Even if the effort at
uniqueness made someone to create sculptures using only toothpicks, or rejecting all materials and just sitting
naked at Museum-it will be gathered into [and this is just a provisional name]
“daft offerings “group.
Within the broad groupings of contemporary art there is a
considerable section of figurative [more-or-less] art and in it many sub-groups.
One that always gives me pause and a head-scratch of bewilderment is what they
call “spiritual art”. The first, momentary reaction would surely be positive to
anything called “spiritual”. The trouble comes next, when you realize that the
understanding of the “spiritual”, especially when connected with art is very blurry
and the more examples of it you see the less clear it seems.
Spiritual artist Sri Chimnoy
As I examine my own inner life I need to state that I don’t
have a “spiritual” life. I experience thoughts and sensations and feelings but
none are of “spiritual” nature. The concept of spirituality takes such a
prominent place in any proclamations of values, of spheres of our concern and
yet-I don’t experience anything that should be called spiritual. When I think
what “spiritual” is the answer that comes is that it is a pursuit of imaginary being and elaborating that inner illusion.
When that pursuit is crystallized by rituals it is religion.
This is not a definition generally available because usually
accepted definition of spirituality is “personal transformation”. I cannot
quite grasp it. Why one would need a transformation and are such changes possible?
Who or what requires of all of us
“personal transformation”? Of course if you sell a product it must be claimed
that everybody needs it, most especially if it assures your good standing with
Imaginary Entity always so keen on obeisance.
Another definition that I fashioned is that spirituality is seeking contact with invisible but sentient
beings. Rain Dances and letters to
Santa would fit that definition well. Turning the prayer wheel or using rosary
is seeking to influence the invisible being with piety. In that, writing two
books “Conversations with God” should qualify right on top of successful search
for any contact with invisible but sentient being. What a triumph: at last!
Except that it is of course just so much smooth verbiage-garbage. Nobody who talks
with God would be returning to scribbling third-rate books any more than people
who intend to pay their rent by publishing a book on how to become a millionaire
in 60 days.
However, the air of tacit complicity on the part of both the
author and the readers is assumed already in the title [no more credible than
“How I was eaten and digested by crocodile”] and if you reached for it you
agreed to have your leg pleasurably pulled. Now extend that tacit complicity to
the congregations of four churches on my short street and then beyond to all “spiritual” people on
the globe. Nobody is suddenly jumping to the microphone and wailing in pain over the radical, unbroken absence of
the object of their supplications, adoration. As if mind-numbing litanies and
polite genuflections could suffice while real contact with the invisible
sentient being was irrelevant or even unwelcome.
On all sides we are
surrounded by such thick walls of religious edifices, decorum and custom
reaching to us from the layered past and enduring right into the future to populate, to move
all the heavy furniture of their mythologies, so that the future will not be
open and yet unwritten, but already musty with past. Malchus will be again and
again looking for his bloody ear in the dirt of Gethsemane. God Gamesh will
keep his elephant’s trunk because nobody will say-“elephant’s trunk? Are you
serious?” Billions of people will believe in god with elephant’s trunk and
billion others will believe in Resurrection. With such surplus capacity for
believing “spiritual art” has huge audience.
For proper reception of “spiritual art” one has to assume
the suspension of skepticism and take it like the book of conversations with
God. One has to dim the lights and “play along”.
Spirituality and spiritual art are coating the mouth of the
abyss of the Ultimate Unknown with breath-fresheners, offending the Greatest
Mystery with domestication routines and blaspheming with soothing bromides.
What is particularly galling is lack of visions, repetitiveness, crippling
symmetries. The colors are so shrill one wants to run from such “spirituality”.
When I look at these examples of spiritual art I see that their authors are
crocheting doilies for subatomic particles.
Alex Gray
