by Nigel Spivey
So it is that we could imagine no great sense of cultural displacement, no fear of essential alienation, if the dedicants of votive statuary at a shrine in ancient Greece were magically transported through several thousand years and halfway across the world to a Buddhist cave-temple in modern Laos (Fig. 118).Votive statues and statuettes gathered in another place at another time display another form of the divine, yet in function and intent are quite the same.This is no trick of coincidence.Those religions that have a use for images are not, in terms of conduct, very distinct.The images themselves may look very different, but how those images are displayed at sacred sites, deployed in ceremonies and addressed by devotees is not a matter of much variation.
FROM AWE TO ABSTRACTION
It has become a commonplace to liken today’s museums and art galleries to places of worship.The comparison is readily made, given that so many public museums seem to be architecturally modelled upon sacred buildings of the past. Between their hieratic rules of reverential behaviour (‘Do Not Touch’; ‘Quiet, Please’) and our anticipation of spiritual uplift museums seem constitutionally poised to supply pseudo-religious or ritualistic experiences. So although most of us see sacred art detached from its original context – with no whiffs of incense, no dance of torchlight, no ecstatic shrieks or whispered prayers – we may yet feel that it has been redisplayed in some equally precious and exalting way. Curators know how to conjure an aura of excitement and revelation. Vistors are marshalled like pilgrims. Creeping into the carefully installed presence of awesome, valuable, untouchable objects, we hush our voices and widen our eyes.This, if not idolatry, is not far short of it.
That glib likening of museums and temples is nonetheless true for being repeated. It should not, of course, obscure the fact that the making of religious imagery as such continues, even if certain major faiths – notably Buddhism and Christianity – have ceased to generate images in the quantity they once did. Our panorama has passed over whole centuries of religious art, and allowed no glances at those parts of the world where its output is currently sustained.We have made a very partial survey, and our account has been biased not only towards those religions with a need or fetish for images, but also towards those people who commissioned the images, and those who used them for worship.The spiritual motivation of individual artists has scarcely occupied us at all.
The anonymity of most of the works of art featuring here is one reason for that neglect. And often enough the knowledge of a certain name, career path and even personality is no warrant for insight into the workings of that artist’s soul. But in cases where an artist commits faith to words as well as images, or where a writer resorts to images, we may find some demonstrable evidence of religious impulse.The English Romantic William Blake (1757–1827), offers such a case (Fig. 119), as does the Lebanese Kahlil Gibran (1883–1931), who, like Blake, was poet, prophet, draughtsman and painter. One figure, however, is of especial importance in any general and historical consideration of how art engages – or tries to engage – with the human intimations of divinity.This is the Russian-born painter Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944), who, according to the annals of conventional classification, produced the world’s first conscious or theorized example of ‘abstract art’.
118 An ensemble of Buddhist votives in one of the sacred caves of Bac Ou, Laos.
119 The frontispiece from Europe – A Prophecy by William Blake, 1794.
That was in 1910. In the same year, Kandinsky began to compose a written statement explaining his purposes as an artist. It was eventually published from Munich in 1912: a brief, dense book, its title rendered in English as Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Not all of its message is easy to relate to Kandinsky’s painting at the time, or to his subsequent output. If a gist can be extracted from the essay, though, it might be presented as follows.
Musicians are to be envied.They have at their disposal a means of expressing spiritual states; a means of expression that is independent of nature, that is its own construct. Some musicians may take inspiration from a songthrush piping in the woods, or a drumming of thunder. But music does not need those models. Its sounds can have a life all their own. Art, by contrast – well, art seems to be reliant upon not only nature, but a whole universe of objects.Art seems to be forever reminding its viewers of something to be seen in the real world. An apple, a waterfall, a naked woman, a deity incarnate – whatever it might be, something objective. Could art never, then, operate like music: take the human soul soaring into the bliss of transcendence, above and away from the things of the world?
For Kandinsky, the content of painting should be nothing other than painting. Once, as he records, he had a vision of pure art – art that was as attuned and direct and arresting as music.This was, he then realized, one of his own pictures turned upside-down so that its subject was unclear; its effect came from the harmonies of colour and form. Colour working as colour, without associations of object; and form working as form, unattached to the delineation of things, stories or scenes.
Whether Kandinsky could ever hope to reach and keep hold of his ambition ‘to consider art and nature as absolutely separate domains’ remains arguable. A sequence of his abstract works would carry studiously non-referential labels – Composition I, Composition II, and so on. Later he tried to convey ‘the pure inner workings of colour’ in his titles – Green Sound, Tension in Red, and suchlike.Yet he was very much aware that the colours on his palette, for all that they were capable of causing ‘spiritual vibrations’, were nevertheless loaded with particular cultural and object-related associations. Red, for example, had its own meaning within the Slavonic terminology of icon painting (where the word krasnyi doubles for both ‘red’ and ‘beautiful’) – not to mention the idiomatic usage, among Russian peasants, of calling that part of the house where icons were displayed as ‘the red corner’. Kandinsky also conceded that forms within his compositions could take the semblance of objects in the world. So when we gaze on a Kandinsky abstract painting, such as one entitled Red Oval (Fig. 120), it may be hard to refrain from finding not only an egg in the eponymous central red oval shape, but also a boat, and an oar, and so on – and commentators have duly speculated biographical reasons for why such objects might be there.
Still, the aim of Kandinsky’s striving was clear. He believed that his art was preparation for an ‘Epoch of Great Spirituality’, and that the figurative, naturalistic traditions of imagery were impediments to that epochal achievement. His was an essentially religious motivation. He was deeply sympathetic to a movement launched in the late nineteenth century, known as Theosophy, which sought to unite all the religions of the world around a common ‘wisdom about God’ (as theosophia translates). A Russian clairvoyant, Helena Blavatsky, was prominent among the founders of Theosophy; it was also to have influence upon the messages of the Austrian educational guru Rudolf Steiner. ‘Guru’ is appropriate here, for many esoteric features of Theosophist teaching came from India; and in Kandinsky’s yearning for an art unimpeded by objects we may sense the disdain of an Indian holy man for material things. Moreover, Kandinsky had academic training in the study of ethnography, and was well informed about the shamanic practices of tribal communities in northern Russia. Altogether this was a potent cocktail of comparative beliefs.
Not all practitioners of abstract art are required to accept that their work is brought about by a quest for the transcendent. But that is the genesis of the abstract as a mode of artistic expression. It is lodged in the history of the struggle to envisage the invisible.
120 Red Oval byWassily Kandinsky, 1920.
8
IN THE FACE OF DEATH
THE WRITER LAY DYING. Prone to tuberculosis, his lungs at last were failing beyond recovery. Doctors had advised the south of France, so he was consigned to a sanatorium at Vence, in the hills above the Côte d’Azur, as autumn settled and fruit began to drop from the trees.
… it is time to go, to bid farewell
to one’s own self, and
find an exit
from the fallen self.
He reached for a metaphor – some symbolic means of visualizing his imminent voyage towards the cold, the dark and the sheer unknown. It came from a museum – an object once seen in a cabinet of Egyptian antiquities.
A little ship, with oars and food
and little dishes, and all accoutrements
fitting and ready for the departing soul.
121 Wooden ship with shabti figures, from the tomb of Mentuhotep, Deir-el-Bahari, c. 2000 BC.Twenty-one figures are aboard the boat, heading downstream: a lookout stands in the bow, pointing the way.
D.H. Lawrence (1885–1929) was not an adherent of any established religious faith. His childhood attendance of a Nonconformist chapel in Britain’s industrial Midlands left him with fond memories of hymns that boomed a fierce expectation of life eternal – ‘Jerusalem,my happy home,when shall I come to thee?’ – but he had rejected all modes of conventional Christian belief, along with the orthodox morality he challenged most notoriously in his last novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Bedridden and fading, he was naturally fearful at the prospect of ‘the dark flight down oblivion’.Yet he was not without hope. In his poem entitled ‘The Ship of Death’, Lawrence voiced the need to prepare for the end; to set sail for the soul’s ‘longest journey’ towards a place for which there were no directions.
It must be dark, for sight and sense will be lost. So the ship of death sets off – into nothingness.
Everything is gone, the body is gone
completely under, gone, entirely gone.
So it seems – a terminus, an unimaginable finality; full stop.
Yet not so. Dawn emerges from night; and from the pitch black of death, the little ship drifts across the flood. Frail and faltering it may be, but still the soul arrives –
… into the house again
filling the heart with peace.
Swings the heart renewed with peace
even of oblivion.
Oh build your ship of death. Oh build it!
for you will need it.
For the voyage of oblivion awaits you.
‘The Ship of Death’ is a poetic metaphor, not an exposition of ancient Egyptian beliefs about the afterlife. It is an apt metaphor nonetheless.We know that miniature wooden boats became a customary part of the ‘furniture’ in Egyptian tombs during the Middle Kingdom (2040–1783 BC). Examples of such boats may be seen in many museums around the world (Fig. 121). Some appear to be carrying a small, corpse-like effigy on board; some carry models of foodstuffs and various utensils; most are staffed by an ensemble of wooden or wax manikins known as shabtis or shawabtis.These were not so much the crew of the boat as a company of servants ready to assist with chores in the next world. Some of these shabti figures are inscribed with their willingness to help (‘Here I am’).We may see them busily grinding meal, making bread and beer, or else prepared for heavier agricultural labours, such as the digging of irrigation channels. All aboard the ship of death, a workforce for the afterlife.The shabtis present a team of retainers who will ensure that eternity is both a comfortable state and, most reassuringly, not a well of loneliness.
Whether serving the modern writer on his deathbed, or the funerary honours of an ancient Egyptian noble, the image of the ship of death seems equally easy to explain. It is a comforting symbol. Death may be a journey to the unknown, a mystery tour beyond us, but we should embark upon that journey with good cheer, trusting to a means of transport we know and recognize.The symbolism of a voyage across water occurs in both pagan and Christian traditions. Classical poets such as Homer sang of faraway ‘Isles of the Blessed’ to be reached by fortunate souls; chapel preachers visualize a ‘land of pure delight,where saints immortal reign’, beckoning across ‘a narrow sea’. For D.H. Lawrence, it was enough to accept that if death were like night, then new life must come as predictably as break of day. In any case, imagery serves to provide consolation.
We share the need for such consolation.Whether out of sight, in peripheral vision, or staring us straight in the face, death is – after all – the one event we cannot miss. Biologically, like other creatures, we humans are programmed to postpone that event for as long as possible. But, quite unlike other creatures, we make an occasion of death. It is a feature peculiar to our species to conduct formal burials: and though some archaeological evidence has been claimed to demonstrate that Neanderthals and humans of earlier periods mourned their dead with flowers and suchlike, more elaborate formalities of burial are generally considered part of the ‘cultural explosion’ happening among Homo sapiens of the Upper Palaeolithic period (see page).The placing of bodies in specially demarcated areas, accompanied by ‘grave goods’, such as tools, weapons, items of personal adornment and joints of meat, is a feature of human presence in various parts of the world c. 30,000 years ago.That is when death became a ritual; and if people were being laid to rest with axes, clothes and food, we suppose that such ritual indicates some primal concept of an afterlife – an existence beyond the grave.
Archaeologists, of course, capitalize upon this aspect of human behaviour. Few qualms are ever voiced about opening graves of the past. If robbing tombs were an absolute crime, we should have little to look at in our museums.The ancient Egyptians were not the only people of the past to bury their dead accompanied by treasured personal possessions – objects that we dig up with predatory greed, then parade as our cultural heritage. But apart from an instinct for treasure-hunting, the driving logic here is that the contents and style of given burials – or an entire cemetery – will hold key information about the deceased persons, or about the society to which they belonged when alive. An individual who ranks highly in the society of the living will be given special honours among the community of the dead; it should be possible, by the same reasoning, to detect from their funerary record persons who were once impoverished or marginalized when alive. So the rite of passage involved in transferring someone from the society of the living to the community of the dead is assumed to be a reflective process, valuable for reconstructing the past.
Our encounters with old burials and funerary monuments, therefore, tell us a great deal about how our ancestors lived.Yet we also become aware of how they died – how they prepared for the inevitable event of death.This is where we may feel most disquiet because we belong to an age unparalleled in its alienation from death.We survive infancy better, and live, on average, longer lives than at any other period of human history, but never before have we tried so hard to pretend that death does not happen. In Western countries cosmetic surgery flourishes; senior citizens are often segregated from the rest of society, and when they die it is rarely conceded as a natural end (heart attack, or some disease or mishap, will be cited as the cause of death); and funerals are usually subdued and brisk occasions, costing little in time or money. Many of us go for years, even decades, without so much as setting eyes upon a dead person. In short, we have tried to make death not so much inevitable as invisible.The reality of death has never been more distanced from our daily lives.
So why then do we fill our vision with images of death? Violent computer games, ‘slasher’ films, stage tragedies and corpse-strewn news bulletins? If we truly wish death to be a remote prospect, why do we insist upon imagining it so vividly and so frequently? This is a paradox that could perhaps be explained by any armchair psychologist, but it raises the more complex historical question of how humans created and developed an iconography of death. If we can trace the process by which death became a subject of art – an event mediated by symbols, pictures and metaphors – then we may begin to comprehend the uniquely peculiar effect of death as a fact of life. Death is a terror, but a terror we have learnt to manage.This chapter explores the importance of art in these strategies of terror management. Examples come from various parts of the world, not necessarily in chronological order: the process is universal.
122 Remodelled skull with shell eyes from Jericho, c.7000 BC.
TH
E JERICHO SKULLS
It was the Hebrew prophet Ezekiel who described how God had set him down in a valley of dry bones and let him witness the marvel of skeletons raised from their graves and restored as living beings (Book of Ezekiel 37). ‘Can these bones live?’ was the challenge of faith to Ezekiel; and some similar sentiment may have been at work among the ancient inhabitants of Jericho, a walled settlement to the northeast of Jerusalem, dating from as early as c. 7000 BC. For in 1953, excavations led by Kathleen Kenyon uncovered precocious evidence of the human desire to preserve or even renew the skeletal remains of the dead. No one was expecting this find: the area under archaeological scrutiny was one of domestic occupation, not a graveyard. It was scheduled to be the last day of the season’s work, a time for tidying up and closing down, when someone tugged at an object embedded in one of the Neolithic walls, and out came a skull.
This skull was clearly a human remain, but not like any ordinary skull. Its nose cartilage had been reconstructed in plaster, and the eye-sockets were occupied by a pair of inset cowrie shells.Anyone gazing upon such an object could only conclude that here was an attempt to give bones a semblance of life (Fig. 122).