Let’s have a mind and raise flowers.

Columbia University’s Religion Department Chair Mark C Taylor has established himself over thirty years to be one of the most compelling thinkers in the area of art and theology. He has chaired research committees in the American Academy of Religion (AAR), written extensively on religion in the postmodern era, and become a philosopher who has aptly dealt with the intersections of art, theology, technology, and philosophy. The strength of his perspective lies in the avenues he opens to discuss art and theology to those who fall outside of mainstream theological traditions. Non-theists, Process Theologians, ‘Death of God’ proponents, and others like Taylor himself who without believing in God find connection to the sacred can find valuable and empowering insight into the art and theology conversation.

            Taylor places himself in the philosophical tradition stemming from Heidegger’s reframing the question of metaphysics which sought to reset the Western philosophical tradition with a new thread of thought challenging onto-theology. Taylor, as a student of the late Jacques Derrida, continues this deconstruction by bringing to light the hidden onto-theological bias in theoaesthetics and complicates what he sees as the uncritical granting of God’s Being, meaning and manifestation of the Absolute in aesthetics, and a correspondence between God and art. Though other Christians have questioned God’s Being such as Jean Luc Marion and Process Christians have created space for Becoming, Taylor examines possibilities beyond both being and becoming which leads to what he has called ‘the abyss’. In keeping with Derrida’s treatment of chora, which is seen as the virginal nothingness and nonexistence where everything finds place and is inscribed. Chora is a third option outside of the Eternal and the sensible and as Derrida writes, it does not exist but it is not nothing. By accepting Derrida’s Chora, Taylor is led to speak of the impossibility of meaning, the ‘trace of a trace’, ‘the sign as a sign’, and ‘Serpentine Wandering’. Like Heidegger and Nietzsche, Taylor remains outside of what could be called nihilistic and has conceded that his writings can and are read ‘spiritually’.

            In Disfiguring: Art, Architecture, Religion Taylor offers A/theoaesthetics as a way to approach art and theology for our contemporary period. It is a negotiation between theism and atheism and any dogmatism of thought. He pits Barthian transcendence against Altizerian extinction of God into radical immanence to find that the two are alike in their easy affirmations and conclusions. He finds that they are also placing the divine-Barth locates a Kingdom of God as afar and transcendent and Altizer places the Kingdom as present but Taylor wishes to unlocate the sacred. An aphorism that summarizes much of Taylor’s thought is neither/nor and writes “The unavoidable void, which neither is nor is not, must be rendered by a figuring that is a disfiguring…disfiguration uses figure against figure to figure what cannot be figured.”[1] This disfiguring creates form of critique to view modern and contemporary art. Abstract art and modern architecture he likens to Barth in its seeking of purity a la Mondrian. Like that Kingdom placed afar, abstract art and modern architecture is seen as an attempt to transcend history and sense. Pop art and postmodern architecture on the other hand like Altizer embeds itself in the doctrine of immanence in part characterized by Warholian omnipresent and homogeneous modern commercial product. Perhaps the strongest critique of abstract art from Taylor lies in what he calls its accompanying ‘Reaganesque hollowness’ and social conservativism that could be interpreted in strengthening psychological and cultural retreats to fundamentalism.

            Taylor represents just one critique and interpretation of abstract art and while it brings with it its own strengths, it can reveal an interior weakness in its seemingly awkward silence on other theologians’ appraisals. One can point to the contrasting points made by Harold Rosenberg and Hans Kung in regards to abstract movements. Rosenberg on the one hand cites that secularized persons are left unaided by psychologically inaccessible abstract works and modern art is unable to provide for their ‘inner nourishment’. On the other hand, there lies the critique of Catholic priest and theologian Hans Kung, who wrote that when the meaning of the divine has been shattered, meaninglessness can pervade all of the human experience. Nevertheless, Kung finds that the meaningless reflected through modern art can bear its own meaning in the interior imaginative life of an artist and the larger culture. This human existential leap is near that of what Taylor speaks at is hinted at in his quotation of Maurice Blanchot: “Art is not religion…But in the time of distress, which is ours, an age when the gods are missing…art is justified, for it is the intimacy of this distress: the effort to represent through images the fallacy of imagery and eventually the ungraspable, forgotten truth that lies behind this error.” The erring imagination that rises from modern iconoclasm draws Taylor towards Kung but without bringing other theologians into purview, his own stance can be felt as historically afloat and reflect the same abstracted sensibilities he seeks to criticize. As Gregory D. Alles writes, “Taylor’s account dismisses at the very beginning almost all other work in the study of art, architecture, and religion…The problem is that it allows Taylor to write in a virtual theological vacuum.”[2]

Alles brings other criticism to Taylor including his narrow and reductive examination of selected arts and artists. This, Alles points out, is a preferential examination of ‘high art’ hailing from Europe and America and neglects often other cultural voices. In this narrowing, he also conveniently avoids difficultly of artists that use explicitly religious art such as Chagall, Dali, and Warhol’s religious series. But Taylor is not only overly selective in which art he allows into his discussion. His predilection for Kierkegaard, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida is clear and Alles and other discerning readers may wonder what Taylor would make of an analysis that included Wittgenstein, Foucault, Tillich, and Kung.

            Taylor is useful in his ability to draw many types of art into discussion including currency, architecture, body art, fashion, and emergent web technology as art. In terms of fashion, he details how the industry has literally draped our flesh in the rent and rending symbols of globalized culture both shattered and clastic. We embody in our chosen disguises the sentiments of Yeat’s The Second Coming “things fall apart; the center cannot hold.” Taylor’s critique of fashion can shed light onto the post-colonial theology of our contemporary period. Just as justice grows and sheds its straightjacket of Empire, our religions’ theologies have burst the same seams that attempt to bind (religare) us.

            Taylor also offers to the Process theologies which are influencing contemporary religious thought. In his evaluation of web technologies as another example of art, he describes their parallel, non-hierarchical structure and existence in co-creative feedback loops. It is a fully empowering dialectic that subverts traditional subject/object dichotomies. While everything and everyone is enmeshed in the Web, there is infinite possibility within the finite structure. Endless shifting and ethereality of the web shapes and empowers to shape just as Whitehead explained our determining God as equally as God determined creation.

His A/theoaesthetic acts to address our cultural/theological/aesthetic situation as a form of critique but it also offers itself as a positive approach to equip for novel progressive thought and creation. He writes that it is an education that at once subverts traditional theoaesthetics but it remains an affirmation towards the project of finding inroads between art and theology. It does so by rejecting transcendent spirituality while not falling into the disrepair of nihilistic resignation. It is a discipline that is also an ethic of humbling relation to the non-limited Other. Hearkening back to Kierkegaard’s angst-ridden Christianity, he utilizes the Kierkegaardian ‘double movement’ to represent the negotiation of a religion that is once void of salvation but remains unresigned. Its is an ethic towards art and theology that “requires us to linger with the negative by forever resisting the repression that structures inevitably inflict. Since repression eternally returns, the struggle of resistance is endless.”[3]

            Thus A/theoaesthetics represents itself as a form of creative iconoclasm. At once it dons and celebrates the image as its only possibility and assails its irreference over a void and abyss. Just as Heidegger’s destruction was established in a constructed framework and served to strengthen life’s possibility and shore up against nullity, A/theoaesthetics is constructive and positive. It serves to consider again Anselm Keifer whose work in ash disappears in invisibility, consumed in and consuming in grey. Its enigma rises in phoenix like triumph as its vacuity pulls from us/invites us to excitation of spirit to fill that very vacuum. Taylor’s A/theoaesthetic as deconstruction is not “a destructive attack on valued traditions and institutions, [rather] deconstruction is a sympathetic diagnosis of pervasive symptoms of psychological insecurities and social uncertainty we are inclined to overlook or conceal.”[4]              

            Reading Taylor in conversation with other Christian thinkers including Kierkegaard can render benefits to both. Jean-Luc Marion in addressing love and non-being can be well coupled with Taylor’s appeal to Baudrillard’s simulacra and in their call to intentionality towards the other. In this spirit, Taylor quotes Eliot’s Little Gidding: “We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”[5] Our experience of and existence with art in an age where God’s Being is being trumped by Agape love calls for heightened authenticity that can establish a perpetually humble negotiation with alterity and a continual reflection on self that defies easy definition-in architect Bernard Tschumi’s words, “masks hide other masks”.

A/theoaesthetics can be likened to a new narration of the long road to Emmaus where the Stranger remains along with us and where the bread is never broken in epiphany, what does remain is Derrida’s ‘wounded word’. The Emmaus Road is an erring, Serpantine Wandering that while mournful, calls one to travel perpetually akin to Mircea Eliade’s eternal return. This returning is an inward and outgoing process that as Nietzsche stated will determine our character. Will we respond with a ‘yes’ to the Stranger accompanying us who offers only questions and no answer?

Mark C Taylor has yet to make his name known and his influence felt within the mainstream Christian consciousness. However, his body of work can serve a vital function in the rounding out of the discussion between art and theology. To the non-academic initiated, he also brings a renewing air to the considerations to the life of faith and considerate religious life. First, he speaks to a kenosis that all humanity is involved in. To engage in the humbling powerless of our art is to find a graceful existence that rests in the Emmaus Road. It also opens the dialogue to those of any faith or non-faith. To those who have been alienated by previous onto-theological traditions and former religious frames for theoaesthetics, he offers an open place where there is always room for more at the table. In what some could see a cross negating and deleting our power and possibility, he sees triumph and power. In our errant sojourning we still remain the codehackers, the sculptors, the dancers co-creating our world playfully suspended over the abyss.  

Bibliography

Alles, Gregory D. “A Book Review of Disfiguring: Art, Architecture, Religion “Journal   
          of the American Academy of Religion”, 64 number 1 Spring 1996

Eliot, T.S. “Little Gidding” in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 4^th Ed. (W.W.
          Norton and Co., 1979)

Mark C. Taylor, Mark C. Hiding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997)

Taylor, Mark C. Disfiguring: Art, Architecture, Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago
          Press, 1992)