Guggenheim Forum Reader 1

The Guggenheim Forum Reader

Domenick Ammirati, editor

contents

The Spiritual (Re)turn

Featuring Krista Tippet, Huma Bhabha, Louis A. Ruprecht Jr., and Mark C. Taylor

Between the Over and Under-Designed

Featuring Aric Chen, Sarah Herda, Arjo Klamer, and Ellen Lupton

Beyond Material Worth

Featuring Peter G. Brown, Martha Buskirk, Juliet Schor, and Simran Sethi

On Repeat

Featuring Simon During, Drew Daniel, John Malpede, and Amy Taubin

Satire, Critique, Provocation, Propaganda

Featuring Julian Stallabrass, Francisco Goldman, Jennie Hirsh, and Martha Rosler

Word for Word

Featuring Robert Lane Greene, N. Katherine Hayles, Anthony Pym, and Biljana Scott

Get Real

Featuring Alison Goddard, Elizabeth Grosz, Ian Hacking, and Douglas Hofstadter

The Name Game

Featuring Mark Abley, Robert Jones, Frank Nuessel, and Ben Zimmer

The Greater Good

Featuring Lynne Soraya, Meghan Falvey, G. Anthony Gorry, and Peggy Mason

Copyright

INTRODUCTION

Domenick Ammiratti

The Guggenheim Forum began in 2009 with modest means and immodest goals: to organize online-only discussions among far-flung groups of experts from widely varying fields to accompany New York major exhibitions, sparking conversation with and among the public. Each Forum takes place over one week and includes a one-hour live chat among panelists (not included in this volume). The roster of participants has included luminaries from the fields of art, art history, philosophy, critical theory, cognitive science, sociology, economics, journalism, and more. A full list appears below. We owe them our deepest thanks.

The Forum also extends its great appreciation to the museum’s Curatorial Department, in particular to Nancy Specter, Deputy Director and Jennifer and David Stockman Chief Curator, for their unwavering support for the program.

In its first four years, the Guggenheim Forum has taken up a wide variety of subjects. In the volume that follows, you will find debates of the importance of design in contemporary life; the place spirituality might play in today’s art; the question of how one determines value; the use of repetition in art; the intricate relationship between art and politics; the central role of translation in a globalized context; the nature of reality; the question of what goes into making a good name; and the roots and societal functions of altruism. Each Forum includes three rounds of exchange among the participants, guided by a moderator.

This first, text-based collection of Forum dialogues may well look very different from those that come after, however: later this year, the museum will launch a redesigned Forum section of its website with new capacities for video and other innovations. We hope that as we grow you will continue to be a part of the conversation.

The Spiritual (Re)turn

October 19–23, 2009

For vanguard artists of the early twentieth century like Vasily Kandinsky, spirituality was not only a key part of their worldview but also a great influence on their art. In contemporary art, spirituality has been noticeably absent from the cutting edge. Do we see signs of the tide shifting back today?

Participants

Moderator

Krista Tippett created and hosts the Peabody-award-winning public-radio program Speaking of Faith, which provides a new model for conversation about religion, meaning, and ethics in modern life. She is the author of Speaking of Faith and the forthcoming Einstein's God.

Panelist

Artist Huma Bhabha earned a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from Columbia University. She was awarded the 2008 Emerging Artist Award from the Aldrich Museum of Art. Her work has recently appeared in After Nature at the New Museum, New York, and in the 7th Gwangju Biennial, Gwangju, South Korea (both 2008).

Panelist

Louis A. Ruprecht Jr. is William M. Suttles Chair of Religious Studies at Georgia State University. The author of six books and a staff writer for the online magazine Religion Dispatches, Ruprecht is currently researching the role of religion in the development of the modern museum.

Panelist

Mark C. Taylor is Chair of the Department of Religion and co-director of the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life at Columbia University. He is the author of more than twenty-five books, several of which are on art and architecture.

Session 1

Moderator: Krista Tippett

It’s exciting to begin this conversation. The spiritual sensibility of Vasily Kandinsky is our jumping-off point—Kandinsky, who declared that art belongs to the spiritual life and is one of its mightiest elements. In his treatise Concerning the Spiritual in Art, he evocatively described a relationship between color, form, and the soul; between the inner necessity of the artist and the spiritual evolution of humanity. Kandinsky was no apologist for religion per se. He saw in much of religion the same kind of externally directed, narrowly literal materialism that he rejected in art. Yet he also saw a vital correlation between spiritual awareness and artistic power. Every work of art, he wrote, is the child of its age. But art that is only a child of its age, with no power to shape the future, he called barren. He admired a saying that the duty of the artist is to send light into the darkness of men’s souls.

I hear an intriguing echo of these sentiments—and one that finds expression in an art that explores human darkness—in an observation Huma Bhabha has made about her concern for the eternal themes of war, colonialism, and displacement and the landscapes of human debris she creates from humble, discarded materials. Does the world of contemporary art have the vocabulary to probe the spiritual aspect (in Kandinsky’s sense of the notion) of this kind of artwork and others? Can we here, in this Forum, propose fresh, challenging language and concepts for such efforts?

I also wonder if we might take on the relatively recent yet culturally pervasive assumption of inherent discord between the intellectual and aesthetic impulses of art and religion. Mark Taylor has long analyzed the hostility between modern art and prominent religious strains in American life that developed in recent decades. Disdain has moved in both directions. But what would happen if that dynamic were turned inside out? Might a robust, creative spiritual discourse in art be a force in what Mark has perceived as an ongoing expansion of the very meaning of religion?

From my own vantage point, I see a kind of dialectic unfolding. A shrill and politicized religiosity bubbled to the surface of global culture after a century in which the religious impulse was progressively compartmentalized in every sphere. But now a new, lived discourse in many disciplines—from education to law to medicine and science—has begun taking account of the reality that reason and spirit synergistically form human lives and societies. Louis Ruprecht has provocatively countered Carl Sagan’s line that science is the new religion with the proposal that art is the new religion. He added, We in the Humanities and Sciences alike should remember to (re)turn to the Arts as we continue to try to imagine . . . new ways to engage the Sciences and the Humanities in common enterprises—whether they be political, ethical, or aesthetic.

I look forward to hearing more about these and other insights of our panelists. How might an intellectual, spiritual, and aesthetic synthesis à la Kandinsky look in the contemporary world? Is that possible, or even desirable?

PANELIST

Huma Bhabha

I don’t think the kind of spiritual interest we see Kandinsky propounding ever went away, but it has definitely gone underground—underground in the sense that it is a subject that is rarely discussed in the art world and often avoided. This is the case even though, from the artist’s point of view, or more specifically, in the artist’s process, the spiritual is a profound component. In my own studio practice, I try to maintain a state of mind that balances concentration, confidence, humility, etc.—the enlightened artisan state of mind, which encourages self-awareness and naturally connects to spirituality on a very direct and practical level.

Spirituality’s relationship to the production of art is a largely ignored subject, for many reasons. One of the most likely is the political potential that spirituality possesses. Clarity and awareness within oneself can obviously lead to clarity and awareness in (and for) the world around us. In Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky quotes Madame Blavatsky as writing, The Earth will be a heaven in the twenty-first century in comparison with what it is now. Unfortunately, the start of the twenty-first century is not making Madame Blavatsky’s prediction look likely to happen.

With the recent global economic meltdown and its subsequent economic impact on the art world, maybe the dialogue will loosen up; as business slows, maybe artists will feel more comfortable talking about spirituality without hiding behind irony. The kind of radical irony that also functions on a spiritual level began with the most obvious examples in the work of Duchamp and goes right through Rauschenberg, Johns, and Warhol, up to the gravel piles of Robert Smithson. The alchemy of transforming supposedly nonartistic materials or images such as toilets and soup cans into high art has become academic and hollow in many cases, entirely devoid of any spiritual content.

Maybe the fact that one of Warhol’s last major bodies of work was a series based on the Last Supper is a portent of or model for art’s near future. The positive spirituality that artists like Kandinsky, Malevich, and many others expressed through abstraction could not find a moment more potentially like a tipping point than the current one. The spiritual might just find it an ideal time to come out of its hiding in artists’ studios and regain centrality in the ongoing discourse of contemporary art.

PANELIST

Louis A. Ruprecht Jr.

Like Krista, I began my reflections with Kandinsky. I was mesmerized by the exhibition at the Guggenheim, stunned by the luxurious interplay of color and form (the two weapons, he says, that painting has at its disposal). So I picked up a copy of Concerning the Spiritual in Art and began to read.

The book has been reprinted by the Museum of Fine Art, Boston, in a series called artWorks. The rationale for the series was explained like this: For as long as there has been art, there has been discussion about art.

But then I read the next sentence: Over the past two centuries . . .

Art is only two hundred years old; that is the strange idea I would like to use as my point of entry into this forum.

The idea goes something like this: I gaze upon a Greek statue in a museum today, and I see it as art. I do not see it as religion, though in most cases it was originally placed in a temple. What accounts for this incredible shift in modern vision, the subtle detachment of art from religion?

For the past five years, I have been exploring that question in a unique (and newly popular) location: the Secret Archives of the Vatican Library. I have found surprising records for the Vatican’s first Museo Profano, which opened to a select public as early as 1767, fully a generation before similar classical art museums emerged in northern Europe. Rome, it turns out, is a more important city than Paris or London for understanding the emergence of modern art.

Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768), the father of modern art history, was directly involved in the creation of this public (and profane) museum in the otherwise very private Vatican Library. He was instrumental in the creation of the modern conception of art and the artist, too. In Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Sculpture and Painting, he argued for what he called the noble simplicity and quiet grandeur of Greek art, juxtaposing this with Baroque bad taste.

The cultivation of good taste was equivalent to the cultivation of a beautiful soul, in Winckelmann’s brave new world. It was a spiritual as well as a moral practice, and the artist was a new kind of priest.

It is easy to miss the extent of Winckelmann’s achievement, both as a curator and as a writer. His profane museum was destined to trump the sacred collections also housed in the Vatican Library. He set in motion a sea of forces that resulted in the detachment of the Vatican Museums from the Library, images from texts, and modern art from religion.

But this is not a story of the secularization of Greek art, nor of art more generally. Rather, the story of the emergence of modern art is the story of the dispersion of religion into new forms and new institutions. Religion is now housed in novel places, like the modern university and the modern museum.

And that is the world in which both Kandinsky’s challenge and our forum make sense.

PANELIST

Mark C. Taylor

I would like to begin by saying how delighted I am to participate in this exchange. It is particularly appropriate for the Guggenheim’s fiftieth anniversary to be marked by this marvelous exhibition of Kandinsky’s work. Moreover, the topic of the forum is completely appropriate. It was Hilla Rebay’s appreciation of the spiritual in Kandinsky’s art that led her to urge Solomon Guggenheim to make it the center of the museum’s collection.

As we begin our conversation, I would like to clarify one point that Krista made in her opening remarks. I have not argued that there is a hostility between modern art and prominent strains in American life; to the contrary, I think modern religion and art are inextricably entwined with twentieth-century American life. This line of analysis, however, presupposes a more expansive notion of religion than most people have. Religion is not restricted to what goes on in churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques; rather, there is a religious dimension to all of life. Indeed, so-called secularism in the West is, in fact, a religious phenomenon that evolves from traditional Judaism and Christianity. In the course of Western history, God disappears in two opposite ways: either God becomes so transcendent that he is completely removed from the world, or the divine becomes so immanent that there is no difference between the sacred and the profane. Within a theological trajectory that can be traced from Nietzsche through Hegel and other romantics like Schleiermacher, Wordsworth, and Coleridge to Luther, the doctrine of divine incarnation ushers in the sacralization of the world, which is at the same time the profanation of the sacred. To miss the sacred shadow of the secular is to misunderstand our era.

During the latter half of the twentieth-century, the commodification, corporatization, and financialization of art seem to have made its spiritual components a distant memory. But the spiritual traditions that were so important for Kandinsky and his peers—the vision of Mondrian, too, was informed by Theosophy, for example—have continued to influence important artists. Joseph Beuys was committed to Anthroposophy, which grew out of Theosophy. Celtic spirituality pervades the work of Mathew Barney, and James Turrell’s vision has been decisively shaped by his Quaker heritage as well as his appreciation for Native American spiritual traditions. And Frank Lloyd Wright’s spiritual proclivities were an important factor in his selection to be the architect of the New York Guggenheim.

With the collapse of global financial markets and the implosion of hedge funds and private-equity companies created to speculate in art, I suspect the work of artists whose work is sensitive to the spiritual dimensions of experience will become increasingly popular. Though Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst may continue to attract interest, their work is symptomatic of the age that is now past. Puppy dogs, balloons, dead sharks, and diamond-studded skulls will give way to art that probes deeply as we head into a more sober period of enormous challenges and broad reassessment of social, cultural, and political values. Art’s role will be to help us understand our recent excesses critically and imagine alternative futures toward which we might move.

Session 2

Moderator

Krista Tippett

So far we all seem to agree that art and religion, artistic creation and the human spirit, are inextricably linked, as Mark puts it, and that this never ceased to be the case; rather, in Huma’s helpful phrasing, the relationship went underground in the twentieth century. I’m very struck by Louis’s image of standing before a Greek statue seeing art when its original observers probably saw religion. At stake, as you all point out, are our very definitions of art and, perhaps more pointedly, of religion.

Moving forward, it may be less interesting to trace why the link between religion and art became invisible than to explore more spacious definitions of art and religion. The intriguing question you’ve all suggested is not how religion and art lost sight of each other but of what is essential that each realm lost sight of in itself. Mark speaks of the sacralization of the world and the profanization of the sacred at the core of modern Western culture and Louis of the emergence of modern art as a story of the dispersion of religion into new forms and new institutions. Where would all of you have us look for illustrations of the unnamed, perhaps unconscious interplay between art and religion in the present, and what do you see there?

On another note, I’m fascinated that both Huma and Mark bring the economic crisis into this discussion. Could we flesh out how a new vision of the intersection of art and religion might address our historical