Elzbieta Wolicka - THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE: FLARE-UP POINTS

The place of art in the field reserved for religious worship, apart from having its long ?famous or nor so famous - history in European culture, is still calling for thorough re?appraisal and a renewed definition, especially nowadays, in conditions of bitter competi?tion from the new trends in art, trends which as a rule tend to break away from the framework of the hitherto accepted standards and habits extant in church patronage and the religious recipient. However, hedged with the traditional requirements and institutionally protected but deprived of a refreshing element of the novelty and discov?ery proper to creative art, the sacred is liable to become alienated from cultural life, ossi?fied in a set of anachronistic forms, and isolated in its enclave of a venerable "museum of ritual" that is undecipherable for the contemporary mentality and remote from its social realities.

The nova et vetera, the tension between invention and tradition, innovation and continuation, permeates the entire history of Christian culture and determines its vitality. But never before, it seems, has this tension assumed as drastic a form of conflict, at least to the moment when it became clear that the role of sacred art could not be reduced to that of ornamentation merely and of a didactic instrument, a visual aid, in religious instruction and the permanent registration in the religious community's collective memory of the representations of sacred history and doctrine. This narrow understanding of its tasks within the liturgical space has been abandoned by the official teaching of the Church. The documents of the Second Vatican Council and papal statements, especially those made by John Paul II, have established " new foundations for the relation of the Church to the world and to contemporary culture, hence also to art . . .. The Church is entering a new phase in her relationship with culture and the arts, a relation of partnership, freedom and dialogue," (John Paul II, Address to artists and journalists, Munich, 19 November, 1980).

However, this "new stage" is bringing a spate of new dilemmas and problems. The aggiornamento announced in the Constitution Gaudium et Spes and the Church's poli?cy of inculturation are today coming up against the phenomenon of the desacralisation of art and culture, a special sensitivity in the artists for personal autonomy and freedom in the sphere of their own creative work, and a specific understanding and experience of the sacred which, searching for expression through new artistic forms, challenges the traditional forms of representation, iconographic schemes and habitual depiction and inter?pretation of religious truths.

Passing over (though certainly not neglecting) practical questions such as the difficul?ties of communication between the Church's patronage and the artists, and also between the recipients of the arts, I shall try to list those factors which seem to be the most relevant, and which appear to be marking out the hotline for the debate on the shape of reli?gious art, or on the place of art in the religious universe and the space of religious cult.

The sources of the controversy are latent principally in the sphere of sensitivity, the per?ceptivity for the fundamental values: those that the teaching of the Church treats as pri?orities in its mission, and those that are recognised and subscribed to by artists in their cre?ative work and even in their private life. Comparing the statements made by John Paul II, for instance, to artists, with the opinions of the artists (as expressed, for example, in the distinguished quarterly, "Kunst and Kirche"), a striking disparity may be observed between the two orientations, which is responsible for the "dialogue", not only the declared one but also the one that is being accomplished in practice but not without difficulties, following a path that is hardly free of conflict, while the "historical compromises" thereby achieved, although they may not be denied a certain distinction, are nevertheless still provisional and the exception rather than the rule. Perhaps it will not be possible to attain much more - at least for the time being - over and above the registration of suc?cessive series of trial and error with the occasional happy reaching of solutions that satisfy both parties. However it might be worth while keeping a current record of what might be learned from one's mistakes, what enables successful solutions to be achieved, and what inspires hope of future progress.

The first barrier separating off contemporary art from the sphere of the sacred is its untamed habit of experimentation and pursuit of novelty. The technological revolution that has come to dominate the workshops of artists, too, often makes fascination for the mater?ial and means, and juggling about with it become an end in itself for them, and the testing out of the available possibilities of achieving artistic effects may thus become something more relevant than the achievement of the values that are overriding with respect to those that have hitherto been regarded as instrumental. In extreme cases this fascination many a time gives rise to pretentious mediocrity: the showing off of skills of using unconventional means for artistic creation, technical ingenuity and playing around with material without any clear intentional goal. " The medium itself becomes the mes?sage" - Marshal McLuhan's dictum is applicable in a high degree to religious art.

The second barrier, more crucial than that of technological illusionism but associated with it, is diffidence with respect to values recognised as traditional and claiming the sta?tus of absolute values. This is a lack of confidence shared by the artists and the recipi?ents of their art, who are equally unsure as to what to base their criteria for assessment on and ready to acknowledge these criteria as a result of arbitrary convention, a temporal and circumstantial agreement as to the rules of the game which may be replaced by other rules at any time. A programmed anti-aestheticism and the psycho-sociological value indices together with fashion, random occurrence and the vogue for experimen?tation, probing the sub-conscious and individual biographies, as well as the idiosyncratic "involvement" of art which impels it to compete with the mass media of communica?tion and propaganda - all these have made the world of values in modern art come to be ridden with the same relativism that is gnawing into public and private morality, politics and social relations on an unprecedented scale. This has given rise to a paradoxical situ?ation. The liberated artist, who treats the slightest hint of any service that might be ren?dered by art as a grave insult, at the same time acquiesces with remarkable docility to the changing dictates of fashion, ideology, and the market mechanisms of supply and demand. In such a situation the self-defensive holding fast by the Church's patronage sys?tem to the traditional forms, contents and means in religious art may at times seem the only effective remedy against uncertainty and the chaotic fluctuation of taste, and against a specific axiological agnosticism that is threatening to dilute the sacred as an absolute and transcendent value with respect to cultural perturbations.

Let us add a third factor, one that questions the reconciliation of art to the sacred as protected by the Church institutions. This is a tendency to display a non-denomi?national form of religion, challenging the dogmatic formulae of traditional doctrine and searching for "signs of transcendence" outside the officially recognised forms of worship, ethical norms and methods of representation. The rift with tradition is much more far ?reaching in this instance than just the querying of the iconographic models or styles hither?to approved of by the Church patron and the mass recipient. It involves the very ele?ment of the sacred itself, which art is to express and in its own way make present; and it goes down into the layers of the symbolic imagination that fashions the basic arche?types of cultural awareness. It is this awareness that nowadays is characterised by a particular ambivalence that causes what Tadeusz Chrzanowski has called a "symbolic dadaism". The art created in this condition of awareness, which dissociates itself from all the conventions inherited from the past upheld by the conservative habits of the clergy and congregations that constitute the religious clientele, moves about in a no ?man's land that has not been settled by any models or delineated by any standards, for?mal, iconographic, doctrinal, or axiological. Such art will not acknowledge any sort of "orthodoxy". Not only does it relinquish the canons, but also any other rules different from those which it itself has set up. It refers back to its own sources of creativity understood in a radically autonomous way, in a spirit of demiurgic liberty. In its propensity for contestation and contention it becomes provocative, perverse, even blasphemous. In its tendency to disclose the stereotypes of "bourgeois piety" and to ridicule the mediocrity of the "sugar-candy" religious art it goes as far as iconoclasm and an attitude that is basically a contradiction of the sacred. On the other hand in its quest for a hierophany it resorts to the esoteric and a supra-real symbolism of the "speaking forms" that is either remote from any association with revealed religion, or else transposes the motifs and themes of traditional religious representation in a completely arbitrary manner, often synthetically, often with the application of pastiche, as a rule heavily impregnated with the artist's own subjective experiences.

Is there, then, any room left in the panorama of contemporary art for a religious art that would be capable of transmitting something of the authentic spirit of religion without destroying the canonical order of values proper to religion, but at the same time staying faithful to its own inventive independence?

One might think that the religious exploration being conducted now by art is directed first and foremost towards the search - often by means of a groping about in the dark - for new forms of witness. The artist has become more aware of his subjectivity than he has ever been before, as a creator and as a believer, and also as a member of and spokesman for the community in which he lives and to which he presents his work. He often experiences this subjectivity in a dramatic way: as a duty to "wake the somnolent", to expose, shock, and provoke. His understanding of art as a carrier of religious subject matter will not permit him to let it become a "ready comfort pill", a therapeutic means of restoring people's sense of well-being. Perhaps more than ever, too, he is aware of his prophetic mission and that is why he is not too keen to submit to the pressures of the majority opinion and the dictatorship exerted by a patron who should turn out to be pli?able with respect to the mediocre tastes and habits of the mass recipients. The artist puts up a defence against any compromise that would want to adapt his work to the "' mean average", he fights against any attempt to make his art prim and proper, or to limit his right to protest, to expose the simple-minded hypocrisy he suspects all models and norms of that are too polite, too agreeable, bereft of any vestige of contradiction.

"In today's art . . . man is liberated of the entire envelope of romanticism that sur?rounds him. He is depicted in - as the saying goes - his actual and no beautified reali?ty. This takes place in contemporary art also as a result of the showing of derangement and frenzy, anxiety, absurdity and incongruity, and of the image of a caricature world and history. It is often associated with the rejection of all taboos. . . .

"Literature, the theatre, film and the visual arts today regard themselves to a large extent as forms of criticism, protest and opposition, accusations against what is going on. Beauty appears to be a category undergoing a process of expulsion from art in favour of the presentation of man with all his negative aspects, all his contradictions, his wan?dering about in a closed compartment without any means of escape, his lack of any kind of sense. This seems to be the current Ecce homo. The 'sound world' is becoming the object of ridicule and the butt of cynicism.. . . . From the point of view of the Christian Church and religion there are no objections to the diverse forms of representation.. . . Is the negative mirror of today's art not becoming an end in itself? Does it not lead to a whetting of the relish for evil, to the Schadenfreude that delights in destruction and downfall, to cynicism and the abuse of man's dignity?" (John Paul II, Address to artists and journalists, Munich, 19 November, 1980).

The stress being put on individual testimony, which is to be the measure of a work's authenticity - even if it does not become engrossed in a one-sided negation and endeavours to make accessible that which is `beyond expression' and to touch the mysterious reality of religion - nevertheless still makes it more difficult for such testimo?ny to be incorporated into sacred space and the universe of the language of liturgy. To put it more simply, it establishes a barrier to the universalism to which all religious lan?guage aspires. It is here that perhaps the critical point of inflammation lies in the controversy between the individualised language of contemporary art and the lan?guage of the Church, to which art is to contribute the indispensable element of symbolic representation and to evoke the sacred:

Today we have replaced the universalism of language by the effectiveness of a statement in the sociological and pragmatic or psychological sense. The trouble involved in the restoration of the universal or rather the transcendental in what is religious is a mutual ailment shared by contemporary art alongside modern philosophy, which is also arduously searching for an adequate expression for intuition and experiences that do not fit into the framework of scientific perception and extend beyond the categories of `positive knowledge', but that no longer qualify for expression or interpretation through the formulae of the old systems of speculative metaphysics. Both art and philosophy must therefore in a way `go back to the beginning', retrieving the origins of their own lan?guage in human experience, individual and universal.

The acid test for the authenticity of the language of religious art should be its simultaneously prophetic and liturgical nature. This paradoxical objective, making manifest that which is thoroughly personal, concrete and `particular' individually, geo?graphically and historically, alongside that which is universal and transcendent, can best be accomplished by the language of symbolism proper to art. I shall close with one more quotation from John Paul II, who has provided a discerning formulation of this task, directing his appeal to the inventive sensitivity that is in artists:

"Art is the experience of universality. It may not be merely an object or a means. It is the original word in the sense that it comes as the first word and is to be found as the basis of every other word. It is the word of the beginning that profoundly probes the fun?damental and ultimate sense of life, passing beyond the directness of experience. It is the perception, expressed through lines and images and sounds, of symbols by which the mind may recognise the fleeting reflections of the mystery of life transcending a barrier that the mind itself cannot cross; art is the opening up to the depth, the greatness, and the unfathomable nature of existence. These are the paths that open up man to the mystery and express that restlessness in him that it is impossible to bring forth by other means. Thus art has within it something of religion 4vhen it leads man to become aware of the restless?ness that is so deeply rooted in his nature and that neither science with its objective for?malism nor technology with its tendency to prescribe programmes safeguarded against error are able to satisfy. . . . Art is not a road to the sub-conscious, but to an even greater awareness; it opens up man to himself and makes him more human. And that is why art is also a form of education and training, the school of the most supreme humanity. . . . Art is, in its own way, a revelation of transcendence."

(Meeting with representatives of art and culture, Venice, 16 June, 1985). February, 1991>