Surrealism and the Sacred: Celia Rabinovitch

You wrote “The pursuit of the numinous emotion was central to modern artists for whom traditional religions and philosophies were bankrupt.” This seems a fair enough statement, but what could you say about modern art itself now six or seven decades later? Is modern art itself bankrupt? Some of us are so burned out on everything, even modern art.

We have to make the distinction between modern and contemporary art.

A Matisse, or De Chirico painting, a Wallace Stevens or Ginsburg poem, a Borges story still have the power to move us because they embody the artist’s vitality, an authentic feeling of life. These artists were not apologists for sincerity, striving for something beyond reach. Contemporary art rarely pursues authenticity. The universities promote cleverness, irony, and conceptualism. Once you get the message you hang up the phone. Who needs art that is a message?

People are burnt out on the sense that they have to strive to get it, and when they do — so what. There is a lot of hype in the art world — it has become like the music world, a youth cult that encourages artists to seek celebrity first…

I’m not talking about an art that has to enhance or beautify life. Even curators agree that fewer people go to museums and galleries because the layering of theory discourages them. People are burnt out on the sense that they have to strive to get it, and when they do — so what. There is a lot of hype in the art world — it has become like the music world, a youth cult that encourages artists to seek celebrity first — we have spawned a culture of self-reflexive dandies. Universities are training students to be artists, rather than to make art. That’s like pretending to be a lover rather than making love.

In your words, “… the unique state of mind embodied in surrealist art can be described by the language of insight for which the Chinese or Japanese artist developed a vocabulary many years before one developed in Europe.” Why do you think it took the West so long to catch up with this Eastern “language of insight” ?

The Eastern notion of self-realization, and the Western collectively defined notion of the sacred oppose each other. Since Christianity, nothing in the Western religious worldview encouraged personal realization. The Biblical tradition was narrative; it did not develop from lyrical, internal states of mind — in the West these are linked to devotional literature. Personal revelation or a direct experience of the holy was heresy according to the Catholic Church, which persecuted first the Cathars, then Francis of Assisi, then Luther. Meditative practices in the west implied extreme forms of devotion, such as denial and penitence. Those who had a personal vision were often punished as heretics, as was Francis of Assisi for his belief that one can experience God directly through nature, that creation was sacred. St. Francis’ vision turned Italian Renaissance artists and the 17th century Dutch painters towards a romance with space and nature. Others such as Meister Eckhart or Jakob Böehme lived on the spurious fringes of Christian thought.

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