The present contribution to the discussion aims to challenge that assumed secularism of institutional art history—what Sally M. Promey describes as the “secularlization theory of modernity” which contends that “modernism necessarily leads to religion’s decline, and the secular and the religious will not coexist in the modern world,”15 and what Hans Belting labels the “paradigm of art history.”16 My study aims to resist the pervasive skepticism when it comes to religion as a topic of discussion in the academy, to move beyond our contemporary and unhelpful model of the secular left (militant atheism) and evangelical right (dogmatic theism), and to come to terms with faith as an irrecusable part of the fabric of the social. More specifically, my purpose is to speculate on the place of the sacred in contemporary visual culture, and, in doing so, to consider the key features of any contemporary theological aesthetics—that it be revelatory and transformative. Bill Viola’s art, I shall argue, provokes the possibility of just such theological reflection.
Fortunately, a much welcome new publication, ReVisioning: Critical Methods of Seeing Christianity in the History of Art, edited by historians James Romaine and Linda Stratford, brings together more than a dozen essays by both emerging and established scholars, which collectively seek to expand the discourse on Christianity in the history of art, in part by challenging the equation of modernism with secularism as a methodological approach to the writing of art history. Romaine writes in the book’s Introduction:
The prevailing narrative of art history is one that charts a movement from the sacred to the secular, progressing out of past historical periods in which works of art were produced to reveal, embrace, and glorify the divine and toward a modern conception of art as materialist and a more recent emphasis on social context. In fact, for many art historians this secularization of art is not only a narrative within the history of art; it has been the narrative of art history as an academic field. Some interpretations of twentieth and twentieth-first century art not only insist on equating modernism with secularism but also describe the erasure of all mention of spiritual presence from the scholarly discourse as a triumph for the field of art history.17
The present study seeks to contest that narrative and to contribute to an emerging field that still lacks the methodological framework by which to honestly and meaningfully address art’s engagement with theology, or at the very least with a religious awareness that, as Dyrness put it, “slips away in the very effort to grasp it.” The theological framework I will engage here begins with the ancient tradition of apophatic, or negative, theology—God talk” (“theo”—“logy”) that seeks to describe God only in terms of what may not be said about God, what God is not. This is the topic of my second chapter. In the words of 9th-century mystic John the Scot Eriugena: “We do not know what God is. God Himself does not know what He is because He is not anything. Literally God is not, because He transcends being.”18
Chapter three will then go on to theorize this transcendence within the context of the Sublime,19 that which critic and philosopher Arthur Danto claims “rocked . . . [the] self-congratulatory culture of the Enlightenment.”20 It is in the presence of the sublime where we witness the straining of the mind at the edges of itself and at the borders of discursive reasoning, prompting a mode of reverence for the inexpressible, the unspeakable. And it is the technology of video, a medium freed from the usual spatio-temporal constraints of plastic art, that enables Bill Viola, David Jasper argues, to “negotiate these sacramental moments in crossings of space and time, breathless moments of eternity in which our being is both slowed and quickened . . .”21 In the sublime’s reemergence in the postmodern world, I shall argue, this very experience of disproportion between the mind’s conceptualizing power and an ungraspable complexity, serves as an analogue for or intuition of something else—the infinite, the divine—and thus the promises of transcendence.
From this acknowledgment of desire or hope or yearning, French postmodern thinkers—Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Luc Marion, among others—will have something to offer my argument, having themselves taken a “theological turn.” As such, Viola’s art will be considered here as a theological enterprise, located in a tradition that runs from the medieval and Early Christian apophatics to postmodern deconstructors. Using the high-tech apparatus of modern video—high speed film, high definition video, LCD and plasma screens, and sophisticated sound recording—American artist Bill Viola’s work has roots in the theological tradition of transcendent experience. All are put to use by the artist in ways that significantly challenge prevailing artistic traditions and return art to the power of the sublime, to an aesthetic of revelation, and to an inquiry into transcendence. In dealing with the idea of representing the invisible, Viola’s art converges, I suggest, with postmodern notions of the “unrepresentable.” Chapter four will consider a number of specific examples of Viola’s work in order to test the theological adequacy of the sublime as heuristic, chiefly within the context of contemporary postmodern culture, and to lay the groundwork for a theory and practice of an ethical sublime.
While the aesthetic sublime was introduced into 20th-century mainstream art theory and practice decades ago by the environmentally-scaled canvases of Abstract Expressionist painters and spiritual provocateurs such as Barnett Newman (author of “The Sublime is Now,” 1948) and Mark Rothko, modern video, as a time-based medium is especially suited to this aesthetic category. Yet Rothko may be instructive here, particularly in his theorizing about his floating fields of color, where nearly imperceptible shifts of tone, intensity and saturation are observable only in prolonged looking—as “gates” or doors through which the beholder might imaginatively leave the world of matter, and enter a realm of ultimacy: “I am interested only in expressing the basic human emotions,” he said, “tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on . . . The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them.”22 The impassioned language of “tragedy,” “ecstasy,” “agony,” and “bliss” is not unlike, as we will see, the emotionally descriptive language of Viola. James Elkins in his fascinating study, Pictures and Tears: A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings, confirms of Rothko: “. . . you may find yourself inside [the canvas].” “It is not hard to see why people say they are overwhelmed,” he continues: