Beyond Belief: Modern art and the religious imagination
National Gallery of Victoria, April 24 to July 26. Curated by Rosemary Crumlin
Review by Warren Brenninger
Zadok Perspectives Issue No. 61
Winter 1998

What is beyond belief? If belief offers the only entry into the beyond, then Rosemary Crumlin's exhibition seems to have more a sense of 'before' than 'beyond', as there is a scarcity of representations of explicit belief, especially as the works approach this end of the 20th century. In fact, The Age's Peter Timms deduced that the exhibition "documents the descent into decadence of the Judeo-Christian tradition".

Some reviewers have described the selection as eclectic, idiosyncratic or odd. In relation to those examples from the first half of the century, I found it pleasurable in its very unexpectedness. George Grosz's image of Hitler, for example, about to be consumed by his own miniature skeletal victims, Tanning's Guardian Angels of 1946, as well as works by Otto Dix, Remedios Varos, James Ensor, Emil Nolde, Georges Rouault and Kethe Kollwitz. All these left you wondering what shape 20th century art would be in today without the two world wars.

These works with their presence of the universal human obligation to respond to evil and suffering reveal, alarmingly, this precise absence in our own era. Kollwitz's works are almost sensed wrongly by us, the radical demands of the New Testament are visualised, but somehow in the confines of our own age they seem anachronistic and, at worst, melodramatic or patronising. When we compare her Pieta with Cindy Sherman's 'Madonna', we sense that certain kinds of responses are no longer considered viable.

The contemporary elevation of parody in art indicates our own deliberate distancing from those very roots which make religious art possible: real evil and real suffering and their corollaries of compassion and judgement. Cindy Sherman's work is indicative of a more recent adherence to impersonal, political deconstruction. Yet something similar is alluded to by George Grosz, who titled one of his works, "Beware of Him whose Eye is Cold". Though he was thinking of the evils of fascism, it could be applied critically to our own fixation with parody and irony.

The Stanley Spencers were as intriguing as ever, with his portly Christ in the wilderness reclining as if at a palace feast. The face in each was calm, devoid of any self-consciousness earned or proved through these endeavours. This series of works was one of only a few in the show that had a definite humour that extended even into the pictorial details and was not expressed as a form of mockery or denigration. On another wall was the equally genuine expression of Rouault, an unexpected inclusion from a surprisingly neglected modernist (though this experience of a truly religious vision, able to penetrate all aspects of social life, was contradicted at every turn.)

Further on in the exhibition one passes Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman with their claim that pure abstraction was the most unadulterated experience of the spiritual. This position now seems ridiculous in the light of the complete and unfortunate disappearance of the minimalist challenge, with even the grandest examples of this period style co-opted, without a struggle, into every boardroom and executive office of our diverse corporate worlds.

Turning the corner one is confronted with the large revisited and revised Francis Bacon. The artist has returned to complete a second version of his famous "Triptych". It is uncanny how he could genuinely repeat his own clearly restricted and undeveloped style. The work seems to reek with a 'camp' aesthetic, its broad gilt frames, its Plexiglas purity, its plush gaudiness and its almost sinister visceral eruptions that speaks so clearly about 20th century fears and attractions are not the least religious. I don't think the work says a word about Hell, God or being an onlooker at the crucifixion, it's about one thing only: the spectacle of private desire made public, the atrocious preoccupation of lust with visibility and the brainlessness of sexual fulfilment at any cost.

It's at this point that the exhibition seems to close down. The unexpected pleasures of the first half move into predictability. I experienced a growing consciousness of what is missing-contemporary, committed religious artists, whose works experience difficult and isolated reception in their own secular environment.

The presence of works such as Harald Duwes' cannibalistic supper and the Andy Warhol give the false impression that religious art today is as visible and accessible as the established reputations of those included. (The only exceptions are the South American and Mexican artists, whose politics and passions are always related to their country's religious experience.) Warhol's inclusion only succeeds in adding another feather to his already overcrowded cap.

With the exception of Colin McCahon and a few others, the religious imagination is almost absent in the latter half of the show. To take this as a reflection of reduced religious interest in our time would be a mistake. In this case it is merely the increasing restrictiveness of the exhibition in favour of artists who are recognised draw cards, but who would confess themselves to having minimal commitment to religious concerns.
We are witnessing the slow and undeniable closure of the modernist canon, a kind of sealing of a century's tomb, with the same blind confidence of the Academy at the end of the last century. Our problem is that, on the one hand we have a democratic process that encourages an acceptance of any creative intention, while at the same time our own era is the least likely to guarantee revision of its pantheon. In the critical landscape, the dearth of robust and radical religious writers on art history means that no alternative views are entering the market place. Instead, noted religious writers are busy praising the cement being used to make recent history immovable.

The closer the exhibition came to our own time, the stronger one sensed the operation of political filters at work and the more predictable it became-the established reputations, the feminist readings, the stylistic dominance and the political values can be easily traced, and are all embodied in artists who are all too often represented in exhibitions of an entirely different nature. The religious mother lode one might expect here, is merely a slim broken vein, a series of dashes that peter out altogether.

The climax of the exhibition was the lowest point in this regard, in part because the exclusive and at times negative posturing of the feminist agenda made one less convinced there was any room left for a genuine religious allegiance. Cindy Sherman's Untitled #216 was based on Jean Fouqet's notorious 'Madonna of Melun' (1450-1460), whom it is considered was the French King's mistress masquerading as the virgin. This image was never a prime example of ideal motherhood in the Renaissance tradition and it is naive to apply such notions to it.

Though one must acknowledge the real pressure that a Curator would have experienced, Rosemary Crumlin's curatorial choices still leave one wondering about a certain naiveté or a preference for works making reference to Catholic history, rather than any genuine and radical contemporary religious art. If the exhibition had remained committed to the 'religious' in both the conventional and radical senses, it would have had to move both 'beyond unbelief' and the well-known reputation; it would have had to confront the informed and uninformed viewer with a whole range of lesser known and marginalised religious artists working across Europe, the Americas and Asia.

This is not too much to expect, because it is this very process that lifts obscure artists of other persuasions into the limelight continuously. Such inclusions at the contemporary end of the show would have challenged the cynical and hasty pronouncements that the exhibition merely confirms and maps the actual decline of religious interest in our society and the arts. It could have dispersed the sense that the exhibition, by embracing too widely, had undermined its own attempts to retain a distinctive and powerful religious relevance at the close of this century.

Warren Brenninger is a Victorian artist who, in 1989, won the Blake Prize for Religious Art.