On The Strange Place of Haring's Altarpiece

Lately I have been struggling with James Elkin's polemic book "On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art". Mostly the internal debates have established by his powerfull rhetoric in convincing me of some beliefs that were hard to get rid off, although he made strong arguments against them. The entire book goes on over the idea of something he would place like this: "(...) serious art has grown estranged from religion. Religious artists aside, to suddenly put modern art back with religion or spirituality is to give up the history and purposes of a certain understanding of modernism" (Elkins, 2004, p.22).

In the beggining of the book he states the following: "Frequently I will set spirituality against religion as its foil. What I mean by spirituality (...) is any system of belief that is private, subjective, largly or wholly incommunicable, often wordless, and sometimes even uncognized. Spirituality in this sense can be part of religion, but not its whole. Some of the artists and artworks I will be talking about are spiritual without being religious" (Elkins, 2004, p.1)

He defines "Art" for his own matters in the book, and to what I believe is a very coherent position, as "whatever is exhibited in galleries in major cities, bought by museums of contemporary art, shown in biennalles and the Documenta, and written about in periodicals such as Artforum, October, Flash Art (...)" (Elkins, 2004, p.1) opposing these two vectors: "Religious art will be one type of art and fine art [described before] another, and there will be no problem in the fact that one excludes the other." (Elkin, 2004, p.2)

All these statements generate an overall view of the authors ideas and intentions in the book. Very coherently he was very much convincing me, but empirism put a defying topic in my way to comprehend and assimilate Elkin's ideas. When walking through Paris, I encountered the church of Saint Eustache, a curious gothic construction around the neighbourhood of Le Marais. Inside, for my surprise, in a shrine located around the altar, stood an altar piece by Keith Haring from 1990. The piece showed, in a very Haring way, the birth of the Christ and him being held by this what could be an interpretation of the Virgin Mary with twelve arms holding her new born baby.

Despite what would be expected from this artist as to have critical position to this sort of iconography and religious dogma, he does not seem critical or skeptical about it any way. There is a distance of miles away between works that the author himself mentions as critical such as the ones by Leon Ferrari and Andres Serrano and this one by Haring. And curiously, not only he is an artist widely comercialized by the art market but is also shown by the most important contemporary art institutions in the world. By a matter of fact, he is also miles away from some other "manifestations" I witnessed inside the church of Saint-Sulpice, also in Paris, and that I could call as religion-trying-to-be-contemporary, or religion-trying-to-be-dressed-to-the-nines, as shown below, and that is very much what Elkins tries to seperate from his concept of Fine Art. They are just the original icons with a new presentation, full of colours and dynamic visuality, almost as inheriting a diminished aesthetic unfolded distantly from Pop Art, as I would add to what Elkins mentions: "typically, a modern-looking window will derive from a mixture of realism, expressionism, and cubism" (Elkins, 2004, p.3). And it is curious that, to me, they were so bad and disturbing, that they made a disservice to my aprehension of that church. They didn't bring people towards faith and they didn't produce the effects of what we could call and expect in a religious artwork as a "religious experience". They were just these terrible repainted sculptures of the Virgin Mary with funky colours in front of even worst paintings revealing a desperate attempt of a religious institution not trying to updateitself and its ideas to the new times and its new paradigms, but just dressing its Middle-age and Renaissance beliefs and aesthetics with a "contemporary look".

These, one can understand, as being precisely to what Elkins speaks of in the following, very clearly: "Most religious ar - I'm saying this bluntly here because it needs to be said - is just bad art. Virtually all religious art made for homes and churches is poor and out of touch". All that is very coherent and clear when one looks at the main picture and encounters this terrible art as the ones showed in Saint Sulpice, and what he does is to clearly state that this sort of art can not be placed in the realm of what we call "contemporary art". But how than to position a work like that of Haring's: placed inside a church, non critical, full of beliefs and produced by an accepted artist within the art world? The problem I believe in Elkins, although he makes a very usefull and interresting cartography of these religious works in art, is his strictness making one believe that it is impossible to exist any art-accepted-by-the-art-world with religious (not necessarily critical) works. His position creates prejudice and constrains to the artistic creation of the contemporaries, as so widely and perniciously done throughout history by religious institutions themselves.

Specially in art schollarship understandings should be kept open and accepting propositions. It can, and should, create landmarks for us to understand the set in which our production is taking place, as Elkins does, but also should keep away from prejudice and absolute affirmations, what Elkins unfortunatly does not, so when one is put towards a work such as that of Keith Haring's he isn't completly keen to discarding a good piece by a relevant artist at the first sight and does not constrain the upcoming propositions of future and present art.

Bibliography:
Elkins, J. 2004. On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art. New York: Routledge.