Recently, while perusing an article on the stained glass “produced” (I will not say “created”) by Gerhard Richter for the grand cathedral in Cologne, Germany I was struck by another example of a curious and saddening absence I have begun to feel more and more acutely as I grow older, and that is both the paucity and poverty of Christian art in the West. The significance was not entirely lost on me that the original windows in the Cologne Cathedral were shattered, most appropriately it seems, by the allied bombing raids that took place approximately 60 years ago.
The West destroying the West is an ever present theme in my thinking and writing. How telling that the “creative destruction” (or if we prefer to abstain from useless euphemism, merely the destruction) wrought by a breed of capitalism born in the US should be the foremost weapon in the denaturing and deracination of the culture that gave it being, for, as we never tire of being told and therein feeling a schizoid sort of pride, the Second World War was a war of factories, not of men, of “industrial capacity”, relegating to an historical curiosity the ancient arts of warfare, and the gentilities that were finally abandoned in that mad scramble to reposition the dominant pieces on the economic game board.
It is therefore fitting that Richter’s grim logic of the linear grid should be ushered in by both bombs (on ancient religious sites, no less) and choirs and ecclesiastical pomp, incense and homilies. Rather than mourn the deconstruction of Christian art by yet another mocker -protesting overmuch that accepting the commission was an act of “faith”- the Catholic Church joins with the war making machinery state in marking the nuptials of materialism and Christianity. The windows now gracing the portals of that ancient landmark are a testament to the West’s new religion: and where that religion is rich in the tokens of its illicit form of wealth, in the coin of a truer and simultaneously more Godly and more humane wealth, it is destitute. Like the regiments that broke the axis flank at Somme, the squares of muddy color are marshaled against the gracious curvature of the window frames, as in an assault. And like the products of the industrial processes over which Germany has achieved and indisputable mastery, each colored plate is identical to the next, utterly bereft of individuality, each a note in a grim monotony of “perfection”. There were no protests, of course, as there is no “opposition” now in Germany to the degradation of the Church. The right wing in Germany shares its enemy’s values. For the Aryans who make a spectacle of denouncing “decadent” art it is simply a matter of who runs the machines, not whether it is fitting that man should be made to serve a machine.
Lest we be accused of unfairly singling out Germany for our opprobrium, we might offer as further proof the specimens on display at the once historic and now merely tedious Venice Biennale, where liberal Protestant turned Marxist turned “categorical secularist” Robert Storr (critic, curator, and Dean of the Yale School of Art) was installed as director for 2007. Among the works there featured were Jason Rhoades’ neon obscenities for female genitalia, achieving the very “avant garde” purpose of scandalizing the nuns, we must presume. One begins to wonder when we of the West will tire of such impertinence. When the “outrageous” has become merely the insipid, the question naturally arises where the aesthetics of the “transgressive” can take us. My immediate thought is that it can only take us to either to the far shores of violence and insanity or to repetition. But in the end, it seems that all save the so-called “elites” in the West have ceased to care about art at all, and thus its effects, and therefore its “price signals”, are only felt within the hothouses of galleries, auctions, and pulp trade news rooms. When art lost its power to inspire us, the only means left for it to mount a claim of relevance was to disgust us. And when our revulsion is also gone, art can be nothing except kitsch. Perhaps Protestantism should examine its abandonment of religious art when searching for a suspect in the disappearance of art that matters.
Thus, while we might find a grim sort of satisfaction in the recognition that the capitalist-materialist religion of the West is a mother who eats her own to make room for an alien brood, our smirking cannot long stave off the realizations to come.
