THE ART OF GOD AND THE RELIGIONS OF ART
By David Thistlethwaite
Solway. £19.99
ISBN 1 900507 78 1
This is a many-sided polemic against most of what passes for mainstream modern art in our culture, and against its apologists. It is written from an overtly evangelical standpoint, and will be of interest to Christians who are thinking about the arts. However, it is also clearly intended to be read by non-Christians, to provoke them into seeing some of the shortcomings of mainstream modern art and the mindset that it embodies, and to see the reasonableness of the Christian gospel as a way of life and as a critical tool.
The book is worth buying for chapter 5 alone. Here, Thistlethwaite deals with art as a means of knowledge, and defines knowledge in terms of a relationship between subject and object. In the age of post-modernism, where evangelicalism still seems to be hamstrung by its emphasis on propositional truth - a legacy of its Puritan roots in the age of rationalism - a move to regain a more rounded notion of truth, which according to the Bible is ultimately a person and not a proposition, is very welcome.
Thistlethwaite rehearses some now familiar biblical background for the arts, but is interesting for identifying the role of art not just as a part of our God-given creativity, but as a vehicle for 'subduing the earth'. He makes a powerful case for what he calls 'small art', works in which the artist picks out something s/he has seen in the world, and draws it to the attention of the viewer.
Cubist critique
He seems to me to be on weaker ground, however, when he moves on from this to critique modern art. He deplores in particular the influence of Cubism in claiming to make art autonomous from natural appearances. Although I sympathised with many of his critiques, I believe he does not pay enough attention to the continuity of thinking in modern art - as if Cubism arrived fully-formed out of nowhere - nor its appropriateness as an expression of the modern age. He is not the first Christian writer to seem to castigate the modern artist for the faults of the entire godless generation.
I also felt uncomfortable with the implication that, as a Christian, I ought to prefer, say, Rubens to Mondrian, and Piero della Francesca to Kandinsky, because the older artists dealt in art's 'natural' language based on representation. To my mind, if we are measuring false spirituality, Rubens and Piero are probably the most pernicious, precisely because they deal with the (mis)representation of biblical subject matter, whereas Mondrian and Kandinsky made no secret of their non-biblical faith.
The book has the attraction of being reasonably short, but it would have benefited from a more substantial introduction to set the issues in context, and particularly to have located Thistlethwaite in relation to the key writers in this area, Rookmaaker, Schaeffer, Wolterstorff and Seerveld. The book reads instead like a personal aesthetic theory, and one is left wondering at various points where some of his assertions come from. When he speaks about art, and the language of nature, as 'givens' in the created order, he is close to Seerveld. When he talks about the uses of art, he is echoing Wolterstorff's Art in action. He might have saved himself some pages, and enriched the others, by interacting with these authors rather more. Perhaps that will come in the next book.
Nigel Halliday
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