by Nicole Marie, as told to her by Sean Dorian Knight.
INTRODUCTION
Using as its primary model the culture of ancient Greece, the great revelation of Dorian Knight follows from the idea that there is an epistemology behind art. The stages of analysis developed here – are taken from his speech at Cornell University and his subsequent stop in Corinth, New York.
In my speech to you, my Dorianites, here shortly before the assumption of my own death, I shall outline the major themes developed in the Greek’s theory of art, and what we can infer from the importance of art’s use as a system of knowledge. The association of art with religion, and what this historic relationship implies for the present day will also be raised. Our analysis will not necessarily try to pinpoint exactly which artist, or work of art, marked the beginnings of these changing trends in Greek civilization. Rather, it will attempt to highlight the underlying assumptions in their historical thinking that shed light on the idea of an epistemology that lies behind all art, and why this should or shouldn’t be of relevance to our time period.
This because, within the core of a tradition that came to consolidate the western European concept of what art is, it would be an over simplification to recognize the culture of ancient Greece as merely a strong influence. Greek thought is inescapably intertwined with that of the West; not only in the arts, but in philosophy and literature, as well as in science. It is therefore that we include its artistic tradition, not as separate, but as the very foundation of our contemporary society. While the link between the art of western culture and Greece is not considered to be one primarily associated with religion, this is not to say this issue, as it relates to both Greece and Modernity, is an irrelevant area of focus. The kinship of religion with art has a much longer tradition still, and in Greek society was an issue of contention no less than our own. In the more than two thousand years that have passed in between, many art works have been created; some religious, some not. But bearing in mind the Greek origins of our aesthetic theory, it was the selection of a modest few works of art, and their historical categorization, which has given direction to the narrative of spiritual apotheosis in western civilization’s artistic tradition.Beginnings
The story of art theory begins in the archaic period of ancient Greece, at around the middle of he sixth century BCE. Though this is not to say that what the still more ancient cultures of Egypt and Sumeria have to inform us of on the subject is marginal or irrelevant. Historical precedents to western civilization in art can of course be traced back much further, and even to the dawn of earliest cave paintings of man in the Paleolithic era, but it is in archaic Greece where a theory of art most resembling our own is to be found.
A further parallel, stark in its implications, stems from the fact that Greek society of that time period was also coming out of the grips of a Dark Age. A historical stage of cultural disintegration following the conflicts of the Trojan War, and the devastating effects of the Dorian invasion between roughly 1200 to 800 BCE. For Greece, this was a span of deep economic underdevelopment, and marked a phase of cultural stagnation similar to the medieval period in modern Western history. Like the era of artistic flourishing that was to occur later in cuattrocento Italy, this historical stage in Greece was to be followed by the beginnings of a Renaissance of their own taking place around the late eighth century.
But the study of art theory, when beginning at such a relatively recent date (circa 600 BCE, even if that date is some 3,600 years ago), can also be misleading as to what art may actually be. In part, our study of art theory begins here arbitrarily, because this is the first known instance of when a theory of art began to be formulated into a written record. This having been said, what art was in its primal origins is skipped over when we begin the study of the theory of art by going simply to when it was first articulated. Meaning that, whatever its original purpose was, and whether this can be likened to an epistemology, was already in existence for at least some twenty thousand years prior.
In that long period of transformation, the external attributes of artistic expression had already passed down through ancient Sumer in 5000 BCE, several Semitic dynasties, and further evolved in Egyptian civilization up until around 1300 BCE. The life of art’s mysterious incarnations, from the beasts depicted on the caves to the half-beast, half human characters embodied in the tombs of Egypt and their Book of the Dead, should give warning that the nature of what art deals with is not easily to be apprehended. Also, when a theory of art first started to be written down in its first overt documentation in late archaic Greece, therefore, several layers of meaning – or the implicit potential for meaning – already obscured the original meaning art had served for the humans of the Old Stone age who painted on the walls of their caves. Art, if it had once begun as an epistemology, was already abstract from what its original intention was in its primary origins. Nonetheless, the study of art theory begins here. Art’s original epistemology, or the scope and validity it had as a way knowing the world, both for the society it came from and the individual artist who created it, must be deduced from behind the more overtly aesthetic demands which came to the fore in the subsequent beginnings of Western civilization.
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One is reminded of the accuracy of the kind of prophetic paradigm of history countenanced by the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico in the 18th century. Vico postulated that a civilization’s life line is marked by three cycles that evolve from a period of ill-defined Chaos; beginning with a Theocratic age, society is transformed by commerce into an age of Aristocracy, followed by an age of Democracy, which by its subjective nature causes a dissolution of objective tradition thereby leading to the disintegration of its society. In the wake of a civilization’s fragmented culture, the lack of societal cohesion gives way to a newly denominated age of Chaos wherefrom another Theocratic age is to be born.
Yet, all along behind the struggles of a civilization to define its tradition, lies art at the center. And when a civilization’s tradition is hollowed out of any meaning, there working unceasingly behind this chaos is art, unsatisfied in its very purpose until it has at last effected another changing of the Gods. The evidence that Greek art distinguished itself from Egyptian art has already been noted. But not being satisfied with the Egyptian view of the world, neither were the Greeks complacent with their own worldview, as the striving for constant perfection later invited a kind of comparison between artists. Experiment in the arts seemed somehow to intimate the possibility of a profounder knowledge to be captured, or we may ask then – what else was it that drove them? To further spur the development of art, a competition not so different to our own society seemed to mark the pace of artistic experiment. In the course of time, as described above, however, this experimentation was molded into a tradition. Looking back from the vantage of history, the period of Classical Greece, and the heights of naturalistic representation that their sculpture achieved is now one of the standards of western culture.
That the art of Classical Greece can be likened to a Renaissance comparable to our own, not least for its prided devotion in the depiction of deities (for example in the statue of Pythian Apollo previously mentioned by Diodorus, or the notorious Phydias’ famed statue of Zeus), also underscores how important the epistemology gained through art was to their culture. Although there was no institutionalized religion, art served no less than to confirm the precise reality of their Gods. As in our own European Renaissance that was characterized by the aesthetic rendering of Biblical themes for the sake of our culture’s sacred past, Greece had a vivid nostalgia for its own sacred era wherein their heroes strode along side distant deities. Not to be easily outdone in artistic achievement by our later accretions, Greece also had a literature to go with it. The fact that Homer’s brilliant (if largely fanciful) enshrinement of a long dead civilization not only survived, but became a combined Bible, moral code and source of practical wisdom for all Greeks of the classical age, remains one of the greatest paradoxes in European History.* But if the knowledge of moral nature and supernatural beings that Homer sought to enshrine in Greek literature was “fanciful,” artists in both painting and sculpture pursued it with equal zeal in their own mediums.
The further connection of these pursuits of knowledge in the arts to the underlying reality of the universe as a whole is also paralleled by the concerns of science in ancient Greece. The quest for early Greek science was for a rational cosmology within chaos. Measure happened to be essential in perceiving the formative principles of the universe, and for the Pythagoreans, also the musical scale of the universe. According to Aristotle in his Metaphysics, there was the perception, by influence of the Pythagoreans, that it was numbers that made up the divine measure of things, and numbers themselves constituted the basis of all sensible things (like physical bodies), but also abstract things like justice.* So there was the belief that everything, including the stars of the universe, could be reduced to consonant proportions. The striving for symmetry in art was thus like a striving for the confirmation of these beliefs that could be thus proven to be ascertained knowledge, should the end result of art reveal beauty and harmony. Viewed in this light, art for the Greeks was an epistemology no less imperfect than science or mathematics itself.
At its essence, great art seems to be spring from a will to know, and this knowledge it seeks to embody is no less than the ultimate nature of reality. Hence, we may call it a sacred epistemology, or at least a will to being a sacred epistemology. And thus, so long as the world is not static, and society changes its forms whether from innate or external factors, in seeking out the invisible presence of that unknown aura art augurs the changes to come. The modern notion that somehow art is dead, however, then is all the more startling for what resurrection lies in wait.
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As we reach the classical period of Greek art, roughly from 480 to 320 BCE, the theoretical elaborations of art came to constitute a fairly unified system. Precise terms for achieving the perfection of form were developed and came to embody Greek art. The critical terminology concerned with the properties of form included; symmetria – or the commensurability of parts; rhytmos – shape, composition; metra – measurements – akribeia – mathematical precision; and paradeigmata – patterns.* By the time the first known theoretical treatise on painting appears, by Agatharchus in and around the middle of the 4th century, new terms for this discipline also come into use. Skenographia, the study of perspective is introduced, skiagraphia – the study of shading, as well as terms such as tonos; harmoge; splendor, as well as a new treatise on color, De Coloribus by Euphanor. What should be apparent here is that the importance given to these new concepts for application in art, are laid down here for the refinement of art; and hence, we may infer, for the sake of an advance, or progress of some kind; the progress of knowledge. Happily, for the Greeks (unlike for us, which it is no longer) this was found to be consistent with the epistemology of beauty, and its passionate pursuit.
But when an art form reaches a zenith of perfection, as it conforms to a theory of knowledge or art criticism that is objectively espoused, a subtle reflection of what is missed in these external criteria seems to well up. After so much effort to attain the standards of a tradition, as if by neglect, artists themselves as well as critics, begin to ponder what an artwork stands for in itself. There is an introspective questioning of the intrinsic meaning of works of art. As Erwin Panofsky put it, “…We deal with the work of art as a symptom of something else which expresses itself in a countless variety of other symptoms, and we interpret its compositional and iconographical features as more particularized evidence of this something else.”*
It is this “something else,” which the physician Galen of the 2nd century ACE deduced was behind the thoughts of Polyclitus’ Canon. It was the intrinsic meaning of their works that had always motivated the artist’s writings and their own explanation. After all Polyclitus was, before and after he wrote his treatise, a professional sculptor. That we may liken this something else behind the meaning of a work of art to be akin to a mysterious sort of epistemology may, or may not be, going too far. One gets the sense that it was perhaps something more menacing. That, this “something else” intrinsic to art was not the epistemology, but rather the ghost that the epistemology was after. When considering the public influence that artworks had begun to have in ancient Greece, it is no wonder that toward the end of the classical period increasing thought was devoted to the mystery of what lay behind art’s power. The raised awareness of this question of intrinsic meaning would, by the time of late Hellenism in the 1st century ACE, dramatically shift the focus of art theory toward a fascination with the artist’s imagination. But four hundred years earlier, Plato, probably the most significant philosopher to shape the course of western thought, had already seized on the danger of art’s enigma.
Plato’s overriding concern throughout all his work follows from his hierarchical conception of reality. For Plato, “empirical reality is but an approximation of ‘absolute existence’ (i.e. of the Ideas) but falls short of them (Phaedon 74bff.)*, and is therefore only their ‘image’” (Phaedrus 250b). Considering Plato’s attitude toward physical reality, which is only an approximation of the real, it is curious to wonder why his reaction to art in general – whether it be with regard to poetry or painting – would therefore prove to be so rife with enmity. But we learn anecdotally from Diogenes Laertius that Plato supposedly spent ten years training in the priesthood at Heliopolis, at the center of Egyptian culture. There he would have become well acquainted with their Book of the Dead and art’s uncanny power to mold the belief system of entire societies. What relevance art has to religion, but which is eschewed by present day art historians for our own culture, Plato would have had first hand knowledge. This, despite the fact that Plato did not live to witness the one thousand years of Christian domination of art during the European Dark Age.
Plato, knowing well art’s mythical role of representing the world of invisible reality, questioned outright the validity of its seemingly strange type of epistemology. In the Ion Plato, through the character of Socrates, parodies the rhapsode Ion’s ability to have any claim to knowledge, saying that Ion’s knowledge depends solely on inspiration and therefore has no relevance to truth. And what they say is true, for a poet is a light and winged thing, and holy, and never able to compose until he has become inspired, and is beside himself, and reason is no longer in him….Herein lies the reason why the deity has bereft them of all their senses, and uses them as ministers, along with soothsayers and godly seers; it is in order that we listeners may know that it is they who utter these precious revelations while their mind is not within them, but it is the god himself who speaks, and through them articulate to us. (Plato, Ion, p220 b-e) Thus artists, poets first among them, communicate things by divine proxy. They have no sense of other things. This is because the God want listeners and spectators to know that the artist speaks for Him.
Here Plato has elaborated his critique of the mimetic theory of art. This critique is transferred specifically to the painter in the Republic when Plato states that, by clinging to outer appearances, the painter as imitator also has no knowledge of what he is really painting. (Republic X, 601). Therefore, for Plato, all art is an embodiment of falsity, and has no place in his ideal society. What truth lies behind the illusion of appearance, the artist, in being servant to his muse, can never give us any knowledge of; and yet, Plato is shockingly aware of how they subvert people’s reason by their artifice. Thus every sort of confusion is revealed within us; and this is the weakness of the human mind on which the art of painting in light and shadow, the art of conjuring, and many other ingenious devices impose, having an effect upon us like magic. (Republic X. 602c-d) The realization of the power of the artist’s imagination that Plato seized upon was to signal new consequences for the evolution of art theory. It foreshadowed the end of beauty, based upon commensurable symmetry, of being an objective quality that one could use for the reliable evocation of reality. For the magic of art was seen to rely on something beyond the harmony of a simple balance of parts, and have its mysterious origin in the demotic imagination of the artist himself. Long ago in Pharoahanic Egypt, in the rituals for their Book of the Dead, art had been used to narrate the objective of the soul’s journey back into the strata of the circumpolar stars and eternity. The Greek worldview had deemed this strange art insufficient to correspond with the true nature reality as they knew it. But, now once again, true knowledge of the ghost had eluded the sacred epistemology.
As a result, beauty revealed itself to have a subjective nature, and its charm in affecting the soul of a person became the object of study. The concept of beauty by now seemed to have come to symbolize whatever the true nature of reality must be. Plato, in positing that the essence of reality lie behind physical appearance had, in effect, started a witch-hunt for an invisible entity. Hence the eerie name befitting this artistic aspiration that historians now know as Phantasia theory. And so, if the truth was elsewhere, artists, by the Hellenistic period in the 2nd century ACE, would have to pursue with a new epistemological focus knowledge of the invisible entity’s presence by seeking evidence of whatever it was they were looking for in the expression of human and natural phenomena. Philostratus the Younger, who wrote a book in the 3rd century ACE, remarks on how the perception of the artist is now central to this search for knowledge. The painter, in order to be a true master of his art, he says …Must have good knowledge of human nature, he must be able to discern the signs of men’s character even when they are silent, and what is revealed in the cheeks and the expression of the eyes…that a man is insane, perhaps, or angry, or impulsive, or in love.*
The final break-up of the physically objective nature of beauty was then secured by Plotinus, in the middle of the 3rd century. However, that the whole be beautiful, its parts must be so, too; as beautiful, it cannot be the sum of ugliness: beauty must pervade it wholly. Further: colors, beautiful hues as those of the sun, this theory would rule out; no parts therefore no symmetry, therefore no beauty. But is not gold beautiful? And a single star by night? When one sees the same face, constant in its symmetry, now beautiful and now not, isn’t it obvious that beauty is not symmetry, that symmetry draws its beauty from something else? (I. 6.1 p35) So then, the essence of the classical Greek ideal of beauty is overturned. As beauty shined from somewhere beyond the physical, no longer was it a matter of measurable symmetrical parts. Instead, the ghost of the real resided in a mystical feeling that somehow art had the power to evoke. This feeling was no less than a living presence. The most living portraits are the most beautiful, even though the other happens to be more symmetric. (VI. 7. 22) With the intellectual negation of the physical world, the structure of Greek and western reality (now under the aegis of the Roman empire) broke down, and art fell into the thousand year reign of the ghost that emanated from paintings in the Dark Age. In western Biblical lore, it was a single guiding star that first signaled the Holy incarnation of its coming in the guise of a newborn God of human flesh. Paradoxically, as the God who was transfigured into the commonplace, he was to become the ghost that had died for us.
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The loveliest creations of men are persistently painful. What would be the description of happiness? Nothing, except what prepares and what destroys it can be told – And now I have told you all that had prepared it.
– The Immoralist, Andre Gide
In retrospect, the closing of the age of Classical Greece was due to many factors other than the shifting concerns of art. But all the while the manifestations of artworks’ concerns traced the changes in their spiritual outlook of the world right up until Plotinus’ incipient medieval philosophy. It was a philosophy of subjective spiritual feeling with no correlation of art to the material of the external physical world. Like the strange manifestations of art one finds hanging in the cavernous walls of today’s Museums of Modern Art, the epistemology ceased to be a looking out toward the world of beauty, but rather became an inner dwelling of the spirit that would be intellectually shrouded over by veil of the west’s oncoming Dark Age. Yet in ways eerily familiar, when the fragments of past knowledge no longer could fit into a coherent whole, it was a feeling in particular sympathy to what is now belatedly called the death of our own art history. A feeling of atonement ensues, you can see it in the hallowed halls of museums, if for nothing else than to hold back an overwhelming sense of Chaos, now that the march of time that has brought us full cycle to the last Democratic stage of Vico’s analysis of history.
But the implication that art history can develop no further, that art has reached the end all of its historical process, augurs a profounder dilemma that we avoid only at our own peril. The end of implicit beauty in the purpose of everyday art is an aesthetic loss we may lament. Yet beyond beauty, art was once much more in that it was the key to religious insight, if not religion itself, and so the death of art portends a relinquishing of a kind of primordial power – a power of survival – essential to our nature. This is not to say that art should affirm and uphold the western idea of Christianity or any other of the four main religions of the world. Only that by being unaware, and having nothing to replace what was lost, we may find ourselves at the threshold of an age darker than we could have imagined.
In a world besieged by religious fundamentalism and monumental ignorance, art has reached the end of its sacred epistemology. And yet, if this is true, while we have thrown away the rational paradigm of western thought for its faulty reasoning, meanwhile on the geopolitical level, the irrational faiths that agglomerate mountains of people in the name of ancient systems of belief threaten our godless world with destruction. Perhaps these recent conflicts are arguably the results of faulty western thinking, of being bound up in the race for political hegemony, colonial expansion, or capitalistic imperialism. Perhaps the conflicts are merely the intrinsic result of our animal nature, or brought on by the simple fact of the scarcity of the earth available to meet our human needs. Nonetheless, the ramifications for this sea change in the Modern western paradigm hover from the mundane and anticlimactic to the potentially dangerous and apocalyptic.
Art, and its place in our system of knowledge, has traditionally been a signpost of changing historical currents. Even if present day intellectuals prefer to disregard the prophetic associations of art, whether art has any ultimate purpose, or should have, one is not certain that this is something that can be changed by the simple asking. That the world of art and artifacts, as a collective grouping of commodities, is now more than ever tied to the apparatus of our market economy makes the meaning of its mysterious presence all the more pressing.
What holds in the balance for the oncoming future could be a dethronement of the exalted status of art – as perhaps, has recently occurred – or conversely, if the prophetic power of art has any truth to it, the maturing antecedents of incalculable bloodshed in the name of some sacred cause.
What are the distant early warnings? The alarming answer of what times are to come may wishfully be a matter of which historical paradigm is adopted as the more accurate. Conversely, the riddle of what art history’s past holds for the future might be contingent, not on what vision of history we prefer, but which one is more true. To this end, our focus of mind in solving the mystery of art must pay special heed to what indications art shows of being a kind of epistemology. All the more so if, indeed, it is a sacred epistemology, will be our necessity to understand what this mean.
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Before proceeding in this line of inquiry, however, it is interesting to take note of some more recent developments and currents of thought. That is, musings about life, art, and the great thereafter – Art, the modern reader will recall, after all, is said to have already passed away. “It is not art which imitates life, but life which imitates art,” adduced the playwright Oscar Wilde at the end of the 19th century. But if art is dead, should it follow that life imitate death as well? Art, it is said by intellectuals of the modern western tradition, has come to the end of its history. If so, what does this mean? What exactly has ended – if, nevertheless, art objects are still being created, and its existence as a commodity continues to shape the culture we live in? The suggestion will be made that it is art’s aesthetic use value, if evidently not its exchange value, that has come to its conclusion for the era that we live in. While art works with aesthetic intentions may still be created, it is not likely they would tell us anything new – that is, so long as we continue to inhabit the same world as we know it. Even so, if the end of art as an object of aesthetic appeal were all that was implicated in this, perhaps the matter would not be so grave. Whenever there has been a death, it is only a matter of time – whether it be decades or centuries – before a rebirth is proclaimed. Yet, what rough beauty looms over the horizon, art may no longer be able to tell us.
The contemporary assertion that “Art has come to an end,” also implicates the death of one crucial element of Modern art theory, not stated above, which is veiled by its aesthetic demise. This is the religious association of art or that, art at its core, is fundamentally religious in nature. Though it is a topic that is superficially avoided in contemporary art historical writing and discussion as it relates to the present, often because it is too controversial – or for lack of being able to raise answerable questions – skirting the issue might in fact betray signs of the unwillingness of society to confront mature conclusions inimical to its wellbeing.
Historians of art generally have no problem considering the intrinsic relation between art and religion when assessing the art of the ancient past. Icons and sculptures dating from before cuattrocento Italy or classical Greece allow present day scholars a safe distance from which to study the fascination of religious motifs. The avoidance of the religious topic in analyzing contemporary art works is further justified, it is assumed, by the simple contemplation of western painting for the last four hundred years after the era of the Baroque. Even in our society’s Renaissance, while painting is replete with religious themes, it is viewed as an increasingly humanist manner of religious depiction, whose religious content in the course of time, would virtually come to disappear as we survey art up to our present day. Thus giving historians comforting evidence that western American and European civilization is, in effect, secular and far removed from the ancient worlds of misguided superstition.
This attitude, however, neglects the many stages of art which older civilizations passed through before falling into the annals of history. Furthermore, it simplistically skates over the explicitly religious and spiritual concerns that were fundamental in forming Abstract Expressionism; the last stage of the era of modern art (only fifty years ago) that we may have sufficient historical distance to evaluate. This is not to say, however, that art exists to play some dramatic religious role at the start of our millennium. Art may no longer be “the writing on the wall” if, in a matter of a mere five hundred years, it is indeed possible for an expressive trait as old as it means to be human to suddenly change. Nevertheless, twenty thousand years of evidence of art’s uncanny power to work magic on humankind’s cultural beliefs should make clear that vestiges of art’s powerful religious implications still lurk in the backdrop of contemporary art theory. Thus the term, the Sacred Epistemology, as used in the title of this essay.
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As for antiquity, in trying to get a handle on what knowledge can be said to inhere from art, the Greek historian Diogenes Laertius remarks that Democritus wrote a book in the early 5th century BCE entitled, On Painting. Though what we know of almost all writings on art of ancient Greece is indirectly through second hand sources, the articulation of art theory in writing also signifies the beginning of its importance. The subject of what art meant to the culture of ancient Greece, however, is further blurred by the fact that they did not have a distinct name for the term “art”, as we do today. The closest term in antiquity may be the word technae, meaning a craft that required a conscious method or means at arriving at a desired end. Indeed, what distinguishes Greek critical thought on the arts at its beginning in the early sixth century from more sophisticated inquiry later on, is that there was a concentration on the methodology of the creative process. Such concerns about the creative process itself, its division into separate stages, as well as the characterization of the final result, are not far removed from the first approaches of our own culture’s critical writings in the Renaissance that would set the tone for our age. This when surveyed superficially, however, is not an investigation with regard to art’s epistemology; but rather about how an artwork is conceived and the skill required to bring it into being. This superficial kind of analysis is fascinated by the aesthetic results of the object, or its likeness to reality – not with how artworks contain or transmit a certain form of knowledge. For paintings of our western culture, the elusive knowledge which art contains – and is the primary objective of the artist – is harder to discern from the superficial content of the picture. This is because, for western tradition, the concept of beauty at some point became separated from its power as a representation of truth. In its beginnings, at least, for ancient Greece this was not the case.
One example of the beginnings of this tradition of analysis, though probably anecdotal, is contained in the writings of Diodorus. He comments on the travels of Theodorus of Samos, who was a sculptor and painter. The story says that Theodorus and his brother, Telecles, spent some time among the Egyptians, where they learned a canon of sculptural proportions. Commenting on the results of the statue of Pythian Apollo for the Samians, which had been finished independently by each brother in two separate halves and later re-assembled, Diodorus remarks: This type of workmanship is not practiced at all among the Greeks, but among the Egyptians it is especially common. For among them the ‘symmetria’ of statues is not calculated according to the appearances which are presented to the eyes, as they are among the Greeks; but rather, when they have laid them out the stones, and after dividing them up, begin to work on them….Then, dividing up the lay out of the body…they produce all the proportions of the living figure. Therefore, when the artists agree with one another about the size of the statue, they part from one another, and execute [independently]….with such precision that their particular way of working is a cause for astonishment.* What is highlighted hear is the distinct technique which the Egyptians used in creating symmetry.
Symmetry was a term that would mark one of the foremost concepts of art theory for all of its subsequent history. Its importance in the arts would become paramount in ancient Greece. Diodorus, in rendering this account, is making not only a distinction of technique, but also one of style. That similar standing postures to Egyptian sculpture can be found in early Greek statues evidences the influence that Egyptian technique had for the art form in Greek culture. But, since Diodorus is remarking upon the difference, rather than the similarity, we may infer that Theodorus’ Egyptian technique, despite its precision that was “cause for astonishment”, did not satisfy or did not sufficiently conform to the later Greeks’ more modern view of their world. For one reason or another – if it was not a matter of epistemology or the adequacy with which a particular statue could inform a society’s knowledge of the world – Greek culture would in the course of time see fit to change this technique in order to make it conform to what they considered a higher standard of excellence.
This standard for art in Greece was most carefully thought out in the Canon of Polyclitus, written in the late 5th century BCE. Its detailed description of a new philosophical purpose of beauty using mathematical proportions made it the most renowned treatise of art in its time. A passage commenting on Polyclitus’ Canon is found in the writings of the physician, Galen, recorded in the 2nd century ACE. Beauty, he feels, resides not in the commensurability of the constituents (i.e. of the body), but in the commensurability of the parts, such as the finger to the finger, and of all the fingers to the metacarpus and the wrist (carpus), and of these to the forearm, and of the forearm to the arm, in fact everything to everything.* This new preeminence of symmetry in Greek art, historian J.J. Pollitt comments, had a primary aim. “The aim of the Canon, however, was not simply to explain a statue but also to achieve tu kallos, ‘the beautiful’ in it; and the secret of achieving tu kallos lay in the mastery of symmetria, the perfect commensurability of all the parts… to the whole.” A further aspect of the treatise concentrated on the method in which mathematical proportion could guide the artist in the production of perfect form. Yet, we must be cautious to note that the precision with which the ideal of the beautiful is sought is not for its own sake. If beauty were not understood by the Greeks to be a measure of order in the world, here there would be no talk of beauty. Here art, we can deduce, is being used as a way to make the external world known. For the Greek mind beauty is the proof, but order – [or one might say] a reliable epistemology – is of chief importance.
The importance of this use of art as an epistemology, therefore, should not be confused by the stress put on beauty. As here truth and beauty are evidence of the same thing. Indeed, the search for order in Greek art and thought is central to their concept of tu kallos. It was an urge toward identification with the interrelationship of all things – with the universe and the geometry of existence. Pollitt explicitly touches on this point, saying, “The urge to discover or construct an order behind the flux of experience in the world is as inherent in the Greek mind, as is, for example, the urge for identification with an incorporeal, transcendental existence in Hindu thought. Order is inconceivable without a conception of its essential characteristic – measure, which involves both definition (marking the boundaries of things) and analysis of the interrelationships of discrete forms.”* Therefore, through their art, like in Hindu thought, an urge that is almost transcendental is seeking a permanent symmetry to existence. Or, in other words, the Greeks in their art were searching for a permanent idea of knowledge about the external world; a knowledge that would be in harmony with the concept of their individual existence in the world – i.e. an epistemology.
Clearly, within the context of a search for meaning, in the Greek notion of symmetria we see a definite religious implication for art’s use. The funny thing is that the culture of ancient Greece, like our own, was primarily secular. The religious function of art that is implicit in the explanation above was by no means something overt. That the religious essence of an artwork was something that lay hidden beneath the surface, or simply was not mentioned out loud, strikes as a kind of deep mystery; somewhat like the Biblical injunction against pronouncing the name of Yahweh aloud. It was only much later, toward the end of the classical period, that the great philosophers would take issue with it. In any case, as mentioned earlier, even though art’s original purpose since it first came into existence around the time of the cave paintings had acquired multiple layers of meanings (and more complex political and aesthetic functions), we see that – behind the façade of beauty – in its Greek incarnation, art still retained a hidden religious aspect. Thus, we may also conclude, some thing of a societal purpose.
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With regard to present day American–European culture, in marked contrast to the kind of purpose art served for Greek society, our modern definition of fine art is strangely enigmatic for the quality of not being made for any particular use or purpose. Sociologists may admit to religion still serving a purpose in contemporary society, but in the course of history this purpose was divorced from what art has come to mean for the present day. Yet while in Greece beauty was the aim, and can be seen to have served a transcendental function – even if religion was not explicitly acknowledged in the purpose of art – for us not only is religion not considered an ingredient of art, but now even beauty has become only incidental to whatever art’s purpose. Passing again through many transformations, art in the twentieth century finally came to be appreciated as having an existence all its own, or despite the bafflement that it still produces, what is colloquially called “art for art’s sake.” The question that remains, however, is if the power to ascribe new definitions to something (or simply not being conscious of the actual origins of something) can actually be said to fundamentally reconstitute what a thing actually is.
If art is no longer about religion, and can be about anything, or about anything without even having to be “beautiful”, then we have come to live in perplexing times. Our existence has been transfigured into the commonplace of the historical present where being and nonbeing are indistinguishable from all else that is just a matter of course. It would appear that humankind is prepared to exist in a universe devoid of any meaning it could ascribe to it. But for this fundamental change to our nature, whether for good or ill, it appears we are not ready. About exploring the notion that art can be anything in his pivotal work on contemporary art The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, the critic Arthur Danto comments of his provisional definition, “I argued first that works of art are always about something, and hence have content or meaning; and secondly, that to be a work of art, something had to embody its meaning.” So then art, as it still seems to be the case, must be about something, just as much as we cannot abide by the notion that life cannot be about anything. Therefore, art and religion presumably still retain what has all along been a relationship of universal concomitance in their intrinsic function to extract answers from the deepest questions of life. And if answers are at all possible, we would wish (one presumes) that they be grounded in some form of knowing; hence an epistemology. In any event, for as long as art, religion and humans have existed, apparently we have not been able to have one without the other.
The religious, or transcendental, aspect of art follows from art’s function as a medium through which people seek an identification with the world of outer existence. The “urge” for this identification, or ‘interrelationship’, such as the Greeks sought in their ideal of beauty, underlies the importance they gave to prescribing a method for arriving and embodying this ideal in their greatest works of art. While the association with religion was by this point in art’s evolution already tacit, we can nonetheless deduce that it was still there. This problem of art raises the riddling question then, of why art’s profound, if hidden, relationship to religion has seemingly gone underground and come to be derided in the contemporary discourse of the art our present day.
Relating the issue to modern concerns, we therefore arrive at new threshold in art’s mysterious evolution. In counterpoint to the idea that there is any need to engage with the relevancy of contemporary art to religion – even if it be only on undisputed historical grounds – stands an alternate view of art and history itself. That is the notion that present day western society has entered into the era of post history.
Falling under the umbrella of Post Modernism, this historical paradigm defines itself against everything the Modernist paradigm of traditional history assumed about the progress of western civilization. Thus for Post Modernism – a movement which spans nearly all branches of the social sciences – the attitude that we now occupy a different historical reality obviates the need to consider the relevance of present day artworks to the last stages of modern art of fifty years ago, let alone arts ancient religious associations. It is in effect, as if we have been thrust out of a historical time warp, beyond time. All logical connection to history has been invalidated because, at its center, the modern historical tradition of artistic progress has been deemed a glaring mistake. So art has succumbed to the natural death of its history, and a new story awaits to be written in a brave future free from the past.
The idea that mankind can, within the sweep of an intellectual movement, break unconditionally with the past to begin history with a tabula rasa is idealistically seductive. Yet William Faulkner’s simple epigram that, “The past is never past, it’s not even passed”, warns that this is only wishful thinking. The conceit that we are now living in a post historical age, or that our structural reality is inherently different than that which shaped the modernist framework of history, also seems to assume we are entering a final mythical stage of human development; the age of Global Enlightenment. The exalted vision from which we may now look down on the history of the past implies as well that we have fathomed all pertinent avenues of knowledge in philosophy and the arts. To paraphrase how Wittgenstein closed the Tractatus, now that we have climbed up the ladder of our old civilization, we may now throw the ladder away. Those mysteries that so baffled other ages, having been shown the consequence of our faulty tools of reasoning and that reason is not to be trusted, now become for the contemporary artist and philosopher merely kindle wood for the modern Promethean fire.
Nevertheless, this new attitude to history neither renders art’s mystical pedigree as irrelevant, nor does it Arthur Danto’s comments on the yet undefined meaning which art seeks to embody as it comes to be created within our midst. There is, even as we go about our daily business, an unnerving religious aura of veneration to contemporary artwork, all the more strange when that work is profane or entirely unaesthetic. For what this says of an as of yet undefined religion’s ghostly existence as it creeps into being, and to bear witness to what extent the invisible presence of this ghost goes un-remarked in 21st century discourse about art, it would not hurt to recognize art’s earliest civilized beginnings.
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Well before ancient Greece, art in its origins, served both as the wellspring of religious thought, and often the fertile ground for the propagation of its theological campaign. Before the invention of textual writing in or around 2500 bce., art was the only thing other than speech that a society had to communicate its belief for the understanding of the world itself, and with which to postulate the existence of a world beyond. This is understandable. Yet, as greater knowledge of the physical world came to develop throughout the ages, the ability of art to represent and make known the invisible world did not decrease in proportion to this, but can even be said to have strengthened into having magical powers attributed to it. These magical powers included the representation of deities, the power to invoke their beneficence, and the power to enhance religious ritual with the physical depiction of a people’s elaborate gods.
According to anthropological studies, “What we call art and what we call religion were inseparable through much of the recorded history of China, India, and Mesoamerica. The same compatible purposes of art and religion can be found in images made by the Incas, the Scythians and Ife, the Moche and Cocle’, Jains and Vedic Brahmans, Parsees and Phrygians, and even the people, whose name is lost, who built the pyramids at Teotihuacan.”* This is cited to recognize that this peculiar characteristic of art is not exclusive to western society, but a common symptom of cultures throughout the world. But that, far removed from its beginnings in the Paleolithic age, the powers of spiritual cognizance attributed to art furthermore developed into the Christian era, and even beyond the age of enlightenment up until the 20th century, should give one pause to be aware.
The parallels for our western culture of what this invisible entity manifesting itself as art and its religious connotations came to mean for the fate of Greek society, is apt to consider. If not with foreboding, we should bear in mind that archaic Greece was born out of a Dark Age analogous to our own, and its later artistic flourishing in the classical period took a similar course to our own European Renaissance. The Greek world which Homer knew (as opposed the syncretic Mycenaean age he drew in his poems) was desperately poor, a series of small isolated communities, each clustering around an isolated hilltop ‘big house’ run on feudal lines by some local warrior-baron. The Dark Age practice of relying on a local chieftain for protection was encouraged by the canton-like geography of Greece, and proved oddly persistent; it foreshadows the city-state in embryo.*
When the Titan Prometheus stole fire from the Gods, thus bringing knowledge to humankind, he paid a terrible price for it. Condemned forever to being pinned to a rock, so that a vulture would pluck his liver clean until it grew back again, he became a hero to Greek mythology and modern man. That the Gods vengeance on him for stealing the key to knowledge should have been to attack an essential organ for his digestive process is a fitting metaphor for our Post Modern condition. That such intellectuals of this movement have avenged themselves on the age of reason by refusing to digest it, in effect spitting out the knowledge which was gained from it, once again signals humankind’s predilection for remaining enthralled to ignorance. The refusal to acknowledge the powerful force of the religious impulse in shaping artistic thought, whatever it may be at the present moment, bespeaks a fear of art’s primordial beginnings and the realization of where all meaning comes from. Set adrift on a new frontier, and unwilling to use our inherited tradition for guidance, looking back the religious origins of art appear hazily like a distant sun on the horizon. There is a romantic darkness on the face of the waters. But whether that fiery religious sun is setting, or only circling back beneath the underworld of our unconscious, remains to be seen.
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