Monks and Barbarians

And the barbarian who mistook himself for a monk.

George Inness, In the Berkshires, 1850 (source)

WaPo critic Philip Kennicott wants to share a secret with us.

For a long time, I have cherished a fantasy about the so-called Dark Ages, when monks in cold abbeys on the edges of the world quietly and methodically copied out manuscripts, illuminating them with miraculous visions, tiny dots of color and life and even humor in a hostile, bleak, dangerous world. I have not a shred of religion in me, but I find enormous satisfaction reading the old lives of the saints, visiting forlorn relics of the monastic age and staring at the quiet, contemplative art of early Christianity.

Warning: Literary conceit incoming.

Almost everything about this fantasy is a fiction, from the idea of the putative Dark Ages to the romanticizing of monastic life. But it is a sustaining fiction, a metaphor for how I think about art and culture, and their place in an increasingly fractured, frenetic and violent world. Culture is the struggle of like-minded souls, working alone but sustained by community, to keep barbarism at bay. Art is the resilient and miraculous residue of that endeavor.

You’ll be unsurprised to learn what inspired this outpouring.

Much of the art world, including many artists who supported Kamala Harris and a substantial number of people who regularly visit museums, galleries and performance spaces, is bewildered by the reelection of Donald Trump. No one in this sector is any more confident of what Trump will do than all the rest of the pundits and politicians who are honest about the vast uncertainty ahead. But there is a need for understanding that transcends the parsing of exit polls and the finger-pointing grievances of those who lost once again to a candidate who embodies chaos.

And the battle of Apollo versus Dionysus rages on. Rest assured:

I am not calling Trump’s supporters barbarians. Barbarism is deeper than politics, deeper than partisan divides. But to survive the next four years, to make sense of where all this could be going, we need to understand barbarism as a living, ever-present force tending always to cruelty and destruction.¹ And more important: We need to understand how culture pushes back against it, creating circles of emotionally habitable space, patches of green on windswept isles, how it can accomplish miracles of resistance, like a ribbon of stone defying gravity, suspended in the air for a thousand years.

I think this essay is fascinating. Imagine that a horde of barbarians found one of those cold abbeys, buffeted by the winds of the North Atlantic, monks huddled inside, copying the Gospels on sheepskin by oil lamp. The barbarians break down the bolted doors, slaughter the monks to a man, and dump their bodies in a pile in the glen. They return to loot the monastery, only to become entranced by what they find. Writing. Illuminated psalters. Images in stone of a god executed by crucifixion.

So transfixed are they that they stay on and adopt what would have been the life of the holy brothers. They cut their hair into tonsures and don robes. They wake early and venerate the crucified god. They forgo their lust for treasure and devote their days to farming and study.

Unfortunately, they can’t read. They pore over the old tomes in bewilderment. They misunderstand the monks’ practice, in some cases utterly. They think the god let himself be crucified because he loves human sacrifice. They mistake the fanciful animals in the capitals and the margins of the psalters as minor deities. They make up a barbarian saga from the Christian elements to form a strange, new faith. Pointedly, it has no more concept of salvation than the pagan cult from which it derived. How could it?

Since it’s neither properly Christian nor pagan, hardly anyone wants this new religion except a few oddballs, but there are enough of them to sustain it for a couple of generations. Then one day a new horde shows up to raid the abbey. The brothers look out and curse the barbarians, having forgotten their barbarian origins, and having only inserted Christian customs and Christian images into a fundamentally barbarian ethos.

This is the story of Philip Kennicott.

Kennicott cites examples of anti-Trump art and art-action during the 45th term. One of them is the Guggenheim’s refusal to lend the White House a requested Van Gogh.

Early in his first term, the Guggenheim Museum in New York firmly declined a request from Trump’s White House to borrow a painting by Van Gogh, which the president and first lady wanted to hang in their private quarters. Instead, the museum offered a work called “America,” by artist Maurizio Cattelan, which consisted of a fully functioning 18-karat gold toilet. “Everything seems absurd until we die and then it makes sense,” Cattelan told The Washington Post in January 2018, when an email from the Guggenheim confirming the contretemps became public.

Kennicott leaves it at that, but Nancy Spector, the Guggenheim curator responsible for this, backhanded a tradition that had long fostered goodwill between the political and cultural institutions and affirmed the importance of art in the public mind. It was an early manifestation of the culture of ugliness at the Guggenheim that finally cost Spector her job.

Jennifer Rubell’s Ivanka Vacuuming, Dana Schutz’s Trump Descending an Escalator, and Robin Bell’s projection of “Experts Agree: Trump Is a Pig” onto building facades around Washington, D.C. were not just critical of the president, they were contemptuous of the people who voted for him. As Trump put it, “They’re not after me, they’re after you. I just happen to be standing in the way.” Actual behavior contradicts the narrative that Kennicott is trying to establish, that the president-elect is a font of chaos and cruelty and artists are responding by doing anything that resembles this:

Art connects us to each other, to the world, to community. Art refines our senses, sharpens our thinking, trains us in perception. Art helps us see both passionately and clearly; it increases our capacity for empathy and care; it is a kind of moral reasoning; it elicits emotions and tames their destructive power; it draws us deeper into ourselves, helps us sort out the trivial and ephemeral from the essential and eternal; it both consoles us and sharpens our pain.

In truth, they responded to his vulgarity with their own. If any artist attempted work that empathized with the people whose frustrations and aspirations caused them to vote for Trump, I have never seen it. The institutionally approved artists cited by Kennicott do not appear capable of it. But that would comport with the real purposes of art.

Kennicott’s moralizing about Trump is vacuous partisanship. “Trump has called on his followers, and soon will call on the country at large, to harden their hearts as mass deportations begin,” he laments. But mass deportation would not now be a possibility if the Biden administration had not pursued a policy of mass importation that was widely unpopular, injurious to civic life across the country, and in many instances lethal.² The ad misericordiam invocations have oppositional counterparts. I see your facedown bodies of Óscar Alberto and Valeria Martínez Ramírez, Kennicott, and raise you the strangled corpses of Laken Riley and Jocelyn Nungaray.

But Kennicott is an art person and one expects his politics to be insubstantial. The more interesting consideration is how precisely a monk in this metaphor would devote himself.

First, monks believe in the Almighty. The most intriguing part of the essay is the one I’m least willing to discuss, the fantasy of a contemplative life coming from someone who confesses to having “not a shred of religion in me.” That statement affords an interesting character study, but I’m not critiquing a man’s soul. Nevertheless, it contributes to the confusion of his metaphor. What is God therein? It’s transcendent art value, the goodness of art apart from its uses. It’s not clear that Kennicott believes in that either.

So, when Trumpism won the day, the disorientation for people committed to the arts may have been even more profound than that of those trying to figure out failures of messaging, demographic shifts or class realignment. It’s not just about trying to understand what happened; it’s the darker possibility that beauty will lose against barbarism, that the nation’s soul is sick, that art will never succeed in doing all the things we think it can do.

If you’re truly committed to beauty, the prospect of Trump being re-elected does not trouble you. The pursuit of good form and sublime images dates to, at least, Sumer. The idea that it will disappear because of the outcome of a single American election is balderdash. Even if it wanted to, and there’s no evidence that it does, the incoming Trump administration could no more stamp out beauty than a Viking might swing his axe through the neck of Jehovah.

Second, monks remove themselves from worldly affairs. The whole point of those chilly abbeys was to insulate themselves from the secular order and devote themselves as much as possible to the work of God. The notion that Jennifer Rubell, of all people, is metaphorically on that team is quite amusing. The monks of art are working on private creative problems that touch on the political situation of their time accidentally if at all. Philip Guston famously noted,

So when the 1960's came along I was feeling split, schizophrenic. The war, what was happening to America, the brutality of the world. What kind of man am I, sitting at home, reading magazines, going into a frustrated fury about everything—and then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue.

But the phase in which he dealt with those frustrations head-on, with drawings of Nixon and whatnot, was short. It gave way to a mysterious vocabulary of shoes, limbs, Klansmen, light bulbs, and other symbols that dropped in and out as needed to fulfill urges that the political world fed but were not satisfied in its honor. The politics were not the point. The point was to work from tensions inherent to contemporary living. Thus he did, adjusting reds to blues all the while, so effectively that a half-century later his paintings are still afflicting the art establishment with indigestion.

As

Michael Rushton

put it, “We are not grateful to the monasteries of the dark ages for their anti-Viking art; it’s the Book of Kells we line up to see.” Kennicott must recognize that “the quiet, contemplative art of early Christianity” does not relate to the activist art he discusses. That he thinks one might be combined with the other causes me to suspect that he is incognizant of the possible depths of artistic practice.

Third, monks live lives of radical affirmation. From The Practice of the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence, a 17th-century Discalced Carmelite friar:

My King is full of mercy and goodness. Far from chastising me, He embraces me with love. He makes me eat at His table. He serves me with His own hands and gives me the key to His treasures. He converses and delights Himself with me incessantly, in a thousand and a thousand ways. And He treats me in all respects as His favorite. In this way I consider myself continually in His holy presence.

My most usual method is this simple attention, an affectionate regard for God to whom I find myself often attached with greater sweetness and delight than that of an infant at the mother's breast. To choose an expression, I would call this state the bosom of God, for the inexpressible sweetness which I taste and experience there. If, at any time, my thoughts wander from it from necessity or infirmity, I am presently recalled by inward emotions so charming and delicious that I cannot find words to describe them.

Lawrence was a veteran of the Thirty Years’ War, one of the most violent conflicts in European history. For most of his monastic life, he was the subject of Louis XIV. Louis would have made Trump seem humble and Putin look like a pacifist, and he reigned for seventy years. Lawrence had as much right to criticize his political milieu as anyone. Instead, he developed a reputation as a sandal repairman and a practitioner of a religious discipline stated in terms an artist might appreciate:

Sometimes I consider myself as a stone before a carver, whereof He is to make a statue. Presenting myself thus before God, I desire Him to make His perfect image in my soul and render me entirely like Himself.

This sounds less like Robin Bell and more like George Inness, who once wrote,

Every individual man or woman born into this world is an offshoot of that Infinite Mind or Spirit which we call God. God creates in us sensation, and through it we are made conscious of the world we live in. A world which we eventually find to be a continual changing state, but a state which forms the basis of all our knowledges.

George Inness, Jr. said of his father: “This was the creed of George Inness—beauty. Translated into all its forms, loved as spirit, religion, God, this he searched daily, hourly, and worshiped.”

Mark Tobey once remarked, “I believe that painting should come through the avenues of meditation rather than the canals of action.” An artist need not live like a monk. Most couldn’t anyway. But a certain kind of artist can summon a monk’s spirit in the studio, listening for true inner voices, contacting the raw being of life and materials, receiving images from the mystery of whence they come.

Such artists become resistant to the political regime because they’re resistant to politics itself. They likewise can become resistant to the philosophical regime, at a cost to their reputations, and the commercial regime, at a literal cost. But they don’t set out to serve the resistance, and certainly not the #Resistance. They set out to be true to themselves. Augustine wrote of certain poets who “had no intention to invent falsehoods, but uttered, as honest men, what the truth extorted from them.” If all artists acted accordingly, we’d have a revolution in the arts like nothing ever seen.

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1. Arguably this is unfair to barbarians. Tacitus asserted that morality in the Germanic tribes was more effective than Roman law and their people were physically and spiritually healthier than Romans. “No one in Germany finds vice amusing,” he wrote. But for the sake of the argument, let’s roll with it.

2. As for “When [Trump] says things that are demonstrably not true, that rhetoric is a relentless assault on thinking, nuance and ambiguity — all the things that art, at its best, helps to foster,” don’t even get me started. Kennicott’s essay would have been more formidable if he had expanded on his correct observation that “We need to understand barbarism as the chaos and will to destruction to which everyone is to some degree inclined,” and elucidated how Democrats have been guilty of it as well as Republicans.