Art can touch the divine. I can touch the divine. I can touch the divine through art.

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I have walked through many a museum, read my fair share of history and anthropology, and kept my eyes open just living in this world. It seems that for as long as humans have been around the primary function of art has been to connect with the divine.  

What do I mean by “divine?” That word can be slippery, having many connotations depending on who you are and where you come from. Simply put, it is the belief that something exists beyond personal mortality. It is the knowledge that reality is far vaster than what my physical senses can readily perceive. 

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Jesus, Mary and the Saints. The pantheon of Egyptian, Greek or Mayan Gods. Buddha and the Bodhisattvas. Vishnu and Shiva. These figures are all symbols, like conducting rods for numinosity—and they proliferate through the art of their respective cultures of origin. Throughout most of history, across most cultures, art has been religious in nature.

 

It was not until the Enlightenment of the 18th Century, when the Christian Church began to lose its chokehold on the collective psyche of the West, that art strayed from predominantly religious symbolism. As a positive, this liberation allowed for the self-determination of art, rather than art playing a subservient role to the Church or some other institution. Yet this also presented a danger, in that art’s connection to the divine could now be easily severed.  

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The divine is, by its very nature, beyond the grasp of our comprehension. It cannot be understood, only felt. One method by which to access the incomprehensible is via symbols. Symbols are an approximation and a guide—an ontological pathway. As the old Buddhist saying goes, “All instruction is but a finger pointing to the moon; and those whose gaze is fixed upon the finger will never see beyond.” My art, therefore, is the finger.

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Or as Karen Armstrong (1993) writes in A History of God:

Human beings are the only animals who have the capacity to envisage something that is not present or something that does not yet exist but which is merely possible. The imagination has thus been the cause of our major achievements in science and technology as well as in art and religion. The idea of God, however it is defined, is perhaps the prime example of an absent reality which, despite its inbuilt problems, has continued to inspire men and women for thousands of years. The only way we can conceive of God, who remains imperceptible to the sense and to logical proof, is by means of symbols, which is the chief function of the imaginative mind to interpret.

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For millennia man has sought a connection with the divine via symbols. To me as an artist, this is the highest function of art. The hegemony that institutionalized religion has held on our symbolic life is dissolving—which I feel is a boon. At this cultural/historic moment there is an opportunity for art to cultivate new symbolic languages, unfettered by the didacticism of institution, and free to explore the numinous anew. 

 

 

References

Armstrong, K. (1993). A History of God. Knopf.

Watts, A. (1957). The Way of Zen. Pantheon Books.