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Comment: Hassan Vawda on sacred spaces and museum spaces
COMMENT A DEFICIENCY IN LIVED DIVINITY IN FRAMING BRITISH ART
For the better part of a year, public museums and art galleries have been ghostly, empty shells. The public collections of art are archived in stasis on the very walls they were installed upon for display ...
Since the 2000’s, flexing to various political trends and the consequential injections/cuts to public spending in the arts, our public collections and the art sector have attempted to identify themselves as ‘essential’ in numerous ways: the arts are essential to wellbeing, essential to community building, essential to society; our museums and galleries are civic spaces where all should be represented. Yet, since we entered a pandemic polity in which decisions about what remains open and what is forced to close rests on the assessment of what is ‘essential’, they have been closed. Shut for the better part of 2020, public art museums are now pushed to the back of the queue. In England for instance, they are classed alongside saunas and after non-essential retail in their right to reopen in 2021.
I have been observing the strife dealt to the art museum alongside the way places of worship have been treated and have responded since the start of the pandemic1. Their services never slowed down despite the buildings being closed in the first lockdown. In fact, faith communities increased activity in many instances2. By the end of the year, as we entered the second national lockdown,
© Rasheed Araeen 1See Hassan Vawda, ‘Museums must go further if they want to be seen as “temples of the secular”’, Museums Journal. https://www. museumsassociation.org/museums-journal/ opinion/2020/06/01062020-museums-gofurther-temples-of-the-secular/. Published June 1, 2020. Accessed December 28, 2020; Hassan Vawda, ‘Closed Museums, Open Churches: what is essential in a pandemic?’ Religion and Collections blog. https://religioncollections. wordpress.com/2021/03/06/closed-museumsopen-churches-what-is-essential-in-apandemic/. Published March 6, 2021. Accessed March 26, 2021.
2 All-Party Parliamentary Group on Faith and Society. Keeping the Faith: Partnerships between Faith Groups and Local Authorities during and beyond the Pandemic (2020).
The Annunciation , 1892.. Image released under Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND (3.0 Unported) Arthur Hacker, ‘Places of Worship’ were given exemption – the only public spaces individuals could travel to for public (Covid-19 safe) congregation in many parts of Britain. In 2021, we have had open mosques, synagogues, temples and churches, but not a single public art museum. This fact is profound, not just in reflecting what is deemed essential to society in this pandemic polity, but as a reflection of the schism between religion, as a lived reality in society and how this reality is
Religion in British Art is often reduced to the bare fact of its historical ties, more specifically its historical ties to Christendom. As Neil McGregor stated in the Foreword to 2000’s ‘Seeing Salvation’ exhibition at the National Gallery, ‘all great collections of European painting are inevitably also great collections of Christian art’3. It is a matter for historical records, for archives and art history. Religion is the past, with secularization supposedly at the heart of modernism. Whilst this sacralization of secularization has been debunked in most disciplines, art history has yet to wrestle with a postsecular reality of religion and belief as lived, everyday experience. The discipline of art history and criticism, particularly within a British context, has not developed ways to interrogate not just the transfer of Christian art into what become the foundations of many collections, but the way the experience of art today derives from the shift in Europe from a Christian worldview to the secular civilizing worldview4. Taking the icon from the church, placing it in the art museum is an attempt to have the best of both worldviews, flattening the perception of religious authority but at the same time aiming at a profound sense of transcendence.
In this lack of engaged literacy, art history and criticism has created what I think of as a deficiency in lived divinity in the discussion of religion within
present (or not) in the way we consider, research, and engage with British Art history today.
3 Neil MacGregor. ‘Introduction’ in G. Finaldi, ed. The Image of Christ: The Exhibition Catalogue for Seeing Salvation, London: National Gallery Company Limited 2000, pp. 6-8. 4 W.D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options, Duke University Press 2011.
the institutionalization of art in Britain. There are attempts to address this, drawing upon the Christian historiographies that are baked into our institutionalization of art. But many attempts to engage with religion in the context of art in Britain are blinded by Christian socialization. Religion and Christianity are as a result often used interchangeably, without any real interrogation of how the term ‘secular’ is conceptualized within the arts. This leaves a fractured engagement with religion, exposing a lack of depth in thinking about religion and belief outside of the framework of Christianity in a British context. What is this deficiency in lived divinity limiting? Or more significantly, who and what is being excluded? As the pandemic polity has emphasized, religion and belief are central to society, central to many communities – ‘essential’ in many peoples’ lives, ‘essential’ even to the politics of Britain. Maybe addressing this deficiency in lived divinity can help place collections of art back in churches – and in turn mosques, synagogues, and temples across the United Kingdom - finding a renewed purpose that helps make the case for the essential place of art in society. To start this, the institutionalization of art in Britain needs a true reckoning, in coming to terms with its exclusion of lived religion and the potential this holds.
Do the themes covered in this article connect with your research and experience? How should BAN address the historically overlooked interconnection of faith and art history? Contact: Hassan hassan.vawda@tate.org.uk and/or Martin Myrone, BAN Convenor mmyrone@paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk
