July 2018.  There are lists, should you be interested.  The 3 most overused themes in films about WW2.  The 7 key themes in social psychology.  The 10 big themes in literature.  The 19 volumes of major themes in Economics.  If you go to MoMA Learning you’re advised to search by theme.  Under Abstract Expressionism there are 4 sub-themes.  Under Dada, 5.  Under Christian Art…well, MoMa Learning doesn’t register this category.

It’s been around for some time.  Christian art.  The major themes treated repeatedly throughout the years/centuries, the earliest dating back to around 70 CE.  Lots of changes over the years both in style and emphasis.  Production dependent on the current religious and political tone.

In the 19th century the line between Christian and secular art becomes more relaxed, or, if not that, the religious themes become more available, acceptable to secular artists.  This makes sense, the themes and the art such a part of our heritage.  Culture.  And naturally artists turned to these themes and continue to do so for many reasons, the material still relevant.

I’ve been following a number of these artists.  Delacroix, Gauguin, and Van Gogh all identifying with Christ the martyr.  Francis Bacon, drawn to the image of Christ’s crucifixion, stating:  ‘I haven’t found another subject so far that has been as helpful for covering certain areas of human feeling and behaviour.’  Gilbert and George.  Jake and Dinos Chapman.  All four, well, essentially all two using religious imagery politically.  Tracey Emin, autobiographically.  Sebastian Horseley using Christ as a symbol of heroism.  Ana Maria Pacheco focusing on the suffering and hope.  Marina Abramovic.

The artist I’ve spent most time with is Abramovic.  She is, perhaps, the catalyst for this show, so passionate, dare I say fanatical about her art, and identifying closely with Christian themes.   She seems quite naturally to straddle the line between saint, martyr and artist.  In the matter of pain, for instance.

Sacrifice, penance.  Pain.  Philosopher Emil Cieran makes fun of the saints who actively pursue pain, but while pain as a means figures prominently in, it does not belong exclusively to the Christian faith.  As an artist Abramovic talks a similar language in her quest for transformation and the creation of art.  For her there is no other way.  Sacrifice is necessary.  The body expendable.  At times it’s difficult to tell her and the saint apart.  If you didn’t know the one served God and the other served Art, you’d be confused.  And certainly she looks the part, levitating as St Theresa in her Kitchen series.

While noting how an artist like Abramovic enters the space and gives herself passionately to her chosen theme, I’m more of a voyeur.  Journalist.  In No Rest for the Pious I talk of being at some remove.  Even use the term dishonest.  That’s a touch extreme.  Rather, think theatre.  Theme as set design perhaps.  As context.  A place to consider something of what that context suggests.   Here’s a list:  The life and death of art.  The likelihood and look of a second life or narrative.  Performance in the service of both God and Art.  The temperament of the artist versus that of the saint.  Misogynistic tendencies among the Greeks and Hebrews.  The attraction of pain and its usefulness.  The hope also to be free of pain, to finally meet up with Godot.  

I’ve looked to writers who’ve worked with the biblical stories and themes, bringing to them perspective, nuance and quite often humor.  Have admittedly drawn on Anne Carson more than anyone else.  For her Isaiah and Lazarus.  Her discussion of female pollution.  Road trip to Santiago de Compostela.  I’ve read Karl Knausgaard and grabbed his Ezekiel, Colm Toibin’s Mary.  Turned to saint literature, to David Ives’ Lives of Saints.  To the somewhat anti-saint literature of Emil Cieran, Tears and Saints.  Owen Hulatt for his essay Has art ended again?  Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.  Abramovic’s Walking through Walls.  Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own.  

And in the end…well, I don’t know that there is an end exactly.  Not having set out to argue a point or make a case I feel myself to be at loose ends.  There has been no precise goal other than engaging with the material and seeing what comes of it.  And if art, by definition, must have a narrative and a definite goal which is either reached or abandoned, then what of the art narrative which simply ends?  Of course I’m confusing things.  Pretending I’m involved in Big A Big N Art Narrative.  Nothing of the sort here.  No Big D Death either.  And certainly, no worries about the Second…or Thirtieth Narrative.   A series simply stopping.  Coming to a timely and somewhat arbitrary end requiring no more than a lower case rip.  Hmmm.  Doesn’t look right though.  Some things you just don’t mess with.  RIP.