Comments from Barbara Braathen

One of our readers, Barbara Braathen, has just submitted the following, which needs no introduction:

Checking the dictionary for "spiritual," it is defined as that which is incorporeal, etheric as opposed to physical, supernatural, sacred. To disassociate art from the spiritual is somewhat disingenuous, since the art-situation, however embodied, alludes to feelings, concepts, theories, possibilities, projections, or just memory itself, all non-physical. (I loved Atta Kim's discussion of the point in Kandinsky's writing.) For instance, while Donald Judd expressed an aversion to both illusion and allusion in art, his work nevertheless provides unique, valuable, and memorable experiences of simplicity, purity, and fineness itself. One of the panelists in this symposium, Suzanne Anker, bases her artwork on science and, by her statement here, eschews the spiritual; nevertheless, her work brings to our awareness science's incredible advances into the nature of nature, how we are composed, and confronts us, in aesthetic form, with the mystery of our own being. It appears that once one ponders the deeper issues of any work of art, one enters the realm of the ineffable, the spiritual.

In the 60s, when I was in school, and in a circle of young and ardent artists in Los Angeles, it was still acceptable to discuss the spiritual in art. This too was a period, perhaps like the early 20^th century, when explorations into Mme. Blavatsky, Bishop Leadbeater, Annie Besant, Rudolf Steiner, the eastern religions, and then for us, Gurdjieff, AA Bailey, and many other mystics, were of great interest. We dabbled in channeling through automatic handwriting, lifted tables in séances, amplified our studies with the occasional psychedelic (discovering how truly unreliable are appearances), and witnessed Swami Satchidananda, at close range in a living room, in meditation levitating about four feet off the floor. I became convinced of the substantiality of the incorporeal, to say the least.

At that time, each exhibition of new art and each issue of Artforum were like powerful jolts of lightning, shaping the exciting present and charging up the future. There was a term often used in referencing contemporary art, viz.,"The Mission." Art's "Mission" was to open vision, to heal the heart, to feed the mind, to transcend all fetters into the freedom of the new and the creative, to perceive inventions from artists in order to be able to face challenges in a novel world with novel mental and emotional tools. Perhaps "The Mission" embodied the last dying gasp of the idealism which fueled modernism…but for us this was art's turf, and it was spiritual in nature, expansive into the unknown terrain of the soul, whether individual, collective, systemic, or cosmic. Bruce Nauman said it in 1967, in blazing neon, tongue-in-cheek or not: "The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths."

Sometime early in the 80s, not only did the future stop looking so exciting, but it was clear that the word "spiritual" as applied to art was absolutely unacceptable…and "The Mission" had entirely disappeared from discourse. I winced when you mentioned, Taney, that you were often met with pity upon bringing up this topic. Pity!!! I have always pitied those not interested in the spiritual mysteries which are of such great fascination to me…. But you learn to not bring up the topic, and eventually to appreciate the other side of thought.

I still believe that art has the power to change the individual, the culture, and the future, and that it inhabits a highly honorable, sacred field. Whether the artist's concern is political, phenomenological, descriptive, symbolic, scientific, cynical, decorative, aleatory, comical, conceptual, illustrative, numerical, whether the art installation is an accumulation of detritus or one of Platonic solids, and no matter what the artist claims, all art is essentially spiritual.