Matthew J. Milliner​: Let me start by asking how you moved from studio art (so nicely covered by Bruce Herman in “A Hermeneutic of Humility” and your recent artist talk for your show In/Dwellings) into the very different task of attending to art through writing.

Jonathan A. Anderson: I have become increasingly convinced that so many pivotal artists and artworks over the past century are deeply shaped by religious traditions and seriously engaged in theological questioning, but this remains severely under-interpreted or misinterpreted in the scholarship about these artists. One might see these threads running through an artist’s artworks and personal writings and even discuss these topics with the artist in their studio, but when one moves to the scholarly writing and teaching about that same artist, that language consistently disappears or is transposed into another register—usually politics, occasionally a highly esoteric spirituality. I wanted to understand, at a non-superficial level, why this was the case, and I wanted to see how other ways of speaking and writing about this topic might be possible.

So that pulled me into writing, but it did so at a moment in which I also began feeling a kind of release from my art-making practice. The important vocational hinge happened in 2012, though at the time I didn’t quite know what was happening, and it took a few years for the character of that hinge to really show itself. I had been an art professor for about six years and had been churning out a lot of artworks, but I was also teaching contemporary art history, theory, and criticism and was becoming increasingly preoccupied with the problems of writing about religion in contemporary art. In an effort to work some of that out of my system, I received a research fellowship in 2012 to write an essay that was eventually published as “The (In)visibility of Theology in Contemporary Art Criticism” (2014) in a volume of essays produced from that fellowship. That essay received a lot more attention than I expected, including from people I deeply respected who immediately understood what I was doing and strongly encouraged me to keep going. Over the next year or two, the writing began to take over. I found myself staying at the writing desk well into the afternoon, or even all day, when I “should” have been in the studio. I was coming to the end of a series of paintings and was restless and unclear about where to go next, while everything seemed clear to me where to go next in the writing. That year was a major shift in my centre of gravity, and that shift has continued to the present.

MJM: I use your first book, Modern Art and the Life of a Culture (2016), co-authored with William Dyrness, every year in my modern art class, and it never disappoints. Can you tell us why you wrote it and explain its premise?

JAA: That book arose from a dissatisfaction with the ways religion has, or often has not, been written about in the histories of modern art, and it was an attempt to begin constructively rereading those histories. In doing so, it addresses two contexts at once. On the one hand, it is a modestly revisionist art history that pays closer attention to the ways modernism was shaped by religious contexts and engaged in ongoing theological questions and concerns. This reads against the grain of the dominant histories that portray modernist art as a vehement refusal of, and liberation from, religion. On the other hand, this rereading goes against the grain of many Christian engagements with modern art, which adopt many of the same basic assumptions as the dominant histories but narrate them as a decline into nihilism rather than a liberation from dogma. What both of these share is an overdetermined secularization theory that I don’t find to be either philosophically or sociologically tenable. Modernist art is more theologically complicated and multivalent than is generally recognized, and it warrants reconsideration as such without forcing it into narratives of progress or decline.

The title of our book is a riposte to H.R. Rookmaaker’s Modern Art and the Death of a Culture (1970), which has been influential in Protestant circles. While Rookmaaker cast a highly affirmative, positive vision for contemporary Christian artists, he linked this vision with (or leveraged it against) an art history of crisis and decline. Chapter 2 is a response to Rookmaaker, but then the rest of the book just gets on with a constructive rereading of the history itself, which for me is the heart of the book. The chapters have a loosely chronological and geographical organization, but really it is a series of case studies that rethink the complicated relevance of, and dialogue with, religion in the works of key modernists: Vincent van Gogh, Piet Mondrian, Vasily Kandinsky, Natalia Goncharova, Kazimir Malevich, Hugo Ball, Allan Kaprow, Andy Warhol, and many others.

MJM: Your article “Modern Art” (2021) in The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion was the first time I felt like I had a language to describe the complexities of the art-and-religion landscape. For those blocked by pesky academic paywalls, can you give us an overview of the new categories you created?

JAA: I’m thrilled to hear that article was helpful to you. Finding adequate language to discuss the interrelations of modern art and religion—and offering a heuristic mapping of the confusing landscape produced by those interrelations—is exactly what I was trying to do there. After some preliminary reflections on what the troubled terms “modern art” and “religion” mean, that article tries to clarify how they are entangled in all sorts of complicated but important ways. In doing so, I develop two sets of categories.

First, I argue that there are at least five “focal points” for examining these entanglements: (1) Object-oriented inquiry studies the ways artworks are discernably borrowing and reprocessing religious imageries, forms, artifacts, texts, titles, materials, and other religious points of reference. (2) Practice-oriented inquiry looks at the ways artistic production, performance, and display are shaped by, or in dialogue with, religious practices, including contemplative prayer, ritual activity, pilgrimage, and the presentation of relics and icons. (3) Artist-oriented inquiry focuses on the often-complicated place of religion within an artist’s statements, personal biography, or larger body of work (such as how an artist’s late religious works relate to earlier works, or vice versa). (4) Context-oriented inquiry pays attention to how religion shapes the physical, curatorial, institutional, and sociocultural contexts in which an artwork is produced, performed, and presented. And (5) concept-oriented inquiry tries to sort out the ways artworks engage questions and concepts that are implicitly or explicitly shaped by religious and theological traditions, including those concerning human dignity, mortality, injustice, lamentation, hope, love of neighbour, shame, gratitude, wonder, beauty, unrepresentability, and so on.

To be clear: the purpose of these five focal points is not to classify an artwork as “religious” or not; rather, these focal points help us identify instances of meaningful dialogue between modern art and religious traditions, which are often denser and can sustain much more critical attention than they generally receive. In the article, I concentrate on how these help us study “religion in modern art,” but I also briefly reverse this to explore examples of “modern art in religion,” including the many instances in which major modernist artworks are situated in churches, cathedrals, synagogues, and other religious contexts.

Second, even though these focal points help us perceive particular entanglements of art and religion, they do not tell us how to interpret these entanglements or their larger implications. So I try to clarify four major “interpretive horizons” within which scholars are currently rethinking the interrelations of modern art and religion: (1) Within an anthropological horizon, the questions of art and religion are primarily concerned with what these reveal about how cultural worlds are formed and sustained. (2) Within a political horizon, the questions of art and religion are principally concerned with the organization and operation of power in a society. (3) Within a spiritual horizon, the questions of art and religion are aimed at fostering socio-eco-spiritual healing, awakening, connectedness, or re-enchantment amid the disconnective and dis-enchanting conditions of modernity. (4) Within a theological horizon, the questions of art and religion cannot really be addressed without attending to the complex, often implicit, theo-logics in play throughout art histories, wherein the world’s being-in-relation-to-God remains a live question.

Together, these two sets of categories—five critical focal points and four interpretive horizons—provide a kind of heuristic mapping device for making sense of most of what is going on in the study of “art and religion” today and for expanding and enriching the future of such study.

MJM: If your Oxford article is the map, I sense that your new book will be hiking the terrain itself, taking us closer to the present than you did in Modern Art and the Life of a Culture. But the world of art-making is a wilderness that changes fast. How did you delimit boundaries to what you would cover?

JAA: The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art unfolds in three parts. In part 1 I seek to understand why and how religion has been generally “invisible” and “undiscussable” in the writing about twentieth-century art. This includes two chapters titled “1979” and “2004,” which critically engage two clusters of key texts published in and around those two dates, twenty-five years apart. I pay special attention to October, the influential journal of art theory and criticism founded in 1976, while drawing in several other conversation partners. These chapters show how the scholarship of modern and contemporary art has significantly under-interpreted the importance of religion in the histories of twentieth- and twenty-first-century art, and they highlight several examples of how these histories might be read differently. Artists and artworks are ultimately the crux of the matter, but these chapters are chiefly concerned with the writing about those artists and artworks. Indeed, my argument amplifies James Elkins’s notion that “the strange place of religion in contemporary art” is less a matter of the artworks themselves than the writing about contemporary art.

In part 2 I turn to study a resurgence of interest in religion and spirituality in contemporary art since 2004, which has produced a “new visibility” and “new discussability” of these topics but in ways that are often confusing and undeveloped. The two chapters in this part are essentially a massive expansion on my Oxford article, developing those five focal points in a more detailed way and showing exactly how those interpretive horizons have worked in major publications and exhibitions over the past two decades. One argument that emerges here is that the same unsustainable secularization theory that has obstructed vital aspects of modern and contemporary art histories is still subtly governing current inquiries into religion and spirituality in those histories. I contend that the scholarship of modern and contemporary art cannot sufficiently address the questions of religion without more developed and historically well-resourced engagement with theology.

In part 3 I press further into what it might mean to have an open theological horizon in the study of contemporary art. Theology’s contribution to this scholarship is not a matter of coercing artists or artworks into doctrinal grids but a matter of attuning viewers to theological formations already operating within “the grain of the history of modernism.” This re-attunement requires deeply reworking some dominant assumptions within art theory, but it only really happens through extended critical writing about particular artworks and their respective histories. Consisting of two chapters, part 3 therefore opens with a case study, an extended experiment in critical art writing that attempts to keep all four of our horizons in view, with particular attention to writing within a theological horizon. The book then ends with an essay theorizing this kind of critical activity by rethinking it from both directions: “art criticism and theology” and “theology and art criticism.”

Your comment about the terrain of contemporary art changing so fast is exactly right. It took me a long time to write this book, and so much changed in the process. Inevitably, the conversation surrounding this topic will continue to change in the coming years—indeed, this book is intentionally pushing for change. But I tried to do several things here that are intended to have longer-range significance. First, this book does a great deal of historiographical heavy lifting that I hope will clear away obstacles that have impeded serious thinking about religion and theology in contemporary art. Second, I have tried to develop several heuristic mapping devices for getting one’s bearings in this fast-changing terrain, which are designed to be useful well beyond the present moment. Third, one of my aims for this book is to heavily resource other scholars (including future scholars) in this field by providing many sign pointers toward things that warrant further attention, including places of significant under-interpretation and misinterpretation. I hope others will pick up the various loose ends in this book and do something with them. Fourth, I offer one extended example of the kind(s) of critical writing I hope to see more of in the future. Fifth, one of my main objectives was to drive the discourse of “contemporary art and religion” deeper into the most fundamental questions it is asking, including the questions of anthropos, polis, spiritus, and theos. I hope doing so will elicit clearer, more potent lines of inquiry in future scholarship. In short, I suppose I delimited the boundaries of this book by intentionally structuring it as prolegomena to further writing.

MJM: I have long been impressed (and chastened) by your irenic approach to those who might be hostile to religion, but your charitable approach does not devolve into a sloppy abandonment of basic theological contours. How would you articulate your approach to artistic work or scholarship that demonstrates outright hostility to Christianity or any other faith?

JAA: For various reasons, I’m usually not much bothered by hostility to religion. I’m sensitive to, and interested in, the many ways one might develop such hostility, the different forms or aims it might take, and the various ways it might be embedded in quite complicated situations (whether in life or in art). For better or worse, I am geared toward hearing what questions are really being asked, discerning what concerns and processes are really in play, and seeing how these might shift in larger or longer perspectives.

Many people who are hostile to religion have encountered very bad or very superficial theology. In that sense, hostility to “religion” might be quite theologically and spiritually productive, perhaps even finding rich dialogue partners in the theologies of Søren Kierkegaard, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Simone Weil, or Karl Barth (all of whom inveigh against “religion” in ways I am sympathetic to). Others have had very bad experiences, and their hostility is really directed toward particular people in their lives, or toward particular social patterns or agendas, more than anything else. This kind of hostility often issues from a strong sense (correctly perceived or not) of coercion, exclusion, injustice, or trauma in religious communities. Hostility sometimes warrants interpersonal care more than intellectual rejoinder, and sometimes it signals something deeply out of joint that religious communities need to address.

More interestingly, sometimes what appears to be hostility is only a surface presentation, or a surface reading, of dynamics that in fact involve serious theological struggle and real theological insight. I’m quite interested in the ways irony, misdirection, paradox, self-deception, and negative dialectics surround the topic of religion in contemporary art. We are often talking about more than we think we are. Furthermore, overt hostility is often only one stage within a longer, more interesting development of a person’s life, thought, or art-making. The vast majority of artists who populate the histories of modern and contemporary art, for example, were raised in religious homes, and their work often involved a (sometimes hostile) distancing from this upbringing and a critical engagement with it. But it is also surprising how theologically important these processes often are and how many of these artists returned to some sort of faith later in life. I highlight several examples of this in chapter 3 of my new book.

Obviously, there are many instances of hostility to religion that are uninformed, boring, and “religiously unmusical” (a phrase Max Weber used to describe himself). But there are also many kinds of this hostility that are deep and resonant. Benjamin Buchloh’s antagonism toward religion is not very interesting, but T.J. Clark’s is extremely interesting. I have found it necessary to critically engage Buchloh (mostly in chapters 2 and 4), but I try to spend my time in dialogue with perspectives that I think are really generative (Clark appears in almost every chapter).

At any rate, I’m grateful for your comment about my general posture here not leading to theological sloppiness or abdication. I am very interested in open dialogue, but my general sense is that the questions and concerns that animate one’s hostility toward religion are often fundamentally theological, and they benefit from pressing deeper into theology rather than merely opposing it. I am with Jean-Louis Chrétien in believing that all things are called into being and, at a fundamental level, all life and all desire is a stronger or weaker responsiveness to That which calls. This basic call and response echoes everywhere throughout contemporary art, but it is usually only heard amid a great deal of noise and restlessness.

MJM: One of the ways this played out was at Bridge Projects, a gallery in Los Angeles that we both worked on, made possible by the generosity of Roberta and Howard Ahmanson and the extraordinary labour of Cara Megan Lewis and Linnéa Spransy. The gallery had a series of exhibitions, publications, and lectures that are still available online. What did you learn the most from that experience?

JAA: Bridge Projects was an extraordinary place, and I learned so much from it. There is so much stigma, awkwardness, and fear of association surrounding the topic of religion in contemporary art—James Elkins calls it a “structure of refusals”—which has produced a great deal of stifled thinking and oblique speech about this topic. The aim of Bridge Projects was to see if more constructive, more generous discussions of this aspect of contemporary art were possible. We sought to curate first-rate exhibitions (the artist rosters from those shows are astonishing), accompanied by events with first-rate scholars (again, astonishing), set within a community defined by genuine hospitality and welcome to anyone from any point of view. Once it became clear that Bridge was doing this carefully, intelligently, and hospitably, there was an incredible influx of interest and participation. I think two lessons really sank in for me during this experiment. First, even though it remains a touchy topic, there is an extraordinarily wide-ranging interest today in religion in contemporary art. Second, whatever “secularization” means, it does not mean the disappearance of religion or belief; it primarily means widespread disaffiliation from social formations that have been popularly identified with religion and belief in recent centuries. Such disaffiliation does not halt theological questioning but probably amplifies it, creating conditions for new and ongoing dialogue.

MJM: The last thing I want to do is to give away the contents of the new book. But can I ask you to highlight one or two of your favourite moments, or perhaps unfurl some material that did not end up in the book?

JAA: Oh, I’m happy to discuss the contents of the book, especially favourite moments. I’m fond of chapter 5, which is an extended critical engagement with Kris Martin’s Altar (2014), a full-scale steel remake of the frame of the Ghent Altarpiece that is installed in various outdoor locations (including on the book’s cover). That work is clearly engaged with Christian history, but it is quite unclear how to interpret that engagement, which presents a rich opportunity for critical experimentation. My chapter mulls over Altar, considering and reconsidering it within all four of the interpretive horizons I’ve mentioned—anthropological, political, spiritual, theological—with particular attention to how the last of those becomes especially generative. The result is not only a study of Martin’s work but a productive rethinking of the Ghent Altarpiece itself. That chapter is important, because I believe many of the problems of contemporary art and religion can only really be worked out through the labours of art criticism, rather than through theory. I originally intended this book to feature a series of case studies, but I found that a lot more theoretical and historiographical work was necessary to clear the way; so this essay stands alone as an example of what further work might look like.

MJM: What was the biggest surprise that came in the process of writing this book?

JAA: I suppose the biggest surprise is just how numerous and sprawling all the little surprises were. The questions of religion in contemporary art were neglected for many decades, especially through the second half of the twentieth century, but the further one pursues these questions, the more one finds. Chapter 3 is packed full of these little surprises. I’m also surprised at just how widespread the interest in this topic has become in recent years and by the sheer diversity of conversation partners and approaches one discovers as one pursues this topic. Chapter 4 surveys dozens of authors treating this topic.

I should give a more specific example. Early in the process, I found myself referring to several major exhibitions directly addressing topics of religion, spirituality, God, transcendence, and the like. I decided to look more seriously at this phenomenon, so I began keeping a list of exhibition catalogues and working through piles of them in all the libraries I had access to. That exercise not only produced a surprisingly long list of exhibitions; it also helped me see the sheer diversity of approaches to this general topic of religion in contemporary art—which, in turn, helped me formulate the four interpretive horizons that appear at the end of that Oxford article and are central to part 2 of my new book. A version of this list appears as an appendix in the book, but I have also posted the full, hyperlinked list on my website, which will be updated beyond the publication of the book. In shaping this book to resource other scholars in this field of study, I have been surprised at just how extensive those resources are.

MJM: What is your hope for the future of the field of theology and art?

JAA: This field is still underdeveloped, but it has such massive potential, which Chloë Reddaway has brilliantly elucidated in your recent interview with her. I suppose my threefold hope for this field is that non-reductive engagements with theology begin generating (1) greater artistic experimentation, (2) greater critical agility in writing about art, and (3) greater depths of historical understanding. Whereas earlier work in this field needed to do a great deal of general theological reasoning about the arts—a theology of the arts or a theology through the arts, for example—I’m hopeful that the future of this field can achieve more fine-grained thinking about, and a higher degree of intimacy with, particular artworks and particular histories of art. Art history has become a discipline that has extensively de-theologized its own subject matter, and this creates extraordinary blind spots. Similarly, theology has become a discipline that has often neglected or disowned its own visual-spatial intelligence and has inadvertently further de-theologized the history of art. My hope for the field of “theology and art” is that it reworks all of this from both sides of that disciplinary divide. On the one hand, this will involve retrieving and developing a deeper theological intelligence within the discipline of art history not only in modern and contemporary art history but also in the long histories that precede it. On the other hand, this requires retrieving and developing a deeper art-historical intelligence in the disciplines of theology. That is a tall and demanding order, but there are more good scholars working on this than ever before. I’m optimistic about what lies ahead.