Mary Beard: How do we look?

WHEN ART STOPPED BEING RELIGIOUS: SEEING WITH(OUT) THE EYE OF FAITH

This copiously illustrated short volume contains thirty or so loosely connected, and relatively – but not altogether – self-contained, brief chapters on objects from ancient civilizations. All of these objects involve the representation of the human body. And all of them, I think it would be fair to say, appeal to us aesthetically in some way, and would qualify by most people’s definition as ‘art’. However, as Beard spends the better part of her text explaining, this aesthetic appeal was not what primarily motivated their production – in most cases. Beard entitles her book ‘the eye of faith’ on account of the domination of those religious, or politico-religious, factors at work in their production and reception – factors that from the perspective of a modern viewer might sometimes be incidental to our appreciation (though Beard seeks to rectify this).

I say ‘in most cases’ because there is one, at least partial, exception: the works of Ancient Greek and Roman sculptors that stand at the centre of the first of the two main sections of the book. In one case at least – the remarkable bronze statue of a boxer excavated in Athens – it is hard to see how those factors could have been other than purely aesthetic. In her other examples of Graeco-Roman sculpture, aesthetic factors would seem to have been at least powerfully contributory, if not perhaps altogether dominant.

A postmodern take on Clark’s Civilization

This book and the linked BBC series constitute a very conscious and deliberate revisiting of Kenneth Clark’s Civilization, seeking to offer both a tribute and a corrective – something that reflects our own ‘progress’ since the initial series in being more global, less ethnocentric, and, yes, more politically correct. Civilizations, you will notice, has replaced Civilization. And Clark’s grand narrative of the development of Art (with a big ‘A’) as the hallmark of ‘civilization’, understood as an ultimate Western value, is challenged. First, by enlarging the compass of the original series to include artistic representation in non-Western cultures; second (and partly as a necessary corollary of this extension), by substituting religious and politico-religious factors for aesthetic ones. Gone, then, is the moral superiority attaching to the Western elevation of aesthetic over everything else. The grand narrative gives way, in the now long-familiar postmodern style, to a de-centred, less ‘hegemonic’ approach.

So much for the aim. Does it work? Yes and no. The problem with all postmodern decentring is that grand narrative is something we humans crave. And the greater the fragmentation, the more any incipient elements of narrative will tend to stand out. It’s like trying to restrain our eyes from discerning faces on an old brick wall or the geometric figures in the wallpaper or the carpet. In the same way, the want of other elements of narrative continuity in the first of the two parts of Beard’s book, causes our attention to be drawn irresistibly to the one narrative development that figures there – the story of the remarkable revolution that took place in Greek representations of the body. For, in defiance of the author’s best postmodern intentions, that is what ends up holding our attention. And, before we know it, here we are back with the old narrative of the rise of Western Art.

But maybe I’m over-complicating things. Maybe it’s simply that Beard is too much the classicist not to let her true passions show. But even the second part of the book succumbs to the same tendency. This, I suspect, is because the closest thing to a common theme linking her accounts of the production and reception of religious objects is her acccount of their appraisal by our Western gaze, and of how that gaze (dominated by the Graeco-Roman ideals discussed in part one), will have differed from evaluation of those by and for whom those objects were originally created. Ultimately, by focussing on incipient theme of the misrepresenting Western eye, she ends up back with the old Graeco-Roman ideals again. It’s like Alice setting out into the garden down one of the corkscrew paths and finding herself returning to the back door whichever path chooses!

Art vs. religion

So in what way does Beard think that her postmodern take diverges from the old grand narrative?

In her concluding chapter Beard says she wants to see our cultural consumption as driven by a ‘respect for civilization’. This is itself, she claims, a kind of religious sentiment, just as much as whatever political-religious feeling might have motivated the original consumers. We all see with the ‘eye of faith’ – both the original non-Western consumers who belonged to religions, and the Western consumers of today who may not think of themselves in these terms. And the object of faith in both cases is the phenomenon of civilization itself. She contrasts this with the traditional view propounded by Clark that the object of our cultural consumption is purely aesthetic (beauty in some idealized sense) and reflects a mode of valuation that is distinctly Western even when extended to non-Western representations. (The question of whether cultural consumption, understood in Clark’s sense, could also be viewed as religious is not something Beard discusses.) The term civilization is used by both perspectives – but differently. With Clark it has a prescriptive sense (i.e. being civilized as opposed to not being a philistine); in Beard’s case, it refers to the historical achievements of a particular people of episode of history seen, as it were, in the round.

Beard apparently views the principal benefit of her own account of our cultural consumption as its greater inclusivity. Unlike Clark’s ‘civilization’, it doesn’t take as its theme the development of something called Art, and then argue that this ‘something’ constitutes a marker of our own cultural superiority. A more thorough-going post-modernist than Beard would no doubt reverse the causal relation between these two stages, and argue that, in thinking like Clark, we invent the notion of Art as a means of establishing our own cultural superiority. Beard does not go that far: and the evidence as she presents it would scarcely allow her to. But the concern for religious contextualization does largely replace purely artistic considerations in her text – which at least goes some way in this direction.

A cult of ‘civilization’?

But – political correctness aside – what about Beard’s concluding assertion: that, as consumers of culture, ‘we all see with the eye of faith’. Really!? Personally, I struggle to see what Beard can mean here by ‘faith’. Or why we should value ‘civilizations’ for that matter. In practice, this politically-correct statement just seems to gloss over the cultural difference which constitutes the real de facto theme of her book – i.e. the difference between Western and non-Western cultures, between our ‘civilization’ and their ‘civilizations’. The reflection to which she invites us – on the true nature of that difference – is precisely the reflection which she proceeds to close off prematurely, presumably on account of its political sensitivity!

How much more interesting it would have been, had she used her evidence to raise the question what it is to see with a modern ‘aesthetic’ eye, and how that differs from seeing ‘with the eye of faith’. Or perhaps it isn’t so much seeing that is at issue here; after all, even the ‘primitive’ Olmec presumably experience the same visual impressions as we do when confronted with the Belvedere Apollo. Rather, it’s about ‘valuing’ with, or without, the eye of faith. Why was it that purely aesthetic images (such as the boxer) came, for the first time, to have a sufficiently important place in a culture for people to start investing in their production and consumption? That’s the real question to which we want the answer, whether we count ourselves as religious believers or not. These are not questions that Clark can help us answer because the absence from his discussion of any autonomous non-Western point of view leaves him incapable of seeing Art and Western civilization, as it were, from the outside. By contrast, Beard’s own more anthropological perspective really does offer her this point of vantage – and her specialism in the cultures that seem to have brought the change from religious to aesthetic make her exceptionally well placed to have a shot at answering. A shame then that the opportunity seems to have been missed.

Art and idolatry

I do not claim to have my own answers. The closest thing I have found to a treatment of these questions in relation to antiquity is in Owen Barfield’s quirky Saving Appearances. Though I think a similar overall perspective is to be found in the theological work of the French phenomenologist Jean-Luc Marion. Broadly, Barfield regards the aesthetic revolution in Greece (i.e. the production of naturalist human images as artworks) as being the result of a filtering out of religious reference – rather as the imposition of ‘perspective’ in late mediaeval art through use of the camera obscura effectively abstracts what is seen from extraneous, non-naturalistic (e.g. social and religious) influences that might otherwise influence the artist. There is no reason to suppose, Barfield would argue, that the mediaeval artist does not mean to produce a truthful representation of his world when he chooses to represent spiritually ‘higher’ entities by increasing their size or adding wings and haloes. His world really does contain such beings, and will cease to be faithfully represented where the rules of naturalism must be strictly observed. In fact, Barfield, who dislikes such naturalistic reductionism, perceives its representations as a paring down of human reality, which he terms ‘idolatry’. Why a paring down? Because, from a phenomenological perspective, human imagination has an active, not a simply passive, role in the world that it inhabits; it has itself engendered much of what it sees (Would we see chairs, but for the need to sit down?); while, from a traditional faith perspective such as that of Aquinas, imagination is at least as much an emanation of divine being as the world that it shapes. Either way, there can be no basis for rendering the imaginative gaze subservient to the world it inhabits to the point of reducing it to a mere replication of the image projected onto the retina. Nor for the devaluation of the human imagination that results from the splitting of human experience into ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’. Other, of course, than our desire to subject our world to scientific control.

Idolatry (another more extended theme of Beard’s book) is a term that has particular resonance in connection with the apparently naturalistic images that began to be produced at the beginning of the Greek fifth century. Frankly, Beard has little to offer when it comes to the religious, political or social causes, or corollaries, of this surprising development. She refers briefly and dismissively to the idea of an association with the rise of democracy. But there is a much more natural corollary, one would have thought, in certain developments in the religious and philosophical domain, especially if we accept Barfield’s thesis of idolatry as a ‘filtering out’ of non-naturalistic reference. What about the emergence in the Greek world at about this time of some philosophical accounts of the cosmos that tended towards religious agnosticism? That locus classicus of classical agnosticism, for example, which Beard and everyone else cite with such evident approval: the passage of Xenophanes where he famously claims that ‘if horses could draw, they’d draw their gods to look like horses’ (or words to that effect)? Such intellectual developments will have had their religious and socio-political corollaries, no doubt, which I am not qualified to discuss. Suffice it to say they have been extensively discussed by scholars like Marcel Detienne and Jasper Svenbro, who speak not about democracy per se, but a far wider development across the Greek political world towards the ideal of the equality of a community of citizens through the law (isonomia) – an enormously more important political development, of which democracy is only one of the offshoots.

But this is so much speculation from a non-specialist little qualified to speculate. What a shame then that Beard with her genuine claim to expertise should have been deterred from such speculation by a doctrinaire postmodern schema so unsuited to the content she so wants to discuss!