In recent years, ISIS’ destruction of ancient monuments and artefacts in the Middle East has horrified the world; symbolic, performative acts recorded and replayed across headlines are the propagandistic art of their violent politics. This past spring, ISIS stormed the Iraqi city of Mosul, and with it, one of the most ancient homes of Christianity – the Nineveh Plains. Thousands of Christians were forced to flee, leaving behind them the homes and culture that had resisted thousands of years of persecution. Taking what little they could, the Christians abandoned the rest to ISIS. As if it was not enough to be driven from home, work and community, the ISIS soldiers made ruins of their spiritual monuments and artifacts – structures and objects revered as the emblems of God, the “artworks” studied from our air-conditioned lecture halls, in glowing PowerPoints and glossy books. Every dome obliterated, every manuscript burned is a potent message broadcast worldwide. Like the Nazis of all-too recent memory, ISIS destroys the physical materialisations – the cultural expressions – of its political enemies. ISIS’s attacks make clear the political and cultural importance of the art and the symbolic – a fact that becomes all too obvious when we see these symbols being destroyed in front of us.
Broadly speaking, ‘Art’, in peace and in war, has ever been and will continue to be an es- sential mode of symbolic communication for humanity. In general discussion, many disregard the true importance of art, especially when actual lives are threatened and being taken. In the world of academia, we often get caught up attempting to answer questions about what art is and what its use and purposes are. Plato, Tolstoy, Kant, Baudelaire and Greenberg argue over the centuries-long dilemma; they dip into theology here, politics there, toeing the edge of the enormous abyss of ideas about our own existence, divine and earthly.
Despite the confounding complexities of the idea, it is this relationship to the concept of art, so woven up with our sense, or questions about, ourselves that makes art itself so important and consequently, the acts of ISIS powerfully disturbing. Surely the history of monumental art and architecture is marked by the wealthy and powerful themselves; people who manipulated lower strata of society to generate messages of their own. The bricks of our pyramids and cathedrals, castles and capitals may have been laid by slaves, gilded portraits funded by feudal underclasses, but we cannot deny them their eternal resonance; their language, unwritten, speaks to our personal experience. The genesis of art, whether for honestly or politically pious reasons, oftentimes lies in humanity’s need to express and understand divinity, spirituality, morality. As if in prayerful meditation, medieval monks in isolated scriptoriums devoted their lives to the creation of glistening illuminated manuscripts, which in themselves were supposed to inspire the same effect in future readers. Ancient calligraphic Chinese landscape paintings can highlight the smallness of man, dwarfed amidst the powerful and moving spirits of nature. In an age of industrial boom, decadent wealth and Dickensian poverty, Victorians A.W. Pugin and John Ruskin summon the spectre of an art beautiful in her goodness to restore a perceived loss of morality.
Certain experiences with ‘Art’ stand in relief in my own mind. How, in my first Evensong at Christ Church, I was inexplicably moved beyond myself beneath the vaulted domes of stone. Impossibly light as air, they trembled with angelic stained-glass rainbows and angelic voices. Suddenly I was unaware of physical nuances and felt external to the strict confines and categories of time and place, religious creed and social circumstance. At that moment a single person can be united with a long history of the human multitude and its collective feeling; the undefinable, invisible ‘heart’ that pulses curious emotions through each and every one of us. Wander through a museum for a while; admire the faces of pale Renaissance Madonnas; lose yourself in Turner’s tumultuous oceans of light; contemplate graceful Japanese ceramics; long to reach out touch the marble muscles of ancient Hercules. Indeed, these pieces were created in vastly different times by different people in a wide range of circumstances. But what is it that draws us to them, makes us long for that “divine” experience felt at Evensong? What makes a Christian priest in Iraq weep as he laments manuscripts, early religious foundational documents, dismembered by men masked in black? What makes us weep with him?
This is the unexplainable phenomenon Im- manuel Kant grapples with as he attempts to determine our judgements of the beautiful; we appreciate his struggle because we too are unable to verbally wrap our minds around these mysterious emotions stimulated by certain places and objects of art. Particularly in our age, art (perhaps in this instance, ‘visual culture’ would be the more appropriate term) can be a privilege of peace, an icon of our individual, spiritual freedoms. In its physicality, it represents what is beyond ourselves, our religious, political and personal liberties. Nevertheless, ISIS understands its power, however mysterious. Art has a place in war. Similarly, art must become our tool, our continued advocate for peace. Where they destroy, others must rebuild. We must become the ‘Iconophiles’ of our day, standing against iconoclasts who attack the buildings that literally structure our valued ideas of ‘self-hood’.
In making many of these statements, I recognise that I am of course making vast generalisations. However, I believe that in our drive toward (quite necessary) specificity in scholarship, we occasionally forget the truths underlying our generalisations: the realisation that art, to this day, still works on us in a level above the simply historical or theoretical.
So if we have, through time looked at and categorized art according to its many roles – art for a king’s sake, for religion’s sake, for beauty’s sake, for its own sake – it is important to here realize and appreciate both our individual personal and broad universal claims in an art for peace’s sake
