Reconsidering the Spiritual

In a recent Washington Post opinion essay, Rebecca Solnit addressed the defeated, Sturm und Drang tone that dominates conversations about planetary extinction. Most of us have been operating from the assumption that a healthy future means giving up things and conveniences we love, then living lives of austerity.

But what if it meant giving up things we’re well rid of, from deadly emissions to nagging feelings of doom and complicity in destruction? What if the austerity is how we live now — and the abundance could be what is to come?

What if the austerity is how we live now — and the abundance could be what is to come? By turning the argument on its head, her essay is a useful reminder of how thinking creates neural pathways, and those pathways become a pattern. Disrupting that autonomic proclivity is essential for perceiving the world more accurately as well as accessing the rich trove of knowing that resides in our consciousness, much of it sub rosa and furtive.

Solnit is right. We have a deeply troubled sense of the times we find ourselves in right now. Pandemics and politics have worn down the protective veneer that protected many of us in the past, leaving us more anxious, suspicious and self-focused. But Solnit’s counter position is a useful tool for reconsidering a variety of currently held views.

One that matters to me is the power of visual art to engage with a sense of awe, transcendence and the numinous. That is just one essential aspect of art’s power, but it has been diminished and, in some cases, left out of the historical canon altogether.

In 2012 Charlene Spretnak published a much needed revision on this topic, The Spiritual Dynamic in Modern Art. She stated it simply: “One cannot grasp the complexity and depth of modern and contemporary art if the spiritual dimension is ignored, denied, downplayed or dismissed.”

Once the evidence is truly acknowledged, the history of modern art looks quite different from the proscribed narrative. It is less a linear account than a richly varied landscape, made verdant in numerous places by the great underground river of the spiritual in modern art. Hence the aim of this book is rather like the process in ecological restoration known as “daylighting” underground streams by removing the cement culverts that enclose them and allowing them to be seen in their natural habitats.

Since Spretnak’s groundbreaking book, “daylighting” has indeed taken place. Overlooked artists, many of them spiritually inclined women, have been featured in major museum shows including Georgiana Houghton, Emma Kunz, Agnes Pelton and the attendance record-breaking Hilma af Klint at the Guggenheim. Recent exhibits like Supernatural America, Witch Hunt and New Time: Art and Feminisms in the 21^st Century have also shifted the conversation. And most recently The Milk of Dreams at the Venice Biennale was a curatorial tour de force envisioned by Ceclia Alemani. Working primarily with women artists, Alemani expanded the purview of art even more broadly:

How is the definition of the human changing? What constitutes life, and what differentiates plant and animal, human and non-human? What are our responsibilities towards the planet, other people, and other life forms? And what would life look like without us?

New books also reflect this more inclusive view of art, art history and a spiritual sense of our lives. In addition to these new exhibit catalogs and artists monographs, stand outs include Jennifer Higgie’s The Other Side: A Journey Into Women, Art and the Spirit World, and Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How it Can Transform Your Life, by Dacher Keltner.

But the best surprise of all is a new book from an unexpected source. I would have never guessed that the co-founder of Def Jam records and hip hop music producer Rick Rubin was my spiritual cotraveler. His new book, The Creative Act: A Way of Being is a feast, bringing art and spirituality into an exquisite confluence. “I set out to write a book about what to do to make a great work of art. Instead, it revealed itself to be a book on how to be,” writes Rubin.

Normally I would share some favorite passages. But every page of my copy is marked up so culling my short list hasn’t happened yet. Just get your own copy! (which is what I also suggested to my partner and son after both were hooked after just a short skim of mine.) Perhaps Rubin sums it up with this one line: “Without the spiritual component, the artist works with a crucial disadvantage.”

Dave Shiflett’s review of the book expands it even further: “The Creative Act can be considered a work of transcendent literature, one that suggests the universe still smiles upon us despite all indications to the contrary.”

It is this larger context that is calling to so many of us. It is that energy that is at the heart of the upcoming show I co-curated with Alison Cuomo and Karen Fitzgerald, Luminous Elsewheres. The exhibit opens on March 31, 2023 at Westbeth Gallery in New York City. (Details on the show are here.)

Spretnak puts this way of being into a beautifully articulated fullness:

My sense of the spiritual dimension of life extends beyond a focus on the self to a sense of our embeddedness in the larger context: the exquisitely dynamic interrelatedness of existence, the vibratory flux of the subtle realms of the material world, and the ultimate creativity of the universe. The cosmos is infused with an unfolding dynamic of becoming and also a unitive dimension of being. Spirituality is the awareness of and engagement with that unity and those dynamics.

It’s our next story.