the road to isenheim

I have long since finished the holiday reading I was given as a gift for Christmas, and have been feeling at a bit of a loose end. Not that I have nothing more to read. If you're like me (or any reader?) you will have a pile of unread books around the house. Perhaps a library. Books that remain unread, maybe even a few that you’ve never opened, but many that have served you well. I judge books by their covers and display the finer ones prominently on my bookshelf, like wearing one’s heart on one’s sleeve. A beautiful book is an object to cherish. Volumes with heft deliver reassurance somehow when you consider them in the palm of your hand. Although these days one can look up just about any work of art ever created on one’s screen, a fine physical reproduction still does a better job of conjuring the original. We have hauled our library painstakingly from continent to continent. It’s at a time like this that moving the sheer weight of all these books from place to place has really seemed worthwhile. 

So I’ve been going back to unfinished and unstarted books in search of inspiration. John Berger’s Portraits has been on my bedside table for many months. Though I’ve not made it past the first few dozen pages, it’s a book that invites browsing, as each chapter deals with a particular artist. I open it more or less at random to the Mathias Grünewald chapter, and suddenly Berger is speaking to me as though he were sharing our pandemic predicament. Colmar's Isenheim altarpiece, commissioned by the hospice at Isenheim by the Antonite order, is the subject of the essay. The hospice was for victims of the plague. 

In a period of revolutionary expectation, I saw a work of art which has survived as evidence of the past's despair; in a period which has to be endured, I see the same work miraculously offering a narrow pass across despair. 

The parallels go further. Like Berger, I've been to see the altarpiece on two separate occasions, 30 years apart to Berger's 10. My first visit was on a summer road trip across Europe with my family. While my mother roped us into her champagne pilgrimage to Rheims, my father insisted on a lengthy detour to see this altarpiece – a major influence on his work for its raw depiction of physical violence being visited on a human body. A jaded teenager, when I first saw the altarpiece in 1985, all I remember seeing was the tortured form of Christ on the cross. Berger writes:

Doctors and scientists working today on the phenomenology of pain might well study this painting….The distortions of form and proportion–the enlargement of the feet, the barrel testing of the torso, the elongation of the arms, depending out of the fingers – may describe exactly the felt anatomy of pain. 

I had to give it to my dad, whose art often revolved around themes of estrangement and even annihilation - the unnatural contortions depicted in this suffering body  were utterly persuasive. Penitent attitudes I acquired with my Catholic education might have suggested to me that the suffering of the afflicted was to be their salvation. 

When I returned a second time in 2015 to see it with my wife and daughters, another family road trip, the cruxifixction scene is as striking as ever. Like Berger's, my experience of the altarpiece this time was carried by the luminosity of its other scenes. It was all aglow with a vivid, almost psychedelic, joyful intensity. I had wanted my daughters to see the altarpiece for what it meant to their grandfather, whom they had never known. What I found myself describing however was a depiction of all of life in resplendent colour in the concertina panels of this magnificent display. There’s the annunciation, the nativity, the phatasmagoric temptation of saints and of course the resurrection, in a palette that can only be described as hallucinatory. All of life seems to be there:

 The altarpiece, no less than a Greek tragedy or the 19th century novel, was originally planned to encompass the totality of a life and an explanation of the world. It was painted on hinged panels of wood. When these were shut, those before the altar saw the Crucifixion, flanked by St Anthony St Sebastian. When the panels were opened, they saw a Concert of Angels and a Madonna and Child, flanked by an Annunciation and Resurrection. When the panels were opened once again, they saw the apostles and some church dignitaries flanked by paintings about the life of St Anthony. The altarpiece was commissioned for a hospice at Isenheim by Amonite order. The hospice was for victims of the plague and syphilis. The altarpiece was used to help victims coming to terms with their suffering.

I am a lapsed Catholic, and I suspect that John Berger was more Communist the Catholic. One can be a complete heathen and still be moved by a work of religious art. Whether or not the Almighty exists, whether or not we believe in the afterlife, the fact of artefacts like the altarpiece and the ritual it gave rise to greatly enriches our lives even today. Berger writes: 

On the occasion of both my visits to Kolmar [1968 and 1976] it was winter, and the town was under the grip of a similar cold, the cold which comes off the plain and carries with it a reminder of hunger. In the same town and the same physical conditions, I saw differently. It is a commonplace that the significance of a work of art changes as it survives. Usually however, this knowledge is used to distinguish between ‘them’ (In the past) and ‘us’ (now). There is a tendency to picture of them and their reactions to art as being embedded in history, another same time to credit ourselves with an overview, looking across from what we treat as the summit of history. The surviving work of art that seems to confirm our superior position. The aim of its survival with us.

This is an illusion. There is no exemption from history. The first time I saw the Grüneveld I was anxious to place it historically. In terms of mediaeval religion, the plague, medicine, allows house. Now I have been forced to place myself historically.

In placing myself historically, the question that presents itself is, 'Where is today’s Isenheim altarpiece?’ How are the afflicted to come to terms with the suffering of the 21st century’s first plague? What has our culture created that might offer solace and provide refuge? Museums it is said seek to simulate a religious experience, which may explain the growing number of secular ‘pilgrims’ that seek them out. When we reflect on the state of contemporary art, however, with its fairs and blockbuster shows, equally fertile ground for selfie-driven acts of performative consumption, don’t they resemble just one more shopping experience? And with shopping for anything but food and pharmaceuticals no longer socially acceptable behaviour, what are we turn to? Not everyone has a library of unread books at home. 

Wondering how our forbears lived is to reflect on the way we live our own lives here and now. The beginning of the 16th century was felt in experience in many parts of Europe as a time of demolition. The same might be said of our own time. A plague and vast migrations are just the most striking similarities. Once again, the parallels to Berger’s essay run deeper:

In 1968, hopes, nurtured more or less underground for years, were born in several places in the world and given their names: and in the same year, and these hopes were categorically defeated…. This is not the place for analysis of what changed in the alignment of political forces on world scale. Enough to say the road was clear from what later would be called normalisation… I see how the long-term direction of [the lives of friends] was altered what deflected at that moment just as it might have been by private event: the onset of illness, and unexpected recovery, bankruptcy….. Normalisation means that between the different political systems, which share the control of almost the entire world, anything can be exchanged under the single condition is nothing anywhere is radically changed. The present is assumed to be continuous, the continuity allowing for technological development.

The pandemic opens up the possibility of radical change, socio-economic transformation and a politics of the imagination. I am moved by Berger’s words: 

...hope attracts, radiates as a point, to which one wants to be near, from which one wants to measure. Doubt has no centre is ubiquitous…. Hope is a marvellous focusing lens. One’s eye becomes fixed to it. And one can examine anything.  

Hope is a transformative mindset. How do we enact hope for expansive changes in the way we live our lives, the sort of changes that this pandemic hints are possible? If it takes the wholesale stoppage of commerce and industry to safeguard our air, water, soil (seems air quality improvements in China may save more lives than lost to the virus…), then maybe this demonstrates the extent of the measures needed to meet our climate aspirations. As we are forced to develop alternatives to consumption, work and travel patterns radically different to what we’re accustomed to, it seems to me more likely that we become more imaginative about solutions for better living. Perhaps all the traditional/ old economy jobs that are jeopardised by social distancing will spur a more constructive rethink on universal basic income? These are grand hopes, and they require collective action. 

The Isenheim altarpiece perhaps points to a different possibility. We bring into focus that which we train our eyes on. In the altarpiece, we may see hope or we may see despair. Both perhaps. I’m not one to lament the decline in the number of the religiously observant in our societies. It’s said that nobody prays any more, but for a shrinking number of the devout. Although I would contend that we all pray, maybe without realising it. Look at the many social rituals we engage in, dedicating our sincere attention. Our prayers emanate from and reinforce the dominant culture, a secular mythology which binds its participants in a social pact. Our earnest hopes and wishes, our solemn requests for help are addressed not to the deity/ies, but to secular renditions of the redemptive, be they technological, monetary or political. 

When confronted by a plague, our fears may speak louder than our hopes. The same may be said of climate change, a secular, 21st century rendition of perdition, of eternal damnation. We have been praying for - paying attention to - our fears more than our hopes, a habit that saps rather than replenishing our cultural, spiritual and physical  resources. Let’s situate ourselves historically. Our present reality reflects all of our individual and collective choices taken to get us to this point. An obvious point, but worth restating, this is true of our healthcare systems, our politics, enterprise, industry, culture. What compromises have we made, and to what end, that we find ourselves so vulnerable as societies in a health crisis like this, with seemingly no more imaginative solution than to turn away from one another?

May I venture a different form of prayer? To paraphrase Blaise Pascal, in the act of kneeling in prayer, a man may yet become devout. A secular society may no longer attend en masse to the ministrations of the minister, the rabbi or the mullah, but there is the space to enact our beliefs, and times like this call upon us to do so. I may no longer attend mass on Sunday to be reminded of the scriptures, but in my own home I am surrounded by the cumulative wisdom of centuries – scientific, cultural, historical. For centuries, the Church insisted on the strict observance of ritual. Late stage capitalism around the turn of the century has enjoined us to consume, ritualistically and often, enacting the duties of a responsible citizen. What we need now is to stop and pay attention, to all of the misguided things we have been paying attention to for so long. Our times call for new rituals to give form to our hopes. Planting trees may be an act of prayer for the new millennium, an act of devotion and an act of hope. Trash walks, beach cleans may soon carry the social (not to say spiritual) caché of past ritual. In time, these may become institutionalised social rituals as durable and powerful as those of the recent and distant past, those observed by the churchgoers and shoppers of yesterday.  

The cynic will plead hopelessness for tacky or trite private actions that could not possibly influence the big things. Only power and money can accomplish this, we’re told. I’ve always been too optimistic to indulge in cynicism. Small actions, in aggregate, combine to create a better way of life. Each small step brings us closer to redemption, which in our case may simply mean species survival. Previous generations have been sincerely devout, and sincerely spendthrift. And what if, slowly, we became sincerely dedicated to enacting new ways of living? Acts of devotion may yet usher in a new world order, a more bountiful episteme than the one we’ve inherited.

Anyway, however it's read, from the cave paintings in Chauvet to Mark Rothko and Cy Twombly via the Old Masters, John Berger's book constructs a history of art that is not about distinction, but about connection. Not just between artists, but between artists and us. Its definition of genius chimes with Simone Weil's: "Love for our neighbour, being made of creative attention, is analogous to genius”.

18.04.2020