Charlene Spretnak, a stellar literary artist in her own right, has recently unleashed her revisionist tour de force, The Spiritual Dynamic in Modern Art: Art History Reconsidered, 1800 to the present.
This, Charlene’s seventeen-year labour of love, leaves few stones unturned; as she provides us a narrative of modern art history via her personal spiritual prism.
I particularly enjoyed her treatment of acclaimed earth-body artist/a, Ana Mendieta (pp. 165-6); whose pioneering contributions, though highly profound, were greatly limited by a shortened life.
The Spiritual Dynamic is about modern art as much as it is about modern people. Nowhere is that more evident than in the afterword, where Charlene’s true passion is on full display:
“We moderns have long been slipping into a detached solipsism that shrinks us further into ourselves….but the great works of modern art have never surrendered to it.” (p. 204)
Great writers author great books because they feel burdened to do so, and Charlene Spretnak is no exception; for The Spiritual Dynamic in Modern Art is more than a mere exposé of our collective creative burden..it is an invitation for everyone to join in the lifting. Count me in.
Interview
KAHLIL: I couldn’t help but notice that Adrian Piper was not included in The Spiritual Dynamic of Modern Art. What are your views of her work relative to the theme of the book?
CHARLENE: There are dozens more artists I would have liked to include in The Spiritual Dynamic in Modern Art, but the publisher puts a word limit into its book contracts. I suppose that is because of paper and production costs. So many things in the publishing process have constricted in the past decade. I also would have loved to have the book illustrated with a hundred color plates, but it was pointed out to me that myriad examples of work by the artists I discuss are available in color to anyone online. Still, even with the various parameters, I’m grateful I got the opportunity to make the case, in the form of a chronological overview from 1800 to the present, that the spiritual interests of the celebrated modern artists, both historical and contemporary, were and are generative in their work. That is definitely not the accepted narrative of the history of modern art. This was demonstrated last year with MoMA’s exhibition on Inventing Abstraction, 1910-1925, in which the lead curator actually asserted, as usual, that Kandinsky and the other pioneers of abstract painting were not influenced by Theosophy or any other spiritual orientation. She insisted on this in spite of the large number of writings those artists left about the new art being born out of their spiritual quest to perceive in some way the invisible realm of subtle dynamics they felt underlies material reality. It’s an odd situation of denial in the professional art world, and art history, with regard to this subject. What I did was focus entirely on direct statements by leading artists over the past 200+ years. I then wrote spiritual profiles of the artists, the untold story. I don’t pass judgment on any of the works of art. My interest in this book is cultural art history, which is ignored by formalist analysis and also by much of social art history. I hope The Spiritual Dynamic in Modern Art will enlarge the ongoing conversation.
KAHLIL: I mentioned your survey of Ana Mendieta in my review of your book. Would you care to expound on the importance of her work?
CHARLENE: Ana Mendieta was one of the artists in the late 1970s and early 1980s who became fascinated with female embodiment as embedded in the processes, forms, and cultural history of the Earth. All life forms are embodied and embedded in that way, of course, but the women artists’ exploration of this dimension of life was a clear rejection of the mechanistic premises of the hypermodern world and was an aesthetic journey into deeper ontological levels of meaning and an engagement with primal cultural expressions that honor woman. Her works are powerful because they incorporate a raw element, a sense that nature is primary. Then, too, she stated that her art contains “a lot of healing.” Healing results, of course, if and when we enter into communion with the rest of the natural world. Ana Mendieta achieved that in her art.
