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But then people have always known, at least since Moses denounced the Golden Calf, that images were dangerous, that they can captivate the onlooker and steal the soul.
—W. J. T. Mitchell

In April 1993, President Bill Clinton, Elie Wiesel, international dignitaries, and Holocaust survivors celebrated the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Initiated by President Jimmy Carter in 1978, the monument is one of the most expensive additions to the federal museum system. Its mission, described by the museum’s project director Michael Berenbaum, is to “memorialize the victims of Nazism by providing an exhaustive historical narrative of the Holocaust and to present visitors with an object lesson in the ethical ideals of American political culture by presenting the negation of those ideals.” These desires are echoed by Ed ward Linenthal, a professor of religion and American culture and privy to design meetings, museum archives, and interviews. Linenthal describes the effect of the memorial as a life-giving “assault” on participants: “The Holocaust is to be ‘inflicted’ on the museum visitor as the narrative seeks to arouse empathy for victims, inform visitors about wartime America’s role as both bystander and liberator, and ask visitors to ponder the power of a murderous ideology that produced those capable of implementing official mass extermination.” This experience serves as a kind of “initiatory passage” created to help Americans “appreciate the virtues and frailty of American democracy and designed to instill an attitude of civic responsibility.” Invoking seemingly ironic Christian imagery in the name of nationalism and patriotism, Linenthal hopes that museum participants will be “born again.” 

Two competing impulses strike visitors as they stroll through the museum. First, there is an intense desire to document and historicize the Holocaust. Countless photographs, testimonies, films, displays of shoes, ovens, hair, and luggage provide the weight that allows one to anchor the Holocaust in reality. 

In contrast, the nonrepresentational art displayed throughout the memorial, which includes Ellsworth Kelly’s immaculate white panels, Sol LeWitt’s geometric wall painting, and Richard Serra’s steel monolith, as well as the void invoked by the Hall of Remembrance, allows the viewer to peer into a space but prevents access to a tangible reality. These pieces of art and architectural spaces work to some degree in refusing easy access to the time, space, and significance of the Holocaust. 

This vacillation between the tangible and the ethereal makes sense, for as Jane Caplan, a professor of modern European history at Oxford, points out, discussions of historical events are often caught up in dualistic metaphysics. What she calls the “derealist” position attempts to mythify experience by making it a “transhistorical event whose real meaning may perhaps only be appropriated in its fullest sense by those who are said to have participated in it” whereas the “hyperrealist” seeks to resist this dehistoricization by fixing explanations of events in “textual sources and readings that are as precise and incontrovertible as possible.” Both approaches ultimately share the desire to fix or frame events in interpretive or causal terms. The Holocaust Museum insists on a narrative form that becomes the apparent core of a historical account, using countless books, photographs, testimonies, and personal visits to fill the gaps and ground the narrative in concrete sources, while on the other hand, the site simultaneously foregrounds the inability to fully represent the experience by stressing that all accounts are contaminated, skewed, and infinitely inaccessible. Visitors experience this double gesture of certainty and indeterminacy. 

The museum’s struggle to represent the Holocaust provides a useful framework to discuss religious art, for displays of the divine often participate in this tension between the historical and the unrepresentable, the tangible and the intangible. This particular tension is especially evident in Mormon art celebrated and privileged by official Church publications and displays. The conflict is, oddly enough, evident in the conspicuous absence of a spectrum: Mormon art displayed in official documents and spaces reflects the Mormon confidence in the ability to know, and this emphasis indicates its greatest limitation. An essential element of spirituality—the emotional, the intangible, the inexpressible—is unacknowledged or lost. 

My aim here is simply to reveal the embedded assumptions of realism and idealism in officially approved Mormon art as well as offer an apology for nonrepresentational aesthetics presently missing from those images. What follows is intended as a sampling of the representational and the nonrepresentational in Mormon art—a “making strange” of the ordinary and familiar—rather than an exhaustive survey. While I want to examine a few paintings in detail, I also want to offer a theoretical framework that stimulates discussion leading toward a wider spectrum in officially approved Mormon art. Instead of closing a gate, I want to expose a path. 

The Quest for Certainty 

Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand.—Pablo Picasso

Mormon theology is surprisingly unburdened by epistemological hand-wringing. That is, while Mormons certainly address epistemological questions—“How do we know what we know? How can we know God? How can we know truth?”—these questions don’t seem to vex the community because most rank-and-file members are comfortable with the idea of personal revelation: “Ask, and ye shall receive” (John 16:24). What could be simpler than a parent answering a child’s question? 

Two foundational texts provide the Mormon epistemological paradigm. First, the archetypal model of Mormon epistemology is the narrative describing Joseph Smith’s First Vision, first published in the History of the Church, and now canonized in the Pearl of Great Price. This event sets the pattern rehearsed in Church-sponsored films, countless images, and expressions of belief over the pulpit. The process is simple: First, acknowledge ignorance or uncertainty. Second, demonstrate faith by seeking the answer by direct prayer to God. Third, interpret the consequences of that petition in spiritual terms. While Joseph Smith was not alone in his era when it comes to claiming divine revelation, Terryl Givens reminds us that nineteenth-century mystics often avoided censure and critique by  couching their revelations in terms of the “subjectively real and privately experiential.” However, Joseph Smith insists that “I had actually seen a light and in the midst of that light I saw two Personages, and they did in reality speak to me” (JS—History 1:25). This emphasis on the literal, the concrete, and the rational distinguishes Joseph Smith’s story and early Mor monism from many of the early nineteenth-century mystics and congregations and provides the epistemological framework that persists today. 

The second text is a key passage in the Book of Mormon, Moroni 10:4–5. Near the end of the book, the ancient editor Moroni directly addresses the reader: 

And when ye shall receive these things, I would exhort you that ye would ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if these things are not true; and if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost. 

And by the power of the Holy Ghost ye may know the truth of all things. (Moro. 10:4–5) 

Although the passage certainly reinforces a nineteenth-century celebration of individualism and the possibility of personal spiritual epiphanies, Terryl Givens is again helpful by reminding us about the more important insight of Moroni’s editorializing: “Our knowing that the particulars of Moroni’s history are true . . . is clearly not the point of his challenge. Knowing they are knowable is.”8 Givens further points out that Mormon theology rejects an ineffable God, the “negative mysticism” of medieval theology. And this insistence on “knowability” is echoed loudly every first Sunday during fast and testimony meetings when individual members take the opportunity to speak from the pulpit and proclaim: “I know . . .” The phrase is not mandatory, of course, but one can easily sense the hierarchy between faith and knowledge, belief and certainty. 

I dwell on this concept of knowability because of its relationship with pictorial literalism and realism. Spiritual experiences and artistic realism enjoy a dialectical relationship, a connection that now deserves more attention. 

Portraying the Historical Real 

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness . . .(Gen. 1:26) 

Much of the art we see in Church publications and the Museum of Church History and Art exemplifies this desire to ground spiritual experiences in a knowable and palpable reality. Figures and events are rooted in a specific time and place. And this grounding does not merely refer to, for example, Joseph Smith as a real person who had a vision during the spring of 1820 near his home in Palmyra, New York. What is literalized is the vision itself. Joseph does not maintain that he saw God and Jesus Christ in a dream, that he saw Jesus and God with his “spiritual eyes,” that his vision was an internal, subjective experience. Instead, Joseph maintains that God and Jesus were actually present, in flesh and blood, taking up space in real time, and they “did in reality speak to me.” Joseph also maintains that he was awakened by the angel Moroni who was equally tangible and concrete, and he recounts another episode in the Kirtland Temple when he and Oliver Cowdery were visited, in person, by Jesus. For Mor mons, these spiritual experiences are not spiritual in the sense that they are not tangible. Instead, they are spiritual because they involve spiritual beings who are also corporeal.

What is also significant in many of these narratives is the embedded rationalism of Mormon narratives. E. Brooks Holifield, a historian of early American Christianity, points out that early American Christian thinkers simultaneously resisted rationalism even as they used it to defend their faith. We see this tension in Mormon representations. While I will address the battle against rationalism shortly, the literalism that we see in the First Vision narrative and the Book of Mormon reinforces rationalism by insisting on the viability of our senses to gain knowledge about the world around us. Sound certainly plays a prominent role, and texture has its place, but the accounts privilege sight. Joseph Smith maintains that he saw God and Christ. The Three Witnesses testified that “we have seen the plates,” and the Eight Witnesses claim that they “have seen and hefted” the plates. And a much-cited episode in the Book of Mormon describes how the Brother of Jared gains spiritual knowledge by seeing the finger of God: “And the veil was taken from off the eyes of the brother of Jared, and he saw the finger of the Lord; and it was as the finger of a man, like unto flesh and blood” (Eth. 3:6). Time and again, sight is equated with knowledge, but sight is not merely a metaphor for spiritual perception. People gain knowledge by literally viewing the divine, thus reinforcing the rational basis of Mormonism. 

Representations of these experiences do not simply make them accessible to others, but they shape our perception and define the experience itself. Art historian Noel Carmack asserts: “Latter-day Saint visual perceptions of Christ throughout the last century were images born out of a form of biblical literalism. Mormon literalism disregarded the skepticism of textual scholarship in favor of studies that supported the LDS canon of scripture. Consequently, official Latter-day Saint publications adopted images from a large body of Western art that substantiated Christ’s ministry as a historical reality.” Carmack points out that, not only does the theological emphasis on an objective experience encourage artists to represent these events via realism, but also that artistic realism encourages interpretations that literalize internal, subjective experiences. Thus, realism and literalism reinforce each other. Or, as Carmack puts it, “The affection for highly realistic art, then, reinforced a literal view of the scriptures,”14 but I would add that a literal view of the scriptures and literal interpretations of spiritual experiences such as Joseph Smith’s First Vision and nocturnal encounters with the angel Moroni encourage highly realistic art grounded in specific times and places. 

This literalism, this desire to rationalize spiritual experiences by making them concrete, is evident at every turn. For example, the Church encourages teachers to use the Gospel Art Packet, a small, portable portfolio containing images displaying stories from the Old and New Testaments, the Book of Mormon, events from Church history, and a few miscellaneous images of temples, baptismal fonts, and latter-day prophets. Printed instructions suggest, “Carefully select appropriate pictures that illustrate gospel stories or principles.” Of the ninety-seven images highlighting stories from scriptures and Church history, not one strays from a literalist reading of the texts. Of course, we should not be too surprised, for most of the images merely offer a pictorial account of a specific story. But the stories that are, perhaps, more allegorical (as with The Creation, Adam and Eve, Noah and the Ark with Animals) or more subjective (as with Moses and the Burning Bush, The Announcement of Christ’s Birth to the Shepherds, The Brother of Jared Sees the Finger of the Lord, The First Vision, and Moroni Appears to Joseph Smith in His Room) convey a concreteness that offers nothing other than a literal reading of those passages or events. As for “principles,” one could, as the Gospel Art instructions recommend, reorganize the images according to categories like “Family,” “Service,” and “Ordinances”; but again, the images convey a highly tangible representation of those principles. For example, “family” is not a subjective impression with flexible boundaries, but a husband, wife, and children. Service is not an abstract concept suggesting a giving up of self, but the act of giving a man sight, defending one’s group from invaders, or rescuing a frozen pioneer. 

The Ensign is equally committed to literalism. While we could extend my assertion to previous years, a quick look at the 2004 issues reminds us of the complete commitment to pictorial realism. There are twenty-five paintings on the covers, inside covers, and inside back covers of the twelve issues. Four portray images directly depicting Jesus (with the Nephites, with Mary after the resurrection, breaking bread with the apostles, and raising Jarius’s daughter) and two depict New Testament scenes (one of Mary and Joseph and the second of Mary alone). Seven depict scenes from the Book of Mormon (Laman and Lemuel tormenting Nephi, Lehi building an altar, Lehi and the Tree of Life, an Anti-Nephi-Lehite woman and child, an angel visiting the sons of Mosiah, and two depictions of the waters of Mormon); eight paintings portray events from Church history (three of the pioneer trek, two of Joseph Smith, one of Nauvoo, another of Adam-ondi-Ahman, and one of a mother quilting with a child nearby); and four others depict a baby being blessed, a winter scene of Salt Lake City, and two temples. In every case, the images simply illustrate a person, an event, or a place. While the degree of detail differs, each painting is representational and literal. 

My point is not to undermine this impulse to “illustrate” a story or principle, but merely to identify the persistent desire to ground scriptural stories, people, or principles in historically specific times and places, thus privileging a rationalist epistemology. External appearances—what we see with our eyes—count as knowledge. From this point of view, spiritual experiences are objective realities, not subjective impressions. All we have to do is open our eyes. 

Portraying the Ideal 

Art does not produce the visible; rather, it makes visible. —Paul Klee1

Surprisingly, insisting on the particular time and place of spiritual experiences often works against the appeal of sacred texts and important spiritual events. Historicizing may ground an event in a reality accessible to our five senses, but it simultaneously distances us from those events. As Richard Oman, curator at the Church Museum of History and Art, points out, “One of those problems [of realism] is that realism can focus the viewers on the trivial instead of on the transcendent.” Oman’s notion of the transcendent echoes Aristotle’s attempt to differentiate between history and poetry. Aristotle argues that the difference is that “one tells of what has happened, the other of the kinds of things that might happen. For this reason poetry is something more philosophical and more worthy of serious attention than history, for poetry speaks more of universals, history of particulars.” This difference is what makes poetry so appealing to Aristotle, but it is also the appeal for many a Mormon reader who desires to follow Nephi’s lead: “I did liken all scriptures unto us, that it might be for our profit and learning” (1 Ne. 19:23). 

Readers, in effect, translate the story, shifting the emphasis from the concrete to the metaphorical, from the historical to the poetic. In other words, this interpretive move allows readers to take a story about Nephi, Laman, and Lemuel, three young men purportedly living in Jerusalem 600 years B.C., attempting to acquire scriptures on metal plates before their flight into the Arabian Peninsula, and turn it into a mythic story about the value of obedience, persistence, and faith. The story becomes myth—from the Greek mythoi meaning plots—in the sense that it offers a narrative representing the values, interests, and aspirations of the Mormon community. The story loses its historical mooring, but this portability actually makes it more useful to those seeking ethical, edifying, and timely instruction. It is no longer history but poetry. 

This desire to translate an event from one context to another leads to a specific kind of aesthetic. Noel Carmack argues that representations are effective to the degree that they allow viewers to personalize the image. Referring to Del Parson’s popular painting of Jesus, Carmack quotes Lynette, Del’s wife: “Del’s purpose in painting the Savior was to create an image in which the members of the Church could project their feelings of the Savior.”18 Oman echoes this line of reasoning when he claims that, speaking of Rembrandt’s portrait of Jesus, Rembrandt communicates immanence by obscuring the eyes and mouth: “Obscuring them causes the viewer to fill the features in, subconsciously expressing his or her personal feelings about the Lord.”19 But this obscuring often has less to do with a refusal to delineate a specific feature, as Oman suggests, than with decontextualizing Jesus. Ironically, what allows viewers to personalize the image is its ahistoricism. Jesus is nowhere in particular. As we look again at Del Parson’s popular painting of Jesus, we note that the clothing does not suggest a distinct time, place, or event. The background, reminiscent of a backdrop one might find at an Olan Mills photographic studio, does not situate Jesus in history, but this absence makes it easier for viewers to “project their feelings of the Savior.” 

Another way to frame this desire for a portable or universal Jesus is to produce what Mormon artist James Christensen calls “an acceptable generic icon”: “In struggling with the issues involved in painting Christ, I have (as have artists other than myself) come to realize that we do not actually need to have a physically accurate portrayal of Jesus Christ. For artists, the goal is to create a character in an image that we can identify with, that we can relate to. But at the same time that character should not remind us of a neighbor or some acquaintance. Christ is too personal to each of us. He must be portrayed with universal but distinct qualities.”

This phrase, “universal but distinct qualities,” accurately describes the role of an icon, a representation that is based on a resemblance of the object yet contains elements that readers or viewers use to recognize the image. Clarifying the insights of semiotician Charles Peirce, W. J. T Mitchell, professor of English and art history at the University of Chicago, explains that “an iconic account of the relation ‘stone-represents-man’ would stress resemblance: a certain stone might stand for a man because it is upright, or because it is hard, or because the shape resembles that of a man.” That is, an icon tries to reproduce in concrete form the exterior appearance of a person, place, or thing. 

Admittedly, a community must largely agree on those salient features or elements that allow one to recognize that resemblance. In other words, this strategy of representing Jesus as an icon has its limits, and a religious community defines those limits. As Christensen notes, the image must be an “acceptable generic icon.” But what defines “acceptability”? Certainly, the answer addresses physical features. For example, I’ve never seen a beardless, short, dark-skinned, or chubby Jesus in Church artwork. However, acceptability has less to do, perhaps, with realism than with idealism, less to do with resemblance than symbolic value. As Christensen reminds us: “It would be unseemly to depict him in an undignified way—even if that image might be historically or pictorially accurate.”22 Mormon artist Arnold Friberg takes idealism one step further when he claims that “artists are not painting a likeness, but an idea—a spiritual concept.” Friberg and Christensen are less concerned with iconic resemblances of physical qualities than with iconic resemblances of Mormon ideals, principles, or attitudes. 

Of course, this ideal grows out of descriptions in sacred texts, but  also out of specific and changing cultural traditions. We all recognize that different cultures celebrate different values and attributes. A quick review of western art reveals a Jesus who at one time is elongated, emaciated, and fair, but who at another times sports a chiseled, full face with long, stringy hair parted in the middle. He plays a number of roles: humble servant, sacrificial victim, dignified martyr, triumphant savior, virile warrior, passive shepherd, or calm teacher. He is at times patient, calm, or protective, but other times he demonstrates sensitivity, humility, or anger. Carmack traces a specific trajectory in Mormon history from Orson Whitney’s “noble stature and majestic mien” to late nineteenth-century’s “muscular Christianity,” from Hugh B. Brown’s “consecrated manliness” to recent celebrations of a “strong, but passive, shepherd type.”

This trend toward portraying the strong shepherd type is perhaps most evident in the popular prints by Greg Olsen. His paintings O Jerusalem, Simeon Reverencing the Christ Child, and A Light to the Gentiles grace many a Mormon chapel, and his prints often appear in the Ensign and at Deseret Book. Olsen provides an interesting illustration, for his paintings combine iconic and symbolic elements. For example, his painting of the raising of Jairus’s daughter, part of the Gospel Art package, demonstrates a mix of literalism and idealism. The painting depicts an episode from the New Testament and places Jesus, to a degree, in a specific time and place. I say, “to a degree,” because of the anachronistic details. Certainly Olsen suggests an ancient Middle East setting, evident in the traditional Hebrew dress and plaster walls, but we also note that the daughter lies upon a raised bed, complete with headboard, fitted sheets, and pillow. Next to the bed lies a small area rug and a nightstand supporting a matching cup and saucer. The table has a routered top and beveled edges. These anachronistic details allow contemporary Western viewers to identify with the scene more easily, for the scene parallels many contemporary bedrooms. However, the painting’s more important function is to reinforce key concepts and ideals: the cup and saucer are perhaps a mortar and pestle, suggesting the primacy of Jesus’s power over mere mortal remedies, and Jesus exemplifies compassion, dignity, and serenity as he serves others—portable concepts that followers strive to attain.

A popular image found on the back cover of the 2001 August issue of the Ensign provides another example. Time to Laugh by Liz Lemon Swindle portrays Emma Smith surrounded by her four children. In the foreground a daughter kneels at Emma’s feet, doting on a baby who sits in Emma’s lap. The two sons are more reticent, one seemingly reluctant to embrace his mother, the other almost “camera-shy”; he hides behind Emma’s bonnet as he peers out toward the viewer. The image places Emma and her children in a specific time and place, but the ideals portrayed matter most. In the background we see a glimpse of a home, an icon of domesticity, a pristine fence enclosing the orchard, suggesting order and division, while trees, grass, and flowers—all signifying fertility and growth—surround the Mormon Madonna. A mother preoccupies herself with her children, and the daughter’s interest in the baby echoes that focus. Emma is the center as her children seem to swirl around her. Following in the tracks of the sentimental tradition, Swindle does not portray Emma and her children as much as she celebrates motherhood and the maternal. Instead of giving us a visual representation that resembles Emma and her children (something she cannot do because she doesn’t know), Swindle offers us an emotional fiction that teaches a moral lesson about women, domesticity, and piety.

The Value of Nonobjective Art

The need is for felt experience—intense, immediate, direct, subtle, unified, warm, vivid, rhythmic. . . . Abstract art is an effort to close the void that modern men feel.
—Robert Motherwell

While realism and idealism serve many useful functions, they provide an incomplete view of spiritual experience, and these modes are problematic for other reasons. Realism risks distancing us from the original event, for the image places the event in a remote time and place. By representing a concept, idealism describes what does not even exist. The image presents us with an intangible concept or what “should be,” not necessarily with “what is.” As a result, realism and idealism often reduce intimacy, confounding the very intentions of their makers and the expressed pedagogical logic of Church authorities.

As I noted in my opening example describing the Holocaust Museum, when it comes to conveying and even transmitting the full range of spiritual experiences, we need an aesthetic that offers an appealing and necessary complement to idealism and realism. I am not, of course, insisting that we eliminate attempts to imitate external appearances or refuse to convey communal ideals. I am arguing that these two modes convey only a portion of religious and spiritual experience. We are impoverished by the absence of an aesthetic that acknowledges internal, emotional, and intangible experiences.

Admittedly, reductivism stares me in the face as I attempt to find a term that contrasts with idealism and realism. I’m keenly aware that it’s impossible to locate a definition that encompasses the sheer diversity of art that does not embrace realism or idealism, for twentieth-century art in particular is littered with –isms: movements, concepts, and practices that challenge the assumptions that support objective representations. But for ease of conversation, I will use the baggy term “nonobjective art” to refer to an aesthetic that challenges the imitative and idealistic traditions, an aesthetic that shifts the emphasis from the external to the internal, from the objective to the subjective. This aesthetic serves a tradition (albeit neglected) in Mormon thought that the divine is beyond our comprehension and that our convictions are grounded in extrarational, unarticulatable feelings and intense emotions.

That nonobjective art has long been used to convey internal, even spiritual, experiences should not surprise us. I’m not suggesting that twentieth-century modernists dovetail seamlessly with Mormon notions of the divine. Admittedly, connotations of “spirit” and “feelings” may differ wildly from Mormon definitions. However, what these avant-garde artists and Mormons seem to share is a belief that external appearances often veil the divine, that non-material realities exist and exert a force, and that personal feelings are authentic and often convey truth.

For example, an artist like Piet Mondrian explores the mystical implications of vertical-horizontal opposition and the emotive qualities of formal elements. Kasimir Malevich, a devout mystic, describes the possibility, the responsibility even, of conveying sensations or feelings. The term he coins, “Suprematism,” describes “the supremacy of pure feeling in creative art.” He explains that “the Suprematists have deliberately given up the objective representation of their surroundings in order to reach the summit of the true ‘unmasked’ art and from this vantage point to view life through the prism of pure artistic feeling.” Along the same lines, Constantin Brancusi concerns himself with the “eternal type,” for “what is real is not the external form but the idea, the essence of things. . . . It is impossible for anyone to express anything essentially real by imitating its exterior surface.” Matisse observes: “There is an inherent truth which must be disengaged from the outward appearances of the object to be represented. . . . L’exactitude n’est pas la verité [Exactitude is not truth].” Oskar Kokoschka exclaims that “we must harken closely to our inner voice. We must strive through the penumbra of words to the core within.” Wassily Kandinsky explains how “inner resonance” and “outer elements” produce a “spiritual vibration”: “It is only as a step towards this spiritual vibration that the physical impression is important.” He also argues: “This seemingly unrestrained freedom and the involvement of the spirit arises from the fact that we are beginning to feel the spirit, the inner resonance, in everything.” Sol LeWitt maintains that “conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions logic cannot reach.”

Despite the seeming “shock of the new” and explicit iconoclasm, this desire to celebrate the presence of an intangible, inexpressible reality should sound familiar to most Mormons, for Alma 32:21 proclaims, among many other scriptural passages, “Therefore if ye have faith ye hope for things which are not seen, which are true.” Surely Mormon notions of spiritual experiences share common ground with these artists’ desires to represent or convey a reality beyond the material. These artists and Mormons may disagree about what hides behind the door, but they share a belief that whatever lingers there is more important than what we see with our eyes.

This shared impulse certainly goes beyond Alma 32. First, much of LDS liturgy and theology deals with intangible abstractions. That is, the concepts we encounter most often—forgiveness, redemption, atonement, guilt, happiness, purity, sin, salvation, love, spirit, eternity, and faith, just to name a few—are mere concepts that can only be grasped intellectually or felt emotionally. Of course, we try to express intangible, abstract, spiritual experience by comparing it to something more familiar by using linguistic metaphors and images. We translate an elusive, raw, and emotive experience to a tangible, orderly, and concrete image. We often compare the unfamiliar event with a familiar experience, guiding and assisting viewers in the process. Nevertheless, we are immersed in abstractions, intangibles, and “unrepresentable essences.” Elder Boyd K. Packer’s well-worn anecdote relating an inability to describe the taste of salt while simultaneously attesting to its flavor should be familiar to most Mormon audiences. The anecdote articulates a truism of spiritual experience: verbal or visual language fails to adequately represent spiritual experiences.

In fact, spiritual experiences are often described as extrarational. In a 1982 address to Brigham Young University’s J. Reuben Clark Law School, Rex E. Lee, then Solicitor General of the United States and later BYU president, frames the tension between realism and abstraction by describing two processes by which we “gain understanding.” Lee argues that the “rational process” is characterized by the “hard, frustrating straining of our mental abilities,” while the “extrarational process” is characterized by “direct revelation from God.” Lee maintains that “since the answers to these questions have come through the only infallible source of knowledge—direct revelation from God—there is no need to resolve them rationally.” Putting aside Lee’s epistemological naiveté for now, we can easily understand a need for an aesthetics that attempts to represent this extrarational approach to knowledge.

Second, we often privilege feelings, and we often equate—perhaps too sloppily—emotional experiences with spiritual experiences. Church discourse is saturated with “I feel . . . I felt. . . . ” This tradition is legitimized by a revelation given to Joseph Smith in April 1829. Joseph allows Oliver Cowdery to attempt to translate the Book of Mormon, but Oliver fails. In the revelation, the Lord proclaims:

Behold, you have not understood; you have supposed that I would give it unto you, when you took no thought save it was to ask me.

But, behold, I say unto you, that you must study it out in your mind; then you must ask me if it be right, and if it is right I will cause that your bosom shall burn within you; therefore, you shall feel that it is right.

But if it be not right you shall have no such feelings, but you shall have a stupor of thought that shall cause you to forget the thing which is wrong; therefore, you cannot write that which is sacred save it be given you from me. (D&C 9:7–9)

This process has, admittedly, a rational element demonstrated in the need to “study it out in your mind,” and the passage still flirts with tactile senses: “I will cause that your bosom shall burn within you.” Nevertheless, the confirmation is based on “feelings” or what could be called spiritual intuition or spiritual sensation. Oddly enough, most readers do not literalize this passage to the same degree as other scriptural passages. We are more likely to hear phrases along the lines of “My decision felt good,” or “I didn’t feel good about the situation” instead of any assessment of the literal warmth of one’s “bosom.”

Third, although the tradition is not as prominent, the sacred texts Mormons accept do acknowledge that knowledge is always, only, and inevitably incomplete, from Paul’s “For now we see through a glass, darkly . . .” (1 Cor. 13:12) to a recognition that God must speak in our language so that we might understand (D&C 1:24, 29:33). Moses 1:11, for example, talks about the need for a vision, a transfiguration, or a transcendent experience. For some believers, the intangibility of spiritual experience testifies to the complexity and mystery of religious faith: the divine exists in the gaps. The spiritual is beyond language, beyond complete knowing, beyond articulation. While this way of conceptualizing the divine may add to the mystery and perhaps power of godly beings, it also challenges direct experience. We should never be so presumptuous as to think that our images, our attempts to confine the divine, can contain anything that we find around us. Our comparisons are nothing but pale versions, creative fictions, familiar but incomplete associations.

This shift to the subjective and internal does not contradict Mormon notions of spirituality. In fact, the move toward the internal or abstract would merely articulate a spectrum that already exists. Importantly, despite their sustained attack on visual representation and knowability, nonobjective art promotes intimacy, for this refusal to submit to the external forms encourages viewers to reflect and engage themselves in making meaning. Although his commitment to this aesthetic seems fragile, Richard Oman acknowledges that the best way to engage the viewer is to “let the viewer be involved in the creation of the work of art.” He insists that personal involvement “requires designing areas of interpretation and entrée to leave at least some space for viewers to look at and be involved in that creation and, in the process, achieve intimacy.” As I have pointed out, Oman cites a portrait of Jesus where Rembrandt’s leaving “the image a little open-ended, as in those small areas of the eyes and mouth, provides a place for the viewer to look at the painting and become involved.” This request to leave an image a “little open-ended” seems very tentative, but the insight is compelling. Ambiguity, obscurity, indeterminacy—all demand that the viewer become a co-creator with the artist. Viewers don’t discover meaning as much as they actively generate meaning. This desire to ask the viewer to participate in the construction of meaning certainly resonates with anyone familiar with modernist and postmodern aesthetics, from William Carlos Williams’s description of a page as a “field of action” to John Cage’s musical performance 4’33 to Roland Barthes’s notion of “readerly” and “writerly” texts.

Barthes’s theory deserves closer attention here, for he explains that “readerly” texts are “products” that plunge the reader into a “kind of idleness—he is intransitive. . . . He is left with no more than the poor freedom either to accept or reject the text: reading is nothing more than a referendum.” A “writerly” text, however, makes “the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text.” The writerly text is not “unimpoverished by any constraint of representation (of imitation).” Barthes explains, “In this ideal text, the networks are many and interact, without any one of them being able to surpass the rest. . . . It has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one.”

The artist—verbal or visual—offers a field of possibilities, and the viewer is invited to make meaningful connections. Although Barthes is describing the process of reading a written text, his insights apply equally well to the process of interpreting images: like writerly texts, nonobjective art empowers viewers by encouraging them to share in the construction of meaning. Mitchell says much the same thing about certain kinds of art. Although the insight isn’t intuitive, Mitchell points out that abstract art, instead of suppressing language, actually accomplishes the opposite: “The fewer verbal promptings provided by the painter in the form of titles, narrative clues, or subject matter, the more demand for the spectator to fill the void with language.” This invitation seems especially valuable when it comes to religious art where engagement, intimacy, and connection are so important.

Nevertheless, there is a near-complete absence of nonobjective art in Church magazines and official Church displays. This decision is not due to the lack of nonobjective art by Mormon artists. For example, for decades Alexander Darais, M. Clane Graves, Hal Douglas Himes, Antonio Madrid Hendricks, and Bethanne Andersen, among many others, have produced a range of expressionist, abstract, and metaphoric work that reverently explores gospel themes. Their work encourages us to examine the nature of spirituality, personal commitment, and the role of Jesus in our lives. Importantly, these works encourage a great deal of inquiry and reflection. We can’t be passive viewers.

Hal Douglas Himes’s Tabernacle is an especially useful example. (See upper back cover.) The image portrays what seems to be a dead or sleeping body before a threshold flanked by trees—conceivably the tree of life and the tree of knowledge—suggesting a passage into another life as well as new awareness. A white goblet whose stem forms a key-hole of sorts invokes, perhaps, purity while a goblet half-filled with red liquid implies sacrifice. The right angle formed by repeating white dots—nearly a draftsman’s compass—invokes a sense of symmetry and circumference. The occasional checkerboard patterns provide a repeated contrast, perhaps between life and death, for we are witnessing a moment of transition from one state to another, especially echoed by the bird imagery which suggests movement and transcendence. And we can’t neglect what appears to be a white heart—even a bird and butterfly—that conveys love and a reminder to have a clean heart.

I neglect many details, of course, but the image engages me, demanding  that I pay attention and work to sort out the imagery and make connections. I establish relationships and write narratives while other viewers find equally compelling—perhaps even competing—connections. The painting becomes an opportunity to fill in the void, but the image also encourages me to reflect on passages, transitions, and death. I’m partly responsible for the image’s significance and meaning, for I am a co-creator. This process enriches me. This is not to say, however, that all will find the painting as appealing or rewarding. My reading of the Bible, my exposure to art history and iconography, and my experience making sense of texts all help me construct meaning. But on the other hand, others who view the image will draw from their own well of knowledge, will recontextualize the painting in different ways; and this invitation to participate in the construction of meaning is what makes the painting writerly and active. Put yet another way, Tabernacle focuses on the process of generating meaning rather than providing a finished product. Like many contemporary performances, the image is incomplete without us.

Framing Art: Limits, Boundaries, and Authority

Our society is one not of spectacle, but of surveillance.
—Michel Foucault

If nonobjective art can serve religious aims so well, how might we explain the apparent refusal to display nonobjective explorations of the spiritual? Picasso tries to put us at ease when he asserts: “There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality. There is no danger then, anyway, because the idea of the object will have left an indelible mark. It is what started the artist off, excited his ideas, and stirred up his emotions. Ideas and emotions will in the end be prisoners in his work. Whatever they do, they can’t escape from the picture.”

Despite Picasso’s insistence that we are never left with mere abstraction, Oman offers a reason that many Mormons might echo: “If we move toward abstraction, we have the potential of sliding down the slippery slope to disembodying God—to removing him from a historical context and from the tangible, physical body that he acquired here on earth. Such attempts can become quasi-agnostic and turn God into an idea or a strange mixture of pantheism.”

Oman is careful in his response. Abstraction has the “potential” to disembody God, and “can” suggest an indefinable notion of God, perhaps reminiscent of the medieval mystics noted earlier or the tradition of the aesthetic sublime that “posits a realm of absolute negation, of radical otherness and unknowability. The sublime, located in pain, death, transcendence, and the unknowable, is precisely the unrepresentable.” While idealism is no less a threat when it comes to portraying a disembodied God, I can also understand why nonobjective art challenges our traditional notions of the divine. However, they are not the reasons Oman lists, and they are the very reasons why we should celebrate nonobjective expressions.

First, nonobjective art celebrates and encourages individualized and personalized interpretation, not communal myth-making. Admittedly, nonobjective art encourages individual responses, responses that may vary from those of other individuals and from traditional narratives and conclusions. Thus, nonobjective art celebrates the radical individualism that was evident in early Mormonism; but it is this individualism, perhaps, that Church authorities want to patrol and contain. We are supposed to stay within acceptable boundaries.

Second, nonobjective art admits and acknowledges ambiguity and uncertainty, confessing the inadequacy of representation. In other words, nonobjective art problematizes the very concept of knowability, reminding us yet again that we see through a “glass, darkly.” Knowledge is illusive, and faith is an active process of constructing meaning.

For example, consider LDS artist Wulf Barsch’s The Template, a painting presenting three silhouetted pyramids in the background, a row of palm trees in the middle-ground, and a series of geometric, architectural drawings in the foreground. At one level, the painting merely represents an Egyptian landscape, with a nod toward the beauty of planning, symmetry, and order. (See lower back cover.) And even at a theological level, Barsch’s painting flirts with spiritual literalism, for Mormon theology maintains that the creation of the earth followed a divine pattern, that the earth was created spiritually before it was created temporally (Moses 3:5). Given that context, Barsch presents us with literal architectural plans that visually precede temporal creation.

However, Barsch provides an enormous amount of interpretive room. One could argue that the painting also celebrates form itself—the pleasure of straight lines, symmetry, systematic relationships, and cause-effect relations between conception and result. However, the painting potentially offers much more: A palm tree on the left leans to the left, pointing away from the pyramids, perhaps suggesting an unplanned departure from architectural plans, perhaps alluding to Satan’s fall, an image reinforced by the horizontal red line below the tree which contrasts with the vertical red line on the right. The painting also invites us to reflect on the relationship between the authentic and the artificial, the scientific and the natural, human creations and natural creations, and the concept of convergence itself.

I can continue to spin out possible interpretations, but that’s my point. By refusing to give us a literal narrative, Barsch encourages us to reflect on the notion of templates and patterns, the intellectual and the tangible. He encourages us to become involved in the making of meaning. We are no longer passive observers, empty vessels in the presence of revealed truth. Instead, the painting engages us, inviting us to share in the process of generating truth.

While the Church rarely uses nonobjective art in its magazines or instructional material, the Museum of Church History and Art occasionally displays nonobjective art. For example, it has displayed the work of Darais, Graves, Hendricks, and Andersen, among others. However, the institution often patrols or limits the proliferation of meaning by using paratexts. By paratexts, I mean “verbal frames,” additions that include “names and pseudonyms, titles and subtitles, cover notes, blurbs, dedications, notes, prefaces and postfaces, epigraphs and ‘epitexts.’” Paratexts function in various ways, from defining the text to defining the context. The paratext may “enhance the text, it may define it, it may contrast with it, it may distance it, or it may be so disguised as to seem to form part of it.” While the paratext is “subject to reading and hence to interpretation,” I’m more interested in the way it shapes or mediates our efforts to make sense of an image.

In “The Loss of a Creature,” theorist and critic Walker Percy explores this concept of mediation in terms of travel, nature, and classrooms. He comments on the way, say, material gathered at a travel bureau provides a “symbolic package” that mediates our experience of the Grand Canyon. Percy claims that this “generalized surrender of the horizon to those experts within whose competence a particular segment of the horizon is thought to lie” amounts to a loss of sovereignty, a loss of openness, thus rendering us a “consumer of a prepared experience.” Sadly, the pleasure of encountering a raw experience is replaced by an experience that satisfies “by the degree to which the canyon conforms to the preformed complex.” We arrive at some version of, “Oh, I see what they mean. I see what they are talking about.” Percy admits that an unmediated encounter with raw experience is problematic, but it’s a question of submission and subordination, a question of what role the paratext or “symbolic package” asks us to play.

Admittedly, we are not a tabula rasa, free of all forms of mediation. I suppose I’m less optimistic than Percy about the possibility of becoming completely sovereign. At the same time, however, Percy’s observation that “symbolic packages” turn us into consumers of prepared experience makes a great deal of sense, especially in the context of religious art. The presence of titles and names, but more importantly, the presence of explanatory notes that often accompany religious art, certainly provides a framework that limits possible connections even as the notes clarify and enrich our experience. This process may be comforting, a kind of buoy that keeps us afloat as we struggle for meaning, but it bridles the proliferation of significance, undecidability, and indeterminacy. In short, it circumscribes meaning.

Oddly enough, paratexts accompany even realistic and idealistic art. For example, the July issue of the 2004 Ensign reproduces a David Koch painting of men and women crossing the Sweetwater River. Without much effort, we can conclude that these are iconic handcart pioneers who exemplify tenacity, strength, and sacrifice. The mother lifts her skirt as she carries a baby across the water and provides stability to a teenage daughter. A man and woman pull a handcart as another man pushes, and we see that these pioneers are but one of many groups. The title Crossing the Sweetwater is helpful for the uninitiated; but below the image, we read, “In 1856 J. D. T. McAllister wrote a happy tune for the handcart pioneers: ‘For some must push and some must pull, / As we go marching up the hill; / So merrily on our way we go /Until we reach the Valleyo’ (Children’s Songbook, 220). Here the pioneers cross the Sweetwater River.” The paratext does more than explain the image—for little needs explaining. The caption provides a rather Pollyanna version of the experience by putting a happy face on what was always an arduous if not life-threatening and life-taking journey. The paratext shapes our perception of the handcart experience, framing the experience in terms of children playing.

In the January 2003 inside cover of the Ensign, we find a work by Linda Curley Christensen who attempts to convey an abstract concept using juxtaposition between the image and the title. The painting appears at first to be a rather ordinary landscape rendered in realist fashion.

Christensen portrays a stream and pool amid some trees, shrubs, and flowers. However, in the upper center of the image, there is a hint of a stone doorway allowing a beam of light so bright that we no longer recognize trees or shrubs. However, the incongruous title of the painting, Perfect Love Casteth Out Fear, encourages us to move beyond realism into abstraction. As a paratext, the title provides a context for the image, but doesn’t explain the image. We work hard to make sense of the juxtaposition between the landscape and the scriptural passage that functions as its title. But immediately below the title and attribution, we read, “The glorious light of the sun illuminating our lives is often used as a symbol of our Savior and His love for us, reminding us that ‘God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him. Herein is our love made perfect. . . . There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear’ (1 John 4:16–18).” This paratext interprets the painting for us, limiting the connections and associations we might generate on our own. The scripture is a “preformed complex” or a “symbolic package” that mediates our experience. Of course, we can continue to make sense of the work, but we are not encouraged to do so. In a sense, the painting now merely illustrates the explanatory text.

Finally, I can sympathize with a viewer who desires paratextual commentary or symbolic packages when faced with, say, Bethanne Andersen’s The Last Supper (Place Setting) (1982) reproduced in Images of Faith: Art of the Latter-day Saints but once featured at the Museum of Church History and Art. We see a bluish-white, textured background. In the center of the painting, we notice two purple circles. To the right of each circle, we see what resembles a two-year-old’s attempt to draw the letter “Y.” A few vertical lines are also to the right of each purple circle. Below the circles and centered, we see a portion of a rainbow. (See front cover.) The painting mystifies. What are these enigmatic figures? The rainbow suggests a connection with Noah, but the purple circles and brown lines don’t necessarily invoke a boat, flood, or animals. Perhaps we’re peering at a vineyard with grapes and stakes. Perhaps the rainbow conveys a sense of promise, and the “vineyard” suggests Christ and the true vine, the ultimate fulfillment of Noah’s sign of peace.

The artist’s title, The Last Supper (Place Setting) steers us in another direction. As we refocus, we now see plates, goblets, and perhaps knives. We might notice the extra light that seems to flow into or out of the “goblet,” implying, perhaps, a difference in revelation, insight, and purity. We then read the paratextual commentary supplied in the margin:

Bethanne Andersen (1954– )

Pastel on Paper, 22″ x 30″ (55.8 cm x 76.2 cm)

Museum of Church History and Art

This unusual view of the last supper shows Christ’s place setting at the table during his final meal before the crucifixion. His plate and goblet sit on the table. The work is an attempt to understand from Christ’s point of view all that would go on before and after that famous meal. Many of Andersen’s works are introspective and personal. In her work, she tries to understand the inner state of the soul. She has written, “In my drawings I use personal symbols to rethink an experience and create new ones.”

Admittedly, this explanatory note is helpful. The text opens up interpretive doors that many find comforting and enlightening. And the information is more complex than it looks, for in addition to the explicit interpretive claims—“The work is an attempt to understand from Christ’s point of view all that would go on before and after that famous meal”—the note contextualizes the artwork in terms of the artist’s identity, medium used, size, ownership, and artist’s own commentary. The paratext provides us with multiple contexts to begin to make sense of the painting. Nevertheless, the commentary mediates our experience, privileging certain ways of viewing the painting while ignoring others.

Let me be clear. I am not suggesting that we can make sense of a work of art outside of a signifying context, that meaning is inherent in a work, or that we can spontaneously understand a work of art’s complexities, layers, and nuances. However, I am saying that contexts—symbolic packages, interpretive frames, paratextual commentary—constrain even as they enable. Contexts generate certain meanings even as they limit meanings. Therefore, it is not a simple choice between authenticity and artifice, purity and contamination, innocence or knowledge. And this is no idle observation. As art historian and painter John Berger reminds us, “The idea of innocence faces two ways. By refusing to enter a conspiracy, one remains innocent of that conspiracy. But to remain innocent may also be to remain ignorant.” My point is that we should acknowledge the force and function of paratexts, that we should identify the gains and limitations of commentary that accompanies works of art. This move shifts our attention from mere evaluation—Is paratextual commentary good or bad?—to a focus on function or effect: In what ways does this paratext shape my response?

Signature

While I don’t find any sinister intent in this desire to guide viewers, the result still makes me pause. This practice of circumscribing meaning implies that there is only one valid reading of an image. Alternative interpretations are, supposedly, examples of “reading too much into an image” or instances of trespassing on an artist’s intention. But the implications are, perhaps, more profound. Uncertainty, proliferation of meaning, abstraction, and ambiguity are not recognized as legitimate forms of religious experiences. They are problems, obstacles to overcome, perhaps even evidence of a wandering soul who has gone astray, adrift in a sea of meaning. Just as we are supposed to be “one in Christ,” we are supposed to arrive at the same interpretive conclusions. Unity, harmony, and agreement must prevail.

I suppose my analysis merely echoes Elder Stephen L Richards who, in “An Open Letter to College Students,” ponders the limiting effect of our human attempts to portray the divine: “What if Hebrew prophets, conversant with only a small fraction of the surface of the earth, thinking and writing in terms of their own limited geography and tribal relations did interpret Him in terms of a tribal king and so limit His personality and the laws of the universe under His control to the dominion with which they were familiar?” Elder Richards points out that even a prophet, an inspired “interpreter,” cannot escape his historical context, for he cannot “present his interpretation and conception in terms other than those with which he has had experience and acquaintance.” And what if Divinity reveals “higher and more exalted truths than he has ever before known and unfold[s] to his spiritual eyes visions of the past, forecasts of the future and circumstances of the utmost novelty, how will the inspired man interpret?” Acknowledging the enabling and constraining effects of context, Elder Richards concludes that this prophet will make sense of and convey his observations “in the language he knows and in the terms of expression with which his knowledge and experience have made him familiar.”

We can conclude that pictorial realism and idealism reveal more about us and our cultural baggage than they do about spiritual truths. Our images display our own interpretations and our own yearnings. And so the phrase, “We make God in our own image,” seems to make a little more sense. I can understand why Jewish law prohibited graven images, and I can sympathize with medieval mystics whose theological treatises often celebrate an ineffable, indescribable God. Our penchant for worshipping our own concepts of the divine is, perhaps, too strong for our own good. The figurative becomes literal, and the literal limits and misguides us. On the other hand, I’m comforted that there are artists seeking to express the intangible, or as Jean-François Lyotard proclaims, “It is our business not to supply reality but to invent allusions to the conceivable which cannot be presented.” These attempts may inspire art that may not be “safe,” for these images revel in openness, multiplicity, and individualism. Conceptual lines are blurry; interpretations are unpredictable, and there may not be an arrival point. Ironically, compared to the images we encounter most often, perhaps these works represent life more realistically, and they may be more accurate in embodying our ideals that often transcend worldly attempts to articulate the divine.

The presence of risk in art recalls Wayne Booth’s observations in “Art and the Church: or ‘The Truths of Smoother,’” the keynote address for the 1980 BYU Humanities Symposium. Booth uses the model of C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters to comment on the state and function of Mormon art. At one point, the “Chief” instructs his protégé “Smoother” about their mission: “What we are out to do, I must repeat, is to prevent spiritual awareness, the depth of spiritual experience, and the genuine growth in individual souls that comes through loving exchange of experience in a community of such souls. . . . Have you forgotten our slogan, inscribed over the very door you must pass through each time you return from Earth? ‘Homogenize, tranquilize, desensitize!’” I am not suggesting that realism and idealism always deaden us, and I don’t mean to imply that nonobjective art always enlivens. But I am saying that we need art that stimulates, and we need art that expresses the full spectrum of spiritual experience. Anything less diminishes our existence, leaving us with more of the same. We stagnate.

As I reflect again on the Holocaust Memorial Museum, I’m reminded of Latter-day Saint temples whose architectural spaces echo the tension between presence and absence. Nearly every celestial room in the temple system is void of any representation of the divine. At most, the divine is conveyed abstractly in that the rooms merely express simple utility (chairs, couches, tables with flower arrangements) and fine craftsmanship in furniture and architectural and interior design. Encouraged by this abstract space, participants sit and reflect with a minimal amount of distraction or interference. The relatively sparse room is a striking departure from previous rooms that either present a barrage of slick images and surround-sound available in newer temples or the elaborate, sensory-rich allegorical murals and live drama in older temples. Celestial rooms testify to a need to reflect and engage in the construction of meaning. The rooms acknowledge and reclaim an essential element of spirituality—the emotional, the intangible, the inexpressible. My plea is that we have more opportunities to do so.