'Regeneration': The Resurrection of Ruskin in Contemporary (Post-Postmodern?) Art

Last week, I attended back-to-back evening lectures that, unbeknownst to me, 'resurrected' the ghost of undergraduate-theses-past and, through it, brought a significant issue of current art making, display and study to the forefront of my attention.

Wednesday - Berrick Saul Auditorium and a talk on 'Ecological Aesthetics' by director of MIMA, Alistair Hudson.  Admittedly,  I knew neither what the terms 'Ecological Aesthetics' nor 'MIMA' implied, but, for that very reason, thought I should go.  This is truly one of the wonderful things about our department here at the University of York: the interests of faculty and students alike are so wide-ranging that amazingly diverse discussions await not only in every-day departmental exchanges but also in all the different speakers invited to give special lectures.  As PhD students intently (and intensely) focused on a sliver of research in a certain area, I believe the opportunity to hear something new and fresh and different is one of the great benefits of being at the University of York as a student of History of Art.  

Thursday - St. Chad's College Chapel, University of Durham and a 'college conversation' on 'Holiness, Regeneration and Beauty' featuring guest speaker and businessman, Jonathan Ruffer.  Never had I been to Durham and when fellow blogger and University of Durham alum Claudia  alerted me to the title of this talk, I could not miss the chance to not only see a new and highly acclaimed historic city, but also to hear anything to do with these three words - three words highly important to my study of nineteenth century debates on art and theology.

Durham by day...

Durham in the dark (ie...4pm!!). 

In talks that (a - I didn't know too too much about initially and (b - that at the outset seemed quite different, there was a strange, serendipitous sense of cohesion that ultimately wound itself back to an old 'friend' of mine: nineteenth century art and social theorist, Oxford Slade Lecturer, John Ruskin.

Author of celebrated books like Modern Painters, Stones of Venice, and The Two Paths (just to name a few...), John Ruskin wrote prolifically about the ancient ideals of societies and their art, their respective risings and fallings-out, and argued that they - art and social virtue - were integrally intertwined.  In an age of rapid industrial change,  Ruskin believed his times to be plunged into a darkness devoid of moral and true beauty.  He argued that his contemporaries must look to and resurrect the models of the past to make art usefully beautiful in the sense that it would inspire them to live and work and do good.  Pointing to and defending artists like J.M.W Turner and the emerging young Pre-Raphaelites as current examples of this ideal, he would continue to advocate for an art 'true to nature,' for guilds and learning and scientific enquiry, and a reverence for the craftsman, his love of intricacy, his skill.  As an undergraduate, I was inspired by his poetic love of art - through his (often lengthy, archetypal Victorian) descriptions, he merged language and image in a near seamless aesthetic expression, such that his text on art became a work of art itself.  Meshing media, meshing topics, I studied his equation of an ideal art with an ideal society with an ideal woman - what he would call a 'Queen of her Garden' or a 'Lily.'  His cohesion of purposeful, virtuous Art and purposeful, virtuous Womanhood I contrasted against Aesthetic 'Art for Art's sake' James McNeill Whistler's rather different equation of Art and Femininity - one sliver of their greater disagreement that would eventually, infamously bring them to court over libel.  Their dispute represented this broader contest within Victorian society where people struggled to find meaning for beauty and art, for themselves and their new lives in a mechanised, globally imperial world.

As Alistair Hudson would point out in his Wednesday night talk, many at the time thought Ruskin was mad - and actually, later in life, he went certifiably mad.  However, despite some of the tendencies in his writings that we see today as extraordinarily sexist and backwardly traditional, he was very very progressive - so radical as to be among the first to suggest that global warming and climate change was going to be an issue for our health and the health of nature.   It is with this eye that Hudson looks to and talked about John Ruskin in the discussion of his own museum's purpose in the industrial town of Middlesborough.  In moving art away from its autonomous reign in the museum, he is instead employing the museum, much as Ruskin would have sought to in his lectures on and about education, 'toward a lexicon of user-ship.'  By creating workshops and arranging galleries that stimulate use and interaction and engagement with art that itself is made purposefully to engage with its times and viewers, Hudsom aims to make not a neutral but an 'intersubjective interface' where the 'monolithic voice' of museums past is replaced by and encourages divergent opinion.  This way, he hopes people may not ask what art 'means' but how it is 'used' and through use, creates meaning for them in their lives, as individuals and a collective, involved, and opinionated whole. Hudson's stream of examples surprised me - their newness, freshness and contemporaneity made Ruskin, this figure of the past, a figure of my past even, so pertinent in the use of art today.  It is for this reason I had chosen to study the Victorians in general - I found their issues, their questions, so useful and present for today as we deal with change second-by-second in the digital world.  To see it actually discussed and begun to put into practice by a curator at a major modern art museum, though, struck me, made me return to my readings of Ruskin from years past....

The next night Ruskin reappeared! Like from an episode of Ghost Hunters, I was tempted to call out to the world of the spirits: 'Are you there? Can you give me a sign???'  (Fortunately, I restrained myself...)  In Durham, Jonathan Ruffer, surrounded by a host of St. Chad theologians, discussed his latest project at Bishop Auchland Castle, and the other such pursuits in the Yorkshire area to bring beauty and holiness to often downtrodden, industrial areas through the inspirational art of church heritage.  Ruffer, a very successful businessman, bought the ancient castle and has thus begun his attempt to restore it and bring it to public appreciation.  Humbly 'open to the will of God,' Ruffer desires not to patronisingly do things 'for people' but instead do things 'with people.' (A fascinating discussion on the use of prepositions in Scriptural events ensued...ask me another time...)  Again, Ruskin was mentioned explicitly as they discussed events in and around Bishop Auchland that sought to engage 'with' people, their faith, and their love of beauty and holy goodness in broader society.  I was absolutely stunned.  On the train back home from Durham, I thoughtfully pondered my own work with art.  How can I make my PhD work, however relatively much smaller than these grand projects at the regeneration of art and beauty, useful?  At this point, can it be? For beauty? For goodness? For grand old Victorian words like 'virtue' and 'society'?

Ruffer ended with an inspirational quote (paraphrasing from my notes of course) I think we should all keep in mind, in one form or another, when we are attempting to find meaning in our work, and in ourselves:  'If we bring nothing, God can do nothing.  If we bring even the smallest amount, the tiniest grain of sand, He works wonders.  Mathematically, God does not add.  He multiplies.'

So, with Ruskin, Hudson, and Ruffer in mind, we all should press on - PhD students, businessmen, and curators alike. Doing our best - making meaning through 'use.'  Because by doing nothing, we will achieve nothing; by doing some good, some good will be achieved.  We just might not see it yet!

Turner's Fighting Temeraire - an inspiration to Ruskin, an inspiration to end on here.