Naked Grace 1 comments

Alfonse Borysewicz

FOR ALMOST twenty years my family and I have spent our summers in Japan, mainly in my wife's hometown of Kyoto. There, family obligations have required me to immerse myself in Japanese culture, such as the August rituals of ancestor worship. Our annual trip gives me a retreat of sorts, and a profitable exile, allowing me to step back from the struggles of painting and life and home and view them from a distance. I begin to see patterns in my work that I can't see when I'm at home. Recently I've come to notice what I'd call its eschatological underpinnings. Its struggles are historically Christian ones: living in the tension between the already and not yet; the encompassing breadth of the Spirit that brings joy and comfort; the immensity of sin; and Holy Mother Church which sustains.

A few years ago my work appeared in a Tokyo exhibit. The paintings were abstract, but hinted at religious forms and used religiously suggestive titles. A critic who was writing an article on the show asked me to put what I believed into writing. I thought, believe? For a while I toyed with giving him a sort of belief 'lite' answer (procreation, Indian food, good weather), but instead I ended up walking over to the Catholic cathedral, finding the Japanese version of the Nicene Creed in the prayer book, and copying it out for him. I don't think this would have been possible for me in the United States. In Japan I feel more free to express my faith, perhaps because there, where I am other, people are not as quick to leap to conclusions.

I think of my vocation as a painter as what Stephen Spender calls a "struggle against superficiality." My work flies in opposition to our amnesiac, banal, celebrity culture; I mean for it to hold the weight of the past while offering a glimpse of the future. I like to call myself a painter and not an artist, because for me the term artist connotes a sort of disengagement from everyday life. I see my work as intimately involved with the everyday, what Pascal calls "licking the earth." Also, the word painter hints at some of the labor involved in art, and this helps me feel more of a connection to the working class world I left behind when as a young man I entered first seminary and then art school.

I grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Detroit in the sixties and seventies, then the murder capital of the world. The city was dogged by riots, economic meltdown, the social divisions brought about by the Vietnam war, and the easy availability of drugs. Friends and family died violent deaths, or overdosed. Philip Levine's long poem "A Walk with Tom Jefferson" captures what I felt:

Better perhaps not to speak
of final anything, for
this place was finally retired,
the books thrown away
when after the town exploded
in '67 these houses
were plundered for whatever
they had...
it's gone now, gone to earth
like so much here-
It's biblical....

Looking back, I see that my childhood predisposed me against superficiality. My parents worked hard, and early tragedy in our family, particularly the death of my sister, led us largely to reject a self-gratifying culture with its easy fixes like drugs and the mall, and to rest instead on more ancient and substantial foundations like prayer, the church, and family itself. The only advantage I have in the art world today is an ability to see through easy fixes, to sniff out the rat in the haystack.

In college I started out by studying political science, in part because of the social problems that had surrounded me growing up, but my reading couldn't give me any answers to my questions, and I left after two years to enter the seminary-whether to flee community or find it, I'm still unsure. My life changed radically then. I went abroad for the first time, to Jerusalem and Rome , and the combination of travel and theological training began to work on me. For the first time, my whole being seemed filled with a hunger for knowledge. My childhood faith took on a mystical dimension, and I began a simple but deeply felt religious practice that has continued all my life, built on foundations laid by my parents and grandparents. I can only say that I felt ripe with religion. But what to do about it? As much as I loved the seminary, it became obvious that a priestly vocation was not for me. The church was becoming more conservative just as I was yearning toward a more open, creative approach to theology (and was beginning to think I couldn't make the celibate commitment). I became interested in art. Since vocations were down and there was plenty of space, the seminary-perhaps unwisely-gave me a second room to use as a studio. My work from that period can only be called garish-sort of Otto Dix meets Marc Chagall. In 1981, I moved to Boston , where I taught high school and went to the Evening School at the Museum School of Fine Arts. On weekends I escaped to New York for museums and, to put it simply, sin. It was intoxicating. I was in my twenties, struggling with my identity as a bisexual man, comfortable with intimate relations with men and women, while resisting pressure to set my identity in stone. Within two years I was exhibiting neoexpressionist, angst-ridden paintings in Boston and New York galleries and museums. My star was ascending.

It all jolted to a halt in 1983 with the sudden death of my father from a heart attack on Father's Day, and the onslaught of AIDS. The plague consumed the New York art world, and many friends died. I felt plundered. I had been spared, but my friends and father had not. I can still recite Auden's plea from "For the Time Being":

Nothing can save us that is possible:
We who must die demand a miracle.

I also struggled with guilt over my choice of vocation. Given my family's working-class ethic, what I was doing seemed strange. At times it was construed as lazy, arrogant, or sissy, but the charge that hurt me the most, and still does, was that I was indulging in artifice. People make that accusation because they don't see art as part of the real world, which they see as made up of bread-and-butter issues like building a solid career; they do not see how the struggle of faith and its representations connects with all our lives. It was painful for me to encounter these charges, but I knew that work in the factory would never claim me.

In my early exhibitions in the eighties and nineties, I was reserved about my beliefs. I could see then and can see now that my work was bathed in faith, but to anyone else, this was obscure. I used no overt references to Christian dogma or tradition. Looking back, I think I did an injustice to the work. It seems inhibited, not completely honest, faddishly minimal, and orphaned-a failing that came from immaturity and a lack of confidence on my part.

Bible images fed my imagination: I was the prodigal son. I was Job. I was Christ at the wedding feast, reluctantly called to perform a miracle. I was the good thief on the cross beside Christ, being promised paradise; I was the bad thief, cursing the suffering and death around me. I was the naked young man who fled the Mount of Olives at night. I was in despair, full of fear. After months and years of shadowboxing, therapy, love, and prayer, I was able to return to the empty tomb on Easter morning, grateful for having endured. When it was over, I was convinced that I had a vocation as a painter, no more and no less.

During this time I began working on a series of paintings called Strata . I walked paint across the canvas in horizontal rows, pushing it from right to left with my palette knife in layers of blue, yellow, pink, and black, like the poet in Tarkovsky's film Nostalgia, who walks a lit candle across a muddy pool, his road to Calvary . One of the paintings, Sunday Morning [see Plate 1] is a sort of landscape in which faith is revealed through everyday experience. Working my way across the canvas, I forget all my anxieties and plans and am just here in a quiet, stupid, normal way: bliss. The mundane makes its subtle indentations on the timeless.

In subsequent years, the Strata indentation grew into a new form, the honeycomb hexagonal markings, which I make with a carved stamp. The marks first appeared in some commissioned church pieces, and are still present in all my paintings-though in some more than others-like Alfred Hitchcock hidden in his own movies. I see the hexagon marking as an exploded version of Strata 's lines. If the careful layers of Strata are an expression of meditative bliss, the hexagons are more about hand-to-hand engagement.

In 1991 I made a Lenten processional cross entitled Cross of the Deposition for a the Oratory Church of Saint Boniface, a Catholic church in Brooklyn . It was made with blocks of old stretcher wood from a painting called Passion, which I had exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 1984. I thought the reuse of material was appropriate: the Passion culminates in the Cross. In the past decade, the once-depressed neighborhood where the church stands has become a center of commerce, and the church itself has been beautifully renovated, but Cross of the Deposition speaks of its earlier days, a reminder that this church has come through a time of pathos to a time of renewal, just like Christ when he is taken down. At the base of the cross is the Latin phrase Ad Lucem per Crucem ("To the Light through the Cross"), which I see as a reference to the church's mission to the city of New York .

A few years later I made several panels for the side chapels in the rear of the church. The central panel of the triptych Our Lady of the Oratory [see Plate 3] shows a shadow of a Madonna and Child; the side panels are inscribed with the title hymn, in reverse. Making works for sacred spaces is an exciting and difficult challenge. These liturgical projects have been very rewarding, though there are always minor dissatisfactions that arise from working in a communal setting. (I'm still hoping the wooden statues in front of my triptych will be moved aside.) When a church community-priests, choir, and laity-becomes committed to good liturgy engaged with good art, something nourishing and inspiring happens. This is particularly vital for the young, who are overfed with our amnesiac, celebrity culture but who nevertheless ask ancient questions.

Though I approach sacred and "secular" works in more or less the same manner (both are part of a seamless garment, some would say), there are a few important differences. Obviously, doctrinal requirements-and my own respect for these requirements-put restrictions on liturgical pieces. To me this is both understandable and liberating. As G.K. Chesterton notes in Orthodoxy, "It is impossible to be an artist and not care for laws and limitations. Art is limitation.... The moment you step into the world of facts, you step into a world of limits.... The artist loves his limitations: they constitute the thing he is doing." Without limits, we can become paralyzed with indecision. For me, the hardest part of making "secular" work is figuring out where to begin, whereas with liturgical work, where set parameters will prevent me from falling into a self-made creative abyss, I attack new projects more eagerly.

In the past, at times when the relationship between the church and the art world has been less hostile than it is now, enlightened guides have helped define edges for artists, allowing them to flower. The Dominican priest Father Marie-Alain Couturier helped commission religious art from modern artists after World War II, and the young Dominican monk, Brother Louis-Bertrand Rayssiguier, drew the plan of Matisse's Vence chapel. In my own case, the enlightened guide has been the Irish Jesuit Michael Paul Gallagher, author and teacher at the Gregorian in Rome , who communicates with me regularly, visits my studio every time he travels to New York , and gives me his friendship and encouragement.

My hope and assumption is that the relationship between the artist and the church can and should continue today, but there is an unfortunate fog in religious circles concerning contemporary art. Though the art world has no doubt contributed to the problem, in much of the church there is what Louis Bouyer in his classic book Liturgical Piety calls "archeologism." This attitude rejects contemporary art-and ultimately, contemporary experience-in favor of the artificial restoration of the religious imagery of the past. Archeologism says, if it's not an icon, if it hasn't acquired the patina of age, it's not art and doesn't belong in our sacred space. "Nothing could be more of an abortion," writes Bouyer, "dead at the very moment of its birth, than this soulless and uninspired false Byzantinism." He later adds, "If we cease to assume that the average late nineteenth-century church has set the rule forever, we can discover in Christian history an astonishing variety of consecrated practice."

Indeed, we as the church must have minds and hearts open to the work of living artists around us. This is necessary for the sake of the young, who are desperately searching for fresh images. In order to nurture this openness in the church as a whole, we artists should not be reserved about sharing what our work teaches us. I remember a sermon Father Paul Berg, an early mentor of mine, gave at Sacred Heart Seminary in Detroit :

The Gospel has, I think, given rise to an unfortunate interpretation. This interpretation is that spirituality is marked by simplicity and simplicity is in turn marked by non-sophistication and non-sophistication means humility and humility means that we abandon efforts at everything but the commonest of ways, and this means that the intellectual life is somehow not reflective of the Gospel.

It is essential that we contemporaries contribute our study, experience, and insight to the historical and continuing dialogue in our synagogues, churches, and shrines, as well as galleries and museums. Matisse's chapel in Vence, Robert Gober's untitled 1997 mixed media installation in Los Angeles [see Image Issue 28], and my skinny cross in Brooklyn each speak in the idiom of the time and place in which the artist lives. Thirty years ago, Auden called his era the Age of Anxiety. I would call ours the Age of Amnesia. Our works express joy and wonder, but also fear, struggle, doubt, and longing. We know that there is room for variety-and even distortion-in our expressions concerning belief, but it is naïve not to realize that we live in a world of powerful communications that tend to trivialize a life of faith. As Flannery O'Connor observed, "The moral sense has been bred out of certain sections of the population, like the wings have been bred off certain chickens to produce more white meat on them." That is our starting point. Remember O'Connor next time you are watching the tube, or on the computer, or flipping through your catalogues.

In the mid-nineties, as my so-called secular work began to gain recognition-and to be written about-I increasingly wanted the people who praised it to know about its real source. Art Forum wrote about the "light of optimism" in my work, The New York Times about its "spiritual intensity," and Art in America about its "language of transcendence which is both traditional and of the moment." I have concluded that my art-making is involuntary, or that I am not its sole agent: I birth my paintings rather than willing them. The pillars that support me are the great legacy of the church, its traditions and dogmas, and the sacramental life. Any art isms -the glib categorizations the art world uses to satisfy its need for profit, its lust for certainty, and to feed the hype machine-regarding my work is secondary (though despite their flaws, artisms can sometimes be useful). In the contemporary art world, there is an element of risk in being too overtly religious. As one critic wrote of my work: "When there happens to be such a thing as contemporary religious art, practically nobody wants to face it as such. Is it ironic that his abstract religious artworks may hardly mean more to those in the art world who reject religion than they will to the hoi polloi who reject abstract art?"

Now that I am older and have a better vantage point on the West, I understand that I am exhibiting in a culture that is infatuated with the trivial and detests any serious affirmation of Christian belief. Meanwhile, a rise of interest in the "spiritual"-a trivialized, ineffectual substitute for the Incarnation-has opened the way for large-scale manipulation of (and profit from) those who are hungry for the real blood and body without knowing it. This new spiritualism divorces itself not only from the reality but even from the possibility of the Incarnation.

As we maintain our vigilance against these developments, our concerns will be the same ones theologians have struggled with for centuries. As Henri de Lubac writes:

All over the world we encounter the lack of understanding of his mystery. We are never done with the work of clearing away the misunderstandings that hide him and letting a glimpse of his glory break through; but equally we have to put right the ideas about him that the merely human element in us leads us to hold ourselves.

I have spoken of my own work as a struggle with superficiality. In my present body of work, Insignia, this struggle is finding a new direction. The pieces are a theological alphabet of sorts, a marriage of my "secular" and "religious" works. In our time, questions concerning religious thought, traditions in art, and the merging of the two in our cultural life seem to be floating around in the ether, and I wanted to try to ground them. The questions-of life and death, fidelity and sin, love and apathy-are age-old, but they have vital importance in the present moment. Rather than raising more questions (an abundance of writers and artists are doing that already), I wanted to dare some answers. The alphabet hints at words and ideas that are, if not answers, at least the paths that will lead to answers. I am trying to offer a bucket from which we can drink from the well.

I painted Icon with Nectar [see Plate 2] immediately before beginning the Insignia series, and the 1998 work hints at what would follow. I wanted the painting to be at once vibrant and still. The awkward black spiral looks for a defined form, while the yellow nectar color suggests something more to come. It took a few more years and many reworked canvases for the first letter to appear. I remember returning to my family in Detroit for Christmas a few years ago and finding a book of George Herbert's poems. I was struck by the way he sculpted words, making poems that were allegories of church architecture, as in "The Altar":

Early in the following spring, in my Brooklyn studio, I painted an image which ambivalently suggested the letter I, just as Herbert's poem does. Unaware of what I had done, I immediately and deliberately knifed an H atop the canvas. I suddenly knew what the struggle of the past few years had been all about, and I eagerly painted the S . The triptych IHS -from the first three letters of the Greek Ihsus, that is, Jesus-was at hand. From this starting point I moved to other letters, alluding to other historically rich words-words powerful enough to raise hackles and hassles in the art world. In the large painting G: an Annunciation, the letter asserts itself in an almost phallic manner on a ground of flickering yellow stars and crosses. I was thinking of the first chapter of the Gospel of Luke in which the names of the significant participants all begin with G: "In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee ...." (Luke 1:26). The series also included C(hrist Solstice) [see Plate 4] and the nine-paneled work Baptistery without Vowels [see Plate 5]. Peter Nagy, who curated the exhibit in which the works appeared, A Threshold of Spirit, called them "a foil to much of the art of the past few decades which has been infatuated with kitsch and sarcasm, irony and debasement."

As the Insignia series expands and branches out, I have been stunned at the insignificant role I play as artist. I feel that my painting, maneuvered by grace, has led me to a physical theology, that is, inspiration given form and color.

Several years ago, between bouts of painting, I wrote a poem about our first child in our Brooklyn yard:

A nine year old,
her long
pale legs
whirling around
the iron post,
smiles contempt
at her father's
suggestion: it's
too early for shorts.
It's April.

As though she were Eve,
she dances
amid spring's early buds
while a lone bumblebee
enters and quickly exits
our tiny yard.

If only
I could capture
her belief
in the world's innocence,
that her dancing
will continue forever,
giving the world its
force and turn to
migrate this
difficult universe.

On September 11, from that same yard (my son is now the age his sister was then), during my morning routine of reading the paper in the garden, I heard the first muted explosion at the Twin Towers across the East River . The second, louder explosion forced me out of my chair and into the street for answers. In the beginning of this essay, I described my vocation as a painter as a struggle against superficiality, an effort in the face of our cultural fixation with the banal. I wrote that before. I think this has all changed now. My story is the same, but the ears and eyes that will hear and see it have been changed. Our bubble has been pricked at an awful price; we are all now forced to migrate this difficult universe.

Christ is my most recent studio painting. It is an odd work. The C is reversed as though seen through a mirror, an allusion to the idea that the Incarnation is visible-reflected-in each of us. The H is anchored in the middle of the canvas, but the four remaining letters are almost hidden, as if the word is reluctant to reveal itself in full. Or perhaps I am the reluctant one.

I have been as shy about revealing the source and inspiration of my work as I have been about revealing my life and my family's life. As the culture wars calm down then heat up again-a sort of Keystone Kops cycle which, sadly, I have experienced firsthand-I sometimes feel like a first-century Christian, afraid to reveal my spiritual master. Meanwhile, in my private life, I am supported by a community of saints: family, friends, and parish community, all of whom believe in my work and have made sacrifices on my behalf. In the past I have been reluctant to reveal too much of what is deepest in me for fear the world would attempt to pick these mysteries apart. Perhaps I'm a bit braver and wiser now. Still, I struggle. I have dual allegiances, and all my loyalties run deep: to my vocation as a painter and to my wife and kids, who make sacrifices for me and my vocation; to making a more comfortable life for my family, and to enduring as an artist; to loving the body and loving the spirit. I often feel disjointed and strained, knowing that I will never be able to explain this easily-to the art community or to my private community. Yet I know this task is of vital importance. "If we make light of what is deepest within us," Newman says, "to seem becomes to be ." How can I coherently describe what Newman calls the "antecedent possibilities" in each of us, the Paraclete that permeates us? Artistically, for me this has meant not some otherworldly creativity but a merging of learned knowledge with the intuitive.

As I mentioned above, I recently joined an exhibit titled A Threshold of Spirit at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York . Most of the artists were converts to Buddhism and Hinduism-fashionable strains in art circles. With my Christian, and-still worse-Catholic sympathies, I was the odd one out, but I wanted to take part because there are so few venues for religious art of any kind, and I find that no one is interested in curating exhibits with a sensitive appreciation for the specifically Christian life. I also admire several of the other artists involved.

But even at the Cathedral, where the art world and the church briefly intersected, I felt shy. I exhibited exactly the pieces I wanted to- Baptistery without Vowels, the triptych IHS, G: an Annunciation, and the Cross of the Deposition -but in person I was rather quiet about my opinion that the pantheon of gods we were exhibiting in a Christian cathedral was a bit ridiculous. Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised. I'm shy by nature (in seminary I had to go to an assertiveness training workshop), and verbal communication is not my gift. I need time, an incubation period, before I can respond to the world around me in any form. I'm especially reluctant to speak in the New York art world, where artisms are so prevalent, essential as they are to the business of art. I know the primary way ordinary people respond to my work is nonverbal; they must know something is there for them, because they return, I'm told, just to be with the paintings. This awes me into silence. Also, fear of dogma and its implications can make me hesitant to be too overt about Christianity even in certain Church circles. Our multicultural world always requires placating, and in it, holding onto dogma can seem not merely unfashionable, but downright belligerent. Yet we must cling to our not-belonging. Abbot Vonier, in his book The Spirit and the Bride, warns us against "the temptation to worldliness of the mind" and "the practical relinquishing of otherworldliness," which cause our moral and even spiritual standards to become "based not on the glory of the Lord, but on what is the profit of man." These are the crosscurrents in which art and religion face off.

One of the pieces in the show was a floor-based installation which included an outline in tape of a Buddhist stupa, or architectural reliquary, encircling the cathedral's baptistery with excerpts from a Zen text. The cathedral asked that the installation be removed for some upcoming baptisms (which raises the question of why the cathedral allowed the installation in the first place). The artist refused, the cathedral removed the piece, and several other artists pulled their work in solidarity. To me, the whole spectacle was like something out of Fellini. Predictably, the local press painted all this as the crushing of individual artistic expression by a powerful institution, but from my corner, the issues were more complicated: sacred space versus secular space; respect for liturgical practices, for art, and for everyone; clarity regarding the true object of faith. I admit that I find the artist's disregard for the needs of the worshipping community upsetting. According to Vonier, we must guard against turning our contemplation on ourselves rather than God, for if we contemplate ourselves, hoping to see God there, we put a sort of filter between our spiritual vision and "the reality that is the object of faith and hope alike." Even if our contemplation has every spiritual perfection, if it does not refer to God, it is no more than "unredeemed worldliness."

I was saddened that the exhibit as planned could not even last a week, but I did keep my own paintings and glassworks up for the duration, hoping that at least one interested soul might find in them a freer sense of lived tradition than the repressive caricature the media was presenting. My major piece, Baptistery without Vowels, also dealt with the theme of baptism, and I hope that for some it might have provided a counterpoint to the flap.

In this essay, I have been more honest and public with the marrow of my work (and life) than I ever imagined I could. Because of personal and intellectual shyness, and perhaps complacency, I tend to be very private. I am quite aware of the minefield in which I journey: I am an artist in a not-so-brave new world, a world consumed with itself-believing in no object of veneration external to itself-and wandering in spiritual anarchy. Because of my marriage to dogma and tradition, I stand apart. Flannery O'Connor writes, "Redemption is meaningless unless there is cause for it in the actual life we live, and for the last few centuries there has been operating in our culture the secular belief that there is no such cause." In my own forty-four years I have seen the meltdown of my hometown, racial injustice, Vietnam , poverty, the plague of AIDS, our endangered environment, and the narcotic of narcissism, along with my own frailties and self-inflicted stupidities. These have taught me, beyond doubting, that there is cause, that we need redemption desperately. And why painting? As the Renaissance Platonist Gabriele Paleotti noted, through painting is revealed the whole of life: the world of the senses, the world of the intellect, and finally the world of Love. Ultimately, painting leads us to love God's goodness. I want my painting to offer an opposition to our cultural iconoclasm, leading us not only to love God's goodness, but once again to see it.

Visit Alfonse Borysewicz as Image Artist of Month for July 2004.

Issue #32 • Fall 2001