Here After

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HERE AFTER

BRIDGE PROJECTS

CONTENTS

4 ——— Directors’ Foreword

Cara Megan Lewis and Linnéa Gabriella Spransy Neuss

10 ——— Here After: Or What’s a Heaven For? Roberta Green Ahmanson

17 ———

106 ———

Alberto Aguilar Andrea Büttner Jeni Spota C. Claire Curneen vanessa german William Kurelek Jordan Nassar Master Shen-Long Stanley Spencer Linnéa Gabriella Spransy Patty Wickman Xu Zhen ®

Ted Gioia

Here and in Heaven

44 ———

Excerpt from Surprised by Hope N. T. Wright

49 ———

Here to Remember

Gyun Hur Olga Lah Beth Lipman Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn

70 ———

Picturing Paradise: From the Earthly Garden to the Heavenly City Jennifer Sliwka

81 ———

The Architecture of After Lynn Aldrich Mandy Cano Villalobos Maja Lisa Engelhardt Zarah Hussain Greg Lookerse Regina Mamou James Wines

Music in Heaven

113 ———

Between Here and After

Farkhondeh Ahmadzadeh Afruz Amighi Mercedes Dorame James Elaine Amir H. Fallah Alastair Gordon Bonita Helmer Charwei Tsai William Villalongo

136 ———

The Hereafter in Contemporary Art Jonathan A. Anderson

145 ———

Hereafter and the Unknown

Belu-Simion Fainaru David Wallace Haskins Kate Ingold Kris Martin Tatsuo Miyajima

170 — Image Credits and Primary Source Citations 174 — Contributor Biographies 175 — Acknowledgments

DIRECTORS’ FOREWORD

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Tucked inside the flyleaf of a Gideon Bible in an Albuquerque Airbnb, there is a typed list on thin paper titled “53 Facts About Heaven.” Its tone is that of a no-nonsense grocery list, although in fact it’s a list of impossibly wonderful things. For instance: “Fact 3: It [heaven] is described as a glorious city, likened to pure gold and clear glass.” Each fact is paired with a scriptural reference. As the list continues, the architecture of heaven comes into focus.

“Fact 9: The wall around the city is made of pure jasper.” And, as if walls of pure jasper weren’t wonderful enough, then things become truly surreal: “Fact 21: It is likened to wheels of burning fire with an emerald rainbow canopy.” Fact 42 is the last in this amazing list: “There will be no death.”

Despite the title referencing 53 facts, the list stops here.

In 2018, when Bridge Projects was still a year from its opening and we were visiting artist studios in New Mexico, we encountered this typed list. On the precipice of so many unknowns ourselves, the folded piece of paper and its earnest convictions felt reassuring.

Human beings have often yearned for images of heaven, to define and shape heaven, write lists and draw maps of it. Yet it is also typical and real­ istic to stop at fact 42 and allow the deep mystery of what lies beyond death to remain an unfathomable mystery.

The hope of paradise has sparked imaginations across human history and its many religions. From Pure Land Buddhism’s chant “Namu Amida Butsu” (“I take refuge in Amida Buddha”) to Christianity’s prayer for the Kingdom to be “on earth as it is in heaven,” the concepts of paradise are as diverse as those who hope for it. For millennia, artists have been depicting the various contours of this hope, and their work continues, informing the contemporary artists featured in Here After. Engaging an ontology of peace, their work dwells upon our shared yearning for all that is good.

Some shroud this hope in the mists of a distant future, but these artists bring eternity into close, immediate proximity—as though we are living in it now. We may not see it, but what we see is not all there is.

As with all of Bridge Projects’ exhibitions, the curatorial process has been collaborative, and our team and the Bridge Projects’ board brought many artists into consideration from across the globe and with connections to many of the world’s religions. Also included in the exhibition are seven artworks from the collection of Howard and Roberta Ahmanson, which form its core.

Five main thematics frame the exhibition and serve as the organizing principle for the artist plates in this catalog. “Here and in Heaven” offers works of art where paradise in some form appears in this life as a foretaste, a glimpse of what is to come. “Here to Remember” offers space to explore remembrance of the dead through distinct traditions that engage tangibly with ideas of the afterlife. “The Architecture of After” describes artists who involve the physicality and “placeness” of heaven in their work.

“Between Here and After” accounts for distinct visions of heaven; here are

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interpretations of the pictures that prophets and visionaries bring back to us as they pass back and forth between this world and the next. And finally “Hereafter and the Unknown” provides a place for the mystery, the profound unknowability of God. Essays by Roberta Green Ahmanson, Jennifer Sliwka, Ted Gioia, and Jonathan A. Anderson contextualize the artworks in the canon of art history and contemporary culture, while an excerpt from N. T. Wright’s book Surprised by Hope offers reflection from a theological perspective.

Accompanying the artist plates and texts are primary source materials chosen by the artists. These literary and often religious texts are the artists’ answers to the questions: “What has shaped the way you imagine paradise and the afterlife?” “What text has influenced your piece that is included in this show?” As a result, these texts illuminate a vast diversity of yearning cherished by many people all around the world.

Indeed, 53 facts may not be enough.

—C ara Megan Lewis and Linnéa Gabriella Spransy Neuss Co-directors, Bridge Projects

(following spread) Installation view of Here After, 2022

HERE AFTER: OR WHAT’S A HEAVEN FOR?

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Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, Or what’s a heaven for?

—Robert Browning, “Andrea del Sarto” Robert Browning wrote that often-quoted line in the voice of the Renaissance artist Andrea del Sarto. The painter is talking to his wife about other artists, artists he thinks may be better than he. Artists like Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and Raphael. Browning’s suggestion, put in the voice of del Sarto, that the desire to make good art is like the desire to go to heaven, rings true even today. It’s fair to wonder why. The reason may simply be that none of us knows, knows in any way that can be proved in our materialistic age, what comes after death. If anything. We don’t know, but we reach. We hope. Or, at least we wonder.

Bridge Projects’ show Here After gives visual space to a wide variety of artists whose work struggles with that very question. The works arise from a varied list of religious or metaphysical positions, suppositions, or questions.

Yet, each seeks to visualize wondering what is beyond our grasp.

The world’s religions offer different answers. In the excerpt from his book Surprised by Hope in this catalog, Christian theologian N. T. Wright surveys the variety and distinctiveness of the very different understandings the world’s historic religions offer. But, as philosopher Charles Taylor noted in his 2007 book A Secular Age, we live in a time when even those who identify in some way with an ancient religion also tweak those teachings to fit their own experience. Beyond that, the growing numbers of human beings, particularly in the West, who identify with no religion at all respond to the question in ever fragmented and fragmenting ways.

This show includes seven works from our own collection. Their variety is an example. William Kurelek (Farm Boy’s Dream of Heaven) and Maja Lisa Engelhardt (The Gate) both work out of a classic Christian understanding, albeit Kurelek was Roman Catholic and Engelhardt is a Lutheran. Kurelek situated his vision on the prairie where he grew up, imagining souls rising to some glowing heavenly home. Engelhardt, on the other hand, draws on the biblical account of the veil separating the holiest place in the Jewish temple in Jerusalem being rent in two at the death of Christ. The bronzes in this show are “sketches” for the giant ceremonial doors she designed for Viborg Cathedral, one of the three oldest Christian sees in her native Denmark. For her, the image means we are now invited through the gate of that veil into the very presence of God. Being in that presence is heaven indeed.

Others take cues from Christian teaching. Stanley Spencer (Angels of the Apocalypse) rewrites the Book of Revelation where seven angels pour bowls of flaming retribution on the earth. Instead, Spencer’s angels pour out seed to sprout and grow a new heaven and earth, verdant and lush with life. Andrea Büttner (Dancing Nuns) focuses instead on transcendent moments here and now. Amir H. Fallah (Cowgirl) draws in part on the imagery of a Muslim afterlife though he is not a believer. For Jordan Nassar (Hou Hou Hou) afterlife is present life. His delicate embroideries embody the longing for a bucolic, flourishing homeland here and now.

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Xu Zhen® (Under Heaven) creates an enticing image of the variety and richness of all that is “under heaven,” a concept layered with meaning in Chinese thought and experience. In China, particularly in Confucian and Neo-Confucian thought, we all live under heaven, that is, in an orderly universe. When we disrupt that order—war, famine, injustice—we all suffer.

The order must be restored. Of course, heaven also simply refers to life on this earth. Some years back we visited the Temple of Heaven in the Forbidden City in Beijing, a still-meaningful symbol of a cosmic order Confucius would say we need to respect.

Some of the works in this show were chosen for the notions of the Here After they portray and others are the fruit of inviting artists to ponder the idea of heaven, of paradise, of a place where all is always well. The range of their responses is wide. If Charles Taylor is right, we live in a time when that range is only expanding. It’s a time when Browning’s question “Or what’s a heaven for?” elicits seemingly infinite possibilities. For some of us, like me, the teaching of the religion I try to follow still speaks. Even then, I don’t begin to comprehend just what it fully means. And, that is Browning’s point.

It is also the point of this show. I hope you find in it food for thinking further.

— Roberta Green Ahmanson Chair, Bridge Projects Hualalai March 7, 2022

(following spread) Installation view of Here After, 2022

Here

and In Heaven

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HERE AND IN HEAVEN

Why give ourselves to music, painting, chemistry or cooking? Out of simple delight in the resident goodness of creation, of course; but out of more than that, too.

Half earth’s gorgeousness lies hidden in the glimpsed city it longs to become.

Paul Cézanne, Still Life with Onions (detail), 1896–98

— Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection (1969)

Since time immemorial, humans have sought out transcendent experiences, and our shared aesthetics have been defined by these pursuits. We rely on symbols, metaphors, sounds, and scents as a means of transport to another realm.

Devout Orthodox Christians venerate icons with kisses and incense. Similarly, Buddhists burn cones of incense before an image of Buddha. Both contemporary rituals have ancient roots and look much the same, but they appeal to distinct figures who represent passageways between this world and dramatically different versions of heaven. One depends on the idea that an icon acts as a portal to the presence of a saint whose exemplary life gains them favor in an eternal heaven filled to the brim with throngs of holy citizenry, a place where the lion lies down with the lamb and tears will be no more.

The other depends on the action of the incense to sanctify the ritualistic events occurring in the temple whose efficacy will help the worshiper live an enlightened life. Such a life is rewarded by rebirth in a temporary heaven, a plane of increased bliss and pleasure. Yet, such a paradise is merely one step toward the singular goal, nirvana, a kind of ultimate release from all passion. Buddha led the way to this heaven, and his sublime example assists the worshiper.

For people in pursuit of such versions of heaven, temples, icons, and rituals are condensed samples of the transcendent world to come. Yet these worlds often spread beyond the ritualized cloud of incense. The far-off goal can press into the present, too. The quotidian can become heavenly. Life can be punctuated with those undeniable moments of lovely ubiquity,

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the immanent here and now—the delicate skins of an onion, spool-woven fibers, purple-pink sunsets, the inquisitive eyes of a child—which impart the most extraordinary glimpses of eternity.

These glimpses are available to all. And the history of art is imprinted with artists attempting to express the transcendent potential of the here and now. As John Ruskin has said, “To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion, all in one.” Vermeer’s portraits of women were more than just a record of Dutch life.

They communicated place, personality, and power—or a longing thereof. Vanitas still life paintings were both a celebration of the pleasures of materiality and a warning of the ephemerality of these pleasures and the brevity of human life: memento mori, “remember that you must die.” The great early street photographers of the 1960s—Robert Frank, Vivian Maier, and Lee Friedlander—all captured the magic and wonder of pedestrian city life in ways that imbued the setting and situations with human meaning, capturing the profundity of the simplest moments and “glimpsing the city it longs to become,” to use Robert Farrar Capon’s language.

Though in some ways otherworldly, the work we’ve included in “Here and in Heaven” is also very human and down-toearth. Patty Wickman’s recurring use of raised garden beds are a meditation on humankind’s mortality—a transition from sentience to senescence. Linnéa Gabriella Spransy’s figures burst with creatureliness in a cycle of life-and-death and death-and-life. Claire Curneen’s delicate porcelain sculptures are poignant reflections on the nature of humanity and our precarious place within it. The late William Kurelek’s pasture landscape is a young boy’s dream of heaven.

Perhaps it’s true: “We see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now we know in part; but then shall we know even as also we are known” (1 Corinthians 13:12; NIV). MEAGHAN K. RITCHEY

N E VA E H N I D N A E R E H

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Sensitive Equipment (Silver and Gold edition), 2022

We’re all glowing, like Moses’s face When he came down From the Mountain of Sinai We just can’t see it Because certain light is not perceived By our eyes We’re surrounded by light Traveling through space In every direction We just can’t see it Because it happens invisibly You’re just gonna have to believe me It’s traveling faster Than our eyes can even perceive And it can’t be defined relatively

Did you ever realize That our eyes can’t see everything. (repeat)

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There are particles That are traveling through space Without leaving a trace We just can’t see them Because they don’t interact with light Well, then what do they look like?

Did you ever realize That our eyes can’t see everything. (repeat) — “Blindsight,” from Madeleine Aguilar’s Field of View (2018; each song in this album was written in response to a unit of a course on quantum physics)

To encounter an artwork by Alberto Aguilar is to transcend what is socially expected and to witness what is socially possible. With an invitation to mystery at the core of his practice, Aguilar’s artworks meet you where you are and guide you into uncharted territory. For example, the installation Sensitive Equipment, first exhibited in 2013 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, creates the conditions for visitors to make a chance-based composition with bells and balloons within the parameters of a living room rug. It was an action that originated at home with his four children (who are regular collaborators in his work). No two tintinnabulations are the same.

A 2015 happening in Chicago—Wedding to Unknown—allowed for hundreds of strangers to partake in a joyous wedding feast for a couple otherwise unassociated with the guests. Before the event, Aguilar stood outside the Chicago City Hall with a sign offering the free wedding party to passersby.

It was through a similar out-of-the-blue Facebook invitation to one of Aguilar’s events titled 50 Ingredient Molé in 2011 that I first made his acquaintance.

I arrived at an unfamiliar house and dined among strangers who over the course of the evening became friends. Aguilar’s open dinners recall Jesus’ parables, that compare the kingdom of heaven to a banquet or wedding feast.

Inclusivity feels increasingly otherworldly in our current divisive times. For early Christians, inclusion was a commandment not an aspirational utopia.

When you make a dinner or a supper, don’t call your friends, nor your brothers, nor your kinsmen, nor rich neighbors, or perhaps they might also return the favor, and pay you back. But when you make a feast, ask the poor, the maimed, the lame, or the blind; and you will be blessed, because they don’t have the resources to repay you. For you will be repaid in the resurrection of the righteous. (Luke 14:12–14; NIV)

Aguilar’s invitation arrives without the expectation of receiving the same in return. This generosity is extended to his practice of having hand-painted window signs with unanticipated messages made for unexpected places.

Fabricated by professional sign painters in a style reminiscent of what you would see at a Mexican bodega, Aguilar’s signs on Bridge Projects’ facade are advertising “Invisible,” “Blindfold,” and “Shapeless” on illusionistic banners separating the words into three parts. At first glance the viewer is not able to make out the words but with closer inspection the phrase, which reflexively speaks of vision, reveals itself.

Aguilar expressed the power of visual alchemy in an email to me: “The Heaven is already here but we just don ‘t see it.” CML

b. 1974, Chicago; lives and works in Chicago

ALBERTO AGUILAR

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Dancing Nuns, 2007

When pain and weariness reach the point of causing a sense of perpetuity to be born in the soul, through contemplating this perpetuity with acceptance and love, we are snatched away into eternity.

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—S imone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1947; trans. Emma Craufurd and Mario von der Ruhr)

Everything beautiful has a mark of eternity.

— Simone Weil, Lectures on Philosophy (1959; trans. Hugh Price)

An artist’s sense of what ought to be is inextricably linked to their sense of what has been. German artist Andrea Büttner confirms this in her exploration of overlooked art histories and forgotten heroes of the poor and disenfranchised.

Her practice of using centuries-old techniques like reverse glass painting, weaving, woodcuts, and agrarian methods of cultivation alongside her video, installation, and performance leaves viewers feeling outside of time—with a memory of the past, the fleetingness of the present, foreshadowing her sense of what might be to come. Her facility with so many varied mediums presented altogether is a strength, but she is never showy. Everywhere she is austere.

1. Simone Weil, Waiting for God, trans. Emma Craufurd (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 108.

Her monochrome woodcut Dancing Nuns (2007) presents each nun in a different position—three ways of being or three postures before God. In her frequent reference to the monastic life, we are reminded that for Büttner, the way up is down: abjection and withdrawal are coupled with a simplistic state of wonderment and praise. There is a spiritual richness in poverty, a counterpoint to the observable excess of the ballooning art market. Like Simone Weil, whom she regularly reads and to whom she often expresses her indebtedness, “To give up our imaginary position as the center, to renounce it, not only intellectually but in the imaginative part of our soul, that means to awaken to what is real and eternal, to see the true light and hear the true silence.”1 Her aesthetic is as defined by her ethics as by her skill. An artist-transgressor, she has written extensively on her feelings of reluctance and dismay about the underpinnings and outworkings of the market in which she participates, even if simultaneously she pays homage to artists of the past who have influenced her, such as Sister Corita Kent, Dieter Roth, and Henri Matisse. MKR

b. 1972, Stuttgart, Germany; lives and works in London and Berlin

ANDREA BÜTTNER

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Four Popes, 2019

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has never put it out.

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— John 1:5 (GNT)

Sometimes, when least expected, the ordinary world ruptures. Visions of pulsating glory visit artists, mystics, and prophets, and they seldom recover easy acceptance of the provincial dimensions of the physical world. Extra sight now burnt into their spiritual retinas, they commence a lifetime of creative commitment to a new reality which now saturates everyday experience.

1. The Last Judgment is a typical Christian image derived from Matthew 25:31–33 (among other verses): “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats.

He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left” (NIV).

Although Giotto’s division of the subject into distinct registers is typical of medieval conceptions of the Last Judgment, his naturalism brings a novel immanence to the whole scene.

Jeni Spota C. had a vision of a vision of a vision. While watching Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1971 film Il Decameron, she was absolutely riveted by a fleeting scene. In it, Giotto has a dream of a painting he will make, what will eventually become the famous Last Judgment in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua.1 Pasolini re-creates it in a rickety live tableau—actors arranged on a tiered landscape, like dolls in a curio shelf. From this moment she saw this odd, animated image, Spota began painting it over and over and over.

Something of the original awkwardness of Pasolini’s re-creation animates her endless rehearsals, combinations, and recombinations of this scene in almost unbelievably thick oil paint. The figures are chunky, goopy, stacked like a failed wedding cake. How any vision is rendered speaks to its content.

The cool clarity of Giotto communicates a kind of natural accessibility; Pasolini, animated surrealism. Spota’s hectic surfaces convey the dense communal atmosphere of the afterlife, its wild, wonky physicality—where bodies swarm, elbow-to-elbow with peasants, angels, popes, and demons in the energetic activity of celebration, judgment, torment, bliss, worship, and resurrection.

Bulging outward with the swarm of all this activity, it would seem that this afterworld is every bit as busy, crusty, startling, and actual as our present world is. LGSN

b. 1982, Long Island, NY; lives and works in Long Beach, CA

JENI SPOTA C.

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Blue, 2013

Though they be mad and dead as nails, Heads of the characters hammer through daisies; Break in the sun till the sun breaks down, And death shall have no dominion.

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—D ylan Thomas, “And Death Shall Have No Dominion” (1933)

Claire Curneen’s ceramic sculptures begin as small discs of clay that are molded by hand into a hollow bodily figure from the base of their feet, onto the torso, and eventually up to the neck and head. Then details like gesture, movement, and intricate adornment come in. The figures begin to take on a personality. Next they’re fired at 1,280 degrees Celsius, and through the intense heat of the kiln, the clay is transfigured into delicate porcelain or terra cotta. Their hardened exteriors further gilded with stunning glazes of azure and gold.

The process by which the work is materialized is reinforced in the themes Curneen hopes to convey: a narrative of transformation, of death, rebirth, and the sublime. In Blue, we see two porcelain figures, whose hands are outstretched toward one another, standing near a tree. They are reminiscent of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden before they ate from the “tree of knowledge of good and evil,” which ended their innocence. Her works often allude to humanist medieval and Italian Renaissance traditions, and to Christian iconography—men, women, angels, and saints—with which she is familiar from her Catholic childhood in Ireland and art historical training.

Like the paintings from which she sources ideas, her sculpture is charged with symbolism: trees and cut branches, crowns and open vessels, pierced wounds and arrows, and downward gazes. Attention to the figure’s hands indicate an attention to Chironomia, the Greek and Roman art of using gesticulations to convey unspoken meaning to a viewer, as seen in works like Cut to the Quick.

Gold is a recurrent material in her work, as seen here in the fingertips on the figures in Blue, and in her St. Sebastian, who has gold oozing from his wounds. In other pieces, gold seems to be used to repair cracks, suggestive of the Japanese art of repair known as kintsugi, which emphasizes mended imperfections as a source of beauty.

“Curneen’s work offers us a precious liminal space of contemplation, like an altar or an icon but crucially, if there is devotion here, it is to humanity and creativity,” says Teleri Lloyd-Jones for the exhibition catalog To This I Put My Name. An encounter with her figures leaves viewers feeling they are witnessing the personification of universal hopes and fears—borne out over time through the artist’s loving hand and intense, fortifying heat. MKR

b. 1968, Tralee, County Kerry, Ireland; lives and works in Cardiff, Wales

CLAIRE CURNEEN

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THE HOLIEST WILDERNESS IS FREEDOM 2, 2020

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love always makes more of itself.

—b ell hooks, All About Love: New Visions (2000)

Love is the only creative, redemptive, transformative power in the universe.

— Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Love Your Enemies” (1957)

“How will you live with courage and love today?”1 Self-described “citizen artist” vanessa german often poses this poignant question through her transdisciplinary works, ranging from assemblage sculpture, performance, communal rituals, mixed-media installations, and photography. Love is the main ingredient in all of german’s works; she deftly channels its power to heal and transform. Her works envision new worlds where every human can fully live in their power, without violence or apology.

This dream starts within the artist herself, who excavates her being, her consciousness, her Blackness, her queerness, taking this excavated spiritual matter into the material world through found objects that she uses to create environments and sculptures. The artist refers to her sculptures as “power figures,” which are decorated in accumulations of recurring found objects, including prayer beads, shells, nails, keys, glass bottles, woven textiles, including her own clothing, shoes, mirrors, and more. German chooses her materials intuitively, approaching each object with its own biography, accessing its language and history. Referencing the tradition of African Nkisi power figures, where physical objects are imbued with sacred energy that can be used for protection and healing, german’s figures present an aesthetic of abundance, but also of protection; the assembled materials feel like a suit of armor.

1. Studio Museum in Harlem, “Lea K. Green Artist Talk with vanessa german” (December 16, 2021), www.studiomuseum.org/ event/lea-k-green-artist-talk/ vanessa-german (accessed February 28, 2022).

2. Karen Hudes, “Art Is Alive,” Center Magazine (June 16, 2020), Rockefeller Center, www.rocke­ fellercenter.com/magazine/ arts-culture/vanessa-german-holiest-wilderness-freedom-exhibit (accessed February 28, 2022).

German’s work THE HOLIEST WILDERNESS IS FREEDOM 2 is part of a series of three power figures—Love, Imagination, Beauty and Nature—first created for an installation at the Rockefeller Center sponsored by New York’s Art Production Fund in 2020. THE HOLIEST WILDERNESS IS FREEDOM 2 is dedicated to Love, featuring a life-size figure with a ceramic sculpture of a floral bouquet of pansies for its head, and wearing a vintage cream-colored lace dress with additions of a cerulean-blue feather collar and puffed-up long sleeves with a yellow and purple polka dot pattern. The hands feature red boxing gloves that have been spray-painted gold; the legs are covered in decorative threads, fringe, and tassels; and the modest plinth the figure stands on is decorated in scraps of quilted fabrics. There is a duality in the figure, tender yet tough, new yet old, playful yet serious. The title of the work is perhaps most apparent in the material of the figure’s head and hands.

The floral arrangement representing the head implies beauty, freedom, peace, while the gilded boxing gloves imply that this did not come without some labor and difficulty, and perhaps might still need defending and protection.

“The idea inside of the power figure, the actual object that people look at, and the process of making it, is living with the idea that you have access on a daily basis—in whatever capacity that you have in your humanity, right where you are—that you have power to contend with any issues, any confrontations in your life, even if the world around you tells you that you do not have that power.”2 VPS

b. 1976, Milwaukee; lives and works in Pittsburgh

vanessa german

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Farm Boy’s Dream of Heaven, 1963

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Will all the citizens of heaven have faces smooth and pure as marble, or will some have cheeks chapped by the wind, wrinkles seamed with the soil of the farm field? Will heaven show itself as readily to St. Augustine, thoughtful in his gilded study,1 as it would to the plowboy in the sweat of his labor?

1. St. Augustine of Hippo (354–430) was a talented and learned Church Father and is commonly recognized as the greatest teacher in the Western Church. He possessed breathtaking eloquence and intelligence, which is on full display in his voluminous writings, and which describe, among other things, stirring visions of heaven.

William Kurelek depicts a world where the veil between splendor and soybeans is tissue-thin and torn all the time. In Farmboy’s Dream of Heaven, an exhausted boy sleeps, and there, in broad daylight, the coral blush of blissful paradise saturates a commonplace pasture. Unsurprised cows chew their cuds as transparent spirits glide toward radiant light.

Depicting if not experiencing visions like these helped Kurelek battle with clinical depression as a young man. Hospitalized for years and treated for schizophrenia, his conversion to the Roman Catholic Church, his unstinting work as an artist, and his happy, fruitful marriage gradually pulled him to safety from the edge of mental breakdown.

Though William Kurelek worked in London for years, learning the craft of opulent old-master framing, and was a successful artist in his own lifetime, he was born on the plains of Alberta, Canada, to a large Ukrainian farming family heartbreakingly familiar with poverty. Describing this world with folksy surrealism—by turns naive and novel—William Kurelek does not merely illustrate the experience of those he depicts; he also identifies with them.

He does so in their own dialect of simple, earthy directness.

Despite this simplicity, his message is still shockingly otherworldly: Even the housewife can glimpse angel’s wings aflutter in the snap of dishtowels billowing in the breeze. Her experience of paradise can begin now, at the laundry line, in the cow pasture, cooking dinner. LGSN

b. 1927, Whitford, Alberta, Canada; d. 1977, Toronto, Canada

WILLIAM KURELEK

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Hou Hou Hou, 2020

The BIG RED SPOT of Jupiter is a storm. Matter is desperate Beirut is eaten by civil war children listen to the roar of cannons matter in fury turns in circles in the big void of the planets Beirut wallows in misfortune HOU! HOU! HOU!

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—E tel Adnan, The Arab Apocalypse (1989)

“The landscapes became representational of a Palestine that only really exists in the minds of diaspora Palestinians, that isn’t a real place, it’s this Utopia that is dreamed up by people that can’t go there and see the reality.”1

1. “Preview: ‘A Palestine That Only Really Exists in the Mind of the Diaspora,’” interview with the artist, Frieze (April 20, 2018), www.frieze.com/video/previewpalestine-only-really-existsmind-diaspora (accessed February 28, 2022).

2. Osman Can Yerebakan, “Jordan Nassar Tells Poetic Stories Through His Exquisite Embroidery,” Galerie (October 15, 2021), https://galeriemagazine.com/ jordan-nassar (accessed February 28, 2022).

b. 1985, New York City; lives and works in New York City

Jordan Nassar’s embroidered landscapes are intricately complex, combining the living cultural tradition of Palestinian tatreez patterns with the artist’s own imagined paradisal visions of home and land, as a diaspora Palestinian living in New York. In this series, Nassar created the work in collaboration with craftswomen living and working in Ramallah. The artist first invited the craftswomen to select the color palette for the threads and to lay the foundational patterns on specific areas of the canvas that the artist had preplanned. Nassar then embroidered multicolored landscapes within the intricate geometric grids sewn by these women.

In Hou Hou Hou, Nassar depicts abstracted pebble-like rock forms in coral, umber, and peach nestled on a green ground. This simple, almost cartoonish scene is embedded in a tightly cropped window featuring a clover or floral embroidery pattern that is then framed by a large border of a tan-colored diamond-shaped embroidery pattern. The image is innocuous, yet mysterious in its meaning.

The title for Hou Hou Hou was inspired by Etel Adnan’s book-length poem The Arab Apocalypse, which was written in response to the outbreak of the civil war in Lebanon in 1975. Adnan’s work as an artist and poet was the initial inspiration for Nassar to explore his own diasporic experience through his art. “Adnan’s interpretation of her Arab identity between living in Paris, California, and Beirut proved there are many ways to embrace a heritage.”2 By weaving Palestinian, matrilineal craft traditions with contemporary Western art aesthetics, specificity of place with imagined spaces, fact with myth, Jordan Nassar presents complicated and rich stories of how our identities are inextricably tied to land, even when we can call the land our home only in our dreams. VPS

JORDAN NASSAR

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The Fundamental Essence Of The Universe Embraces All Beings 太上含靈 , 2007

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Who would have thought that self-nature is intrinsically pure!

Who would have thought that self-nature is intrinsically neither arising nor ceasing!

Who would have thought that self-nature is intrinsically endowed with all!

Who would have thought that self-nature is intrinsically unmoved!

Who would have thought that all phenomena manifest from one’s self-nature!

— From the Platform Sutra, a document of a lecture given by the Sixth Chan or Zen Buddhist (禪宗) Patriarch Huineng (638–713 c.e.), recorded by his disciple Fahai, that serves as the main source of information about Huineng’s life

太上含靈蘊群生, 無盡玄音拂龍天; 神龍天下神龍王, 千古妙絕照大千。 逍遙

神龍

The fundamental essence of the universe embraces all beings, The endless sound of Buddha teaching drifts lightly around all spiritual realms.

Shen-Long (the Buddha-nature within everyone) King of the Shen-Long Universe, Is magnificent and unparalleled for all eternity and illuminates the universe.

— Xiao Yao Shen-Long

Master Shen-Long is a painter, poet, calligrapher, philosopher, and Buddhist master. For over fifty years, he has pioneered new approaches to painting that have made him one of the most innovative ink artists of this generation.

In 2000, Master Shen-Long wrote “A Manifesto on the Use of Enlightenment Power and Ability in Art Creation” 覺能藝創宣言, a statement of his own theoretical concepts as imbued in his artistic practice.1 In it, he establishes his theory and philosophy of “enlightenment power” to describe the pure inherent nature of all beings to create art and life.

1. Master Shen-Long, “A Manifesto on the Use of Enlightenment Power and Ability in Art Creation,” is available at his website: https:// mastershenlong.com/manifestoon-the-use-of-enlightenmentpower-and-ability-in-art-creation (accessed March 14, 2022).

b. 1958; lives and works in Dallas

The Fundamental Essence Of The Universe Embraces All Beings refers to this philosophical concept, where enlightenment power is everywhere and comes from our inner selves. In this painting, the landscape is alive and infinitely changing, intended as a microcosmic and macrocosmic reflection of the universe. In the center are three rising and distinct spiritual forms to reflect the natural, material, and spiritual realms, and symbolic of our original inner nature. In the Chinese ink landscape painting tradition, this painting is innovative in the artist’s use of fabric, the artist’s own large carved seal imprint, and the application of untraditional media such as spray and metallic inks. As a prolific poet, he composed and inscribed his own poem to accompany the painting. In addition to mastery of all traditional Chinese calligraphy scripts, he has created his own style of calligraphy, as seen here by an outline form text style called Shen-Long double-hook calligraphy (神龍雙鉤). The term Shen-Long 神龍, literally meaning “incredible dragon,” not only represents the artist’s sobriquet, but also speaks to the artist’s philosophy that all beings are Shen-Long and possess Buddha-nature within to become Buddha. JACQUELINE CHAO, PHD

MASTER SHEN-LONG

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Angels of the Apocalypse, 1949

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The title of Stanley Spencer’s Angels of the Apocalypse and the bucolic scene depicted therein are incongruous at first glance. Referencing the vision of John the Revelator detailed in the Christian Bible’s Book of Revelation, Spencer’s 1949 painting depicts a heterodox vision of the seven angels who would usher in the end of time. In the Book of Revelation, the seven angels bring increasingly epic disasters to earth from burnt forests to an utter darkness that covers creation.

Spencer’s angels, in contrast, are winged gardeners bedecked in cozy knit sweaters and pleated skirts. Plaid, polka dots, checkered and floral patterns comprise the wardrobe of the apocalypse. Instead of plagues, Spencer’s angels have arrived bearing watering vessels from which seeds drop to the ground below. The rural scene is not scorched and appears to be fertile ground for the new seedlings.

The agrarian locale depicted in the painting is most likely Spencer’s hometown of Cookham, England. After a personal revelation that Spencer had lying prone in a cemetery one day, he henceforth dedicated his painting practice to supporting the belief that Cookham was the New Jerusalem.

He once expressed that what happened in the Bible had happened in Cookham.

He set his Last Supper painting in the Cookham Malthouse and his most famous Resurrection painting was positioned at the Cookham churchyard and featured his friends, neighbors, and first wife, Hilda Carline (whom he met at Slade School of Art) emerging from their future graves. Having served in the Royal Army Medical Corps in World War I—an experience that led him to create the most important memorial for that war in the UK—peace was something he fervently sought. And peace he gave us by bridging the here and now of Cookham with the world that is to come. CML

b. 1891, Cookham, England; d. 1959 in Cookham

STANLEY SPENCER

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everything a seed, or the seed of a seed, 2022

The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; And though the last lights off the black West went Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs— Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

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— Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur” (1877)

Performing autonomy is the act of our age. In our work, we prove our selfsufficiency. In our isolation, we forget our need for friendship. In our commerce, we betray the land to which we are indebted. Embracing our finiteness and dependence on external forces is not a modern notion. And yet, this embrace of self-forgetting is the Rule of Life in Linnéa Gabriella Spransy’s studio practice.

For years, Spransy built intricate line-based paintings and drawings out of calculated systems which populated recurring lines and topographies of color. While this work continues, more recently her practice has blossomed into the creation of vast pastels with an anthropomorphic feel. Across sutured pieces of resilient paper, charged with symbolism, these drawings remind us that, in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s words, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.” In everything a seed, or the seed of a seed, in a round, womblike space, we see the choreography of giant kelp, whose forests are ecosystems, braided together with a massive octopus, known to have the highest brain-to-body ratio of any invertebrate, which might make it the gem of the sea were it not semelparous (reproducing only once in a lifetime). Nearby there are tangled figures: three women like three lifespans, and a larger figure whose scaly flesh is shades of blue, purple, and turquoise, with extra limbs, creating a multiplying effect. There is also the ornamental presence of symmetrical diatoms, microalgae that sustain the natural world. Tucked in the corner, we see a hagioscope, also called a squint, often built into the chancel of a church to enable congregants to peer at the altar during the Eucharistic Mass. And then, perhaps as a sort of legend for the rest of the drawing, nestled between figures just off center, we see the glowing silhouette of Mary, adorned with a mandorla that surrounds the totality of an iconographic figure.

While the pastel drawings may appear to be a departure from her previous line-based work, limits remain inherent to her practice—though they have taken new form. Instead of the practical limitations of math and shape, now Spransy seems to be constrained by the pursuit of personal limitations and resultant themes: a creaturely care for the wild earth, spiritual and social porousness, death and life and rebirth, and temporality and eternity.

If the mind-bending majesty of these creatures and their seamless enmeshment in one another doesn’t remind viewers of our shared dependencies, sacrifices—and splendors—what would? A physical echo of the overabundance of the Garden of Eden, everything is fruitful and multiplying.

“Nature is never spent,” to quote Hopkins. The Lord’s Prayer teaches the devoted to pray, “Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” All comprehensively true, all difficult to trust. But that is the exercise and demonstration at hand in Spransy’s work. MKR

b. 1976, Oconomowoc, WI; lives and works in Los Angeles

LINNÉA GABRIELLA SPRANSY

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Raised Bed, 2020

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We awaken in Christ’s body, as Christ awakens in our bodies . . . and everything that is hurt, everything that seemed to us dark, harsh, shameful, maimed, ugly, irreparably damaged, is in Him transformed and recognized as whole, as lovely, and radiant in His light —S t. Symeon the New Theologian (949–1022; trans. Stephen Mitchell)

Napping in the afternoon sun, the family dog sleeps on a fallow garden bed, faintly snoring, content. Likely a common sight, walking the brief path from her studio to the backdoor of her house, on some special afternoon Patty Wickman paused and noted this humble tableau. Perhaps it occurred to her that comfortable domestic moments can sometimes articulate ineffable mysteries in the simplest terms.

Depicting this moment in parched browns, the scene is drained of comfort.

The pall of recent death seems to hush the breath, the breeze, the rustling leaves. Fur disintegrates into soil, reminiscent of the Christian tradition of Lent, when ashes serve as reminder that all bodies will return to their origin: “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.”

Summoned by a somber palette, meditations like these recall Goya’s The Dog. Famous for its emotive pathos Goya’s masterpiece inspired Wickman in painting Raised Bed. Directly painted on the plaster of Goya’s villa where he lived in isolation, deaf and near the end of his life, it shows the head of a dog straining above the brim of a swelling brown wave, overwhelmed by vacant atmosphere. He is alone, struggling, pleading. Hope, if there is any, lies beyond the frame. There is only suspense, no repose.

And here is where Patty Wickman departs from Goya. Spread like wings above the fallow body of her dear pet, a strange tree blooms in hints of blush and pale sunshine—the only color in her canvas. Gradually, supernatural perfection is comprehended, for the apple tree emerges from the sleeping ashy earth with absolute symmetry. It weaves its way toward the sun with the grace of metered lyric as the beloved body of familiar life translates and ascends in the praise of branch, leaf, and bloom. Here a tree appears, a tree where death becomes life.

Perhaps only in the process of painting her dog dreaming on a raised bed did the potency of this parable of life’s ultimate riddle take shape.

For death is certainly that, and sleeping, our closest experience of death in life. Only once will we not wake in this world; all other mornings, we rehearse resurrection. LGSN

b. 1959, Pasadena, CA; lives and works in Altadena

PATTY WICKMAN

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Under Heaven—2832QM0152, 2014

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Tianxia is the succinct Chinese word for a sprawling concept with a long, long past. This deep history means that “All under heaven” is a phrase which has morphed from one meaning to another over time, from indicating the entire geographical world and/or the metaphysical realm of mortals, to later associations with political sovereignty. Confucian religious philosophy uses it one way, the Chinese imperial court in another; though the distinctions are subtle, their ramifications aren’t necessarily so.

Neo-Confucianism, which developed around 1000 a.d., eschewed the super­ natural influences of Taoism and Buddhism, yet still held to the mantra of “cultivation of moral character, establishment of family, ordering the state, and harmonizing tianxia.”1 These things could only be accomplished by means of great personal virtue. Six were identified as crucial: ren (benevolence), yi (honesty), zhi (knowledge), xin (faithfulness), and li (correct behavior).

1. Derived from The Great Learning or Daxue, one of the “Four Books” in Confucianism.

Meanwhile, hundreds of years after the development of these ideas, the title All Under Heaven, given to a series of heavy oil paintings produced by Xu Zhen®, have a dramatically altered implication. To be clear, Xu Zhen® is a brand, not an artist. Though there is a Chinese individual known by this name, born in 1977 and who makes art, he has founded MadeIn Co., which produces a brand called Xu Zhen® and which, in turn, produces works of art.

This art questions ideas surrounding belief, desire, and consumption.

Using oil paint as though it were frosting by pushing it through a pastry bag, unctuous, glistening mounds of bright color beckon a salivating response.

Sheer exuberant ornament encrusts the canvas, confection so thick it seems to stack only on itself. Xu Zhen® produced this series, among other things, as a response to the increasingly hedonistic appetites of Chinese consumerism. Under the reign of commercial ideology, self-gratification is virtue, self-indulgence entirely encouraged.

Though Confucianism held that by cooperating with the influence of heaven, a version of it was possible here on earth, initiating heaven on earth was impossible without benevolence, honesty, knowledge, faithfulness, and etiquette. In contemporary China however, Xu Zhen® insinuates that none of this is needed to enjoy the sweet, creamy taste of consumeristic bliss instantaneously. All that is under heaven is possible on earth, as it is in Confucianism, but it is much much easier to pay in cash than in a lifetime of self-restraint. LGSN

b. 1977, Shanghai, China; lives and works in Shanghai

XU ZHEN ®

EXCERPT FROM SURPRISED BY HOPE

N. T. WRIGHT

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CONFUSION ABOUT HOPE: THE WIDER WORLD

1. David Edwards describes a modern version of this in his After Death? Past Beliefs and Real Possibilities (London: Cassell, 1999), 101ff.

2. Nigel Barley, Grave Matters: A Lively History of Death Around the World (New York: Holt, 1997), 97.

Beliefs about death and what lies beyond come in all shapes and sorts and sizes. Even a quick glance at the classic views of the major religious traditions gives the lie to the old idea that all religions are basically the same. There is a world of difference between the Muslim who believes that a Palestinian boy killed by Israeli soldiers goes straight to heaven and the Hindu for whom the rigorous outworking of karma means that one must return in a different body to pursue the next stage of one’s destiny. There is a world of difference between the Orthodox Jew who believes that all the righteous will be raised to new individual bodily life in the resurrection and the Buddhist who hopes after death to disappear like a drop in the ocean, losing one’s own identity in the great nameless and formless Beyond.1 And there are of course major variations between different branches or schools of thought in these great religions.

So too there are wide varieties of beliefs about what the dead are up to right now. In many parts of Africa the ancestors still play a large role in communal and family life, and there are widespread and complex systems for seeking their help or at least preventing them from making mischief. Nor are these beliefs—as Western secularists might arrogantly assume—confined to so-called primitive peoples. The anthropologist Nigel Barley tells how he met a highly trained Japanese colleague who had worked near him in Chad. Barley had been fascinated by “the complicated form of ancestor-worship involving bones and the destruction of the skull and all sorts of exchanges between the dead and the living.” His Japanese friend had found all this quite dull.

Barley comments: He was, of course, a Buddhist who had a shrine to his departed parents in his living room, on which regular offerings were made. . . . He had taken to Africa some bone from his dead father’s leg, carefully wrapped in white cloth, to ensure protection during his fieldwork. For me [Barley comments], ancestor worship was something to be described and analysed. For him, it would be the absence of such links between the living and the dead that would require special explanation.2 Coming closer to home, we have seen in our own day and culture a bewildering variety not only of stated beliefs but also of telltale practices associated with death and life afterward. I suspect there was never a period when Christian orthodoxy on the subject was the belief of even the majority of people in Britain. Certainly, already by the time of the Victorians there was a wide variety of belief as people wrestled with questions of faith and doubt.

This variety of belief toward the end of the nineteenth century was closely reflected, as we shall see, in the hymns and prayers of the church.

Moving forward toward our own time, the First World War produced not only a great deal of sudden death but also much reflection on its meaning.

Some historians have suggested that belief in hell, already under attack from theologians in the nineteenth century, was one of the major casualties of the Great War. There had been so much hell on earth that people couldn’t believe

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that God would create such a place hereafter as well. So much death affected so many at that time, and again less than a generation later in World War II, that my own reading of our twentieth-century British attitudes to death is that there was simply too much to cope with. I grew up in a culture of near silence about death; children in the 1950s were insulated from it. I didn’t attend a funeral until I was nearly twenty. This may have been, I suspect, a reaction against perceived melodramatic Victorian deathbed and funeral practices. It may also have been a strategy whereby adults might protect themselves from their own enormous and still-buried grief, which could all too clearly be reflected in and brought to the surface by the innocent reactions of a child.

But if death, and life beyond, was the great unmentionable in the 1950s, it certainly is not today. Films, plays, and novels explore it from all kinds of angles. Films like Four Weddings and a Funeral and Perchance to Dream reflect the interest, even the fascination, of a new generation with the question they had not asked and to which they knew no satisfying answers.

The darker end of the market wallows in death, not only in screened violence but also in snuff movies, where death becomes the ultimate thrill. The nihilism to which secularism has given birth leaves many with no reason for living, and death is once again in the cultural air.

The most brilliant play I saw when we lived in London was the Pulitzer Prize–winning play Wit by Margaret Edson, a schoolteacher from Atlanta, Georgia.3 The heroine, Vivian Bearing, is a renowned specialist in the Holy Sonnets of John Donne, and the entire play takes place in the cancer ward, where she is herself dying, reflecting as she does so on Donne’s great sonnet “Death Be Not Proud.” The play was more successful in New York than in London; perhaps Britain is not yet as ready for a full exploration of midlife death as are our American cousins. But the questions are around us all the time, and people are increasingly curious about possible answers.

Where does all this leave us? What do people believe in when they talk about life after death?

N. T. WRIGHT

3. Margaret Edson, Wit: A Play (London: Faber & Faber, 1999).

Here

to Remember

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HERE TO REMEMBER

We all die. The goal isn’t to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.

Artists in Korea, Gamnotaeng (Nectar Ritual) hanging scroll, 1744

—Chuck Palahniuk, Diary (2003)

An experience we all share is that each of us is born and will die someday. This is a reality that we’ll eventually confront in our own lives as well as the lives of our loved ones. So, what is the point of it all? Is death the end? Why do we yearn for something that lasts when that is not our experience in this life?

Artworks featured in the section “Here to Remember” such as Gyun Hur’s There is a land beyond the river and Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn’s The Boat People pose similar questions and make space for remembrance.

Different cultural and religious practices throughout history speak to this yearning through funerals, memorials, commemorations, and veneration of the dead. The living gather to grieve, remember, and celebrate in community through rituals, ceremonies, and feasts. Food serves an important role in funeral practices as a bridge between the living and the dead. Many religious practices, from ancient Egyptians, to Buddhists, to Zoroastrians, would include the preparation of food offerings for the dead to sustain the deceased in the afterlife. The living create intimate, domestic altars that include the deceased’s favorite foods—a physical act of remembrance, love, and care. In Gamnotaeng (Nectar Ritual), a Korean hanging scroll from 1744, both Confucian veneration of ancestors and Buddhist beliefs of the afterlife are represented. This scroll painting features an altar covered with food, with flower offerings in the center. Hovering overhead in the image are the Buddhas and bodhisattvas who transform these offerings into nectar, an immortal drink referred to in Sanskrit as Amrita, which is then consumed by the human souls dwelling at the bottom of the painting. Nectar ritual ceremonies are held several times a year to guide souls into paradise.

Most importantly, food is meant to sustain the living. In periods of mourning, ritual gatherings for a meal serve not just practical needs but spiritual nourishment for the living. Mexican mourners gather for nine days of grieving following a death, called

R E B M E M E R OT E R E H

Diego Rivera, Day of the Dead—City Fiesta (detail), 1924

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the novenario. They eat tamales, molé, and comforting food.

Vietnamese families in mourning will gather for forty-nine days at the deceased’s gravesite, where they leave food offerings and eat among themselves.

From Día de los Muertos in Mexico, to All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day in Christian traditions, to Samhain in Celtic traditions, this confluence of rituals that honor the dead coincides with harvest festivals and the changing of the season from the abundance of summer to the dormancy of winter, connecting the human experience of life and death to a larger ecology.

These traditions of remembrance are a way to make space and time for grieving, not to erase and ignore death, but to hold it up and look at it from all sides. VICKI PHUNG SMITH

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(facing) There is a land beyond the river 저 건너편 강 언덕에 (detail), 2021; (following spread) Installation view of Here After, 2022

There’s a land beyond the river, That we call the sweet forever, And we only reach that shore by faith’s decree; One by one we’ll gain the portals, There to dwell with the immortals, When they ring the golden bells for you and me.

Chorus: Don’t you hear the bells now ringing.

Don’t you hear the angels singing? ’Tis the glory hallelujah Jubilee.

In that far off sweet forever, Just beyond the shining river, When they ring the golden bells for you and me.

We shall know no sin or sorrow, In that haven of tomorrow, When our barque shall sail beyond the silver sea; We shall only know the blessing Of our Father’s sweet caressing, When they ring the golden bells for you and me.

(Chorus)

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When our days shall know their number, And in death we sweetly slumber, When the King commands the spirit to be free; Nevermore with anguish laden, We shall reach that lovely Aiden, When they ring the golden bells for you and me.

(Chorus) — Daniel de Marbelle, “When They Ring the Golden Bells” (1887)

Water is beguiling. Our reliance on it renders it quotidian and familiar, when in reality the molecular components of water are primordial and their presence on earth remains a mystery. Water can not be added to the earth, nor can it disappear; it takes on different shapes in the course of its cycle. For eternity.

Gyun Hur’s work wrestles with the mystery between presence and eternity.

In There is a land beyond the river, Hur incorporates locally collected water as a representative for the rivers from her childhood home in South Korea; for her the river basins are “sites of mourning, washing, and rejoicing.” To hold the precious resource in suspension, Hur created teardrop-shaped glass vessels. The composition is elegant in its minimalism, graciously bearing the weight of its symbolism. The wall sculpture is a memorial to the eight victims of the spa shooting in Atlanta on March 16, 2021.1 Each teardrop mourns a life senselessly cut short.

1. Delaina Ashley Yaun, Paul Andre Michels, Xiaojie Tan, Daoyou Feng, Hyun Jung Grant, Suncha Kim, Soon Chung Park, and Yong Ae Yue.

Hur created the work as a means through which she could process her own personal proximity to the tragedy. Having moved to the United States from Korea at age thirteen, she grew up in the Atlanta Korean community to which her parents are still connected. The title is the first line of the 1887 Christian hymn “When They Ring Those Golden Bells,” whose lyrics express a yearning for the comfort of the “sweet forever.” The bright yellow color of the glass raindrops symbolizes the “golden bells ringing.”

Yellow is a recurring color in Hur’s oeuvre, as deconstructed funeral flowers often yield glowing swathes of golden pigment across gallery floors in exhibitions of her work. Since 2009, these installations have become sites where visitors have processed grief and trauma inspired by Hur’s own journey of processing loss. The titles To hold gently (2020) and Loving Deeply in Suppleness (2019) invite tender reflection and lamentation. But in Hur’s world, hope remains the undying companion to heartache. This optimism reverberates in There is a land beyond the river. Over the course of the exhibition, the water evaporates leaving sediments and memory from the rivers they once traversed. Like the victims remembered here, the water has moved on, taking on a new form “in that haven of tomorrow.” CML

b. 1983, Daegu, South Korea; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY

GYUN HUR

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(facing) Across the Rise, 2022 (details on following spread)

At the end of my suffering there was a door.

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Hear me out: that which you call death I remember. ...

You who do not remember passage from the other world I tell you I could speak again: whatever returns from oblivion returns to find a voice: — Louise Glück, “The Wild Iris” (1992)

Accumulating cast-away materials en masse, pondering their many potentials, arranging them in startling ways, breaking them down, reconsidering them, and then rearranging them again many times over is the cycle of continual renewal central to Olga Lah’s practice. Like the cyclical journey of water through our atmosphere, her work is a collaboration with time, opportunity, fragility, and transformation.

More than any single piece, the overall experience of working this way communicates Lah’s desire to provide astonishing experiences with materials that, without her intervention, would otherwise end up in the dumpster.

By exceeding the sum of their familiar parts, her installations speak to the fact that wonder is more available than we may realize—even trash can glow with transcendence. Yet, there is a very particular species of wonder she hopes to encourage; the Greeks call it thaumazō: a philosophical excitement of mind sparked by the perception of something strange. Socrates said that “philosophy begins in wonder.”

Lah herself wonders at her own life. She never planned to be an artist, despite her double BA in studio art and art history from UC Riverside. Assuming art wasn’t practical and was too demanding, after graduation she held jobs whose main goal was to stabilize life. Eventually she went to Fuller Theological Seminary, intending to earn a degree in theology. It was there that she began to listen to questions that resonate with uncertain excitement, not just cramped practicalities, which are so often tinged with fear and doubt.

Follow­ing that reverberation of wonder wherever it led, Olga Lah now finds her life transformed. To her own surprise she is a busy artist who has accomplished many impressive installations over the course of a decade.

To anyone absorbed by her work, it becomes clear that her best hope is to offer a similar opportunity to be struck by wonder and perhaps be transformed. If not, then however briefly, to see the ordinary world backlit, aglow with the halo of its actual glory. LGSN

b. 1980, Los Angeles; lives and works in Los Angeles

OLGA LAH

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(facing) Northern Monkshood Composition (detail), 2020; (following spread) Candlesticks II, 2020

You go to sleep in one world and wake in another.

You who were not your life nor were stranger to it, you who were not your name, your ribs, your skin, will go as a suitcase that takes inside it the room— Only after you know this can you know this.

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As a knocked glass that loses what has been spilled, you will know this.

— J ane Hirshfield, “You go to sleep in one room and wake in another” (2020)

There are few objects quite so ancient and universal as candles. Across cultures, faiths, and histories, these beacons of light have taken on deeply symbolic meaning: flickering flames, like our fleeting lives, remind us of our temporality and mortality; their light a source of wisdom to illuminate a pilgrim’s path. In Jewish households, Hanukkah celebrations are marked by a nine-branched candelabrum lit on eight consecutive nights to commemorate the rededication of the Second Temple. Though candles predate Christianity by centuries, services of matins, lauds, and vespers rely on the use of candles to affirm the idea of the Uncreated Light of Christ. In Buddhism, along with incense, candles are placed in front of shrines as a mark of respect or deference, to evoke the state of impermanence and change—a cornerstone of Buddhist philosophy.

Temporality and impermanence are ideas that sculptor Beth Lipman’s practice is preoccupied with. She creates glass assemblages of inanimate objects and domestic interiors that act as composite portraits of individuals, institutions, societies, and perhaps most importantly, ideas. Shaped by the still life tradition, her delicate compositions remind us of the narrative power of objects, and what those objects communicate about the role of the sacred and profane, and the splendor and dangers of our appetite for excess. As viewers immerse themselves in the work, uncanny webs of association ensue.

Though Lipman’s primary medium is sculpture, with Candlesticks, she has created a photograph of a three-dimensional sculpture which she later shattered. Scaled to the size of the original sculpture and printed as a negative, Candlesticks is enlivened by the reversal of light and shadow, which the camera lens perceives even more keenly than the naked eye.

Candlesticks is presented as part of the series Ephemera, nomenclature which reinforces the idea of temporality. With the work destroyed, the viewer is left only to experience its documentation to recall the original form. This process—creation, celebration, destruction, memorialization—which all the works in Ephemera follow, is not unlike the ways in which we remember the lives of others. Much of who we are and what we have loved is known by the vestiges of what we leave behind.

Is there anything more destined to burnout than a flame? Isn’t the very creation of art an effort to divert our constant awareness of limitations?

What traces will we leave behind and how will we be remembered? MKR

b. 1971, Philadelphia; lives and works in Sheboygan Falls, WI

BETH LIPMAN

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(facing) Stills from The Boat People, 2020; (following spread) Installation view of The Boat People; (pages 68–69) Installation view of Here After, 2022

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Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn’s film The Boat People follows a group of five children, the last survivors of humanity in a post-apocalyptic future, as they travel the seas until they land in an idyllic place formerly known as Bataan in the Philippines. Led by a confident young girl, the group of young travelers piece together stories of the world they never knew, through artifacts and monuments that remain on the island, revealing complex and richly intermingled histories of past wars and migrations. Amid the lush, verdant landscape, the children encounter the ruins of old temples, shrines, monuments, cemeteries, and statues of Buddha, a bodhisattva, the Virgin Mary, and even Pope John Paul II. The young girl also encounters a mysterious statue head on the beach. The statue comes to life, and the two discuss faith, death, and the afterlife.

The girl explains to the statue head: “There is nobody left alive to steal from, the world is ours now, we seek the stories of our ancestors, of who we once were.” The girl figures out where the statue’s body is and asks if the statue head would like to be made whole again, at which the statue head replies: “Objects like me do not need to be whole, I’m at the service of human memory, a stand-in for someone, that in turn was a stand-in for something else.”

1. Harley Wong, “Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn’s Mystical Art Brings People in Touch with Lost Ancestors,” ArtNews (April 8, 2020), www.artnews.com/artnews/artists/tuan-andrewnguyen-interview-1202683390 (accessed February 28, 2022).

As the young explorers find artifacts that resonate with them, they replicate the objects by carving them out of wood and then burning them. The young girl explains that these rituals “bring the past into the future. And burning brings nowhere to everywhere.” Nguyễn’s protagonists do not carry the weight of the past. How could they when they don’t know it? They are free and unburdened; they can transform objects and make their own stories.

And yet, they still have an innate desire to remember. Why do we need to remember? Is that what makes us human?

Nguyễn first visited Bataan in 2018 to research the area. The artifacts that the children discover in the film are all connected to real sites in Bataan, including the Philippine Refugee Processing Center that prepared Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian refugees for resettlement; the Boat People Museum; the Khmer and Bayon Monuments, built by Cambodian refugees; Chùa Vạn Hạnh, a Buddhist temple that was built by Vietnamese refugees; the Bataan Death March Memorial; and many more.

Nguyễn’s film reveals a history of war and trauma but also perhaps of hope, a history of migration and survival, and of reconciliation of what is lost with what remains. The artist often explores this complicated and layered reality through his narrative films. “I am obsessed with looking at how narrative functions within the context of history, especially through the lens of memory.

Working with communities that have been made invisible through history and the different threads of history, such as colonialism and postwar migration, I believe I can help empower them again through storytelling.”1 VPS

b. 1976, Sài Gòn, Vietnam; lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

TUẤN ANDREW NGUYỄN

PICTURING PARADISE: FROM THE EARTHLY GARDEN TO THE HEAVENLY CITY

JENNIFER SLIWKA

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1. David Rohl, Legend: The Genesis of Civilisation (London: Century, 1998).

2. For the etymology and various meanings of this term see s.v. “paradise, n.” in the Oxford English Dictionary.

3. Alessandro Scafi, Mapping Paradise: A History of Heaven on Earth (London and Chicago: British Library and University of Chicago Press, 2006).

4. More specifically, see Genesis 2–3 and Ezekiel 28, 31.

5. On these various proposals see: Joseph E. Duncan, Milton’s Earthly Paradise: A Historical Study of Eden (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1972); Brook Wilensky-Lanford, Paradise Lust: Searching for the Garden of Eden (New York: Grove Press, 2012); Scafi, Mapping Paradise; Ziony Zevit, What Really Happened in the Garden of Eden? (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003).

6. For a discussion on the identifications of Eden in the United States, see Wilensky-Lanford, Paradise Lust; for England, see Jane Shaw Octavia, Daughter of God: The Story of a Female Messiah and Her Followers (London: Johnathan Cape, 2012); on South America, see Scafi, Mapping Paradise, esp.

240–42.

7. Irenaeus writes: “Those who are deemed worthy of an abode in heaven shall go there, others shall enjoy the delights of paradise, and others shall possess the splendour of the city; for everywhere the Saviour shall be seen according as they who see Him shall be worthy.” See Irenaeus, Five Books of S. Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons, Against Heresies, trans.

John Keble (London: James Parker, 1872), bk. V, chap.

36. On Irenaeus and notions of the earthly and restored Jerusalem, see K. B. Copeland, “The Earthly Monastery and the Transformation of the Heavenly City in Late Antique Egypt,” in Heavenly Realms and Earthly Realities in Late Antique Religions, ed. R. S. Boustan and A. Yoshiko Reed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 147–48.

8. Origen, De principiis, bk. II, chap. 11, no. 6.

9. A later visual example of this is seen in Fra Angelico’s Last Judgement of c. 1435–40, now in the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin (Kat. Nr. 60A), in which the souls of the righteous are represented as being guided from a paradise garden into heaven by angels.

For more on this work see Neville

In 1998, the British Egyptologist David Rohl claimed to have identified the location of the garden of Eden and its four rivers in Azerbaijan, not far from the city of Tabriz.1 Unfortunately, Rohl’s proposal found little support among scholars and represents just one of many attempts made over the centuries to identify the location of Eden, a search which continues to preoccupy some to this day. In many ways, Eden is synonymous with paradise, a name derived from the Latin paradisus, which has its origins in Greek and Old Iranian terms signifying a park, garden, or walled enclosure.2 It is also known as the garden of God or the terrestrial paradise in the three Abrahamic religions. This paradise garden has long been considered a real place on earth, situated in actual geography and indicated on maps.3 Described in the Books of Genesis and Ezekiel, this garden was populated with beautiful and life-sustaining trees and was where the first man and woman, Adam and Eve, lived before the Fall in the account of the creation.4 The biblical accounts also describe Eden as located at the source of four rivers. Accordingly, various suggestions have been made as to Eden’s original location, ranging from the head of the Persian Gulf in southern Mesopotamia (now Iraq), to present-day Armenia, India, Jerusalem, and, more recently, Azerbaijan.5 Some have also located it outside of the Middle East in Missouri and Florida in the United States, Bedford in England, and in South America.6 The biblical narrative, for both Jews and Christians, opens with a descrip­ tion of paradise, the garden of Eden (Genesis 2:8–14), where the first human couple lived in a blissful state of perfection and innocence before the Fall. For Christians, this narrative closes with the description of another paradise, that of the New Jerusalem (Revelation 21:1–3, 22:1–2), understood as the place of the final redemption and perfection of humanity that will be established by God in heaven. This account in Revelation recalls a description in the Book of Ezekiel 40, a major prophetic book in the Old Testament, which describes the renewal of the old city of Jerusalem and the rebuilding of the Holy Temple during the Messianic era. This eschatological paradise is likened therefore to heaven and, interestingly, theologians began making both connections and distinctions between conceptions of paradise and heaven at a very early date. Already by the second century, for example, Irenaeus, bishop of Lugdunum (now Lyons, France) wrote that only the souls of those deemed worthy would dwell in heaven, while others would enjoy paradise, and the remaining souls would live in “the city,” that is, the restored Jerusalem.7 By contrast, Origen, a third-century Church father, described paradise as the earthly “school” that prepared the souls of the virtuous for their ascent through the celestial spheres to heaven.8 Accordingly, many early Christians believed that paradise was a place on earth where the souls of the righteous remained until the resurrection at the Last Judgment.9

MAPPING PARADISE From the medieval period onward, there were attempts not only to locate paradise and situate it on maps but to represent it in visual terms that would validate the authority of holy scripture and support the Christian faith. One

JENNIFER SLIWK A

of the finest examples of this early kind of mappamundo (map of the world) is Giovanni Leardo’s Mapa mondi, figura mondi (fig. 1), made in Venice in 1442. In this work, Jerusalem is represented at the center of a tripartite world, consisting of Asia, Europe, and Africa (the three known continents at that time), which is encircled by the ocean. The map is oriented east and locates the terrestrial paradise, represented as a city with a tall column in the center surrounded by magnificent buildings, near India at the top.10 In this case therefore, paradise is understood not as a garden but as a kind of idealized city, though one distinct from Jerusalem.

This desire to visualize and locate paradise continued through the Renaissance period onward, alongside changing beliefs about the nature of the universe, which in turn brought about new theological conceptions and artistic impressions.

COSMOLOGICAL MODELS The Renaissance understanding of the universe was largely indebted to the cosmological models of ancient Greek and Arab philosophers. In these, the planets and stars were believed to be embedded in a series of concentric spheres made up of “quintessence,” an ethereal, transparent fifth element.

Aristotle (384–322 b.c.), for example, described a cosmology in which these nested celestial spheres rotated, with uniform motion, around a central, stationary Earth (a geocentric model). He argued that the movement of each of these spheres (the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and the Fixed Stars) was governed by its own planetary god (a mover) and that beyond them was a ninth sphere, which he called the Primum Mobile (or “Prime Mover”), that affected all the subordinate spheres.

Christian philosophers and theologians subsequently adapted this ancient model to include an outermost region, called the empyrean heaven (the firmament or highest heaven), which they identified as the dwelling place of God and of the elect. They also argued that the lower (inner) spheres were moved by spiritual movers called intelligences, whom they equated with angels, and identified the “Prime Mover” with God. A model of this type is found in the Sienese artist Giovanni di Paolo’s The Creation of the World and the Expulsion from Paradise (1445) (fig. 2).11 God the Father is shown swooping down from the sky, borne by seraphim, to “animate” the universe, here represented as a map of the earth surrounded by different-colored concentric circles representing the different elements and celestial spheres. To the right, an angel drives Adam and Eve from the garden of Eden, and below them the four rivers of paradise seem to flow out of the picture into our space. This panel, a fragment of an altarpiece, was originally accompanied by a representation of paradise which also survives. The accompanying scenes of the Last Judgment, hell, and the Flood are now lost.12 In the paradise panel, a lush tapestry-like meadow is filled with apple trees and flowers and shows humans (especially members of religious orders and the clergy) and angels embracing (fig. 3). At the upper right of the composition, one angel leads a young man toward a stream of golden light, presumably a gate to the celestial city of heaven.13 While this garden paradise includes

FIG. 1

Rowley’s catalog entry in Gemäldegalerie: 200 Master­ pieces of European Painting, ed. Michael Eissenhauer (Berlin: Gemäldegalerie, 2019), 304–5.

10. For a discussion of this map see Scafi, Mapping Paradise, 18.

11. This work is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, inv. 1975.1.31. On this panel see Keith Christiansen, Painting in Renaissance Siena: 1420–1500, exhibition catalog, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1988), no. 32a; Kristen Lippincott. “Giovanni di Paolo’s Creation of the World and the Tradition of the Thema Mundi in Late Medieval and Renaissance Art,” Burlington Magazine 132 (1990): 460–68, figs. 1 and 2.

12. The altarpiece was painted for the Church of San Domenico in Siena and is also known as the Guelfi altarpiece. The main, upper tier, is now in the Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. Both the creation and the paradise panels are in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

13. On the paradise panel see Carl Brandon Strehlke in Painting in Renaissance Siena: 1420–1500, exhibition catalog, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1988), pp. 192, 198–200, no. 32b, ill.; Jennifer Sliwka, Visions of Paradise: Botticini’s Palmieri Altarpiece, exhibition catalog, National Gallery, London (2015), 34, 111, fig. 19.

(fig. 1) Giovanni Leardo, Mapa mondi, figura mondi, 1442

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(fig. 2) Giovanni di Paolo, The Creation of the World and the Expulsion from Paradise, 1445; (fig. 3) Giovanni di Paolo, Paradise, 1445

PICTURING PARADISE

FIG. 2

14. See, for example, Brueghel’s The Creation of Adam (1594), Rome, Galleria Doria Pamphilij; The Garden of Eden (c. 1610–12), Madrid, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza; The Garden of Eden (1613), Hong Kong, private collection; The Fall of Man, made in collaboration with Rubens (1615), The Hague, Mauritshuis; Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden (1615), London, the Royal Collection Trust; among many other versions on this theme.

15. On Brueghel and Borromeo, see Arianne Faber Kolb, Jan Brueghel the Elder: The Entry of the Animals into Noah's Ark, Getty Museum Studies on Art (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2005). For more on Borromeo’s interest in the story of creation, see I tre libri delli laudi divine, published posthumously in 1632.

FIG. 3

a few hares and a deer, the attention here is clearly on the human and angelic figures and not the animal kingdom. By contrast, later artists, particularly those working in a Counter-Reformation spiritual context such as the Flemish painter Jan Brueghel the Elder, often included a great variety of animals in their lush paradise landscapes, as in Brueghel’s Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden (1615).14 Enjoying the great patronage of Cardinal Federico Borromeo (1564–1631), Brueghel seems to have adopted aspects of his philosophy such as how the study of nature brings one closer to God and how the variety of animals in the world embodies the divine power of creation.15 Indeed, in many of Brueghel’s and his contemporaries’ works, it is the animals and the landscapes that take center stage in paradise while human figures are often represented in the far distance, usually on a minute scale.

THE LEGACY OF DANTE’S COSMOLOGY The Christian-Aristotelian model of the universe outlined above was taken up, most famously, by the Florentine poet Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) in his epic poem, the Divine Comedy, written circa 1308–20. In the poem, Dante recounts his own journey through the three realms of the afterlife: inferno (hell), purgatorio (purgatory), and paradiso (paradise). At the opening of the poem, he finds himself lost in a dark wood, a metaphor for his sense of ignorance and of entanglement in the vices of the world. He is rescued by the spirit of the Roman poet, Virgil, who guides him through hell (described as a funnel descending into the center of the earth) and purgatory (a mountain rising from the surface of the earth). In purgatory, Dante meets Beatrice, a woman he had loved in his youth but who had died at a young age. Beatrice guides Dante to the earthly paradise at the top of the mountain of purgatory from which the two ascend through the celestial spheres, all the way to the empyrean, where Dante comes face to face with God himself, and, finally, understands Christ’s divine and human nature. The poet’s journey through

(fig. 4) Domenico di Michelino, Dante as the Poet of the “Divine Comedy,” 1465

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FIG. 4

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PICTURING PARADISE

the three realms serves as an account of the soul’s journey toward God and, ultimately, to salvation.

Dante’s Comedy is widely considered one of the most important poems of the Middle Ages, and the author’s evocative descriptions of hell, purgatory, and paradise have had such a powerful and enduring impact on subsequent visualizations in Western art and literature that is now difficult to imagine them in any other way. Indeed, the immediate and sustained fame of Dante’s poem helped disseminate an understanding of this geocentric conception of the universe, which largely persisted until Nicolaus Copernicus revived the idea of the sun-centered universe in the early sixteenth century. Dante’s vivid descriptions in the Comedy created rich material for illustrators, with the earliest illuminated manuscripts appearing in Florence in the 1330s. Several commentaries on this complex poem were written around this time, and it soon became the subject of close study in many Italian universities and was widely read aloud in public, making it accessible even to the nonliterate.

Illuminated manuscripts were relatively small expensive objects and therefore had a fairly limited audience. By contrast, Domenico di Michelino’s Dante as the Poet of the “Divine Comedy” (fig. 4), a large panel (91 ⅓ × 114 inches) painted for the north wall of Florence’s cathedral in 1465, was a much more imposing and accessible model for visualizing paradise. In this composition, Dante is standing at the center, holding a copy of the Divine Comedy in his left hand, which emanates golden rays that illuminate the city of Florence.

With his right hand, he indicates a procession of sinners descending into the nine circles of hell, while behind him, are the seven terraces of the mountain of purgatory, with Adam and Eve represented at the top to indicate the earthly paradise. The sky above is defined by concentric circles of increasingly darker shades of blue, each marked with the symbol of the planetary sphere it is intended to represent.

Domenico’s large panel, in the cathedral to this day, continues to be of great spiritual and civic importance for Florentines, as it casts their city as the New Jerusalem. Florence, like several other cities, liked to portray itself as the New Jerusalem as described in both Ezekiel and Revelation through texts, images, architecture, and relics that drew parallels between the two cities. In Revelation, John of Patmos describes how an angel took him “in the Spirit” to a vantage point on “a great and high mountain” to see the New Jerusalem’s descent from heaven down to the earth, where the river of the water of life flowed, and much of his elaborate description evokes the garden of paradise (Revelation 21–22). In casting Florence as an evocation of the New Jerusalem, that is, the heavenly city to come, Domenico was making a special claim for his native city and its citizens, associating them with the elect who will populate the eschatological kingdom.

PARADISE AS A BEGINNING AND AN END The understanding of paradise outlined so far, as a place associated both with the garden of Eden and with the heavenly Jerusalem, comes together in an extraordinarily powerful yet enigmatic way in Sandro Botticelli’s so-called Mystic Nativity of circa 1500 (fig. 5).16 At first, this Nativity appears to be a relatively straightforward scene of earthly and heavenly delight, as angels

(fig. 5) Sandro Botticelli, Mystic Nativity, c. 1500

76 JENNIFER SLIWK A

FIG. 5

(following spread) Installation view of Here After, 2022

PICTURING PARADISE

16. This work is now in the National Gallery, London, inv. NG1034. For an in-depth discussion of it see Rab Hatfield, “Botticelli’s Mystic Nativity, Savonarola, and the Millennium,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 58 (1995): 88–114; see also Jennifer Sliwka, “The Painter and The Preacher: Botticelli’s Mystic Nativity and Savonarola’s Sermons,” Brooklyn Rail (July–August, 2021).

17. The Greek inscription at the top translates as: “This picture, at the end of the year 1500, in the troubles of Italy, I, Alessandro, in the half-time after the time, painted, according to the eleventh [chapter] of Saint John, in the second woe of the Apocalypse, during the release of the devil for three and a half years; then he shall be bound in the twelfth [chapter] and we shall see [him buried] as in this picture.”

18. The Italian Wars (1494–1559) were a series of conflicts between the Valois kings of France (the primary aggressors) and their Habsburg opponents in Spain and the Holy Roman Empire. Savonarola managed to dissuade the French from invading Florence but the wars continued across the peninsula until 1559 Peace of CateauCambrésis, which established the Habsburgs as the leading power in Italy.

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dance in the air above both the magi and the shepherds who attend the new-born Christ child, his mother and Joseph seated before a cave in a forest clearing. In the foreground three angels hold scrolls which proclaim (in Latin), “Peace on earth to men of goodwill.” The angels, as in Giovanni di Paolo’s representations of paradise, embrace three men as if welcoming them to Eden.

The curious Greek inscription at the top of the work, however, contains prophetic and troubling words taken from Revelation.17 In the inscription, Botticelli interprets contemporary political events—which he calls “the troubles of Italy”—in the light of Revelation, which foretells the end of the world and Christ’s second coming. The contemporary events Botticelli alludes to involved the powerful preacher Girolamo Savonarola (1452–98), who warned Florentine citizens that a great scourge was approaching and that they should mend their corrupt ways. Savonarola further claimed that Florence could become the New Jerusalem if citizens would only repent and abandon their sinful luxuries. Savonarola’s prophesies were believed fulfilled when the Italian Wars broke out in 1494 and a large French army invaded Italy.18 With these words and events in mind, Botticelli’s composition appears more ominous. For example, the cave in which the scene is set, calls to mind representations of Christ’s tomb, while the sheet on which the child is laid evokes the shroud in which his body will one day be wrapped. Unusually, the magi bear no gifts, suggesting, perhaps, that they have abandoned such luxuries and that their devotion alone is a gift. Further, in between and among the embracing figures in the foreground devils can be seen fleeing into the underworld.

Taken together, all of these elements call to mind representations of the Last Judgment, the reckoning of the damned and the saved at the time of Christ’s second coming. Accordingly, the painting seems to represent not only the paradise garden and the birth of Christ but also his imminent return to earth after death. At the top of the composition, the golden dome of heaven opens up and becomes visible from earth, as if preparing for the descent of the heavenly Jerusalem. The fleeing devils and the olive branches held by the angels also seem to anticipate Christ’s return and to herald the era of peace believed to follow. Like many artists who preceded him, and those who would follow, Botticelli envisions a paradise, in this case, combining both the earthly and the heavenly, the past and the future, that expresses his aspirations for the hereafter.

The Architecture

of After

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(facing) Sri Mariamman Hindu Temple, Singapore; (right) Basilica of Sant’Apollinare in Classe, Ravenna

THE ARCHITECTURE OF AFTER

There is a wonderful description of the construction of Chartres Cathedral that has come down to us from the twelfth century.

It says that people from all walks of life and social strata—lords, ladies, soldiers, and common workers—came together in the grueling task of transporting stones, wine, grain, and oil to the work site. They labored side by side and in rever­ential silence and all forgave their enemies. What we see here is a hint of the new city made possible by the authority of the risen Christ at work in his church. When we visit a Gothic cathedral and move into the magnificent light of the place, it is the true God that we are meant to praise and this new world that we are compelled to imagine.

— Robert Barron, Heaven in Stone and Glass: Experiencing the Spirituality of the Great Cathedrals (2000)

R E T F A F O E R U T CE T I H C R A E H T

(top) La Sagrada Familia, Barcelona; (bottom) Hagia Sophia, Istanbul

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The architecture of a pilgrim’s faith is formed by the sacred spaces they inhabit. Before contemporary societ­ies started to build cathedrals to commerce in the form of skyscrapers, sacred spaces were the largest buildings in a city, their grandeur rightfully unmatched because of the special function they served in facilitating communion with the sacred. Towering spires of cathedrals and massive domes of mosques symbolize an ascent to heaven, mimicking the open sky of the universe, beyond the boundaries of this world.

THE ARCHITECTURE OF AFTER

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Not just the structures of the buildings themselves were symbolic. Of equal and lasting import were the iconography, sacred geometry, and use of sophisticated semiotics. In fact, the early history of art was an exploration and utilization of these motifs—and none of the works in this current exhibition would exist in this form were it not for evolution of forms that preceded them.

Of Constantinople’s sixth-century Hagia Sophia, Byzantine historian Procopius noted: “One might say that its interior is not illuminated from without by the sun, but that the radiance comes into being within it.” The visitor’s mind, he added, “is lifted up toward God.” The works included in the “The Architecture of After” either directly or indirectly reference this aspirational quality, whether with the aim of creating space to imagine the life hereafter or in trying to directly access it. This group of artists involves the tangible “placeness” of heaven in their work. Maja Lisa Engelhardt’s The Gate serves as a literal and symbolic threshold. Though it functions as a door, when a parishioner or passerby passes through the gate, the “veil is torn down” and they are welcomed into the space of an everlasting kingdom. Sharjah Spectrum, by Zarah Hussain, turns breathtaking abstraction into actuality, reminding viewers—even in the most ubiquitous of spaces—of divinity and the enormity of the universe. Lynn Aldrich’s take on stained glass rose windows elicits the same awe-inspiring response of its Gothic predecessors: wonder at the phenomena of the natural world and hope for the new heaven and new earth. MEAGHAN K. RITCHEY

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(facing) Oculus, 2020; Porthole, 2019; Crack!, 2019; Discovery in a Tar Pit, 2019 (installation view); (following spread) Oculus, 2020

For behold, I create new heavens and a new earth; And the former things will not be remembered or come to mind.

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But be glad and rejoice forever in what I create; For behold, I create Jerusalem for rejoicing And her people for gladness.

— Isaiah 65:17–18 (NASV)

In a short documentary about her practice, Lynn Aldrich wanders up and down the aisles of a Southern California Home Depot delighting in the bristles of dusters, the ripples in corrugated roofing materials, the malleability of sponges. If Simone Weil is right that “attention is the purest form of worship,” Aldrich is among the most worshipful.

Her celebrated career has been defined by a steady obedience in one direction: the transformation of everyday household materials into allegorical sculptures and wall constructions, which, like a microscope to mitochondria, create an expansive sense of wonder and a desire for exploration. Influenced by her father, who was a research scientist and pathologist in the air force, she enjoys the interplay between science and spirituality. “My art is not about me psychologically or about my identity. It’s about my outward gaze on the world. I think artists share that with scientists,” she said in an interview with her alum magazine at Art Center College of Design.

Her concepts are of immense gravity, and yet her playful repurposing of materials leaves the work with a graceful levity. And formal elegance comes through her reassigning functionality to cheap, factory-produced goods.

Titles and narratives are very important to Aldrich, and she has shared that she thinks as much about C. S. Lewis as Marcel Duchamp when at work in the studio. With titles like Reverse the Rain and Water Feature, meticulously accumulated garden hoses and rain gutters become simultaneously a meta­phor for Christ as the water of life—and a commentary on California’s fresh-water crisis.

Made of twenty-five layers of layered tulle cut into a stencil, the ethereal Rose Ghost, Holy Spirit, was inspired by the rose windows at Chartres Cathedral and spiral galaxy images from the Hubble telescope. From the same series, Discovery in a Tar Pit is a mound of tar felt which a viewer peers down into a hole as if looking through a telescope to find an illuminated rose window.

Her take on stained glass elicits for viewers the same awed response of its Gothic predecessors: wonder at the phenomenon of the natural world and a hope for the new heaven and the new earth.

After forty years of practice, numerous exhibitions, and many accolades, it’s no exaggeration to say that Aldrich’s work has subverted our culture of consumerism with an architecture of transcendentalism. MKR

b. 1944, Bryan, TX; lives and works in Los Angeles

LYNN ALDRICH

88

(facing) Dim Gold (Feast of Brides), 2022; (following spread) Installation view of Here After, 2022

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Now bows the hour and wakens me with clear, metalic strike: my senses tremble. I feel: I can— and grasp the maleable day.

Nothing is completed, before I behold it, each becoming stands still.

My glances are ready, and as a bride to each comes the thing it wills.

— “ The Poetry and Spirituality of Rainer Maria Rilke,” compiled and translated

by Arthur Freeman (1994)

1. John O’Donohue, Anam Cara (New York: HarperCollins, 1998), 199.

Irish poet John O’Donohue wrote in his 1997 book Anam Cara, that from the moment of birth we are accompanied by a “presence who walks the road of life with you. . . . The name of this presence is death.” Our lives are spent together with this invisible presence until, one day, the veil is lifted and we are finally wed to that which was once a mystery. We arrive at our eternal home.1 “What are the trimmings of our eventual home? When will we get there and what will it look like?” are the questions queried by Mandy Cano Villalobos’s found-object installations. Sock monkeys, toy race cars, and thrift store lighthouse paintings pile one on top of the other and this pile is balanced— sometimes precariously—on top of a tricycle, or a throne, or a raft. The thrust of Cano Villalobos’s practice is an attempt to visualize human longing for our eternal place of belonging in heaven. This act of the imagination has led Cano Villalobos to create a sacred refuge for an anonymous middle school girl, a freedom mobile for a nine-year-old boy who lives in a crowded two-bedroom house with his multigenerational family, a bedecked boat for an anonymous man who is nearing the end of his life.

For her new-found object assemblage sculpture created for Here After, Cano Villalobos sought inspiration in the archetype of the waiting bride illustrated in all her complexity in literary figures such as Charles Dickens’s Mrs. Havisham and the women of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s coming-of-age stories. Mrs. Havisham of Dickens’s David Copperfield was left at the altar and donned her wedding veil in perpetuity. Cano Villalobos reflects on these characters in their continuous states of waiting: “I find similarities to a Christ who waits for the church as his bride in the ultimate consummation of a New Heaven and a New Earth.” The architecture of this new heaven and new earth is detailed in the Book of Revelation.

And the twelve gates were twelve pearls, each of the gates made of a single pearl, and the street of the city was pure gold, like transparent glass. And I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb. By its light will the nations walk, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it, and its gates will never be shut by day—and there will be no night there. (Revelations 21:21–25; NIV)

In Cano Villalobos’s constructed place of waiting, the elements described by John the Revelator are honored in unifying hues of pearl and ivory. Below this thin veneer, the textures of the earthly materials and found objects reveal that we are still here on earth accompanied by the presence of inevitable death but offered the hope of a glorious eternal home. CML

b. 1979, Petersburg, Virginia; lives and works in Grand Rapids, Michigan

MANDY CANO VILLALOBOS

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The Gate (GW 5018), 2010

I­ t isn’t just in single moments that I view everything aeterno modo [in the mode of eternity], as Spinoza says; I am constantly aeterno modo.

Many people think that’s what they are too when, having done the one or the other, they combine or mediate these opposites. But this is a misunderstanding, for the true eternity lies not behind either/or but ahead of it.

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—S øren Kierkegaard, Either / Or (1843; trans. Alastair Hannay)

How to inhabit the timescale of our existence without suffering and to fill the moment with eternity is one thing that the great Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard explores in his 1844 classic The Concept of Anxiety. A pupil of Kierkegaard, Danish multidisciplinary artist Maja Lisa Engelhardt fills sacred spaces with eternity, too, though the results are anything but anxiety-making.

Like artists of the Danish Golden Age, the surfaces of Engelhardt’s paintings, stained glass, and sculpture reverberate light. Her works seek to facilitate a depth of profound encounter with the incarnational realities of the Gospel, and to visualize the paradoxes of faith, the Trinity, the resurrection of the flesh, and eternal life.

Church commissions come with the burden of responsibility to committees and clergy—the expectation is that the work somehow “embellishes” (to use her word) the space without interrupting it. “I will not paint a figure of Christ simply in order to paint this motif. It must have a higher meaning. . . . I can’t stand it when someone asks me if I am not proud of having completed a work of embellishment. I am not proud, but humble,” she writes in Towards the Light, a book collecting her liturgical works.

Since 1996, she has collaborated with over thirty churches all over Denmark and the United States. The Gate (Porten) was created as a bronze sketch for what would become her massive nave entrance door at Viborg Cathedral, the site of one of Denmark’s most important historic churches. Engelhardt makes the symbolic connection between the doors of a church and the Temple Veil, which separated the holy place from the holiest of holies (Exodus 26:33), and was torn in two from top to bottom at the moment of Jesus’ crucifixion (Matthew 27:51): “Long flocks of animals on the way to the temple are no longer needed to be sacrificed. God has placed his son on earth and given him to us as high priest and the last soundless sacrifice to God. Christ has opened the new way of life for us through the veil (gate), that is, by his earthly body, and we have in him a great priest over the house of God,” she writes in Porten, a book of essays about her churchwork in Denmark.

Like the veil, The Gate acts as a literal and symbolic threshold. Though it functions as a door, when a parishioner or passerby passes through the gate, Engelhardt hopes that it is understood that here one has access to a new eternal reality. MKR

b. 1956, Frederiksberg, Denmark; lives and works in Paris and Denmark

MAJA LISA ENGELHARDT

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Stills from Sharjah Spectrum, 2015 (installation view on following spread)

O Allah, place light in my heart, light in my tongue, light in my hearing, light in my sight, light behind me, light in front of me, light on my right, light on my left, light above me and light below me; place light in my sinew, in my flesh, in my blood, in my hair and in my skin; place light in my soul and make light abundant for me; make me light and grant me light.

This prayer is very inspirational to me and it informs my work with light. The dua inspired me to work in projected animations.

I love the fact that these animations are just ever-changing colour and light.

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— Zarah Hussain

—D ua (prayer) of Light narrated by the Prophet Muhammad

Zarah Hussain works out of a long tradition of hand-drawn Islamic geometry.

The first person ever to animate an Islamic pattern through computer code, she combines her extensive training from the Prince’s School of Traditional Arts in London with the latest digital software to create entrancing looping animations. These projections have enchanted utilitarian public spaces with the wonder and contemplation of the world’s most celebrated mosques.

Ancient practitioners of this art relied on strict geometry to create dazzling compositions, called girih, the earliest of which was found as the frontispiece of a Quran manuscript from the year 1000. These are seen in a variety of forms in Islamic art and architecture, including kilim carpets, which often function as prayer rugs; Persian girih, the earliest of which was found as the frontispiece of a Quran manuscript from the year 1000; Moroccan zellij tilework; muqarnas (decorative vaulting); and jali (perforated screens used to delineate spaces).

1. Keith Critchlow, Islamic Patterns: An Analytical and Cosmological Approach (London: Thames & Hudson, 1984), publisher description.

“The geometrical patterns of Islamic art reveal to the eye of the sensitive onlooker the intrinsic cosmological laws affecting all Creation. The primary function of these patterns is to lead the mind from the literal and mundane world towards the underlying permanent reality,” writes Dr. Keith Critchlow in his celebrated work Islamic Patterns: An Analytical and Cosmological Approach.1 Hussain, who studied with Critchlow, originally installed her work Sharjah Spectrum across three walls at the Sharjah Art Museum in the United Arab Emirates in December 2015. The brightly colored animation loops infinitely by way of a computer algorithm, and it is very unlikely that the same color and time sequence will ever repeat. In the Bridge Projects iteration of the piece, original music was composed by Peter Chilvers, who frequently collaborates with Brian Eno. To view one of Hussain’s works is to be reminded of the enormity and precision of the cosmological order, on which the whole of the world rests. Math marked by the artist’s hand imparts an attempt to turn abstraction into actuality, to make sense of divinity and the grandeur of the universe. MKR

b. 1980, Cheshire, England; lives and works in London

ZARAH HUSSAIN

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N. 1 from Firmaments series, 2018

High fantasy lost power and here broke off; Yet, as a wheel moves smoothly, free from jars, My will and my desire returned by love,

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The love that moves the sun and the other stars.

— f rom Dante, Paradiso XXXIII (conclusion) (trans. Dorothy L. Sayers) (Dante wrote all three canticles of the Divine Comedy using the same terza rima structure. At the end of the last canto of Paradiso, he is left speechless as he gazes upon the Trinity.)

Manuscript illuminations of medieval cosmology picture the firmament as a series of interlocked spheres revolving in snug suggestion around the anchored earth. Like clever theatrical machinery, the cosmos scrolled its glowing constellations, heavenly bodies, mythical beasts, and heroes over the wondering eye of humanity. Later, science replaced this anthropomorphic parade with the smooth surface of an absolute vacuum. Kepler threw the once anchored earth into a dizzy, anonymous whirlpool of planets, stars, and space dust. Physics laid bare the struts and beams of the universe, and the personable throng of the heavens dispersed into the unimaginable depths of space.

In the European West, Reformation also scattered the crowded ranks of the enchanted world. It whitewashed cathedrals and smashed statuary, replaced stained glass with the unbroken sheets of pious certainty. Now, it seems, devotion is restricted to the interiority of the individual in a world where only the essential seams and joists of faith and the once magical cosmos remain.

But for Greg Lookerse, they are more than enough. In their chaste simplicity there is room for contemplation, for doubt and the deep stirring of conviction. When all ornament is stripped, elegance remains—testimony to the miracle of creation and the Power that daily shapes it.

In tracing this joinery, Lookerse humbles the grand architecture of the divine even further by imitating cathedral ceiling outlines in frail paper, at eye level and in shallow relief. Yet, even still, light is the subject, substance the culmination of emptiness and frailty. Lookerse’s artistic practice gravitates toward this kind of substantive simplicity; whether the work be video, sculpture, performance, or drawing, there is a spare intentionality to its effect. His training at Biola University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston wove interest in faith and art into an integrated whole, which is a strength he now offers to his students at Hope College.

Yet, Lookerse’s work seems to argue that to offer emptiness is also to offer strength. Cathedrals cup air in sweeping scoops and arcs. Whether richly decorated or scrubbed clean, they offer receptivity to the reverberations of heaven. In a clamorous, distracted world, it is in chambered absence where the music of paradise lingers. LGSN

b. 1987, Redlands, CA, lives and works in Holland, Michigan

GREG LOOKERSE

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Plattenbau Model, 1970s, from The Loop, 2022; (following spread) installation view

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While visions of paradise have often been linked to notions of life after death as professed by the world’s religions, there also have been antireligious attempts by totalitarian regimes to create paradise on earth.

Regina Mamou’s artistic investigations have taken her to North Korea, Cuba, and many Soviet satellite states as she attempts to process and translate the nuances of totalitarian regimes and their societies. For example, upon return from North Korea, Mamou cultivated the eponymous orchid Kimilsungia named for the country’s founding leader, Kim Il-Sung, who ruled from 1948 until 1994. Displayed en masse, the flowers represent a small cross-section of the reign of control Kim had over the country, continued by his grandson to this day.

1. National Public Radio, All Things Considered, August 19, 2021, www.npr. org/2021/08/19/1029437787/ in-1991-soviet-citizens-sawswans-on-the-tv-and-knew-itmeant-turmoil (accessed March 14, 2022).

2. From Regina Mamou’s artist proposal, February 2022.

3. From Regina Mamou’s artist proposal, February 2022.

b. 1983, Southfield, MI; lives and works in Los Angeles

In 2018, Mamou first presented the video installation Looping Swans (2018–), which merges fact and fiction to explore the savviness of ideological messages. Looping Swans uses a clip of the Russian ballet Swan Lake as a metaphor for history’s political loops. Mamou’s research for the project led her to a critical moment in Soviet history: “On August 19, 1991, as tanks and troops rolled into Moscow, Soviet state television presented a different picture [from the coup]—Tchaikovsky’s ‘Swan Lake’ on loop. Soviet citizens knew this was not good. Soviet leaders had also aired the piece while they selected a new leader following the death of Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev.”1 The Loop (2022), Mamou’s installation for Here After is comprised of objects culled from the Wende Museum in Culver City, where she is currently artist-in-residence. German for “turning point,” the Wende collects art and artifacts from the Cold War era, with a focus on the transformative period surrounding the fall of the Berlin Wall. The objects serve as pedagogical tools to explore political and cultural changes of the past to encourage active participation in social change for the future.

The selected objects subtly point to both the utopian aspirations and the complications of the socialist and communist projects across Central and Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Among the objects is a bottle of Russian perfume—To the Cosmos—produced by Novaya Zarya. The fragrance likely celebrates the flight of Yuri Gagarin on Vostok 1 in 1961 pointing to space as “the new frontier onto which a nation can imprint its utopian visions.”2 The layers of cultural references across the centuries become in Mamou’s words “a palimpsest of meaning. The current and ongoing tensions between Russia and its former republics, mean that history is not a static loop, but rather, an amalgam of repetition and forward momentum yoked to the classical notes of Tchaikovsky.”3 CML

REGINA MAMOU

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Bedford House, 1984

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Ancient cities mirrored the cosmologies of their makers. China’s Chang’an reflected the belief that the earth was a square, and its city planners divided it according to the four cardinal directions. The zenith tube in the Mayan city of Xochicalco was designed to harness the animating power of the sun to create a hierophany in a darkened underground space from the end of April to mid-August every year. Each terrace of the Hindu city of Angkor Wat represented a different tier of the world. These cities nestled seamlessly into nature—not on top of it—and optimized such precious resources as water, instead of exploiting them.

These ancient, holistic ways of constructing seem to provide answers to a question posed by architect and artist James Wines in his book Green Architecture: “If we convince ourselves that we really merit nature’s blessings, what does the notion of sustainability have to do with the soul and its relationship to a spiritual eternity?”1 For Wines, a founding member of the SITE (Sculpture in the Environment) architectural group, beauty is at the core of the search for sustainability. If a building is not beautiful, it is more likely to be torn down to make room for something else. Ironically, many of the fantastical buildings for which SITE is known—those designed in the 1970s and 1980s for BEST department stores—have fallen victim to the cycle of real estate development. Designed to look as though they were in varying states of construction or destruction, BEST department stores designs were self-critical reflections on the sprawling growth of the suburban retail environment.

1. James Wines, Green Architecture (Cologne, Germany: Taschen, 2000), 20.

2. Excerpt from an essay by Bevin Cline, in Envisioning Architecture: Drawings from The Museum of Modern Art, ed. Matilda McQuaid (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002), p. 220; available at www. moma.org/collection/works/709 (accessed March 20, 2022).

3. Thomas Merton, When the Trees Say Nothing, ed. Kathleen Deignan (Notre Dame, IN: Sorin Books, 2003), 43.

b. 1932, Oak Park, IL; lives and works in New York

Another self-critical project was a series of drawings titled Highrise of Homes.

Rendered in ink and wash, these drawings present a Mies Van der Roheesque steel and glass high-rise, but inside each gridded rectangle can be found varying kinds of homes: a mansion next to a bungalow next to a split-level ranch house. Trees break through the gridded plane. Wines shared that the vision behind Highrise of Homes was to “accommodate people’s conflicting desires to enjoy the cultural advantages of an urban center, without sacrificing the private home identity and garden space associated with suburbia.”2 On view in Here After is a drawing that SITE made for a private home— Bedford House—designed for a couple who wanted to live within a forested region of Bedford, Connecticut. Created out of glass blocks and glass windows, there is little separating the inhabitants from the natural world. The seamless fusion between home and landscape recalls the words of Trappist monk Thomas Merton’s reflections on nature: “In this wilderness, I have learned how to sleep again. . . . The trees I know, the rain I know, the night I know. I close my eyes and sink into the whole rainy world of which I am a part.”3 Bedford House proffers a similar cosmology of interconnectedness and reflects the glory and perfection of nature that Wines so earnestly seeks to honor. CML

JAMES WINES

MUSIC IN HEAVEN

TED GIOIA

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What is music like in heaven?

If someone had asked me when I was a teenager, I’d have known exactly how to answer. Heaven would grant me immediate access to every song— any time and anywhere.

But my iPhone now does that for a streaming subscription price of just $9.99 per month. So clearly I need to aim higher. But what songs could I possibly find behind those pearly gates that surpass all the sweet and soulful music available on planet earth?

Throughout history, people have asked this same question. Instead of immediate access to terrestrial music—my beguiling teenage dream—they have typically speculated on a superior kind of celestial song, better than anything on the radio or my streaming playlist. They disagree on the particulars, but they concur on one matter: music in the afterlife will be something special.

The ancient Greeks even told the story of Orpheus, whose song in the Underworld was so persuasive it convinced Hades to let him bring his dead wife Eurydice back to life. Orpheus was always depicted playing the lyre, and even today we associate string instruments—especially harps—with music in the world to come. A lost work attributed to Orpheus, entitled the Lyra, even went so far as to claim that “souls cannot ascend without a lyre.”

But not everybody agrees on harps or lyres as the soundtrack of the world to come. If we judge by funerary inscriptions, those same ancient Greeks who admired Orpheus believed that choral dancing was the preferred entertainment in the afterlife. We encounter something similar in Zoroastrian texts, where blessed souls are guided across Chinvat Bridge to the House of Song—a term which some have taken as a metaphor for heaven itself.

In these belief systems, singers hold the upper hand. And, despite all those familiar images of harp-playing angels in heaven, even the JudeoChristian tradition has typically given precedence to vocal music or chanting. The example of the Psalms of David is often cited as a sign that singing is especially pleasing to God. And it’s true that the Psalms are sung prayers.

Yet even David makes frequent mention of musical instruments.

In just four verses of Psalm 150, we encounter a biblical endorsement of eight different categories of instruments. Here’s the King James version: Praise him with the sound of the trumpet: praise him with the psaltery and harp.

Praise him with the timbrel and dance: praise him with stringed instruments and organs.

Praise him upon the loud cymbals: praise him upon the high sounding cymbals.

Let every thing that hath breath praise the Lord. Praise ye the Lord.

That’s a whole orchestra, not just a singer or a harp. And the rest of the Bible is filled with similar references. Consider the fact that music is mentioned in 1,150 different Bible verses. So there are probably almost as many genres in the Good Book as on your Spotify playlists.

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How did the harp get top billing in all this abundance of song and dance?

Many would point to the Book of Revelation (14:2), where John describes the sounds heard by the blessed: “And I heard a voice from heaven, as the voice of many waters, and as the voice of a great thunder: and I heard the voice of harpers harping with their harps.” But let’s not give too much credit to John the Revelator. The Egyptians were painting images of harpers on tomb walls more than two thousand years before the time of Christ. We even have surviving texts of so-called Harper’s Songs. They aren’t very inspiring, however. In fact, Egyptologists tend to view them as rational and secularist, with very little spiritual content. You might even describe their vision of the afterlife as cynical.

These ancient Harper’s Songs emphasize enjoying life now, and not in the hereafter. One of the texts, found in various versions in different tombs, declares (as translated by Donald Mackenzie): Follow your heart and your happiness, Do your things on earth as your heart commands! ...

Wailing saves no man from the pit!

Make holiday, Do not weary of it!

Lo, none is allowed to take his goods with him, Lo, none who departs comes back again!

These distinctly secular texts, illustrated with images of blind harpers, tell us to enjoy music now, and not wait for better songs after we die.

Let me be cynical in turn, and suggest that the harpers were simply trying to drum up demand for the services in the here-and-now. Or perhaps they were aware of the dangerous tradition of killing musicians after a great leader died, and burying them alongside the deceased ruler. For example, the tomb of Queen Puabi in Ur, dating back more than forty-five hundred years, included the skeleton of a harpist, buried in a seated posture, apparently ready to take song requests in the next life. If I faced that kind of risk as a harpist, I’d also turn into a passionate advocate of live music, in every sense of the term.

There’s another tradition of heavenly music, less familiar than harp songs, that I’d like to celebrate. In this alternative view, the songs of the afterlife are played by percussionists. I find this scenario quite pleasing, especially because medical science and ritualistic traditions both tell us that the rhythmic element in music possesses a genuine power to create transcendent and ecstatic experiences.

So I wouldn’t be surprised to find a drum circle in heaven, or perhaps some other percussion-driven ensemble. And many of the leading visual artists in the Western tradition have clearly had the same notion. Angels playing tambourines, perhaps the most ancient type of frame drum, can be seen in paintings by Signorelli, Titian, Fra Angelico, and others.

And according to Ezekiel 28:13, the tambourine was even played in the Garden of Eden.

TED GIOIA

(following spread) Installation view of Here After, 2022

MUSIC IN HEAVEN

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What’s that I hear? Are you laughing at me? Do you think that debates over the musical instruments of heaven are some kind of joke? In truth, these distinctions are more revealing than you probably realize.

Two different visions of music have battled with each other since the beginning of human culture. Some societies focus on rhythm and drumming.

That’s because they want to nurture the power of ecstasy and trance. Other societies celebrate the well-tuned music of string instruments, which reach for a kind of Pythagorean perfection. The latter communities have different social priorities, seeking harmony and order in all spheres of public and private life. You can tell a lot about any society merely by considering its vision of how music is played in the hereafter.

So take your pick. You can embrace songs of intense, mind-altering drums beating out the beat and putting you into a kind of hypnotic state, or the serene tones of harps and lyres lulling you into a peaceful, orderly reverie.

Either of those might be on our playlist in the next life.

But we hardly need to wait. We can make those same choices in the music we consume right now.

Between Here

and After

(facing) The Prophet Muhammad’s Celestial Journey, 1539–1543; (right) View of the eastern vault of the Jameh Mosque of Isfahan

BET WEEN HERE AND AFTER

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A complex play of geometry tessellates the doorways separating streetlife from sacred spaces throughout the Muslim world. The architectural composition called a muqarna is often compared to a stalagmite or a bee’s honeycomb pattern, combining the curvilinear shape of a cupola with a quad­ rangular base. The resulting visual effect is rhythmic to the eye. The confluence of the curved movement and the fixed geometric points is designed to create the conditions for a viewer to perceive the threshold space between heaven and earth. To experience a muqarna radiating light in all directions is to glimpse the slippage between here and the hereafter. The time-space inflection point between life and death is territory for some of the most profound spiritual and artistic exploration.

There have been numerous written accounts of such explorations into the afterlife. The Christian anchorite Julian of Norwich, who fell deathly ill at age thirty, was the recipient of a series of sixteen visions or revelations while she recovered. The first vision was of Christ’s blood dripping from the crown of thorns. With each vision, Julian experienced with greater and more excruciating detail the suffering of Christ’s

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crucifixion. Simultaneously she received intimate knowledge about the three stages of bliss, “that every soul shall have in Heaven that willingly hath served God in any degree in earth.” 1 Her near-death experience was an answer to a prayer that Julian had from childhood: to glimpse the face of Christ. Her visions are recorded in her fourteenth-century devotional text Revelations of Divine Love. From a place of unparalleled human suffering, as waves of the Black Death swept across Europe, North Africa, and Asia, Julian shared her visions of the realm of eternal love and bliss that awaits servants of God. Prophets in all the Abrahamic traditions have made the journey to that which lies beyond the door of death and returned to tell the tale. In turn artists have depicted the world beyond for the rest of humanity. The night journey or ascent of Muhammad to heaven has been the subject of some of the greatest masterpieces of Persian miniature painting. In these illustrations, a veiled Muhammad sits on the back of a winged creature—the Buraq—who, according to the hadith, or record of Muhammad and his followers, carried the Prophet to Jerusalem and then into the heavens. In the sixteenth-century artist Sultan Muhammad’s illustration, a host of angels circles the perimeter, one of whom represents Jibrail or Gabriel, who led the Prophet through the seven stages of heaven, where he met earlier prophets face to face, including Moses, Abraham, and Jesus. At the pinnacle of his journey, Muhammad encountered God, who commanded the daily prayer rhythm of five times per day. This message came back from heaven to earth with Muhammad to become a pillar of the Islamic faith.

What occurs when prophets and mystics journey to heaven and receive visions from the other side affects how religious practitioners live their lives in the here and now.

These accounts of what lies on the other side become fertile ground for artistic expression. The most famous Christian journey through the realms of the afterlife—that of Dante and his three guides, Virgil, Beatrice, and St. Bernard—has

RET FA DNA EREH NEEW TEB

1. Julian, Anchoress at Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, a version from the manuscript in the British Museum, ed. Grace Warrach (London: Methuen, 1901), 34.

BET WEEN HERE AND AFTER

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Gustave Doré, Rosa Celeste: Dante and Beatrice Gaze upon the Highest Heaven, The Empyrean, 1832

been enchanting artists for centuries, from Gustave Doré’s engravings to contemporary artist Tacita Dean’s film and corresponding silkscreens that feature colors lifted from William Blake’s series of vivid watercolor illustrations of the Divine Comedy.

Several artists featured in Here After situate themselves in this liminal space between earth and heaven, life and death.

Artists grouped within “Between Here and After” map this uncharted territory. Spiritual journeys are plotted in the works of Farkhondeh Ahmadzadeh, Afruz Amighi, James Elaine, Bonita Helmer, and William Villalongo; while installations and sculptures by Mercedes Dorame and Charwei Tsai position the viewer between worlds, feet firmly planted on the ground yet gazing at the glory and wonder of the beyond. CARA MEGAN LEWIS

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Canticle of the Birds—Mantegh o Alteyer ‫منطق الطیر‬, Debating the Journey, 2020

It was in China, late one moonless night, The Simorgh first appeared to mortal sight—

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He let a feather float down through the air, And rumours of its fame spread everywhere; Throughout the world men separately conceived An image of its shape, and all believed Their private fantasies uniquely true!

If this same feather had not floated down, The world would not be filled with His renown— It is a sign of Him, and in each heart There lies this feather’s hidden counterpart.

Whoever wishes to explore the Way, Let him set out—what more is there to say?

—F arid ud-Din Attar, The Conference of the Birds (twelfth century; trans. Afkham Darbandi and Dick Davis)

We often seek answers to life’s essential questions by looking outward at a distant horizon. It is far more rare for us to consider the infinite inner landscape and the wisdom that can be found within each of us. This is broadly the moral of the The Conference of the Birds, also known as The Canticle of the Birds, a twelfth-century narrative poem by the Persian Sufi Attar of Nishapur, which chronicles the journey of the world’s birds as they seek their sovereign leader, the mythical Simorgh, under the guidance of the legendary Hoopoe. The flock of thousands of birds must cross several treacherous valleys to reach Simorgh’s mountain of Ghaf. Thirty survive, and only upon arrival do they realize that they themselves, in fact, are the Simorgh. Simorgh in Persian means thirty (si) birds (morgh). Their search all along has been to find themselves.

1. Titus Burckhardt, Art of Islam: Language and Meaning (Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom, 2009), 37.

Farkhondeh Ahmadzadeh has been on her own artistic quest, studying the art of Persian miniature painting in Iran and London over the past twenty years. Her handmade watercolors follow the tradition of creating natural pigments from lapis lazuli, malachite, indigo, gold, and palladium. One of the characteristic facets of this ancient Persian art form is the representation of a hybrid landscape shaped by the earthly ideas of paradise as well as attempts at envisioning a heavenly paradise.1 Over the course of a few years, Ahmadzadeh contemplatively read The Canticle of the Birds with a small group on Tuesday evenings, and in 2020 she began working on a triptych that would illustrate the journey of the flocked fowl.

The first painting in the suite is Debating the Journey. It is at this point in the narrative that any initial excitement from the birds is consumed by complacency. Ahmadzadeh has articulated the individual birds’ circumstances and their myriad reasons not to embark. For example, the hawk can be found perched on the arm of a king content to not go in search of a spiritual ruler in the Simorgh; and the duck, happy in a pond, sees no reason to leave his water. Viewers of the painting and in turn the poem can identify themselves in these feathered friends and reconsider the stubborn human habits that become obstacles against attaining deeper spiritual wisdom. CML

b. 1964, Tehran, Iran; lives and works in London

FARKHONDEH AHMADZADEH

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The Guardian, 2021

”The Dead” as a category—into which I am reluctant to admit either of you. The lament is an obituary that has forgotten its manners. Where can I put it down? Like a jacket removed and folded and set down. The future springs from the past.

Where the dead go fascinates all cultures and these speculations become the foundation for a culture’s spiritual and ethical activity. Death, once again, functions as a creator, inspiring the living into perpetual invention and creative imagining.

Kora, a young woman in the Peloponnesian city-state of Sicyon, had a lover who was departing. To preserve his memory, she drew a careful and sinuous line around his shadow. (The account, taken to be the originary myth of portraiture, is recounted in book 35 of Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis historia.) Kora’s father, Butades, filled the outline of the shadow with clay and fired it alongside his pots. A means of remembering what would otherwise have been forgotten. A shadow made permanent.

— David Meltzer, ed., Death: An Anthology of Ancient Texts, Songs, Prayers, and Stories (1984)

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—T eju Cole, Black Paper: Writing in a Dark Time (2021)

“I like the extremes of light and dark as well as the nuances created in between. I want the viewer to feel immersed and alone in the work, and to experience something beyond the marks I make on paper or in steel.”1 The main medium for Afruz Amighi’s works is light and shadow, both literally and figuratively. During the pandemic, as the artist felt the immense loss and weight of death, Amighi began exploring the journey of the soul into the afterlife. “I felt the absence of a guide in my hands. It seemed as though the underworld hovered above us instead of below, like a dense canopy of confused spirits.”2 In the artist’s father’s religion, Zoroastrianism, there are many special funerary practices to honor the dead, including placing a food offering for the deceased on one’s rooftop. This offering is made every year for thirty years, and then finally stops as the deceased untethers themselves from earth to enter the next realm.

1. Kostas Prapoglou, “Shadow Shift: Afruz Amighi,” The Seen: Chicago’s International Journal of Contemporary and Modern Art (April 17, 2018), https://theseenjournal.org/shadow-shift (accessed February 28, 2022).

2. Artist statement.

In Spirit Canopy, Amighi gives the souls form, tethering them so that they don’t get lost. The sculptural forms resemble attenuated chandeliers or elegant missiles made of delicate, almost jewelry-like chains suspended from the ceiling at varying levels of ascension and descension, each with a single chain pooling on the floor in the form of mandalas. The precise lighting of Spirit Canopy multiplies the forms by casting shadows on the surrounding walls and echoes the liminal space the spirits inhabit.

Amighi’s second work in this series is The Guardian, a singular figure presented in a separate darkened room, except for a few lights illuminating the form.

The figure constructed out of black mesh, steel, and chain, is suspended under a set of archways, resembling a portal. The figure’s head consists of a knightlike helmet, and the body is composed of a gown, flowing out onto the floor in all directions. The shadows cast on the surrounding walls create an additional portal, beckoning to an immaterial one. The Guardian is at once menacing and angelic: a guide whose sole purpose is to oversee the passage of the spirits, itself permanently situated in a threshold, in limbo.

The final part of this series, The Labyrinth, Amighi has yet to realize. Her plan is to present an immaterial pathway where the spirits will cast off any vestiges of their physicality and return to the ether. In this three-part series, Afruz Amighi visualizes the journey of the afterlife, perhaps providing a pathway and a guide for a future unknown. VPS

b. 1974, Tehran, Iran; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY

AFRUZ AMIGHI

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Waiting for the moon to dance—Mwaar'a Hevuuchok Yakeenax, 2022 (detail on following spread)

”I don’t believe it. Those stories couldn’t happen now,” I said. He shook his head and said softly, ”But someday they will talk about us, and they will say, ’those two lived long ago when things like that happened.’”

—L eslie Marmon Silko, Yellow Woman (1993)

The omnipresence of repair in the universe is without a doubt the sole reason it is shared by both mathematics and art. It is a primary characteristic of human biological and cultural evolution. Without the process of repair, there would be nothing–neither chaos nor stability. Everything is guided by the determinist agency of repair.

In a ceremony, you give of yourself. You have to give before you can take. Whether it is giving of your endurance, or of yourself so that you become not a self but an entity. There is no room for personality there. You are there as a participant, not as a leader.

As soon as people start jockeying for positions, they should leave.

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— James Luna, speaking in an interview with Julia Barnes Mandle (1992)

— Kader Attia, The Loop (2015)

Mercedes Dorame refers to her sculptural installations incorporating celestial maps as “portals.” A portal is simply defined as a doorway, but to elaborate further in connection with the artist’s work, it is a doorway to connect different worlds or states of being: a person to the land or to their ancestors, the past to the present, the present to the future, the land to the sky.

1. Gary Brewer, “Studio Visit: Mercedes Dorame,” Art and Cake (August 26, 2020), https:// artandcakela.com/2020/08/26/ studio-visit-mercedes-dorame (accessed February 28, 2022).

2. Deliasofia Zacarias (Snap Research Fellow, Director’s Office), “Reimagining the Continuous Presence of Native People with Mercedes Dorame,” LACMA Unframed (June 29, 2021), https://unframed.lacma. org/2021/06/29/reimagin-ingcontinuous-presence-na-tivepeople-mercedes-dorame (accessed February 28, 2022.

Waiting for the moon to dance—Mwaar’a Hevuuchok Yakeenax is one of these portals that Dorame creates. Situated horizontally on a large base is a circular field of an indigo painted canvas that references the night sky or deep ocean, with white silhouettes forming images of birds and other creatures.

Strategically placed on the surface are several red ochre and grayish colored “star stones,” which are re-creations of Tongva artifacts that have been found, the original purpose of which is still a mystery. The arrangement also includes an abalone shell, feathers, and deer hide; cinnamon powder and rock sea salt are sprinkled throughout. At the center is a found stone shaped like an anatomical human heart, and at the perimeter are four different stones placed in the cardinal directions of north, east, south, and west forming a kind of compass. Connecting this portal vertically is a series of red strings connected to an overhead skylight with each red string connecting below to the “heart” stone and directional stones. “I make reference to the Yovaar, but I am also thinking of light, a beam of light, starlight. I make the installations differently each time I create one, to respond to the environment, and the location. The star stones are placed along with abalone and different objects and I use cinnamon to cover them. I want to connect them to the land but also the stars. I am trying to re-imagine how our people connected physically and spiritually with the night sky.”1 As a Native inhabitant of contemporary Tovaangar (present-day Los Angeles), Dorame explores through her artwork the construction of identity, culture, and ceremony, which are intrinsically connected to a landscape with a complex and fraught history. How can a group of people be expelled from a land that they never left? Through her art practice of creating intimate ceremonial interventions in the landscape and sculptural installations where she brings the night sky into the gallery space, Dorame is reclaiming the land, unearthing overlooked histories, making visible often invisible peoples, creating new narratives by weaving her Tongva history with an imagined future.

“I think about the history and . . . about how the meaning has become dislocated from these objects and instead of feeling sad about that lost history, I want to be empowered in interpreting them myself.”2 VPS

b. 1980, Los Angeles; lives and works in Los Angeles

MERCEDES DORAME

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Restoration of a Peripheral Field: Aligning Weeds into Spring, 2020

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In the winter of 2020–21, when a tree died on his family farm in Texas, James Elaine did not have it cut down. Instead he began work on covering its limbs in pieces of slightly used aluminum foil, intuitively creating a pattern of silver dashes. Elaine stood back and watched the sunlight animate its barren branches. The act of renewal and of restoration has been part and parcel of Elaine’s art practice since the 1970s. A taxidermied duck, a painter’s shoe found in an alley, felt trimmings left by a friend—all are included on the list of myriad materials that comprise his multimedia paintings. Elaine breathes new life into the otherwise discarded.

Elaine’s new body of work—made on Chinese ink painters’ felt—tracks the artist’s personal journey of transformation. Upon moving to Beijing in 2008, Elaine began to shed one identity as a prominent curator in New York and Los Angeles in order to restore his identity as an artist. Here the discarded entity now resurrected is intimately connected to his biography.

Jerusalem, while it was one of the first works on wool felt he started in 2017, was not finished until 2020. Having set the work aside for a few years, Elaine revisited Jerusalem at the beginning of the pandemic. To his surprise, as he began to work its surface by applying remnant pieces of craft felt to its surface, a code began to appear. It is something he can not put into words but he sensed a message about the future. “It was bigger than what I could understand.” Context matters. Jerusalem was resurrected from within a Beijing under a COVID-19 lockdown—a ghost town—that Elaine would traverse regularly, praying for the shuttered businesses. In a city paralyzed by fear and blanketed by snow, Elaine tended a garden.

The large-scale work Restoration of a Peripheral Field: Aligning Weeds into Spring tracked Elaine’s spiritual growth. As he ordered and arranged the marks on the felt background, he grew in his faith, sowing seeds of hope for the city that lay below. The lyrical mark-making recalls the paintings that Abstract Expressionist Arshile Gorky began making when he moved to the Virginia countryside in the 1940s. It was the milkweed that most captured Gorky’s attention and yielded One Year the Milkweed emerging from layers of loose paint wash intuitively applied. Elaine’s gestures, too, move to their own pull of gravity. In much the same way that Gorky drew beauty out of the prosaic, Elaine shines light into the darkness. CML

b. in Texas; lives and works in Beijing, Los Angeles, and Celeste, TX

JAMES ELAINE

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Cowgirl, 2020

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Amir H. Fallah’s work is marked by a discernible cycle—from appropriation to interpretation to communication—employed to interrogate systems of visual representation. An Iranian-American living in Los Angeles, his hyperdetailed paintings combine images from a variety of geographies and art histories, including the tradition of Persian miniatures, a small work on paper akin to the Western medieval and Byzantine traditions of illuminated manuscripts, and pop cultures. The densely populated, vibrant paintings are like picture book maps of ideas, rife with delightful surprises and details—the sort of works you could live beside day after day but never fully grasp. And it’s no wonder: Fallah has created his own lexicon; the delight is in discerning what ideas are being communicated in the paintings.

His ornate landscapes compel viewers to speculate as their eyes trace the contours of the works’ ephemera and paraphernalia. “If this is a portrait, who might it be?” the viewer asks. “Why this piece of pop culture paraphernalia alongside this blooming botanical?” “What historical event does this cite?”

His six-foot work Cowgirl was first presented paired with Cowboy as part of the ICA San José Facade Project, which uses the ICA’s building face to explore critical social and political issues. With Cowgirl and Cowboy, Fallah continued his practice of making biographical paintings. Images accumulate on the canvas to build a personality and to explore ideas related to identity, westward exploration, and freedom. Believed by Muslims to be created by God from Light, we see a red-winged Islamic angel or malikalah found in Persian miniatures beside the Black Panther logo, an oft-depicted representation of an adorned Arabian horse, California poppies, lilies, and morning glories, some sort of a graffitied memento mori, and of course a cartoonish cowgirl. This collision of images communicates ideas of conquest and peace, unbridled power, rebellion and subjugation, life and death.

It’s possible to read the works as parables, and Fallah has said that after becoming a father he began to consider what lessons he wanted to leave behind on the canvas for his child. Shulamit Nazarian, his Los Angeles gallery, writes: “Neither of this world or the next, Fallah’s works reside in the liminal space of being Othered.” MKR

b. 1979, Tehran, Iran; lives and works in Los Angeles

AMIR H. FALLAH

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Astonishment In the Terrain of the Familiar, 2022

There are many ways in which things may almost be said. There is a sense in which the expression of any experience contains other kinds of experience caught up in suspension within it: summer implies winter snow, and the glittering calm sea betrays the storm.

How the materiality of the world interposes itself between us and its essential nature! It is so assertive.

The enormous matter of landscape is the measure of all bulk, the floor on which we crawl; but there are some artists and writers whose nature it is to paint or write every sort of overtone and undertone rather than the thing itself. It is an impossible task. They are in the wrong game. The poems they write and the pictures they paint are not necessarily those they intend. Dealing with images of what they see, they try always to show us what is just out of sight.

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—C hristopher Neve, Unquiet Landscape: Places and Ideas in 20th-Century British Painting (2020)

Some poets attempt to speak the ineffable in fragments, while some painters gesture at the presence of an idea in the absence of its content. These chance attempts at communication, limited as they are, have a sort of creative cosmic charge. This charged space has historically been termed the axis mundi. Also called the center of the world, cosmologists describe the axis as the point of earthly existence converging with the grandeur and majesty of the universe—the space where earth meets heaven. On that plane, whether a real location or a state of being, particular objects are adduced to be metaphors. Majestic mountains, ancient trees, and even items of human manufacture like ladders, labyrinths, and spires stretching to the clouds, are understood to be imbued with, or expressive of, transcendent religious meaning.

1. Alastair Gordon, Why Art Matters (London: Inter-Varsity Press Books, 2021 ), 68.

“There are many ways in which things may almost be said,” writes Christopher Neve in Unquiet Landscape, his discourse on painting. In Alastair Gordon’s Astonishment in the Terrain of the Familiar, the almost quality on this meeting point is expressed by a far-off shore, an island in the distance, pierced with fragments of sun and sky. Not merely a pleasant landscape, the scene is interrupted by the presence of a monolith of contemporary man: a sleek Apple iPhone. Though a naggingly ubiquitous device, it persists and is used by many as the contemporary stand-in for altars and incense of the past, the ultimate means of transport to another realm. As with many of Gordon’s paintings, especially from his recent series of trompe l’oeil still life works, deliberate, painterly marks have a meditative quality; they carry with them a certain weight of concern. Primal ephemera of memory and experience— even the illusion of remnant masking tape—alongside ethereal imagery, invite the viewer into a space where the studio meets the mystery of the sea.

And yet the work is not only a representation of the microcosm; the painting itself functions as a point of access: a window to questions of order, beauty, and truth in the terrestrial and celestial realms.

In Gordon’s book Why Art Matters, he shares his view that art is a great source of wonder and consolation in one’s longing for heaven, and that it can point to a new creation. Through art “we might peer through the windows and see the wonder inside,” he says.1 Certainly, The Astonishment in the Terrain of the Familiar does just that. MKR

b. 1978 Edinburgh, Scotland; lives and works in London

ALASTAIR GORDON

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The Four Worlds (Tiferet), 2002–5

I wander through the depths of understanding and try to capture these abstract concepts through images in paint.

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— Bonita Helmer

Throughout her career, Bonita Helmer’s artistic practice has paralleled her spiritual quest to chart the complexities of the universe. The artist started her monumental series The Four Worlds at a time when she was learning the teachings of the Kabbalah under the direction of Rabbi Stephen Robbins both privately and at the American Jewish University and was shortly thereafter diagnosed with a serious illness. Her process of painting the series became an integral part of her understanding the often esoteric tenets of the Kabbalah, while also providing healing for her illness. The series conceptually depicts the four worlds of existence of the Kabbalah: Atziluth (the world of emanation), Briah (the world of creation), Yetzirah (the world of formation), and Assiah (the world of action), with each work highlighting one of the four worlds, but never in isolation; the four worlds are always connected, always present. And when they all come together, they form the Tree of Life, a map for living.

Helmer’s The Four Worlds series is comprised of four distinct works: Kether (crown), Da’at (knowledge), Tiferet (beauty), and Malkuth (kingdom), each consisting of a four-panel painting. The multipaneled paintings are epic in scale, with each panel featuring a dominant color as it delicately shifts into the next color, moving from the right panel to the left panel. The white references the unknown, and then shifts to purple and blue hues symbolizing spirituality and elements of the earth. Lastly, the color red expresses life force and action, the world that we live in. Hidden and emerging throughout the terrain of the paintings are flecks and veins of silver and gold paint, as well as geometric shapes and numbers representing the four worlds. The numbers 1, 2, 3, 4 progress from the right to the left of the canvases representing Jacob’s ladder. In the center of the painting The Four Worlds (Tiferet), Helmer positions a tilted square containing tiny glass shards on the right portion and then small rocks representing the earth on the left portion. This emblem on the canvas shows the alchemy and fusion of the upper worlds to the lower worlds.

Although Helmer’s paintings feel atmospheric and abstract, every color, shape, and number connect to Kabbalah teaching, a school of thought that is incredibly dense and richly layered. But what resonates in Helmer’s series is the desire to understand the origins of creation. How did we get from an unknowable, limitless God (Ein Sof, ‫” סוף אין‬there is no end”) to physical creation and human existence? It is through the four worlds, the journey that connects creation to God, and God to creation. VPS

b. Chicago; lives and works in Los Angeles

BONITA HELMER

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Stills from Bardo, 2016

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As you fall asleep, think: I am dying; My consciousness of my senses is dissolving.

As you wake up, think: I have been reborn.

I long to make good use of this fleeting life For the benefit of myself and others.

—D zongsar Jamyang Khyentse, Living Is Dying: How to Prepare for Dying, Death, and Beyond (2020)

Imagine a real-time narration of the process of dying, a soothing voice that describes what is happening to your bodily organs, that welcomes you to the light on the other side and gives advice regarding where your soul should seek rebirth. This is the content of the Bardo Thodol, also known as the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

For her 2016 video installation Bardo, Taiwanese artist Charwei Tsai in collaboration with Tibetan filmmaker Tsering Tashi Gyalthang paired readings from sections of the Bardo Thodol—The Transitional State of Dying and The Transitional State of Becoming—with abstract images of blurred objects. The familiar contours of a ceiling fan in motion, incense burning, and a Buddha statue come in and out of focus. A calm steady male voice affirms: It feels as if you are being crushed by mountains, tossed by waves, scorched and carried off by strong wind.

This is the bardo of dying.

1. “Emptiness and Form, Form and Emptiness: An Interview with Charwei Tsai and Luise Guest,” COBO Social (February 2021), www.cobosocial.com/dossiers/ interview-with-charwei-tsai-2021 (accessed February 27, 2022).

Tsai, who has been creating work across the genres of writing, drawing, and photography since graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2002, conceived of the video installation upon the invitation to participate in the Sydney Biennale in 2016. The work responded to the site of the Mortuary Station, which was a holding place for coffins before they were loaded onto a train to go to the cemetery. Around the time of the Sydney Biennale invitation, Tsai’s grandmother passed away. Tsai turned to the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, and “learned about the subtle consciousness that still remains after the person is clinically declared dead.”1 In Tibetan, the word bardo means “in-between state,” and this definition took on new layered meanings from inside the train station waiting rooms.

In the iteration on view at Bridge Projects, visitors to the exhibition are invited to light a stick of incense in memory of a deceased loved one and to place it in the bed of ashes upon which the video is projected. Increasingly, Tsai’s work has become participatory. Earlier works were created in a fairly solitary process and involved her inscribing the Buddhist Heart Sutra onto large spirals of incense, blocks of tofu, and surfaces of lotus leaves, among other substrates. The shift toward a more participatory approach took place after Tsai visited the Buddhist caves of Dunhuang in western China. The spiritual rituals that she witnessed there led her to integrate them into her artistic practice. “I consider this trip as the beginning of a series of pilgrimages.” CML

b. 1980, Taipei, Taiwan; lives and works in Taipei and Saigon

CHARWEI TSAI

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Holding it Down, 2018

Annie had listened to this gruesome narrative with strained attention. “What a system it was,” she exclaimed, when Julius had finished, “under which such things were possible!” “What things?” I asked, in amazement. “Are you seriously considering the pos­sibility of a man’s being turned into a tree?”

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— Charles W. Chestnutt, The Conjure Woman (1899)

For William Villalongo’s Holding it Down, the artist wanted to be explicit that the title comes from an expression in Black vernacular that means to support and take care of, to hold together. This sentiment is made evident as you encounter the work, which presents a maelstrom of white markings that resemble branches, twigs, and leaves, like a small swirling whirlwind on a fall day. And on either side of that flurry, two brown hands holding all the pieces in place, as two brown eyes stare straight ahead from the center of the tumult— all on a black surface. The swirling and intricate white markings are sliced out of black velour paper, and any representational references to the body are painted and collaged onto the paper. The portrait presents a vision of transformation. Is the figure in the midst of coming together or falling apart?

Perhaps a bit of both. There’s a tenuousness, that it can go either way.

Villalongo’s recent series of portraiture, combining organic plant forms and the Black figure, seeks to define an ecology of Blackness, emphasizing the ever-fluctuating roles of visibility and invisibility, joy and trauma, history and myth, corporeal and immaterial. An important basis for Villalongo’s ecology is Charles W. Chestnutt’s The Conjure Woman, which features a collection of folk tales told by a freed slave named Julius to a white couple, John and Annie, who hire him to help out on their property. In one story, “Po Sandy,” Julius recounts a story of a conjure woman who turns Sandy, an enslaved man, into a tree in order to protect him. Unfortunately, the plantation owner’s wife has the tree cut down to build a kitchen. When the new kitchen starts to make strange noises, the owners dismantle the kitchen and build a schoolhouse instead. Julius tells this story to prevent John and Annie from dismantling an old schoolhouse on their property. From this mythological story, Villalongo builds his world of transformation, where nothing is left behind or left out, but is made more whole through the process. How can we reconcile our past history and imagine our future salvation? William Villalongo envisions a way. VPS

b. 1975, Hollywood, FL, and raised in Bridgeton, NJ; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY

WILLIAM VILLALONGO

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1. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions (c. 397–400 C.E.), trans. Sarah Ruden (New York: Modern Library, 2017), I.i (p. 3).

2. Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love (c. 1393), trans.

Barry Windeatt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 74–75; cf. 20, 40, 78, 80, 136, 164.

From the first page of his Confessions, Augustine of Hippo addresses God as both source and end of all human desire: “You made us with yourself as our goal, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”1 The rest toward which all such restlessness pulls has nothing to do with the eradication of desire, nor is it a condition of absolute inactivity or oblivion—as though understood solely in negative terms. Rather, it is an absolute positivity, in which the depths of human desire and need are met with a Fullness that heals, reconciles, and fulfills. For Augustine, and for thinkers across various philosophical and theological traditions, this is the rest toward which all dimensions of human restlessness, and in fact time itself, are ultimately oriented—the fullness of love which is “in” God. “Paradise” is a concept often used to designate this rest. The etymological roots of the term denote an enclosed royal garden—a protected, special place set aside for cultivating ideal conditions for the flourishing of plant and animal life. In this sense, paradise is a limited, isolated domain, existing in a qualitatively heightened state of life in relation to the world around it.

In many ancient religious frameworks, however, the entire point of such a place was to figure what all the earth was capable of, and even meant for. As a limited site of creaturely flourishing, the garden thus embodied a longing for and a foreshadowing of an eventual—eschatological—flourishing of all creation in all its dimensions: ecologically, physiologically, socially, spiritually, and so on. Cultivating the life of the enclosed paradise (i.e., the temple, the church, etc.) was ultimately embedded in a hope for the life of the world on a more cosmic scale.

While some vision of paradise is found in almost all religious traditions, these visions are of course widely diverse (and divergent) between and within traditions—especially regarding the character and comprehensiveness of this cosmic scale. At the center of the Christian tradition, to which Augustine belongs, is a trust that the Love who is the source and end of all creation is reconciling “all things” in, through, and to himself (Colossians 1:15–23; cf.

Romans 11:33–36, Acts 3:21), spanning garden (Eden) and city (Jerusalem), earth and heaven, and “a multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people, and language” (Revelation 7: 9). Indeed, in its most comprehensive articulations, such as the “showings” of fourteenth-century English mystic Julian of Norwich, this reconciliation somehow (incomprehensibly) will extend to the bottom of all things, such that ultimately “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”2

CONTEMPORARY ART AND THE RECONCILIATION OF ALL THINGS Though it seems counterintuitive, all of this remains vitally in play and at stake in modern and contemporary art, as both a constellation of yearnings and an arena of contestation. Even as many artists distanced themselves from religious communities (church, synagogue, etc.), they often have continued to wrestle with deep forms of restlessness that (in one way or another) remain linked to eschatologies of rest. Sometimes this linking is explicit, but more often it operates implicitly in artistic treatments of time, mortality, injustice, and other themes.

FIG. 1

FIG. 2

(fig. 1) Edward Hicks, The Peaceable Kingdom, c. 1834; (fig. 2) Horace Pippin, Holy Mountain I, 1944

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For many nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists, the enclosure of the artwork itself became a space for articulating the nexus of hope and doubt surrounding human restlessness. The nineteenth-century American painter and Quaker pastor Edward Hicks insisted that paradisal longings are coherent only insofar as they produce acts of peace and concern for the flourishing of others, including all people, animals, and the natural environment. Over the course of three decades (1820–49), Hicks painted at least sixty-two versions of The Peaceable Kingdom (fig. 1), depicting a child leading an array of animals (both predators and prey) in peaceful coexistence—imagery (and sometimes inscriptions) drawn directly from Isaiah 11:6–9. Inflecting the sociopolitical dimensions of this peace, Hicks often portrayed in the back­ground an imagined scene of William Penn’s 1681 treaty with the Lenape Native Americans—a glimpse of eschatological peace that has remained painfully unrealized in American history. A century later, the African-American painter Horace Pippin employed a similar theme in his four Holy Mountain paintings (1944–45, fig. 2), situating his peaceful array of animals against a background that subtly includes racist violence at home (in the form of a lynched man hanging from a tree) and World War II abroad (in the form of soldiers and white-cross graves).

Indeed, eschatological visions of reconciliation and rest are intimately linked to articulations of moral restlessness in the face of everything profoundly wrong in the world. Or put the other way round: acts of protest and lamentation are intimately and necessarily linked to some strong sense (even if implicit and unarticulated) of what justice and peace (i.e., true rest) in the world might mean. In other words, artworks capable of pronouncing a deep and sustained No to that which violates the goodness of life—injustice, sickness, war, ecological degradation, and so on—necessitate and imply a more fundamental Yes to a goodness and aliveness that should be the case.

In this way, the profound restlessness of lamentation (the No) always includes, in some obscure sense, a negative print of paradise (the Yes).

Powerful acts of lament have been fundamental to modern and contemporary art, from the searing agonies of Kathë Kollwitz or Frida Kahlo to, more recently, the haunting examples of Gillian Wearing’s Trauma (2000), Teresa Margolles’s Muro baleado (Culiacán) (2009), or Doris Salcedo’s A flor de piel (2013)—all of which depend upon some implicit concept of the (violated) good. In Here After, the works of Gyun Hur, vanessa german, and William Villalongo operate in this vein. These artists offer no explicit vision of redemption or reconciliation, but they implicitly demand one.

In some cases, this demand is more explicit. In the most devastating years of World War I, Max Beckmann worked away at his huge, never-finished Resurrection (1916–18, fig. 3)—a painting that expresses the corruption and deathliness that had overtaken Europe while remaining deeply ambivalent about any ultimate redemption. This pressurizing of religious hope in the midst of terrible loss is similarly explicit in the work of Marc Chagall, Anselm Kiefer, or, in Here After, Patty Wickman’s Raised Bed (2020) or Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn’s The Boat People (2020). All such meditations on disaster, breakdown, barrenness, and deathliness also

JONATHAN A. ANDERSON

(fig. 3) Max Beckmann, Auferstehung (Resurrection), 1916–18

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FIG. 3

harbor profound longings for something else, something more alive to the goodness and beauty of creaturely life.

For many other artists, the arrival of rest must imply severe historical discontinuity, rather than continuity. In these cases, the hereafter is imagined as a domain of radical otherness, interruption, or disembodiedness—requiring a transforming or transcending of current orderings of space and time. Indeed, abstract painting through much of the twentieth century often comingled a metaphysical beyond with an eschatological one, wherein nonrepresentational painting might open human consciousness to the eternal and immutable. Eschatological imageries recur throughout Vasily Kandinsky’s turn to abstract painting, as seen in his numerous paintings of the apocalyptic resurrection of the dead, including Sound of the Trumpet (1910–11), All Saints II (1911), and his landmark Composition V (1911). And similar impulses are identifiable in the abstraction of Hilma af Klint, Piet Mondrian, and others.3 In Here After, works like William Kurelek’s Farm Boy’s Dream of Heaven (1963) envision an eschatological beyond in figurative form (wherein souls of the departed rise into luminous heavens), while the works of Zarah Hussain or Bonita Helmer, for example, do so in more abstract terms.

FALSE PARADISES If conceptions of paradise have implicitly or explicitly circulated through modern and contemporary art as frameworks of human desire and hope, artists have tended to be more preoccupied with contesting, parodying, and dismantling such conceptions. Indeed, contemporary art has been highly sensitive to the strong propensity of paradisiacal visions to breed violence, manipulation, self-indulgence, and / or sentimentality. Paradises

3. For further exploration of examples in this paragraph, see Jonathan A. Anderson and William A. Dyrness, Modern Art and the Life of a Culture: The Religious Impulses of Modernism (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2016), chaps. 4–5.

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(of whatever sort) have a structure to them—an ordering of spatial and temporal relations—which visual artists have persistently sought to clarify and undermine. The twentieth century alone was full of the most horrific examples of how violent paradisiacal political visions can be—whether religious or secularist. For each of its imagined utopias, the modern imagination abounds with histories of cruelty, projections of dystopic dread, and manifold idolatries.

Beyond politics, technology has consistently been a domain of pseudo-­ eschatological dreams. As the technologization of modern life has become increasingly dominant—transforming nearly every aspect of labor, leisure, agriculture, medicine, and communication—so too have the powers of instrumentalization that enable the construction of heavily managed paradises.

Marc Quinn’s The Garden (2000), first installed at Fondazione Prada in Milan, is, according to the artist, about a desire to actualize “all the flowers in the world all coming up at the same time, in the same place, an idea of a perfect paradise.” This paradise is a feat of technological control, in which huge vitrines display an array of plants that are suspended in full bloom by being immersed in silicone oil constantly refrigerated at –20° Celsius.

In Here After, similar themes of a technologically or economically realized paradise are evident in the work of Tatsuo Miyajima or Regina Mamou, each inflected with dystopic anxiety.

Other artists have focused on the ways that notions of heaven and the hereafter have been sucked up into the machinery of mass-media entertainment, marketing, and advertising. Indeed, “paradise” has become a facile spectacle in popular culture, often operating as a cipher for self-indulgence, uninhibited consumerism, and disregard of social consequences—or as a domain of sentimentalism and cliché. Artists like Ed Ruscha and Jeff Koons toy with the cheapening and sloganeering of “paradise” or “heaven” as conspicuously packaged to fuel restlessness. In Here After, the works of Amir H. Fallah and Xu Zhen ® present a paradise of consumerist marketing and accumulation.

In the end, these various dystopic visions and the suspicion of any impulse to project one’s desires into a “paradise” might not entail a rejection of eschatological reasoning as such. Indeed, many artists’s intense distrust of sham paradises is more anti-idolatrous than anti-religious. Religious imaginations often suffer from visualizing an unrepresentable hereafter, which many artists confront not by abandoning all such notions but by accusing them of falsity—which implies and necessitates some truer (even if ineffable) possibility. Contemporary art regularly features a renunciatory or apophatic retracing (or untracing) of paradisaical representations— whether visual, verbal, or conceptual—for the sake of a rest that cannot be constructed or comprehended but can only arrive. In Here After, Kate Ingold’s Apophatic Quilt (2021) powerfully performs this retracing, as do the works of David Wallace Haskins, Kris Martin, Greg Lookerse, and Lynn Aldrich.

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BEING AT HOME IN THE WORLD An enduring problem with notions of the hereafter is their propensity toward otherworldliness, escapism, and other (often sectarian) refusals of creatureliness and history. In his book Heaven on Earth: Painting and the Life to Come, art historian T. J. Clark resists all this by arguing for a way of reading early modern painting that recognizes its various eschatological orientations but reroutes these through a “tragic conception of life”—one that renounces any future redemption in favor of “a way of being earthbound— fully and only here in the world.”4 This “modest materialism” thereby wants to entirely transpose the energy of Augustine’s restlessness from an eschatological register into a sociopolitical one.

A weakness of this approach (one Clark seems to recognize) is that this transposal risks relinquishing the very resources one needs to sustain the notion of tragedy, which demands some (unavoidably metaphysical, teleological) frame of reference from which to say No to the way things go.

Otherwise “tragedy” becomes a fairly arbitrary description for sheer mechanical causation. As we’ve said, this tragic No implies and demands some profounder Yes to the goodness of what gets ruined, violated, and degraded.

The deeper the No, the deeper the Yes—and the open future of that Yes— implicitly is.

Clark is right to seek a profounder sense of being at home in the world— and with it, a deeper sense of the world’s tragedy—but this would seem to require some kind of theological horizon. Admittedly, many eschatologies revel in a gnostic, antimaterial detachment. But any eschatology worth its salt includes a fundamental affirmation of the goodness and integrity of creatureliness. Our manifold restlessness for the reconciliation of all things—including all adam, who are made of adamah (earth) (Genesis 2:7)—is concerned precisely with the world in all its givenness, including its everyday realities of joy, pain, peace, violence, vitality, and mortality.

For this reason, C. S. Lewis suggested that we are better off imagining the reconciliation of all things not in celestial, ethereal terms but in terms of all things becoming more material, more enduring, more fully and peacefully themselves—heavier with the glory of God in them.5 In this way, a creatureliness that fully belongs to the world might be inextricable from some kind of eschatology, and vice versa.

In any case, Clark is absolutely correct that painting (and art more gen­ erally) is capable of recognizing—in visual, spatial, and bodily (rather than verbal) terms—this at-homeness. In Here After, works such as Andrea Büttner’s and Claire Curneen’s point us to an awkward, vulnerable, fragile, sensual bodiliness, embedded in the surface of the world where all things come to pass.

AN ONTOLOGY OF PEACE Ultimately, all questions of the hereafter are rooted in questions of what the world is. In the simplest terms, much turns on whether we see being itself, at its most primordial level, as constituted in violence or in peace.

Obviously, there is appalling cruelty and injustice in the world, but does this violence go ontologically “all the way down,” so to speak? In many ancient

4. T. J. Clark, Heaven on Earth: Painting and the Life to Come (London: Thames & Hudson, 2018), 242, 8.

5. Lewis plays on the idea that the Hebrew word for glory, kavod, means weighty or heavy.

C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1945), 321–22. See also Lewis, The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1949).

THE HEREAFTER IN CONTEMPORARY ART

6. For a development of this topic, see David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), here 4.

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creation myths (from Mesopotamia to Rome, for example), the sheer fact of existence—that this world exists rather than nothing at all—emerges in and through violence, in the rending of primordial oneness (or nothingness) into a multiplicity of beings and domains. From this then ensues an endless struggle between gods and between all other beings in a violence of “differencing.” In this general ontology—which finds contemporary articulation in the theorizing of difference by Nietzsche, Foucault, Deleuze, and others—creaturely difference and otherness is constitutively violent, and thus all strivings toward peace and justice are (perhaps valiant but ultimately self-interested) attempts to constrain, manage, and transform what being-in-the-world fundamentally is.

By contrast, other ancient creation theologies (most prominently those of the Abrahamic religions) regard existence as emerging in and through peace, in God’s giving (speaking) of being into a multiplicity of beings and domains—from which then ensues a “teeming” of life forms that fill the temple-cosmos with a generative differencing that God deems “good” and “very good” (Genesis 1:3–31). In this view, the interdependent differences that constitute the world are created in and for peaceful flourishing, into which violence is an intrusion and a disordering of what being-in-the-world fundamentally is.

This idea—and with it the notion of rest embraced by Augustine and others—entirely depends upon recognizing the infinite ontological difference between beings (creatures) and the Source of all being (Creator). In other words, God is not a being among other beings but is the giver of being itself, in whom “we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:31). And thus all forms of being—glimpsed in the sheer hereness and thisness and otherness of things—are intelligible as gift, founded in the peace and in the love that is God. Opposed to an ontology of violence, this is “an ontology of an original and ultimate peace.”6 These ontological questions are thus directly relevant to eschatological questions concerning hope and the hereafter. In the Christian tradition of Augustine, with whom we began this essay, the love of God is the final causality that gives all things into being, and it is this same noncoercive love that draws all things to itself. For this reason, the hope of eschatological peace is not merely an imaginative projection into the future—an escapist tidying up of whatever causes unhappiness. It is a claim that the world is founded in love rather than violence.

Admittedly, these concluding thoughts are fairly abstract, but they are live questions in contemporary art, and they deserve further thinking by art historians, theorists, and critics than they have received. In concrete terms, these questions play out in artists’ orientations toward questions of power, violence, difference, and the possibility of love, peace, and justice. At the center of all notions of paradise is a conviction—or wager—that ultimately Life is deeper than death, that Peace is more primordial than violence, and that Love gives all things into being and calls all restlessness into its rest.

Hereafter

and the Unknown

HEREAFTER AND THE UNKNOWN

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Although it may seem strange to define a thing by what it is not, we often do so. We call a leaf green, but in truth, chlorophyll is a substance that swallows all light except green. Or, in an especially uncanny example, the known mass of the universe is much too roomy for all that we can detect—all the swarming hosts of galaxies, starfish, bacteria, and skylarks that we can hear, taste, touch, smell, and see. So, we infer dark matter.

Dome in Konya, Turkey

That 85 percent of the matter of the universe is inaccessible to our senses and even to our most sophisticated science is a thought that overturns comfortable notions of what is and what is not. It is deeply uncomfortable to acknowledge that the overwhelming bulk of the universe can only be defined by what it is not.

Though this sort of counterintuitive conundrum may have arisen from the investigations of an advanced scientific age, it turns out not to be at all new. For thousands of years and across many religions, great minds, saints, and mystics have recognized the necessity of defining the divine by what it is not. Attempts to approach God via the descriptive power of negation is called apophatic theology, or the via negativa.

Glimmers of the via negativa emerged in Western thought as early as Plato and reached their full influential flower for Christendom in the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, a fifth- or sixth-century author about whom we know very little. In Islam, Rajab Ali Tabrizi, a seventeenthcentury Shi’ite philosopher and mystic, and in Judaism the philosopher Maimonides (1135–1204 a.d.), were influential exponents of apophatic thought. Hindu, Buddhist, and Bahá’í all have parallel figures and philosophies.

Fundamental to the various versions of apophatic thought is the recognition that God is not an object of knowledge, for to be God is to be above knowledge. Rich with contradictions which offend conventional logic, the via negativa is most often followed by those with a mystical tendency.

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NWO N K N U E HT D N A RET F A E RE H

Artists often possess this tendency—or at least their work does. For historic examples, consider the blank marble slab hovering like a portal into the afterlife placed by the Re­naissance sculptor Antonio del Rossellino above the effigy of James of Portugal.1 Central to Rossellino’s design, it is the most suitable and mysterious depiction of the dead bishop’s imminent encounter with an unknown God. It is suitable as well to mention the gorgeous geometric abstractions guilding mosques the world over. They respectfully depict the perfection of Allah in an abstract language that remains impersonal and without dimension.

For contemporary examples, consider the artists included in Here After. In his sculpture David Wallace Haskins invites us to plunge into a boundless void, letting all the terrifying otherness and beauty of openness grip us. Kate Ingold intones

Marble slate above the effigy on the tomb of James of Portugal (1461–66), by Antonio del Rossellino, in San Miniato, Florence

1. Also known as Antonio Gamberelli, but nicknamed Antonio del Rosselino (1427–79), he designed and carved the tomb of James of Portugal, a bishop and prince who died at the age of twenty-six.

HEREAFTER AND THE UNKNOWN

147

(following spread) Installation view of Here After, 2022

the rhythmic mantras of what God is not with minute stitches, employing almost impossible patience to painstakingly outline absence. Kris Martin lodges small contradictions in the mind, which, in time, grow to be distracting puzzles—the candle in a sealed box, whose existence cannot be proven with the senses. Tatsuo Miyajima uses digital counters to display the uncountable, unending dimension of existence.

In a way, each of these artists invites experiences with realms too vast to see and too close to touch. Because definition is impossible, encounter is necessary. This is the way of the mystic. Only through encounter can we earn knowledge, even if that knowledge is ineffable and even, from the rational point of view, unknowable. Their work provides a place for the mystery, the profound unknowability of God to be accounted for. In the moment of encounter, ultimate reality might suddenly heave up from the opaque void of dark matter and reveal itself.

However briefly. Maybe.

LINNÉA GABRIELLA SPRANSY NEUSS

150

(facing) Monument for Nothingness, 2012–22 (detail on following spread)

151

Rabbi Hanokh said: ”The other nations too believe that there are two worlds. They too say: ’In the other world.’ The difference is this: They think that the two are separate and severed, but Israel professes that the two worlds are essentially one and shall in fact become one.” In their true essence, the two worlds are one. They only have, as it were, moved apart. But they shall again become one, as they are in their true essence. Man was created for the purpose of unifying the two worlds. He contributes towards this unity by holy living, in relationship to the world in which he has been set, at the place on which he stands.

— Martin Buber, “The Way of Man, According to the Teachings of Hasidism,” in Hasidism and Modern Man (2016; trans. Maurice Friedman)

Praised be your name, no one.

For your sake we shall flower.

Towards You. —Paul Celan, “Psalm”1

1. Paul Celan, “Psalm,” in Paul Celan: Selected Poems, trans. Michael Hamburger and Christopher Middleton (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1972), 70.

2. Moshe Idel, “The Depths of Nothingness,” Galeria Plan B press release for Belu-Simion Fainaru’s Nothingness—The Poetics of Void (2012).

3. Monument for Nothingness.

A conversation between artist Belu-Simion Fainaru and philosopher-rabbi Prof. Marc-Alain Ouaknin.

This poem by Paul Celan accompanies Belu-Simion Fainaru’s installation Monument for Nothingness, an artwork that contains an infinite depth of meaning through relatively simple gestures. At first encounter, there is a paradox even in the title. Monument implies presence, power, physicality, and time, whereas Nothingness seems to be quite the opposite. Thus Fainaru right away establishes a polarizing dichotomy. The installation itself consists of a white wall, blank with the exception of a gridlike matrix of small holes drilled into its surface. An empty wall filled with small empty holelike spaces.

The installation is activated by participation. The visitor is invited to pick a rose petal from a nearby bouquet of red roses and insert the rolled-up petal into one of the small cavities in the wall, conjuring an image of the Western Wall (the Wailing Wall) in the Old City of Jerusalem. The austerity and rigidity of the blank wall becomes populated with soft, deep-hued, organic petals that will decay as time passes. The installation reveals an emptiness, contrasted with the act of filling. Inertia becomes action; emptiness becomes fullness.

This concept that Fainaru explores is further explained by Moshe Idel: “In Kabbalistic theosophies, it is the revelation of the image of God within the divine manifestations, necessary for the maintenance of the world, that is conceived of as perfection. This perfection is obtained by performance and not by some form of knowledge.”2 The simple performance in Monument for Nothingness becomes part of a greater maintenance, of learning through action. With a background in art studies and philosophy, Fainaru’s artistic approach often starts with the writings of authors, poets, and philosophers as the genesis of exploration. Through his research, Fainaru’s transdisciplinary works explore complex themes of Jewish and Kabbalah philosophies and identities that also more broadly reflect universal themes. “The idea that finitude departs from infinity is unique to the Jewish perception. I find it unique because ‘being’ originates in ‘nothingness.’”3 In Monument for Nothingness, Fainaru invites the viewer to contemplate this creation; how being comes from nothingness, how the finite emerged from the infinite. Perhaps this meditation is also a prayer. VPS

b. 1959, Bucharest, Romania; lives and works in Haifa, Israel, and Antwerp, Belgium

BELU-SIMION FAINARU

154

(facing) Atma, 2022; (following spread) Installation view of Here After, 2022

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

155

When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language, even the phrase ”each other” doesn’t make any sense.

— J alal al-Din Rumi, ”A Great Wagon” (thirteenth century; trans.

Coleman Barks)

1. I borrow this helpful distinction from the brilliant discussion of Malevich in Jonathan A. Anderson and William A. Dyrness, Modern Art and the Life of a Culture: The Religious Impulses of Modernism (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2016), p. 223. They ask: “Is Black Square a figuration of (ontological) void or a (semiotic) voiding of figuration? An icon of the death of God or an icon of God’s unrepresentability. . . . Is this an act of modernist hubris or theoaesthetic humility?” (213).

For both Malevich and Haskins, it is the latter.

2. Speaking of Porete’s tragic execution by burning, Maria Lichmann writes, “For her own spiritual poverty was so great that it had to suffer conflagration in order to be reborn out of the heart of God into the soul of Meister Eckhart.” Maria Lichtmann, “Marguerite Porete and Meister Eckhart,” in Meister Eckhart and the Beguine Mystics: Hadewijch of Brabant, Mechthild of Magdeburg, and Marguerite Porete, ed. Bernard McGinn (New York: Continuum, 1997), 86.

3. Marguerite Porete, The Mirror of Simple Souls, trans. Edmund Colledge (Mahweh, NJ: Paulist Press, 1993), 109.

4. Lichtmann, “Marguerite Porete and Meister Eckhart,” 71.

b. 1975, Willmar, MN; lives and works in Chicago

The many fortunate visitors to David Wallace Haskins’s 2016 solo show in the elegant confines of Mies van der Rohe’s Elmhurst Art Museum began by entering a seemingly standard, well-lit gallery space. The room contained what appeared to be a single upright rectangular black canvas, one that deliberately evoked Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square (1916), painted precisely one hundred years before. But unlike Malevich’s canvas, Haskins’s image was interactive, involving, even intimate. Guidance—whether from fellow viewers in the know, or from the artist himself if he was present—was required to take the next step. And the step was literal. For the canvas was not a canvas, but a door.

Viewers who passed through the rectangle stepped into an ample, darkened room reminiscent of the Holy of Holies itself. Stumbling or bumping into fellow gallery goers was possible inside the space, but the artist’s intention was not to trouble those enjoying his exhibition, but to comfort them. At the center of the room was a large plush ball, covered in fur.

The experience, which words cannot replicate, evoked not a darkness of despair but of delight, not nothingness but no-thingness.1 If Bruce Nauman’s similar installation, entitled Room with My Soul Left Out, Room That Does Not Care (1984), clobbered its viewers with meaninglessness, Haskins’s Void Room seemed to caress viewers instead.

Like the diasporic Jewish communities that enjoyed G-d’s presence beyond the confines of Jerusalem, David Wallace Haskins’s smaller installations such as Atma at Bridge Projects replicate the spirit of the solo show just des­cribed. Here he brings the sky into the gallery, as if to invoke the ancient Emerald Tablet (“As above, so below”) or the Lord’s Prayer (“on earth as it is in heaven”). His use of mirrors summons the celebrated medieval mystic Marguerite Porete (d. 1310), the author of Mirror of Simple Souls who so inspired Meister Eckhart.2 For Porete, the mirror becomes not a site of preening vanity or fragmenting judgment but of transfiguring grace. Souls with such proper self-regard swim “in the sea of joy, in a sea of delights, flowing and running out of the Divinity.”3 What has been said of Porete is true a fortiori of the art of David Wallace Haskins: “At the heart of her apparently negative theology is the supreme value of Love.”4 MATTHEW J. MILLINER

DAVID WALLACE HASKINS

158

(facing) Apophatic Quilt, 2021 (detail on following spread)

(Bell) Form is emptiness and emptiness is form.

Form is not other than emptiness; Emptiness is not other than form.

The same is true with feelings, perceptions, mental formations and consciousness.

No interdependent origins and no extinction of them.

(From ignorance to death and decay) No ill-being, no cause of ill-being, no end of ill-being, and no path.

No understanding and no attainment.

(Bell)

(Bell) Listen Shariputra, All dharmas are marked with emptiness.

They are neither produced nor destroyed.

Neither defiled nor immaculate.

Neither increasing nor decreasing.

Therefore, in emptiness there is neither form, no feeling, no perceptions.

No mental formations, no consciousness.

No eye, no ear, no nose, no tongue, no body or mind.

No form, no sound, no smell, no taste, no touch, no objects of mind.

No realms of elements from eyes to mind consciousness.

— The Heart Sutra, as recited at Plum Village (chant 4) by Thích Nhất Hạnh

159

The textile that is the foundation of Kate Ingold’s Apophatic Quilt (2021) came to her via eBay, described as a “mourning quilt”—a blanket made out of the clothing of a deceased loved one. In 2020, at the start of the global COVID-19 pandemic, Ingold brought this tattered piece of much-loved and well-worn fabric out of storage and held it in her hands. In the new light of mandated isolation, Ingold saw the night sky on the back of its dark indigo expanse. She started repairing the front with 24-karat gold thread.

This is a practice that Ingold applies to many of the works in her Damaged Goods series, in which she repairs discarded fabrics, broken porcelain figures, and vintage magazines with interventions of hand stitches and graphite marks. The restorative act is reminiscent of the Japanese method of kintsugi, in which artists repair broken dishes with veins of liquid gold to render anew something that has been broken. The woven twilight that emerged from the back of Ingold’s fabric became the quilt’s face, and she embroidered the phrases “not this” and “not not this” across the entire quilt as an offering and a prayer.

An apophatic approach to thinking about what lies after death would be to describe what it is not. Apophatic theology is the companion to kataphatic theology, which uses positive language to describe the divine: “God is love,” “God is good.” Apophatic theology fills out the complexity of the divine imagination by stating, “God is also unknowable.” Ingold, who recently received her Zen Buddhist precepts from Buddhist teacher Roshi Joan Halifax, has shared that “in our tradition, we do not stop with ‘not this.’ What is ‘not this’ is also ‘not not this.’” Above, the Heart Sutra translation by Zen Buddhist monk and teacher Thích Nhất Hạnh, speaks to this posture as the text imagines emptiness—also translated as boundlessness. “Form is emptiness and emptiness is form.” Ingold shared that Hạnh would often “use the example of an empty tea cup and ask what was it empty of? Tea, yes, but full of air!”

Standing in front of Apophatic Quilt, a viewer enters into a similar conceptual space. In the context of an object of mourning, death is not this and death is not not this. Our imaginations fill in the blanks of what “this” actually references. In a sequence of efficient gestures, Ingold’s Apophatic Quilt creates a palpable bridge between the intimately personal space of the lap blanket and the infinitely expansive realm of the beyond. CML

b. 1970, Chicago; lives and works in Pasadena, CA

KATE INGOLD

162

(facing) Life After Death, 2012 / 2022; (following spread) Installation view of Here After, 2022

163

The work of Belgian artist Kris Martin is marked by an extended meditation on time, mortality, and the limits of human understanding. Death is a recurring theme in his work, as are various frameworks for interpreting the meanings of death—especially those inherited through the Roman Catholic traditions of his native Flanders. Dozens of Martin’s works bear the title Mandi, a Friulian (in northern Italy) dialect term for “goodbye.” Originating as a contraction of the words mano (hand) and Dio (God), mandi is a form of farewell that entrusts another person into “the hand of God.” As Martin says, the term implies that “there is a destination, there is a time, but you give it out of your hands. [This idea] is a red line throughout my work.”

Though united by this concept, the works in this series take widely diverse forms. Mandi III (2003) and Mandi XXI (2009), for example, are large, mechanized, split-flap information boards—the kind one finds in many European train stations—which periodically cycle through updates to destinations and departure times but without displaying any further information. Mandi VIII (2006) is a plaster re-creation of the famous ancient Roman Laocoön sculpture but without the serpents that Poseidon sent, whereby the priest and his sons were left struggling with an invisible mortal enemy. In each case, death becomes a domain of unrepresentability. Mandi XLV (2019), featured in the Here After exhibition, consists of a locked cabinet with a candle invisibly burning inside. The burning candle—an old symbol of hope and prayerful petition amid the brevity of life—is enclosed in a location unseen and (symbolically) unknowable.

Life After Death (2012 /2022) engages similar questions from another direction. The work consists of an edition of poster-size prints, each certifying “Life After Death for _________,” completed with the handwritten name of the print’s collector, followed by an identification of the “time” (date, time of day) and “place” (using the geopolitical convention of city, nation). This format follows the conventions of conferral (of a degree or membership) or sacrament (as in baptism or marriage), as though this flimsy document could record and ensure a person’s acquisition of “life after death.”

Issuing such a document is a ridiculous act of hubris, delusion, or parody, certifying something over which no creature has any power or authority— and doing so by producing a commodity for sale. In this way, the work is reminiscent of the Church’s former practice of selling indulgences. On the other hand, this gesture might be rather modest, even winsome—a denotation of what most societies have believed is true for all people: namely, that whatever is most deeply alive in each person does endure after death. In either case, Martin’s meditations on death—and hope in the face of death—insist on humility, even silence, before the deep mysteries of human living and dying. JONATHAN A. ANDERSON

b. 1972, Kortrijk, Belgium; lives and works in Mullem, Belgium

KRIS MARTIN

166

(facing) Life Liquid type-U, 2018; (following spread) Installation view of Here After, 2022

167

Three simple directives guide all of Miyajima’s work: “Keep changing. Connect with everything. Continue forever.” Shaped by a deeply Buddhist perspective, these phrases harbor immense potential. Artistically, they have animated a body of work that makes use of a single metaphorically suggestive object, the digital counter, in a wide-reaching range of configurations. Yet, in Miyajima’s view, these three short statements contain not just immense artistic potential, but also transformative power for all humanity.

Born in Tokyo in 1957, Miyajima experienced firsthand Japan’s impressive leap into a frenetic era of technological enterprise. Yet he began his artistic training in oil paint, a time-honored though ultimately foreign medium.

Continuing to connect the old with the new, Miyajima eventually moved into digital mediums, but he did so in order to articulate ancient Buddhist notions more clearly.

In one body of work called Innumerable Life/Buddha, large plaques of red digital counters blink in endless cycles, their warm hue meant to evoke vitality, and their busy calculations the endless expanse of life-after-life particular to the Buddhist tradition. But this expansiveness has an even more particular inspiration. When describing this body of work, Miyajima refers to a famous legend in which Siddhartha teaches that his wisdom will be spread, not just by his Ten Great Disciples, but also by thousands of bodhisattvas, innumerable “little Buddhas.” This democratic access to wisdom is very important to Miyajima.

So is life itself. In his series Life Liquid, glass containers act as amniotic sacs nurturing digital counters in their clear bellies. The moment of introduction into another sacred cycle of life is controlled by wires and scientific experiment. Clone technology and the pursuit of artificial intelligence can easily tilt the impulse to understand into the impulse to control.

Inherent in these pursuits is a perennial human impulse to attempt to contain the uncontainable. In the Buddhist view, there must be thoughtful caution in such an enterprise. Yet, without much hesitation we continue to use high-tech means to record the dimensions of a measureless life—an endless eternity in the Buddhist view, cycle after cycle, where everything changes, connects, and continues. LGSN

b. 1957, Edogawa City, Tokyo, Japan; lives and works in Ibaraki, Japan

TATSUO MIYAJIMA

IMAGE CREDITS

Cover: Bonita Helmer, The Four Worlds (Da’at) (detail), 2002–5. Acrylic and mixed media on canvas. 7 × 12 feet.

Photo: Edward Goldstein. Courtesy of the artist.

Page 30: William Kurelek, Farm Boy’s Dream of Heaven, 1963. Mixed media on panel. 19 ¼ × 27 ½ inches. Collection of Howard and Roberta Ahmanson.

Photo: Eric Stoner.

Pages 54–55: Installation view of Here After, 2022. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer. Artworks, left to right, by Gyun Hur, Alastair Gordon, and front, Charwei Tsai.

End Papers: Alberto Aguilar, Enigmatic State 2 and Enigmatic State 3 (installation view), 2022. Enamel on paper.

36 × 36 inches each. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer. Courtesy of the artist.

Page 32: Jordan Nassar, Hou Hou Hou, 2020. Hand-embroidered cotton on cotton. 20 ½ × 32 inches. Collection of Howard and Roberta Ahmanson.

Photo: Shark Senesac. © Jordan Nassar 2022. Image courtesy of the artist, James Cohan, New York, Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, and The Third Line, Dubai.

Pages 56: Olga Lah, Across the Rise, 2022. Metal fencing, latex paint, reflective plastic. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer. Courtesy of the artist.

Detail on page 58–59.

Pages 8–9: Installation view of Here After, 2022. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer. Artworks, left to right,

by Patty Wickman, Jordan Nassar, William Kurelek, vanessa german, Linnéa Gabriella Spransy.

Pages 14–15: Installation view of Here After, 2022. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer. Artworks, left to right,

by Stanley Spencer, Alberto Aguilar, Andrea Büttner.

Here and in Heaven Pages 16, 19: Paul Cézanne, Still Life with Onions (detail), 1896–98. Oil on canvas. 26 × 32 ¾ inches. Collection of Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France. Auguste Pellerin bequest, 1929. © RMN (Musée d’Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski.

Page 20: Alberto Aguilar, Sensitive Equipment (Silver and Gold edition), 2022. Area rug, console table, handbells, balloons and elastic jump rope.

Photo: Monica Nouwens. Courtesy of the artist.

Page 22: Andrea Büttner, Dancing Nuns, 2007. Woodcut. Two parts, each 70 ½ × 45 inches, framed: 72 ¼ × 89 ¾ × 1 ¾ inches. Edition 8 of 10, with 2 APs. Collection of Howard and Roberta Ahmanson. Photo: Axel Schneider. Courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles.

Page 24: Jeni Spota C., Four Popes, 2019. Oil on canvas. 20 × 22 inches.

Photo: Robert Wedemeyer. Courtesy of the artist and Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York.

Page 26: Claire Curneen, Blue, 2013.

Porcelain, cobalt, and gold lustre.

24 × 21 × 6 inches. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer. Courtesy of the artist and Ferrin Contemporary, North Adams, MA. Page 28: vanessa german, THE HOLIEST WILDERNESS IS FREEDOM 2, 2020. Mixed-media assemblage. 61 ½ × 26 × 18 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Kasmin Gallery, New York.

Page 34: Master Shen-Long, The Fundamental Essence Of The Universe Embraces All Beings 太上含靈 , 2007. Ink and mixed media on polyester fabric.

7 × 5 feet. Courtesy of the artist.

Page 36: Stanley Spencer, Angels of the Apocalypse, 1949. Oil on canvas.

24 × 36 inches. Collection of Howard and Roberta Ahmanson.

Photo: Eric Stoner.

Page 38: Linnéa Gabriella Spransy, everything a seed, or the seed of a seed, 2022. Acrylic and pastel on paper. 73 ½ × 70 inches. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer. Courtesy of the artist.

Page 40: Patty Wickman, Raised Bed, 2020. Oil on linen. 72 × 63 inches.

Courtesy of the artist.

Page 43: Xu Zhen ®, Under Heaven— 2832QM0152, 2014. Oil on aluminum.

51 × 63 × 5 ½ inches. Collection of Howard and Roberta Ahmanson.

Photo: Eric Stoner. Image courtesy of the artist and James Cohan, New York.

Detail on page 42.

Here to Remember Page 48: Artists in Korea, Gamnotaeng (Nectar Ritual) hanging scroll (detail), 1744. Ink and pigment on silk. 78 ¾ × 92 ⅝ inches. Collection of the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA. Museum purchase, made possible by an anonymous donor, 2004.

Page 50: Diego Rivera, Day of the Dead—City Fiesta (detail), 1924. Court of Fiestas, south wall mural in the Secretaría de Educación Pública, Mexico City.

Pages 52: Gyun Hur, There is a land beyond the river 저 건너편 강 언덕에 (detail), 2021. Eighteen hand-blown glass vessels and Chattahoochee River water. 10 × 11 feet. Courtesy of the artist.

Page 60: Beth Lipman, Northern Monkshood Composition (detail), 2020. Glass, wood, metal, paint, adhesive. 98 × 68 × 30 inches. Photo: Jesse Bascom. Courtesy of the artist and Nohra Haime Gallery, New York.

Pages 62–63: Beth Lipman, Candlesticks II, 2020. C-print, face mounted to acrylic. 30 × 58 inches.

Edition of 3. Courtesy of the artist and Nohra Haime Gallery, New York.

Page 64: Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn, video stills from The Boat People, 2020.

Single-channel video, 4k, Super 16mm transferred to digital, color, 5.1 surround sound. Duration: 20 min. © Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn 2021. Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan, New York. Installation view on pages 66–67.

Photo: Robert Wedemeyer.

Pages 68–69: Installation view of Here After, 2022. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer. Artworks, left to right,

by Alberto Aguilar, Amir H. Fallah.

Picturing Paradise: From the Earthly Garden to the Heavenly City, Jennifer Sliwka’s essay illustrations Page 72: Fig. 1. Giovanni Leardo, Mapa mondi, figura mondi, 1442. Verona, Biblioteca Civica MS 3119 (detail showing the paradixo terresto, or earthly paradise). 28 ¾ × 23 ½ inches.

American Geographical Society Library, University of WisconsinMilwaukee Libraries.

Page 73 (left): Fig. 2. Giovanni di Paolo, The Creation of the World and the Expulsion from Paradise, 1445.

Tempera and gold on wood. 8 ¼ × 20 ½ inches. Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, gift from the Robert Lehman Collection, 1975.

Public domain.

Page 73 (right): Fig. 3. Giovanni di Paolo, Paradise, 1445. Tempera and gold on canvas, transferred from wood. 18 7⁄16 × 16 1⁄16 inches. Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, gift from Rogers Fund, 1906. Public domain.

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Page 74: Fig. 4. Domenico di Michelino, Dante as the Poet of the “Divine Comedy,” 1465. Tempera on panel.

91 ⅓ × 114 inches. Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, Florence.

Public domain.

Page 76: Fig. 5. Sandro Botticelli, Mystic Nativity, c. 1500. Oil on canvas.

42 ¾ × 29 inches. Collection of the National Gallery, London. Public domain.

Pages 78–79: Installation view of Here After, 2022. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer. Artworks, left to right,

by Amir H. Fallah, Farkhondeh Ahmadzadeh, Kate Ingold, and front, Mercedes Dorame.

The Architecture of After Page 80: Sri Mariamman Hindu Temple, Singapore. Photo by Andreas M. on Unsplash, 2019.

Page 81: Basilica of Sant’Apollinare in Classe, Ravenna. Photo: Roberta Green Ahmanson.

Page 82 (top): La Sagrada Familia, Barcelona. Photo by Claudio Testa on Unsplash, 2018.

Page 82 (bottom): Hagia Sophia, Istanbul. Photo by Raimond Klavins on Unsplash, 2021.

Pages 90–91: Installation view of Here After, 2022. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer.

Artworks, left to right, by Mandy Cano Villalobos, Greg Lookerse.

Page 92: Maja Lisa Engelhardt, The Gate (GW 5018), 2010. Bronze cast. 39 ½ × 19 ¾ inches. Collection of Howard and Roberta Ahmanson. Photo: Eric Stoner.

Courtesy of the artist.

Page 94: Zarah Hussain, video stills from Sharjah Spectrum, 2015. Digital animation made with code. Music by Peter Chilvers. Courtesy of the artist.

Installation view on pages 96–97.

Photo: Robert Wedemeyer.

Page 98: Greg Lookerse, N. 1 from Firmaments series, 2018. Cut and folded paper. 64 × 40 inches. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer. Courtesy of the artist.

Pages 102–103: Regina Mamou, The Loop, 2022. Steel, aluminum, birch, hard-coated EPS foam, acrylic, waterborne alkyd paint (pedestal); digitally-modified Soviet payphone (circa 1970s), cast iron, plastic, 8 audio tracks. 85 ⅞ × 154 × 34 inches (pedestal), 12 ½ × 8 ½ × 4 ⅜ inches (phone). Photos: Robert Wedemeyer.

Courtesy of the artist and The Wende Museum of the Cold War, Los Angeles.

Detail on page 100.

Page 84: Lynn Aldrich, Oculus, 2020; Porthole, 2019; Crack!, 2019; Discovery in a Tar Pit, 2019 (installation view). Photo: Robert Wedemeyer.

Courtesy of the artist.

Page 104: James Wines, Bedford House, 1984. Ink and wash on paper. 26 × 36 inches. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer. Courtesy of the artist.

Pages 86–87:Lynn Aldrich, Oculus, 2020. Carbon paper, wax paper, felt, paper cut-outs, graphite, colored pencil, oil paint. 24 × 32 inches (collage), 27 × 35 inches (framed). Photo: Gene Ogami. Courtesy of the artist

Music in Heaven, Ted Gioia’s essay illustrations

Page 88: Mandy Cano Villalobos, Dim Gold (Feast of Brides) (detail), 2022.

Wedding cake decorations, vases, stuffed animals, fake flowers, ballet shoes, glass and plastic figurines, baby monitors, wooden spindles, soccer balls, human hair, synthetic hair, kitchen utensils, baseballs, discarded appliances, dish ware, spools of thread, mops, books, Christmas ornaments, baby bottles, tables, bath plugs, costume jewelry, old clothing, baby shoes, ice skates, cassette tapes, rope, used sponges, lace, adding machine, typewriter, light switches, ironing board, unwanted toys, hair curlers, telephones, and kid gloves. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer.

Courtesy of the artist.

Page 116: Farkhondeh Ahmadzadeh, Canticle of the Birds—Mantegh o Alteyer ‫منطق الطیر‬, Debating the Journey, 2020. Handmade watercolor with natural pigments; lapis lazuli, malachite, indigo, gold, and palladium. 61 ½ × 41 ⅓ inches. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer.

Courtesy of the artist.

Page 118: Afruz Amighi, The Guardian, 2021. Chain, aluminum, light. 15 × 14 × 14 feet. Photo: Genevieve Hanson.

Courtesy of the artist.

Pages 120: Mercedes Dorame, Waiting for the moon to dance— Mwaar’a Hevuuchok Yakeenax, 2022.

Acrylic on canvas, cast concrete star stones, found stones and shells, abalone, deer hide, acorns, feathers, white sage, chalk, red ochre, sea salt, cinnamon, yarn. Photos: Robert Wedemeyer. Courtesy of the artist.

Detail on pages 122–23.

Page 124: James Elaine, Restoration of a Peripheral Field: Aligning Weeds into Spring, 2020. Acrylic paint and felt on wool felt. 91 × 92 inches.

Photo: Robert Wedemeyer. Courtesy of the artist.

Page 126: Amir H. Fallah, Cowgirl, 2020.

Acrylic and collage on canvas. 72 × 72 inches. Collection of Howard and Roberta Ahmanson. Photo: Eric Stoner.

Courtesy of the artist and Shulamit Nazarian Gallery, Los Angeles.

Page 128: Alastair Gordon, Astonishment In the Terrain of the Familiar, 2022. Oil on panel. 35 ½ × 23 ½ inches. Courtesy of the artist.

Pages 110–11: Installation view of Here After, 2022. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer. Artworks, left to right,

by Bonita Helmer, Afruz Amighi.

Page 130: Bonita Helmer, The Four Worlds (Tiferet), 2002–5. Acrylic and mixed media on canvas. 7 × 12 feet each. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer.

Courtesy of the artist.

Between Here and After

Page 132: Charwei Tsai, in collaboration with Tsering Tashi Gyalthang, video stills from Bardo, 2016. Video with color and sound. Duration: 5 minutes, 30 seconds. Courtesy of the artists.

Page 112: Sultan Muhammad, from Nizami’s Khamsah (Five Poems), Tabriz, Iran. The Prophet Muhammad’s Celestial Journey, 1539–43. Opaque watercolor and ink on paper. 11 ½ × 7 inches.

Page 113: View of the eastern vault of the Jameh Mosque of Isfahan, Iran.

Photo: Amir Pashaei.

Page 115: Gustave Doré, Rosa Celeste: Dante and Beatrice Gaze upon the Highest Heaven, The Empyrean, 1832. Engraving from Dante Alighieri’s Purgatorio and Paradiso (London and New York: Cassell, Petter, and Galpin, 1868).

Page 134: William Villalongo, Holding it Down, 2018. Acrylic, paper collage and cut velour paper. 40 × 39 inches (sheet), 45 × 44 ⅜ inches (framed).

Photo: Argenis Apolinario, New York. © Villalongo Studio LLC. Courtesy of the artist and Susan Inglett Gallery, New York.

The Hereafter in Contemporary Art, Jonathan A. Anderson’s essay illustrations Page 138 (top): Fig. 1. Edward Hicks, The Peaceable Kingdom, c. 1834. Oil on canvas. 30 × 35 ½ inches. Collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Gift of Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch. Public domain.

Page 138 (bottom): Fig. 2. Horace Pippin, Holy Mountain I, 1944. Oil on canvas. 30 ½ × 36 inches. Collection of Art Bridges. Public domain.

Page 140: Fig. 3. Max Beckmann, Auferstehung (Resurrection), 1916–18 (unfinished). Oil and graphite on canvas. 135 ¾ × 195 ⅔ inches. Public domain.

Hereafter and the Unknown Page 144: Dome in Konya, Turkey.

Photo: Roberta Green Ahmanson.

Page 146: Tomb of James of Portugal (1461–66), by Antonio del Rossellino, in San Miniato, Florence.

Pages 148–49: Installation view of Here After, 2022. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer. Artworks, left to right,

by Jeni Spota C., Xu Zhen®, Maja Lisa Engelhardt, Claire Curneen, and front, Alberto Aguilar.

Page 150: Belu-Simion Fainaru, Monument for Nothingness (installation view), 2012–22. Take a rose petal.

Think of a wish. And insert the petal into the wall. In-situ intervention.

Photo: Robert Wedemeyer. Courtesy of the artist and Galeria Plan B, Berlin, Germany and Cluj, Romania. Detail on pages 152–53.

Page 154: David Wallace Haskins, Atma, 2022. From the Skywall series.

Dedicated to Matthew J. Larson.

Pyrolytic coated glass, mirrored glass, wood. Courtesy of the artist.

Installation view on pages 156–57.

Page 158: Kate Ingold, Apophatic Quilt, 2021. Discarded quilt, indigo-dyed silk thread, and 24k gold thread. 42 × 48 inches. Courtesy of the artist. Detail on pages 160–61.

Page 162: Kris Martin, Life After Death, 2012/2022. Print on paper. 27 ½ × 19 ⅝ inches. Unlimited edition, each is personally dedicated by the artist. © Kris Martin. Courtesy of the artist and Sean Kelly, New York.

Pages 164–65: Installation view of Here After, 2022. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer. Artworks, left to right,

by William Villalongo, Kris Martin.

Page 166: Tatsuo Miyajima, Life Liquid type-U, 2018. Dome-shaped glass. 21 ¼ × 17 ⅝ × 19 ⅝ inches. Photo: Nobutada Omote. © Tatsuo Miyajima. Courtesy of the artist and Lisson Gallery.

Page 168–69: Installation view of Here After, 2022. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer. Artworks, left to right,

by Tatsuo Miyajima, Beth Lipman, Master Shen-Long.

PRIMARY SOURCE CITATIONS

Here and in Heaven Capon, Robert Farrar. The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection. 1969.

Repr., New York: Modern Library, 2002.

Alberto Aguilar Aguilar, Madeleine. “Blindsight.”

Field of View, 2018.

Andrea Büttner Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace.

1947. Trans. Emma Craufurd and Mario von der Ruhr. Repr. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Weil, Simone. Lectures in Philosophy.

1959. Trans. Hugh Price. Repr., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.

Jeni Spota C. John 1:5. Good News Translation.

Claire Curneen Thomas, Dylan. “And Death Shall Have No Dominion.” The Poems of Dylan Thomas. Copyright © 1943 by New Directions Publishing Corporation.

Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

All rights reserved. vanessa german hooks, bell. All About Love: New Visions. New York: William Morrow, 1999; repr., 2000.

King, Jr., Dr. Martin Luther. “Love Your Enemies.” Sermon delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Montgomery, AL, November 17, 1957.

Jordan Nassar Adnan, Etel. The Arab Apocalypse.

Copyright © 1989 by Etel Adnan.

Reprinted by permission of PostApollo Press.

Master Shen-Long Huineng, Yampolsky, Philip B. The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch. New York: Columbia University Press, 1967.

Linnéa Gabriella Spransy Hopkins, Gerard Manley. “God’s Grandeur.” 1877.

Patty Wickman St. Symeon the New Theologian.

The Enlightened Heart: An Anthology of Sacred Poetry, 949–1022. Trans.

Stephen Mitchell. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993.

Gyun Hur de Marbelle, Daniel. “When They Ring the Golden Bells.” 1887.

Olga Lah Glück, Louise. “The Wild Iris.” The Wild Iris. New York: Ecco Press, 1992.

Beth Lipman Hirshfield, Jane, “You go to sleep in one room and wake in another.”

Ledger: Poems. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2020.

The Architecture of After Barron, Robert. Heaven in Stone and Glass: Experiencing the Spirituality of the Great Cathedrals. New York: Crossroad Publishing, 2002.

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Kader Attia, The Loop. e-flux journal, 2015.

Mandle, Julia Barnes . “James Luna: Interview.” In Sites of Recollection: Four Altars and a Rap Opera.

Williamstown, MA: Williams College Museum of Art, 1992.

Alastair Gordon Neve, Christopher. Unquiet Landscape: Places and Ideas in 20th-Century British Painting. London: Thames & Hudson, 2020.

Gordon, Alastair. Why Art Matters.

London: Inter-Varsity Press Books, 2021.

Lynn Aldrich Isaiah 65:17–18. New American Standard Bible.

Charwei Tsai Khyentse, Dzongsar Jamyang. Living Is Dying: How to Prepare for Dying, Death, and Beyond. Boulder, CO: Shambhala Publications, 2020.

Mandy Cano Villalobos Freeman, Arthur. ”The Poetry and Spirituality of Rainer Maria Rilke.”

Bethlehem, PA: Moravian Seminary, 1994.

William Villalongo Chestnutt, Charles W. The Conjure Woman. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin; Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press, 1899.

Maja Lisa Engelhardt Kierkegaard, Søren. Either/Or. Trans. Alastair Hannay. London: Penguin Classics, 1992.

Belu-Simion Fainaru Celan, Paul. “Psalm.” Selected Poems and Prose. Trans. John Felstiner.

Copyright © 2001 Used by permission of the author and W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Zarah Hussain Dua (prayer) of the Prophet Muhammad.

Greg Lookerse Alighieri, Dante. Paradiso. Trans.

Dorothy L. Sayers. London: Penguin Classics, 1950.

Farkhondeh Ahmadzadeh Attar, Farid ud-Din. The Conference of the Birds. Trans. Afkham Darbandi and Dick Davis. New York: Penguin Books, 1984.

Afruz Amighi Cole, Teju. Black Paper: Writing in a Dark Time. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021.

Meltzer, David, ed. Death: An Anthology of Ancient Texts, Songs, Prayers, and Stories. San Francisco: Northpoint Press, 1984.

Mercedes Dorame Silko, Leslie Marmon. Yellow Woman.

New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993.

Buber, Martin. “The Way of Man, According to the Teachings of Hasidism.” In Hasidism and Modern Man, ed. and trans. Maurice Friedman.

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016.

David Wallace Haskins Rumi, Jalal al-Din. “A Great Wagon.”

The Essential Rumi. Trans. Coleman Barks, Expanded ed., New York: Harper One, 2004.

Kate Ingold Hạnh, Thích Nhất. The Heart of Understanding: Commentaries on the Prajñaparamita Heart Sutra. Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 1988.

CONTRIBUTOR BIOGRAPHIES

Roberta Green Ahmanson, Chair of Bridge Projects, is a writer and philanthropist whose public activities are focused on deepening awareness and understanding of the role of religion in public life, the importance of knowing history to understand the present, and the vital role the arts play in shaping human experience.

Jonathan A. Anderson, PhD, King’s College London, is an artist, art critic, and postdoctoral associate of theology and the visual arts at Duke University. Anderson’s research and writing focuses on modern and contemporary art, with a particular interest in exploring its relations to religion and theology. He is the coauthor, with William A. Dyrness, of Modern Art and the Life of a Culture: The Religious Impulses of Modernism (2016). His essays include “Modern Art” in The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion (2021) and “The (In)visibility of Theology in Contemporary Art Criticism” (2014).

Jacqueline Chao, PhD, is Senior Curator of Asian Art at the Crow Museum of Asian Art of the University of Texas at Dallas. Her exhibitions have presented works ranging from the historical to the contemporary in all media from across the globe. A specialist in East Asian and Buddhist art, she is a widely published author and frequent lecturer on Asian art. In addition to her museum appointment, she is a faculty member of the Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History and sits on the Asian Art Advisory Council of the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts. In 2019 she was recognized for her curatorial work in Patron Magazine’s “Best Of: Curators” issue for bringing advanced perspectives to the Crow Museum’s collection and for broadening perceptions of Asian art. She is also the recipient of a 2021 Association of Art Museum Curators Curatorial Award for Excellence.

Ted Gioia is a music historian, and the author of eleven books, most recently Music: A Subversive History (2019).

Cara Megan Lewis is Co-director of Bridge Projects and an artist in the collaborative Díaz Lewis. Having started her career at Fraenkel Gallery in 2002 and received her MA in Curatorial Practice from California College of the Arts in 2007, Lewis has been an advocate for artists since the early 2000s.

Matthew J. Milliner is an Associate Professor of Art History at Wheaton College. He is the author of The Everlasting People: G. K. Chesterton and the First Nations (2021) and Mother of the Lamb: The Story of a Global Icon (2022).

Vicki Phung Smith is Director of Client Relations and Gallery Operations at Bridge Projects. A gallerist and curator, she was previously Director of the Frank Lloyd Gallery in Santa Monica, CA, and later Director of ACME. Gallery in Los Angeles.

Linnéa Gabriella Spransy Neuss is Co-director of Bridge Projects, an undertaking begun in 2015 motivated by her experiences as an artist invested in matters of spirituality, science, history, and religious practice.

Spransy Neuss finished her education at Yale University in 2001 and moved to Los Angeles in 2012.

N. T. Wright is the former Bishop of Durham in the Church of England and one of the world’s leading Bible scholars. He serves as the Chair of New Testament and Early Christianity at the School of Divinity at the University of St. Andrews as well as Senior Research Fellow at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford University. He has been featured on ABC News, Dateline, The Colbert Report, and Fresh Air. Wright is the award-winning author of many books, including Paul: A Biography (2018); Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense (2006); Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (2010); The Day the Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus’s Crucifixion (2018); Simply Jesus: A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did, and Why He Matters (2011); After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters (2012); and Scripture and the Authority of God: How to Read the Bible Today (2013).

Meaghan K. Ritchey is Director of Communications at Bridge Projects.

Prior to joining Bridge, she worked in the nonprofit visual arts and publishing space in New York, most recently as Director of Communications and Marketing for Image, and before that as Associate Publisher for Commonweal. She began her career at International Arts Movement as the Director of Global Community.

Jennifer Sliwka, PhD, is Deputy Director of the VCS Project and Lecturer at King’s College London.

An art historian and curator specializing in Italian Renaissance and Baroque art, Jennifer is also interested in transhistorical studies, making connections between historic and contemporary art in particular. Her research has been supported by the Getty Research Institute, the Kress Foundation, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Villa I Tatti and the Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. At King’s she is responsible for overseeing the Visual Commentary on Scripture project (theVCS.org), a free online resource which commissions scholars to curate digital exhibitions on art and the Bible, and for convening and teaching KCL’s collaborative MA Christianity and the Arts with the National Gallery. From 2007 to 2017 she worked as a Curator at the National Gallery, curating exhibitions, including: Devotion by Design: Italian Altarpieces Before 1500 (2011), Visions of Paradise: Botticini’s Palmieri Altarpiece (2015–16), and Monochrome: Painting in Black and White (2017–18).

Her next exhibition, Reframed: The Woman at the Window, opens at Dulwich Picture Gallery in 2022.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We offer special thanks to our funders Roberta and Howard Ahmanson. Their contribution extends beyond the financial support necessary for such an ambitious endeavor. Roberta’s far-reaching research towards her forthcoming book “The New Jerusalem in Art and Architecture“ guided the formation of this exhibition and inspired the content of this catalog.

For devoting themselves fully to Bridge Projects, we thank our Board of Directors, Jonathan A. Anderson, Ann Hirou, Matthew J. Milliner, and Jane Milosch; as well as our advisors, James Davison Hunter and Arvind Bhambri.

For their vision, dedication, and imagination, we are grateful to all of the artists featured in Here After.

For offering meaningful context to the artworks in this exhibition and thoughtful response to themes of the show, we thank writers Jonathan A. Anderson, Ted Gioia, and Jennifer Sliwka. For their contributions to the artist texts, we thank Jacqueline Chao and Matthew J. Milliner. We are deeply grateful to N. T. Wright for his permission to publish an excerpt from Surprised by Hope.

For lending their expertise and wisdom to our parallel programming we thank Mia Chung, Founder of Octet Collaborative; art historian Thomas E. Crow; artist Consuelo G. Flores; Pujan Gandhi, Assistant Curator of South and Southeast Asian Art at The Minneapolis Institute of Art; musician and author Ted Gioia; Amy Landau, Director of Education and Interpretation at Fowler Museum, UCLA; Ben Quash, Director of Center for Arts and the Sacred, King’s College, London; Melissa Raphael, Professor Emerita (Jewish Theology) at the University of Gloucestershire; Joes Segal, Chief Curator and Director of Programming at the Wende Museum, Culver City; Saskia WilsonBrown, Founder of the Institute for Arts and Olfaction, Los Angeles; poet Jane Wong; David Zahl, Founder and Director of Mockingbird, Selah Gospel Choir, and Self Help Graphics.

We are grateful to the following galleries and museums for working with us on loans and consignments of artworks: Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York; Jacqueline Chao at the Crow Museum of Asian Art, Dallas; James Cohan Gallery, New York; Anat Ebgi Gallery, Los Angeles; Ferrin Contemporary, North Adams, Massachusetts; Galeria Plan B, Berlin; Nohra Haime Gallery, New York; Susan Inglett Gallery, New York; Kasmin Gallery, New York; Sean Kelly Gallery, New York; Lisson Gallery, London, New York, Shanghai; Shulamit Nazarian Gallery, Los Angeles; and The Wende Museum, Culver City.

We are grateful to Jane Bowman at Fieldstead for coordinating the loan of the artworks in the Ahmansons’ collection.

We are forever grateful to Phil Peters for his continued support with all things related to audio visual needs.

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For attentive, innovative translation of the vision of Here After into book design, we thank Kimberly Varella and Elizabeth Knafo of Content Object.

For his careful handling of this book’s texts, we thank copyeditor Andrew Frisardi.

Finally, we thank the anonymous author of the “53 Facts About Heaven” list that inspired this exhibition’s theme.

This publication was printed in conjunction with the exhibition Here After.

BRIDGE PROJECTS

6820 Santa Monica Blvd Los Angeles, CA 90038 www.bridgeprojects.com ISBN 978-1-7336400-5-3 First Edition, Summer 2022 ©Bridge Projects All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without written permission from the publisher and the artists.

Editors— Cara Megan Lewis, Linnéa Gabriella Spransy Neuss, Vicki Phung Smith, and Meaghan K. Ritchey Book Design— Content Object Design Studio Copyeditor— Andrew Frisardi Color Separations— Echelon Color, Santa Monica This book was set in Bridge Projects Display (David Yun and Zak Klauck, Wax Studios), Domaine Text (Klim Foundry), Graphik (Commercial Type), and Ogg (Sharp Type), and printed on Magno Natural.

Printed by Verona Libri, Italy

ALBERTO AGUILAR FARKHONDEH AHMADZADEH LYNN ALDRICH AFRUZ AMIGHI ANDREA BÜTTNER JENI SPOTA C. MANDY CANO VILLALOBOS CLAIRE CURNEEN MERCEDES DORAME JAMES ELAINE MAJA LISA ENGELHARDT BELU-SIMION FAINARU AMIR H. FALLAH VANESSA GERMAN ALASTAIR GORDON DAVID WALLACE HASKINS BONITA HELMER GYUN HUR ZARAH HUSSAIN KATE INGOLD WILLIAM KURELEK OLGA LAH BETH LIPMAN GREG LOOKERSE REGINA MAMOU KRIS MARTIN TATSUO MIYAJIMA JORDAN NASSAR TUẤN ANDREW NGUYỄN MASTER SHEN-LONG STANLEY SPENCER LINNÉA GABRIELLA SPRANSY CHARWEI TSAI WILLIAM VILLALONGO PATTY WICKMAN JAMES WINES XU ZHEN ®