For something that the vast majority of people have never actually seen, the double helix of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) certainly has broad recognition. We find it on corporate logos, academic organizations, and in popular culture. It is, as art historian Martin Kemp writes in his forthcoming book Christ to Coke: How Image Becomes Icon, an icon of our times. As such it is an image of “terrific and enduring fame,” Kemp explained in a recent interview. Here on frequencies.ssrc.org, David Morgan offered another take. “[Icons] are special—they stand like mountaintops in a society, managing the flow of thought and feeling that constitutes the body of a culture.” Icons are symbols of tremendous weight, like the cross, the flag, or the wheel of dharma.

The double helix is certainly an icon, and a particularly apt one for today. It is, first and foremost, an icon of science. Since the eighteenth century, science has increasingly become the dominant means of relating to the world around us. It possesses power, authority, and conveys legitimacy onto everything it touches, as historian Daniel Patrick Thurs has written. We negotiate birth, disease, and death through science. We use science to sell products and decide policy—though we sometimes fight over whose science or which results to accept. While religious and non-scientific approaches to engaging the world exist, all such approaches butt against the pervasive explanatory power of science. The double helix emblazons this mantle of science.

The double helix icon sometimes also functions like another item of religious material culture, the talisman. Like the chamsa (Hand of Fatima), crucifix, or OM, the double helix is a marker of membership within a community: in this case, the community of science. Like any talisman the double helix conveys real power. Place a double helix on a product—perfume, for example—and it captures the legitimacy, authority, and cachet of science. Add the double helix to an article of clothing, and it marks the wearer as a priest—or at least a member of the congregation—in the church of science. The double helix as talisman transforms an object into an emblem of science, and with it all the qualities that we envision science as possessing, including the values of progress, truth, and empiricism.

The double helix, like other icons, inspires conflict as well as desire. This should not surprise us. People want to control, possess, and define the sacred. The double helix is no different. Competing companies use the icon to sell their products and convey the sense of authority that the double helix conveys. Proponents of everything from stem cell research to creationism have latched onto the image of the double helix. Secularist journals and Christian magazines all include illustrations of the double helix.

For nearly two years the Discovery Institute, known for its forceful advocacy for Intelligent Design and theistic alternatives to normative Western science, used a double helix as part of their logo. The Institute initially used as their logo an excerpt from Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel—the famous scene of God touching Adam—but from October 1999 to August 2001 they replaced Adam with the double helix. The double helix made a return to the Institute’s logo again in July 2004, but paired with da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. Why would an evangelical group like the Discovery Center not known for its endorsement of materialist science use this image? The science of genetics—one would think—offers particular threat to such Christians, since it represents the biological determinism and natural selection that they generally abhor.

The reason lies in the plasticity of the symbol. For the evangelicals who bear the double helix as their emblem, DNA represents an icon of order, and therefore what they consider evidence of intelligent design. No fixed meaning exists for icons like DNA. Unlike fossils or moon rocks, DNA is both omnipresent and cannot be directly observed. It is therefore more plastic as a symbol and can be deployed in nearly any circumstance. The double helix can represent Intelligent Design or evolution, scientific triumphalism or Christian resistance. It is a powerful symbol, but one whose multivalent power is neither stagnant nor fixed.

The double helix, with its multicolored nucleotides linking its two long strands, has taken on a reality beyond the illustrative one for which the symbol was intended. It has become more than merely an image. Since Watson and Crick first introduced it as a model of DNA, it has transformed in most people’s minds from an approximate model to an actual image, an imago biologica of the genetic code at the center of our biological lives. It is impossible to see it unmediated, but even with the aid of powerful microscopes DNA doesn’t look exactly like the double stranded molecule that we so often see in culture. Most people think it does. The signifier has become the signified. Chalk up some of this to scientific ignorance, but also to the fundamental way that icons and other images work. The same has happened with religious symbols as well. Warner Sallman’s famous painting Head of Christ has become for many American Christians the essentially true image of Jesus. (See David Morgan’s work for more on this.)

There is a term in religion for an image that really is what it represents: a murti. In the Hindu tradition a murti is not only an image of the divine, but the divine itself made manifest. Krishna, Shiva, Devi, or any other God manifests in the murti, and through ritual practice the image becomes that which it represents. Something similar has happened with the double helix. As a murti, the double helix of DNA functions as not only a symbol approximately representing our genetic code, but as a manifestation of those genes. When I asked students in my religious studies classes—a fair cross-section of students at the college—what DNA really looked like, they described the familiar multicolored ladder-shaped molecule. Like Sallman’s Head of Christ, Michelangelo’s work at the Sistine Chapel, and a myriad of other icons, the double helix has become a symbol as real as the idea that it represents.

When discussing religion, today it is quite common (perhaps cliché) to hear people say, “Well, I’m not religious, but I’m spiritual.” Even in churches it is not uncommon to hear something along the lines of, “I don’t believe in religion, but I believe in a relationship with God.” A favorite at the church of my youth was, “I’m not religious, but I love the Lord!” Numerous scholars and journalists have directed energies to analyzing this phenomenon. One of the more popular interpretations attributes the emphasis on personal spirituality to novelty in the contemporary historical moment. In this view, younger generations are seen to display an increasing skepticism towards organized religion, even as they embrace an ethic of personal choice in the face of a global cultural marketplace.

In contrast, others have persuasively linked this novel neoliberal spiritual impulse to a long tradition of religious liberalism. For instance, Leigh Schmidt has argued that liberalism, more generally, “was always as much a religious vision of emancipated souls as a political theory of individual rights… For religious liberals, unlike their secular cousins, a deepened and diversified spirituality was part of modernity’s promise.”

Alongside of the grand narrative of religious liberalism that has helped to produce the personal vision of spirituality so popular today, there is a vibrant tradition of African American cultural expression that has cultivated a similar concern with spirituality. In the poetry, prose, performances, visual culture and criticism that comprise this history, one can readily observe what might be called a grammar of spirit (i.e. spirit, spiritual, spirituality). That is, black artists and intellectuals—men and women, alike—have persistently engaged in spirit-talk.

Obviously, it is impossible to cover the entirety of this story of spirit-talk. So, perhaps it is most productive to center my gaze on the most chronicled moment in this longer narrative; namely, the apex of the New Negro movement, aka the Harlem Renaissance, in the 1920s.

Early accounts of the Harlem Renaissance have framed this moment as an aesthetic intervention in race politics; an attempt at “civil rights by copyright,” according to the historian David Levering Lewis. At the center of such efforts were leading civil rights organizations in the liberal tradition of interracial activism, like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the National Urban League. The artistic energies of the two organizations were guided by, amongst others, two now familiar figures: W.E.B Du Bois and Alaine Locke, respectively. Du Bois, the first African American to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard, worked closely with Jessie Redmon Fauset in editing the NAACP’s Crisis. Alain Locke, the first black Rhodes scholar, received his PhD in Philosophy from Harvard in 1918. He played a role similar to that of Dubois; but he did so for Charles S. Johnson at the Urban League, helping to edit Opportunity and oversee its literary competitions. While they represented competing aesthetic positions and institutional interests, together Dubois and Locke had a hand in the publishing careers of most of Harlem’s literati; including the likes of Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Claude McKay—the list goes on.

Perhaps appropriate to their educational pedigree, both Locke and Dubois cast their lots with science and reason. Still, even as men clearly on the side of “modernity,” much can be said of the import of religion to their aesthetic and political visions. One thinks of Herbert Aptheker’s collection, Prayers for Dark People, which includes a range of prayers written by Dubois over the course of his life. And there is Locke’s longstanding relationship with the American Bahai community, which included writing for its publications and advising its racial amity committees. More apropos for my purposes here is that both men also contributed much to what I have previously named as a grammar of spirit, especially as they theorized the aesthetics of the New Negro movement.

W.E.B. Dubois’ The Souls of Black Folk is the most celebrated book about the black life in the United States, as well as it is a foundational text of the field now identified as African-American Studies. It is increasingly becoming a classic for religious studies as well. With the term “soul” Dubois invites readers within “the veil,” into the inner-worlds of black communities at the turn of the twentieth century. Writing against the grain just after the triumph of legal segregation, he affirmed black humanity by asserting black interiority. A small signal of Dubois’ significance, “soul” has since become synonymous with blackness. However, he developed a grammar of “spirit” to interpret religion in the United States, and black contributions therein. In his less heralded book, The Gift of Black Folk, Dubois insisted that the gifts that “the Negro” brought to America were singularly spiritual.

Of course, from a 21st century lens this smacks of essentialism. That said, however, Dubois’ arguments also enable an alternate reading of the Harlem Renaissance, illuminating its certain spiritual grammar. At the start of the book’s final chapter, fittingly named “The Gift of the Spirit,” Dubois argues, “Above and beyond all that we have mentioned, perhaps least tangible but just as true, is the peculiar spiritual quality that the Negro has injected into American life and civilization.” (italics mine) There are so many layers of significance to unpeel in this short sentence alone. Indeed, Dubois begins this task in the remainder of the chapter.

Yet beyond the author’s arguments, Dubois’ particular take on “The Gift of the Spirit” points to a spiritual grammar displayed by Alain Locke and others who sought to interpret the New Negro. Also in 1925, Locke edited what has come to be known as the “bible” of the Harlem Renaissance, The New Negro. In both the foreword and first chapter of an anthology that totaled almost five hundred pages, he framed the entire enterprise as spiritual. Spirit-talk pervades these pages. Attesting to both its great vigor and vacuity, in places this spiritual grammar appeals to Africa, taking inspiration from the “ancestral arts” of Ivory Coast, Congo and elsewhere. Other instances reveal an indebtedness to the rhetorics of German Romanticism. In this latter view, spirit-talk seems to evince a hedging of bets that the New Negro was evidence of a new racial zeitgeist. If nothing else, for Alain Locke the best of both worlds—Africa and Europe—were apparent in Harlem. This was the very spirit of the New Negro. “Harlem isn’t typical, but it is prophetic,” he insisted. Yet Locke’s arguments were more about race than geography. Harlem was but a key epicenter for the New Negro movement, a cultural, political and racial project that at its theoretical core was spiritual—it was about the forging of “a new race-spirit.” The final paragraph of Locke’s “Foreword” captured this best, “Negro life is not only establishing new contacts and founding new centers, it is finding a new soul. There is a fresh spiritual and cultural focusing… There is a renewed race-spirit that consciously and proudly sets itself apart.”

To return to where I began this brief essay, in conclusion, is to remember that the categories of religion and spirituality are never mutually exclusive. Rather they are porous, mutually informing, and often co-constitutive of one another. That is, many church-goers embrace spiritual grammars, and many “spiritual, but not religious” folks have formed their own institutions. This familiar fluidity—between church and spirit—was also present at the launching of the Harlem Renaissance, in a special issue of Survey Graphic on Harlem, which Alain Locke edited in 1925. Much of this periodical became the core of his larger, definitive anthology. However, in a piece that would not be included in The New Negro, George Haynes most directly addressed the church/spirit fault-line with his article, “The Church and the Negro Spirit.” Haynes was the first African American to receive a PhD from Columbia University, a founding member of the National Urban League, a longtime Presbyterian layperson, and a key contributor to the Federal Council of Churches’ race relations work. Fittingly, Haynes turned his gaze to Harlem’s churches to interpret the Negro Renaissance. In his view, churches did not constrain, censor or compromise the aspirations of New Negro aesthetes. Rather, he proffered, “The Negro churches of Harlem are visible evidence of an aspiring people to express the best of life within them.” Reading Haynes alongside Dubois and Locke allows for recognition of the place of churches in a standing, and expanding, aesthetic history. That is, in parlors, poetry readings, and political rallies, and in pulpits and pews, one could espy the spirit of the New Negro. At the same time, one was also privy to gifts of the spirit on display in racial aesthetics. As Haynes put it, each of these entities are, “channels of their spiritual life blood.”

Interviewer: Is this just a fun fair prank, or is there something more serious going on here?”

Tino Sehgal: Seriously, I don’t know. I think you’d have to make like a survey or something like that. One of the reasons there are many people here today, sorry to disappoint you, is that it is President’s Weekend. But people have been coming. I think that people like to be addressed. I think that visual art, or the museum in general, has been a social segregator, as people like Pierre Bourdieu have pointed out. And it’s difficult to understand—these codes of painting or something. And so somebody just addressing you and saying what do you think, giving you that kind of recognition, saying, always implying that you are important, what you think is important—I think that is relieving to people in such a secular temple like this one.

The Tino Sehgal installation at the Guggenheim closed on 10 March 2010, and many of the interpreters were at a bar on Third Avenue. Drinking had been going on in earnest since the beginning but as usual I had not joined in. My ready made excuse was my son Solomon. He needed to go home. Despite his participation in the installation he was only 11, and couldn’t yet be expected to take the crosstown bus home in the dark alone, much less to join the adult interpreters at a bar. So instead I was sitting on my couch searching the Internet for commentary on the piece. Over the last few months, I’d found multiple written descriptions of Sehgal’s “This Progress.” All described its simple conceit and structure; most also admitted that describing the installation failed to capture what had made it compelling—or repelling. “Something” was happening, at least some of the time, when people talked with each other in intimate groups on the ramps of the Guggenheim Museum. But what was it, exactly? Why was it so difficult to describe? During the six weeks that I had been walking and talking with strangers on the ramps of the Guggenheim I had given quite a lot of thought to the problems of conveying what was happening in the piece. Clearly I was not the only one who was caught up by the problem of giving words to what happened. To give words to the words that had been spoken. How do you do that? But it still perplexed me. Why did I—and and so many others—seem to lack a language to describe what happened without sounding pretentious or pathetic, or lapsing into mystical tones.

Several weeks into the installation I had stopped taking notes after each one of the interactions I had with strangers. Reading them over each night, I’d decided that keeping track of words or topics was not that interesting. By then I’d accepted that although the piece was about words, it really wasn’t about what we said. But on the last day I decided it was time to make notes again, just in case I changed my mind. After all, there was no other documentation that I’d be able to access in the future. So, with opportunity slipping away, I jotted notes after talking with strangers about eminent domain, death and regeneration, positive thinking, Japanese Buddhist temples, archaeology, British anarchy, representational democracy. These were longer conversations than those earlier in the show, mostly because Tino and Asad slowed us down as we walked up the ramps. Their subtle, silent hand semaphores directed the interpreters to stop, slow down, but keep talking—to wait in other words until an older interpreter could position herself at the far side of the small opening between a wall and the edge of the ramp.

Many of the interpreters had noted with irony that the busier the museum, the more interest in the show, the slower the piece, the fewer who could participate.

With an hour left before the installation closed for good, I passed through the keyhole doorway into the Guggenheim’s reading room. Tino was Skyping on a laptop. The laptop was perched on the top of his son’s stroller. It was the only clean surface in what had become the dark, smelly womb of the piece for all the adult interpreters. Amid the empty coffee cups and stale sandwiches and jars of dried fruit and nuts emerged a site of conversations about careers and kids and travel and literature and yoga that continued over days. The inverse of the ramps, the negative space of “This Progress.” It had to be talk, but talk of a different kind. For some, this talk was nourishing. Some wondered if the real progress of Sehgal’s concept was taking place in this dirty smelly room. We were the real art. Our conversation was the real conceit.

On the laptop, I could see a well-dressed woman standing in an office. Behind her, a man in a well-cut suit sat at another desk, typing—the cut of his suit and the office furniture suggested that they were beaming in from some European cosmopole. She was doing something that looked like a jumping jack. Then Tino made a similar motion. I sat down next to Dave, who asked Maureen—an interpreter who had been in several of Tino’s projects—what piece they were doing. “Is it ‘This is So Contemporary?'” Maureen didn’t hear Dave—or at least she didn’t look up from her iPhone. She didn’t even pay attention to Tino’s gyrations. Dave shrugged in the silence. I offered, with a tone of authority, “Oh no, ‘This is So Contemporary’ is not jumping jacks—it’s swinging arms.” “Oh yeah?” Dave said, impressed. I shook my head and admitted that I didn’t really know at all. Maybe it was something new. There being no video or authoritative documented written description of any of Tino’s pieces, we had no idea what they were doing. Maybe they were only calisthenics. Dave and I laughed, tired and punchy. Anna walked in and announced to no one in particular that the performers of “Kiss” (Tino’s kinetic sculpture on view in the atrium) were high for this last shift. Ecstasy. Dave and I laughed some more, and went out to watch. Tino kept jumping.

A few hours later, not drinking, sitting on the couch by myself, I wondered if I could find a video of “This is So Contemporary” on the web. I brazenly typed Tino’s name into the Youtube search box. It would be a futile act, I knew, and I was right. Tino’s agent had assiduously kept every video and image of every one of his works from the web. Part of the agreement of buying his work or having it “on loan” was that it would not be documented with video, camera, blueprint, written word, or even written contract: when a museum bought a Tino Sehgal, the agreements were oral. The money, of course, was real. This was a source of unending fascination. Everyone seemed to have something to say about it. And then, early in the run of “This Progress” the New York Times ran an ebullient review of the show and included a photograph of Tino’s “Kiss.” That day, Tino stayed off the ramps. He commandeered the tiny reading desk in the reading room and called and texted and typed all the powers to strike the photograph from the record. That day, the mood in the womb was hushed, worried. We realized we didn’t know Tino that well.

On the evening of March 10, while everyone was out drinking and celebrating, and I was looking for “This is So Contemporary” I discovered that someone had posted a video of “This Progress.” I clicked with excitement knowing I could only watch it a few times before it disappeared. I watched it over and over. Little edges of sadness that had nagged at the edge of my consciousness on many days at the Guggenheim started to take firmer shape as I watched. Ah, how intimately familiar the pace of the hand-held camera, taking in the calm ballet of not-quite colliding bodies moving up the ramps, first past the opening to the permanent collection on the second floor, past the reading room, past the cut opening in the wall, past the planter on the fourth floor, up and up to the seventh floor, where the sun streamed in brilliantly through Frank Lloyd Wright’s magisterial clear glass ceiling. The glass ceiling that made the interior of the Guggenheim so unusually, unexpectedly bright and glowing—and which would be covered up the night after Tino’s show closed. But ah—how intimately familiar the inflections of the transient conversations caught on tape, especially the repetition of that lifting of tone, the one that that marks less a question than a query, a hope for a response that takes you somewhere.

In the weeks before the exhibit opened, while the interpreters were still practicing our moves, Tino gathered us in the reading room and told us what we were doing. Museums were places that addressed people, but that demanded no speaking back. Much like our over-mediated society, he said, the speech and thought of citizens, much like art observers, was not expected or required. Tino was worried about these mute public spaces, and wanted museums to be more participatory. I listened, with skepticism, even though just an hour before I had also taken note of the dull tired trudge of the people walking up the ramps, carrying their winter coats, barely pausing to look at the Kandinskys. It was a very expensive stroll up a ramp, I thought to myself, if one did not even bother to pause and look at the things. Even after this, I remained skeptical of Tino’s vision. Yes, there were codes of painting. But there were also codes of conversation. Weren’t we merely replacing one set of codes with another? After all, the interpreters were never asked to practice what we said. We had been chosen because we knew how to do our job already.

Our task in the piece was to interrupt an ongoing conversation by interjecting a new starting point, talking with that stranger for a few minutes as we walked, and then surreptitiously slip away from this second conversation before it had properly ended. We disappeared through a doorway and ran down two sets of stairs, to begin the loop again. Everything in the rotunda of the Guggenheim is designed: the patches in the floor and the signage are both intentional and unique. Painters come every morning to cover the last day’s smudges. By contrast the stairs that we disappeared into were undistinguished and indistinguishable. They could be anywhere, an afterthought. It was in that space, between the floors and between conversations, where I would scribble notes, and where I would on occasion feel a nagging sadness competing with my skepticism. Neither feeling could last long, however: out in the rotunda I was easily distracted by the light pouring in through the skylight and all the chatter.

After the first busy weekend, on a Wednesday afternoon I was walking down those nondescript stairs and met Asad, Tino’s friend who had originally convinced me to sign up, over a conversation about trains and focus groups and Adorno and strangers. Asad mentioned that a mutual friend had been to visit the piece earlier in the day. Had he liked it? I asked. Asad said that he had, adding that it was “probably for the best” that our friend had decided not to be an interpreter after all. I knew immediately what Asad meant by this, and felt the sting of my skepticism resonate strongly. “That’s not fair, he’s a very nice man,” I responded quickly. Thinking of my friend, his penchant for verbal pugilism, his overt impatience with chatter that merely rehearses the well-grooved paths that pass as thinking, that sting felt sharper. Why was I so patient with the people I met? So patient with their awful, boring comments? What would happen if I were to say to a museum visitor, “you really know nothing about that, you know…” Who were these people, all those people in the museum, in the subway, in the focus group, in the train, with whom we can talk without feeling discomfort? Or without feeling much of anything at all?

In the room the women come and go/ Talking of Michelangelo.

Not everything is without feeling. Wealthy women pushing strollers or carrying Prada bags know exactly how to push the buttons of an unidentified college professor of similar age. As do graying European travelers who refused to believe that interpreters were more than actors, and could opine on law, Freud, Seneca.

And then, late on a Saturday I ask a couple from Brooklyn if they have ever been to Ocean Grove, New Jersey, the Methodist town where leisure was meant to be holy, even godly: no alcohol, just church and waves. I ask them, have you ever thought about how in our society leisure is supposed to be uplifting in some way? We’re to derive some edification from it? They look at me curiously, and with some pity. What I have said seems like a joke to them. The man offers, no, it has never occurred to him. That’s not anything they’ve ever encountered, she adds. I say to the woman, well I think about it; my children’s school says they are not supposed to watch more than an hour of television or videogames a day, that there are other things to do. The man laughs. Really? They say that? The mother has a daughter, and she says to him that she has, indeed, heard the teachers say that. “They say no more than two hours a day.” She then turns to me, “But she does play more hours a day than that, especially in the winter. It’s cold and dark—and I don’t want her to go out and play when it is just boys in the streets. In Brooklyn, the boys play outside, the girls stay in.” Her husband is still shaking his head, thinking about this school rule. He is Dominican, he offers. “I didn’t grow up with these things, where I grew up, we didn’t have TV. So I just let her do what she wants—I don’t know the rules.” I offer that I grew up in the countryside, and we just ran around and did whatever we wanted all the time. Out and running around, no adult supervision. The husband is suddenly interested again. “Ah, that’s how I grew up. No one telling me what to do all the time, pestering. I think about my daughter, she’s always inside, always her mother and me and her brothers around.” I ask, “Do you think a lot about the differences in your growing up?” We are coming near the pass through. As I slip away I hear him answering with a note of worry, “I think how different she is growing up, from me. I think about it all the time.”

The video on YouTube is looping again. Now, I’m a bit teary, wishing I could go back to see the empty rotunda with the open glass ceiling one more time, or maybe find that Dominican couple. On the video, the layered voices of organ and soprano have kept me from reading the credits, but now I do—the video is by Lars Vilks. The name is familiar, but I can’t place it. I Google. Vilks, Swedish, is an artist who drew cartoons representing the Prophet Muhammad as a dog. These cartoons had led to a murderous plot against Vilks by a group that included a suburban Philadelphian woman nicknamed Jihad Jane, who was indicted in federal court on 9 March 2010. Jihad Jane’s brother, interviewed in the newspapers, said that he was as surprised as anybody that she was wrapped up in such business. For all he knew, she was “just like anyone else.” As probably was Vilks at the Guggenheim: just one more tall, gray artist/Swede/European, talking about this or that.

It was a strange feeling, looking at the video a last time, finding my pleasure tied up now with the disgust I felt toward Vilks. He had a thing for giving images to things that insisted on no images. Why? What was the irritant about the lack of image—secular or religious—that made him pursue it madly, destructively? If I had met Vilks on the ramps I could not have asked him that question directly. That was one of the rules. Instead, I was to ask a sideways question, like one of these: Do you know that the Amish think that a photograph takes a part of your soul? Do you think conversations have images? How do we remember things that we don’t have images for? Why does English have so few words to describe the way things taste? Does viewing a movie of your trip to Disneyland change the trip itself, or only the memory of it?

After hundreds of meaningless conversations prompted by questions like these, the desire for a question that gets closer to the bone—that does not operate on the level of our politeness, which runs so deep that we can consider every option, that displays our knowledge, that provides positions that we can inhabit–only intensifies. Maybe one of those sideways questions could hit the mark. But how would we know if it had, with so much else unresolved? The secular temple will not offer up its mysteries so readily, the skylight is closed. The procedures of “This Progress” create the sense of this desire but they cannot slake it. There must be more than this. There should be more options than these. But before we can ask the question we are on our way to another conversation. We are so contemporary.

Tino Sehgal says:

I think that now, in the twenty-first century, I feel like the question ‘what is progress’ is up for grabs again, because it’s not sustainable, this current model, it’s not going to be able to run forever. And now … in the west, we’ve satisfied so many material needs—on the costs of others, but we’ve satisfied them—and now more immaterial needs come. And we’re not going to satisfy those immaterial wants from material artifacts. And that’s where people like me are proposing a return to a more interpersonal, to a focus on interpersonal rather than a focus on transforming the earth.

So listen closely to how easily we move from subject to subject, how untraceable we expect these movements to be, how prepared we are for a lack of continuity between them, and how resigned we are to the claim that we do not need a trace, a line, a touch. How resigned we are—or strangely and wrongly hopeful—that we might be better off without whatever it is that transforms the earth, that leaves a trace, or can be held within our hand.

Sanctifying those who govern, harnessing official religion for state ends, inspiring the people, channeling their dreams—even in modernity angels adorn public structures and monuments, whether in victory pillars, war memorials, or paintings of the apotheosis or heavenly ascension of great leaders. The Apotheosis of Pittsburgh, by the then-renowned American artist John White Alexander, is a series of 48 murals, all painted by Alexander between 1905 and 1915, in the grand staircase of the Carnegie Institute (now the Carnegie Art Museum) in Pittsburgh, a cultural haven sponsored by industrialist Andrew Carnegie, dedicated in 1895. Alexander died in 1915, leaving his enormous mural cycle unfinished. The paintings tell and glorify the story of the building of Pittsburgh through the kinds of industries that Carnegie ran and that made him wealthy enough to found institutions for the people devoted to culture and the arts. In the 2nd-story painting known also as The Crowning of Pittsburgh, a knight in black armor floats heavenward, to the sounding of trumpets, about to be crowned with a wreath by angels, the man who made all this bounding development possible, the hero. The knight is meant to be a virile personification of the city of steel and looks quite similar to the Institute’s benefactor, Andrew Carnegie.

Detail from The Apotheosis of Pittsburgh courtesy of Lee Sandstead

Alexander meant his monumental artistic feat to instill in viewers a historical yet mythological narrative that made American industrial capitalism a manner of fulfilling God’s purpose. I came across images of Alexander’s angels while researching a forthcoming book on angels and modernity. As with so many modern angels, I find these riveting. Despite the supposedly anti-metaphysical bent of modernity, the art of public spaces continues to aspire to shape people’s spiritual dreams. Hence one explanation for the continued ubiquity of angels.

Around the ascending knight/Carnegie, around across some of the walls of this enormous “grand staircase” flits a bevy of gorgeous angels, slim, vanilla pure and elongated, an art-nouveau-like chorus line, adoring fans, coming forward with gifts. Their garb resembles fancy evening dresses, their faces and expressions not un-innocent. A few of the winged beauties in the foreground—therefore the largest, most prominent, also highlighted because unlike others they wear colored outfits—are topless, their breasts detailed in a way rather risqué for the angelological tradition. This makes an interesting choice for Alexander, whose many portraits of (human) women, though dwelling attentively on femininity and sensual detail, never depict anything immodest. The figures in The Apotheosis of Pittsburgh are not technically angels. Because the painting hails from a classical genre (apotheosis), they are actually winged genies from classical mythology, not Judeo-Christian angels. The different winged beings from different cultures have a history of coming together and interbreeding, however. Most of the artistically-aspiring viewers of Alexander’s paintings would have understandably seen these winged females as angels. The rising black knight, the modernity of all of the scenes of the building of Pittsburgh serve to Christianize the cycle and essentially make these attractive fairies into angels.

Detail from The Apotheosis of Pittsburgh courtesy of Lee Sandstead

By the time Alexander won this assignment he was an accomplished and internationally admired artist, sought after as a portraitist. An orphan, his artistic life had begun in the Illustrations Department of Harper’s Brothers, publishers of Harper’s, and turned into an American dream. With only this brief experience, and a bit of saved money, he set out for artistic training on a European tour, joined up with continental artists, and remained throughout his life intensely active and successful in painting’s institutional world, becoming an ardent missionary for and defender of American painting. Friend of modernists as varied as Auguste Rodin, Stéphane Mallarmé, Oscar Wilde, and Henry James, considered a great American painter like Edwin Abbey, John Singer Sargent, and James Whistler, from 1909 until his death in 1915 he presided over the U.S. National Academy of Design. As an artist, Alexander came to favor Beaux-Arts, art for art’s sake and the ornamental; fluid lines and soft colors, yet sober; naturalism, but idealized. Rarely did he abandon realism in his depictions.

Born in Allegheny City in 1856, later absorbed into Pittsburgh, a sense of local patriotism likely moved Alexander when engaged in the Apotheosis murals. His own American rags-to-respectability and financial security paralleled that of steel-built Pittsburgh and the nation as a whole, each a fulfillment of the promise of America, it’s manifest destiny, built on grit and faith, at least in the telling of works of art like this. Industrial progress and economic growth is the civil religion Alexander lauds in his imperial-sized painting cycle. By the time he received the Carnegie commission he had painted some official monumental art, such as panels for the Congressional Library in Washington, DC, and had been invited to paint a series celebrating Pennsylvania history for the State Capitol in Harrisburg.

Some monomaniacal drive leads an artist to attempt, much less execute, a work consisting of tens of gigantic paintings. (The original commission conceived of 69 individual works.) The grandiose scale of the physical effort, not to mention the work itself, mirrors the life of the sponsoring institution’s founder and funder, Andrew Carnegie, who made his vast wealth as a canny and ruthless industrialist. Carnegie first laid out his doctrine of social Darwinism and redemptive philanthropy in an 1889 article entitled simply and aptly, “Wealth,” later published in 1900 as part of his book The Gospel of Wealth. Cultural centers such as the Carnegie Institute were to serve as the temples of the new social gospel that sought to improve the lives and souls of the laboring masses. Behind Carnegie and Alexander stands the all-consuming drive toward power, control, reputation and empire critiqued in Melville’s contemporary tragic anti-hero Ahab.

In an update on an age-old motíf, Alexander’s self-exposing and gift-bearing angels comprise the (male) hero’s true gift, his reward for performing well, like a man, for leading heroically. Labor entails one of the main themes of Alexander’s Apotheosis murals—he called the whole cycle “The Crowning of Labor”—and a noticeable gender division distinguishes the masculine exertions that built the city from the heavenly compensation of feminine charms bestowed on the male hero(s). The lower level of murals portray the city’s working classes, a theme that was rare at the time, their lives and labor romanticized for art patrons’ consumption, though Alexander’s depiction of “the laboring male body as physically vigorous and autonomous” obscured “the extent to which mechanization had degraded the role of the skilled worker to that of machine operator.” Here panels named “Fire” and “Toil,” the foundation of Pittsburgh and of Alexander’s paintings, evoke materialism as emerging from hellish conditions. The top level, unfinished when Alexander died, was to show the masses closing in on their goal: culture and the arts, achieved by means of the wealth produced by industry. In between, smoke rises from all the industry, forming into clouds on which flit the jarringly erotic angels as well as the knight in black armor floating heavenward. The knight, personification of Pittsburgh, makes Andrew Carnegie, a robber-baron of the utmost wealth, a self-made public intellectual and quasi-celebrity, into the protector and patron of the people he believed himself to be. Sarah Moore reads the depiction of Carnegie—“aloof and sanguine”—as a reflection of his “practice of absentee corporate capitalism” that featured “[i]ncreased mechanization, a transfer of workplace control from skilled workers to management, and a hiring boom for unskilled and semi-skilled labor” and “a rigid hierarchical line of control.”

Moore considers Alexander’s use of medieval tropes—knighthood, chivalry, and one could add the apotheosis theme itself—as part and parcel of the era’s anxious reaction to the power and wonder but also the dislocations of advancing technology, industry and science, modernity. In different ways spiritualized Christianity both resisted and sanctified technology and science. The angels stand in relation to industry in the paintings much in the way Alexander’s own artistic pursuit of beauty was described after his death by John Agar President of the National Arts Club: “We have had little time in this country to devote to the production of beauty or to the study of its forms. We have had to devise and develop a political government, conquer a wilderness, fashion the commerce and industry of a throbbing nation in a vast continent. Our best minds have been too much occupied with these immediate works to find time for the larger spiritual endeavor.” Like Alexander, Agar genders beauty and spiritual endeavors as feminine, ancillary and supplementary to the more primary masculine work of conquest and building.

As was common in European modernism at the time, Alexander’s bevy of angels represent pure feminine beauty, as well as spiritual beauty; beauty as spirit/mind, spirit/mind as beauty. It should be noted that Alexander apparently initiated an evening class for women at the National Academy of Design. He also co-authored an article in 1910 that, typical for the times, warned against the increasing masculinization of women and effeminacy of men. Perhaps he intended his (unprecedented for him) breast-baring women to remind viewers of the femininity that was proper for women. The beauty and sensuality of Alexander’s angels—certainly manifesting “the vitality of a young and vigorous race” of the figures in his painting in general–the quiet seductiveness of the color and lighting aim to heighten the viewer’s response, and thus double the libidinal energies that must be invested in the heroic accumulation of wealth, the wealth that permits the flourishing of society and great art, which lauds the wealth that made it possible. Sarah Moore says that the winged spirits represent “the arts, music, literature, science, and poetry.” Masculine lust for achievement is rewarded through pleasure in/of the feminine. Viewers could be forgiven for confusion about the carnal rewards seemingly implied by these seemingly Christian angels.

The urge toward beauty that is said to motivate biological reproduction Alexander harnesses to invigorate the cultural reproduction of citizens who believe that they should aspire to Enlightenment/spiritual notions of self-fulfillment: autonomy, reasonableness, civility, refinement. Such citizens are to believe, like Alexander, that the ability to achieve personal wealth unencumbered is justified (in the theological sense), even if by means of crushing, within the limits of the law or beyond, the human aspirations to livelihood, health, and autonomy of others. In this telling, the desire that feeds robber-baron industrial capitalism stems from great (divinely-ordained) desire, great both quantitatively and qualitatively. Beauty, art and culture, properly channeled forms of desire, can improve and redeem the working classes—only Carnegie’s knight gets the heavenly girls, as it were—whose working conditions have been eroded through Carnegie’s and other robber-baron union-busting tactics, can erase or compensate for the harms caused in the very process of producing civilization. Paid for by the libidinal hero, high art intends to sublimate, to spiritualize the libidinal hero and his achievements, the latter beneficently (sycophantically, really) equated to the achievements of the people. On the one hand, suggest Alexander’s topless “angels,” perhaps the joke is on high art. The visual metaphor of spirit subverts itself, leaving only carnal figures, the very sign that, despite art’s intentions, best generates the kind of urges capitalism needs in order to succeed. On the other hand, high art, domesticated by patronage, gets to play its joke as well. After all, it has already been well paid. For our part, we continue to take in (to be taken in by?) art’s mythification of the manufactured toils and travails of the working masses, its mythification of our own worlds. We continue to be shaped by painted angels, larger than life, intended to shape us.

[A historical figure or obsolete god rises from the dead.]

What a world. Look at it.
Has something changed? I mean
really. Did I say us I meant it. The best
in my day are long gone. Me,
I’m starting to show my age
but I hope I seemed a fine
specimen of a leader. My kind
of power was a good session
at the table, two if I was lucky.
Public words, here and there,
as good as secrets. The best
could hold anything to anyone.
That was power. That was an art.
Weren’t they the artists? What other
kind were there? Hiding in caves, bringing
us happiness, releasing
us from suffering every day
after day after day.