In the Sacred Relic Room in Topkapi Palace, a former imperial residence and present-day museum of the Ottoman period in Istanbul, Turkey, visitors will find relics of the Prophet Muhammad. Among them there is a sword and a few strands of the Prophet’s hair. The devotional practices that surround these relics, concerned quite literally with the spirit of God and thus appropriately termed “spiritual,” are not expressly political. Nonetheless, the public veneration of such baraka (spiritual power)-charged relics challenges laicist traditions in Turkey, whether secularist or Islamist (both of which espouse a version of “rational Islam”). These practices remind us that spirituality is not simply a “private” or domesticated form of religion, but rather a form of devotion that always takes place within broader—and, in the modern context, public—fields of debate about the nature of religion.

Despite the relics’ nearly continuous 550-year residence in Topkapi Palace, we can profitably distinguish between the early years and the later years of their exhibitionist career. Having arrived in Istanbul via Ottoman expansion into Egypt and the Hijaz in the early sixteenth century, the possession of these objects informed the force of the sultan’s claims to authority over the entire Muslim community. They were material evidence of what God’s revelation to humanity through Muhammad made possible for believers in this life and in this world. They point to a physical man (illustrated through his hair), Muhammad, who enjoyed incredible success in nurturing, protecting (at times through his sword), and expanding a community in the service of God. The incredible growth of the Ottoman Empire in the space of a century suggests that the sultan may not have been unjustified in seeing a connection.

Today, safely ensconced in a glass case that sits in a state heritage site (itself a relic of the past), the Prophet’s relics reflect the attempted domestication of Islam in the service of a nationalist project to create and maintain the Turkish nation that can be distinguished from the Ottoman period at all costs. Despite being embalmed in a museum, however, these relics continue to function as something more than data in nationalist historiography. However much the Turkish state continues to regulate what it means to be a Muslim, the authorities cannot contain the surplus value of the Prophet’s relics. Thus we find people using a seemingly secular institution for devotional purposes, much like one finds in the Hagia Sofia, another contested state exhibition space in Istanbul.

On my own visit to Topkapi Palace, just after I entered the relic room, a large group of Turkish visitors soon followed—what seemed to be a class outing of some kind. In the midst of the clatter of young kids liberated from the classroom, I felt myself being elbowed aside by a small elderly woman. Clearly, I was not the first. A Frommer’s review of the palace warns visitors: “It’s impossible to rush through the palace, so you should allot at least a half-day and be prepared to encounter a few bottlenecks throughout the enclosed exhibition halls, especially in the Holy Relics Room where the ardent faithful, in their religious fervor, tend to obstruct the display cases.” The momentary displeasure I felt as a tourist gave way to a slight embarrassment as a non-believer: this woman, I presume, actually wanted to be close to the relics because their power was real, no matter how purposefully prosaic the setting.

As a character in Turkey’s nationalist rendering of history, the entombment of the Prophet’s sword is perhaps too obvious a prop to offer much analytic insight. Tamed by the Turkish assembly’s abolishment of the Caliphate in 1924, Islam is no longer a politico-military force with which modern societies must reckon. The Prophet’s hair is another story.

Hair, as in any other matter containing DNA, contains the breath (ruḥ) or spirit of God. Surat al-sajda, verse 9 (Sura 32, or “Prostration”), which details God’s creative capacities, reads: “and then He forms him [human] in accordance what he is meant to be, and breathes into him his spirit: and [thus…] He endows you with hearing, and sight, and feelings as well as minds: yet how seldom are you grateful!” The modern Arabic term for spirituality (and I stress the historical novelty of the term in Arabic) is al-ruḥiya, and derives from the same root as breath (r-waw-ḥ). The phrasing of verse 9 in the original Arabic is instructive: God “inflates” him (human) from His breath [min ruḥihi]. The spirit of God inhabits every nook and cranny of creation, not least every cell of the human body. Spirituality, then, though a novel term, captures a devotional emphasis that focuses attention on the enduring presence of God on earth as manifest in humanity itself.

Much to the chagrin of distinctly modern reformist perspectives across the Muslim community—a category that admits to a range of visions, from secularist to Islamist—practices focusing on the baraka of relics of one kind or another function as an important element of the devotional life of many Muslims. From the last quarter of the nineteenth century, reformists have identified such “irrational” practices as bearing much responsibility for the “backward” state of the Muslim community. Mustafa Kamal Ataturk banned Sufi orders in 1925 for two reasons: One, Sufi orders provided too great a non-state institutional space for the expression of opposition to elements of his modernization project; and two, authority within Sufi orders flowed from the baraka of sheikhs (living and past), which for Ataturk smacked too much of superstition to be welcome in the modern world. It is no coincidence that Ataturk created museums in some of the buildings formerly occupied by Mevlevi orders of dervish fame.

Over time, the Turkish state has softened its stance on Sufism. Orders are now legal but regulated. The Mevelvi whirling dervishes are one of Turkey’s most beloved exports, performing in front of audiences the world over. Nonetheless, the “religious fervor” of the “ardent faithful” in the Sacred Relic Room in Topkapi Palace suggests that, no matter the regulatory regime in place, domesticating the spirit of God lies somewhat outside of state power and authority.

For those who recognize the reality of saints’ intercession with God on humanity’s behalf, the relic room is a shrine, not to the Turkish nation or state, but to God’s presence on earth as manifest in a very special human being. The active devotional life that unfolds in a space meant to perform a break with “pre-modern” kinds of authority raises significant questions about what constitutes public religiosity. The elderly woman who elbowed me out of the way did not do so in order to make a statement about a fundamental relationship between religion and state (an absurd proposition given my memory of the situation). Nonetheless, the presence of spirit-infused relics in a public institution marks a seemingly “politically neutral” devotional practice as necessarily political. In its very effort to domesticate Islam the laicist Turkish state created a new space for (and thus a new kind of) public “spiritual” devotion that challenges common accounts of the meanings of public religiosity in Muslim-majority contexts.

Artist Richard Prince (b. 1949) is at once an observer, purveyor, and critic of an American spirituality shaped through promiscuous borrowings from the everyday world. Prince is best known for his technique of “rephotography,” a formal descendant of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades in which the artist takes pictures of pre-existing photographs. In these and other works, Prince mimics and critiques the spirituality of his context, employing a range of appropriation strategies in order to recycle, reshape, re-contextualize, and re-purpose the flotsam and fragments of American life: advertisements, car parts, cartoons, dime-store novels, and even other people’s jokes. As critic Nancy Spector has remarked, Prince’s art is thus “stolen but original, ironic but sincere, illusory but real,” something that might be said of the “spiritual America” he invokes.

Among Prince’s most recognizable images are his re-photographs of iconic cowboys against the great American landscape portrayed in the famous Marlboro cigarette ad campaign. By appropriating and recontextualizing these images, Prince reveals that the quintessence of “authentic” American machismo is as constructed as the advertisements themselves. In fact, as Spector has illuminated, the “founding myth of the sanctity of individual freedom” is itself a commodity, a spiritual ideal packaged and sold to consumers. This incarnation of American spirit is thus a product, in every sense of the term, of what David Loy has called the “religion of the market” and its auxiliary consumerist-entertainment complex. Any “pure” American spirituality, in other words, is always already contaminated, polluted, impure; it is an admixture of patriotism, capitalism, and popular culture.

The wild bricolage of desires, dreams, and sentiments that characterizes Prince’s notion of American spirituality ranges from the familiar to the outrageous. In seeking to disclose the full amplitude of this spirituality, and to expose the contradictions therein, Prince not only de-familiarizes the banal—advertising images and the like—but also elevates the obscene to critical visibility.

Shot at the outset of the American “culture wars” of the Eighties, Prince’s most famous and controversial re-photograph carries the title “Spiritual America.” This name itself is an appropriation; it was first attached to a 1923 photograph by Alfred Steiglitz that excerpted the harnessed hindquarters of a gelded horse. Steiglitz saw his photo as a “bitterly ironic critique of the American puritanical ethos.” Prince’s “Spiritual America” is an appropriation of Garry Gross’s lascivious photo of a nude, ten-year-old Brooke Shields. The all-American girl stands in a deep bathtub, with thick, almost seminal, steam swirling at her feet. Her face is heavily made up, and her body, glistening with oil, is turned to highlight at once the curves of her buttocks and her pre-pubescent chest. Shields’s face, as critic Michael Newman describes it, captures the contradictory nature of American spiritual values and longings, showing “both the fearfulness of the child and the total control of the temptress.”

That Prince saw his work in a religious register befitting this strange spirituality is clear. In 1983, he arranged an entire exhibition under the title “Spiritual America” in a gallery by the same name. Here the re-photograph of Gross’s image of Shields “hung alone—shrinelike—in a cheap gold frame beneath a diminutive picture light at the end of an otherwise unlit, or dimly lit, narrow room with exposed brick walls.” Newman develops this comparison, suggesting that “gallery meets church” in the exhibition of “Spiritual America.” Prince, he says, “could be making a critical point here at the expense of art-lovers: we go to worship at a gallery or museum and that constitutes us as a certain kind of passive spectator…. It’s an image which panders to the fantasy that the object is complicit with the viewer’s desire to see.”

Prince’s gesture, however, is leveled not only at “art-lovers,” but at an American spiritual tendency more broadly, at the American proclivity for privately reveling in what it loudly condemns. In fact, “Spiritual America” met with controversy and confusion for its spectacular sexualization of a minor, soliciting at once desiring gazes and outraged condemnation. And this was just the point. In Prince’s hands, the pedophiliac image provided a way of unlocking the paradoxical nature of this country’s collective spiritual disposition. If, as Newman suggests, there is a “religious power” to Prince’s photo, it has to do in part with its function as an icon of American spirituality and a corresponding contradictory moralism. Engaging the gaze of the viewer in a manner at once complicitous and critical, the piece thus exceeds what Walter Benjamin called the modern artwork’s “exhibition value” and partakes of the “cult value” of religious art. At once ironic and iconic, Prince’s work illuminates a spiritual America that takes pleasure in conjuring what it condemns, loathing what it longs for.

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.