Quodlibetica

In case you have not yet noticed, angels are all the rage. Long gone are the days of Wim Wenders’ gloomy, alienated voyeurs stalking unsuspecting Berliners in Wings of Desire (1987). The angels of counter-culture, most famously Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (1993), have gone mainstream: think of Emma Thompson’s imposing, majestic, luminous angel crashing through the roof and descending on a helpless Prior in the HBO-mini series based on Kushner’s Pulitzer-prize-winning play (2003). And remember Tilda Swinton’s scheming, androgynous, and gloriously corrupt Gabriel, a performance that single-handedly made Constantine (2005), an otherwise forgettable horror flick, worth watching? Whether sentimental or spiritual, biblical or apocryphal, popular or religious, campy or pious, angels fascinate: they provide a delectable crutch for making the afterlife seem bearable.

Last month, Anne Rice, prolific creator of pulp fiction, launched her latest business venture, a series of novels starring not Rice’s signature vampires but, you may have guessed, angelsProxy-Connection: keep-alive
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Coinciding with the release of the first title of the series, Angel Time, “Calling All Angels,” a show in Minneapolis’ form + content gallery featuring Camille Gage, Anders Nilsen, and David Asher Everett, opened in early November and presents three distinct takes on the angel phenomenon.

What happens, then, when popular culture’s angel fad meets fine art’s more serious, reflective engagement with angels? Is it even possible to invoke such a charged, over-used figure whose metaphorical potential has been stretched to the limit (and beyond) without running considerable risk? Probably not.  But art without risk is like life without adventure: you cannot help but wonder what the point is.

Two of the artists in the show engage with the idea of angels in a way that acknowledges popular culture’s impact on the originally religious figure: no longer confined to the spiritual realm, their angels have entered the vernacular, for better or for worse. Particularly enjoyable for their tongue-in-cheek irreverence: Anders Nilsen’s angels.

Safe and sound in the realm of make-believe, naked angels pick the pockets of sleeping beauties in bucolic whimsy. In Nilsen’s work,  St. Jerome’s lion did eat the donkey rather than innocently suffer the blame for the theft of his beloved asinine companion. The angel Gabriel appears as well, alongside Wolverine and Batman: cast out of heaven, the three lie next to an impact crater, looking like so much debris of divine wrath. Nilsen’s Gabriel is a creature of popular culture, not biblical provenance: the pathetic wing stumps have no precedent in scripture or apocryphal writing—but in the fate of Tilda Swinton’s Gabriel, which, in turn, is a spin-off from Vertigo’s Hellblazer comics. Recycled and transformed in the cauldron of pop culture, the mighty messenger angel becomes part of Nilsen’s angel camp, which, far from inviting sentimentality, portrays angels as the mythical creatures they are.

But Nilsen also engages with the idea of angels in a more serious, critical way: Two Angels shows one angel wearing the infamous orange overalls of Guantanamo detainees, the other a military uniform, facing each other in the clouds. Dating from 2004, Two Angels is the oldest of Nilsen’s works on display and brims with political questions: is death a great equalizer? Regardless of which religious faith they may or may not have adhered to while alive, do the former foes find each other again amidst the clouds, equally angelic in afterlife? Did they both die for noble causes, even if those causes and ideals were diametrically opposed in life? Or is this an image of redemption, of the falsely accused meeting up with the executor of orders that were not to be questioned? We don’t know, and Nilsen does not tell us.

A similar open-endedness appears in David Asher Everett’s Angels for Our Times: Without a trace of ethereal elegance, these hefty contemporary angels come with a distinctive military air. Although specifically designated for our times, their rusty, weathered look seems very much at odds with the sleek, high-tech look of postmodern warfare. Picturing them in flight brings to mind roaring engines and fumes, not sophisticated anti-radar-detection devices or majestic soaring. War is still dirty, Everett’s angels remind us. War still costs lives.

The military joined the angel bandwagon early on. Since 1946 the flight demonstration squadron has been called  the “Blue Angels.” Popular with audiences of all ages, as the official website assures visitors, the Blue Angels promote the fun and games angle of military prowess. Everett’s angels, though toy-sized, do not invite a similarly light-hearted take on angels.

The diminutive size of Angels for Our Times precludes fantasies of mastery. Cast from Barbie and Ken dolls, Everett’s angels are re-made in the image of popular culture’s fantasies of femininity and masculinity, respectively. Rather than stop at questioning the gender of war, a question that has been raised by such luminaries as Virginia Woolf and Susan Sontag, Everett’s sculptures hint at the instability of other, more overtly martial ideals, such as heroism, patriotism, valor and might. Far from innocent, popular culture plays a significant part in shaping and propagating these ideals. But the dead, even if we imagine their angelic successors as looking like Ken and Barbie, are still dead. Defunct toys, earthbound angels—perhaps these ideals have outlived their usefulness. (Does this implied suggestion make Everett’s work preachy, as Gregory Scott suggests? I’d call it laconic.)

While both Everett’s and Nilsen’s angels reference popular culture and acknowledge the fact that the winged messengers have gone viral, Gage’s work claims a different sort of cultural space. Other than the pop-song-inspired title of the show, there is nothing in Gage’s work that undermines the reverence for the mystique of the angelic.

Four small-scale oil paintings, in pairs of two, flank the centerpiece of the show: an ethereal white robe, mostly covered in white feathers, suspended kimono-style, and lit to evocative perfection. Larger than life, the luminous robe resonates as a garment of magical transformation, a luxurious burial shroud fit for elegantly angelic attire. The paintings resemble an equally classical material: the thick layers of oil in pale pink interspersed with traces of greenish hues resemble nothing so much as marble, prized by sculptors for its uncanny  ability to suggest skin and flesh. A double transformation, then: oil ossified into quasi-stone, with feathery fossils seemingly embedded in its layers, suggesting flesh and skin, slightly moldy, with age.

Gage’s angels are disembodied, poetically transformed into an absence, present only by feathery trace. The eponymous piece, a beautiful old typewriter, whose clacking keys and rings invite nostalgia for a pre-computer era, does not break with the overall elegance of Gage’s work but allows for less ethereal and more embodied engagement: Calling All Angels calls on visitors to participate by typing the names of their private angels onto a translucent paper scroll that slowly ascends—if not to heaven, then at least to the ceiling of the gallery.

Despite the gesture of interactivity, the work keeps its distance. It feels like a private ritual in the making—but not one the visitor is necessarily invited to join, despite the fun of typing and listening to the soundtrack Gage composed for the occasion. (Most notable lyric: “Please don’t ask about angels.”) This elegant remove results in a sort of sterililty, which is accompanied  by a sense of déjà vu: a white shroud, beautifully lit, in the back of the gallery? Small-scale oil paintings, thickly layered and cautiously colored, with traces of an organic presence? An interactive component that asks visitors for sharing their words? Gage’s 2008 show, “The Presence of Loss,” incorporated all of these elements. Here, we encounter them again, in altered form, still driven by the idea of loss, the play of absence and presence, the ritual of transformation.

Ritual is repetitive. Art’s relationship with ritual is ancient. For years, those disenchanted with the cold intellectualism attributed to much of conceptual art have called for the “re-enchantment” of art. (Consider, for instance, Suzi Gablik’s The Reenchantment of Art). Gage is in good company.

But what disrupts the enchantment with the angelic in this case is the undeniable presence of pop culture’s secular substitutions next to the ritual practices of old. After all the creatively distorted and deviant angels popular culture has generated, does it really work to reclaim them, seemingly untarnished, in all seriousness and sincerity? Can their vernacular halo just be ignored? Ultimately, what “Calling All Angels”—and I take that to mean the spiritual and popular ones—asks us to consider is another relationship altogether: that between fine art and popular culture, the seemingly endless circulation of signs, and the impossibility of autonomous meaning.

Postscript: Got a favorite angel? Tell us! Movies, books, TV, art—let us know where you have found your favorite angel.

Images

1) Camille Gage, Calling All Angels.

2) Anders Nilsen, Batman, Wolverine, and St. Gabriel

3) Anders Nilsen, Angel Pickpockets 1 and 2

4) Anders Nilsen, Adam, Eve, and St. Jerome’s Lion

5) David Asher Everett, Angels for Our Times

6) Camille Gage, (Robe for Judith)

References

Suzi Gablik. The Reenchantment of Art. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1991.

Tony Kushner, Angels in America. New York : Theatre Communications Group, 2003.

Mike Nichols, dir. Angels in America. HBO, 2003.

Wim Wenders, dir. Wings of Desire. Road Movies Filmproduktion and Argos Films. 1987.

Francis Lawrence, dir. Constantine. Warner 2005.

Susan Sontag. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Picador, 2003.