Antihumanism, Christian Humanism, and Contemporary Art: A Meditation on the Artworks of Andrea Büttner

Abstract

The histories of twentieth‐ and twenty‐first‐century art have been deeply shaped by structuralist and poststructuralist critical theories that have often been rigorously antihumanist. These theories have been adept at diagnosing malformations in the ways humanist discourse operates in the arts, and they have been highly generative in foregrounding how structural systems (social, linguistic, psychoanalytic, formal, etc.) shape the making and criticism of art. However, scholars are increasingly drawing attention to the ways these antihumanisms also generate blind spots and contradictions in contemporary art discourse, especially pertaining to love, joy, kindness, attachment, human dignity, moral responsibility, political solidarity, and religious experience. Part of the problem is that the “humanism” to which the antihumanist turn reacted is itself reductively conceived in the discipline of art history, centered on detheologized readings of the European Renaissance that prioritize universal rationality, individualism, possessiveness, and technical mastery. Caught between ill‐rendered humanisms and inadequate antihumanisms, many contemporary artists and scholars of art are reengaging religion for alternative resources. After briefly clarifying these dynamics in contemporary art history, this article turns to an extended engagement with the works of German artist Andrea Büttner, which provide particularly fruitful sites for rethinking the play of humanism and antihumanism in contemporary art. Büttner's works repeatedly interact with Christian imageries, monastic communities, and Franciscan and Carmelite theologies of poverty and littleness, subtly retracing the (im)possibilities of love of neighbor in ways centered on open‐handedness, renunciation, and care.