D
anto has appropriated, he says, the term “transfiguration” for forging his notion of the transfiguration of the commonplace, his use of “liturgical language is a façon de parler”(Danto 2012, 309).But talk of the transfiguration is hardly liturgical, but rather biblical. But what is the role of transfiguration in Danto’s theory of art and what does it mean? Let me begin with a quote from his seminal essay “The Artworld”
(1964). Is the world full of “latent artworks waiting, like the bread and wine of reality, to be transfigured, through some dark mystery, into the indiscernible flesh and blood of the sacrament?”, he asks (Danto, 1964, 580–
1). His point is that the original, ordinary Brillo box, which was designed
by the abstract expressionist painter commercial artist James Harvey as a container for soap pads has a “transfigured” and all but indiscernible counterpart, Warhol’s Brillo Box, which is a work of art, a transfigured Brillo box. In The Transfiguration of the Commonplace and later writings Danto explicitly refers to the biblical narrative of Jesus’ transfiguration as a model for artistic transfiguration.
It is, however, abundantly clear that “transfiguration” in the biblical narrative means a change in visible appearance, it is not a question of two perceptually indiscernible persons. Jesus of Nazareth and the Christ is the same person whose face and clothes underwent a perceptible change, referred to as “the transfiguration” in St. Matthew and St. Mark.
In the gospel of St. Matthew it says that Jesus’ “face shone like the sun, and his clothes became white as the light”(Matt. 17: 2–3), similarly in Mark 9:3 his clothes became “dazzling white”, and St. Luke writes that “the appearance of his face changed and his clothes became dazzling white”
(Luke 9: 29–30). Danto refers explicitly to this passage in St. Luke as a narration of “the original transfiguration” (Danto 1981, vi), although the term “transfigured” occurs only in St. Matthew and St. Mark. The Latin in the first two places has “transfiguratus est”, and the Greek “metemorfothe”, from “metamorfoo”, to transform. The Oxford English Dictionary lists under “transfiguration”, “[t]he action of transfiguring or state of being transfigured; metamorphosis” and “[t]he change in the appearance of Jesus Christ on the mountain”; “Transfiguration” refers more generally to a change in the outward appearance of something as well as the Church festival commemorating the transfiguration of Christ. Similarly the general meaning of the verb “to transfigure” is to change or transform the outer appearance of something. The biblical as well as the non-biblical figurative use of the notion of transfiguration does not imply a fundamental change in the nature or the substance of something; it does not suggest a change in ontological status. What the biblical narrative suggests is that the three privileged disciples, Peter, James and John, received, as it were, a visual confirmation of Jesus’ divinity, in particular since a voice from high proclaimed him to be his Son (Matt. 17:5 , Mark 9:8, Luke 9:35). According to common Christian belief Christ’s transfiguration is a confirmation of his
divinity, the “dazzling brightness which emanated from His whole Body was produced by an interior shining of His Divinity”, as one theologian puts it (Meistermann 1912). According to orthodox Christianity Jesus was the Son of God, the Second Person in the Trinity, from the beginning of time, quite apart from the transfiguration. Whereas transfiguration is in a sense accidental and instantaneous, transubstantiation is not: “Thus from the concept of Transubstantiation is excluded every sort of merely accidental conversion, whether it be purely natural (e.g. the metamorphosis of insects) or supernatural (e.g. the Transfiguration of Christ on Mount Tabor)” (Pohle 1909).
If one believes that the notion of transfiguration provides an apt analogy for the change in ontological status between an ordinary everyday object and its perceptually indiscernible artistic counterpart, one should note the following disanalogies. Even if an ordinary object acquires, by being taken up in the artworld, new contextual and relational properties, e.g. being a certain kind of work of art, making a statement, referring to something, being about something, being commented on by art critics, being seen as witty or provocative, giving rise to debates about the definition of art, there is no change in its perceptual properties (Davies 1991, 66–69). And that, of course, is the starting point for Danto’s analysis. Transfiguration in Danto’s analysis does not affect the perceivable properties of the objects in question, but by transforming their ontological status they acquire properties their untransfigured counterparts lack. For Danto it is a question of ontological change, not of “transfiguration”, taken in its biblical and ordinary sense.
Now, it might be said that the notion of transfiguration can be used in new untraditional ways, but that is not the case with Danto since he explicitly refers to, and relies on the biblical notion of transfiguration. Danto’s talk of
“the transfiguration of the commonplace” is not just misleading, as Christel Fricke and Steinar Mathisen have pointed out (Fricke and Mathisen 2008
& 2010), it is based on a rather elementary confusion between the biblical notion of transfiguration and the theological concept of transubstantiation.
In The Transfiguration of the Commonplace Danto claims that to learn that something is a work of art “means that it has qualities to attend to which its untransfigured counterpart lacks”, consequently our responses will
be different; “this is not institutional, it is ontological”, he claims as if transfiguration could affect the ontological status of something (Danto 1981, 99).
Danto’s confusion about transfiguration and his conflation of the notion of transfiguration with transubstantiation is apparent already in his essay
“The Artworld”, as can be seen from the passage already quoted (Danto 1964, 580–1). What happens in the sacrament of the Eucharist (the Last Supper) according to Catholic theology is that “by the consecration of the bread and wine there takes place a change of the whole substance of the bread into the substance of the body of Christ our Lord and of the whole substance of the wine into the substance of his blood. This change the holy Catholic Church has fittingly and properly called transubstantiation”
(Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 1376). Now the appearance of the wafer that becomes the hostia and thus the body of Christ and the appearance of the wine that becomes the blood of Christ through transubstantiation does not change, there is no change in their visible properties, in other words, they are not transfigured.
The transubtantiated elements of the sacrament have, of course, as do Danto’s “transfigured” works of art, other properties than their untran-substantiated and “untransfigured” counterparts. That transubstantiation has occurred cannot be perceived by the senses, it is, to use Danto’s phrase about the art status of an everyday “transfigured” object — “something the eye cannot decry” (Danto 1964, 580), or, as Thomas Aquinas puts it regarding the Eucharist: “That in this sacrament are the true Body of Christ and his true Blood” is something “that cannot be apprehended by the senses”, it can be apprehended “only by faith, which relies on divine authority” (Aquinas, Summa theologica, III, 75, 1). Perhaps the recognition of an everyday object as a work of art does not require faith, but belief in Dantoesque transfiguration; one critic has, however, argued that Danto needs a leap of faith in his approach to art, a mysterious “transfiguration”
for his theory to work (Rougé 2013, 296). Be that as it may, Danto’s view requires us to accept that artistic theory and artistic interpretation have transfiguring powers in turning ordinary objects into works of art (Danto 1986, 44). Yet, in transfiguration something remains the same in essence
but not in appearance and in transubstantiation something remains the same in appearance but not in essence. The metaphor of transfiguration in regard to art is thus an infelicitous and misleading metaphor.
In After the End of Art (1997) Danto claims that it is characteristic of pop art as such that it transfigures “emblems from popular culture into high art”, Warhol “transfigured” according to Danto Marilyn Monroe
“into an icon” (Danto 1997, 128). There may be some truth in this if we take “transfigured” in the second, and wholly figurative sense listed in the Oxford English Dictionary. “To transfigure” in a figurative sense means
“[t]o elevate, glorify, idealize, spiritualize”. Warhol’s silkscreen paintings of Marilyn Monroe have a certain lustre that the original photograph they are based on lack, she is thus glorified or idealized, elevated into an icon. Warhol’s Brillo Boxes, however, are not transfigured in this sense. That would have been the case had he painted the Brillo Boxes in fluorescent colours, or in brighter colours than the original colours of the commercial Brillo boxes, but he didn’t. The commercial Brillo boxes and Warhol’s art boxes look (almost) the same, whereas the photograph of Marilyn Monroe is markedly different from Warhol’s triptych. In any case, transfigurativeness is for Danto a fundamental characteristic of pop art. He then goes on to explain what transfiguration means; it is a religious concept, he says, it means “the adoration of the ordinary, as, in its original appearance, in the Gospel of Saint Matthew it meant adoring a man as a god” (Danto 1997, 128–9). This is actually one of the very few places where Danto explains what he means by “transfiguration”
— according to the index this is even a definition of transfiguration.
Many things have gone wrong here. In the first place, the notion of transfiguration is above all a biblical one, not a common religious notion;
what is more serious, the biblical notion of transfiguration has nothing to do with adoration of the ordinary, in fact, it has nothing to do with adoration at all. The three disciples present at the transfiguration on the mount did not adore “a man as a god”, they didn’t adore anybody at all;
according to the biblical narrative they were in fact terrified during the transfiguration (Matt. 17: 6–7). It is, however, true that they later adored Jesus as the Christ, that is, as the Son of God; from a secular and
non-Christian point of view one may of course say that they actually adored a man as a god, but adoring Jesus as the Christ, or, adoring the man Jesus of Nazareth as a god has nothing to do with the transfiguration. Danto has commented on Raphael’s Transfiguration on several occasions (Danto 1964, 573; Danto, 2003, 89; Danto 2013b, 164; Danto, 2013d, 254). A closer look at that painting might have put Danto on the right track, for in the Transfiguration it is there for everybody to see — at least if one knows the biblical narrative of the transfiguration — that Christ is represented as having been temporarily transfigured. Biblical transfiguration is transient whereas Dantoesque transfiguration is permanent; also in this respect transubstantiation shows more affinities with the conversion of ordinary things into artworks, although transubstantiation is not an altogether felicitous metaphor, as I shall argue below (section VI).