Transgressive Devotion: Theology as Performance Art

By Natalie Wigg-Stevenson

Academic theology is in need of a new genre.

In "Transgressive Devotion" Natalie Wigg-Stevenson articulates a theological vision of that genre as performance art. She argues that theology done as performance art stops trying to describe who God is, and starts trying to make God appear.

Recognising that the act of studying theology or practicing ministry is always a performance, where the boundaries between what we see, feel, experience and learn are not just blurred but potentially invisible, Wigg-Stevenson brings together ethnographic theological fieldwork, historical and contemporary Christian theological traditions, and performance artworks themselves.

A daring vision of theology which will energise anybody feeling ‘boxed in’ by the discipline, Transgressive Devotion blurs borders between orthodoxy, heterodoxy and heresy to reveal how the very act of doing theology makes God and humanity vulnerable to each other. This is theology which is a liturgy of Divine incantation. In other words: this is theology which is also prayer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: SCM Press
• Release date: Feb 26, 2021
• ISBN: 9780334059493

Natalie Wigg-Stevenson

Natalie Wigg-Stevenson teaches Theology and directs the Contextual Education Program at Emmanuel College, Toronto. Her research focus is on how ethnographic methods help create theological conversations across church, academy and everyday life. She is the author of "Ethnographic Theology: An Inquiry Into the Production of Theological Knowledge". She is the co-chair of the 'ecclesial practices' group at AAR.

Book preview

Transgressive Devotion

Transgressive Devotion

Theology as Performance Art

Natalie Wigg-Stevenson

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© Natalie Wigg-Stevenson 2021

Published in 2021 by SCM Press

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For Tyler, the one whose flesh bears the truth my soul needs to know

… ruin in me that which is opposed to ruin

Animo!

‘The very intention to write a science of the sacred has something of the sacrilegious about it, and the feeling of transgression … may incline those who risk performing it to increase the injuries which they must inevitably inflict (and self-inflict) by futile excesses – expressing not so much the desire to make the reader suffer (as one might have thought) as the temptation to twist the stick in the other direction, to overcome resistances.’

Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, p. 185.

Oh God, take these words and draw them into your heart. So that in chasing them down, we might find ourselves in you.

Contents

Introductory text

Opening

Disable

Father

Indecent

Spirit

Disfigure

Son

Broken

Church

Ecstasy

Salvation

Care

Humanity

Closing

Repeat. Rupture. Rearrange. Perform. Displace. Consolidate. Repeat. Etc.

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

Introductory text

A young woman dressed in a lightweight floral summer dress walks across the expansive concrete floor, simple black flats on her feet. She stops to stand beside a wooden chair, positioned opposite a second chair, identical to the first but for the addition of a cushion. A woman sits in this second chair. She is older than the first, regal in heavy, radiant white robes, her feet hidden under the voluminous folds of her dress. The young woman gazes at the older one. The older woman gazes at the floor.

The two are at the centre of a large, otherwise empty square space. Hundreds of people watch them, but no one crosses the taped line on the floor that marks the borders of what’s happening. Josephine Decker – the young woman’s name, we later learn – lifts her dress up over her head, exposing her naked body beneath. Standing in only those simple black flats. Large uniformed men rush across the tape to drag Josephine away. The second woman continues staring at the floor.

In the spring season of 2010, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City (MoMA) held a retrospective of performance artist Marina Abramović’s life’s work. The title work of the exhibit, The Artist is Present, was both the only original performance and the only one in which the artist herself appeared. Patrons waited in line for hours to sit in the chair opposite her, but once they were in the chair they could sit for as long as they wanted. After, participants frequently described their experience in spiritual, even quasi-religious terms. Numerous YouTube videos reveal them weeping, smiling and flirting in response to Abramović’s mostly vacant gaze. Performer and participants both ascribe a type of mystical participatory interrelationality to the work, imagining it to transcend any typical gallery experience.

Participatory and interrelational to a point, that is. One must wonder what threat Decker’s nudity posed to Abramović’s work when in an adjacent room the artist’s own acolytes – sanctioned, of course, by the artist and the gallery – wandered around naked for another performance. Abramović’s earlier works invited participants to participate however they wanted, even allowing them to inflict bodily harm on the artist. But the celebrity that had grown around her since those more innocent days – she played a version of herself in Sex and the City; she had a recent collaboration with Jay-Z – meant that while The Artist [may be] Present, that presence required protection. Apparently from the naked female form. Something that adorns the walls of even the stuffiest galleries.

Rules, it seems, aren’t made to be broken. Systems can be threatened most by the arrival of something vulnerable.

Opening

In the spring of 2010, when Marina Abramović performed The Artist Is Present, I was elbows-deep into an ethnographic theological project, alternating daily between fine-tuning the fieldwork methods and writing up the copious fieldnotes. During MoMA’s opening hours each day, Abramović sat in her chair – for a grand total of 736 hours and 30 minutes – silently engaging whoever occupied the chair in front of her. I sat each day at my desk, reading and rereading the theory informing my research methods and painstakingly transcribing recorded interviews. The only thing connecting Abramović and me was the small window in the upper right corner of my computer screen. There I kept MoMA’s livestream of the performance running, seeking inspiration for my own task at hand.

While I did not realize it at the time, this quasi-voyeuristic companionship had begun to reconstruct my theological imagination. Because that is what art does or, at least, it is one important thing that art can do. Art does more than just represent reality to us. Art has the power to reorganize the very structures by which we perceive that reality. Performance art, perhaps more than any other art genre, not only asks us to step into the space where this re-organization takes place, but also to roll up our sleeves and join in with the labour.

Deeper than revealing something to me about the Divine, then, as Abramović sat in that chair making herself vulnerable to ever expanding circles of witness, The Artist is Present helped me to refashion how I experience that revelation.

It’s true that I was at a bit of a crossroads at the time. I had been performing a number of theologically-inflected roles in my own life – ordained minister, academic theologian and everyday Christian – that were coming to feel increasingly incoherent. Each one sang in the chorus that made up my theological voice, but I was damned if I could get them to sing the same song, let alone do it in harmony. Conventional wisdom kept telling me to reach for that coherence. Conventional wisdom kept demanding that I find a way to be authentic – perhaps one of the least interrogated values of our time. Conventional wisdom kept suggesting that I stop performing and just be.

We perform so many roles in life, though, that what if trying to be the same person across each and every one of them actually hindered, rather than helped, our capacities to be transformed by God? Of course, the language of performance comes with all the baggage of inauthenticity. If I’m performing a role, then I’m not really me. I’m simply playing around. And yet, playing roles is such an important way in which we make and remake our selves. By extension, role-play might also be one of the ways in which God makes and remakes us too.

This process of making and remaking is perhaps easiest to see with children who use role-play to develop their sense of self. Role-play, and play in general, is how children learn, how they organize the world around them and how they come to recognize themselves in that world as they construct it. Their play can be transgressive. By taking on different roles they push on the borders of what’s acceptable in order to figure out their own way. But their play is life-building, not frivolous. Their role-play is not fake, but an extension and thus ongoing creation of who they are. Imaginary friends are sometimes just as real as those of flesh and blood.

One of the lesser-considered paradoxes of the adult Christian life is that we must put off childish things while at the same time approach Christ as a child. Serious play, performative play, provides us this opportunity. As adults we need to rediscover this self- and world-constituting power of role-play, to let go of what we think we know, of who we think we are, so that something new can emerge. So that God can do a new thing in us. We might need to sit with the discomfort that all the roles we play cannot be neatly integrated, but that by playing them in and out of sync, with and against the grain, our performances might be the very processes by which we are transformed into the image of God.

Making and breaking character

The first role I was playing – that of minister – had been officially inaugurated a few years before, when I was ordained by my congregation at that time, First Baptist Church, Nashville (FBC). The feminist, liberationist, queer and other theological commitments I had developed throughout my theological education as I pursued the second role – that of academic theologian – should have already exiled me from more conservative church life. And those commitments had certainly begun to expose misalignments within me. But it’s also the case that I had enough social privilege to be able to choose when I did and did not want to reveal that more radical version of myself. And for a while, at least, I could justify keeping parts of that self hidden if I framed my internal struggle as a by-product of a vocation to build bridges across difference.

So when I felt the call to ministry, I didn’t have to run away from home to answer it. I had been playing the third key role that shapes my theological imagination – that of simply being a Christian – since my early teens. I knew that my capacity to hear the still, small voice of vocation had been shaped by my early faith formation in charismatic evangelicalism. No matter how far other versions of myself had strayed from that particular faith, it was and still is the faith in my bones, too deep within me to be amputated.

My desire to find a way to integrate these three roles was why, in large part, I chose my own congregation as the site for my ethnographic fieldwork. Combining ministry in a conservative congregation with my more progressive academic theological inquiry could allow the two to mutually constitute each other. I hoped that doing so might help me integrate these two often competing roles within my own faith life as well. For a while, that hope found fruition.

At the same time, this work required that I explore an increasingly complex configuration of roles and relations at the church. This burgeoning complexity began to challenge my sense that fieldwork should be used as a source for theological reflection and construction. It seemed we were doing something different to that.

So, as I sat in my chair watching Abramović sit in hers, I began to let my imagination run wild. Abramović was performing an embodied, relational engagement with those who had gathered to participate in the artwork with her. She set the stage and defined some parameters but, within reason (and sometimes too strictly, as was the case perhaps with Josephine Decker), shared her power to define what the artwork could be with those gathered in ways that made them all vulnerable to each other.

This performance wasn’t purely conceptual, representing some image or idea in an artistic way. Neither did it seek to represent the gathered to themselves. The people were not a source for her art. Rather, their collaboration – via mutual transformation – was what actually made the art. We should not overly romanticize this transformative aspect, of course. Sometimes Abramović and others get a bit carried away when they describe the intensity of the shared experience in ‘quasi-religious’, uncritical, spiritual terms.¹ Art, like theology, can suffer from idealism. Nevertheless, something powerful was taking place within that gallery space, something I could feel through my computer screen miles away.

This was the kind of energy I wanted to generate with my ministry-based fieldwork, something much more embodied and collaborative, disruptive and transformative even, than collecting data as a source for theological reflection would allow. My ministry role at FBC was exercised primarily through adult theological education and, given that the classes I taught already employed mutual teaching and learning, it seemed that they could provide a space for theological collaboration. So I began to teach a very atypical kind of Sunday night course to a group of about 25 adult participants in our church basement.

Over the course of two ‘semesters’, we did two ‘Topics in Theology’ classes: one on ‘Jesus Christ and Salvation’ and the other on ‘God as Trinity’. Drawing figures explicitly from my doctoral qualifying exams, we studied Scripture (primarily the gospels), early church figures (drawing on Justin Martyr, Arius, Athanasius and Augustine), the Medieval period (Anselm, Abelard, Beatrice of Nazareth and Marguerite Porete), the Reformation (Luther and Calvin), Modernity (Descartes, Pascal, Kant, Hegel, Schleiermacher), and twentieth-century theology (Jürgen Moltmann, James Cone and Elizabeth Johnson).

While there were no assigned readings for this class, our group would sometimes read together short passages from various theologians’ writings. More often, though, I simply summarized the core questions that animated any given figure’s theological pursuits. This approach failed to capture a particular theologian’s whole corpus, of course. But it did allow us to press quickly to the heart of their context in order to feel that same heartbeat in us.

As became clear through our engagement with these historical figures, many – if not most – hung in the background of our own religious experience. They all contributed to our shared theological imaginary, creating an affective structure that resonated from their time to ours.² Even though most of the class members didn’t explicitly know these historical theologies, they nevertheless could feel their impact in their current beliefs and practices.

This meant that most times, when I unpacked what one of the theologians had argued, the class members could feel some family resemblance with it. This is how the theological traditions stay alive within us. The present is always hybrid, containing the pulse of the past inside it.³ As literary theorist Elizabeth Freeman argues, an approach to history (and, we might add, historical theology) that ‘sees the body as method’ recognizes that ‘historical materials can be precipitated by particular bodily dispositions.’⁴ Our flesh bears history, she writes, such that it can ‘elicit bodily responses … that are themselves a form of understanding’.⁵ This is why the ethnographic narratives in these pages are so crucial. They gather bodies that bear witness to all the ways that faith is carried in our bones.

As I sat at my computer that year, allowing Abramović to distract and inspire me in equal measure, I was less than a year away from defending my dissertation, and – unbeknownst to me in that moment – less than a year away from moving to Toronto to begin my first real academic job. I was in the midst of a number of positive life changes. I was beginning to feel as if I had finally figured things out, as if I was making good progress on the integrative path I still desired.

But, of course, I wasn’t as integrated as I thought. I had really only found one way to arrange the pieces that would work – until it, too, didn’t. And what I was failing to see in that moment was just how much ministry and academic theology had become the primary stages upon which I was performing my Christian identity, upon which I was performing my faith.

I’m still not sure if it was the already years-long experience with infertility that my husband and I were experiencing at that time, or the repeated waves of my undiagnosed mental health concerns that were crashing their way towards the tsunami of full-blown mental illness, but the more I came to professionalize my Christian faith, the more that faith seemed to sever itself from who I was as a human being. Ministry and academia should have provided scripts that could direct my ways in times of trouble. But as time marched on, and with no progress in sight, they mostly seemed to make things worse.

And then one day I woke up and realized that I no longer believed in God. It’s not that I became what is colloquially named an atheist. The concept of atheism is far too reactionary to, and therefore parasitic upon, ‘belief in God’s existence’ as the primary paradigm for defining a life of faith. And in the aftermath of that morning, I wasn’t thinking about belief. I was thinking about hope, the most desiring of all the theological virtues. Or better, I wasn’t so much thinking about hope as I was reaching towards it.

I hoped that those old stories, those old doctrines, those old Scriptures could still become true in some way. I yearned for the fragile conditions in which my desire for God might be illumined by the presence of hope’s Spirit. It is hope that endures all things as we wait, hope that shapes our yearning. What I perceived as losing my belief in God was something else entirely. It was a negation of my knowledge of God. Not a negation of what I knew but rather a negation of my knowing. It was an invitation to stop searching and, instead, be found.

I perform these scripts of doubt and hope so often that I now hardly need to consult my lines. Internalized to my flesh, a simple gesture – a downturned gaze, a hand on my hip – can set off their improvisation. Over time, they too have become the affective structures of my ways of being. I think I’ve arranged the pieces of myself in the right order. Then, like dry leaves, they are scattered by the wind. For a moment I’ll cohere, become transparent to myself, only to fragment to pieces again. Anything approaching authenticity appears only in the realization that I’m not the person I thought I was.

It’s taken multiple versions of breaking apart to get me to give up these tyrannies of order, coherence and authenticity. I don’t want to be disordered, incoherent and fake. Almost no one does. And yet the God who I long to proclaim doesn’t work with the straightforwardness I crave.

Making and breaking theology

The systematic frame of the book’s chapters might seem like an odd choice for structuring theology done in a performative mode. The former gold standard of academic theology is frequently – and often rightly – accused of being too detached from everyday life. Over-abstracting from the lived reality of those whom Jesus loves, its detractors argue, systematic theology can only produce dogmatic proclamations that are irrelevant and cold. Systems can too easily embody and perpetuate a status quo that becomes hegemonic, inherently oppressing those living at society’s margins. Moreover, in the light of the growing awareness – even in theological circles – that all knowledge is contingent and fallible, any attempt to ward off error through the contrivance of an internally coherent structure seems, to many, to be naïve.

All these concerns are valid and important. In fact, as I came to share them in my own academic training, they led me towards practical theology in the search for a new scholarly home-base. Practical theology felt ideal because it articulates critical theological norms that both derive from and return to concrete practice in order to reform it. The ways in which it functions via a complex hermeneutical circle, tacking back and forth between practice and theory, seemed – counterintuitively – to reify that binary, however. I didn’t want to interpret reality. I wanted to transform it. Seeking something in theology that didn’t divide out first and second order reflective processes, then, I next turned my sights on constructive theological approaches. These were particularly attractive because of their unapologetic orientation towards justice.

Constructive theology critically deconstructs the normative subject of theology (e.g., white, heterosexual, cis-male, able-bodied, etc.) to highlight dynamics of identity and difference. In so doing it re-configures doctrine in ways that can attend to the diversity of God’s creation. I certainly wanted to ally myself with this camp, but also found that these approaches tended to generalize their experiential categories in order to make their doctrinal point. Constructive theologies didn’t, at that time, bring the ethnographic rigour that practical theologians deployed to their theological constructions. So for a while I found my home trying to pair ethnography with constructive theology. But from this place I all too often longed for the play that the structures of a robust systematic frame could generate.

Worrying about the minutiae of different academic theological approaches probably seems like a waste of time to anyone outside of academia. It probably all looks like ivory tower rambling that has little bearing on everyday life. What matters here, though, is that each approach really does want to learn from and contribute to the life of faith. Their key differences, in fact, tend to grow out of the ways in which each frames that relationship differently. Each one thus contains insights for how to practise Christian faith at the unfurling intersection of its present, past and future.

The hyper-fragmentation and proliferation of academic theological sub-disciplines belies the fact that each one needs the goods of the others. But the solution here is not to try to integrate them back into a single discipline. Disciplinary fragmentation and incoherence do not necessarily make for inauthentic theology. Even if they did, it’s not clear that something we could call ‘authentic theology’ would be preferable either. The question, ‘authentic to what?’ could too forcefully bind theology to The Christian Tradition in ways that made it contextually irrelevant. Or the same question could over-commit theology to a programme of relevance that too quickly trades the gifts of particularity for a rampant relativism. Fragmentation and incoherence might, once again, not be such a bad thing after all.

The problems articulated