On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art

James Elkins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135879709
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism

Can contemporary art say anything about spirituality? John Updike calls modern art "a religion assembled from the fragments of our daily life," but does that mean that contemporary art is spiritual? What might it mean to say that the art you make expresses your spiritual belief?

On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art explores the curious disconnection between spirituality and current art. This book will enable you to walk into a museum and talk about the spirituality that is or is not visible in the art you see.

Notes

Preface

1. Elkins, “From Bird-Goddesses to Jesus 2000: A Very, Very Brief History of Religion and Art,” Thresholds 25 (2002): 75–83, especially the section “Caroline Jones Responds,” ibid., 81–83.

The Words Religion and Art

1. It is hard to sound neutral in defining a part of life as large as religion; I do it reluctantly in order to get the argument going. I have tried, in this definition, to name just the features of religion that are at once universally agreedupon (my definition is adapted from several dictionary definitions) and pertinent to the themes in the book. I thank Frank Piatek and David Morgan for their responses to this issue.

2. Spirituality as I intend it here can also be linked to what the art historian David Morgan calls the “spiritualized response to art,” the search for innerlichkeit and innere Empfindung in art. Morgan traces this through Romanticism to Winckelmann’s reading of the Laocöon, which Morgan finds is infused with 18th-century “Pietist spirituality.” If I do not follow this genealogy here simply because it has become so diluted and pervasive that it would be difficult to distinguish interpretive agendas that effectively oppose it. I thank Morgan for sharing his unpublished manuscript “Toward a Modern Historiography of Art and Religion,” forthcoming in Reluctant Partners: Art and Religion in Dialogue, edited by Ena Giurescu Heller (New York: The Gallery at the American Bible Society, 2004).

3. Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, translated by Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).

A Very Brief History of Religion and Art

1. For a color photograph and brief discussion, see Vincenzo Nicola et al., The Christian Catacombs of Rome (Regensburg: Schnell und Steiner, 1999), 124–25; for background see Paul Finney, The Invisible God: The Earliest Christians on Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).

2. Andre Malraux, La Musée imaginaire de la sculpture mondiale (Paris Gallimard, 1952–54).

3. Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, translated by Robert Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983); Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, translated by Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Mark Lalonde, Critical Theology and the Challenge of Jürgen Habermas: Toward a Critical Theory of Religious Insight (New York: P. Lang, 1990).

4. Marx’s phrases are from Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1844), translated by Annette Jolin and Joseph O’Malley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972).

5. Slavoj Žižek, The Spectre Is Still Roaming Around! An Introduction to the 150th Anniversary Edition of the Communist Manifesto (Zagreb: Arkzin, 1998), 72.

6. The secularization of current studies of iconoclasm is acknowledged by Bruno Latour, in Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art, edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). See my review,“Visual Culture: First Draft,” Art Journal 62, no. 3 (2003): 104–7.

7. Personal letter from David Morgan,May 20, 2002.

8. Willaim Hood, Fra Angelico at San Marco (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993); Georges Didi-Huberman, Fra Angelico: Dissemblance and Figuration, translated by Jane Todd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

9. For other Renaissance examples see John Shearman, Only Connect . . . Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992); and Paolo Berdini, The Religious Art of Jacopo Bassano: Painting as Visual Exegesis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

10. Eileen Reeves, Painting the Heavens: Art and Sciences in the Age of Galileo (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). My review, in Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 62 (1999): 580–85, takes up this point.

11. Leo Ewals, Ary Scheffer, 1795–1858 (Dordrecht:Waanders, 1995).

12. The painting is in the Musée d’Orsay. I thank Marc Gotlieb for bringing my attention to it. Gérôme is still awaiting contemporary treatments, see Scott Watson, “Jean Léon Gérôme (1824–1904): A Study of a Mid-Nineteenth Century French Academic Artist,” MA thesis, University of British Columbia, unpublished; available on microfiche (Ottawa: National Library of Canada, 1997).

13. Albert Boime, Thomas Couture and the Eclectic Vision (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980).

14. I thank David Morgan for bringing these religious affiliations to my attention. See Morgan, “The Cosmology of Philip Otto Runge and Its Influence on His Interest in the Gesamtkunstwerk,” MA thesis, University of Arizona, 1984 (Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms, 1985).

15. I owe these two paragraphs, including the information on the artists’ religious affiliations, to David Morgan, although the conclusion I draw is my own.

16. This is the subject of my “A Hagiography of Bugs and Leaves: On the Dishonesty of Pictured Religion,” Journal of Information Ethics 2, no. 2 (1993): 53–70, reprinted in Religion and the Arts 1, no. 3 (1997): 73–88.

17. Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Studio of the South, edited by Douglas Druick and Peter Zegers (Chicago: The Art Institute, 2001). Compare Lauren Soth, “Van Gogh’s Agony,” Art Bulletin 68 (1986): 301–13, especially 309 on the “essentially religious nature” of the painting.

18. For Munch see Edvard Munch: Psyche, Symbol, and Expression, exh. cat., edited by Jeffrey Howe (Boston: McMullen Museum of Art, 2001). I thank Thomas Sloan for this reference.

19. Celia Rabinovitch, Surrealism and the Sacred: Power, Eros, and the Occult in Modern Art (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2002). I thank Celia Rabinovitch for correspondence on ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• The Words Religion and Art
• A Very Brief History of Religion and Art
• How Some Scholars Deal with the Question
• Five Stories
• Kim’s Story Explained: The End of Religious Art
• Rehema’s Story Explained: The Creation of New Faiths
• Brian’s Story Explained: Art that Is Critical of Religion
• Ria’s Story Explained: How Artists Try to Burn Away Religion
• Joel’s Story Explained: Unconscious Religion
• Some Words to Describe Spiritual Art
• Conclusions
• Notes