Imaging Pilgrimage

Art as Embodied Experience

Kathryn Barush

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501335020
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Religious Art

Winner of the American Academy of Religion's Religion and the Arts Book Award
Winner of the Borsch-Rast Book Prize & Lectureship
An Oxford Alumni Book of the Month pick While place-based pilgrimage is an embodied practice, can it be experienced in its fullness through built environments, assemblages of souvenirs, and music? Imaging Pilgrimage explores contemporary art that is created after a pilgrimage and intended to act as a catalyst for the embodied experience of others. Each chapter focuses on a contemporary artwork that links one landscape to another-from the Spanish Camino to a backyard in the Pacific Northwest, from Lourdes to South Africa, from Jerusalem to England, and from Ecuador to California. The close attention to context and experience allows for popular practices like the making of third-class or "contact" relics to augment conversations about the authenticity or perceived power of a replica or copy; it also challenges the tendency to think of the "original" in hierarchical terms. The book brings various fields into conversation by offering a number of lenses and theoretical approaches (materialist, kinesthetic, haptic, synesthetic) that engage objects as radical sites of encounter, activated through religious and ritual praxis, and negotiated with not just the eyes, but a multiplicity of senses. The first full-length study to engage contemporary art that has emerged out of the embodied experience of pilgrimage, Imaging Pilgrimage is an important and timely addition to the field of material and visual culture of religion. It is essential reading for anyone interested in pilgrimage studies, material culture, and the place of religion within contemporary art.

1

Vashon Island → Spain¹

A Backyard Camino

On a hand-drawn map of a ten-acre plot on Vashon Island near Seattle in the Pacific Northwest, Phil Volker has labeled, in gently sloping capital letters, the north and south pastures, the garden and the corn patch, the woodlot, and Raven Creek (Figure 1.1). A map is not strictly necessary while walking the path thanks to the helpful yellow arrows carved into wood and affixed to trees and fences that point the way. The trail is a roughly clover-shaped circuit bordered in places by towering fir trees and smaller hardwoods; at one point, five irregular stones form a rustic bridge across the creek. It is a path that Volker has walked many times, and with many companions. On the right-hand side of the map, the same lettering explains:

Blessed by Father Marc, we opened the Camino on Dec. 21st 2013. Between then + May 12th 2014 I walked 909 laps to equal 500 miles or the length of the Camino de Santiago in Spain. I walked alone and with others in all kinds of weather. Time was available to pray, think, laugh, cry, discuss + wonder.²

Somewhere around the time that he was diagnosed with colon cancer (now in his lungs, having reached stage IV), Volker had started to dream of walking the ancient pilgrimage path through the Pyrenees to Galicia—but with frequent chemotherapy treatments it seemed impossible. What he did instead was to bring the Camino to the land that he calls home,³ laying out a backyard trail that measured 0.88 kilometers and calculating that 909 laps would get him from Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, where many pilgrims set off along the “French Way” to the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela.⁴

Although seemingly far away, the salty sea physically links Vashon Island to the Galician Coast where the remains of St. James the Greater, son of Zebedee, were said to have washed up in biblical times. He had ceased his work as a successful fisherman to follow Jesus, and, according to an ancient legend, even traveled as far as Spain to preach the Gospel. Upon completing a period of ministry and mission there, he returned to Judea and was put to death at King Herod’s orders. After his martyrdom, two of his own disciples transported his body to shore where they found a miraculous boat which is said to have conveyed his remains back to Spain. By the twelfth century, Santiago de Compostela was a flourishing center of pilgrimage, only surpassed in popularity and importance by Rome and Jerusalem. Many made, and continue to make, the arduous physical and spiritual pilgrimage, including St. Francis of Assisi.

Figure 1.1 Phil Volker, map of Backyard Camino, ink and colored pencils on paper, c. 2013.

As Volker’s spiritual director, Sr. Joyce Cox, BVM put it, through Volker’s project, “[a] solidarity uniting both Spain and Vashon developed” (Figure 1.2).⁵ I argue here that this interlinking of one landscape with another can be understood as an example of “transferable holiness.”⁶ Volker’s creative mapping of the pilgrimage route itself connects the project to the medieval tradition of mental or “transferred” pilgrimage for those who could not travel on foot to faraway locales for a variety of reasons, such as tenure to the land, lack of resources, economic hardship, or—like Volker, ill health.⁷ Rather than setting up a strict dichotomy between contemplative (mental) and place-based pilgrimage, the interlinking senses of the term must be acknowledged. Religious architecture and landscapes functioned throughout the long history of Christian art as temporal reminders of a promised land to come as mediated through artistic practice. Then, as now, literal journeys were themselves understood as metaphorical in the sense that they were microcosmic, geographic versions of the universal pilgrimage of the soul.⁸ From a broader perspective of pilgrimages and world religions, Coleman and Elsner have discussed not only the metaphorical resonances of geographical pilgrimages but also the function of objects (like the backyard Camino) and texts as memorials for the pilgrim and as a link to the sacred goal for those who would undertake a future journey.⁹ The critical lexicon for discussing this reciprocal relationship is still being developed, but Volker’s Camino is an example of this process in action.

Figure 1.2 Sr. Joyce Cox, BVM and Phil Volker on the backyard Camino. Photo: Steve Tosterud.

The focus on the present day and its inherent links to the distant past, and to the Camino de Santiago, through the project of mapping an ancient European pilgrimage route onto a backyard in North America complements and expound upon the notion of place-based pilgrimage as a manifestation of “temporal past and future manifested in the spatial, [symbolic of] eschatological hope as well as paradigmatic memory.”¹⁰ It is also a contemporary example of how images are linked to their “authenticating sources in remotest times by chains of images,” as Wood has discussed in the context of the late Middle Ages.¹¹ As I argue here, this is reflected in several ways through Volker’s intentional but also instinctive ritual practices, in the embodied process of forging the trail, and in the meaning ascribed to it by pilgrims. When asked about the takeaways of the backyard Camino, one pilgrim wrote about the “potency of parallel experiences—the efficacy and beauty of re-creating a powerful milieu within a local setting.”¹² Volker’s project emerged out of a desire not to copy, but to continue the experience of the Camino as an extension of Spain in the Pacific Northwest, and offers a productive lens through which to flesh out some of these ideas.¹³ In his words, “we have to cobble together our separate Camino in our separate locality, same reality. This is very tricky in the sense of how one sets into motion a new life in the same old place.”¹⁴ This chapter engages such questions of temporality and communitas-through-culture by looking first at the origins of the backyard Camino and the community that it has generated since. The focus then turns to the material culture and symbolic structures that both comprise the route and which can be found along the way. Finally, an exploration of the film based on Volker’s project continues to develop these themes.

For some of the pilgrims who travel to the Vashon backyard, the circuit-walk is a visceral reminder of their own journey along the Camino de Santiago. As his neighbor Kelly Burke attests:

I have walked Camino de Santiago twice in the last couple years. The backyard version is just as good as the real one except shorter. It [gives] you time [to] think about the world, forget your worries, and help solve your problems in your life through walking and talking.¹⁵

For others, it is experienced completely on its own terms, as is the case for those who learn about the Camino for the first time through an encounter with Volker or his trail. Some have been inspired to travel to Spain after walking the backyard circuit, which is perhaps an example of Benjamin’s insistence that “in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced.”¹⁶ Eighty years later, scholars are still working on developing a critical lexicon to discuss the idea of this kind of transfer of spirit from place to place. In an article written while I was working on this book, I posited Volker’s Camino as a “surrogate pilgrimage.”¹⁷ It became clear to me eventually that “surrogate” was not the right word to describe what was, and still ...