Political Spirituality in Theaster Gates's and Danh Vo's Work

Theaster Gates and Danh Vo incorporate spiritual motifs in their work to question religious identities as something strictly confined, utterly demarcated, rigid. Critical but open-minded, Gates’s and Vo’s engagement with their own hybrid cultures and religious upbringing find clear expression in fragmented sculptural remains from churches, relics of abandoned sacred sites, memories from a spiritual past relocated within museum spaces and art galleries. Personal lives and collective history inform both artists’ works as evidenced by Gates’s Gone Are the Days of Shelter and Martyr and Vo’s Mother Tongue installation, both presented at the Venice Biennale 2015. But if Vo focuses on the complicated interchange between secularity and religiosity in a context of decolonization, Gates works on the recreation of sociabilities through the revitalization of ancestral materials and ritualistic practices. Scholars often narrate the history of modern art as a progressive estrangement from religions and spirituality. And yet, as James Elkins notices, there is something religious or spiritual in much modern art. Following Elkins’s statement and focusing on the exemplary works of Gates and Vo, in this presentation I ask what is the nature of their spiritual aesthetics? By relying on how objects are transported and transmuted in the artists’ practices, this paper argues that, more than speaking about religions or spirituality, the artists perform the intertwinement of the religious and the secular through a distinctively political form of spirituality. Ultimately, what the artists’ work testifies is that no culture is pure; no culture is self-sufficient.