Aesthetics of the Spiritual in Contemporary Art
Through an embrace of ritual, religion, and theological perspectives, contemporary artists use ancestral practices, traditional materials, and affective genealogies of the past to make sense of contemporary life. Scholars such as Eleanor Heartney, Leesa Fanning, James Elkins, Laura E. Pérez, and many others have argued for the significance of spirituality and religion in art from the 1980s to the present. Looking to the interconnectedness of art and spirituality in works of art that contain both overt and latent religious references, this session moves beyond a defensive argument for the presence of religion and spirituality in contemporary art. Instead, it examines the ways in which the line between secular and religious in contemporary art is always already destabilized by artistic practices that challenge postmodernist legacies of the ahistorical and irreverent.
Presentations include discussions of the work of Francis Alÿs, Rummana Hussain, Theaster Gates, Danh Vo, and Veronique d’Entremont. Themes include elisions between the religious and the secular, ritualistic practices in contemporary art, institutions of religion and art, sacred spaces and sites of worship that double as sites for artistic production, and aesthetics of spirituality.
Field of Study:
Africa
Asia
Canada
Caribbean
Central Africa
Chair:
Mary McGuire,Mt. San Antonio College - mcguiremct@gmail.com