1st Edition
Religion and Contemporary Art A Curious Accord
Religion and Contemporary Art sets the theoretical frameworks and interpretive strategies for exploring the re-emergence of religion in the making, exhibiting, and discussion of contemporary art. Featuring essays from both established and emerging scholars, critics, and artists, the book reflects on what might be termed an "accord" between contemporary art and religion.
It explores the common strategies contemporary artists employ in the interface between religion and contemporary art practice. It also includes case studies to provide more in-depth treatments of specific artists grappling with themes such as ritual, abstraction, mythology, the body, popular culture, science, liturgy, and social justice, among other themes.
It is a must-read resource for working artists, critics, and scholars in this field, and an invitation to new voices "curious" about its promises and possibilities.
Introduction
Ronald R. Bernier and Rachel Hostetter Smith
Part I: Theoretical and Interpretative Frameworks
1. The New Visibility of Religion in Contemporary Art: Four Interpretive Horizons
Jonathan A. Anderson
2. Exploring Theological Dimensions of the Work of Art
Linda Stratford
3. Translating Religion: Contemporary Art Through a Postsecular Lens
Lieke Wijnia
4. The Question of Criticism: What to Do with Our Revelations?
Jeffrey L. Kosky
5. Curating Faith: Art, Religion, and the Curatorial
Daniel A. Siedell
6. A Loving Regard: Contemporary Art and Expanding the Archive
Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt
7. Exhibition as Pilgrimage: Visual Strategies for Interfaith Dialogue
Aaron Rosen
Part II: Artistic Strategies
8. Iconic: Contemporary Portraiture and Sacred Personhood
Katie Kresser
9. Relic-ing Now: Reliquary Strategies of Materiality and Memory in Contemporary Art
Cynthia Hahn
10. Contemporary Art as Pilgrimage Site: Ambrosio’s As Far as the Eye Can Travel Zine
Kathryn Barush
11. Rogue Priests: Ritual, Sacrament, and Witness in Contemporary Art
Rachel Hostetter Smith
12. Walking Naked and Barefoot: When Ancient Jewish Prophets Meet Avant-Garde Performance Artists
Wayne L. Roosa
13. Revisiting "Art in the Dark": Thomas McEvilley, Performance Art, and the End(s) of Shamanism
Karen Gonzalez Rice
14. Infused with Light: Christian Traces in Multimedia Installation Art
Jorge Sebastián Lozano
15. Bill Viola, the Icon, and the Apophatic Sublime
Ronald R. Bernier
Part III: Case Studies of Artists and Artworks
16. The Lived Religion of Andy Warhol
Stephen Bush
17. "A King Aesthetic?": Tim Rollins and K.O.S. and the Ethos of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
James Romaine
18. From the Wounds Grace: John August Swanson and the Theological Aesth/Ethics of Liberation
Cecilia González-Andrieu
19. Cities of Light: Phillip K. Smith III and the Light & Space Movement
Matthew J. Milliner
20. Performativity and the Flesh: The Economy of the Icon in Lia Chavez’s Light Body
Julie M. Hamilton
21. Theaster Gates and the Good Use of Forgotten Things
Donato Loia
22. On Preaching, Performance Art, and Television: Christian Jankowski’s The Holy Artwork
Isabelle Loring Wallace
23. Tools of the Apocalypse: Eschatology in Contemporary Jewish and Catholic Art
Ben Schachter
24. Back to the Garden – Utopia and Paradise in the work of Jim Shaw, Liza Lou, Shirin Neshat, and Shoja Azari
Eleanor Heartney
25. Deep Waters: Art and the Revival of Religion in Contemporary China
Patricia Eichenbaum Karetzky
26. Salvation in the Fallen World: On Meng Yan’s Recent Monumental Works
Changping Zha
27. Chrysanne Stathacos and Charwei Tsai: The Mandala
Haema Sivanesa
28. Performing Memory and Mourning: Diane Victor’s Martyred Women
Karen von Veh
29. Weaving Land and Water: On the Poetics of Diasporic and Indigenous Resistance
Yohana Agra Junker
30. Al Buraq: Explorations of Liminality in Contemporary Islamic Art
Sascha Crasnow
Afterword: A Colloquy with Diane Apostolos-Cappadona, James Elkins, Ben Quash, and S. Brent Rodriguez-Plate.
Contributors: Biographical Notes
Credits
Index
Biography
Ronald R. Bernier is Professor of Humanities at Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston, MA. His books include The Unspeakable Art of Bill Viola (2014), Beyond Belief (2010), and Monument, Moment, and Memory: Monet’s Cathedral in Fin-de-Siècle France (2007). His research interests are modern and contemporary art and religious studies.
Rachel Hostetter Smith is Gilkison Distinguished Professor of Art History at Taylor University. She publishes widely on aspects of religion and the arts, including two edited volumes of Religion and the Arts and several exhibition catalogues, and has developed numerous international, intercultural art projects and traveling exhibitions, most recently Matter + Spirit: A Chinese/American Exhibition.
"This remarkable volume invites into conversation an impressive assembly of interlocutors and an impressively diverse set of approaches to a still-mystifyingly understudied subject. Religion and Contemporary Art: A Curious Accord represents a signal contribution that brings into creative relation its two key terms to demonstrate how they are not simply manifest in adjacency but often also inextricably fused. Highly recommended to scholars in art and/or religion as to artists in all media!"
Sally M. Promey, Yale University, USA
