Art as Religion talk tomorrow
So I'm giving a talk at Concordia University tomorrow about a topic I've been researching lately which applies to my practice, namely art as a form of religion.
I haven't written out everything I wanted to say, but I made really pretty slides and cliff notes, so maybe you can piece it together on your own. Enjoy!
-why art matters
-This talk is to discuss the fact that art carries the same space as religion--
-Defining Art As Religion
-The question becomes what do art and religion do
-Art provides a way of understanding ourselves, comparing our experiences with others, and relating ourselves to the world in general
-The differences between organized religion and ritual
-Art is independant of morality
-Religion says "this is" and art says "suppose this is"
-Freud and Art
Naming-
-the power of the artist's signature
Contagion Magic
-The concept of the original being worth more than than a reproduction because the artist has actually touched it.
Ritualistic Repetition
-Not just performance art ritual
Temple
I haven't written out everything I wanted to say, but I made really pretty slides and cliff notes, so maybe you can piece it together on your own. Enjoy!
- art recreating and sustaining archtypes
- Art as the same a religious ritual
-There is this discussion of whether what we do is important, if we make an impact, if we deserve funding.
helps the consumer understand their own experience
By the symbolic "living-through" of the narrative, the audience gets the benefit of the myth that lie behind the creation. "It functions as a life shaping force, hence as a religion" Pg 17
Henry Wiebe Myth, Religion and Ritual (The Subversive Artist)
-Religion has been afforded societal status, art can be even more important
-The role of the artist is important
"Art has to do with the way life is lived. It has a formative, didactic dimension, and and in this regard wields significant power.
Poets/artists collectively, with their better than 20/20 vision, are seers, "seeker of visions," the dreamers of dreams. "Where there is no vision, the people perish" (Bible: Proverbs 29:18)…
…The poets/artists are the source, the creators of life sustaining visions. They suggest, they set forth, they pattern life, provide its meaning, its possibilities, and its imperative. They are "dream makers." As George Santayana suggests, "An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world."
Henry Wiebe
Pg 13 Myth, Religion and Ritual (The Subversive Artist)
Hoppy Copy Centers Ltd. 1998
-Henry Weibe goes on to say,
-if artists know this, deepens the power of their work
-Allows them to rejoice
-have confidence
-allows audiences to value them more appropriately
-Religion and art do we need them?
-we don't know, but it has been shown that human beings will naturally tend
"It is in the meanings of aesthetically significant fictions that the essence of religion lies- as well as of course in the ways in which such meanings may be "applied" to practical life."
-Colin Falck
Pg iii Art, Myth, Religion and Ritual (The Subversive Artist)
-Reading Thomas R. Martland, Religion as art
-Breaks down what makes up religion and art
-Things of artistic or religious significance are that way because someone makes them that way
Historically, we can come across the usage of almost any object or human activity that at one point has religious or artistic significance. This means that it is never an object or activity that in itself artistic or religious, everything that is religious or artistic is so because it functions artistically or religiously.
-History of the words
-Latin roots- both of their focus is not on what is prepared or gathered together, but on the activities of gathering and preparing.
-Art is preparing, religion is gathering.
-Sanskrit root- sustaining, maintaining, that which the religious person holds is not what already is. The focus is on sitting under something that is impossible to pin down.
-Art and religion are activities that do, whose contents are of value only so long as they cross to other shores. (Pg 15 Religion as Art)
-Both art and religion detach and create
They work from live but move beyond it
"Each person knows that somehow he shapes what will be, that what he is doing is not a charade which merely affirms what already will be, but an efficacious activity which contributes to that future, even if it is only that individual's own."
Pg 17 Religion as Art
-Have to do with the way life is lived
-if showing how one's person life is to stating how it should be
-Does not function to express reality
-Realism a function of certain artistic time periods, but not a necessity
-Art and religion introducing something that was not there before
-Neither activity obviously repeats or naively represents what is already the case.
"…art is a power or force ex-pressing or pressing out what was not there before, transforming the old into the new."
Pg 21 Religion as Art
-Art and Religion are focused on a vision outside of ourselves
-Martland states that both provide directions on how to see and what to do.
-present collectively created frames of perception which people use to interpret their lives.
-each is to provide us with a new pair of glasses with which to view the world
-creating the world each time
"And lo and behold, the world around us (which was not created once and for all, but is created afresh as often as an original artist is born) appears to us entirely different from the old world, but perfectly clear. Women pass in the street, different from what they used to be, because they are Renoirs… The carriages, too, are Renoirs, and the water, and the sky… Such is the new and perishable universe which has been created. It will last until the next Geological catastrophe is precipitated by a new painter or writer of original talent."
Proust
-Martland talks about the capacity of both art and religion to see the world
-then it moves away from old ways of seeing things, builds new ones
"…The artist and the religious person willingly detach themselves from these current understandings, either by sacrificing that ego construct through which they understand the world or by suspending judgement. I conclude that the artist or the religious person each willingly creates or finds new understandings by incorporating experiences which they had previously ignored."
Pg 26 Religion as Art
-Artists may use and build on the established myth of Christianity, but what they create is intrinsically different.
-Weibe states that while spirituality is present, not organized religion
-Christianity is god centred, teaches that only god is to be worshiped.
-Art is human focused, is the humanist tradition, invites adulation of the artist. -Christianity focuses on spiritual matters, a matter of the faith.
-Art thrives on imagery.
-Religion seeks god in truth an moral goodness.
-Artists seek their god or god in and though beauty (however that is consistent with their own vision)
Pg 48
-Religionists seek virtue first, truth, good, morality and associated virtues. Aesthetics is secondary.
-Artists seek aesthetics first, but moral goodness, morality and "truth" are not a guide to the artist's gods.
Pg 37
-relation between aesthetic and ethical quality.
-artists can create "good" work which is ethically bad and "bad" work which is ethically good
-Artists testers of limits, of any status quo morality, artists are subversives.
"We have considered certain aspects of art which have ethical implications. Yet it has become clear that art is somewhat independent of morality. Form, color, sounds, words, and movements are in art essentially determined by aesthetic values."
Johan Hygen Pg 49 Morality and the Muses.
-Religion focused on giving answers, art focused on questioning
-Difference between worship and ritual
-Catherine Bell in Performing Bodies Pg4-
-Religious rites are non-utilitarian, in that they are focused on worship
-Magical rites are acts that are seeking a practical result, however non-practical
-Art is magic, art is pagan
-the arts are rituals, which are responding to the deepest human needs and appetites
-this makes the artist the shaman
"Artists are their own "priests" , with their own transcendent, Bible-by-passing connection with, and entry into, the universal mysteries."
Henry Wiebe
Pg 49 Myth, Religion and Ritual (The Subversive Artist)
-Freud does not believe in magic
-art is the one place where magic can exist in that a person can take what is in their mind and fully realize it in real life
"Only in one field has the omnipotence of thought been retained in our civilization, namely in art. In art alone it still happens that man, consumed by his wishes, produces something similar to the gratification of these wishes, and in this playing, thanks to artistic illusion, calls forth effects as if it were something real. We rightly speak of the magic of art and compare artist with the magician."
Freud
Pg 149 Totem and Taboo: Resemblances Between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics
Moffat Yard and Company, 1918
And Martland-
"Each person knows that somehow he shapes what will be, that what he is doing is not a charade which merely affirms what already will be, but an efficacious activity which contributes to that future, even if it is only that individual's own."
Pg 17 Religion as Art
-Art as more powerful than Christianity
-Art can assume the role and function of Christianity
-It can establish moral and principle
-it can fill the need for ceremony
-it can interpret life
-Art is more immediate and authentic
-Christianity has employed drama and the power aesthetics
-Weibe argues that is what has made the church so powerful
-But in this need for art to create a relevant religion, religion admits its defeat in power without the artist.
-Church employs art to revivify itself, lusting after the power that is immediately available through art (Pg 29)
-the problem within the church with the worship of graven images -Hygen
-Art so powerful because in its action it make spirit present.
"Art, when it is approached through the intuition of the senses, perpetuates and makes the spirit present. Thus it joins truth itself."
-Père Alain Couturier
Pg 9, Sacred Art
Menil Foundation Inc, U.S.A, 1989
-A true name is the word that expresses a being's true nature.
-A concept in magic, religious invocation and mysticism since the antiquity.
-Hellenistic Judaism- the true name of God plays a vital role of power in the Kabbala
-Bible- the angel wrestling with Jacob refuses to tell him his name so he will not lose his power.
-Folklore and fairytale- knowing the true name of someone allows one to affect another person or being magically -Ruplestilskin, the girl can free herself by knowing the name of her captor.
-Even in pop culture
laura kosloff
cast
Venice Biennial 2011
-The artist arrives to the Biennial, gets other artists to sign her cast
-the validation of it as an artwork
-artists endorse the object with their status while, paradoxically, they kneel before the nameless Kosloff
-The law of Contagion is a folk belief that suggests that once two people or objects have been in contact, there is a magical link that persists between them, until an act of banishing breaks the link.
-The law of Contagion has two sides.
-good side, there is the aspect of relics
-Bad side, someone possessing something of yours has control over you
-Common things, voodoo dolls, physics and mediums using an object of a person to "focus", Christian relics.
-The image therefore, has the designation of "producing" the person
Ann Hamilton Malediction, Louver Gallery, New York, 1993
Chews bread dough in her mouth, creates a mouth cast which she then places in a body sized basket. It is not a body part, and yet the whole piece becomes representative of her body, as well as a discussion of encounter of the body as process
Something that is nourishment, lubricated with the artist's own saliva
the repletion of the process. the artist has performed this herself, changes how we feel about the piece.
"Participation between the individual and his appurtenances (hair, nails, excretions, clothing, footprints, shadows etc.)- between symbol and what is represents (stone symbols of ancestors, petrified ancestors)- between corpse and ghost… equals a community of essence [as an] identity felt between what participates and what is participated in."
Lucien Levy-Bruhl
Notebooks on Primitive Mentaility Pg 108
(1975)
-One the key aspects of spiritual practice is repetition.
-The call to Mosque, going to church on sunday, praying before dinner, the drawing of the pagan circle, rites of passage, traditional ritual dress, any sort of religious holiday, all of these things are essential to the core of spiritual practice in traditional religion.
-Repetition reinforces the principles of practice and helps solidify it in the body of someone again and again.
-returning to historical knowledge
-every artist has a repetitive practice in the type of materials and subject matter they use.
-Ashley Miller- all artists are just making the same artwork over and over again.
-Yayoi Kusama
-In the 1960's organizing happenings where the artists were painted with polka dots, working with the repetition of this pattern for her entire life in different forms, her most recent exhibition at the Daegu Art Museum in South Korea,
Where she still covers a variety of surfaces in her dots, one of the key pieces being titled "Dots Obsession"
-A temple is a place specifically reserved for religious activities like prayer, sacrifice or ritualistic rites. It is a space of worship and is found in almost all religions, wether it takes the form of a permanent structure, a building used occasionally or a temporary circle drawn in the sand.
-Art galleries also known as art museums are the space or a building that is meant for the exhibition of art. They can be either private or public; and are intended to display various art forms to public.
-The discussion of the role of galleries in the validation of the artwork
Stephan Doitschinoff (Calma) Viva la Revolución Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, 2011
After this I go on to talk about my art practice, but we'll leave that for another time...
Bibliography
Braddock, Christopher
Performing Contagious Bodies
Palgrave MacMillan 2013
Couturier, Père Alain
Sacred Art
Menil Foundation Inc, U.S.A, 1989
Freud, Sigmund.
Totem and Taboo: Resemblances Between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics
Moffat Yard and Company, 1918
Hygen, Johan B.
Morality and the Muses
Augsburg Publishing House 1965
Rank, Otto.
The Myth and Birth of the Hero
Vintage Books, New York, 1932.
Martland, Thomas R.
Religion as Art
State University of New York Press, Albany, 1981
Van der Leeuw, Gerardus.
Sacred and Profane Beauty: the Holy in Art
Weidenfeild and Nicolson, London, 1963
Wiebe, Henry.
Myth, Religion and Ritual (The Subversive Artist)
Hoppy Copy Centers Ltd. 1998