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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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In an earlier comment thread there was some discussion about Re-enchantment, a recent panel at the Art Institute of Chicago on art and religion (with Thierry de Duve, Boris Groys, David Morgan, Kajri Jain, Wendy Doniger, and James Elkins). In the comment thread Matthew Ballou, a faith-motivated artist who "spent a good number of sleepless nights on the ninth floor of that very same building in various states of woe over the issues under consideration by this panel" posted this link to a paper he wrote in response to the event. The paper is interesting, and I felt it was worth a front-page post. I am not a faith-motivated artist, but I very much appreciate the opportunity to hear about the "exclusion of spirituality from academic discussions of modernism and postmodernism" from the perspective of someone who is. Here are two bits that particularly gave me food for thought.
Simply put, the work of art that has the least potential for transgressing the self-conceived autonomy of the viewer is one most able to gain approval. The work that functions more as a sign than as a symbol is far closer to approval, since the sign tends to present itself to the autonomous self for review, whereas the symbol announces itself as avatar of a broader, even universal, conception which bears with it a kind of jurisdiction over the self.There is another response posted here, as well as readings submitted by some of the panelists.
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Why is religio-spiritual content subject to the evaluation of theory and not the other way around? The problem with this arrangement is that theory denigrates practice by the expression of its critique. That is, the form of its existence is a questioning of praxis, hence the eternal strain inherent in the attempt to bridge the theory of a phenomena and the actuality of it. Any analysis of a particular practice, rather than reifying it, particularizes it in a hierarchical structure where the analysis plays the dominant roll of overseeing other. Thus by virtue of its own critical action, the theory of a discrete application becomes the arbiter of the value of that system. This is where the fundamental power of critique comes into existence. A theory of religious or faith-motivated art, then, must be a kind of violence exacted upon that art, for in its attempt to quantify, qualify, name, and place the systems and functions of that art, the theorizing acts as a systolic element that compresses the potentiality of anything it has defined. This is perhaps the fatal flaw of the Re-Enchantment panel: that their words could not seem to traverse the gulf between the disqualifying otherness of critique and the gut-wrenching, heart-felt arena of making artworks. They could not connect with the practice of making contemporary religio-spiritual art in any full measure; most of their time was spent describing it.