"Harnessing the Divine" (original) (raw)

Evoking the Sacred: The Artist as Shaman

2009

"This thesis examines, via a feminist theoretical framework, the systems in existence that permit the ongoing exploitation of the environment; and the appropriateness of ceramics as a medium to reinvigorate dormant insights. I argue that the organic nuances expressed through clay; the earthy, phenomenological and historic ritual connotations of clay; and the tactile textured surfaces and undulating form, allows ceramics to conjure responses within the viewer that reinvigorates a sense of embedment in the Earth. It is anticipated that when configured to reflect universally recognised symbols within the environment, the resulting installation triggers latent responses within the viewer thus reinvoking recognition of the inherent sacredness of the landscape. The arrival of the twenty-first century bears witness to a great many ‘illnesses’ within our communities, and in this context it may be appropriate to apply the metaphor of ‘Artist as Shaman’ to the role of the artist within contemporary society. It is intended that the body of work produced to accompany this exegesis, when installed in the natural environment, will trigger inherent recognitions of the viewer’s connection to the Earth and their sense of belonging within nature. The research informing this method of presentation includes an investigation into innate recognitions humans appear to possess regarding certain symbols and textures, which motivate the forms, surfaces and installation of my work; and an exploration of Fibonacci, fractals and the collective unconscious, supported by research in scientific disciplines such as the New Physics, Evolutionary Psychology and Evolutionary Aesthetics."

Chicanx Aesthetic Expressions of Resistance: Making Art and Spirit through Altars and Writing

Journal of World Philosophies, 2023

Many scholars argue that the spiritual dimensions of aesthetic practices and resistance have been undertheorized or omitted. This paper examines aesthetic processes taken up by Amelia Mesa-Bains (1994, 1999) and Gloria Anzaldúa (1987, 2015) to theorize how some Chicanx artists employ an aesthetic based on spirituality as relational, memorial, and material practice to critique colonial ideologies embedded in dichotomies such as man/woman, subject/object, fine/folk art, and individual/community. By focusing on Mesa-Bains' altar installations and Anzaldúa's writing process, I draw out how social relations and memory work operate to interpret the relationship between aesthetics and spirituality. I argue that the relational dynamic of their aesthetic sensibilities and techniques show ways some Chicanx scholars and artists subscribe to a sense of spirituality that maintains interconnected relations with others who have been disempowered and marginalized. To support this position, in the first half of the paper, I analyze the relational sensibilities central to Chicanx aesthetic sensibility of rasquache domesticana, which highlights the concrete spaces in which Chicanx, their aesthetic perception, and techniques generate a communal resistance that is sustained through spirituality. The second half turns to Mesa-Bains' altar installation for Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1994) and Anzaldúa's writing process described in Borderlands (1987) to clarify ways in which aesthetics and spiritual relations engender practices of resistance to social dichotomies.

The shamanic seam: transnatured humanities and sutured animal bodies in contemporary visual practice

This paper was featured in the Pointure supplement (edited by Leora Farber and I), published in December 2012 in Art South Africa. This publication following the Pointure exhibition and colloquium hosted by the University of Johannesburg in 2013. This pdf contains this and other articles that emerged from these events: In pointing to a lace structure in the human experience, the Irish poet and scholar John O’ Donohue chooses an apt model for the frailty of the human interface with the eternal. He also gestures to an unexpected notion: that it is the ruptures in our lives, the openings, punctured, trimmed and mended, and at times raw, that are the most sublime. The recent Pointure exhibition and colloquium ‘laced’ together a poignant range of artworks and theoretical papers that relate to artistic acts of stitching and notional derivations of this material phenomenon. In these written theses and artworks, the acts of stitching, pricking, suturing, tearing, rupturing, cutting, embroidering, appliquéing, grafting, spinning and weaving, and a myriad of other incarnations of this practice of the ruptured mark, demonstrate and invoke the incisive, deconstructive, cathartic and prophetic energy of the ‘stitch’. Derrida’s rhetorical formulation – pointure – is employed as a probing theoretical frame for this ‘weave’ of medium and metaphor. Pointure is a metaphoric device in Derrida’s 1978 essay ‘Restitutions of the truth in pointing [Pointure]’, ‘poking holes through’ and ‘lacing together’ Heidegger and Shapiro’s exploration of themes of presence in Vincent van Gogh’s painting, Oude Schòenen (Old Shoes). This mimetic word relates to printing in terms of the “small iron blade with a point, used to fix the page to be printed on to the tympan” as well as the “the hole which it makes in the paper”; and serves the figurative purpose of opening the text for critique. Pointure also references the practice of cobbling (in an intertextual gesture to van Gogh’s shoes) in relation to the ‘sewing together’ of the shoe, and the ‘drawing together’ action of the lacing-eyelets. In the context of the Pointure exhibition and colloquium, pointure is employed as a trope through which complexes of visual culture involving ‘pointured’ mediums and ‘pointured’ literary approaches may be critically framed. In this sense, pointure serves as a textu[r]al ‘loom’ for weaving together theory and practice, with the ease that one might lace a shoe. This extended conception of pointure is here entwined (by unisex design) with Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger’s intrauterine inspired matrixial theory – a “maternal-feminine” model for human discourse. In a leaning towards aesthetic application and revisionist thinking, matrixial theory and Derridian pointure share a common zeitgeist. Further to this Ettinger has also linked matrixial theory figuratively to the notion of weaving. In terms of the articulation of ‘pointure-type’ visual and textual practices, matrixial theory represents significant possibilities, as it allows for a complex ‘weave’ of subjectivities within visual representation and the ‘warp and weft’ of practice and being. Ann-Marie Tully is an artist, writer, and Research Associate at the Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre, Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, University of Johannesburg.

Religion and Art: Rethinking Aesthetic and Auratic Experiences in ʻPost-Secularʼ Times

Religions, 2019

Since the beginning of modernity, the relationship between art and religion has been a multifaceted one, characterized both by tensions and by productive exchanges. One can claim that the modern concept of “art” (and the corresponding modern institution of art) has been one of the “secular–religious” expressions of modernity. The language we have been employing to characterize thedomainof“finearts”and“esthetic”experienceshasbeenremarkably“religious”. We“meditate” in front of artworks; art allows us to experience a “spiritual” excitement; we make pilgrimages to see and venerate masterpieces in their (secular) sacred spaces (e.g., museums) that require a special decorum, inspiring the atmosphere of devotion. In this way (and following the lead provided by WalterBenjamin)wearewitnessinganexchangebetweenthe“aura”ofdevotional(religious-esthetic) objects, and the “aura” of (secular–religious) artworks. This exchange of “auratic” experiences can also be seen in the exchange of roles between traditional sacred spaces (churches) and modern (secular–sacred) museums: modernity has turned museums into places of silent worship of sacred objects (artworks), while churches have become exhibition spaces where most of the visitors go to see artworks and not to celebrate the Eucharist. The most recent developments testify to yet another reversal. Increasinglybusymuseumspaces—withtheirever-expandinguseoftechnologyandunder constantpressuretoembrace“participatoryculture”—arebecominglessandlessoftheold-fashioned quietspaceswithafocusonestheticcontemplationinfrontofapieceofart. Churches,onthecontrary, are providing such a context for carrying out practices associated with the traditional role of the museum, outside the time of church services. All of this presents us with the need to reconsider the question of the relationship between art, religion, and the sacred. How can we think of the “aura” of (sacred) contexts and (sacred) works? How to think of individual and collective (esthetic–religious) experiences? What to make of the manipulative dimension of (religious and esthetic) “auratic” experiences? Is the work of art still capable of mediating the experience of the “sacred” and under what conditions? What is the significance of the “eschatological” dimension of both art and religion (the sense of “ending”)? Can theology offer a way to reaffirm the creative capacities of the human being as something that characterizes the very condition of being human? This Special Issue aspires to contribute to the growing literature on contemporary art and religion, and to explore the new ways of thinking of art and the sacred (in their esthetic, ideological, and institutional dimensions) in the context of contemporary culture.

Syllabus_Graduate Seminar on Media Art Theory II (Fall 2015)

2015

[*Note: One of the main classes I enjoy teaching on every semester, this seminar constitutes arguably the backbone of my critical and scholarly formation as an art critic and a scholar. While updated virtually every semester, and traversing various yet a peculiar group of thinkers such as Simmel, Uexküll, Heidegger, Karatani, Dufrenne, Merleau-Ponty, Simondon, Kittler, and Agamben, this seminar nonetheless remains fixated on the central question: what is it that which makes artworks and our experiences of them possible? What is that which mediates us (as artists, spectators and audiences) and artworks? Or, put differently, what are the conditions of (im)possibilities of these entities and their relationships, which often vanish upon completing their roles? These are the questions that will lead us somewhere, if not everywhere.] "This seminar seeks to think through and reflect on 'media' less as a material or a set of means than as fundamental 'conditions of possibility' of art/aesthetics. Put differently, this class does not try to 'recall' familiar 'pedigrees' and 'idées fixes' the idea of 'media art' is bound to suggest via, say, a conditioned reflex. If art(ist)s willing to characterize themselves in terms of a 'specific medium' are becoming harder to find, it is strictly due to the situations where the relationship between 'art in general' and 'media' itself has become an object of inquiry. Hence the idea of the 'post-medium.' When the status of media as a medium, i.e., what mediates (aesthetic) entities in the middle (cf. 'in media res'), is displaced/disjointed (again), and extant material coordinates are in ruins, 'media art' must be redefined anew. With these in mind, this seminar concerns concerted efforts and works to render figural- if not ‘figurative’- something, which is- despite its essential contribution to mediating certain things to function as aesthetic objects- now somehow made virtually invisible. In this sense, we will pay attention to scattered genealogies of divisions or separations dividing 'background and foreground', 'objects and circumstances', 'subjects and environments/Umwelt', and, further, 'the visible and the invisible.'"

Art Between the Sacred and the Secular

Akademie der Künste Berlin - King's College, University of London: Roundtable discussion with Neil MacGregor, Alicja Kwade, and Ben Quash. 6 June, 2022

This three-way panel conversation aims to explore the relation between contemporary art and religion from a range of perspectives. Combining the insights of a leading contemporary artist, and two distinguished art historians and curators, it will be chaired by the theologian Professor Ben Quash of the Centre for Arts & the Sacred in London. This dialogue will be of interest both to art scholars and art enthusiasts—both those sympathetic to religion and those critical of it; those with faith as well as those with none. The abiding power of Christian motifs, ideas and styles in a host of modern and contemporary works that superficially look un- or anti-Christian indicates that visual art and Christian tradition have not become complete strangers. This invites analysis and understanding. How have religious artworks and artistic traditions found new articulations, caused new departures, or provoked new subversions in the last 100-150 years? What forms of engagement between theology and modern and contemporary art do such developments in the relationship between art and Christianity invite and reward? How do viewers (religious and non-religious) interact with historical Christian art today, and how do modern sensibilities affect our viewing of earlier Christian artworks and artistic traditions? Is contemporary art an alternative to religion or can it sometimes be an ally? How do contemporary art and religion each respond to human experiences of the absurd or the tragic? What do contemporary art and the spaces in which we encounter it, tell us about the histories of both Western Christianity and Western secularisation?

The Lost Dialogue of Artists: Negotiating the Conjuring of Art

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies

This article examines the nature of the duologue between artist and creative source, as a lost interplay and negotiation within the gestation of the work in a uniquely individual language that can never be fully revealed, translated, or understood by a viewer. The author, an elder, late career studio artist, draws comparisons to sacred language and interpretation positing that the conversations and relationships that form between artist and art are very different from those between works of art and humanity and have never been appropriately examined from an insider perspective. She offers reflections and writings of master artists as an attempt to illuminate the intimate exchange between artist, medium, and creative source.