The Alchemical Marriage of Art, Performance, and Spirituality

Ansuman Biswas, Theatre, from Body States: The Pilot Project, 2005.Photo: Courtesy Franc Chamberlain.

This special section of PAJ, entitled “Art and the Spiritual,” concerns a surge of interest in spirituality that currently informs the creation of art across a wide range of disciplines. In the fields of performance art, film, sculpture, video installation, multimedia performance, dance, music, and theatre, numerous contemporary artists are directly engaging with dimensions of the spiritual. Between October 19, 2008 and January 26, 2009, for instance, the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in Queens is presenting an exhibit featuring the work of twenty-nine artists (none of whose work is discussed here) entitled NeoHooDoo: Art for a Forgotten Faith. This exhibition “grew out of a desire to explore the multiple meanings of spirituality in contemporary art,” and it includes over fifty works of sculpture, photography, assemblage, video, performance, and other media from North, South, and Central America.¹ This is not the only exhibition dedicated to contemporary art and spirituality that has been organized in recent years, and more are sure to come.

The purpose of this section is to respond to why this abundance of spiritually concerned art exists, and to explore what is unique about the present relationship between spirituality and art. My comments are intended to contribute to the diverse conceptualizations of spirituality and religion that contemporary artists have inherited, highlighting how their attitudes toward the spiritual differ from the way they have been viewed by artists in the past.

Many artists and critics make distinctions between “religion” and “spirituality.” To consider their proposed differences adds clarity to our understanding of the spiritual because speaking about either religion or spirituality can pose challenges. In The Oxford Dictionary of World Religions, John Bowker notes that “a strange thing about religion is that we all know what it is until someone asks us to tell them.” This statement also applies to spirituality, which is more readily experienced than defined. The close association of spirituality with religion further complicates the effort to speak cogently about them.

Franc Chamberlain, who has contributed interviews with contemporary artists to this section, compares a “relaxed and open approach to spiritual inquiry,” which he calls “post-secularism,” with a “religious worldview” that he compares to fundamentalism. By bringing up fundamentalism, Chamberlain invokes the strict and legalistic side of religion that is not conducive to the free exploration that characterizes the work of the artists he interviews. In a similar vein, Erik Ehn’s essay describes spirituality as a “disposition,” such as the “fondness for food,” and religion as something more rigorous, like the requirements of a “diet.” Chamberlain and Ehn conceive of religion as something that requires the acceptance of prescribed rules, beliefs, and practices. Their comments suggest that religion is more restrictive than spirituality.

This perspective is not unfounded. According to Bowker, the Latin root of the word religion (religio) refers to an “over-anxious” and “obsessive attention to detail” in the performance of sacred rituals. The example of instauratio, the repetition of an entire ancient Roman religious festival in the case of a mistake in a ritual, comes to mind as an example of how religious legalism can lead to extreme behavior. In The World’s Religions: Old Traditions and Modern Transformations, Ninian Smart proposes various “dimensions” of religion that influence exactly how the faithful practice and experience the sacred in their daily lives. These dimensions prescribe what position believers should assume during meditation and prayer (the “practical and ritual” dimension), with whom they should sleep (the “ethical and legal” dimension), and the architectural qualities of the buildings in which they worship (“material” dimension). Due to its tendency to create laws and practices that relate to virtually every aspect of human existence, it is easy to think of religion as little more than a social institution that imposes arbitrary rules and regulations upon seekers of spirituality.

This view is too reductive since religion also enables human beings to ponder spiritual questions both within and outside of the context of specific faiths. The...