Traditionally, art and religion occupy mutually exclusive realms in society.

In the 21st century, the concept of spirituality is becoming increasingly important to various cultural discourses, including that of contemporary artwork. Art that is described as spiritual may reference or represent a spiritual and/or religious tradition. Whether referring to specific religious traditions or not, spirituality concerns the feelings stirred or probed by the art, which may prompt viewers to reflect on the meaning of life, often drawing on existential questions, such as: Why are we here? What are we doing? What happens after life ends? A sense of the spiritual also gives people the sense of belonging that they crave, a feeling that they are part of something greater than the self. The spiritual also contrasts with the material, where the material concerns acquisitiveness and worldly success. Spirituality seeks to transcend worldly goods and ambitions.

The relationship between art and spirituality has been historically mediated through the relationship between art and religion, something which has been periodically problematic throughout the centuries. But in spite of the decline of organized religion in Western Europe, there has been growing interest in spirituality in areas of cultural life, especially in art. Many people no longer view traditional religion, in the sense of institutionalized religion, as adequate for exploring their spirituality and look to new forms of spirituality as alternatives for finding ultimate meaning and addressing the profound needs of humanity. Central to the role of the artist has been a preoccupation with the deeper questions of life, often to reveal sights that are normally kept hidden from the public gaze and to challenge entrenched beliefs. The process of creating art is often described in quasi-mystical terms, whereby the artist-as-shaman unleashes or channels special creative powers in a process of making that transports the viewer to a different realm of the imaginary. Given these affinities between the roles of art and spirituality, it is unsurprising that spirituality is an enduring feature of contemporary art.

Definition of Terms

“Spirituality” is a term that is often used vaguely to refer to an attitude or approach toward life that involves a search for meaning. Before looking at how spirituality is articulated in cultural life, it is imperative to set down its forms. One of the first points to make is that historical religions are comprised of spiritual traditions that vary in significant ways but which can be considered within the framework of religious discourse. There are also spiritual forms that exist in alternative (and non-doctrinal) religions that are not classified as organized or institutional religions, such as new religious movements (NRMs). Spirituality also exists outside of theology or religious practice, where it is allied to ethical issues about identity, selfhood, and human interaction in the world. Although from a secular viewpoint spiritual concerns do not involve religious views about the supernatural, secular spirituality should not be opposed to religious spirituality because they have shared concerns, even if the roots of their concerns are different.

Philip Sheldrake provides some useful initial definitions of spirituality: “‘[S]pirituality’ refers to the deepest values and meanings by which people seek to live.” It conveys an outlook, vision, or aspiration about life that involves thinking holistically about identity, about one’s own and that of others, and of being cognizant of death. The mystical writer Evelyn Underhill suggests that the drive for spiritual fulfillment takes us beyond a purpose that is geared toward the practicalities of “tool-making” to something that is “vision-creating,” thus conveying the sacred (in the sense of the non-mundane) aspects of spirituality.

Sheldrake also describes the study of spirituality as an academic discipline and discourse. In some formulations, spirituality is viewed as an individualistic project of “self-realization” that typically takes the trajectory of “inwardness” or can be directed outwardly, in a consumerist sense, to promote various lifestyle choices like “fitness, healthy living, and holistic well-being.” Since the 21st century, there has been a drive toward an expanded sense of spirituality that goes beyond the quest to fulfill or orient the self to using it as the basis of policy formation in fields like social work, education, health, psychotherapy and even business.

The second term that needs qualification is “contemporary” in the sense of contemporary art. “The contemporary” can be used to refer to the current, the present, the here-and-now. The sense in which it is used here encompasses this description but also incorporates the art historical meaning of “the contemporary” as referring to the postmodern. Historically, this delineates work from the 1960s onward but earlier work, where pertinent, will be discussed. Also addressed will be artworks that express (either directly or indirectly) spirituality or that give rise to interpretations of spirituality. In some cases, artists are motivated by particular religious traditions; in other cases, the art broadly reflects a personal or communal vision about the nature of reality. Wade Clark Roof and Robert Wuthnow discuss the prevalence of “seeker spirituality,” which describes many people’s attitudes to finding spiritual forms or ideas that resonant with them, even if these forms and ideas are from different traditions. This eclectic sense of gathering together ideas from different sources reflects the nonspecific nature of the spirituality identified in the artworks. What is perhaps more important than being able to identify or attribute a specific type of spirituality, if that is indeed possible, is to recognize that contemporary art provides an avenue for the spiritual.

The Separation of Art and Religion in Modernism

In Western art history prior to the 20th century, spirituality was often subsumed by religion. The relationship between art and religion was fractious; at times they were mutually reinforcing, while at others there was dissension because of the lack of unanimity about the image. The crux of the Iconoclastic controversies of the 8th and 9th centuries, and later the Protestant Reformation, was not so much a denial of the importance of imagery but, on the contrary, was about just how much power images held. The iconoclasts believed that the use of images distracted from the main goals of religious practice, and could lead to moral and religious corruption.

Throughout most of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, concerns pertaining to religion were marginalized in art history; the coded religiosity of Romanticism gave way to Realism, which focused on physical here-and-now reality rather than the underlying mysteries of the universe. There were exceptions, though, in the work of particular individuals, such as Vincent Van Gogh, who probed the depths of materiality in his depictions of the natural world. The aesthetic sensibility of modernism brought about further tension between art and religion. As expounded by critics such as Clement Greenberg, modernism extolled formalist values—purity, autonomy—and purged the artwork of external reference. Meaning was gleaned not by any reference to the external world but by examining the formal relationships in the artwork, which were self-referential. This aesthetic was seen in abstraction, a form practiced by many artists who were interested in devising a language that went beyond the particular to the universal. Although the strident aestheticism of modernism was antithetical to interpretations that went beyond those contained in the artwork, there were a number of artists such as Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt whose work utilized formal motifs as a vehicle to express their spiritual outlooks.

Kiefer’s elegiac work probes the manifold challenges of representing the unrepresentable, of finding redemption in tragedy, which denotes a different type of sublime. An overriding theme in his paintings is the coming together of creativity and destruction, where creation is bound up with devastation and the trauma of history.

Recovering the Spiritual

There are also church members who extolled the importance of the arts as part of their mission. In France, the Dominican friar Marie-Alain Couturier was an influential figure who played a groundbreaking role in the revival of 20th-century church decoration, which, he argued, had become outdated and sentimentalized. He called on the church to enlist the ideas of contemporary artists regardless of their religious persuasion, in the belief that it is better to offer commissions to geniuses without faith than employ believers without talent. This unprecedented move of placing artistic expression above religious affiliation led to a stream of commissions to well-known modernist artists, such as Germaine Richier, Henri Matisse, and Marc Chagall, to make art for religious spaces at, amongst others, the Church of Notre-Dame de Toute Grâce du Plateau d’Assy. A fellow pioneer active at the same time was Walter Hussey, an Anglican patron of the arts at St. Matthew’s Northampton and Chichester Cathedral, who commissioned a number of artworks (including musical compositions) by such artists as Graham Sutherland, Marc Chagall, Benjamin Britten and John Piper.

Another way out of the “impasse” between religion and art, as Elkins calls it, is to consider the methodological solutions offered by “religious visual culture,” which was an approach inaugurated in the 1990s by American scholars who were working at the intersection between the two fields, such as David Morgan, S. Brent Plate, Sally Promey, and Colleen McDanell. Religious visual culture looks at the study of religions and its relationship to images and objects. It differs from art history’s preoccupation with iconography and style in favor of an engagement with images and objects as visual practice. While art history’s remit is about showing how images (from high art) reflected, reinterpreted, or critiqued textually-based and often biblically-based readings, religious visual culture is about making religious studies by showing how images and objects operate in meaning-making. This involves thinking about the different ritualized practices that the images and objects are employed in, including liturgy, meditation, and other forms of instruction that they occupy in people’s lives.

Refiguring the Spiritual in Contemporary Art

The sheer range of artworks that can be described as “spiritual” conveys the numerous possibilities that are open to artists in the current day as a result of fewer prescriptions or expectations about what forms spiritual art should take. The situation was very different for artists before modernism, as they were bound by the particularities of iconography and the proposed setting, and were sometimes obliged to work in the service of the Church. In the present day, artists are at liberty to combine genres, materials, and forms and to represent a range of global subjects, some of which refer directly to societal issues, whereas others are more universal and timeless. Themes of interest include the War on Terror, the fragility of the body, consumerism, and human rights. Some artists explicitly use ideas and symbols from religious or mythological traditions in the expression of their ideas; others have a more “pick-and-mix” approach to spirituality, where aspects from different traditions, including private beliefs, are amalgamated. It is far from necessarily the case that the most meaningful spiritual reflection is found in explicitly religious art.

Most contemporary artists are drawn to secular sources—ordinary objects, motifs, symbols and metaphors—but in the encounter with them, transformation occurs. The video artist Bill Viola frequently uses everyday people, including himself, in his installations and performances, and takes the viewer to an experience beyond the mundane, which conveys the power that art has of transporting the viewer to extraordinary states. Graham Howes argues for the non-specific (amorphous and generic) nature of spirituality expressed in contemporary art, claiming that

today’s artists are—unlike Grünewald—far more likely to disclose the broadly numinous rather than the explicitly incarnational, and are far more likely to offer generalised religious experience rather than Christian revelation. In doing so they, like Rothko and other abstract expressionists before them, move religious art beyond its traditionally didactic and narrative intentions towards the primarily experiential.

In contemporary culture, when viewers talk about experiencing art as spiritual they are rarely picking out a particular tradition and are just responding to the encounter with the art, in its imagery and formal qualities, and what this has opened up in them. The art often involves threshold states of encounter and experience, such as the feeling incurred by the sublime, or it may entail the setting apart of an object that is sacralized in the ritual of art. When viewers perceive art that brings about these feelings, it is often difficult to put into words how or what they are feeling, and they often resort to emotional language or analogy to describe their responses. Such emotional states prompt reflections of a spiritual nature. When viewers talk about experiences of a spiritual kind, they are implying that there is a temporary alteration in their psychological state that involves the setting apart of that moment from the mundane, a making sacred.

A final factor that needs to be addressed concerns the artists’ intentions. In many artworks that are described as eliciting spiritual experiences, we cannot assume that the artist intended it to be so. This does not devalue the experience but demonstrates the often personal and subjective nature of viewing, as well as the different ways of engaging with the spiritual.

New Media and Spirituality

Since the late 20th century, artists have used a range of new media, where the latter refers to new types of media as well as the technical term “New Media.” New types of media refer to art forms that go beyond the traditional forms of painting and sculpture. These include installation art, where the art is made for a particular location (site- specific, or site-sensitive), often on a temporary basis; it characterized by an inventive use of space and an internal dialogue among the objects in the space. Performance art, as the name suggests, involves the artist as performer making the work, often through interaction with an audience and using his or her body as the platform of creativity. New Media is an umbrella term that refers to changes in electronic communication that have taken place since the arrival of digital technology in the 1980s such as video and computer art.

The forms described here invite different and more intimate types of interaction than those of traditional media and revive the sublime in a technological medium. The passive viewing of a painting on a wall or a sculpture on a plinth is replaced by active participation in a multisensory domain that entails much more than viewing and involves walking around, through and sometimes into the art work itself. It is impossible to perceive the work in a single instance of time, and continued interaction is required in order to understand the work. Contrary to the misconception that technology distances people from their bodies, digital multimedia often heightens the sense of the phenomenological or the embodied. Spirituality is felt rather than simply understood.

Viewers have to sacrifice more in accessing the art, including giving up time, negotiating the artwork (which may involve following instructions), interacting with artists, and placing themselves at risk. This transaction closes the gap between the viewer and the artwork as the former becomes immersed in the art and implicated in the meaning of the work. In many instances, the work necessitates the willing interaction of the viewer, who becomes a participant, sometimes collectively, in the making of meaning through ritualized action. The interaction with the artwork also involves the potential for a transformation of our perception of mundane reality. Risk is involved because the “safety” of the frame or plinth is withheld and the viewer is placed in a more immediate and individualized relation with the artist and artwork, and has to be receptive to their supra-intellectual demands. Another factor that needs to be taken into consideration is context. Spiritual experiences are no longer confined to religious buildings but can be found in a variety of secular spaces—the museum, art gallery, nature park—on a temporary or long-term basis. This involves the expansion of context where art works are exhibited, as well as the blurring of boundaries between the sacred and the secular.

What follows is an exploration of examples from different media in turn, focusing on key artists who are associated with the form, while conveying how the context and reception give rise to a spiritual experience. This signals a conceptual and interpretative shift away from an exclusive focus on content and imagery, which defined the approach taken to art before the 20th century, and to the experiential and immersive dimensions that make different demands on the viewer and participant. The art itself and the conditions of production, circulation, and reception change so fundamentally that they sharply distinguish the work from earlier art.

Installation Art

James Turrell’s artwork is about light, but rather than representing light, his work is light. Typical installations consist of site-specific spaces that have been flooded by light. Turrell takes an element that is central not only to art but also to viewing and perception and turns it into his subject. When a viewer enters one of his spaces, there is no object or focus, and that is precisely the point; we become focused on the act of looking itself, and sight becomes a form of touch. Many works introduce illusory surfaces and shadows as Turrell manipulates the emission of light through partitioned shafts, but they all instill a sense of contemplation and meditation. This is facilitated by seating that invites relaxation and absorption, for this is not art that can be passed over but requires time.

Performance Art

Performance artists of the 1960s and 1970s started using their bodies (both the outer and inner) as a medium of expression. The artist’s body was disclosed as valid art material, or a vehicle, in its own right, and became the tool of experimentation for artists to explore philosophical and political notions about identity (including gender and sexuality) and community, and by which they could question strictures imposed on art and society. Extreme actions (including piercing, cutting, ingesting, and expelling) were employed to push the body and mind to their limits, liberating the self from pain.

The artists—Gina Pane, Chris Burden, Franko B., and Ron Athey—adopted different roles that depended on their personal motivations, casting themselves in the role of sacrificial victims, and invited preselected assistants or audience members to mutilate their bodies for the purposes of collective ritual. The ritualized pain undergone by the artist had a cathartic and “purifying” effect, a comment made by RoseLee Goldberg, who added that these actions were necessary “in order to reach an anaesthetized society.” By subjecting themselves to situations that ranged from the uncomfortable to the downright dangerous, performance artists opened their bodies up to a spirituality of embodiment whereby wounding becomes a way of knowing and feeling and connecting to others. The 1960s group, the Viennese Actionists, were influenced by pagan and early Christian rites, and staged spectacles that involved ritualized sacrifice and torture in order to attain abreaction and catharsis. In Orgies Mysteries Theatre (OMT), one of the actionists, Hermann Nitsch, carried out sacrificial rites using dead animals and humans. Doused in blood and eviscerated, the mimetic violence was reminiscent of the Dionysian rites of the bacchanal.

Witnessing violence without intervening has moral implications, and so all audience members were complicit even if they did not directly bring about harm. This work tests boundaries: the boundaries between the individual and the group, the boundaries of the artist’s body, and the boundary that determines what is permissible and morally acceptable. Abramović maintains the integrity of at least two concepts that are unreservedly spiritual. The first is to push the physical and psychological limits of tolerance, both in herself and also indirectly in others, and secondly, in doing so to create a heightened awareness of being in the present, and in the here-and-now. This work functions, like her many others, as a spiritual exercise that seeks to recenter the self in interaction with its external environment.

Video Art

Bill Viola is an American video artist who employs electronic sound and image technology to create an extensive range of works, such as videotapes, architectonic video installations, and flat-panel video pieces. He studied at Syracuse University in the early 1970s and has had a central role in establishing the contemporaneity of video art and in expanding its possibilities through his innovative explorations of content and form. Viola’s works are meditations on the human condition and are concerned with embodiment, suffering and existential anxieties. Often featured on their own, his figures operate as the Everyman that stands in for the viewer.

Viola’s approach to spiritual traditions was syncretic and he was influenced by different religions, including Zen Buddhism and mysticism (from St. John of the Cross, Meister Eckhart, and Islamic Sufism). In spite of the explicitly Christian nature of his titles, Viola did not intend his work to be interpreted religiously in the sense of belonging to a particular religious practice, but instead he used religious ideas evocatively to channel spiritual feelings and the experience of the sublime. His work, like many examples of installation art, constitutes a totalizing environment that involves more than the simple interaction of what is projected or screened; engagement is about the total environment between the viewer and objects in space. This dynamic facilitates spiritual exercises whereby constant and continuous engagement with the visuals and sounds leads to a deeper understanding of life, and where sense perception becomes a route to self-knowledge.

Viola’s work demonstrates an important point about how technology can be used in order to enhance and not detract from spiritual meaning, raising the issue that the transience of technological innovation has the potential to engage with enduring spiritual themes and does not depart from them.

Space of Exiles: Spirituality as Identity

The artists and artworks discussed so far have been predominantly from Western traditions, but it is important to consider how artists from different cultural and religious backgrounds construe spirituality in their practices. Shirin Neshat and Shirazeh Houshiary are from Iran but have both set up home in the West. Art fulfills a critical role for both women, as a means of processing feelings of disenfranchisement and dislocation and as providing powerful images of cultural identity and transformation.

Houshiary’s most celebrated work (in partnership with Pip Horne) is her commission for the East Window of St. Martin in the Fields, London, which is of a cross being formed around a circular motif as a result of the warping of the metal framework. Perhaps the most striking point about this artwork is the fact that an Iranian female artist of Muslim descent was selected to make work for this historic church, which signals a shift in the attitudes of the Anglican Church.

The work of Neshat and Houshiary represents a snapshot of the many voices of postcolonialism: of artists who reflect on their displacement to explore the different threads of their political and cultural identity. This coincides with developments in the art markets in the Middle East and Asia that started in the early 1990s with the United Arab Emirates Biennale and various national art fairs.

Contemporary Art in Religious Spaces

Today in certain parts of the Western world, the Church (the Protestant Church, in particular) has become viewed as a cultural space for exchange and dialogue, and part of this identity entails accommodating artworks on a temporary or permanent basis via a program of commissioning. Works are not necessarily commissioned to reflect Christian theology or to support the liturgy; they might indeed offer a critique of or challenge to Christian values, but the intention is to respond sensitively to the space in which the work will be contained, and to encourage spiritual reflection, even if this is not always in connection to religion. The placement of artworks in these settings is not unproblematic. For churchgoers, it may be seen to enhance lived worship, or viewed as a distraction or intrusion. The presence of contemporary artworks might attract a different demographic, including non-churchgoers, into spaces they would not normally visit. In general terms, contemporary artworks that do something other than reflecting ecclesial truths expand the parameters of the sociocultural function of churches and cathedrals.

Transgressive “Religious” Art

Having relatively fewer constraints than artists in earlier centuries, and hence greater autonomy, contemporary artists have sometimes exploited religious symbols in ways that go against their traditional role to support faith, and are used instead ironically or blasphemously, in order, alternately, to critique and to provoke. Both inside and outside the contemporary art world, iconic images of Christ are summoned because of the degree of familiarity and connotations they represent.

In Bacon’s work, then, we are exposed to religious bankruptcy and, in an unusual way, through the vehicles that in Christianity are meant to give rise to a profound feeling of wholeness. The lack of religious meaning does not preclude a spiritual reading of Bacon’s work, though; his work is deeply spiritual as it is about themes that are central to human life, including embodiment, isolation, and mortality. His vision also anticipates post-Christian and post-secular attitudes to God and religiosity, and gives a foretaste of the spiritual tenor of contemporary art.

Concluding Remarks on Spirituality and Contemporary Art

The artworks under discussion here detail the scope and breadth of art that can be described as spiritual by virtue of its revelatory, revitalizing and contemplative capacities. This communicates the significance that art holds in the contemporary world. Rather than interrogating the relationship between art and religion, more pertinent questions in the contemporary age are: What is the nature of the dialogue between art and spirituality, how do the two come together, and what is the form the meeting takes?

The range of multimedia brings novel forms of encounter occurring outside in the gallery and other spaces involving audiovisual and other means of articulating the spiritual. These new forms, as typified in installation art, create greater intimacy (often through immersion), both physically and psychologically, which heightens the impact they have on us. Most of the artworks introduced here are not paintings on walls or sculptures on plinths that are kept at a “safe” distance from us but are, rather, objects that we have to negotiate our way around, that intrude, often testing our equanimity, resulting in an outpouring of emotion.

One of the consequences of having greater intimacy through interaction or immersion can be a heightened awareness that increases presentness and a sense of embodiment. Although firsthand viewing of artworks is preferred to representational documentation of any kind, in the context of contemporary art it is often essential for understanding and appreciating the spiritual aspects. In the examples discussed, perceptual knowledge cannot be relayed secondhand, and the viewer has to interact with the artwork in various ways before understanding can be achieved. The alignment with the here-and-now that contemporary art brings about is part of the “mantra” of mindfulness, and opens up spiritual reflection on identity and meaning. The upset created is not necessarily distressing and may provide a welcome release and relief at one’s being able to stop and be still. These musings take on a personal form, which means that there are potentially as many interpretations of spirituality as there are viewers, which is unproblematic and demonstrates the malleability of spirituality.

What can be agreed on is the growing importance of, and need for, spirituality in contemporary society. In an ever-changing world, spiritual artwork provides the space and opportunity for contemplation and reflection.

Which of the following statements is true regarding the relationship between art and religion quizlet?

Which statement best describes the relationship between art and religion in non

What aspects of society culture can influence artwork being made quizlet?

Is the quality production expression or realm of what is beautiful or of more than ordinary significance?